Gabe nodded to an empty place at the end of the third row. “Over there okay?” He looked at Rhonda for an answer, all but ignoring the comments about his heroics.

Rhonda nodded. “Sure.” She looked at her coworker. “Have we got any blankets left? The poor fellow looks like he could use a bit of comfort right now.”

“There’s one or two left,” Karen said, heading for one of their supply tubs. She sorted through it and returned with a faded-blue plaid blanket and offered it their direction. “I’ll let one of you two do the honors.”

Gabe cocked an eyebrow in Olivia’s direction after they’d set the crate a foot or two from the crated dog at the end of the row. From Olivia’s best guess, it was a border collie/Dalmatian mix. “Be my guest. And here,” he said, fishing through his pocket. “Might as well give him the last of these.”

Olivia ignored the rush from their fingers brushing together and sank to a squat in front of the pointer’s crate, letting him sniff the blanket through the bars. When he didn’t seem frightened by it, she opened the door slowly and placed it at his feet. Then she rewarded him with the last two treats, which he inhaled in the space of a second or two. He looked at her hungrily, clearly hoping for more, but Olivia scratched him behind the ear instead.

It had taken most of the ride here for her tears to stop flowing. She was a sucker for hunting dogs anyway, and this one seemed so docile and sweet. And he was clearly underweight. By quite a bit. If the owner had pulled up while they were there, it would’ve been all she could do not to give him or her a swift kick in the shin. What sort of person kept a dog locked in a pen and didn’t provide adequate access to food?

The same sort who left him to drown.

Olivia shuddered. Thank goodness he was safe. She couldn’t imagine a greater horror than watching helplessly and Gabe not being able to get him out in time. “He’s so thin.” She swallowed hard. “There’s no excuse for a dog to be this thin.”

“Agreed,” Gabe said. “Underweight as he is, added to the fact that he was left in a locked pen during a flood, is enough to warrant a neglect confiscation, I suspect. And if you’d seen the house… I should’ve taken pictures. I didn’t think about that until now. It looked abandoned. Worse than abandoned. More like a junkyard. And I suspect it wasn’t any cleaner inside the pen before it flooded than it was in front of the house.”