Paw and Order (4 page)

“He's not nominated yet,” Lanny said. “And our opponents have a long and happy history of shooting themselves in the foot.”

Uh-oh. I'd seen perps do that, and more than once. Maybe this town was tougher than it looked.

“Picking someone other than the general would be shooting themselves in the foot?” Suzie said. “Is that what you're saying? And what kind of strategy depends on the other guy screwing up?”

“Strategy's beyond my grade level,” Lanny said. He raised his hand. “Check!”

“I'll get this,” Suzie said.

“Nonsense,” said Lanny, paying the waiter. He rose. “Let's stay in touch.”

“Why?” said Suzie.

Lanny laughed again. “You're going places,” he said. He sat back down, lowered his voice. “In fact, if General Galloway is the nominee, I may have something for you during the campaign. As long as you don't jump the gun.”

“What sort of something?” Suzie said. “And what do you mean by jumping the gun?”

“Asking premature questions, like you're doing right now.” Lanny rose again. “How's that landlady of yours, by the way?”

“Lizette Carbonneau? You know her?”

“Seen her at parties,” Lanny said. “Are she and Eben close?”

“I don't think they know each other,” Suzie said. “Why?”

“No particular reason,” said Lanny. “You'll find this is a small town, that's all. Remember student government in high school? It's the same type of people, but exactly.”

“Am I meant to understand that in the context of Eben and Lizette?” Suzie said.

Lanny smiled. “It was just an idle remark, and not particularly original,” he said, “signifying nothing.”

He walked off down the street. Suzie watched him go. I watched both of them, no need to turn my head even as the distance grew. That's how we roll in the nation within. I'm sure your eye setup has its good points, too.

“I actually liked high school,” Suzie said.

I pressed up against her. I liked high school, too, especially the one near our place on Mesquite Road, where I'd once snagged a baseball in the middle of a game. And then done it again the very next day!

FOUR

S
uzie Sanchez, girl reporter,” said Suzie.

Back in the car, stop-and-go traffic and a cat was eyeing me from the rear window of the car ahead. Ever had a cat eye you? Cats always send the same message, a message about them being on top and you on the bottom. Even the way they move sends that message! Once—true story—I was digging a hole—can't remember exactly where or why and it doesn't matter—and really making progress, all paws chipping in to the max and clods of earth and sod soaring sky high, when I happened to notice a cat on someone's porch, perhaps a porch associated with the very lawn I was digging up, it now occurs to me, although it did not at the time, but that's not the point. The point was the way this cat, so perfectly still, was watching me, so perfectly in motion, if that makes any sense. I froze for a moment, standing, if I'm remembering right, on just two of my paws, one front and one back. That was when the cat yawned, an enormous yawn somehow right in my face despite the distance between us. At that moment, I lost all interest in the hole! True story! And just walked away. A good thing in the end, because by the time the dude with the shotgun came charging onto the porch, I was out of range.

“. . . speaking of high school, my very first piece on the high school paper,” Suzie was saying, “an exposé of janitorial salaries that made the principal—Chet? What are you doing?”

What was I doing?

“Not digging at the seat, by any chance?”

Digging at the seat? Me? Of course not. My front paw was poised like this because . . . just because. Up ahead, the car with the cat in back swung onto an exit ramp and disappeared from view. My paw came down and rested comfortably on the seat, a seat that felt slightly rougher than before, hardly at all, not worth a second thought.

“Good boy,” Suzie said.

That was me! I gave the side of her face a nice big lick. She laughed. “Stop it—we'll have an accident.” So I stopped, if not then, at least not too long after. Suzie was the best! When I was with her I didn't even miss . . . uh-oh, but I did. I did miss Bernie, just a bit. Then more and more. I curled up on the seat and thought about him, all nice thoughts. Suzie's voice flowed by me, kind of like a bubbling stream Bernie and I had come across on a missing wilderness camper case, of which all I remembered was an encounter with a mule named Rummy, plus the glimpse of a golden seam in a mine just before it caved in.

“. . . the ways of the school committee in my little town being very good prep for DC, as it happens,” Suzie was saying. “But maybe not this particular story, whatever it actually is. Eben says he's going to have something spooky for me.” She laughed a laugh you hear from time to time, soft and not particularly happy. Human sounds can be confusing. “Literally spooky, maybe? Like with real spooks?”

