“You should be in my business,” Bernie said.
“But, forgive me, there’s no money in it, is there, Bernie?” said Mr. Singh.
“No.”
No? Just like that? No? Meaning our finances would always be a mess? I refused to believe that. This must have been an example of Bernie playing what he called a deep game. The last deep game I recalled had involved crawling down an old mine shaft in the hills. And hadn’t we found a real old Navajo blanket, which could have sold for big bucks if Bernie hadn’t given it to the tribe? We could play deep games, Mr. Singh, and there was money in our business, better believe it.
“So,” Mr. Singh said, handing Bernie a sheet of paper, “here is all the—four one one, is that how you put it?—on my colleague. The—perp? correct?—is scheduled to arrive in”—Mr. Singh checked his watch—“forty-five minutes.”
“I owe you,” Bernie said.
“Join the crowd!” Mr. Singh laughed and laughed. He walked across our lawn toward Heydrich’s house. The door opened, although Heydrich did not step into view. Mr. Singh stopped laughing and went inside.
• • •
A bell tinkled as we entered a shop in a strip mall out beyond the Old Western Studios, almost where the last housing developments peter out and open country starts up at last. Love that tinkling sound! It sends a nice little charge down to the tip of my tail and partway back again.
“Deke Stargell?” Bernie said to the dude back of the counter.
“Yup.”
No man looks good in a wife beater, in my opinion, and those who come off the worst are the ones with no muscles, just skin and bone. Deke Stargell was very much of that type. The bony knobs sticking up from each of his shoulders bothered me the most. Also he smelled like a smoker and Bernie had been doing so well lately. On the plus side he was one of those shopkeepers who supplied a bowl of water in case a member of the nation within should happen by. And wouldn’t you know it? I was hit by a sudden thirst. Deke Stargell’s water proved to be first rate, fresh and cool.
“Nice to meet you,” Bernie said. “I’m Bernie Little, friend of Mr. Singh. He—”
“Friend of Pappy’s is a friend of mine,” Deke said.
“His first name is Pappy?” Bernie said. “Didn’t know that.”
“Course it isn’t Pappy, for fuck sake,” Deke said. “He’s from India. His real name’s some godawful gibberish but with lots of Ps in it, so we all call him Pappy.”
“We all being?”
“Everyone in the biz. We’re big fans of Pappy. Honest as the day is long and sharp as a whip.” Deke leaned across the counter. “Tell you something. I was totally against immigration till I met up with Pappy. Now I’m all for letting in the Indians willy-nilly. From India Indians. T’others is here already.”
“Before us, actually,” Bernie said.
Deke tilted his head sideways, squinted at Bernie. “Don’t tell me you’re a goddamn do-gooder.”
“Definitely not.”
Deke extended his hand. They shook. Deke looked my way. “Whoa! Your dog lapped up that whole bowl of water? Except what he splashed all over my floor?”
“Uh, this is Chet,” Bernie said, kind of rubbing his foot in a windshield wiper pattern on the floor, for reasons of his own. “He . . . he gets thirsty in this climate.”
Deke gazed at me. “Sizable fella.”
“Hundred-plus-pounder,” Bernie said. “Can’t say exactly. Getting him on the scale’s not so easy.”
I remembered that game! One of my favorites, and we hadn’t played it in way too long. I glanced around. No scale in sight. I didn’t like my chances.
“What is he, anyways?” Deke said.
“Chet? What is he? Want the long answer or the short?”
Oh, the long, please.
“Huh?” said Deke. “I meant like German shepherd, border collie, what’s the word?”
“Breed?”
“Yeah. What’s the breed?”
Bernie gave me a look. “He’s a mix, obviously.”
“A mix of what?”
“I’ve wondered about that,” Bernie said. “A combo you don’t often see, whatever it is.”
Deke thought for a moment or two. “I’m part Canadian myself, but you’d never guess.”
“You’re right about that.”
