“Anything else?” she said, running the little scanner thing over the bottles. Her movements turned out to be surprisingly speedy.
“Got any Big Chew Cherry Gum?” Bernie said.
The woman turned to a shelf behind her. “How many?”
“I’ll take a couple.”
She laid two packs of gum alongside the water. “That it?”
“Yes, thanks,” Bernie said.
Uh-oh. Had I heard right? Not a real question, since I always do—meaning something of the highest importance had slipped Bernie’s mind. I forgave him at once, of course, even before I blamed him, meaning I didn’t actually blame him, blaming Bernie being something I’ve never done and will never do. But none of that stopped me from barking a quiet little bark just to get his attention.
When humans are startled by some sudden sound—a car plowing into a plate-glass window, for example—they do this sort of spasm and whip around to see what just happened. Which was what Bernie and the old lady did now, both of them gazing in my direction, mouths open.
“My god,” the old lady said, “never heard a bark like that in my life, and I used to run a kennel.”
“Sorry,” Bernie said, “I—”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” said the old lady. “How many Slim Jims should I ring up?”
“Make it one of those eight-packs.”
And very soon after that we were all gathered cheerfully at the counter, Bernie paying, the old lady making change, and me sitting quietly, like an obedience school champ. I’d actually been a K-9 school champ, by the way, except for flunking out the very last day on the leaping test. Even though leaping was my very best thing! My memory of the details is a bit sketchy. All I remember is that a cat was involved, and possibly some blood. But that was the same day I met Bernie, so it turned out to be the best day of my life.
“Want your receipt?” the old lady said.
Bernie nodded. She handed him the receipt. He checked it. “Sofia?” he said.
“That’s me.”
“Any chance you’d remember a certain customer from yesterday?”
Sofia gave Bernie a close look. A little old lady, but her eyes were big and bright and didn’t seem old at all. “Depends,” she said.
Bernie reached into his pocket and handed her the other receipt, the one I’d found at the base of the slope in Dollhouse Canyon. Don’t forget we’re a team, me and Bernie. “How about this particular customer?” he said.
Sofia took one quick glance at the receipt and said, “What’s he done now?”
“We don’t know yet,” Bernie said. “What’s he done before?”
“Taken too many shortcuts,” Sofia said. “Are you a cop? You don’t look like one, not exactly.” She tilted her chin at me. “And this guy has that K-nine look, but he’s not quite right for it either.”
Bernie’s face lit up, the way it does when he gets real interested in something. “Not right how?” he said.
“Too independent-minded,” Sofia said.
Bernie laughed and handed her our card. This was the card Suzie had designed for us, the one with the flowers at the bottom. Suzie was Bernie’s girlfriend, although maybe not anymore, what with her being in London, which I knew was far away. And also Eliza was now in the picture. “Can you love two women, Chet?” Bernie had said the other night. “Or is that the road to madness?” The meaning of that had escaped me completely, but I hadn’t liked the sound, so I’d pressed up against him, preventing any movement down any road whatsoever.
But no time for that now. “Never met a private eye before,” Sofia was saying.
“We don’t bite,” said Bernie.
An absolute stunner! True, we didn’t bite often, and only when we had to, but we did bite, as more than one perp now sporting an orange jumpsuit could tell you. And when it comes to biting and the Little Detective Agency, it’s not just me, amigos. Mostly me, yes, but there was one time—this was during the rather surprising finish of the dental hygienist case, best forgotten—when Bernie had brought his own teeth into play. So, what was he up to, here at the QwikStop counter? I locked my gaze on him and kept it locked.
Sofia pocketed the card. “Florian Machado is who you’re looking for,” she said. “He really needs to stop.”
“Stop what?” Bernie said.
“Taking what doesn’t belong to him.”
“Such as?”
“Cell phones, laptops, the odd car or two—whatever’s easy.”
“Wallets?” Bernie said.
“Not to my knowledge. But if it was easy…” Sofia shrugged. “Is that what he did? Snatch somebody’s wallet?”
“Could be,” Bernie said. “What if one of these theft opportunities turned out to be not so easy?”
