Tender Is the Bite

by Spencer Quinn

  “Ferret?” said Bernie. “Last time, it was a giant squirrel.”

  Uh-oh. Two puzzlers in a row. I handled that by stepping on Rico’s foot a little harder.

  “Ow,” he said.

  “Chet?” Bernie said. “Let’s give Rico a bit more space. Maybe he’ll concentrate better.”

  Really? In these situations, I’d always thought the opposite. This had to be a special case. Who else could have figured that out so soon? Nobody, people. And I get to work with him every day!

  “So,” Bernie said. “Ferret or squirrel?”

  “Ferret,” said Rico.

  “Does the ferret have a name?”

  “Yeah, but—no.” Rico looked down. “No name that I know of.”

  Bernie nodded, a pleasant nod that showed he and Rico were getting along just fine. That’s what it showed Rico, is what I mean. I know Bernie better.

  “You described the man who took the ferret as a, quote, ‘little black guy. Jeans and a T-shirt. Wore one of them do-rags. Red. Not the real bright kind, more like Alabama.’ End quote. Sticking to that description? Making sure you got the red exactly right was a very nice touch.”

  “Uh, thanks,” said Rico.

  “You should have been a novelist,” said Bernie.

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “A writer who makes up stories.”

  “Any money in it?”

  “Once in a blue moon,” Bernie said. “But let’s focus on the whole made-up part.”

  “Like, uh, what, exactly?” said Rico.

  “The little black guy in the do-rag,” Bernie said. “Too generic for a first-rate novelist? Maybe, but I’m no expert.”

  Ha! Of course Bernie was an expert on novelists, whatever they were. In fact, I got the feeling they were like us, at least on the finances end.

  “So, um, you’re, like, suggestin’ that…?”

  “The little do-rag black guy was a figment of your imagination.”

  Rico’s eyes brightened. “My mom always said I had a great imagination.”

  “Yeah? Where does she live?”

  “Over in Rio Vista.”

  “What part?”

  “You know Rio Vista?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Know Carson Park?”

  “Sure.”

  “She’s right across the street from the statue of the guy on a horse.”

  “Kit Carson,” Bernie said.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” said Rico.

  We seemed to have a nice and relaxed back-and-forth going on, which happens in some of our interviews, often the best ones. I could sort of feel their two minds. Bernie’s was huge, and Rico’s was tiny.

  “I’d like to meet her,” Bernie said.

  “Who?” said Rico.

  “Your mom.”

  Rico shook his head. “You don’t know her. She’s got a mean temper. This vein in her neck?” He pointed to his neck. “It’s always throbbing—baboom, baboom, baboom. Ready to explode, is what I’m saying.”

  “Interesting,” said Bernie. “Let’s go check it out.”

  “Huh?”

  “Now’s a good time. We’ll grab some flowers on the way.”

  “Whoa!” said Rico. “No way. Wouldn’t be smart.”

  “How come?”

  “We’re not gettin’ along too good these days.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Not sure how to say it. Like when two people disagree about something?”

  “A misunderstanding?”

  “That’s it! Yeah. My mom and me are having a misunderstanding.”

  “About what?”

  “Five hundred bucks. Now she’s sayin’ it was a loan—plus fuckin’ interest!—but at the time, it was a gift, no question about it.”

  “No problem,” Bernie said. “Let’s get right over there and straighten out the whole thing.”

  “Wait just a sec.”

  “We settle disputes like this all the time, me and Chet.”

  “Well, you’re not settling this one, bud.”

  Bernie reached out and took Rico by the arm. Not hard or anything like that. He just wrapped his hand around the skinny arm, up at the biceps part. “You’ll thank us in the end,” he said.

  Rico glanced down at Bernie’s hand. Then he looked up at Bernie. I felt the tiniest breeze. “There wasn’t no black dude. It was a big, shaved-head white guy, like you said.”

  “Name of?” said Bernie.

  Rico gave Bernie a squinty look. “Maybe you already know?”

  “We’d like to hear it, just the same,” Bernie said.

  “Mickey Rottoni,” said Rico.

  Bernie let go of Rico’s arm. “Friend of yours?”

  Rico rubbed his arm. “We get along, sure.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “That time, right here.”

  “Take us through it.”

  “How?”

  “Like a story. An afternoon in the life of a ferret.”

  “Hey! That’s pretty good.”

  Not to my way of thinking, but I could feel we were on a roll, so I let it go on by.

  “Well, to start with, you guys rode in and went up to the office. I was out here, just doin’ my job.”

  “Which is?”

  “Takin’ care of things, sweeping up, makin’ sure what’s sposed to be locked is and what ain’t sposed to be ain’t.”

  “So you work for Sylvia.”

  “Sorta. She’s way up on the … what do you call it?”

  “Corporate ladder?”

  “Yeah. And I’m way down. But I get along with all the Rottonis—Mickey, too. He’s not a bad guy, just ambitious. The American dream, all that. Anyways, he comes up, sees your car, and does this double take. Then he says to me, ‘Hey, what’s goin’ on?’ And I tell him about you and the dog, goin’ inside. Then he spots the ferret, cuts him loose, and says to me, ‘You don’t know nothin’. Hundred bucks, next time I see you.’ And I go, ‘What’s with the ferret?’ And he winks at me and goes, ‘His name’s Icing on the Cake. You didn’t see him neither.’ Kind of a strange name for a ferret, but the whole thing’s kind of strange.” Rico’s forehead wrinkled up. “’Specially now that I’m tellin’ it like a story.”

  “Did you get the hundred bucks?”

