Pythagoras the Dog is Missing

by Jess Faraday

About the Author: Jess Faraday is the author of the Ira Adler mysteries, the Simon Pearce mysteries, and several standalone novels. Her work has won and been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Rainbow Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Golden Crown Literary Society Award. She lives in Scotland.

Excerpt

The first call buzzed in when I was eight feet up a lamppost with a pair of scissors.

Pet snatchers had settled into the neighborhood over the past few weeks, and they used arrangements of zip ties around lampposts and telephone poles to point the way to houses where people routinely left their dogs unattended. Snipping the ties on my way to my veterinary practice had become a daily ritual.

By the time I slid down the pole, my watch was humming like a hive of angry hornets. I took out my phone.

“Doc, where are you?” my intern, Tate, said when I picked up.

“Making life harder for our friendly neighborhood dognappers. What’s up?”

“Well, it looks like they’ve brought the fight to us.”

“You mean beyond graffiti and flaming cat poo on the doorstep?” Our attempts to raise awareness of the pet snatching problem had made us a few enemies.

“Someone broke into the kennels last night and they took Pythagoras.”

The breath went out of me and my heart started to pound.

“Wait,” I said, mentally scrolling through our current list of boarders. “Which one is Pythagoras?”

“You know, the Jack Russell who came in yesterday afternoon?”

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