“You’re asking if he’s violent?”
Bernie nodded.
Sofia shook her head. “Flory’s just a big baby. He’d never hurt anyone. Well, there was that one time, but it wasn’t deliberate. He doesn’t know his own strength, is all.”
“What happened?”
“One of those traffic stop things. He ended up with an assaulting a police officer charge, did some time.”
“Where do we find him?”
“It’s a little tricky.” Sofia drew us a map on a scrap of paper. She pointed with her pen. “Look for a blue boat hereabouts.”
“And then?”
“You’re there. He lives on the boat.”
“A stolen boat?” Bernie said.
Sofia nodded.
* * *
The desert is dry, but some parts are drier than others. No saguaros, mesquite, or paloverde in the real dry desert, which is mostly rocks and sand and maybe a droopy and dusty bush or two. That was the kind of desert we found as we drove out of San Dismas, past the last mound of orange tailings, toward a distant gray stone butte, which turned out to be not that distant and we arrived in no time, just another one of those strange things that can happen out our way. The pavement ended and we followed a dirt track, past a parked ATV, and to a blue boat up on blocks in the shadow of the butte. A strange kind of sight, for sure. Do I love this job or what?
Bernie turned off the engine. It got very quiet. Bernie said, “I can almost hear the sea.”
I gave him a close look. Although Bernie’s ears aren’t small for a human, they’re not in my class when it comes to hearing, nowhere near. And what did almost hearing something even mean? So therefore … so therefore it had to be a joke! Bernie can be a joker at times. Once he’d done a brief stand-up routine at LaffRiot, something about a bet with a few buddies from Valley PD, very successful from my point of view, although the riot part had pretty much taken over. But … but whoa! Had I just done a so-therefore? So-therefores were Bernie’s department. I brought other things to the table. So therefore—oh, no, not again!—I dropped this whole thing at once, made my mind a complete blank, and felt much better, more like myself. In fact, exactly like myself, which is when I’m at my best.
We walked up to the blue boat. A cabin cruiser: on our San Diego trip—we’d surfed, me and Bernie!—we’d gone out on a cabin cruiser belonging to an old Army buddy of his, a much nicer cabin cruiser than this one, since it didn’t have peeling paint or holes in the hull. “The hardest part of surfing is popping up on the board,” Bernie had said. But of course I was popped-up to begin with, so the whole thing had been a snap. Now here we were working on a case involving boats in the desert and possibly making money—too soon, in my experience, to rule out the moneymaking part completely. Who wouldn’t be feeling tip-top?
We stepped around some flattened beer cans and stopped at the bottom of a ladder leading up to the deck. The sound of snoring came from inside the boat.
“Ahoy,” Bernie said, not loudly and with a flicker of a smile crossing his face, the smile that showed work can be fun. “Permission to come aboard.”
Inside the boat, the snoring continued. Did Bernie hear it or not? I didn’t find out, because the next thing I knew he�
��d started up the ladder. This was a problem. Don’t think for a moment that I can’t climb ladders. I just run right up them, easy-peasy. The problem was I like to be first in this sort of situation, especially if the other guy is Bernie. So I did what I had to do—
“Chet! For god’s sake!”
—which was to sort of run right up Bernie’s back, one paw—possibly the take-off paw—possibly landing on his head, and spring onto the deck. There! Can’t make something or other without breaking eggs: you heard that all the time. Uh-oh. All at once I was starving! Not now, big guy, said a voice in my head, Bernie’s voice, which was often there. I waited for more, specifically something about steak tips if I was a good boy, but that didn’t happen. Maybe it went without mentioning.
In my most good boy way, I turned to Bernie, now stepping onto the deck, his hair somewhat askew. But that only made him look better! Meanwhile, the sound of snoring was starting to remind me of the thunder we sometimes get in monsoon season.
“Hear that?” Bernie whispered. “He’s snoozing.” He tiptoed toward the cabin. You had to love Bernie, and I did.
