“I’ve got an idea, Chet,” he said. “Not pleasant, but—”
KA-RANG! And then CRACK! A chip of gravestone went flying, leaving a hole in the stone right beside Bernie’s hand.
“Chet! Down!”
And then we were crouched behind the gravestone, Bernie with his arm around me.
KA-RANG! CRACK! Another chip flew off the stone, over our heads and into some bushes.
Silence, except for Mingo—out of our line of sight—who started up on some of his neighing, now louder and more irritating than before. Very slowly, Bernie raised himself up just enough for peeking over the stone. I did the same—we’re partners, after all—and just had time to spot someone moving on a distant ridge before Bernie said, “Chet!” And sort of pushed my head back down. Kind of gently, but a push for sure. Did that mean we weren’t partners?
Bernie ducked back down with me. He took my head in his hands, looked right into my eyes. “I can’t let anything happen to you, big guy. So be good.”
Well, of course I’d be good. That was my MO. But things happened to me all the time. I lead a very busy life. Plus I make things happen, better believe it. Was Bernie not making sense all of a sudden, just because we were getting shot at? That wasn’t the Bernie I knew. The Bernie I knew would be firing the .38 Special, blam, blam blam. Oh, no. Was it in the glove box? Mingo had no glove box. The Porsche was preferable in every way.
We stayed together behind the gravestone. Mingo had stopped neighing, begun what sounded like stomping and thrashing. Bernie raised his head again. I did the same. We’re partners, after all.
“For god’s sake, Chet! Why—”
Bernie broke off before I learned what was on his mind. Now there was no one to see on the distant ridge, and no movement at all. We rose. And just as we did, Mingo snapped the branch he was tied to right off the tree, and went prancing away.
“Mingo! Come back!”
Mingo did not come back. Instead he gave his head a powerful toss or two. The branch came loose from the reins and fell to the ground. Mingo seemed pleased about that. He pranced even more prancily, if that makes sense, pranced right out of the eucalyptus grove and into open country.
“Go get him, Chet.”
I went and got Mingo. You don’t want to know the details. Hot? Dusty? Never-ending? Kicks, nasty and sneaky? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
* * *
We crossed open, trailless country, in several formations, finally settling on me in the lead, and Bernie on Mingo following behind, which seemed to work best. After that we climbed the ridge, switchbacking on the steepest parts. Mingo turned out to be not so bad at this. “Good boy,” Bernie said, as we got to the top of that last rise.
I turned back to look at him.
“Uh, and you, too, Mingo,” he said.
I kept looking.
“Just do what Chet does and you’ll be fine,” Bernie added.
I trotted on.
We came to a jumble of big rocks. As I picked my way through, I smelled a shell casing, followed the scent, coppery and smoky, couldn’t be easier, and snapped it up. Then, beyond the rocks was a little surprise: two ATVs and a couple of Border Patrol guys wandering around, one thin, one chubby. The chubby one turned out to be Fritzie Bortz.
“Bernie? You’re on a horse?”
“No denying it.”
“What are you doing up here? There aren’t even any trails.”
“Someone took two shots at us from this ridge,” Bernie said.
“At you?” said Fritzie.
The other Border Patrol dude came over.
“You know this guy?” he said.
“An old pal,” said Fritzie. “Must have been mistaken identity, Bernie.”
“What do you mean?”
“These drug dealers sometimes take potshots at each other. There’s a couple of rival gangs.”
“Three,” said the other dude.
“We got a report of gunshots,” Fritzie said, “and drove out for a look-see. No one here, but that doesn’t mean—”
A beep sounded from one of the ATVs. Fritzie’s buddy went over to it, came back with a laptop. The two of them gazed at the screen. “Recognize him?” Fritzie said.
“Nope,” said his buddy.
“What’s going on?” Bernie said.
“We had a drone nearby, just coincidence,” Fritzie said.
