Breaking Creed

2

The Coast Guard helicopter pitched to one side, sending Ryder Creed sliding. He tightened his grip on Grace. His other hand white-knuckled the leather strap that kept him anchored to the inside wall. Grace was tethered to him, one end of the nylon restraint secured to her vest and the other end wrapped around Creed’s waist. Despite never having flown in a helicopter before, she didn’t appear stressed at all.

Creed, however, didn’t have a good feeling about this trip. In fact, he was beginning to regret taking the assignment. None of his dogs had ever been in a helicopter before. He couldn’t help thinking the sixteen-pound Jack Russell terrier felt even smaller cradled next to him.

But Grace was taking it in stride, already used to the thumping of the rotors and treating the roller-coaster ride as if it were just a part of the adventure. She watched and sniffed at the unfamiliar surroundings, anxious to get to work, because as soon as her vest went on, she knew they were headed for a job, and this girl loved her work. That was what made her such an excellent air-scent dog. She possessed a natural curiosity. The tougher the puzzle, the more excited she became.

“She’s not exactly what I expected” was the first thing Commander Wilson had said when he met Grace and Creed on the helipad before takeoff.

While Wilson handed Creed his own “mustang”—the aircrew’s term of endearment for the orange flight suits they wore — he stared at Grace as though perhaps Creed might have brought the wrong dog. Even the rest of the crew — copilot Tommy Ellis, flight mechanic Pete Kesnick, and rescue swimmer Liz Bailey — looked at the terrier as if they weren’t sure what to do with her.

But it was actually Grace whom the Coast Guard had requested. Last week she’d made the national news when she managed to sniff out two kilos of cocaine at Hartsfield’s international terminal in Atlanta. A Colombian woman had creatively found a way to make chocolate bars with cocaine centers. She had made it through customs and was headed out of the area when Grace pulled Creed off the line they were working and raced after the woman.

Two weeks before, Grace had stopped a duffel bag filled with a case of peanut butter. It was coming down the conveyor belt out of the cargo hold of an American Airlines flight from Iquitos, Peru. They had already spent a morning going over checked luggage from incoming international flights when Grace alerted Creed to the red-and-black duffel that looked brand-new. Sure enough, in the gooey middle of each jar was a triple-bagged stash of cocaine. Each sixteen-ounce jar of extra-crunchy contained almost a kilo. Creed was told that the twelve-pack carton had a street value of nearly a million dollars.

Suddenly they were becoming celebrities. Just two days ago, Creed and Grace had traveled to prerecord an appearance on The View that was scheduled to air this week. Creed’s partner, Hannah, was fielding calls for more appearances, on Good Morning America and Fox & Friends. Grace, of course, was taking the attention the same way she reacted to everything else — as if it were just another part of her daily adventure.

Creed not so much.

He’d worked hard to carve out a mostly private life for himself despite building a nationally known K9 business. At first he bristled at the media attention, until Hannah convinced him it could be a way for his sister, Brodie, to find him.

“Rye,” Hannah told him when he groaned at another photo of him and Grace, this time on the front page of USA Today. “What if Brodie is still alive? She might see you. She’ll recognize the name, if not the face. Maybe all this is a blessing.”

That was Hannah, always finding a positive spin, seeing blessings where Creed saw only chaos. That’s how she had saved him in the first place. Seven years ago she’d seen promise in the drunk and belligerent marine who had taken on three guys in a bar fight. It happened at the end of her shift at Walter’s Canteen on Pensacola Beach.

In all his life, Creed had never had to deal with an angry black woman, especially one whose anger came in a calm and measured sermon that had sobered him more than any drill sergeant ever had. Somehow he ended up with a mop in his hands, cleaning up broken glass and sticky beer, instead of in an alley with a busted skull or broken ribs.

It was Hannah who’d convinced Creed to use the skills he’d learned as a K9 handler in his marine unit to start his own business. And since that night she’d managed to become his business partner, his confidante, his counselor, his family. She was usually right, even about the things he didn’t want to admit. And maybe she’d be right about this.

Fifteen years ago his sister, Brodie, had disappeared, taken from an interstate rest stop. She was only eleven. Creed was fourteen. Brodie’s body had never been found. It ripped apart his parents and forced Creed to grow up too soon, haunted and forever burdened by that autumn day when suddenly Brodie wasn’t in the restroom anymore. She wasn’t anywhere to be found.

His search for her inspired Creed to start K9 CrimeScents. The company had grown into a multimillion-dollar operation with a dozen employees, a training facility on fifty acres, with a waiting list for their services as well as for the dogs Creed trained.

Every cadaver search got his hopes up, because even though Brodie had disappeared as a little girl, there was always the possibility that she had lived on for any part of the fifteen years she’d been missing. So every time Creed’s searches discovered a body — whether it was that of a child, a teenager, or a young woman — there was always a chance, always the slightest possibility, that it could be Brodie. And each time the body was identified as someone else, Creed felt the same overwhelming mixture of relief and misery. Relief that maybe, just maybe, his sister could still be alive. And misery, because if she was, what kind of a life was it?

Initially, when the despair from searching for dead bodies almost did him in, Hannah insisted Creed start training some of their dogs for search and rescue, and then she added bombs and drugs to the list. That was why she had him doing drug searches these past several weeks. When she found him passed out in his loft apartment or saw too many women coming and going, she knew he needed a break from tracking dead bodies. Otherwise the stench of death and the false hopes would suck the life right out of him.

So Creed told Hannah that he’d tolerate the media attention as long as it didn’t bother Grace. And he would do a few more drug searches. But this helicopter ride was bringing back other memories that Creed had not expected, and now he wished he’d said no to Hannah and to this assignment.

Grace licked his hand. She was staring at him. An intense stare was supposed to be her cue to him that she had found what they were searching for. Grace was one of his few multitask dogs. All Creed had to do was put a different vest or harness on her and Grace knew what he wanted her to sniff out. But this stare was different. Dogs could detect their handlers’ emotions, too, and Grace knew that something was wrong. She was an amazing little dog. He had found her half-starved and hiding underneath one of the double-wide trailers he kept for hired help. Hard to believe that someone had discarded her like trash. But then that was how Creed had gotten most of his dogs.

Hannah shook her head at him when he brought in another stray.

“Folks just taking advantage of your soft heart,” she’d tell Creed.

What no one understood, not even Hannah, was that the dogs he rescued — those abandoned mutts that were worthless to someone else — had flourished into some of his best search dogs. There was a loyalty, a bond between Creed and the dogs. He’d given them a purpose, a second chance. In a sense it was exactly what they’d given him.

But now, for Grace’s sake, he needed to shove aside those memories that had jolted him with the simple smell of diesel and the sound of the rotors. It was Grace’s first helicopter ride, but it was hardly Creed’s. Almost as soon as he’d boarded, the vibration had drummed out a rhythm that threatened to swallow his heartbeat. Without warning, his chest felt as if it might explode. He craned his neck so he could look out and down at the emerald-green water below. He took deep breaths and calmed his nerves. He tried to remind himself that it was the Gulf of Mexico under his feet and not the suffocating dust and rock of Afghanistan.

Times like this, it surprised him how much he could still feel that place. And yet, he had no one to blame but himself.

His mistake.

He’d been looking for an escape from his life and thought the marines would take him far away from his troubles, but instead he discovered that there were worse versions of hell than the one inside you.

“We’re almost there.” Commander Wilson’s voice blasted through Creed’s helmet, startling him a bit.

Creed scratched behind Grace’s ears — their signal that everything was okay. Finally she put her head down on his leg, but her ears were still pitched forward, letting him know that he wasn’t fooling her.