“Please… I don’t understand,” she said in a whisper. “Look… look at him. He’s not doing anything wrong.”
The German Shepherd glanced at him sideways, as if to confirm the man was still there. Then he fixed his gaze back on the line of weapons. It was a living shield.
Don Ernesto, as if guided by something from afar, stretched out his hand and carefully lifted the harness. He touched the mark with his fingertips.
He went pale.
“No…” she whispered. “That scar…”
Mateo frowned.
—Do you know her?
Don Ernesto gasped for breath. His hands began to tremble.
—I had a partner… years ago. In the army. He wasn’t with the police. He was… he was one of us. A German Shepherd. We called him Shadow.
Valeria blinked, tense.
—That dog’s name is Delta, sir.
The silence grew heavy. Even the sea seemed to be listening.
Don Ernesto squeezed his eyes shut, and the pier disappeared for a moment.
He saw himself again in the mountains, years ago, on a night operation against an armed cell. The earth smelled of gunpowder and pine. The shots sounded like whips. And he, Ernesto, still young, advanced with his unit while the dog marked routes for him, read his fear in the air, saved his life without asking permission.
Then, the explosion. An improvised device. White light. The world blown to pieces. Screams. Dirt in his mouth. And the last image: the dog’s body lunging toward him, pushing him out of the line of impact.
When he woke up in the hospital, they told him the dog hadn’t made it. That they were “so sorry.” That he was “a hero.” And he cried like he’d never cried before, with a pain he didn’t know where to put.
On the dock, Don Ernesto opened his eyes, which were moist.
“They told me he died,” she said, barely. “I buried it in my mind for years. But that mark… that mark was made on the same day he… he took my people.”
Mateo carefully took out his radio.
—Commander… Delta’s file shows an explosion injury, registered… —she looked— twelve years ago. Before entering the municipal program.
Valeria slowly raised her gaze.
—Twelve years old…? —he repeated.
Don Ernesto looked at the dog as if he were seeing it for the first and last time.
—Shadow… —she whispered, and the word broke—. Is that you?
The German Shepherd relaxed his posture, as if the real danger had shifted from the surroundings to his heart. He took a step, pressed his chest against Don Ernesto’s, and, with a gentleness impossible in an animal trained to take down men, placed a paw on his knee.
A specific gesture. Too specific.
Don Ernesto put a hand to his mouth.
“I… I taught him that,” she said, crying. “When I had seizures, when I couldn’t breathe… he would put his paw on me like this. To bring me back. To tell me, ‘Here I am.’”
Several officers had their eyes water without permission.
Valeria lowered the weapon completely. Her face, once hard, softened into a display of humanity.
“Stop,” he ordered in a low voice. “Everyone… lower your weapons.”
Continue reading…