“My mama’s daddy was a lumberjack up in the Yukon.” Deke checked his watch. “Two on the dot,” he said. “Told him to be punctual.”
“Thanks,” Bernie said, glancing out the window. A car pulled in. A man got out, but he went into another store.
“This is a sting, right?” Deke said.
“Kind of,” Bernie said.
“Expect any trouble?”
“I doubt it.”
Deke reached under the counter, came up with a shotgun. “Better safe than sorry.”
“How about we keep it out of sight until needed?” Bernie said.
Deke put the shotgun away, lit up a cigarette, saw how Bernie was looking at it. “Smoke?” he said.
“No,” said Bernie. “Thanks. No thanks.”
But some time later—this was after I woke from a pleasant nap—Bernie and Deke were smoking together, Bernie on one side of the counter, Deke on the other.
“Looks like—what’s his name again?” Deke said.
“Billy Parsons.”
“Looks like little Billy ain’t comin’. Think he got cold feet?”
“No idea,” Bernie said, blowing out a long stream of smoke. “How little is he?”
“Wanna see a photo?”
“You’ve got a photo of him?”
“Hell, yeah. Everything here’s on tape.”
Bernie stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray.
Not long after that, Deke had a monitor set up on the counter and we were watching a video. There was Billy, kind of the way he’d appeared in Mr. Parsons’s photo: shoulder-length fair hair, vague sort of eyes, that snakehead tattoo on his cheek. Plus he turned out to have lots of ink on his arms as well. He stood at this very same counter, holding up a watch so that Deke could see. The Deke on the screen, is what I mean. The other Deke, Deke himself, right here, pressed a button, and the action on the screen froze. Then he pressed another button and we zoomed in on the watch.
“Yours?” Deke said.
“For sure,” said Bernie.
“A knockout,” Deke said.
Our watch, no doubt about it. A kind of wild idea—something about biting the screen—rose up in my mind. While I was getting that under control, Deke said, “Told me it was a family heirloom.”
“True as far as it goes.”
“Hear that all the time,” Deke said.
They both glanced outside. Nothing doing.
“Happen to see what he was driving?” Bernie said.
“Got that on tape, too.”
“I was hoping.”
More tape went blurring by on the screen, then slowed down, and we were looking out the window, not in the here and now—how hard this is!—but in the here and then, if that makes any sense. A dusty and dented sedan was parked outside.
“Little shitbox,” Deke said.
“Can you zoom in on the plate?” said Bernie.
Deke laughed to himself. “Sure thing, but hell of a lotta good it’ll do you.”
He zoomed in the plate.
“All mudded up?” Bernie said.
“The kind of trick pulled by the kind of guy who thinks he’s smart,” Deke said.
Bernie nodded.
“Which is a kind of guy that’s always bugged me, know what I mean?”
“I do,” Bernie said.
“So while I had little Mr. Billy in here, I texted to my buddy Esteban who runs the auto parts store two doors down.”
Bernie smiled. I had no idea why and didn’t care: Bernie’s smiles are always a highlight of my day.
More blurring on the screen, and when it slowed down a man in denim bib overalls was moving toward the dusty sedan, a rag
in hand. He knelt, wiped the license plate clean, and walked away. Deke zoomed in on the plate. Bernie grabbed a pen off the counter, wrote something on his hand. I loved when he did that.
“Did little Billy happen to notice on his way out?” Bernie said.
“The little Billys never do,” said Deke. “They do all their noticing after the fat lady sings.”
What was this? Now I had to be on the lookout for fat ladies? The case had taken an unexpected turn.
ELEVEN
* * *
Back in the car, Bernie had a look on his face I always like to see, a strong-jawed look that means we know what we’re doing and now we’re going to do it, step aside, amigos! Maybe not all of that, but some. We took a crisp turn, then another, and were soon zooming toward the freeway ramp just past the big wooden cowboy who stood outside the Dry Gulch Steakhouse and Saloon—one of our favorite hangouts in the Valley, with a patio out back where they know how to take care of me and my kind, but no time to go on and on and on some more about their steak tips right now—when Bernie lightened his foot on the gas and eased into the slow lane.
