Trust the Beagle's Nose

TSA.
“Terminally shitty assignment.” Jason kept it under his breath so that the passengers entering the long airline counter queues wouldn’t overhear him. And especially none of his fellow airport security dog handlers.
Yet Darwin, with better hearing than any human, looked up from his task.
Jason looked down. “What?” He needed his head fixed if he was expecting his Beagle to answer. “Sorry, boy. Seek,” he ordered his dog back to work.
At the command, Darwin returned his attention, and his fine nose, to inspecting the long line of suitcases, knapsacks, duffles, golf bags, and the thousand variations that people thought were appropriate for modern air travel.
No explosives. No explosives. No explosives.
He was an explosives dog first but didn’t consider finding drugs to be outside his purview.
No drugs. No drugs. No drugs.
Darwin stood a mighty fourteen inches at the withers, to Jason’s six-two. He liked telling folks that since he couldn’t be five feet ahead of his dog, at least he could be five feet above him. Polite-laugh ratio was better than half on that line, so he was keeping it until he found something better.
However, his back would never survive bending over that far all day to guide Darwin’s sniffing track—an essential collaboration between dog and handler. So, Jason had trained Darwin to follow where he pointed his extendable baton.
The TSA issued their officers a fighting baton that weighed a full kilo and snapped open with a sharp thwack! It made Darwin startle every time. He didn’t like the closing method of ramming the tip hard against the ground any better. And while two-point-two pounds didn’t sound like crap, holding it aloft for a full day, every day, was a beast. ASP’s Agent model baton could be extended with a simple pull of his hand, closing back to its mere nine inches just as quietly with a button push and pressing it against his palm. It weighed a quarter as much and was probably tougher than the all-steel ones. It had set him back a couple hundred, but it made Darwin a far happier detection dog.
The biggest advantage, above and beyond not having to bend down so far to guide Darwin’s investigations, was that his Beagle didn’t appear any more imposing than the two whole inches of his oh-so-sensitive nose. His Kevlar vest, size X-small, didn’t noticeably enhance his visual impact. However, the matte-black, half-meter baton held by a TSA K-9 officer in a bulky Kevlar vest generally kept people from approaching the adorable little dog. He’d never managed to train Darwin out of being painfully cute.

Initial Publication: November 2025 ("Love Me in Vegas" anthology)
Edit / Re-release: September 1, 2026
Print pages: 78