by Jason Miller
They nodded.
“It’s his boss? Or his wife’s boss? Anyway, I’m guessing work’s involved somehow. He needs to remain anonymous, and the situation is real delicate and has to be handled carefully. And by carefully, I mean with money.”
Sheldon’s cheeks reddened.
“Has he asked you to Western Union him anything? He probably called it a finder’s fee or some such.”
“That he did, and that we did,” Sheldon admitted. “Said he’d require a thousand dollars. Times are lean, though. We could only swing five hundred, and even that was a stretch.”
“He doesn’t have the dog,” I said again, but couldn’t help thinking of the measly sixty-five they’d offered me. I put that in my Happy Box. “This is a scam gets run out here sometimes. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”
A. Evan said, “We know him.”
“Know who?”
Sheldon said, “Man who’s supposed to have her. Fella on the phone slipped up a little one time and said his name. Reach. Dennis Reach. He runs a little place out our way. Roadhouse name of Classic Country.”
“That might have been a trick, too,” I said, uncertainly. “Let me ask you, how do you know this Reach?”
Sheldon said, “Like I say, club’s not too far from our place. We might have wandered in there once or twice with a thirst. Reach likes to tend bar, time to time, and he’s known to spin a tale.”
“Any idea why he might be wrapped up in something as low-down as dognapping?”
Sheldon shrugged. “Club’s full most nights, so it’s not likely he needs any kind of ransom.”
“Would you say he’s an enemy?” I said, because that seemed most obvious.
“I wouldn’t say I know him well enough to call him that, but I’m pretty sure that if I did I would.”
“Have you asked him?”
“No, sir.” Sheldon again. “I do that, I’m liable to shoot the rascal. We was kinda hoping you’d do it for us. Ask him, I mean. Not shoot him.”
I nodded and looked at Anci again. I said, “You’re sure this one passes muster?”
“Sounds harmless enough,” she said. “But are we really taking dogs for clients now?”
“What can I say? Times are rough.”
She said, “Someone really ought to keep you away from jokes.”
“We’ll do it,” I said to Sheldon. “Anyway, I’ll run out there. See what there is to see.”
“Well, I figured you would. But thank you.”
“Figured how?”
“You know a feller name of Lew Mandamus?”
“Sure, I know Lew,” I said.
“He’s the one aimed us at you. Said you have a soft spot for critters.”
“I’ll have to find some way to thank him.”
“Don’t know what to say,” Sheldon said. “We was . . . we was desperate.”
He wiped at something in his eye with a finger. A. Evan farted. I scratched down the names and numbers. Reach’s address was near the Classic Country Showroom, a residence behind the bar. We shook hands all around. A. Evan’s was like a refrigerated chicken’s foot. His fingers were long and bony, the skin cold and slightly moist, despite the temperature both outside and in. I wiped my palm on my pants and thought I was being sly about it, but the skinny little shit noticed and smiled meanly at me and winked again. Then he followed his old man out of the house to the Chevy flatbed and in another moment they’d vanished down the dark throat of Shake-a-Rag Road.
I said, “Well, that is something you don’t see every day.”
“Or smell,” Anci said. “Did you get a whiff of A. Evan? It’s like he bathes in hog guts.”
“It’s called personal hygiene for a reason. And what was with you back there? You might have got us involved in a missing-kid case. I’d rather chew barbwire.”
“I would, too,” she said. “But I could tell by looking at them it wasn’t a kid. You look at folks, you get a sense of them. I confess I didn’t think of a dog, though. My money was on ‘car.’”
“A car? Named Shelby Ann?”
“Could be. Some people name their cars. And stop being so damn sensitive all the time.”
“And for sixty-five dollars, too.”
Anci rolled her eyes. “Oh, I know. Usually, you get kicked in the head for free. Why not try it for money this time? Besides, this is your chance to do a good deed, pile up some karma.”
“You can’t eat karma, darlin’.”
“No, but it can eat you.”
2.
