* * *
We had a beautiful blue boat, me and Bernie, called Sea of Love. We’d sailed Sea of Love all the way to San Diego—which we’d had to do to get to the ocean—and now we were just roaming around on bright shining waters. Forever and a day—was that an expression? It was perfect. These bright shining waters smelled of flowers, specifically flowers a day or two before they get thrown out. Bernie and I were going to sail forever and a day, across the wide Missouri, whatever that happened to be, on and on and—
And suddenly we came to a stop. Sea of Love made a tiny squeak, like the brake pads were shot. I knew all about brake pad issues from the Porsche, but boats also had brake pads? Cool. Cool, but everything was much too dark. I tried opening my eyes. That worked.
Uh-oh. I seemed to have forgotten some things, but now they started coming back to me, the most important of them probably being that I was caged in the back seat of a car. Behind the wheel sat a dude with light blond hair and in the passenger seat was a dark-haired woman. Outside were lots of palm trees and flower beds and the glowing entrance to some big fancy place. Hey! Rancho Grande, oldest hotel in the Valley. They had beautiful gardens out back, where’d I’d been a few times, the last one for the bat mitzvah of the older sister of Charlie’s buddy Eli. My very first bat mitzvah, so naturally I’d been on the lookout for bats, even though it was daytime and bats only came out at night, in my experience. But you can’t be too careful, as a certain type of human often says, and bats—part bird and part rat, couldn’t be any clearer, just from the name alone—are no favorite of mine. Did mitzvah mean hunt? That was my take, and I started in on hunting the moment we arrived. And wouldn’t you know it? Almost right away I noticed a dark grayish bat all folded up in the lap of a woman too busy downing champagne to even notice. Some humans need more protection than others. I pounced on that bat and gave it what for but good, discovering—maybe a little on the late side, you make the call—that my bat was actually more or less a type of scarf, something to do with Hermès, I found out at a later date, when Bernie was cutting the check.
Bernie!
But no Bernie now. Instead we had the dark-haired woman, opening her door, then pausing to turn to the driver. A green-eyed woman with very nice teeth for a human, on the small side but shining white and even. Did I know her? No, but her smell was oddly familiar: flowers, specifically flowers a day or two before they get thrown out. And what was this? A whiff of hamster?
“One more time,” she said.
The man turned to her. Hey! I knew this man! Wasn’t he Wendell Nero’s nephew, the surfer type dude? From when Prof had taken us into Wendell’s office? Hadn’t he been looking for a photo of a horse? I should have gotten a bad feeling right then. Instead I was getting it now.
“Seriously?” he said.
The woman said nothing, just gazed at him. He looked away. “All right, all right. I go somewhere out in the middle of nowhere and take this goddamn dog off the board.”
“Go on.”
He sighed. “Disappear him without a trace.”
“And—”
He sighed. “Without being seen. But like, isn’t that just part of without a trace?”
She gazed at him again.
“Just thinking out loud,” he said.
“Dewey?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Am I paying you to think?”
Dewey shook his head.
“I’m paying you to follow instructions to the letter,” the woman said. “Any questions?”
“Well, uh, what about Bernie Little?”
“We’re not doing a thing about Bernie Little, not going near him, not getting on his radar. We’re simply taking him off the board as well.”
“Without going near him?”
“We’re distracting him, Dewey. We don’t need forever, now that … things are rolling our way. I’ve done my research. He has an Achilles’ heel.”
“I had one of those myself but the doc sewed it up, good as…” Dewey’s voice trailed away, maybe because he saw the look in the woman’s eyes.
“What I’m telling you,” she said, slowly and quietly and yet somehow nastily, too, “is that he will do nothing but search for this dog until he finds him.”
“Which ain’t gonna happen.”
“Not if you do your job, Dewey.”
