Paw and Order

by Spencer Quinn

  “All right, big guy, hang on—hang on, for God’s sake.”

  Bernie pulled into a little roadside clearing. I hopped out, sniffed around a bit. The place smelled unmistakably of pit stop, clearly one of the busiest in my experience, popular with humans of both sexes, and same for the nation within, a cat or two, plus foxes, deer, squirrels, raccoons, and what was this? A bear? Plus another creature or two I didn’t even know! I laid my mark here and there, finally settling on a tree stump with white mushrooms growing on the top. There I was, watering mushrooms and therefore doing good, all the while gazing at the sky in that relaxed frame of mind you often get toward the end of a successful pit stop, when out from behind the crown of a nearby tree came the strange bird, the shiny hovering bird with no eyes, no feathers, and wings that didn’t flap. It glided down in a long slow arc, passed right over Bernie’s head—he was standing outside the car now, leaning in through the open door and digging around under the seat, meaning he was searching for a cigarette, of which there were none, as I knew from the total lack of tobacco smell in the car—and then rose straight up in the air and hung motionless, at about treetop level or so.

  I finished up what I was doing, gave myself a quick shake, what Bernie calls my head-clearer—“like slapping your face with aftershave,” which sounds unpleasant, in my opinion—but time enough to forget all about the strange bird, trot over to Bernie, watch him rooting around under the seat, and then—whoa!—remember again about the strange bird. Was it still up there hovering? Oh, yes.

  Bernie straightened, turned to me. “What are you barking about?”

  The strange bird, of course. What could be more obvious? I amped it up.

  “What? What? You needed a pit stop, we took a pit stop. Thirsty maybe?” He reached back into the car, dug out my portable bowl and a bottle of water, filled the bowl, laid it on the grass beside me. I have a thing I sometimes do, hard to say why or even describe, that involves backing up with my legs real stiff and barking in a quick rat-a-tat-tat machine gun way that’s hard to ignore.

  “Drink, for the love of God! You’re not thirsty? What do you want?” Bernie raised his hands, looked up, spoke to the sky, a human thing you see from time to time, the sky never answering, in my experience. “What does he want? What the hell does—”

  Bernie froze, his gaze at last on the strange bird. I went silent. It got very quiet in our little pit stop area, nothing to hear but the faint whirr-whirr of the strange bird. Bernie watched the bird. I watched Bernie. At first, his face looked surprised. Then his mouth opened very slightly, a sign he was understanding something. Next, his eyes got hard.

  He glanced at me. “Good boy, Chet. Way ahead of me again, huh?”

  Of course not! How could anyone ever be ahead of Bernie?

  Bernie opened the trunk of the Porsche and took out the tire iron. That was unexpected. We were going to do some work on the car? Were we even having any problems with it lately? Not that I’d noticed. And the truth is that car repairs are not our best thing. You wouldn’t believe how long it takes to get a coat like mine clean if it happens to get splashed with all the oil that’s in the tank and then some. But if Bernie said car repairs, then car repairs it would be. Except now he was stepping away from the car, his head tilted up, eyes back on the strange bird. He patted the end of the tire iron once, twice on his open hand and then—and then came maybe the most exciting moment of my career, so far. Bernie drew back his throwing arm—he’s got a cannon, as I must have made clear by now if I’m doing my job—and flung that tire iron high in the sky. It spun up there, glittering in the sunshine and whirling so fast I could hear the rush of air, closing and closing on the strange bird, which just went on hovering, maybe too stupid to know that big trouble was on the way—on the way with bells on, amigo! whatever that might mean, my apologies for even throwing it in there—and then: WHACK! What a lovely sound, solid, metallic, satisfying. The strange bird came down in a jerking spiral and landed right beside us with a jangly thud.

  “Easy, big guy, easy.”

  Uh-oh. Was I jumping up and down? I made my best effort to get that under control, at least eliminating the up part of the jump, if that makes any sense. Meanwhile, Bernie was crouched over the strange bird, which was now in pieces, more than two, and not a bird at all, or even a creature of any kind, but a machine, with insides that reminded me a bit of the insides of Bernie’s desktop computer, the day that Charlie figured out how to get the back off. The fun we’d had! And I’d ended up pooping out that one missing piece—a little green plastic square if I remember right—the very next day, so no harm, no foul. But no time for any of that now. Eye on the ball, big guy, which is what Bernie always says, although when it comes to playing fetch all our tennis balls and lacrosse balls are covered in my scent, so nose on the ball gets it done for me.

