Paw and Order (20 page)

“Snotty times two,” Bernie said.

The kid laughed. “Yeah, but he wasn't snotty once you got to know him. Not like he was a barrel of laughs or anything. Just nice.”

“You and he talk much?”

“Not really. He talked a lot to Queenie.”

“Yeah?”

“Saddling up, washing her down. You'd hear him saying ‘Who's a beautiful girl?' ‘What's your pleasure today?'—like that.”

And then we were all back to looking at Queenie again, a somewhat annoying development, in my opinion. “Will Queenie be staying here?” Bernie said.

“Not sure,” the kid said. “The lady who bought her has a big spread not too far away.”

Bernie hadn't moved at all or changed his stance in the slightest, but the whole patience thing was over. I could feel it, simple as that.

“What's her name?” Bernie said.

“Mrs. Galloway,” said the kid. “Her and Eben rode together sometimes.” He glanced at Bernie. “She's more the snotty kind.”

“Nobody's perfect,” Bernie said.

Except for him, or course, but he was too perfect to say so. With my mind on that, I didn't realize until we were back in the car that I'd forgotten to spook Queenie, maybe chase her around the meadow a bit. Would we be coming back here? I sure hoped so.

TWENTY-FOUR

T
his,” said Bernie, the two of us back in the car now, and possibly driving in the direction we'd come from—I'd only know for sure if that golden patch appeared again—“is a time for playing your cards close to the vest. But since we haven't got any, let's go full frontal.”

Full frontal? I hoped with all my heart—which is my MO when it comes to hoping—that full frontal wasn't in the plans. It had only come up once in our career—the case having to do with a stolen sombrero and a nudist colony, nudist colonies being totally new to me back then, a happier time in that way and that way alone. The less said about nudist colonies the better, but clothes are a fine invention when it comes to humans, let's leave it at that. For the rest of the ride, I kept a close eye on Bernie, waiting for him to start unbuttoning his shirt, but that didn't happen, meaning maybe he'd reconsidered. Sometimes you catch a break in this business.

We pulled back into the driveway at General Galloway's place, went to the front door. The white-uniformed dude opened up before Bernie even knocked.

“They're gone for the day,” he said. “Did you forget something?”

“The general mentioned they were going out,” Bernie said. “I didn't realize it was so soon. Remind me where they went again?”

Nothing changed on the white-uniformed dude's face or in his voice. He just wasn't as friendly anymore, impossible to explain how I knew. “Sorry,” I said, “I don't do the schedules.”

“Who does?” Bernie said.

“One of the assistants.”

“Is he around?”

“She,” said the white-uniformed dude, the sound of less friendliness now in the air. “And no, she's not. Is there any message you'd like me to pass on to the general?”

“No,” Bernie said. “But you can tell Mrs. Galloway we came back.”

“Yes, sir. You came back. Anything else?”

“That's it,” Bernie said. “We came back.”

• • •

“Messed that one up, but good,” Bernie said as we drove away, although I didn't see how, all humans in the scene remaining clothed, for one thing. “ ‘We came back.' It was supposed to sound like the voice of doom, but I bet he started laughing the moment the door closed.”

What was this about? I had no idea. My mind was pleasantly blank for a spell, and then, with no warning, I thought: lunch!

“Hey, big guy, what's up?”

Up? Nothing was up. I did seem to have a paw pressing down on Bernie's knee, but in the nicest way.

“Need a pit stop, huh?” Bernie said.

Which wasn't the case at all, until . . . until all of a sudden I did need a pit stop, and in the worst way!

“All right, big guy, hang on—hang on, for God's sake.”

Bernie pulled into a little roadside clearing. I hopped out, sniffed around a bit. The place smelled unmistakably of pit stop, clearly one of the busiest in my experience, popular with humans of both sexes, and same for the nation within, a cat or two, plus foxes, deer, squirrels, raccoons, and what was this? A bear? Plus another creature or two I didn't even know! I laid my mark here and there, finally settling on a tree stump with white mushrooms growing on the top. There I was, watering mushrooms and therefore doing good, all the while gazing at the sky in that relaxed frame of mind you often get toward the end of a successful pit stop, when out from behind the crown of a nearby tree came the strange bird, the shiny hovering bird with no eyes, no feathers, and wings that didn't flap. It glided down in a long slow arc, passed right over Bernie's head—he was standing outside the car now, leaning in through the open door and digging around under the seat, meaning he was searching for a cigarette, of which there were none, as I knew from the total lack of tobacco smell in the car—and then rose straight up in the air and hung motionless, at about treetop level or so.

