Pursuits Unknown

by Ellen Clary

  Yolanda reminded herself to breathe, then said, “Walk up. Slow.” Gimli crept up toward the building. She took a look at the camera feed. “Go into the bushes and get near the window.” She was now looking at a close-up of a bush that looked like a tangled jungle. What if he can’t get through this? she thought. She saw the view change to a less dense view and could almost feel him negotiating his way through the wee forest. Then she was looking at nothing and was just about to ask Harris if something was wrong when she realized she was looking at the window. “Turn your head right if you can.” The display showed the window on the left and shrubbery to the right. “Hold still.”

  Say a prayer to the deity of your choice, she thought as she released the first bug. She saw something flicker on the left of the display, and a moment later, Harris said, “First bug is in place and operational.”

  Hooray, she thought, exhaling. Now to get out of this. “Okay, Gimli, great job, you can come out of the bushes, but stay near them.” The display went back to a wander through the jungle and then it cleared. “Come back the way you came.” She wasn’t sure if that was going to translate, but they got it to mostly work and with effort, she got him back to the back of the building.

  The next two bug placements went well too. Now for the last one, where he had to work out of her line of sight.

  As he came out from the second bug in the back, she said “Go left,” and then “Go left” again when he had cleared the corner. By now he knew the drill and was already walking down the side of the building, according to his red dot. When he got into position again, she said, “Go left into the bushes.” She could see branches bashing into the camera lens. In what seemed like no time he was at the window and had turned his head. She released the last bug and Harris confirmed that it was in place.

  Yes! A knot that was in the back of her neck untied and she said, “Okay, Gimli, come on back.” She could see the display start to shift, and then it shifted back. Then it shifted again and returned, the branches shaking and trembling. “What’s wrong, Gim?”

  /Stuck./

  “Don’t panic, just try moving backwards and forwards.” She realized she hadn’t taught him quite those words. Rephrasing, she said, “Back. Now, walk,” telling him the words that meant go backwards, go forwards. The leaves got smaller and larger, but didn’t move. “Try it again.” She saw the same thing.

  She anxiously worried that she might need to go to his rescue. At least the bugs were in place, and she could get him to bark, which would justify her trespassing.

  /Stuck, grrr./

  “Don’t panic, Gim, just try small movements.”

  Then she saw his shoulder on the display. That’s weird, she thought, I usually don’t see his shoulder, he must be twisting his neck way around. Then she saw that he was biting and pulling on a branch.

  /Rrrrr, rrrrrr./

  “Easy, Gim,” and just as she said that, she heard the twack sound of a branch breaking loose and then the thud sound of a corgi body hitting the window. She had just enough time to think: I didn’t know Harris installed a mic on the coat, when every light went on and alarm horns started blaring a shrill two-toned sound.

  “Run!” she said unnecessarily.

  /Aaaaaaaaaaaaa,/ he shouted, terrified.

  “Gimli!”

  /Aaaaaaaaaaaaa./ A part of Yolanda’s mind was trying to figure out how he was managing to shout telepathically.

  The red dot tracking Gimli was going in a circle.

  “GIMLI, COME.”

  /Aaaaaaaaaaaaa./

  She said to anyone who was listening on the mic, “Forget it, he can’t hear me. Going old school,” as she opened the door.

  “Leave the handheld,” a voice said.

  “Done.” She pitched it back into the car and relocked it with her hand.

  “GIMLI! GIMLI, COME. Talk to me!”

  She heard a popping sound though the alarm. Shit, no!

  A voice said, “Don’t shoot, you idiot, there are houses over there. It’s just an animal. Go check the window.”

  /Owwwww./

  /Gimli baby, please come./

  /Owwwww./

  /What hurts?/

  /Side./

  A teeny, tiny voice in her head said, That could be good news.

  /I know it hurts, but come up the hill and I’ll fix it./

  Looking through the taller fence shrubbery, she could see that he was on the edge of the light. He was crab-walking, with his body bent.