Spooks? Oh, no. I knew spooks from Halloween, my least favorite of all the holidays, Thanksgiving being the best. Everyone zonked out in front of football on TV and leftovers out the yingyang, just for the taking: hard to beat Thanksgiving! But Halloween, with masked humans on the loose—like everyone's suddenly a perp!—is the worst. And the humans in those white-sheet spook outfits? The worst of the worst. We no longer go out on Halloween, me and Bernie. Bernie even likes me to stay in the kitchen when the trick-or-treaters come knocking, likes it so much that he once tried closing the door on me. A door he'd already taught me to open! No one's funnier than Bernie. But bottom line: if Suzie was dealing with spooks, I felt bad for her.

“. . . then there's this outfit of Eben's,” Suzie was saying. “Consultants, Chet—the town's crawling with them. They all want something, meaning Eben wants something, but what? Aside from what he's not going to get, of course.”

I had no idea. And I didn't try too hard to make one happen. My mind was on other things, namely the news about all these crawling types in this burg. I scanned both sides of the street, saw not one crawler, although an old guy stepping out of a bar on the next corner looked a little wobbly. He blinked in the light as we went by, but he didn't go down. Once I saw a whole roomful of crawling humans. This was at a New Year's Eve party where Bernie and I hadn't actually been invited but showed up anyway, on account of a perp name of Playboy Boyovich possibly being on the scene, which turned out to be the case, and was he surprised to see us or what? So were the other partygoers, for that matter, all of them naked—which never shows humans at their best, in my opinion, no offense—and playing some sort of gigantic board game that covered the whole floor. Which reminds me of the point of all this! Whoa! Chet the Jet catches a break! But I've had a lot of luck in life. Complaints? Not a single one, amigo. Start me up!

Back to where we were before. Which was . . . something about . . . oh, so close, in the slow flickering shadows right at the edge of my mind, just out of reach. Does that ever happen to you?

“. . . all so Byzantine,” Suzie was saying. “In fact, I've been reading about Byzantium lately. Thinking of pitching a thumbsucker on Byzantium as a sort of handbook to twenty-first-century DC.” She glanced over at me. There was a tiny vertical line on her forehead, right between the eyes. That meant she was worried. Why would Suzie worry? We were all back together, me, Bernie, Suzie. I gave her knee a quick head push.

Suzie laughed. “Nothing like the direct approach,” she said. “That's you, Chet.” What was that about? You tell me. And while you're at it, please clear up the pitching thumbsucking thing. I knew pitching, of course, baseballs being one of my very favorite balls, so interesting when you start getting inside, most likely why the guys at Sportz ‘n Sudz, a bar we no longer frequent in Vista City, talk so much inside baseball. Thumbsucking? I knew that, too, on account of Charlie when he was little. The moment that tiny thumb came out of his mouth, I'd be right there on the spot to give it a lick. How do you like that? Actually, it's possible, I realize now, maybe kind of late in the game, that Leda did not like it one bit. Was that around the time she and I started to not get along so well? And maybe Bernie and Leda, too, now that I thought about it? Uh-oh. I stopped that thought at once, stopped it cold and blew it to smithereens forever. But the point was I hadn't followed Suzie at all.

“. . . and so,” she was saying, “let's do it the way you do it—how does Bernie put it? In the nation within the nation? Let's be the opposite of Byzantine. Thanks, Chet.”

Huh? What was this? All I knew was that Suzie was giving me a pat—nice, but way too short—then whipping into a U-turn. The line on her forehead was gone. But the opposite of Byzantine? I was lost. At that moment, we shot forward.

“Chet!”

And practically right away I realized I was resting a paw on Suzie's driving leg, maybe even pressing down somewhat, for reasons unknown. I sat up at once, tall in the shotgun seat, a total pro, even though we weren't actually working any sort of job. I work with Bernie.

• • •

We crossed the river and not long after entered a world of office parks. We've got the same kind of world back home in the Valley, except not so green.

“Welcome to Maryland,” Suzie said. “Most of what you see around you is about elephants versus donkeys.”

Oh, no. Up until then I'd been liking Maryland a lot. But I'd had encounters with both those creatures—it's that kind of career, amigo—and if elephants and donkeys were in the picture, we had problems.

“Fun times, Chet. Election two years away, president's numbers in the toilet, and the opposition jumping up and down with glee.”

That did sound like fun, the toilet part especially, and there can never be too much of jumping up and down. Suzie turned into a mostly empty lot and parked in front of a low brassy-­colored office building with those brassy-colored windows you can't see through from the outside. I don't like them, hard to say why.

“Feel like actually waiting in the car this time? I'll be quick.”

Suzie looked at me; I looked at her.

