Michael didn’t even have time for his lungs to fill completely with oxygen before he was heaving, throwing up water and bits of seaweed and sand. He tried to push himself up, at least to his knees, but his arms almost immediately gave out when a searing pain exploded in his shoulder and he fell back down.
He landed with his cheek to the sand and he roared in agony, the pain in his shoulder was nothing compared to the pain in his neck upon impact.
“Fuck,” he groaned, feeling his still moist lips get coated in sand.
It took him a few tries and a whole lot more screaming, but he eventually got himself rolled onto his back, where he realized, with a grimace, that his neck was bent at a very unnatural angle. Typical. Just perfect.
I fucking hate this part, he thought to himself as he lifted his arms, hissing at the throbbing pain in his shoulder. He put one hand on his chin, the other firmly on the top of his head, then inhaled a sharp breath, bracing himself before twisting his head, re-breaking his neck back into place, listening to the disgusting sound of the vertebrae in his neck cracking as they slid against each other.
He let out a howl as every nerve in his body radiated with pain, those that had been severed reconnecting and flaring with heat. Michael laid in the sand for a few seconds, waiting for the pain to die down, registering distantly that there was something tugging at the pant leg of his jeans.
When he had his faculties about him enough to move again, Michael lifted himself up onto his elbows and saw at his feet a dog; a dirty, unkempt looking mutt with steely blue eyes. She was probably some sort of pit bull, missing half of her left ear and still tugging on Michael’s pant leg.
“All right, all right! I’m up already! Chill out, Cujo,” Michael said, taking his leg back from the dog and sitting up fully. The dog, seemingly content for the time being, sat down on her haunches as well.
Michael glanced around, assessing his situation. He was at the beach, if one could call it that. It wasn’t the warm, colorful beaches that most of SoCal was known for, it was the seedy part, just underneath the pier where a great many of Los Santos’s Most Wanted made their shadiest deals and trades.
In fact, Michael was fairly sure that’s what he’d been doing before he’d been attacked from behind, hit so hard on the back of the head that it’d broken his neck, then thrown into the unforgiving depths of the Pacific Ocean. Fantastic.
He glanced down at the dog, who noticed his attention and cocked her head at him, then looked back behind him at the water. He was about twenty feet from the ocean now, too far for even the tide to have taken him, and between himself and the water was a long, windy trough, probably created as his body was drug upshore.
Michael turned back to the dog, who he was surprised was now right next to him, sniffing him curiously.
“Well, Lassie, looks like you saved me from that big, old well,” Michael said, smirking as he reached up to scratch her behind the ears.
Upon closer inspection, the dog was extraordinarily filthy, and malnourished. He could see the outline of her ribs along her torso, so prominent that Michael could count them. Her eyes were pink around the rims, and her ear, though healed now, had definitely not been removed in a kind manner. Despite all of this, she couldn’t have been more than a few years old. Michael found himself wondering if she’d dragged him out of the briny deep for no other reason than to have him as a snack.
But he took in the dog’s wagging tail, sparkling eyes, and the way her jowls separated into what Michael thought was probably a much nicer smile than most of the people he encountered in his day to day life had, and decided "No way." This baby couldn’t hurt a fly.
He let his arm drop to his side, looking around him. He was probably at least five miles down shore from where he’d parked his car, and he would honestly be surprised if they hadn’t torched that the second he disappeared under the waves. So he was looking at probably a two hour walk to somewhere that had a payphone so he could call Lindsay to come pick him up. Either that or he could jack someone’s car, but who had the energy for that honestly?
The dog, in the meantime, had decided he’d been sitting still for too long and seemed to deduce that he’d died again, so she leapt back onto her hind legs, slamming her two front paws into his chest, sending him toppling and groaning back into the sand.
She then stood on his chest, bouncing up and down on him, in what Michael figured was her attempt at resuscitating him.
His mind wandered back to a video Meg had once showed him of a dog that had discovered a dead fish by the beach and had tried to revive it by splashing it over and over again with water. He’d spent the next hour trying to get her to stop crying, because “Dogs are just too good for this world, we don’t deserve them!”
Make that a three hour walk, he thought as the dog licked and slobbered all over his face.
~ ~ ~
If the dog had had any intention of going about her normal life and leaving him to his broken collarbone and sandy underwear, she hadn’t acted on it yet.
She followed close by him the whole time, nipping playfully at his heels and sticking her butt into the air, wagging her uncropped tail in excitement at her new friend.
At some point during the walk, Michael found a stick half-buried in the sand and picked it up, tossing it with his good arm for the dog to go after. She immediately did, barking happily as she grabbed it and returned it to him to throw again.