  /I know it’s hard but I need you to come up the hill./

  /Ow./

  /You can do it./

  She saw him work his way up the hill one agonizing hop at a time. He slid back down a couple of feet. /Come on! Gim, I’ll buy you the biggest Bongo Burger they have./ She crouched down, hoping there weren’t cameras. What seemed like inch by inch, the corgi worked his way up the hill. She saw Steve get out of his vehicle, and she motioned for him to wait there.

  She ran over to the hole in the fence as he got up to it and nearly dragged him, yanking on a part of the coat that caught on the fence. She picked him up and noticed the remnant of a bullet slug buried in the vest. Oh, thank Dog. As she opened the door and threw them both in, she put the vehicle on lockdown. The windows darkened, doors and wheels locked. She could have the vehicle lower itself to the ground but thought it unnecessary.

  Turning on the interior light, she pulled off the vest and checked him over. No blood, but she had a very unhappy dog. Doing a quick exam showed that he had no broken skin, but his left ribs were bruised, possibly cracked.

  “Status?” a voice, probably Harris, asked.

  She realized she hadn’t said a thing after getting out of the car yelling.

  “Sorry. We’re back in the car. He’s been shot, but the vest stopped it. He’s very sore and unhappy. He might have cracked a rib or two. I’m going to give him a painkiller. He has no other obvious injuries, though he might have a splinter or two in his mouth.”

  Yolanda gave Gimli a painkiller and stroked him while it took effect, and she watched him relax. The alarm had stopped and she could almost hear voices outside near the building, which meant they were shouting.

  She said, “What moron would shoot blindly at something?”

  “A paranoid, stressed one maybe,” said what had to be Steve.

  “I’m so sorry, puppy. This wasn’t supposed to happen this way.” She offered him some cheese, but he wouldn’t eat it, which meant that he really wasn’t feeling well. His pulse was elevated, but still in the normal range for a dog—it had taken her forever to learn what a typical dog’s heartbeat was supposed to feel like. It was like a human heartbeat, but it would pause briefly whenever the dog breathed. His gums were okay and his breathing was getting less ragged.

  Yolanda said, “I really want to come home and get our vet to check him, but I need to have a talk with those goons to see if I can learn more about why they’re so hair-triggered. I think he’s stabilized, so I’m going to leave him in the vehicle and go have a chat.”

  “And who is going to go have this chat?” Steve asked.

  “Why, the damsel in distress who is missing her dog, of course.”

  “Ooo, they’re in a heap of trouble. How are you going to avoid pulling their fingers off?” Steve said.

  “With effort. I have to remember that doggy is not bleeding or they would be.”

  Making sure he was comfortably resting in his crate, Yolanda took the car out of lockdown and got out, pocketed a leash, and locked the vehicle again, but told it to keep the temperature stable and the air flowing.

  She mentally rehearsed: I am looking for my corgi named Muffin. Have you seen him? He might have come over here. He doesn’t always come when called. He’s very sweet even when he’s being a bad dog. He might have been chasing a cat. And she tried to temporarily forget that they would have killed her dog had he not had the vest on.

  Both Amy and Yolanda’s wife, Lydia, had told her that her damsel-in-distress routine wa
s just as good as any hetero or bisexual woman’s.

  Confidence bolstered, she walked down the road to the front of the building, occasionally calling out, “Muffin! Here, Muffin.” She saw the guards still standing around outside with that look of just having been really busy, and now wondering if they should be doing something else. She increased her pace, so she could work some urgency into her voice.

  “Excuse me, have you seen a loose dog? A corgi?”

  One guard, who was younger with short brown hair, weak chin, and a slight build that looked like it was going to take a few years to fill out the uniform he wore, looked completely startled. “A dog?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been looking for him in the neighborhood and he might have come over here. He’s terrible about chasing cats. Have you seen him? He’s red and white, kinda blonde colored, and about yea tall.” She bent over with her hand about a foot above the ground. “I heard the alarm go off, and I was concerned.”