The cabin door hung off its hinges. We went through the doorway, me first. Smells were coming the other way, kind of like a river you might not want to swim in: a river all about toe fungus, stale beer, unwashed human male. Shafts of light shone through holes in the walls, falling on a huge drooling guy in a tank top and tighty whiteys sleeping on a bunk; a pizza box open on the floor, one slice left; and up front, on the control console, a black leather wallet. Bernie, a hard look on his face and no longer on tiptoes, strode to the console, picked up the wallet, checked inside. Then he turned to the sleeping dude, a slow turn that … that reminded me of a tank in a movie we’d watched, slowly swinging its big gun around. And then: KABOOM.
“Wakee wakee,” he said. Not a kaboom, his voice soft, if anything, but somehow that soft wakee wakee had kaboom force. The sleeping dude’s eyes snapped open at once.
Very small eyes for such a big potato-shaped head. They shifted Bernie’s way, then to me, and back to Bernie.
“What the fuck?” he said.
“On your feet, sailor boy,” Bernie said. “Hands where I can see them.”
Four
Hands up where we can see them is one of our best techniques. Humans can’t do much in a fight without their hands. Biting—except in dentist-hygienist cases, as I mentioned—is pretty much a non-factor, which leaves kicking, and most humans are slow and clumsy when it comes to kicking, although we have run into an expert kicker or two. Take Joe Bobb Wu, owner of Wu’s Wonderful World of Martial Madness—a spot on the wrong side of the tracks in Rio Vista, where both sides of the tracks are wrong—that turned out to have martial madness in front and a meth lab in back. Joe Bobb had lost his temper a bit when Bernie and I discovered the meth lab part—we’d been so palsy until then—and he’d come flying at Bernie feet first, high off the ground and lashing out with speedy kicks at Bernie’s head. At least in his mind. But in real life, the moment that leading-edge foot just twitched, who was up in the air with him, grabbing him—yes, this is pretty amazing—by both pant legs at once? I think you know the answer to that one.
Back on board the blue boat, we had what you might call the beginning of a problem, namely this huge dude on the bunk not getting his hands up where we could see them, but in fact sliding them under his pillow, a stained pillow with no pillowcase. Here’s something funny about Bernie: he won’t sleep on a caseless pillow. No matter how tired he is, or even if he’s had a teensy bit too much in the bourbon department, and he comes home to find no pillowcase, he roots around for one, maybe in the laundry pile, and puts it on.
“Florian!” Bernie said. “Hands!”
Florian frowned. “How do you know my fuckin’ name? Who the hell are you, anyways?”
“Hands up. Then we’ll talk.”
“Okeydoke,” Florian said. And slow and easy, like a nice, cooperative perp, he slid one hand out from under the pillow. But after that, things speeded up. First, out came his other hand, real quick, and not empty. A knife? In some ways knives are scarier than guns, but no time to get into the reasons, if any. This was a long knife, the blade golden for a moment as it passed through one of those shafts of sunlight, and then silver as Florian came lunging toward us in the shadowy cabin. Yes, a huge guy, one of those mountain-of-a-man types, surprisingly quick and seeming to fill the whole space. He raised the knife high, his face all twisted from the force he was gathering inside himself, and stabbed down at Bernie. At the same time, I flew right at him. And also at the same time, not looking like he was in any kind of hurry, Bernie launched that sweet, sweet uppercut.
CRACK!
A lovely sound. Bang on the chinny-chin-chin. Florian’s eyes fluttered up, his eyelids fluttered down, he toppled backwards, and I soared right over him. The knife clattered down on the floor. Bernie picked it up.
“That’s not the way to attack with a knife,” he said. “First of all, you hold it like so. And the motion is this, not that.” Bernie demonstrated the motions. Who for? Florian was out cold on the cabin floor and I had no need for knives or weapons of any kind. I was … a weapon all by myself! What a thought! Did you get smarter as life went along? Something to look forward to.
We got busy, Bernie taking out the plastic cuffs, flipping Florian over and cuffing his enormous wrists nice and tight behind his enormous back, and me … well, just sort of tidying up, if taking care of that last slice of pizza counted as tidying up. Meanwhile Bernie found some bungee cord, flipped Florian back over, and then bungee-corded his legs together from ankles to hip.
