Sidecar Read Online Free PDF Page B

hadn’t been careful. He knew better now—kept a gamut of medication for those sorts of things on his shelves, and the hospital had been an oblivious benefactor for his altruistic pursuits.
    So the truth was, it didn’t matter if Casey did see him looking like the Bride of Fucking Frankenstein and it scared him. As soon as Joe was done feeding Ira Kenby’s fucking dog, he was going to call social services again, and Casey would be taken to a home that would be more appropriate for a runaway.
    So really, Joe would say, they owed much of their lives together to a senile old man and a dog tortured by hunger to the point it didn’t know better. (Casey would always reply that they would have met again, because there was just no way they could have lived without each other, but Joe’s faith didn’t run that deep. Casey would say that was because Joe didn’t have a Josiah Daniels in his life, and Joe would shake his head and walk off, but that was later in their story.)
    Joe’s neighbor lived about a half a mile away by the dirt road that had brought the motorcycle to the garage the night before, but if you cut through the back, you could find the fence that divided the property (an anomaly in New York, but Joe had gotten used to them here in “free” California) about two hundred yards through the trees. Joe’s property spanned about twenty acres, but Joe hadn’t been that interested in those numbers when he’d been looking at it to buy. He’d mostly just seen the big batch of space between the two houses and been sold.
    And the only time that space didn’t seem to be a blessing was when he was scratching the hell out of his ankles on the underbrush as he walked the path he himself had worn between his house and the fence. Fucking Rufus. Damned dog would be eating Kenby out of house and home, but Joe had made the mistake of bringing home some kitchen scraps for him once—one lousy, fucking time—and the dog had lost his mind. Now, if old Kenby didn’t dig deep enough into the gargantuan bag of kibble for the poor bastard, Rufus was howling at the fence, trying to get Joe’s attention.
    Except… oh, dammit. This time, of all moronic fucking things! Rufus was tangled in the bent pig fence, having chewed his way through the support post and leapt halfway over the fence before it twisted. Oh crap. It looked like the dog’s leg was broken in one of the smaller gaps, and Joe resisted the urge to just turn around and call Ira and have him clean up his mess.
    Rufus caught sight of him then and let loose with a howl, both pathetic and pitiful, and Joe sighed. Ira was too old to be living alone as it was.
    “All right, Rufus. C’mon, big guy. You and me, we’re going to have to work together, see? Now I’m just going to move the fence so—”
    A howl punctuated the sudden quiet as Josiah shifted the fencing so that he could walk on top of it and get to the dog to help free him.
    “Yeah, yeah—I’m sorry about that, big guy. Here. Here. See? Here I am, got my arm over your shoulder, I’m working the leg through, okay? And— fuck! ” Oh, ouch, oh fuck, oh shit, oh holy fucking Moses in a bushel basket with cookies, ouch!
    “Jesus, Rufus!” Joe fought back tears and the urge to look at his bicep, where the damned dog, in his fear and pain, had just sunk his big long fucking teeth through the denim jacket, the skin, and the muscle, right to the fucking bone. But Joe was this close to getting the dog’s leg out, and the dog already had a hold of his arm—why the hell not finish the job?
    Suddenly the leg came free, broken and bloody, and Joe let go of it, hoping that Rufus would let go of his arm.
    Rufus did, and sank to the ground in a whimpering puddle, hurt and scared and probably embarrassed and sorry to boot.
    Joe still didn’t look at his arm. Instead, he knelt on the flattened pig wire and picked Rufus up—all one hundred pounds of him—and then walked over the pig wire back toward his house. It was