The woman got out, closing the door firmly without quite slamming, and walked toward the big glass doors of Rancho Grande. Dewey put the car in gear, then twisted around to look at me. I looked right back at him. His eyes shifted like he was having a thought—probably not a good one, if I knew his type, and I did.
* * *
We drove out of the Valley, first on a big highway, then on a pretty busy two-laner. I recognized things going past—a truck stop where we’d once busted a guy with an empty truck who turned out to be smuggling trucks, and a tequila bar with a shooting range out back, now closed. This road led to Mexico. Had the green-eyed woman mentioned Mexico? I didn’t think so but wasn’t sure. Dewey flipped open the glove box, glanced inside, flipped it closed—but not before I glimpsed the revolver inside. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror. I watched him.
Traffic thinned out. Dewey put on an earpiece, made a call.
“Mig?” he said. “Me, Dewey.”
“Whaddya want?” said Mig.
“You in?”
“Why?”
“Got a proposition.”
“What?”
“More of a show-and-tell thing. I’ll swing by.”
“Huh?”
Dewey didn’t answer. Instead he clicked off and sped up a little. I checked the rearview. He was smiling.
Not long after that, we entered a little desert town, the kind with one main street and a few back streets. At the end of the backmost back street, unpaved and rutted, we pulled into the driveway of a small house with no neighbors and parked beside a shiny new pickup. A light over the side door of the house flashed on, the door opened and a man came out. Dewey climbed out of the car to meet him. He had that slightly rolling gait that comes from wearing cowboy boots.
“Hey, Mig,” he said.
“What’s up, Dewey?” said Mig, who turned out to be one of those short, wide guys you run into from time to time. They come in types, Bernie says, one type being very strong, so you have to watch out, and the other type being soft through and through. “I’m kinda busy.” One thing he’d been busy with for sure was smoking weed. The smell rose off him like he was a little round weed furnace.
“Too busy to make money?” Dewey said. “Check out the back seat.”
Mig came closer to the car, peered in at me. “A dog?”
“Know a PI name of Bernie Little?”
“The one with the dog? Heard of him.”
“This here’s the dog,” Dewey said.
“How’d you get him?”
“That’s not the point. A dog like this is valuable.”
“For what?”
“Guarding, that’s what. He’s big and strong and real smart. The kind of dog one of your pals on the other side of the border would be itchin’ to own.”
“Oh?” said Mig. “What do you know about my pals on the other side of the border?”
“Nothing,” Dewey said quickly. “Nothing at all. Zip. Business acquaintances of yours, is what I meant. And I didn’t even mean that. But I was thinking, since we’re buddies, I’d give you a real good price and you could do a resale down there for way more.”
“Why me?”
“I already said. We’re buddies.”
Mig gave Dewey an unbuddy look. “You want the dog to end up in Mexico—that it?”
Dewey looked surprised. “How’d you know?” he said.
“Magic,” said Mig. He took another look at me. “I’ll give you five hundred bucks.”
“Five hundred? He’s worth ten grand, maybe more.”
“Six hundred,” Mig said.
“C’mon, Miggy. Make it a grand.”
&nbs
p; “Six fifty.”
“How about seven?” Dewey said.
Mig took a step toward the house.
“Okay, okay, six fifty.”
Mig nodded. He took out an enormous roll, peeled off some bills, handed them to Dewey. Then he came to my door. “You got a leash on him?”
“No,” Dewey said.
Mig went into the house and returned with a length of rope. He made a loop at one end.
“How are you gonna get that on him?” Dewey said.
“No worries,” said Mig, and from his pocket drew … a Slim Jim? Yes, a Slim Jim. I love Slim Jims, goes without mentioning, and of course wanted this Slim Jim more than anything. I jumped up and—
But no. I did not jump up. I did not want this Slim Jim more than anything. What I wanted more than anything was to be with Bernie. And all at once—is there anyone luckier than me?—there he was in my head. Lie down, big guy, like a good, little doggie. I lay flat down on the seat.
