The Sound and the Furry

by Spencer Quinn

  “Who told you that?”

  “Lord himself, although not directly.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Mami said.

  “In fact, he ended up denying it, if I followed him correctly. But his denial was the kind guilty guys come up with, at least in my experience. So now that the cat’s out of the bag, what went down?”

  Now that what? I sniffed the air and detected not a trace of cat. Was that because the cat was in fact still in some sort of bag? Not likely. Bags don’t stop me: I can smell every single item in a grocery bag. And what bag was he talking about? I trotted over to a tree and raised my leg. It was all I could think to do.

  “I got nothin’ to tell you,” Mami said. “G’wan back to where you come from, far as I’m concerned. Blood is thicker than water.”

  Take it from someone who’s tasted both: Mami was totally right about that. But how did she know? She had to be watched like a hawk. I’d watched plenty of hawks watching me out in the desert, knew how it was done.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Bernie said. “But we’ve worked a lot of cases, Chet and I, and one thing I can tell you is that the results are always better when there’s trust between us and the client.”

  “Yeah?” said Mami, turning the key. “Then how about this’ll be the exception that proves the rule?” She backed away from the dock in a fast, tight turn, then slammed to a stop, the pickup rocking back and forth. “Get one thing clear. Lord didn’t grab those shrimp. A whole goddamn ton—you think he could pull off something like that? And where’d those shrimp end up—ask yourself that.” Then Mami hit the gas and zoomed away on the rutted road, trailing dust that formed a golden cloud in the sunlight and slowly vanished. This was a lovely spot in its way.

  Bernie looked at me. “I should have handled that better.”

  What a crazy idea! He’d handled whatever it was perfectly. We walked onto the dock, a floating dock that was kind of unsteady under our feet. At first I didn’t like it and then I did.

  “And proves was a way of saying tests at one time,” he said. “So exception that proves the rule doesn’t even mean what she thinks.”

  That zinged over my head, here and gone. We stepped up onto the deck of Little Jazz.

  My very first ever time on a boat! I liked its old wooden smell from the get-go. We walked around the whole deck from back to front and back again, went down a few steps into a sort of living room, the floor covered with a strange shaggy sort of rug.

  “Welcome to suburbia, circa 1963,” said Bernie.

  I didn’t get any of that except for the welcoming part. Very nice of Bernie to say, but not necessary: we were partners, after all.

  Bernie opened a low door, crouched down, and peered into a small dark space. “What’s keeping this thing afloat is my question,” he said.

  Not mine. It hadn’t even occurred to me. All I knew was that we were floating, no problem, and also that a pita chip was somewhere in the vicinity, the smell of a pita chip being just about impossible to miss, at least in my world. In a moment or two I’d found it behind a stool at the eating counter in the kitchen part of the boat. I downed it in one not-very-crunchy bite, totally satisfying. Freshness doesn’t matter at all when it comes to pita chips; does it ever matter with any foods? None came immediately to mind.

  Meanwhile, Bernie was sitting at the control console, examining some papers. “If I’m reading this chart right, one of Ralph’s anchorages is less than a mile from here,” he said. “How about we check it out in that pirogue and then see if we can hunt up some chow?”

  All of that pretty confusing except for the very end. I loved when that happened. It was like wandering around in a strange place and then suddenly you’re home. So were we home in some kind of way? Things were going well.

  A ladder led down off Little Jazz’s back deck and onto a small platform at water level; the pirogue was tied to the platform. “Some things you need to know about boats,” Bernie said, as we jumped down to the platform, me actually jumping, “beside the most important fact that they’re a hole in the water into which you throw money.”

  Oh, no. What a terrible idea, worse than Hawaiian pants or even the tin futures play, which would have made us rich except for an earthquake in Bolivia, or maybe because the earthquake didn’t happen. Was Bernie about to throw three K into the bayou? I didn’t know what I’d do.

  “First, there’s all the lingo,” he said. “Bow for front, stern for back, et cetera. Then, with small boats like this it’s important to remember—” A whole lot of things, but I was too worried about the money to concentrate. I kept my eyes on Bernie’s hands, as though . . . as though he was a perp! That was bad of me, but I couldn’t stop.

