Another shake. “My mom loved cats. Personally, I can’t see the attraction. You feed them, pamper them, clean up their crap, and they still act like they’d be gone in a second if they got a better offer. Call me needy, but I want a pet that wants me back. I brought a puppy home once but…It didn’t go over too well, so we had to get rid of it.”

According to Brad, my mother had shipped the dog off to the pound while I was at school, though she’d told me it ran away.

“How about—?” I began, then stopped.

“How about me?” Jack said. “Pets, you mean?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”

“Wouldn’t ask anything I minded answering myself.” He stretched out his legs, earning a grunt from Scotch as he invaded her space. “Had barn cats. Don’t really count as pets. Found a dog once. Should say, my older brothers found it. Gave it to me.”

“That was nice of them.”

“I thought so. Till I realized they just wanted someone to do the work. Feed it. Brush it. Take the blame if it caused trouble. Dog played with all of us. Didn’t care who ‘owned’ it.”

I laughed. “Smart brothers.”

“Yeah.” He smiled, then went quiet, traced a finger around the circle his mug had left on the table. “Yeah, they were.” Jack swiped away the condensation mark with his hand, then waved at Ginger, who was still sucking up my attention. “No reason you can’t get a dog. Build a good outside kennel. You’re outside most of the time anyway.”

“I suppose.”

“Should have one. At least for protection. That caretaker you’ve got? He’s, what, seventy? Not much help. No security system. Fuck, I tried the front door once. Two a.m. Wasn’t even locked. Then there’s your jogging. You take a gun along?”

“Where I live—”

“Doesn’t matter. You need to be careful. Those deserted roads? I remember—” Jack shook his head. “Wouldn’t believe what guys can pull off.”

“Such as?”

He lifted his brows.

“Come on. You set up a story, now carry it through. You’ve still got”—I glanced in his mug—“half a cup left. Tell me half a cup’s worth of story and we’ll call it a night.”

And, to my surprise, he did.

HSK

HSK

He pecked at the keyboard with his index fingers. Slow but steady. His philosophy for all things, or so it had been…

What was the cliché? You can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Of course you could, so long as you provided the twin keys to change—motivation and desire. He’d never be a sixty-word-a-minute typist, but his two-fingered method suited his purposes just fine.