To avoid running over Ping, the guy flips off the board, landing really hard on the black paved path.
“Ping! Pong! Come back here!” Renée calls, as though they will listen to her.
Instead, Ping tackles the skateboarder, licking the guy’s face and wagging his behind. Pong stands close, sweeping the air with his tail. If I waited for the dogs to obey me, I’d be waiting a long time. Instead, I run to them and snatch up the leashes, yanking them away from the skateboarder. “Oh, man! I am so sorry!”
The guy doesn’t answer for a moment. His knees poke out of his pants, bleeding.
“Are you all right?” Renée asks. “I can run into the community centre and get some ice.”
“It’s just a scrape,” he answers, pushing his bangs out of his eyes. There’s something weird about those eyes; they look crossed but they’re not. Maybe because one looks more solid, darker. That’s it, one’s brown and the other is green. Renée’s staring and I shove her.
“You’re bleeding,” she tells him. “They’ve got a first aid box.”
“I’m fine,” he repeats. “I’ll clean it up at home.”
“Why wait? Infection can set in quickly. Have you had a tetanus shot in the last five years?” I ask him.
“Forget about it. I had my tetanus yesterday.” He sounds annoyed.
It’s at this point that I reach into one of my pockets for a business card. “We’re so sorry about the dogs. We should have controlled them better.” I hold the card out to him but he’s busy scratching behind Ping’s ears and smiling. A dog lover, phew! “Listen, your pants are wrecked. Send my dad the bill and Noble Dog Walking will cover it.”
“Dogs did me a favour. Tomorrow, I won’t have to wear these ugly pants to school.” He takes the card anyway. Maybe he knows someone who will need Dad’s services.
Pong squeezes in for some pats, now, whipping his tail across the guy’s shoulder. The skateboarder reaches way up to stroke his head. “What kind of dog is he?”
“Greyhound,” I answer.
“But he’s not grey.”
“They come in all colours,” Renée explains. “Grey means bright or fair in old English.”
The guy squints at her
I shrug. “She studies Wikipedia in her spare time. He’s a retired racing dog.”
“Must’ve been expensive.”
“Oh, probably.” Should I have said that? Maybe the guy will think our dog-walking service is only for wealthy dog owners. I pull the dogs away so he can get up. We give him a head start and he skates toward the community centre.
To be extra safe, we double back the other way, heading for the school again. Ping suddenly leaps into the air, barking like crazy.
“What is it, Ping? Another bag of dog poop in a tree?”
“Check out the roof!” Renée points. “There’s a dog running around up there!”
day one, mistake five
“Hey, Mrs. Klein’s up there, too.” I point to a wiry, short, red-haired lady. Our latest custodian is roaming the roof with the dog and a policeman.
“It’s not ball day today, is it?” Renée asks.
Once a year our other custodian used to clear the roof of all the balls that landed there.
“Of course not,” I answer. “Would she throw balls down when there’re no kids around to catch them?”
“You’re right. That would be no fun. She wouldn’t need the police for that, either. Maybe the dog is sniffing out a criminal.”
The Ping Pong team pulls us past the baseball diamond and goalposts, and up the hills toward the school.
“They’re looking for a bomb,” Renée says between breaths.
“Oh, yeah?” I bluster, so wanting her to be wrong. “How do you know?”
She points to the white trailer I noticed earlier in the parking lot. “That’s where the bomb squad stores its equipment.”
She can’t possibly know this. “But the trailer’s not even marked.”
Renée shakes her head. “Imagine the panic if it were. The bomb squad came to my dad’s bank last February. That’s definitely their trailer.”
Of course it is. Princess Einstein knows it all. “We should leave the park, then. Why are we going closer?”
“Because I want to know more.”
As we reach the school, Ping wags himself crazy. He rears on his hind legs and bounces on only two paws. Dog body language for Look at me, pay attention to me. Friends, friends!
Pong wags, too, and his mouth opens into a grin.
The dog running around the edge of the roof looks like a German Shepherd–retriever cross, gold and black with floppy ears. Sniffing along the edge, he stops to give the Ping Pong team a yip and a wag.
“Would you kindly leave the area,” the police officer calls down. “Your dogs are distracting Troy, here.”
“Troy distracted them from their walk.” Renée may think she’s just explaining, but to me, it sounds like she’s back-talking the police officer. “Shouldn’t he be trained to ignore them?” she asks.
“Yeah, well, no one’s perfect. And he’s bored.”
“Not finding anything?” I ask, trying to smooth things over.
“A bologna sandwich,” Mrs. Klein answers. “You kids should eat your lunches.”
“Clear out,” the cop says more firmly.
Suddenly, Troy forgets our dogs and rushes off barking. He leaps down to a lower level of the roof, nose down, tail wagging, and sniffs at some large pipes. Those pipes lead to the furnace room.
“Let’s go,” I tell Renée and pull Pong away from the schoolyard.
“Wonder what they found …” Renée says.
I break into a jog now.
“Slow down. What’s your hurry?”
“We could blow up!” I answer.
“Nah. We just have to dive to the ground and cover our ears,” she says.
“They’ve gone back inside. Troy must have smelled a bomb in the furnace pipes.” My hands get sweaty and I breathe more quickly.
“Or another bologna sandwich. Don’t you want to know?” she asks.
“I owe these dogs an hour. A safe hour. We’re heading back toward the library.”
“Sure, we can check out the school on our way back.”
“Hurry!” I run again, giving her no chance to argue. We need to put distance between ourselves and a possible explosion. We breeze by the skateboard park. There are some kids riding their BMX bikes up and down, but no one’s in the tennis court. “In here.” I take Pong into the court, and she follows with Ping and shuts the gate. There, I throw the ball for them, and we chase them to get it back. Great exercise … for us.
When Renée’s phone plays a bar from Beethoven’s Fifth, she checks for texts. “It’s my brother,” she says, as though I’ve asked. “Attila’s in the house now, so I can go home.”
“Did you just call your brother Attila, as in Attila the Hun?”
“Yeah, I know, strange name. But my parents are Hungarian. It’s popular there.”
“Wait