IT WAS EARLY THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON THAT WE SET OUT to solve the case of the missing puppy. Anci said she’d come up with a snappier title later on, record everything that happened in her notebook. I said that was fine. She also said if she was going to play Watson to my Holmes maybe she should have a pistol, like how the good doctor does. I told her to focus instead on her notebook and detective work. Guns were for the adult people, I explained, responsible folks with calm nerves and sound judgment. The two of us shared a laugh over that one.
The Cleaves had mentioned Lew Mandamus as their original contact, so that seemed a good enough place to start this business. Plus, I needed Lew’s help, I was going to do this thing correctly and with at least a wink at personal safety. After lunch, we snugged into our helmets, climbed on my motorcycle, and rode out of Little Egypt into northern Kentucky, a trip of an hour and a half or thereabouts. The Mandamus residence was south and west of Tolu township, past the bright ripples of Bennett Lake and some long stretches of browning pastureland. This was a good size cut, alluvial tillage inherited from Lew’s father, a one-time Pinkerton’s agent who’d come to the area on a job and decided to stay but then basically needed two thousand acres of buffer between himself and the heads he’d busted during his days as strikebreaker. The property edged its way along the bend of the Ohio River, girded farther south by dense woodland spreading up gentle slopes and to the north by more floodplain and some marshland sucked dry by the heat. When Lew had come back to this place following a long stretch in Korea, he’d buried his father and the memories of his wickedness and with his new wife settled the land, which he named Shinshi. A mythical place of spirits.
Anyway, we pulled up the dirt car path and stopped. The electric fence and gate were new, taller than the previous model and glinting molten silver under the hard sunlight, but my old combination code still worked and I buzzed us in.
I switched off the Triumph and put down the stand, and Anci and I pulled off our sweaty helmets and walked the few hundred yards up to the old farmhouse. You had to walk, otherwise it was like navigating an obstacle course. Shinshi was full of spirits, and the spirits did their best to be underfoot. There were cats and dogs and geese. There were some yardbirds and some raccoons. Anci calls them maskies. Around back, there was a big pond and a herd of ducks lounging around a fingering stream nearly choked with canary grass. Lew owned the pond on paper, but the ducks owned it in fact. Everywhere you looked there were critters, because that’s what Shinshi was: a rural preserve and recovery center for wayward, injured, and unwanted animals.
Anci and I went up to the white farmhouse and knocked but nobody answered so we walked around a little more until we found Eun Hee on all fours in a tangled vegetable patch. She was plucking at a clump of Jimsonweed and muttering swears when the thorns got her even through her heavy work gloves. When she saw us, she sat back on her shins and smiled and said, “Well, I’ll be. He’s alive.”
Eun Hee was in her mid-sixties, a pretty woman with deep brown eyes and eyebrows shot through with white threads like spun silk. Probably her hair would have been white too, but chemo had taken it, and so now she wore a dew rag to protect her smooth scalp from sunburn. She said, “We were starting to think the wolves had got you, Slim.”
“Not yet, anyway,” I said. She stood up off her knees and we shared hugs all around. “And I thought it was supposed to be the Indians.”
She chuckled.
“Political circumstances r
equired us to find a more sensitive replacement.”
“Except now you’re on the wolves’ case.”
“Life’s just full of trouble, isn’t it?”
“For example, I see that you’ve got some new security.”
Eun Hee nodded. “Sadly, we had no choice. Had some break-ins a couple weeks back. Up at the sheds, I mean. At first we thought it was bored kids doing what they do, but . . .”
“But?”
“Well, I don’t know really. Just a feeling, I guess. An itch. Maybe bored kids but maybe something else. Anyway, Lew decided it was time to tighten things up some.”
“Any idea what were they after? Whoever they were?”
“Not the animals, anyway. You can get those anywhere. But there’s some equipment back there, and some copper wiring from that outbuilding we pulled down last spring. It’s not much, but you know how it is nowadays. You leave a basketball sitting out, there’ll be someone along forthwith to steal the air.” She pulled off her gloves and rubbed a hand through Anci’s hair and said, “You’re growing fast, angel.”
