🐾 PART 4 — “Things You Can’t Train”
Rockport, Missouri | Later That Week
Frank Dillard stared at the blinking cursor on his laptop.
Chapter Two was saved. Finished. Honest.
He hadn’t typed like that in years — the kind of writing that comes not from memory, but from marrow. With Matt’s help, he was filling in what he never knew: the sound of Axel’s breathing in that closet, the texture of the boy’s trembling fingers against fur, the way a dog’s steady presence can hold a child together better than any adult.
Frank sipped his coffee, now cold. Outside, dusk settled like an old blanket over the town. The porch creaked once, then again. He waited, hopeful — but no rose tonight.
He wasn’t sure if he was disappointed.
He called Matt the next day.
“Got time for a visit?”
“Always,” came the reply.
Frank drove out that afternoon, bringing a box with him. Inside were items he hadn’t touched since Axel’s passing — the partner badge, a worn K9 vest, a half-chewed Kong toy.
“I figured if we’re going to write this,” he told Matt, “you ought to see the things that made him who he was.”
Matt laid each item out on his kitchen table like sacred artifacts.
“This is the vest he wore the night of the warehouse shootout?”
Frank nodded.
“Still has the scar,” he added, running his fingers over the stitched-up tear in the side. “Bullet didn’t kill him right away. He crawled back to me.”
Matt’s voice was soft. “He came back.”
Frank looked away.
“It’s what gets me. All those years training him to run toward danger, and in the end, he still came back. Not to the fight. To me.”
They sat in silence.
Then Matt asked, “How do you train for that?”
Frank chuckled, bitterly.
“You don’t. You train obedience, signals, scent tracking. But loyalty like that? That’s something you can’t earn with treats. That comes from living every single day together.”
Matt nodded, but didn’t speak.
Frank saw something in his expression.
“You thinking about getting a dog?” he asked.
Matt smiled faintly. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot more lately.”
Frank sipped his coffee. “Don’t think too long.”
Later, they walked around the neighborhood.
Leaves crunched underfoot, dry and sun-bleached. Frank moved slowly, cane in one hand, his old K9 unit jacket on — a little tight now. Matt walked beside him, quieter than usual.
“You okay?” Frank asked.
Matt shrugged.
“I’ve just been wondering… what if Axel hadn’t come in? What if it had been another cop, without a dog? What happens to a kid like me then?”
Frank stopped walking.
He looked up at the late-afternoon sky.
“I think,” he said, “you’d still be alive. But you wouldn’t have healed right. That’s the thing dogs do. They don’t just protect your body — they give your soul a place to hide.”
Matt’s jaw tightened. He blinked a few times.
Frank let the silence settle.
That evening, they sat on Matt’s porch, working through photos and records, piecing together the moments that mattered. Matt brought out a journal — not the one with the title, but another, older one. Blue cover. Torn edges.
“I wrote these after I turned sixteen,” he said. “When the nightmares stopped being about the man and started being about the silence after.”
Frank opened it carefully.
The first entry read:
I don’t remember the cop’s name. But I remember the dog’s tail thumping. Like he was glad to find me.
He turned the page.
He didn’t bark. He didn’t sniff. He just watched me. And I think he knew I was more scared of being touched than being hurt again.
Frank closed the journal gently.
“You wrote this as a kid?”
Matt nodded.
“I didn’t know who else would listen.”
Frank stared at the porch light flickering above them.
“He listened.”
Back home, Frank placed Axel’s badge back on the mantle.
He sat in his old recliner, the one Axel used to nudge with his nose when it was time for bed.
The night was still.
He turned on the old police scanner — something he hadn’t done in years. Most of the traffic was routine. Car trouble. A lost dog on Elm Street. A noise complaint from the diner.
But something in the background caught his attention.
A soft bark.
Probably nothing.
Probably just coincidence.
But Frank smiled anyway.
“You still listening, partner?”
The next day, Frank received a letter.
No return address.
Just his name, written in looping script.
Inside was a single sheet of paper.
“I was one of the paramedics on April 14.”
“He wouldn’t leave the boy. Not even when we tried to pick him up.”
“He growled — not like a threat. Like a promise.”
Below that, in smaller handwriting:
“He didn’t save just the child. He saved everyone who watched him that night.”
Frank folded the letter and sat for a long time with it pressed to his chest.
He wondered how many more people Axel had touched without ever knowing.
That night, he wrote again.
Axel never knew what kind of hero he was. He never asked for thanks. He only asked to come along. That was enough.
The chapter title:
“Things You Can’t Train.”
He typed until his hands hurt.
Until the words blurred.
Until he heard the front porch creak again.
And this time — another rose.
Still white.
But next to it, something new:
A worn, rubber toy.
One Frank hadn’t seen in over a decade.
His breath caught in his throat.
Because it was Axel’s.
And no one else would’ve known where it had been buried.