  Where were we? Oh, yeah: the strange bird that turned out to be a machine. Bernie poked through its remains, and I squeezed in my closest to give him every bit of support I could. He picked out a tiny round glassy thing, turned it between his finger and thumb.

  “Camera lens, Chet,” he said. He glanced up at the sky, now empty except for a few gold-tipped puffy clouds, and then looked all around. A pickup went by, towing a horse trailer, the horse’s tail sticking out the back. No getting away from horses in these parts. The tail flicked in an irritating way, and then we were alone again, me and Bernie.

  He rose. “What we’re going to do, big guy, is wait right here.” He checked his watch, not his grandfather’s watch—our most valuable possession and always either in the safe back home or at Mr. Singh’s, our favorite pawnbroker, and don’t forget his lamb curry—but his cheapo watch, that had actually cost nothing, Bernie having found it in a trash barrel while we were working some case about which I remember nothing else. “How about we time this?” he said. “Test the efficiency of our spooks, if you see what I mean.”

  I most certainly did not, nor, if spooks were involved, did I want to. Hadn’t Suzie said something about spooks a while back? If so, you already know my stance on Halloween.

  “First, let’s take out an insurance policy,” Bernie said.

  A fine idea. Once we’d had a fire in the circuit breaker box in the garage, not long after Bernie had figured out a cool way to do something or other with the wiring, and pretty soon we’d learned all sorts of lessons about insurance. But so worth it, those dudes from the fire department turning out to be a fun bunch.

  Meanwhile, Bernie was snapping pictures of the remains of the strange bird with his phone. I love how he closes one eye when he does that!

  “We’ll just send these to Suzie,” he said, pressing a button. Then he found a paper shopping bag in the trunk of the Porsche, paper always his response when asked that plastic or paper question, and tossed all the pieces of the strange bird inside. After that, we just sat in the car and listened to some of our happiest tunes: “Sea of Heartbreak,” “Born to Lose,” “The Sky Is Crying,” “It Hurts Me Too.” Bernie sang along, and I chipped in from time to time as the spirit moved me—and it did a whole bunch of times, which is one of the things about me—with this woo-woo-woo thing I can do, nose pointed to the sky. We know how to sing a song, me and Bernie, and were singing our very best when two black cars, a sedan and an SUV, came up the slope, turned into our little spot, and parked on either side of us. We got out of the car, both of us moving as one, no communication. A situation like this starts up, you don’t just stay there on your butt like . . . like a sitting duck. I’ve had some exp—

  But no time for that now. We stood side by side. The doors of the SUV opened, and a man and a woman got out, both of them in dark business suits. A lot of suit wearing went down in this part of the country. I was still wondering whether that thought was going to lead me anywhere when a man got out of the sedan. He too wore a dark suit, but there was one difference, namely that I knew him. It was Mr. Ferretti, pushing his energy wa
ve on ahead. Did I have anything against Mr. Ferretti? Not that I could think of. Besides being on the good-looking side for a human, with that big bony nose, even bigger and bonier than I remembered, hadn’t we had a fun car ride together, not so long ago, a car ride that included some steak he was nice enough to share with me, and share in the nicest way, meaning I got most of it? So why would anyone be surprised that my first move was to trot over to him, tail wagging and all set for a hiya-pal-how-ya-been kind of pat? But surprise was what I saw on the faces of the two people from the SUV, and also from Bernie. Mr. Ferretti looked more bothered than surprised, frowning the way humans do when a problem suddenly crops up. I tried to identify a problem and pretty soon actually came up with one, which doesn’t happen every time. The problem? I wasn’t getting any pats from Mr. Ferretti. I headed right back to Bernie.

