Peggy Nicholson - Don't Mess With Texans

“Wednesday, right. First week in January, last year of the century.” The car that hit him last night must have just grazed him, breaking his jaw as it tossed him aside. But his brains didn’t seem to be scrambled. “And who’s the president?”

The tom’s ragged ears stayed flattened to his furry skull. Another subsonic moan issued through wired jaws.

“Who cares? You wouldn’t give three fleas and a dead rat for every politician in the country,” Tag translated. “Can’t say I blame you.” Neither would he. Politics was a pastime for comfortable people with time on their hands and steady paychecks coming in. For his and the cat’s kind, survival was the name of the game. And living well was its best revenge.

Still, to live well this stray would have to learn to tolerate humans. Because as soon as he mended, Tag meant to find him a home. He hadn’t spent half the night patching him up just to boot him back out on the street when he was healed. He shut the cage door, then lingered, talking soothing nonsense till the cat stopped growling.

“Got time for a paying customer, Doc?” Carol Anne Kopesky, Tag’s medical technician/receptionist, frowned at him from the doorway leading to the front of the clinic. Hired some twenty years ago by Tag’s senior partner, Dr. Higgins, and trained by that grimly practical gentleman, she took his same dim view of charity cases. And now that Higgins had suffered a mild heart attack and taken a leave of absence, Carol Anne was watching their bottom line with even more than her usual zeal. Tag was earning for two now, till Higgins returned to the Green Mountain Veterinary Clinic next Monday. And even then he would only be practicing part-time.

“Mrs. Allen’s in room one,” she briefed him as Tag stretched his tired bones to his full six feet, one inch. “With her Irish setter, Jebbie, for his yearly checkup and vacs.” She lowered her voice. “A month late. I was afraid we’d lost them to you-know-who.”

A new practice had opened in Bennington, twenty miles to the west, last summer. Their competition was a small-animal man with glitzy new facilities and all the toothy charm of a TV game-show host. Higgins had brought Tag in as his junior associate to counter that threat.

A bell rang as the clinic’s front door opened.

“That’ll be Mrs. Rafferty with Gigi,” Carol Anne added as a yap-yap! like two strokes of an ice pick to the skull rang out from the reception room. “Here to have her toenails trimmed, and don’t even think of suggesting we knock her out to scale her teeth. Gigi has a delicate constitution.” She rolled her eyes and departed.

“Right.” Let the day begin. Tag rotated his shoulders under his white coat and headed for exam room one. Four hours’ sleep last night, and five the night before, with that false alarm out at the Great Dane kennel on the edge of town. A firsttime mother’s delivery, except that she hadn’t. No doubt she’d drop tonight—about the time he dropped off.

Three dogs, two cats and a molting parrot later, he heard a truck rumble down the driveway. Tag injected the last c.c. of distemper vaccine into a squirming Lab puppy and glanced up in time to see a dusty two-horse trailer, hitched to a pickup, glide past his window and on to the barn. Damn. Somebody who hadn’t heard that Doc Higgins was out of commission.

Higgins ran a mixed practice, serving small animals and large, for what had been a rural farming community. But dairy farms were giving way to computer analysts’ country retreats, where the largest animal in residence was more likely an English sheepdog than a sheep. Tag, in keeping with changing times, was a small-animal specialist. Unless the occupant of that trailer had a very simple problem, he wouldn’t be much help.

“You’d better go see,” he advised Carol Anne as he set the syringe aside and took hold of the puppy before it could leap off the table. “Paws like pie plates, he’s going to be a bruiser,” he added to the proud owner. “Have you thought about obedience school?” The bell chimed at the front door. Driver of the truck and trailer, he supposed.

While Tag gave his views on various trainers around the state, he listened with half his attention to the voices down the hall. Carol Anne’s was rising and taking on a hard edge. Some sort of disagreement going on out there? Her opponent’s responses were barely audible, a low liquid murmur and pause, insistent for all its softness. A woman, he thought. Any man would have recognized Carol Anne’s no as no and stomped off by now.

“So Carol Anne can give you Mrs. Dearing’s number.” He eased patient and owner out the door and down the hall toward the debate. “I believe she has a class starting next month.” He gave the puppy a farewell ear scratch. “Meantime he’s looking terrific. You’re doing a great job with him.”

As they reached the reception room, a girl—woman—spun away from the desk to face him. Hair the color of marigolds, flying out from her head as she swung. Cheeks pink with emotion, big eyes meeting his own like a slap. “Are you the doctor?”

High-heeled boots rap-tapping on the linoleum, she came at him. For a moment Tag thought she’d march right into the puppy’s owner, but at the last instant the women do-si-doed and she was toe-to-toe with him, looking up. Despite threeinch heels, she stood no higher than his heart. Pointy chin, lush lips. “You’re Dr. Taggart?” She caught his sleeve.

An emergency, that was clear. Half his mind was already listing the instruments and meds he might need—tourniquets, splints, horse-size syringes, painkiller? The other half was taking her in the way a punch-drunk boxer takes it on the chin, one hit after another, with no time between blows to recover. Drawl like hot honey in spite of her urgency. Her hair wasn’t standing on end; it just seemed that way. Eyes blue as a summer thunderstorm, pink-rimmed with recent tears or maybe lack of sleep, long-lashed in gold. A faint scent of flowers overlaid with a whiff of...bourbon? Maybe it was just some component of her perfume.

She tugged him toward the door. “Would you please, please, please help me?”

He would, in a heartbeat.

“I tried to tell her,” Carol Anne said angrily from behind the counter, “that Dr. Higgins is out. That if she’d just drive to Bennington, I’m sure she could find somebody who’d—”

“I haven’t got time!” his captor snapped without turning. She transferred her grip from his sleeve to his forearm. Slender fingers, and strong. “If you’d just come see...”

“Of course. Show me.”

“Doctor! Honestly, I never—”

The door slammed on Carol Anne’s reproach and they burst out into cold, crisp air—a warm day for January in Vermont, low forties with sunshine. Her breath smoked. “He’s around back.” She couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, but she was all leg in her tight blue jeans and short denim jacket. Matching him stride for stride, she tugged him down the drive, and he went willingly, wanting to laugh, in spite of her urgency, because of her fierceness.

“What an old dragon! I thought she’d chew me up and spit me out before you showed up. Though she’s right, this is terrible, me landing on you out of nowhere like this, ’thout an appointment, but I...” She shrugged and smiled up at him for the first time in apology. Beautiful teeth, something Nordic in her blood with that high coloring. She pronounced her long Is as ah. Ah thought...Ra-aht, instead of right...

Georgia, he guessed. What was she doing up here in the cold north? “How did he hurt himself?” And if she could smile like that, how terrible could it be? Half of him hoped for a false alarm, an easy fix. The other half wanted something serious that he could heroically cure. Dr. Taggart at your service, m’lady.