He turned the screen so we could see. What was this? A pretty clear picture, but not so easy to understand. We seemed to be flying high above a ridge, with a jumble of rocks at the top and open country down below. A human lay prone among the rocks, a rifle barrel sticking out over the edge of the ridge, the only straight thing in sight. Then came an orange flash from the muzzle, and after a pause, one more. Meanwhile we were on the move, passing over him and heading away.
“Right now’s when he hears us,” said Fritzie’s buddy.
The human—a man—turned over and looked up at the sky. This was a man we knew—the big hair-gel guy we’d met coming out of Leticia’s house, the yellow one with the chimes on Bluff Street. Real quick, he covered his face with his hands and rolled back over. We moved on, and in a moment or two he was out of the picture.
There was a hard look on Bernie’s face. “Can you ID him?”
“The boys in the office’ll give it a shot,” Fritzie said.
“Never seen him before,” said his buddy. “And I’ve seen ’em all. Let’s get back to work.”
“Doing what?” said Bernie.
“Looking for shell casings,” Fritzie said. “Normal policing procedure, Bernie.”
What was that? Something about shell casings? I dropped mine at Fritzie’s feet, where he couldn’t miss it.
Twenty-four
There are many good things about the Porsche. One is that it’s too small to fit any characters of, say, Mingo’s size. We drove back to the Valley alone, me and Bernie, a quiet ride except toward the end, when Bernie turned to me and said, “Do we now know for a fact that Lotty didn’t kill Clint, or is it the exact opposite?”
What a great question! Nobody has better questions than Bernie.
“But here’s one sure bet—if we’re on the same road as Clint, we’ve passed him. And we’re still alive, big guy.”
Totally alive! Bernie nailed it again. I really couldn’t have been any more alive than I was at that moment. As for the road, we were on the freeway coming into town. No surprise that Clint had been here, too. It was the busiest road in town. I couldn’t have been more in the picture.
We have experts for this and that at the Little Detective Agency. For example, Otis DeWayne is our weapons dude. He lives with a member of the nation within name of General Beauregard, a huge buddy of mine you don’t want to mess with, although I always do. Then there’s Prof at the college, our go-to guy for anything about money. He used to have a fish called Beryl in his office. It was really too bad what happened to her, a strange sequence of events which in the beginning had something to do with thirst. For what Bernie calls living memory, we see Mrs. Beamish, a retired librarian who was actually fired, a subject Bernie never goes near except for once, where it soon turned out that Mrs. Beamish kept a Colt .45 in her drawer, a big surprise at the time.
“Hello, Mrs. Beamish,” Bernie said as she opened the door of her apartment, a small apartment in a part of town where things needed freshening up.
“So you’re alive,” she said, the cigarette in one corner of her mouth bobbing up and down. “There were conflicting reports.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Bernie said. “You know how people exaggerate.”
“They get things wrong in every way imaginable,” Mrs. Beamish said, and then peered through her cigarette smoke at me. “Is he going to behave?”
“Oh, of course.”
“Don’t of course me, Mr. Little. He makes Delilah very nervous.”
“He’ll be on his best behavior. Isn’t that right, Chet?”
Then all eyes were on me. Well, not Delilah�
��s. I hadn’t spotted her yet, but she was somewhere close by. Cat smell is not something I miss. I had a sudden and powerful desire to mark certain objects in Mrs. Beamish’s place, such as her hat stand. This was probably not the time. Instead I sat down and took care of an itch or two, scratching with one back paw and then another.
“Don’t tell me he has fleas,” said Mrs. Beamish.
“Never gets them,” Bernie said.
Good to know! So those drops from the vet were for something else? This visit was a success already.
We went into the living room. Mrs. Beamish sat at her desk, Bernie on a stool. I lay down near the couch. From there I had a good view of the fireplace and the mantel above. Delilah lay on the mantel, curled up between two candlesticks. She was gazing down at me in an irritating way. I ignored her completely, put her clear out of my mind. The mantel itself was a high sort of mantel, but don’t forget that leaping is my best thing.
“Coffee, Mr. Little?” Mrs. Beamish said, reaching for a coffeepot that stood on the desk.
“That would be good.”
“Or bourbon?”
“Well…”
“Or coffee with a shot of bourbon?”