  Bernie showed no sign of reaching into his pocket. Instead, he grabbed the rope and pulled the pirogue up against the platform. Then he knelt down so our faces were close. That meant something important was coming.

  “Okay, big guy, I know this is all new. What I want is for you to hop in the bow, right in front of this thwart—” He patted a sort of seat in the pirogue. “—and then sit nice and still. Can you do that?”

  What a question! I was almost insulted. Except nothing like that could ever happen between me and Bernie. He patted the seat again and said, “Go,” followed by “sit,” and maybe something else. All I knew was that a moment later I was sitting in the bow of the pirogue, facing front, perfectly motionless.

  Bernie smiled, a very nice sight. He had beautiful teeth for a human. “You look like a natural-born sailor.”

  Bernie got into the back of the pirogue, fiddled with a switch or two on the motor, pulled a cord, and vroom vroom! A nice vroom vroom with the deck of the little boat vibrating softly under my paws, but we weren’t going anywhere. Bernie untied the line and pushed off.

  And then we were gliding over the water, watery sounds bubbling and swishing all around me. How lovely! I’d had no idea being in a boat was so wonderful! Plus the bow was obviously the best place to be, just like the shotgun seat. I sat up even straighter, gazing straight ahead, missing nothing. Chet, the natural-born sailor: what a life!

  TEN

  We moved along the narrow bayou, cruising through patches of shade and patches of sunlight. A fish with a thick-lipped face that reminded me of Fritzie Bortz—funny how the mind works—jumped right out of the water, its scales like a bunch of tiny flashing mirrors. An empty beer can drifted by, and then a container of laundry detergent and a wicker chair. It was beautiful out on the bayou, no question about that, but I wasn’t used to the damp, heavy heat, and I didn’t seem to be getting used to it. All of a sudden it hit me: How about a swim? I couldn’t think of a single reason why not; I didn’t even try.

  “Ch—et?”

  I sat back down.

  “There’ll be time for a swim later.”

  Later? I tried to remember what that was about. The whole idea resisted me, retreating into a shady patch in my mind and staying there. Meanwhile, we were coming to a sort of fork in the road except we were on water. A dude named Yogi Berra—possibly a perp—had once told Bernie, if I’m remembering this right, and I should on account of how often Bernie’s mentioned it, that when you come to a fork in the road take it, and that’s what Bernie did. We know the ropes at the Little Detective Agency, although no one puts a rope on me, amigo.

  The new waterway rounded a corner and opened up into a big round lake lined by green grasses and some tall trees, all that greenery reappearing on the surface of the water. And a boat—hey! our boat!—was doing that same doubled-up thing. Our boat but with one very rough-looking customer in the bow. The hair on the back of my neck rose right away, and I got ready to—

  “Chet! For God’s sake! How many times do we have to go through this?”

  Go through what? While I tried to remember whatever I was supposed to remember, the rough customer stopped baring his enormous teeth and so did I. Why look for trouble? And what was this? His ears didn’t match? And one of them had a t
iny notch taken out of it, the kind of notch a whizzing bullet might have . . . At that moment, I remembered what I was supposed to remember. Then there was nothing to do but give myself a good shake, which was what I did.

  “Chet! You’re going to tip the goddamn boat!”

  And then we’d have our swim? That sounded pretty good to—

  “CHET!”

  I went still.

  Out in the middle of the lake rose a small island. Bernie glanced at the map. “This is it,” he said. “Isle des Deux Amis. Kind of a long name for such a little spot. Means island of two friends, maybe.”

  Excellent name in my opinion. A few trees grew on Isle des Deux Amis and another one had fallen into the water and lay there partly underneath. Bernie steered around it, cut the motor, and we glided up to a low sandy bank and came to a stop with a gentle bump. Bernie held out a rope end, waved it around a bit. A waving rope end within snatching distance? Who could resist?

  “Think you could hop out with it?” he said.