I finished up what I was doing, gave myself a quick shake, what Bernie calls my head-clearer—“like slapping your face with aftershave,” which sounds unpleasant, in my opinion—but time enough to forget all about the strange bird, trot over to Bernie, watch him rooting around under the seat, and then—whoa!—remember again about the strange bird. Was it still up there hovering? Oh, yes.

Bernie straightened, turned to me. “What are you barking about?”

The strange bird, of course. What could be more obvious? I amped it up.

“What? What? You needed a pit stop, we took a pit stop. Thirsty maybe?” He reached back into the car, dug out my portable bowl and a bottle of water, filled the bowl, laid it on the grass beside me. I have a thing I sometimes do, hard to say why or even describe, that involves backing up with my legs real stiff and barking in a quick rat-a-tat-tat machine gun way that's hard to ignore.

“Drink, for the love of God! You're not thirsty? What do you want?” Bernie raised his hands, looked up, spoke to the sky, a human thing you see from time to time, the sky never answering, in my experience. “What does he want? What the hell does—”

Bernie froze, his gaze at last on the strange bird. I went silent. It got very quiet in our little pit stop area, nothing to hear but the faint
whirr-whirr
of the strange bird. Bernie watched the bird. I watched Bernie. At first, his face looked surprised. Then his mouth opened very slightly, a sign he was understanding something. Next, his eyes got hard.

He glanced at me. “Good boy, Chet. Way ahead of me again, huh?”

Of course not! How could anyone ever be ahead of Bernie?

Bernie opened the trunk of the Porsche and took out the tire iron. That was unexpected. We were going to do some work on the car? Were we even having any problems with it lately? Not that I'd noticed. And the truth is that car repairs are not our best thing. You wouldn't believe how long it takes to get a coat like mine clean if it happens to get splashed with all the oil that's in the tank and then some. But if Bernie said car repairs, then car repairs it would be. Except now he was stepping away from the car, his head tilted up, eyes back on the strange bird. He patted the end of the tire iron once, twice on his open hand and then—and then came maybe the most exciting moment of my career, so far. Bernie drew back his throwing arm—he's got a cannon, as I must have made clear by now if I'm doing my job—and flung that tire iron high in the sky. It spun up there, glittering in the sunshine and whirling so fast I could hear the rush of air, closing and closing on the strange bird, which just went on hovering, maybe too stupid to know that big trouble was on the way—on the way with bells on, amigo! whatever that might mean, my apologies for even throwing it in there—and then:
WHACK!
What a lovely sound, solid, metallic, satisfying. The strange bird came down in a jerking spiral and landed right beside us with a jangly thud.

“Easy, big guy, easy.”

Uh-oh. Was I jumping up and down? I made my best effort to get that under control, at least eliminating the up part of the jump, if that makes any sense. Meanwhile, Bernie was crouched over the strange bird, which was now in pieces, more than two, and not a bird at all, or even a creature of any kind, but a machine, with insides that reminded me a bit of the insides of Bernie's desktop computer, the day that Charlie figured out how to get the back off. The fun we'd had! And I'd ended up pooping out that one missing piece—a little green plastic square if I remember right—the very next day, so no harm, no foul. But no time for any of that now. Eye on the ball, big guy, which is what Bernie always says, although when it comes to playing fetch all our tennis balls and lacrosse balls are covered in my scent, so nose on the ball gets it done for me.

Where were we? Oh, yeah: the strange bird that turned out to be a machine. Bernie poked through its remains, and I squeezed in my closest to give him every bit of support I could. He picked out a tiny round glassy thing, turned it between his finger and thumb.

“Camera lens, Chet,” he said. He glanced up at the sky, now empty except for a few gold-tipped puffy clouds, and then looked all around. A pickup went by, towing a horse trailer, the horse's tail sticking out the back. No getting away from horses in these parts. The tail flicked in an irritating way, and then we were alone again, me and Bernie.

He rose. “What we're going to do, big guy, is wait right here.” He checked his watch, not his grandfather's watch—our most valuable possession and always either in the safe back home or at Mr. Singh's, our favorite pawnbroker, and don't forget his lamb curry—but his cheapo watch, that had actually cost nothing, Bernie having found it in a trash barrel while we were working some case about which I remember nothing else. “How about we time this?” he said. “Test the efficiency of our spooks, if you see what I mean.”

I most certainly did not, nor, if spooks were involved, did I want to. Hadn't Suzie said something about spooks a while back? If so, you already know my stance on Halloween.

