I froze as Chickie began barking inside the cab.
It was a side street right off normally bustling Cicero Avenue, but it was Saturday morning, not quite as much traffic, so I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was.
“Don’t turn around and no one’s gonna get hurt,” the man promised. “Just pass the wallet over your shoulder.”
Deliberately, I pulled my ID from the breast pocket of my Burberry wool-blend military greatcoat and did exactly as he asked, holding it over my right shoulder for him.
“Oh fuck.” He groaned as Chickie wriggled free of the seatbelt and flung himself against the door, pawing the glass, his nails clicking on it, snarling and growling, trying to get to me. “You’re a cop?”
“Marshal,” I corrected as he pushed the muzzle of the gun harder into my back.
“Fuck,” he swore again as Chickie lost his mind and howled.
Grabbing the door fast, I opened it a crack and Chickie exploded from the cab, the force of the door opening knocking me back into the man, slamming us onto the asphalt at our feet.
He dropped the gun and my ID when he landed, scrambled out from under me, and ran. I was winded for a moment, but he was operating on far more adrenaline than I was. I knew the dog wouldn’t rip my face off; he was under no such impression.
“Chickie,” I yelled, but he was gone, barreling after the fleeing man.
I stood unsteadily, retrieving the gun and my ID, and watched as Chickie caught the guy in a flying leap, grabbed him by the shoulder, jaws clamping down, and lifted him off his feet in a blur of motion before hurling him to the ground like he was a rag doll instead of a man.
I groaned.
“Oh!” a bystander yelled from the other side of the parking lot.
“Jesus Christ!” another shouted from the sidewalk.
A good Samaritan who’d come running to see if I was all right grimaced in sympathy with the criminal. “Oh shit, that had to hurt.”
“Dayum,” a woman standing beside her Volkswagen Beetle two cars away called out as well, all of us watching Chickie dance around his fallen quarry.
The takedown had looked painful and the man wasn’t moving.
It was fortunate that Chickie wasn’t a trained attack dog or he would have gone for the jugular and the guy would be dead. As it was, he growled and barked, circled his victim, wagged his tail, basically waiting for his fallen quarry to twitch or move in any way. Jogging over to them, I called Chickie to me and petted him as the man simply lay there and moaned.
“I called 911 for you, brother,” good Samaritan, who had followed me, said.
“Thank you.” I sighed, squatting down and holding Chickie as the guy on the ground turned over.
“I think he broke my back, marshal,” the would-be-robber said hoarsely, still not in possession of all the air normally in his body.
“And what did we learn?” I asked snidely.
Applause caught my attention, and I turned to see all the people from the veterinarian’s office standing outside the front door, clapping. It was nice that they all saw Chickie for the good boy he was. As I heard sirens in the distance, I petted him while he took a seat beside me.
“Next time just grab the perp’s leg, okay?”
All I got for my trouble was a wet nose in the eye.
I HAD to go down to the police station, file a report, have the vet fax over Chickie’s medical records so I could prove all his shots were up to date and he didn’t have rabies, and then sit for hours before giving a statement about exactly what had occurred. And that was fast!—with them throwing some professional courtesy my way after they found out I was a marshal. The sheer volume of paperwork involved in law enforcement was simply staggering.
“Why didn’t you use your gun?”
“’Cause I figured the dog would hurt more,” I lied. It took a lot for me to pull my gun on someone, certainly a life-and-death struggle, and those were few and far between.
“Really?” the officer taking my statement asked, chuckling as he filled out the report on his computer, leaning forward in his squeaky office chair.
“No, not really,” I groaned. “I usually yell first, right? You warn people before you shoot at them.”
“So then what happened?”
“My dog got there before I could even say ‘Stop or he’ll eat you.’”
The cop grinned wide. “What an idiot.”
“You get a badge when you mug someone, you drop it and run.”
“Right?”
I shrugged.
“Man, what’re they teaching these clowns in the joint nowadays,” the officer muttered.
Unfortunately for my mugger, threatening a peace officer, marshal, any law enforcement personnel at all carried with it a greater penalty than simply trying to rob your average person on the street. He was in for a world of shit.