He turned to me and said, “Iggy.”
Iggy? What did Iggy have to do with anything? Weren’t we on the job, me and Bernie? Me and Bernie, period?
“We better look in on him.”
Look in on Iggy? What for? We’d never looked in on Iggy in the past. Why start now? Then I remembered where Iggy actually was at the moment, not at his place where he belonged but at our place where he was always welcome for a visit, of course, but in no way belonged. How had that happened, again? I took a swing at lining up all the facts in an orderly way. That was something Bernie often said, “Let’s line up all the facts in an orderly way.” Who wouldn’t love Bernie? A surprising number of people, in fact. I fell into a fun little daydream of meeting up with each of them, one on one.
Soon after that, we rolled into our driveway and walked up to the house. Bernie opened the door. “Oh, Iggy,” he said.
• • •
A long long time passed before we had everything all straightened out. We ended up pulling into the MVD just before closing, which was the only part of the day when the line wasn’t out the door. In our business you need a contact at the MVD, and ours was Mrs. Trujillo. She spotted us in the waiting area and fluttered her fingers in the “come here” sign. We went past the counter where people were waiting to take a number and entered Mrs. Trujillo’s corner office.
Mrs. Trujillo leaned back in her chair, stuck a pencil in her bun, if that’s what you called the big round pile of graying hair on top of her head. “Well, well,” she said. “Long time no see.” Which made no sense to me, Mrs. Trujillo’s eyes—pretty much the sharpest in the whole Valley—looking just the way they always did.
“How’s Ramfis?” Bernie said, Ramfis being Mrs. Trujillo’s kid, a grown-up kid we’d kept out of the slammer for reasons I couldn’t remember, although I did recall that Ramfis was always nice to me. The same went for Mrs. Trujillo, who at that very moment was reaching into a desk drawer that contained biscuits, reasonably fresh and sniffed out by me as we’d come through the doorway. They were a fine family.
“He got a real job,” Mrs. Trujillo said, offering a nice big biscuit. I went closer and sat, the way you do when a biscuit is on the way. Although not sitting completely, in this case: Mrs. Trujillo didn’t care about little things like that. Ah. Delish.
“Doing what?” Bernie said.
“Bartending for a wedding caterer.”
“Bartending?”
“It was either that or fracking in North Dakota, and Ramfis hates the cold.”
“Makes sense, then,” Bernie said. He held out his hand, the one with the writing on it.
Mrs. Trujillo glanced at the writing, then turned to her computer and started tapping away at the keyboard. “Here we go. Plate’s registered to a Ms. Dee D. Branch, 2177 El Norte Highway, High Pines.”
“High Pines?
“A one-stoplight town up in the Burro Mountains. Starting to lose it, Bernie? Never stumped you before.”
“You haven’t been trying,” Bernie said. “Can you bring up her driver’s license photo?”
“Ha! One day I’ll be able to bring up her innermost thoughts.”
“Stop scaring me.”
Uh-oh. Mrs. Trujillo was scaring Bernie? How was that possible? Just in case, I sidled into the space between them, the biscuit secure between my teeth, but droppable at any moment, supposing my teeth were needed for something else.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Trujillo was tapping away again. A woman’s face appeared on the screen—a woman with lots of blond hair, not as old as Mrs. Trujillo, not as young as Suzie.
“What’s that look called?” Bernie said.
“Tramp,” said Mrs. Trujillo.
• • •
The sun was low in the sky, a fiery blob quivering in our rearview mirror, as we left the last developments in the Valley behind and started climbing into the mountains.
“Did she hit on something?” Bernie said. “Am I losing it?” He rubbed his forehead.
What was this? Something totally beyond me. I curled up on the shotgun seat and thought about biscuits. Another one would have been nice. But you can’t let little disappointments bring you down in this life. Forget all about them and get on with something else! For example: a nap.
