Page 19 of Nobody Told Me Thrift Shops Sell Stolen Dragon Heirlooms

“Afternoon, Mr. Alvarez,” I called as we approached.

Mr. Alvarez looked up from the grill, a broad smile breaking over his face when he spotted Max, who was, in his opinion, the superior customer. “Ah. Queen.”

I grinned. In his defense, Quinn wasn’t the easiest name to catch over traffic and a cart that hissed like a small industrial machine.

“One loaded dog for me, one plain for His Majesty,” I said with a smile.

Max, hearing the tone if not the words, straightened slightly at my side like a decorated veteran arriving at a state dinner.

Mr. Alvarez had company today. A woman around my age sat on a folding stool beside the cooler, textbook open on her lap, highlighter clipped to the spiral binding. She had thick dark hair pulled up in a claw clip and that specific exhausted-pretty look of a college student between semesters who hadn’t wanted to spend the afternoon selling hot dogs but knew family businesses didn’t care about your major.

Mr. Alvarez jerked his chin toward her. “My niece, Elena,” he said. “Home from school and already judging my business practices.”

Elena looked up from her textbook. When she saw Max, she made the exact face every sane person made the first time they noticed him. Not fear and not even awe, exactly. More a kind of startled respect, as though she’d accidentally encountered a very handsome lieutenant colonel in the produce aisle.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Can I pet him?”

“Of course.” I shifted the paper napkins and soda in one hand and looked down at Max. “Fuss.”

He moved instantly into heel position at my left knee, body aligned with mine in that precise, almost elegant way that still made something in me warm with pride every time I saw it. Belgian Malinois were all lines and angles and intent, and Max, even retired, still had that look of being assembled for competence first and beauty only incidentally.

Elena frowned. “What was that?”

“German. It’s his command language.”

Her brows shot up as she crouched carefully in front of him. “He’s bilingual?”

“Multilingual,” I said.

Mr. Alvarez barked out a laugh from behind the cart. “Dog smarter than law girl?”

“Infuriatingly so.”

Elena let Max sniff her hand before scratching under his chin, exactly where he liked it. He accepted the attention with polite dignity, ears half-forward, tail giving a restrained thump against my calf.

“He’s so calm,” she said.

“That’s because he’s in public. At home he has stronger opinions.”

Mr. Alvarez passed me my hot dog in its paper cradle, then Max’s bun-less one in a separate tray. “For soldier,” he said solemnly.

“Thank you.”

Max’s service file had called him a United States Military Working Dog. Avery called him a “retired federal employee with boundaries.” To me, he was somewhere in between.

He’d been stationed at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, worked joint training with partner K-9 units in East Africa, had run a handful of missions in Somalia and across the Sahel, then retired after shielding his handler from an IED that had taken a piece of his hearing in the right ear and, according to Avery, absolutely none of his self-respect.

After I’d broken Max’s hot dog into bite-sized pieces, I asked Elena if she would like to help me give him a treat. She nodded and took a piece. “Sit. Sitz,” Elena corrected herself immediately, grinning up at me.

I pointed at her. “You’re picking this up unreasonably fast.”

“I took two years of German and retained just enough to order beer and apologize.”

“That’s honestly more than most tourists.”

Max dropped neatly into a sit. A man on one of those three-wheeled electric things shot past us, trailing club music and his own deep personal commitment to endangering pedestrians. At the exact same moment, one of the giant inflatable rat costumes from whatever union demonstration was happening down the block lurched sideways in the wind like a cursed parade balloon.

Max turned his head, his ears perking. If I fed him now, while his attention was elsewhere, half his hot dog would be lost to the sidewalk.