Dog Bless You by Neil S. Plakcy

you home?” Rick
asked. “My treat.”
    “Thanks for the offer, big spender,” I said. “But
Rochester’s still got an upset stomach, so he’s getting boiled chicken and rice
for dinner, and if I ate a hamburger in front of him without giving him some
he’d never forgive me.”
    Rick dropped me and Rochester off at home, and I boiled
up some fresh chicken and  rice, which I mixed in with some of his regular
chow. I heated up a TV dinner for myself. We ate together in the kitchen, and
then I took him out for his evening walk.
    A car was cruising slowly down Sarajevo Court, and my
first reaction was to think someone was scoping out houses for burglary. Was
that because of my cruise through Crossing Estates with Rick earlier? Or just
because of the way my parents had raised me?
    The car sped up after it passed us and disappeared
around a corner. As Rochester sniffed and peed, I thought about crime and
wondered if I could find any information on line about crime in Bucks County.
Maybe I could discover something that would help Rick with the spate of
robberies he was investigating. Or maybe by figuring out where the crime was
around Friar Lake, I could give Tony Rinaldi a clue to the identity of the dead
body that had been buried out there.
    My heart rate accelerated as I thought about it, and I
tugged on Rochester’s leash to get him moving back toward home. I felt that
same surge of adrenaline I got whenever I contemplated doing snooping online.
It was probably what Rick’s burglars felt when they found a house to break into,
that sweet sense of breaking society’s bounds.
    I hurried Rochester along. I was probably over-thinking
things, as I usually did. From what I’d read in the years since my own
incarceration, most criminals did what they did not because they were
inherently bad people. They stole, dealt drugs and committed murder because
they didn’t see other options.
    My behavior, I thought, as I unlocked the front door
and ushered Rochester inside, was more akin to an addiction. Goosebumps rose on
my skin and my pulse accelerated when I thought about hacking. And like many
addicts, I thought I could control my behavior and keep myself out of trouble.
    In that way, I guessed, I wasn’t much different from
Mary, the way she used retail therapy to ease her psychic pain over the loss of
our unborn children. And probably like Owen Keely, too, who I presumed was
using chemicals to wipe out bad memories of the war in Afghanistan.
    I got the stepladder from the garage and carried it to
the upstairs hallway, where I set it up just under the hatch that led to the
attic. I climbed up and popped the lid. There wasn’t much up there—a single
light bulb, a lot of pink insulation and my next-door-neighbor Caroline’s
laptop.
    I had found the laptop in her house while I was
investigating her murder. Santiago Santos didn’t know it existed, and if he
ever found it I was sure it would be enough to revoke my parole, because I’d
installed a suite of hacking tools on it which I kept up to date by visiting
certain underground forums I wasn’t supposed to know about.
    My fingers tingled as they always did when I was
getting ready for a stint of cybersnooping. I wasn’t sure what I was looking
for but I rationalized that anything I did wouldn’t be bad because I was on the
side of the angels, just trying to help the police.
    I considered myself a very moral person, and I only
broke the law when I felt it was justified in pursuit of a greater good.
    It’s a slippery slope, I know.
    And sure, I could have left all that investigation to Rick
and Tony. They had the badges and the legal access. But where was the fun in
that?

Police Blotter
    Rochester followed me downstairs, where I opened the
laptop up on the kitchen table. While it booted up, I closed the vertical
blinds that faced out into the courtyard. No need to announce what I was doing
to anyone who happened to drop by.
    When I sat back down, Rochester came up to me