“A nice compromise,” Bernie said.
Mrs. Beamish added shots of bourbon to two mugs of coffee, handed one to Bernie.
“What happened to the spirit of compromise?” she said.
“I don’t know,” Bernie said.
A cylinder of cigarette ash fell on her desk and smoldered on the wood, glowing orange. She wet a finger with her tongue, stubbed out the tiny fire, and took a nice big gulp from the mug.
“The conquest of the outside world marches on,” she said. “The inside world is a shambles. Ever think there’s cause and effect between those two statements?”
“No,” Bernie said, “but the shambles part is why we’re here.”
She gave him a look over the rim of her mug. “You use the pronoun we a lot.”
“I do?”
“Is it a royal we?”
Bernie smiled. “I’m a commoner.”
“So we is you and—?” She gestured my way with her thumb.
Bernie nodded. As for what they were talking about I had no clue, but I’d picked up one new fact. We were commoners, me and Bernie, and proud of it. Actually two new facts, then. Wow! Was I getting smarter with age? If I kept on living, say forever, how smart could I end up? Something to look forward to, for sure.
“Just clarifying,” said Mrs. Beamish. “Now walk me through the shambles.”
I rose, but no actual walking ensued. Instead Bernie started in on a long story about drug overdoses, death certificates, doctors, and a lot of other stuff that sounded familiar and also just out of reach. I glanced up at the mantel. Delilah was gone.
“So,” Mrs. Beamish said, “Hector de Vargas—cause of death, criminal record, possible descendants, song credits?”
“That’s a start,” Bernie said.
She flipped open her laptop. Silently—I never want to disturb anyone at work—I made my way out of the living room, down the hall, and into the kitchen. No visible activity, but something quiet and at the same time … how to put it? Dramatic? And if not dramatic, at least something very interesting was going on behind the fridge, something that involved tiny frightened squeaks, not the kind of sound you ever heard from cats. I moved a little closer and out from behind the fridge came Delilah, a mouse between her teeth.
Delilah looked right through me, like … like I wasn’t there! Like there was no Chet! Cats: a complete mystery. Then she dropped the mouse from her mouth. The little guy took off, possibly headed toward an air duct in one corner. Delilah watched him run. He was a pretty good runner, for a mouse. Was Delilah thinking something along those lines? Or—
But no time for any ors. Next came a sort of leaping blur, orange and white, and Delilah was suddenly standing poised right over the mouse. She batted him sideways with one of her paws, batted him back with another. Was it some sort of game, a bit like ice hockey, perhaps? I’d tasted puck once, but no time to get into that now. The point was that Delilah seemed to be playing a game, a game I’d never even dreamed of, where a mouse gets batted around in a lazy sort of manner. Was it a fun game? I didn’t know. The only way to find out with games is to play! And playing is one of my best things, maybe not quite on the level of my detective work, but close. A voice in my head—my own voice!—said, “Play, Chet, play!” And I was bounding toward that mouse, no actual idea of what came next in my mind but not in the least worried about that, when all of a sudden there was another one of those leaping orange-and-white blurs and—OW!
That hurt. Well, not hurt. Forget I mentioned hurt. But it wasn’t pleasant. Some parts of the body—the nose, for example—are more sensitive to pain than others, a lesson you learn—possibly more than once—if very sharp claws are in the picture, which seemed to have been the case. I licked my nose. Delilah watched me do that. The mouse lay on the floor, not moving. I considered letting Delilah know what was what.
And was still considering it as I went back to the living room. This was in no way a retreat. I don’t even know what that means, and never will. Just think of my return to the living room as getting back to work. We were on the clock, me and Bernie.
He had pulled his stool closer to the desk, was peering over Mrs. Beamish’s shoulder at the screen. They were both smoking cigarettes, a little hazy cloud over their heads.
“No evidence whatsoever of a musical career,” Mrs. Beamish said. She tapped at the keys.
“What about—” Bernie began.
“Don’t interrupt,” said Mrs. Beamish. She tapped some more, squinted through the haze at the monitor. “The rights to ‘How You Hung the Moon’ are owned by QB Inc., an LLC registered in Grand Cayman.”