Mig opened the car door, real slow and careful. “He better have more fight in him than this,” he said.
“Oh, for sure,” said Dewey. “Probably still woozy from the knockout drug.”
Mig held out the Slim Jim. “Treat.”
Real slow, nice and easy, I rose and moved toward the Slim Jim. But my eyes weren’t on it. Instead I was watching Mig’s other hand, the one holding that loop of rope.
“There’s a good dog,” he said.
Very gently, I took one end of the Slim Jim—one of the tastiest Slim Jims I’ve ever encountered, by the way—in my mouth. At that moment, Mig’s other hand twitched. And the next moment—
VA-VOOM!
From zero to sixty in no time flat, whatever that might mean. Did Mig get knocked aside, possibly right to the ground, turning out to be the soft through and through type of short wide guy after all? Was there yelling back and forth? Did I hear the glove box flip open? Who knows? The only sure thing was that Chet the Jet was on the loose! And he still had that Slim Jim! Can you beat that?
I tore around Mig’s house, away from light, toward the darkness and the desert. A car engine howled and headlights flashed on, lighting up a bush, a rock, a rusted-out fridge, but not me. Not me at first, and then suddenly I got lit up. Crack! Crack! Crack! Gunshots, one of them smacking into the ground close by, one whistling past my ears, one maybe parting the fur on my back.
Zigzag, big guy! Zigzag!
How could I have forgotten the zigzag, one of my primo moves? I zigzagged—Crack! Crack! Crack!—up a steep hill, down the other side, across an arroyo, up the bank, down another slope, then straight across some rough ground. I glanced back as I ran, caught the glow of distant headlights, not moving now, their beams petering out way behind me. I ran up another hill, and another after that, and from the top of that hill I could see the glow of the Valley. I took a short break and polished off the Slim Jim.
* * *
Not long after dawn—by then I’d settled into what Bernie calls my go-to trot—I spotted a giant donut in the sky. What luck! Donut Heaven. We’ve got Donut Heavens out the yingyang in the Valley, just one of the things that make it great. I headed straight for the giant donut, got there in no time.
Business seemed a little slow this morning. There was only one car in the lot, a Valley PD black-and-white. I went over to it. Sitting behind the wheel and munching on a cruller was Captain Stine. He was an old buddy, owed his being a captain to me and Bernie. What had we done? I couldn’t remember. In fact, I couldn’t think at all, beyond one single thought: Cruller! Cruller!
Captain Stine’s head snapped around in my direction, like he’d been startled. The air seemed strange, as though some very loud sound, possibly bark-like, had recently passed through it.
“Chet?”
Ten
“What have we here?” said Amy. Amy’s my vet—a big woman of what Bernie calls the no-nonsense kind. Was that because she hardly ever laughed at his jokes? I didn’t know. Right now we were in her waiting room—I’m not a fan of the whole setup Amy had behind the door that led to the rest of her office—and she was running her hands along my back, the strongest female hands I’d ever come across, although they were always gentle with me.
“That’s what I was wondering about,” Bernie said.
They were kneeling on either side of me, Amy parting my fur, both of them giving my back a close look. Was there some problem? Not that I knew of. I felt a little bit thirsty, but otherwise tip-top.
“Appears that something grazed him,” Amy said, “but superficially. No sutures required. I’ll clean him up and put him on an antibiotic. That should take care of it.”
“What kind of something did the grazing?” Bernie said. “Thorns, maybe?”
They looked at each other over the top of me. “Could be thorns,” Amy said. “Could be from crawling under a wire fence. Could be a lot of things, depending on the scenario. Any idea how long he was gone?”
“Less than ten hours. That’s all I can say for sure.” Amy went on looking at Bernie. “My fault completely,” he added, which made no sense to me. First, nothing was wrong. Second, even if something was wrong, how could it ever be his fault? We’re talking about Bernie here, folks.
“Wouldn’t want anything to happen to Chet, would we?” Amy said.