  I didn’t even have to think, which is usually when I’m at my best. I’d leaped onto the shore—more muddy than sandy, as it turned out—and trotted up to the nearest tree, marking it at once, the rope end still in my mouth.

  Bernie stepped out of the boat and—oops—sank down in the mud to his ankles. He pulled his feet free with a couple of wet sucking plop sounds, not unpleasant, and then said a few things I’m sure he didn’t really mean. He walked over, took the rope end, and tied it around the trunk of the tree.

  “My best sneakers, big guy.” They were? What about the other pair, the one without the paint spatters? “This whole goddamn state’s drowning.”

  That sounded like a problem, and maybe scary, too, but right then I was more interested in the fact that another member of the nation within had already marked my tree, lower down—much lower down, in fact, meaning a little guy—not very recently, certainly not today or the day before. Other than that, all I learned about the little dude was that like me he was a fan of Slim Jims. Suppose he had one? Snatching it away from him would be a snap! Maybe not a nice thought. I tried to get rid of it, but it didn’t want to leave.

  “Time for a quick recon, Chet.”

  I’d been just about to come up with that on my own—I knew it! Quick recons were what we always did first thing in a new place, especially crime scenes. Uh-oh. Was this a crime scene? I got ready for anything.

  We moved on to ground that was a little higher and found a sort of path lined with sawtooth grasses I’d never seen before and proved to myself how sharp they were right away. “No footprints,” Bernie said. “If Ralph came here, you’d think there’d be footprints. Although with all the rain . . .”

  He went quiet, but the thoughts kept on going in his mind: I could feel them, like birds flying in the night. One thing was for sure: no footprints. That didn’t mean no humans had been here. In fact, there’d been two, around the same time as that little member of the nation within. Two human smells, both male and alike in lots of ways, but that was something you had to get past in this business. Funny thing about me: it didn’t take a lot of effort. None at all, was the actual truth, if you must know. For example, one of these dudes had a garlicky thing going on and the other had overdone it with the same aftershave that Bernie used before Suzie made him stop, the one that comes in the square green bottle.

  “I’m worried we’re a bit like a fish out of water down here,” Bernie said.

  Whoa. A fish out of water? I love being in the water myself, but the fact is, I move much faster on land. And so would a fish, unless I was missing something. Therefore: nothing to worry about. We were going to crack this case—missing persons, if I remembered correctly—crack it wide open!

  “Easy, big guy!”

  What was this? I seemed to be up on my hind legs, front paws on Bernie’s chest. Maybe not the right time. But before pushing off, I gave those stitches on his forehead a quick lick. They were right there in front of my face, after all; you’d have done the same.

  Bernie looked down at me, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand in the nicest way. “Something—” His gaze rose beyond me, Bernie cutting himself off before saying “bothering you, big guy?” which I’d heard many, many times and now heard again, just inside my head. The answer was nothing was bothering me: nothing hardly ever did! We had good times, me and Bernie.

  Bernie moved toward a tree stump, not the kind smoothly cut by a tree guy with a chainsaw—and it didn’t have to be a tree guy: how about Mrs. Teitelbaum cutting down Mr. Teitelbaum’s prize tangerine tree while he watched helplessly from his chopper, just taking off from the Teitelbaums’s private helipad? The Teitelbaum divorce: a nightmare. But forget all that. The point was that this particular tree stump was the kind where the tree just split off and fell with help from nobody. There it was, lying almost completely hidden in the sawtooth grass. The stump itself was all soft and rotten, with small white mushrooms growing inside and some interesting bugs wriggling around in there. And what were those tiny glistening whitish things? Bug eggs of some kind? I couldn’t help wondering how they’d ta—

  “What have we here?” Bernie said. Caught on a piece of bark that stuck up from the edge of the stump was a pair of glasses. Bernie took surgical gloves from his pocket, put them on, and picked up the glasses: black-framed glasses that reminded me of some long-ago singer Bernie liked, the name not coming to me at the moment.

  “Buddy Holly–style glasses,” Bernie said. Wow! The very next moment and there it was! Was I cooking or what? “Who else wears glasses like this?”