“No mention of the actual writer?”
“Hold your horses,” said Mrs. Beamish.
Oh, no. I glanced at the entrance to the front hall. No sign of Mingo. Were there other horses suddenly in my life, horses I didn’t even know about? We’d done just fine without horses so far. Didn’t Bernie always say, “Don’t change a winning game”? We were winners, me and Bernie!
“Here you go,” Mrs. Beamish said. “Writer credit—Lotty Pilgrim. But—” Tap tap, tap, tap. “—no evidence of any connection between her and QB. Inc. Nothing on QB Inc. at all, beyond the registration.”
Bernie drummed his fingers on the desk. He does that sometimes, why, I’m not sure. But it’s nice to watch, since his hands are so beautiful.
Mrs. Beamish glanced over at his drumming fingers. “Please,” she said.
Bernie’s fingers went still at once and he stuck his hand in his pocket. Maybe Mrs. Beamish was the kind of human who had no time for beauty. Some humans—a surprising number, in my opinion—were like that.
“Death certificate of Hector de Vargas,” she said, pointing her chin at the screen. “Drug overdose.” She sat back and reached for her mug.
Bernie leaned forward. His eyes went back and forth, back and forth. Then he grew very still. “It’s signed by Dr. Wellington? Dr. Frederick Wellington?”
“All death certificates are signed by a doctor, Mr. Little. I’m surprised that’s news to you, given your line of work.”
Bernie looked at her. He said nothing but Mrs. Beamish nodded as though he’d spoken after all. “Ah,” she said, “person of interest?” Her hands returned to the keyboard. More tapping, and then, “Frederick Wellington, MD, general practitioner … affiliated with Valley Hospital … retired twenty years ago and … died five years after that … liver cancer.” She turned to Bernie, waiting with her hands over the keyboard.
“That should do it,” Bernie said. “At least for now.” He rose. So did I, which was when I noticed that Delilah was back on the mantel, eyeing me in a contented sort of way. How could I show her what was what? I waited for an idea.
“I’ll send you an invoice,” Mrs. Beamish was saying. “Terms are thirty days, no excepti
ons.”
“You say that every time,” Bernie said.
“Correct,” said Mrs. Beamish.
We went outside, hopped in the car.
“Hey,” Bernie said. “What did you do to your nose?”
Nothing. I’d done nothing at all to my nose.
“Is it bleeding?”
Absolutely not. I ignored my nose completely, hoping Bernie would do the same. The only problem was that the more I ignored my nose, the more it wanted to be licked.
“What gets into you?”
Me? What gets into me?
We drove away. I licked my nose.
“Do we need to go to the vet?”
The nose licking stopped at once, and didn’t start up again, hardly at all.
* * *
“It stinks,” Bernie said as we took an exit ramp. “Stinks big-time.”
It did? I sniffed the air, picked up many smells, although none could be called stinking, at least not to me. I studied Bernie’s nose. It seemed the same as always, slightly crooked in a very pleasing way.
“Hector de Vargas’s drug supplier and the signer of his death certificate were one and the same,” he said. “The metaphor comes to life.”
We pulled into a parking lot. What with waiting for the arrival of a perfect Delilah-related idea—or just any—I hadn’t been paying attention in my usual way. I’m a professional, don’t forget. But now I saw that this parking lot was familiar: the visitor parking lot at Valley Hospital. What were we doing back here? Weren’t we done with Valley Hospital, now and forever? Wasn’t Bernie back to feeling tip-top? I studied his face. Yes, tip-top and then some, the healthiest man in the Valley.
“What’s that look?” he said.
It was the look that says turn the key and hit the gas, pronto. It was not the look that says open the door. Which was what he did.
“How come you’re not hopping out, Chet? You always hop out ahead of me.”
I sat in the shotgun seat, made myself immovable.
“Tired?” Bernie said. “You can stay if you want. Curl up. Grab some shut-eye.” He got out of the car and started walking toward the entrance.
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