  The man from the SUV walked off on his own, stopping around the spot where the strange bird had landed and toeing the grass. He turned to Mr. Ferretti, shook his head. Mr. Ferretti gave the woman a tiny nod. She came closer. Her hair, nice and thick, was tied up in one of those buns, one stray bit hanging loose at the back. That stray bit perked me up for some reason, and just at the right time, on account of those non-pats being a bit of a letdown, even for a dude as naturally perky as myself.

  “Are you in possession of an object that doesn’t belong to you?” she said.

  “I paid for it with my taxes,” Bernie said.

  Oh, no. Tax time already? I really hoped not. Tax time was the worst, balled-up papers wall-to-wall, ink on Bernie’s nose, calculators bouncing off the ceiling.

  “Maybe you don’t realize the gravity of the situation,” she said.

  “Normally, you’d be right,” Bernie said. “But we just had a demonstration of gravity on this very spot, so it’s fresh in my mind.” No idea what that was about, but it seemed to make Bernie very cheerful, so I felt cheerful, too.

  The woman eased back one side of her suit jacket, revealing a holster on her hip, gun butt showing out the top. When I’m cheerful, I sometimes do things I don’t realize I’ve done until they’re over, like . . . like snatching that gun right out of its holster! A voice in my head—Bernie’s, of course—said, “Not now, big guy.” I got a grip. Not now means maybe later, with quite possibly no maybe about it, at least from my understanding of how things shake down.

  “Hand it over,” the woman said.

  Bernie smiled. “You guys from a model plane club?”

  She didn’t like hearing that, and neither did her buddy from the SUV, but Mr. Ferretti laughed. He came forward. “I’ll handle this,” he said. He turned to Bernie. “What do you want?”

  “Not to be spied on,” Bernie said.

  “Can we have a grown-up conversation?” said Mr. Ferretti.

  “Sure,” said Bernie. “Start by telling me who murdered Eben St. John. Even money it was you.”

  “You’d lose that bet,” said Mr. Ferretti. “Plus it’s a damned ungrateful thing to say.”

  “Ungrateful?” Bernie said.

  Mr. Ferretti stepped forward, put his arm over Bernie’s shoulder, and led him away, although not away from me, since I was right beside Bernie from the get-go. “I was hoping you’d go back to Arizona,” he said.

  “When was this?” said Bernie.

  “After I sprung you.”

  Bernie stopped, turned to Mr. Ferretti, studied his face. I could feel Bernie thinking real fast. “So you do know who killed him.”

  “Negative,” said Mr. Ferretti. “I just know it wasn’t you.”

  “How?”

  “Can’t you figure it out?”

  What a question! Of course, Bernie could figure out whatever it was. Wasn’t he always the smartest human in the room? I waited. And waited some more. A little smile appeared on Mr. Ferretti’s face. Was there a problem? All at once, it hit me: We weren’t in a room! We were actually at this pit stop, in a kind of invisible soup of piss smells, the invisible part pretty meaningless to me, although probably not to you. The terrible point—I shrank from even letting my mind think it, but good luck with that, my mind so often being its own boss—was that perhaps, at this particular pit stop, Mr. Ferretti was the smar—

  No! No! It couldn’t be. The sun rises every day. Bernie’s Bernie. That’s all there is to say.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  * * *

  You don’t know who killed Eben, but you know it wasn’t me,” Bernie said.

  “Correct,” said Mr. Ferretti. “So therefore . . .”

  Whoa! Mr. Ferretti was going to take a swing at a so therefore? Didn’t he know so therefores were Bernie’s department?

  Bernie didn’t let that happen. Before Mr. Ferretti could say one more thing, Bernie said, “So therefore, your name’s Ferretti, two R’s, two T’s.”

  Good for Bernie! Although kind of confusing: didn’t we already know that? I certainly did. Sometimes humans were . . . a little slow? No, no, not possible. What a crazy thought! I made it go away and hoped my hardest it would never come back. If humans were a little slow, then we were all in big trouble, and who wanted that?

  Mr. Ferretti laughed. “You’ve got a smart girlfriend,” he said. He glanced at me. “And a smart pooch. Even a cool car, at least in my eyes. All adds up nicely. Go home, Mr. Little. Enjoy your life.”

  “I’m enjoying it right here,” Bernie said.

  “Then you don’t know what’s in your own best interest,” Mr. Ferretti said.