“First, let's take out an insurance policy,” Bernie said.

A fine idea. Once we'd had a fire in the circuit breaker box in the garage, not long after Bernie had figured out a cool way to do something or other with the wiring, and pretty soon we'd learned all sorts of lessons about insurance. But so worth it, those dudes from the fire department turning out to be a fun bunch.

Meanwhile, Bernie was snapping pictures of the remains of the strange bird with his phone. I love how he closes one eye when he does that!

“We'll just send these to Suzie,” he said, pressing a button. Then he found a paper shopping bag in the trunk of the Porsche, paper always his response when asked that plastic or paper question, and tossed all the pieces of the strange bird inside. After that, we just sat in the car and listened to some of our happiest tunes: “Sea of Heartbreak,” “Born to Lose,” “The Sky Is Crying,” “It Hurts Me Too.” Bernie sang along, and I chipped in from time to time as the spirit moved me—and it did a whole bunch of times, which is one of the things about me—with this
woo-woo-woo
thing I can do, nose pointed to the sky. We know how to sing a song, me and Bernie, and were singing our very best when two black cars, a sedan and an SUV, came up the slope, turned into our little spot, and parked on either side of us. We got out of the car, both of us moving as one, no communication. A situation like this starts up, you don't just stay there on your butt like . . . like a sitting duck. I've had some exp—

But no time for that now. We stood side by side. The doors of the SUV opened, and a man and a woman got out, both of them in dark business suits. A lot of suit wearing went down in this part of the country. I was still wondering whether that thought was going to lead me anywhere when a man got out of the sedan. He too wore a dark suit, but there was one difference, namely that I knew him. It was Mr. Ferretti, pushing his energy wave on ahead. Did I have anything against Mr. Ferretti? Not that I could think of. Besides being on the good-looking side for a human, with that big bony nose, even bigger and bonier than I remembered, hadn't we had a fun car ride together, not so long ago, a car ride that included some steak he was nice enough to share with me, and share in the nicest way, meaning I got most of it? So why would anyone be surprised that my first move was to trot over to him, tail wagging and all set for a hiya-pal-how-ya-been kind of pat? But surprise was what I saw on the faces of the two people from the SUV, and also from Bernie. Mr. Ferretti looked more bothered than surprised, frowning the way humans do when a problem suddenly crops up. I tried to identify a problem and pretty soon actually came up with one, which doesn't happen every time. The problem? I wasn't getting any pats from Mr. Ferretti. I headed right back to Bernie.

The man from the SUV walked off on his own, stopping around the spot where the strange bird had landed and toeing the grass. He turned to Mr. Ferretti, shook his head. Mr. Ferretti gave the woman a tiny nod. She came closer. Her hair, nice and thick, was tied up in one of those buns, one stray bit hanging loose at the back. That stray bit perked me up for some reason, and just at the right time, on account of those non-pats being a bit of a letdown, even for a dude as naturally perky as myself.

“Are you in possession of an object that doesn't belong to you?” she said.

“I paid for it with my taxes,” Bernie said.

Oh, no. Tax time already? I really hoped not. Tax time was the worst, balled-up papers wall-to-wall, ink on Bernie's nose, calculators bouncing off the ceiling.

“Maybe you don't realize the gravity of the situation,” she said.

“Normally, you'd be right,” Bernie said. “But we just had a demonstration of gravity on this very spot, so it's fresh in my mind.” No idea what that was about, but it seemed to make Bernie very cheerful, so I felt cheerful, too.

The woman eased back one side of her suit jacket, revealing a holster on her hip, gun butt showing out the top. When I'm cheerful, I sometimes do things I don't realize I've done until they're over, like . . . like snatching that gun right out of its holster! A voice in my head—Bernie's, of course—said,
“Not now, big guy.”
I got a grip. Not now means maybe later, with quite possibly no maybe about it, at least from my understanding of how things shake down.

“Hand it over,” the woman said.

Bernie smiled. “You guys from a model plane club?”

She didn't like hearing that, and neither did her buddy from the SUV, but Mr. Ferretti laughed. He came forward. “I'll handle this,” he said. He turned to Bernie. “What do you want?”

“Not to be spied on,” Bernie said.

“Can we have a grown-up conversation?” said Mr. Ferretti.

“Sure,” said Bernie. “Start by telling me who murdered Eben St. John. Even money it was you.”

“You'd lose that bet,” said Mr. Ferretti. “Plus it's a damned ungrateful thing to say.”