  I had no idea. Bernie reached into his pocket again, this time taking out a photo. We looked at it together. Was this the photo Vannah had given him? I remembered something about that. “Ralph Boutette,” Bernie said, his voice quiet. Ralph had on glasses just like those in Bernie’s hand. A ray of light shone down through the trees and caught the lenses, glaring on a fingerprint or two. Fingerprints are big in our business, which I’m sure you know. What you may not know is that sometimes they leave behind a smell, like now. Ralph Boutette’s glasses gave off a very faint smell of garlic.

  Bernie put the glasses in a baggie and tucked them away. Then we took a real close look at the stump and the area around it. After that, Bernie went down to the pirogue and brought back the paddle. We went over the whole island, Bernie using the paddle to hack away at the sawtooth grasses so we could see underneath. At first all that paddle hacking was a bit too exciting for me. And even not just at first! We spent what seemed like a long time, the sun, no hotter than back home but so much heavier, if that makes any sense, sliding down the sky, and sweat dripping off Bernie’s face. Mosquitoes arrived. I’d only seen them once before, on a case we’d worked at a wilderness camp in the mountains, but not like this, in swarms. I hated their sound and when they went for my nose, but otherwise they didn’t bother me. Bernie was another story: he smacked at them, yelled goddamn bastards a few times, ended up with bite bumps all over his arms and legs, plus bloody and sweaty little smears here and there. As for our search we came up with zilch.

  Back in the pirogue, we rode away from the Isle des Deux Amis, the mosquitoes following us for a while and then giving up. Bernie cut the motor, dipped his hands in the water, washed off the bloody smears.

  “Gonna need a transfusion,” he said, losing me completely. I started panting. If Bernie needed something, it was my business to know.

  “Hot, big guy?” he said. “You can take that swim now, if you like.” He patted the water with his hand. I got the idea, perhaps in midair.

  And then I was splashing right in. Ah! I went under, bobbed up, and started swimming. Swimming is just like trotting, except underwater. Anyone can do it. The pirogue drifted toward the far shore of this lake or whatever it was and I swam alongside, just my eyes and nose above the surface, my style when it comes to swimming.

  “Looks like fun,” Bernie said.

  Bernie: right again! And even though I wouldn’t ha
ve minded if this water’d been a lot colder, it was still plenty fine. Come on in, Bernie, come on in! But he did not. I swam along beside the boat to my heart’s content, which was how I liked to operate. As we got closer to the far shore, a house appeared, a strange sort of house with the front part up on stilts right over the water. Sunlight glinted off a pickup parked in the nearby trees.

  “That pickup look familiar to you?” Bernie said.

  Or something like that. I make it my business to listen to Bernie and listen good, but in this case I was distracted by a smell, specifically that froggy snaky smell mixed up with peppery poop. It got stronger and stronger, seemed to be rising up from deep down in the lake.

  “Sure looks familiar to me,” Bernie said. “Back in the boat, big guy.”

  Did I have to?

  “Chet! We’re not on vacation here.”

  Uh-oh. Was I messing up? I immediately swam to the side of the pirogue, raised my paws up on the top edge, a total pro. Bernie helped me in. I gave myself a shake, but a real quick one, wasting no time at all. Then I sat up in the bow, perfectly still, eyes on that pickup, maybe important for some reason. I actually kind of remembered it, especially those painted crabs and shrimp on the side.

  We rode up to the stilt house, and I saw that the front part was a deck. A sign was nailed to one of the stilts. Bernie read it: “Beware of Iko.” A wiry dude with a bushy white mustache walked onto the deck and looked down at us. That mustache brought it all back: this was the dude who’d bought Mami’s crabs. So there I was totally in the picture. What was next? Something good: I just had the feeling. Then I noticed the gun in his belt and wasn’t quite as sure.

  Bernie cut the motor, reached out, and got a grip on one of the stilts, holding us steady.

  “Hey,” he said, looking up at the wiry dude.

  The wiry dude put his hand on the gun butt. Guns and hands: I watch them real close. “Lookin’ for someone?” he said.