  The guard’s face started to turn whiter than it was before and he looked desperately at the other, older guard, who filled his uniform a little too well. “Good evening ma’am, we saw an animal, but we couldn’t identify it.”

  The other man started to say “I sh—” and visibly rephrased his sentence “shouted at it, but it ran off before we could get a look at it.”

  She figured repeating herself wouldn’t hurt, and added extra love to her voice. “His name is Muffin and he doesn’t always come when called, but he’s very sweet and will come to you if you have something good to eat in your hand. He’s such an opportunist that way.” Yolanda could see the younger man’s face was going even whiter; it appeared he was about to pass out. She was rather enjoying this.

  The older man said, “Our alarm appears to have been set off by an animal, but we can’t be sure it was, what is his name?”

  “Muffin.”

  “We don’t know if it was, er, Muffin who set the alarm off.”

  Yolanda sighed. “That dog! What will I do with him? How could he possibly have set off an alarm? He’s only a foot tall.”

  “Glass break sensors went off.”

  “He broke the glass? He’s a corgi.”

  “No, the glass wasn’t broken; the window was probably just struck and shaken.”

  “Struck and shaken? Isn’t that quite a long way from breaking the glass?”

  “Well, the owner of the business has the sensor set hypersensitive.”

  Yolanda looked up at the sign. “Applied Sciences. Isn’t that the lab-in-a-box people?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “They putting gold in these boxes?”

  The older guard laughed, “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Yet they have it set so that something the size of my dog can set it off. Wow.”

  “Yeah, they’re pretty touchy about it, especially in the past year,” the younger man said, and the older man shot him a Shhhh look.

  “Well, if you find Muffin could you call me? My number is on his tag.”

  “Will do, ma’am.”

  “Thank you,” and she walked off, occasionally calling, “Muffin! Muffin, here Muffin.”

  Looking over her shoulder, she noticed that the younger man was grasping the other man’s arm not too gently, appearing to ask a demanding question in that “What the hell do we do now?” sort of body language.

  “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the damsel,” she said to anyone who was listening on the line.

  “Remind me never to cross you or your dog,” Steve said.

  “Consider yourself reminded,” as she worked her way back to the car while still calling out for “Muffin.” After a few steps she said, “Master Gimli is now going to ER to get checked out more thoroughly.”

  “What are you going to tell them? They have to report gunshot wounds,” asked Harris.

  “I was tempted to make something up about a rock, but I don’t think that would fly, so I’ll probably just tell them the vague truth, but say it’s an ongoing investigation and I can’t discuss it.”

  “Best to Gimli; he was a great dog today,” said Harris, and Amy and Steve added their best wishes as well.

  Yolanda said, “He’s a great dog every day, but today he gets whatever junk food he wants when they let him eat.”

  “Extra-large Bongo Burger with double cheese,” said what had to be Steve.

  CHAPTER 24:

  Harris Looks at the Bug Data

  HARRIS GAZED at all the captured bug information, and wanted to run from the room and find a gopher hole he could hide in. It had only been a day and data was piling up. They had four working bugs, all reporting multiple conversations. Who would have thought the “lab-in-a-box” people could be this chatty? And so far, it was pretty much all boring day-to-day stuff, except for the arrangements for the clandestine love affair. There was too much for one person to keep up with, and everyone else was busy with other commitments.

  He first told his analyzer to look for the word “nanobot,” which gathered only a couple of conversations. He tried “nano,” but that was too vague. “Data unit” really wasn’t getting him anywhere. He took a break to throw a toy for his very bored Portuguese water dog, Boomer. Boomer didn’t go out on assignment nearly as much as the others did, since Harris’s expertise was more at Central, but given the misadventures that had been happening to the on-assignment dogs, he wasn’t too concerned about Boomer missing out on all the hazards.