• • •
“High Pines,” Bernie said.
I opened my eyes.
“Elevation four thousand sixty-three feet, population three hundred eighty-two. Could maybe plot them on an x and y axis, express each in terms of . . .”
Imagine waking up to that! As though Bernie had gone completely incomprehensible in the space of my very brief—what does Bernie call it?
He turned to me. “Catch a little beauty sleep, Chet?”
Beauty sleep: that was it. Did I need beauty sleep? I couldn’t think why. But not the point. Bernie was back to being comprehensible again, meaning we’d be at our best for whatever came next. Heads up, bad guys! And even some good guys who sometimes let their goodness slide.
We rounded a bend, the sky deep purple on one side, black with a few stars on the other, and huge in every direction. All at once, despite being a hundred-plus-pounder, I felt a bit smallish. The fur on the back of my neck stood up. Feeling smallish? What was going on? Were we both losing it, me and Bernie?
“Hey! What are you barking about?”
That was me? I got a grip. But that bark, echoing and re-echoing through the hills, made me feel much better, in fact, pretty close to tip-top.
The land flattened out, and we rode down the main street of a little town, a few stores on either side, closed for the night, and a bar and a restaurant showing lights, dim figures inside. We came to the sole light in town, caught it on red. No traffic other than us. A quiet town—High Pines, was that it?—except for the wind, rising from the black part of the sky. The light made a clicking sound and turned green. Bernie peered at the cross-street sign. “El Norte.”
We followed El Norte out of town. Full night lowered itself around us, all except for the yellow tunnel our headlights made. The road narrowed, zigzagged through some switchbacks, and straightened out. A mailbox came in sight. Bernie slowed down and read the number. “Two one seven seven.” I saw a bullet hole or two in the mailbox, but that didn’t mean anything out here. We turned onto a dirt track, bumped over a low rise, and stopped in front of a double-wide trailer up on blocks. The handlebars of a motorcycle gleamed at the entrance to a shed over on one side. No cars in sight, but lights shone in the windows of the double-wide. Bernie cut the engine, and we got out of the car. A woman called from inside.
“Billy? That you?”
Bernie put one finger across his lips. That was our signal for quiet. We have all kinds of signals. Take the trigger-pull signal. That means go-get-’im, one of my favorites. For a moment I forgot about quiet and thought only of go-get-’im.
“Billy?” the woman call
ed. “What are you doing?”
Bernie gave me a surprised look and made the quiet sign again. Whatever low growling had been going on stopped on a dime, if that makes any sense, but still my tail drooped, as though it knew I’d done wrong. I got it back up nice and high. If by any chance there’d been some mess-up, it wouldn’t happen again.
We walked around a kid’s swing set, lying on its side, and stopped at the door. Bernie knocked.
“Use your key, Billy,” the woman called again. “I just got out of the shower.”
Bernie knocked.
“For chrissake!”
Then came approaching footsteps—the barefoot kind—and the door opened. A woman stood in the doorway. She had a towel wrapped around her head—the way women do after a shower, but not men, just another one of those man-woman mysteries—and was trying to get another one around her body, and fast. Meanwhile, her face was running through some expressions, surprise and fear being two. With her hair hidden under the towel, her face seemed so bare. And what was this? Practically no eyebrows at all?
“Ms. Dee Branch?” Bernie said.
At which point she lost her grip on the towel—not the one wrapped around her head, the other one—and it fell to the floor.
“Fucking hell,” she said, sort of half-bending and half-twisting around to pick it up. Bernie sort of half-turned away. What exactly was going on? Was this an interview? Were we off to a good start?
The woman finally got the towel nicely around herself, from the neck to not much below her waist: I’d seen bigger towels.
“Dee Branch?” Bernie said.
The woman made a grab for the door and slammed it in our faces. But not quite: Bernie already had one foot in the doorway, just one of our techniques at the Little Detective Agency. The door ended up slamming against his foot. Have I mentioned Bernie was wearing flip-flops at the time?
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