“Right,” Suzie said. “But the leash is nonnegotiable.” She popped open the glove box and took out the leash she'd kept just for me back when she was still in the Valley. I was kind of surprised to see it still there, also not that happy about it. Suzie smiled and gave me a quick scratch between the ears, not hard enough but blissful just the same. “Come on, Chet. I know you can do it.”

We got out of the car. Suzie came forward with the leash. Of course, I could do it! And not only that, I could do it like you've never seen.

“Chet?”

Yes, that was me, pure and simple. At the moment, I appeared to be wriggling around the parking lot on my back, just one of my tricks, and one that happened to scratch all the itches Suzie hadn't taken care of.

“There'll be a little treat if you're good.”

Not long after that, we went through the front door of the office building, me upright and leading—and on the leash, I suppose, although all my attention was on an almost whole croissant Suzie had suddenly produced from her pocket. Almost whole or not, it was all gone—down the hatch!—by the time we came to the elevators. “Down the hatch,” was what Bernie used to say to Charlie, back in the high-chair days, a high chair I hung around quite a bit. That little spoon of Charlie's! He missed the opening to the hatch just about every time. Honey-coated Cheerios—Charlie and I grew up on them together.

The elevator opened and we got in. Or, more accurately, Suzie got in and I lingered at the entrance, one paw raised. Am I at my best in elevators? Maybe not. Elevators are a lot like crates, as I'm sure you've noticed, and crates are out of the question for me. But just as Suzie was starting to give me some sort of look, I caught a whiff you don't usually catch in elevators, namely a whiff of guinea pig. I sniffed up that whiff, if you get what I mean, all the way to the back of the elevator.

“Good boy, Chet,” Suzie said as she pressed a button on the wall panel.

Suzie, just the best! And always nice to hear
Good boy, Chet,
although why now was a puzzler, a puzzler I ignored completely, on account of how occupied I was with the guinea pig smell. No actual guinea pig had been in the elevator—the scent wasn't nearly strong enough—meaning it had been left by some human who spent time with guinea pigs. Why would a human do that? I'd had some experience with guinea pigs. Take Peony, for example, a guinea pig who'd cropped up in a case some time back and of which I remembered nothing but Peony, with whom I hadn't gotten along. Guinea pig teeth are surprisingly sharp; let's leave it at that.

The elevator rose and came to a too-quick stop, the doors sliding open. Hey! I almost puked! We got out, walked down a hall, and stopped before a door. Suzie read the sign: “ ‘World Wide Solutions,' ” she said. “Eben has a lot of good points, but modesty's not one. Not much modesty in this town, now that I think of it. Possible story idea, Suzie girl.” Or something like that, way too hard to follow. Suzie opened the door and we went inside.

You get to know offices in this line of work—Cedric Booker, the Valley DA has a basketball hoop in his! Which had got me a bit too excited, and the next thing I'd known Cedric's basketball was all shriveled up, nothing ballish about it. A story for another time.

This particular office had no hoop. Instead, there was just the usual reception part and an inner office at the back. No one sat at the reception desk, which bore a vase of flowers, the plastic kind without a trace of flower smell. Wasn't flower smell the whole point of flowers? There were lots of human things that I didn't understand. I was trying to think of another one beside the plastic flowers as we approached the closed door of the inner office.

Suzie knocked. “Eben?”

No answer, but a man was in there: I could smell him, and also smell that lovely leather briefcase. How nice a few moments with that briefcase, preferably alone, would be! Was that in my future? This was shaping up as a fine day.

Suzie turned the knob, opened the door. The inner office was smaller than our office back home on Mesquite Road but much tidier, no papers scattered around, no piles of this and that, nothing on the desk but a closed laptop—in short, it was all as neat as Eben's little trimmed beard. Eben was sitting behind the desk, kind of slumped in his chair. One of his eyes was open and the other closed, like he was winking. Except he wasn't.

“Eben?”

I went closer, possibly pulling the leash from Suzie's hand, but that's the kind of thing that happens when I smell blood. It was seeping, although hardly at all, from a small round hole just behind one of Eben's ears.

“Oh, my God!”

Eben's open eye shifted very slightly in Suzie's direction.

“Eben! What happened?” Suzie, now right beside me, touched Eben's shoulder, a light touch, but enough to make him tip sideways, right off the chair and onto the floor. Suzie's eyes got huge and frightened, and she covered her mouth with her hand, something you see women do, but men never.

The death smell started up almost at once, which was always how this goes down. So we had the blood smell, the death smell, and also—almost overwhelmed but definitely in the room—the guinea pig smell. I had the craziest thought of my life: the guinea pig did it.

I needed Bernie.