Bernie sat on the bunk, the wallet and the knife on his knee. “Wendell’s wallet, murder weapon, murderer,” he said. “The whole package in”—he checked his watch, not the one that had belonged to his grandfather, our most valuable possession, currently with our buddy Mr. Singh at Singh’s Pawnbroker and Financing for All Your Needs shop, but the everyday watch, that had come in a cereal box—“less than three hours. This could be some kind of record, big guy.”
I sat beside Bernie, got patted a bit. We really were pretty good. For a moment I thought: Who is paying? A bothersome thought and it quickly vanished. We waited peacefully, nice and comfy in this blue boat in the middle of the wide wide desert.
After a while, Bernie gave Florian a little kick, not hard, on the sole of one of his huge, bare, and toe fungusy feet. Florian groaned. Bernie gave him another kick. Florian groaned again and his eyes fluttered back open. He … how would you put this? Took in the situation? Something like that. That went on for what seemed like a long time. At last he spoke.
“Whaddya want from me?” he said.
Bernie’s eyebrows have a language of their own. Now they rose in a very interesting way that made Bernie look like the huge one and the huge guy look small.
“Nothing,” Bernie said. “We don’t want anything from you.” He glanced down at the wallet and the knife, still resting on his knee. Very slowly, Florian’s little eyes shifted in the same direction, gazed at the sight in a confused sort of way, like he didn’t quite understand what he was seeing.
“Uh,” Florian said. “What are you, like, saying?”
Bernie shrugged, didn’t say a thing.
“You a cop?” Florian said.
“Nope.”
“Then … then what are you? You’re on my property. I got rights.”
“What about Wendell Nero?” Bernie said. “What about his rights?”
“Who the fuck is he?”
Bernie didn’t like that, not one little bit. He didn’t show it on the outside. Was Florian sensing what I was sensing? Probably not, and maybe if he’d been back on his feet and unbound, he’d have been in big trouble. But right now he was safe from harm. Bernie would never hurt someone tied up, not even the worst of the worst. Was Florian the worst of the worst? We’d only come up against one single man who was the worst of the worst for sure. That was at the end of the broom closet case, t
he only one where we’d failed completely. We’d found the missing kid—Gail was her name—but not soon enough. Later that night, we’d taken care of justice ourselves, me and Bernie, also a onetime thing in our career. After it was over Bernie had said we had to forget what we’d done and never think of it again. Yet here it was back on my mind, and not for the first time.
Bernie rose, opened the wallet, took out the driver’s license, and held it for Florian to see. “This is who he was,” Bernie said.
Florian’s face scrunched up in thought, not a pleasant sight. Then his eyes opened wide. “Wait a goddamn minute. You think I killed that old man?”
Bernie didn’t answer, simply pointed at the long knife, resting on his knee.
“But … but that’s crazy!” Florian said. “That knife never leaves the boat. It’s under my pillow at all times.”
“Why would that be?”
“I got enemies is why.”
“Any of them on the inside?” Bernie said. “Because that’s where you’ll be spending the rest of your life. Unless you get the death penalty, still a real possibility in this state.”
“You … you bastard!” Florian starting wriggling around on the floor. “You’re framing me.”
“Oh?” said Bernie. “This”—he gave the wallet a little shake—“was lying right there when we came in.” He pointed to the console.
“So what?” said Florian. “Maybe I stole the wallet. But that don’t make me a murderer. The old man was dead when I got there.”
Bernie sat back. “Go on.”
“Like I said—he was dead when I went in the trailer, sitting back in his chair, throat cut from ear to ear. I almost had a heart attack, for Christ’s sake. But then I happened to see the wallet, lying right out there on the desk. So I made myself go up and take it. Not easy, I can tell you. The sight was like … like a fuckin’ horror movie. The slasher kind. I hate those.”
He studied Bernie’s face. Good luck with that, amigo. When Bernie wants his face to show nothing it doesn’t. Florian was getting nowhere. Where was he even hoping to get?
Of Mutts and Men Page 3