“It’s a project.”
Eun Hee looked at me.
“I don’t guess this has escaped your notice, but she’ll be dating soon.”
“Heaven protect the suitors.”
“From her or from you?”
“No comment. Lew around?”
“Number six,” she said, “with an abuse case,” and pointed a frown in the direction of one of a small clusters of shelters, a pole barn up a brushy path a few hundred yards on.
“Bad?”
“You could say bad. You could say terrible. You could also say just another day at the ranch. All three are correct.”
“I honestly don’t see how you do it.”
“Sometimes I don’t, either.” She shook her head a little about it, the world and its people and their ways. “We made a decision a long time ago about the kind of life we wanted to lead and I’m proud we stuck it out, but I admit there are days it don’t exactly put whipped cream on my apple pie, you’ll pardon the expression.”
I pardoned the expression. I like apple pie just fine. Whipped cream, too. I said, “You think Lew will mind I go up and see him?”
“Not at all, Slim.” She wrapped Anci in her arms from behind and kissed the top of her hair and said, “But this young one stays here with me.”
I nodded. I pounded fists with Anci and left them and walked up the way. The path turned east slightly and then up a grade toward a long line of black elm and yellow poplar that in the summer scorcher had gone as still as bas relief. A duck waddled across my path and gave me a snotty look, but thankfully that was as ugly as things got. Honest to God, I don’t know what it is. Me and birds. The duck kept walking, and I kept walking. I went to the big shed and slid open the door and stepped inside.
The floor was thick with fresh straw and the air heavy with its smell. The walls were fitted with shelves atop jigsawed brackets and lined with metal boxes of various sizes. It was quiet in there, as quiet as a chapel, but for the sound of many small breaths. And there in the dim light was Lew Mandamus. He stooped over one of the boxes, a silver carrier with the name Maggie written in black felt on a strip of masking tape.
“Pose for your portrait, Slim,” he said, finger to his lips.
I froze. Lew returned his attention to the cage. The little metal door was open, and there was a cat inside. Maggie, I guess. Lew had something between his bare fingers. A piece of meat, something like that. The cat had retreated to the back of the box.
At first, she wouldn’t move. Or couldn’t. I couldn’t tell which. Lew was talking softly, and the critter was twitching her nose and hissing a little. Growling some in her throat. She tried to get up, but something had been done to her back legs. Lew’s hand inched farther into the box, and the cat growled some more and then came forward just enough to take the treat from Lew’s fingers, and Lew said something gentle to her and closed and latched the box.
He turned to me and smiled an unhappy smile that reminded me a little of Eun Hee’s frown and said, “We can chat outside, son.”
We went out and Lew shut and bolted the door behind us and lit a smoke.
I said, “Rough day?”
Lew Mandamus was maybe seventy. He was wiry and tall with long arms and a long face and probably the same close-cropped hair he’d worn during his days in army intelligence. For twenty-five years, he’d run the Ballard County Animal Cruelty Task Force, which meager state funding relegated to little more than a couple of desks and a box of paperclips. Everything that happened at Shinshi was freelance.
“I’ve had better. Good to see you, Slim. We’d started to think the Indians had got you.”
“Eun Hee says wolves.”
“She’s got a dose of that political correctness maybe.”
“What’s the story on the deli in there?”
“Would you believe it’s taken me a month to get her to do that? To show that kind of trust? I can’t use gloves with her. Gloves scare her. The first few times she dang near took off a finger.”
“Tough life,” I said.
“Believe it or not, she’s a house cat. Never been wild. Family owned her relocated out west somewhere, but their boy goes to school in the area. One reason or another, they gave the cat to him. Not sure why. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that cats don’t like being moved, even across town to a new house. This cat wanted to show her disapproval of the new situation so she pissed on the kid’s bed.”
“He beat her.”