“No, ma’am,” Bernie said.
“On the other hand, given his occupation, interests, and abilities, it wouldn’t be fair to get all overcautious.”
“No.”
Amy rose. “The wound was made by a bullet, Bernie. Ten to one. He should take it easy for a day or two. And he’s dehydrated—make sure he gets plenty of water.”
Plenty of water—that sounded good. I went right to the water bowl in the corner of the waiting room. A few members of the nation within had been sipping from it, and not long ago. I’m sure I don’t have to point out how annoying that was. I slurped up every drop.
* * *
“I let you down, big guy,” Bernie said as we drove away, me in the shotgun seat, him behind the wheel, our usual arrangement, and life living out just like it’s supposed to. Except for that last remark, whatever it was. “Now,” he went on, “we go home and take it easy, doctor’s orders.”
Sure thing. We went home. I love being at home. We hung around the kitchen and had a snack or two. I noticed that Bernie had taped the smiling photo of Wendell and the girl with the rolled-up papers under her arm to the fridge door. I almost left out the baby goat, who seemed to be smiling, too.
We sat down on the couch and watched some TV. Bernie flicked through all the channels. So many glimpses of so much stuff! There’s nothing like watching TV. Bernie switched it off. That was even better.
I wandered into the kitchen, drank some water. Bernie refilled the bowl. I drank again. He cracked open a can of beer—a lovely sound, lets you know that good times are on the way. He sipped beer. I lapped up some more water. We went out to the patio, sat in the shade.
“Feeling all right, big guy?”
For sure, except for being bored out of my freakin’ mind. I noticed a tennis ball behind the swan fountain, picked it up, dropped it at Bernie’s feet.
“Fetch?” Bernie said. “Maybe tomorrow. Today we’re taking it easy.”
But I’d had enough of taking it easy! I snapped up the tennis ball, flipped it in the air, caught it, pranced around.
“I’m not paying attention to you.”
How infuriating! I was considering ways to possibly get Iggy involved when Bernie took out his phone and said, “Wonder what Eliza’s up to today.” He pressed a key or two.
“Eliza?
“Hello, Bernie.”
“How’re things?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“Off today?”
“Yes.”
“How about coming over? I can show you our new boat.”
“Was there a cancellation?”
“Cancellation?”
“In your social calendar.”
Berni
e shot me a puzzled glance. “Eliza? I don’t understand.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Eliza said. And then: click.
“Whoa,” Bernie said. “What’s going on?” He pressed a button. “Eliza? Pick up.”
But she did not. “I’ll text,” he said, and did some quick touching of the buttons. Then he laid the phone on the table. It just sat there.
“Chet? What happened?”
I had no idea. My only thought was that if we’d gone off for a round or two of fetch in the canyon this whole Eliza thing wouldn’t have happened. But perhaps not a nice thought. I tried to forget it and was successful at once.
Bernie snapped his fingers. “I know! We can work on the boat. That won’t be too taxing.”
What a brilliant idea! But that’s Bernie. Just when you think he’s done amazing you, he amazes you again. In no time at all, we were beside the house and climbing up on Sea of Love, Bernie carrying the tool kit and me the tennis ball, just in case.
We walked around, checking things out. Bernie poked his hand into a hole here and there, some in the deck, hardly any in the hull, and none of them big. Only small fish had a chance of getting through, so what was the problem? As for fishiness, I smelled something fishy behind a hatch cover under the rusty, coiled-up anchor chain. Whew. A little of that goes a long way, and this was more than a little. I joined Bernie, standing at the console.
He turned the wheel. “A tad on the loose side, Chet,” he said. “Should be a snap to tighten. And I like the idea of starting with the wheel.”
So did I! I loved it! Starting with the wheel! Wow!
Bernie opened the toolbox, chose a tool, cast it aside for a bigger one, ended up using a tool even bigger than that.
Of Mutts and Men Page 8