  Boomer splashed into the river with complete abandon after the retriever-dog toy, called a bumper, that Harris had thrown for him. Harris pondered: What are we looking for? Well, nanobot tech obviously, but these are stolen data units that someone is trying to sell. Given the amount of owner paranoia that Yolanda has uncovered talking to the guards, it seems unlikely that someone trying to sell it would spell out the name of the thing over the phone even if the phone communication was encrypted. They’d probably use a generic term like package or present or maybe gorilla—Or maybe not.

  Boomer charged up, shaking off excess water right onto Harris, and dropped the bumper at his feet. The bumper looked like a short, wide, sewn-up firehose that somehow managed to float, and it had a rope tied on the end. Harris wasn’t a hunter, so he had no idea if it came anywhere close to matching a duck. He did know that Boomer didn’t give a hoot about real birds. He just wanted to chase after his toy. Harris threw it again, thinking: So what are we really looking for?

  He thought about what the conversations he was looking for had in common. Someone was trying to sell something. Someone was often on the defensive. Someone was often angry. That’s it! Heck with keywords. What we want to know is who is stressed and talking; that might lead us to someone who is trying to fence the data units.

  “Boomer, come.”

  They went racing back in. Steve looked up. Harris hit him on the shoulder in what he hoped was a light thump and asked, “Could I borrow you a second or two?”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  Harris went into a workroom, beckoning Steve in and closing the door.

  Harris spoke to the system. “Record on my mark.” He turned to Steve. “Talk like you’re angry or mad.”

  Steve’s brow furrowed. “Really?”

  “Really. Shall I punch you to inspire you?”

  Steve said, “Should we put a sign on the door?”

  Harris opened the door, shouted to an empty room, “Ignore anything we say right now,” and shut the door.

  “Give me a scenario,” said Steve.

  Harris looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then looked back at Steve. “Your partner is leaving you for someone younger.”

  Steve smiled. “You can do better than that.”

  Harris looked at him a moment, considering, his eyes getting that malicious, mischievous look. “I am leaving you for someone prettier, and younger, and who gives me better sex.” He hit the record button.

  Steve’s right arm shot out sideways, gesticulating. “WHAT?! You said that I was the one for you. You always
said you loved how young I acted. And what the eff do you mean about better sex? Where could you possibly get better sex that you didn’t have to pay for, or are you paying for it?” By now Steve was shouting and Harris ended the recording.

  “That’s perfect, thanks.”

  Steve took a moment to gather himself. “Okay—I think.”

  Steve opened the door to find both Amy and Yolanda. For two women who looked nothing alike—Yolanda with her walnut skin, as opposed to Amy’s light tan, Amy with her caramel-blond hair past her shoulders versus Yolanda’s short-cropped, black hair, Yolanda’s very slim build and Amy’s more solid body—they were standing there with identical grins, their heads angled the same way, and their bodies in the exact same pose with their arms folded and their weight on one foot.

  Looking back at Harris, Steve said, “This is your fault, I hope you’re happy,” and walked across the room after miming slamming the door.

  Harris called back, “Oh, I’m VERY happy. Thank you, Honey.”

  Harris kept on, “Come on in, and bring your angry, stressed voices with you.”

  Amy and Yolanda looked at each other, raised their heads in a half-nod, and walked closer.

  Yolanda asked, “What kind of romantic interludes are you having in here?”

  “I need angry, stressed voices.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  Harris said, “I want to use it to filter all this bug data that we’re looking at.”

  “And you broke up with Steve just for that?”

  “I am NOT seeing Steve. Hold that thought.”

  He pressed record again.

  “I am NOT seeing Steve.”

  Yolanda smiled, catching on. “Yes, you are.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Leaning onto the desk, Amy said, “You sure you don’t secretly waaaaant to?”

  “NO! Well that came out wrong. I don’t hate him.”

  “Mmmm-hmm,” Yolanda said.

  Harris decided that this needed a gear shift. “Yolanda, what do you think of the man that shot Gimli?” Harris said.

  Her eyes blazed. “That two-bit know-nothing is lucky that I didn’t take his gun and shoot his backside up over the building.”