  “That’s still up to me,” Bernie said, “unless there are new laws I’m unaware of.”

  “New laws you’re unaware of? That’s a given. To say nothing of the old ones. For example, the law gives me the power to arrest you on the spot for practicing your craft in this jurisdiction without a license.”

  Bernie reached into his pocket, took out a folded-up sheet of paper, handed it to Mr. Ferretti. “Can I sue you for defamation?” Bernie said.

  Mr. Ferretti snapped the sheet of paper out straight with a flick of his wrist and gave it a quick glance. “Soares gave you this?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Mr. Ferretti sighed. Sighs are interesting. Bernie’s mom, for example, a real piece of work who sometimes comes for a visit—please not again anytime soon, the fact being I do not shed, whatever she happens to believe, and if I do, it’s no biggie—is a champion sigher, and we’ve got plenty of sighers in the nation within, but I haven’t figured out what sighs are all about. Did Mr. Ferretti and Bernie’s mom have something in common? She’d had a sort of big bony nose at one time—nothing on the scale of Mr. Ferretti’s, of course—but then some work got done, and more work after that. The truth was, she looked like a whole new person every time I saw her. No problem for me and my kind: her smell remained exactly the same, somewhat reminiscent of Bernie’s, which was the best thing about her.

  “Too many cooks,” Mr. Ferretti said, giving the sheet of paper back to Bernie.

  Mr. Ferretti was right about that. Cooks were better all by their lonesomes, as Bernie and I had learned when we’d attended the Great Western Chili Burger Cook-Off as guests of Cleon Maxwell, our buddy who runs Max’s Memphis Ribs, best ribs in the Valley, bar none. Some cook had peed in some other cook’s special top-secret barbecue sauce, or maybe it was the other way around, and the next thing we knew, the air was full of flying cleavers and we were on the run, both of us packing a burger, me in my mouth and Bernie . . . in his mouth, too! At least in my memory.

  “. . . any reason your recipe’s better than his, following up on your cliché?” Bernie was saying, losing me completely and all at once, meaning he was now at his most brilliant. The case was as good as solved or even better. I tried to remember who was paying.

  “Is that a serious question?” Mr. Ferretti said. “Soares is just a local cop.”

  “And you?” said Bernie.

  Mr. Ferretti tilted up h
is chin a bit. I felt that energy wave of his, the chin movement sort of nudging it along. “You know what I am,” he said.

  Bernie didn’t move at all but seemed to close the distance between the two of them, maybe just by getting bigger, hard to say how, exactly. “It doesn’t scare me,” he said.

  “No?” said Mr. Ferretti.

  “Not personally,” Bernie said. “But for the future of the republic, yeah.”

  “A subject above both our pay grades,” Mr. Ferretti said.

  Bernie was about to reply when the woman called to him. “Boss?”

  We all turned to her. Hey! She and the other dude were way too close to the Porsche—our ride!—and the other dude was reaching—reaching inside!—and . . . what was this? Taking out the shopping bag with the remains of the strange bird? Our shopping bag? One thing and one thing only was clear: I had no time to think. The good news is that’s when I’m at my best. No bad news comes to mind. Bernie says I’m a bowl-half-full type of guy, whatever that might mean, although at that moment he was saying something else, like, “Chet!” Or possibly, “CHET!”

  Here’s a funny thing. There have been times in my life when from the face of someone, Bernie, say, you can tell that shouting is going on, but what I’m actually hearing is more of a whisper or nothing at all. Does that ever happen to you? No matter, the important point being this was one of those times. I was vaguely aware of Bernie whispering my name as I charged my very hardest and fastest—way too long since my last hard and fast charge—right at the dude with the shopping bag. He saw me coming—there’s a look humans get in their eyes when they see me coming in full-charge mode, a look I love!—and then started flailing around in a clumsy way, hands coming up, body half-twisting, shopping bag pinwheeling away, all those bird pieces taking separate flight, in short, the exact kind of reaction you want from a chargee, if chargee makes any sense, probably not. And so: I launched! The wind in my ears, the pounding of my heart, the taste of blood any moment now: hard to beat a moment like that, even if you live forever, which has always been my plan.