“That he did. Badly. Then he poured gasoline on her and set her on fire.”
I said, “Say, where is this young fella now?”
Lew cocked one of his bushy eyebrows.
“. . . Why?”
“Well, because I’m going to kick his ass until he begs me to stop. Then, when I’m tired of kicking or my leg falls off, I’m going to pay someone to kick it for me. Big fella probably. Somebody with a leg like a redwood.”
“Can’t help you. Much as I’d like to.”
“Somebody like that, probably end up hurting a person.”
“Not fully outside the realm,” Lew said. “Try telling that to the poll-sniffers in our state legislature, though. Way the law is written, the kid basically got let go with a small fine and a pat on the fanny.”
“That sucks.”
“It throws sucks off a barstool and steps on its neck, but that’s what it is. At least for now. What brings you this way, Slim? You dropping off?”
“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about the Cleaveses.”
“The who?”
“Sheldon and A. Evan Cleaves. They paid me a visit last night, said you’d given them my name.”
Lew sighed.
“Oh, Christ. Those two. They come to you dressed like a father and son mortician team?”
“So you do know them? I almost thought they’d made it up.”
“I know them. But not well. You might say no one knows ’em well. I met them through the agency a ways back. They ask you to locate their missing animal?”
“Yep.”
“Something to do with a fella name of Dennis Reach?”
“Yep.”
He said, “He doesn’t have the dog.”
“Nope.”
“It’s a swindle gets run out here sometimes. Country places.”
“I know.”
“How much you into them for?”
“Think of a number. It’s less than that,” I said.
He thought about it a moment, sucking his long front teeth, then nodded.
“You want to borrow one of the trucks?”
“I was hoping you’d offer.”
“I’ll get the key,” he said. “But it’ll cost you.”
“Name it.”
“A few hours with your little girl. It’ll make my Eun Hee happy.”
I said, “She was kind of wanting to tag along, but I bet she’ll go for it.”
“Good. She’s a g
ood girl.”
“Yes, she is.”
“Another thing.”
“Name that, too.”
“The dog, you’ll bring her to me first?”
“He doesn’t have the dog.”
“I know,” Lew said. “They never have the dog. It’s what the whole deal is about. If he does have her, though.”
“For a checkup?”
“Something like that. You can count on her not being fixed or vaccinated. That wouldn’t exactly be the Cleaveses’ style. The last thing we need is a surplus of stray pits roaming our neighborhoods. We had a boy attacked up here not long ago, in Tolu. Thing tore through him like a buzz saw. Kid lost an arm.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.
“I’ll owe you one,” he said, and then the two of us walked together back down the property.
The day got hotter. I don’t know how it managed it, but it did. We were having that global warming, probably. Someday—and someday soon—the earth would bake for good, the waterways empty, the glaciers collapse beneath the weight of our error. I reflected on that sometimes, as I reflected on the part I’d played in it all during my time as a coal miner and more generally as a person who liked cheap electricity. I guess you could say I was ashamed. I liked to think others would be ashamed, too—those fools in government and public life who denied anything was amiss—but cash money beat shame every time, and by a span, too.
I stopped thinking about the end of the world and followed Lew into a detached four-bay garage, whereupon we laid eyes on part of the problem: a pair of oversized Dodge gas-guzzlers. There were dog crates welded in their beds, though both were basically big enough to transport circus elephants. I refrained from comment. My own truck wasn’t exactly a Matchbox car. Forgive us, America. We rural folk have stupidly large vehicles in our blood.
“I ain’t seen that black one before,” I said.
Lew nodded.
“I’ve reached that age when the people in your life start dying off, leave you things. Money.”
For a moment, both of us were thinking about the woman in the farmhouse up the hill. Neither of us looked at each other. Then Lew shrugged. He took a key ring off a pegboard on the wall and gave it to me. He unlatched a container crate in the corner and scrounged up some equipment: a pair of heavy leather gloves and a telescoping metal rod fixed with a retractable noose.