It occurred to him after playing fetch with her for a while and her never tiring of it that this was probably the first and maybe the only kindness that the dog had ever known. If he was honest, this dog was probably the first being outside of the crew to be genuinely nice to him in a very long time as well.
It was around when Michael had been talking to the dog and having her talk to him back in a funny, high-pitched for about ten minutes that he realized that he was already almost back onto the street that led into the city. The two-and-a-half hour trip had felt like maybe half that with the dog’s company.
He looked down at the dog warily, feeling the warm pinpricks of attachment curdling low in his stomach.
“All right, but let’s get one thing straight,” Michael said to the dog. “I’m Turner, you’re Hooch.”
He trudged his way up a few more blocks until he found a convenience store, where he “persuaded” the teller to let him use the phone behind the counter (it didn’t actually take much convincing, the teen working the register didn’t seem to care much one way or the other, he figured he was probably just playing up the “criminal” vibe to impress the dog.)
As soon as he’d hung up with Lindsay, he reached into his still damp jeans and pulled out the wad of cash he kept in the special pocket Meg had sewn into all of their pants (and Lindsay and Jack’s skirts), hidden behind the regular pocket from muggers (usually in Gavin’s case) and other baddies (in Gavin’s and everyone else’s case.)
He spent about five minutes peeling wet bills apart from each other until he’d successfully extracted an almost full ten dollar bill, then used it to buy a Crunch bar and a Mountain Dew for himself and a can of Spam for the dog, pocketing the rest of the change.
The pair ate in silence on the sidewalk outside of the convenience store, and when they were done, the dog watched in curiosity as Michael pulled his water-logged pistol out of the holster, standard issue that Kerry had swiped while undercover at the precinct and he was grateful for it, he would’ve no doubt lost his gun to the sea had he been without it. He disassembled the gun, setting the pieces in a neat line next to him as he cleaned it and inspected it for water damage (he put the bullets pointedly so he was sitting between them and the dog.)
He was just sliding the magazine back into the gun when a car pulled up next to them, the dog immediately jumping to her feet, the hair at the back of her neck standing up as she bared her teeth at the people piling out of the car.
“Michael!” Gavin cried, running towards him but skidding to a quick stop when the dog snarled at him.
“All right, down, Bonnie,” he said, patting the dog behind the ears and smirking when she instantly relaxed. Dear lord, he already had a name for her.
He waited a few seconds before looking back up at Gavin and raising an eyebrow at him, opening his arms expectantly.
Gavin instantly vaulting himself into Michael’s chest, jumping up and down as he held onto him.
“Michael Vincent Jones,” Meg said sharply, teasingly, while stepping out of the car in a white babydoll dress and equally pristine heels, as beautiful and innocent-looking as an angel, even though Michael knew full well she had a gun and a taser somehow concealed in her bra. “What have I told you about getting yourself thrown into the sea and drowning?”
“Uh, to never do it without you so we can act out the scene from Titanic?” he said, grinning as she tucked herself under his arm and he kissed her forehead in greeting.
“Yet here you are, a Jack without a Rose,” she scolded, rolling her eyes. “Unbelievable.”
“‘Sup, fish food?” Lindsay called from the front seat of the car, leaning out to kiss Michael hello. “Who’s the dog?”
“Oh, that’s Bonnie,” Michael said, turning back to the dog in question, who was still eyeing the others warily, but seemed to warm immediately up to Meg, who was now cooing at her. “She’s cool.”
“Nice,” Lindsay said. “Good luck explaining her to Geoff.”
“Well, I’m thinking he might give her a little leeway, considering she’s the one who dragged me out of the water,” Michael said, smiling at the pooch.
“What?” Meg cried, covering her mouth with her perfectly manicured hands, eyes welling with tears. “She did the fish thing to you?”
“All but gave me mouth-to-mouth,” Michael chuckled and Meg screamed, throwing her arms around the very confused-looking, but not unwelcoming dog.
“Oh, precious baby cinnamon roll! Too good, too pure for this world!” Meg sobbed, and Gavin frowned.
“Great. More competition,” Gavin teased, trying to ease Turney off of the dog.
“What say we get back to base, chaps?” Lindsay said, pounding on the side of the car door twice before ducking her head back in.
“Sure, but can we stop by PetSmart first?” Michael said, ready to bodily toss Gavin out of the front seat before reconsidering and picking Bonnie up gingerly, sliding into the backseat with her and Meg. “I have to get someone a collar, and for the first time, it’s not Gavin.”