  “Haven’t seen Mickey since. But he’s good for the money. I’m expectin’ fifty at the very least. He’s got one of those long memories. Good and bad.”

  “What’s the bad part?” said Bernie.

  “He don’t forget when somebody goes sideways on him,” Rico said. “Wanna hear an example?”

  “You’re way ahead of me.”

  “Huh?”

  “An example would be nice.”

  “Okeydoke. Take that restraining order his girlfriend got on him. Guess what Mickey did to get back at the cop who served the papers?”

  “Kidnapped her dog.”

  Rico blinked. Then he blinked again. “If you know, why ask?”

  “Straight out of the textbook,” Bernie said.

  Rico nodded. “Shoulda known. Textbooks was never my thing.”

  “There’s still time,” Bernie said. “And that fifty you’ve got coming? Think of it as seventy. You don’t owe us anymore.”

  Rico looked surprised, and then very pleased. “My real name’s Donny,” he said.

  “You’re Rico to us,” said Bernie.

  Eighteen

  “Let’s remind ourselves,” Bernie said. “Only one ferret per case. Call it the ferret rule. Our ferret is Griffie. Therefore Icing on the Cake isn’t a name. It’s a descriptor.”

  The ferret rule? I didn’t like the sound of that. How could ferrets rule? It made no sense. And what about Icing on the Cake? Not a name, according to Bernie, but instead some other thing that had zipped right on by? All that was way beyond me, although I’d had some experience with cake icing—for example, at a New Year’s Eve party we dropped in on, not for long, whe
re they’d had a giant cake. The problem was—and I knew this the moment I walked into the room—that a woman was hiding in it! I did what I had to do, as you can imagine. But the point is, I know icing. If icing was going to turn up in this case, who’d be the first to know? Me, Chet the Jet! We had a big payoff waiting for us, I just knew it. What was I supposed to do? Remind myself? That was it. I reminded myself how good we were, me and Bernie.

  We took a ramp up onto the freeway, headed toward the orange tip of the sun, just visible over the edge of … of whatever that edge is, where you can’t see any farther. The edge itself was very hard to get to—in all our time on the road, we’d never quite reached it. There’s lots to look forward to in this life.

  “The point being,” Bernie said after a while, “if Griffie’s the icing, what’s the cake?”

  A terrible thing to admit, but Bernie would get no help on this from me.

  He sighed. “How about we go over the timeline, big guy?”

  Uh-oh. The timeline only got brought up when we were having trouble with a case. And here I’d thought we were sailing!

  “We—well, actually you, big guy—found Griffie at Johnnie Lee’s place on Aztec Creek Road. We also know, pretty much for certain, that Griffie was expected at Neddy’s trailer in New Mexico but never showed. After Aztec Creek Road, we had Griffie, and then Mickey had him. Stay with me here. Did Mickey bring him to the mine near AZ EZ, where he seemed to be—I want to say hiding out, but let’s just call it living? In which case, someone else grabbed Griffie and…” His voice trailed off, just in time, as far as I was concerned.

  Meanwhile, Bernie seemed to be in a good mood. He took his hands off the wheel and rubbed them together like we were getting down to business. For a while, his knee did the steering. Bernie’s the best wheelman in the Valley, which I should have mentioned already. Once Rumblin’ Ronny Leibnitz, a smuggler of this and that, offered Bernie big bucks to drive for him and got pretty upset when Bernie turned him down. “No one says no to me,” he told Bernie.

  “No?” said Bernie.

  At that moment, I remembered something about the timeline. “Stay with me.” Wow. And of course I would, for as long as Bernie needed me and then long after that.

  Bernie put his hands—actually just one hand—back on the wheel. “How can we test timelines?” He leaned forward and fished around under the seat, eventually discovered what I already knew, that even the last bent little cigarette stub was gone. “How about we impose timelines on the known physical space and see what pops up?” My eyelids suddenly got very heavy. Bernie may have stepped on the gas.

  * * *

  I had a fun dream about Rumblin’ Ronny Liebnitz and huge cakes and woke to find we were on a dirt road that seemed familiar, the last light of the day in one low corner of the sky. Ahead stood a small ranch house with a flatbed truck out front, loaded up with ATVs. Aha! EZ AZ Tours! Chet the Jet, in the picture. We parked by the flatbed truck and got out of the car.

  Lukie was sitting by himself in the cab. He looked out the open window.

  “Hey, Chet,” he said. “Is that you?”

  What a smart kid! My tail started up right away. Was he planning on hopping out of the cab and playing some game, chase, maybe, or fetch? I was ready for anything.

  “Yes, Lukie, it’s us,” Bernie said. “How are you doing?”

  “Okay,” said Lukie, his skinny little arm resting on the doorframe.

  “Headed someplace?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Anywhere special?”

  “Colorado,” he said. “Where Uncle Bill lives. But don’t tell anybody.”

  “I won’t,” Bernie said.

  “My cousin’s there.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Debbie.”

  “Nice name.”

  “She thinks I’m cool.”

  “So do I,” Bernie said.

  The door to the ranch house opened, and Poppop rolled out in his wheelchair, a suitcase in his hand and a bolo tie around his neck. He closed the door, made sure it was locked, then started toward the flatbed truck. That was when he noticed me and Bernie.

  “What the hell?” Poppop let go of the suitcase and wheeled toward us, surprisingly fast. “Who the—” And then he recognized us. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from here?” He got between the cab and Bernie, leaned forward, and gave Bernie a push. From time to time, some bad guy or other had tried the same thing, although never from a wheelchair. All of them much younger and stronger than Poppop and all of them regretting it very soon. Now Bernie just let himself be pushed, taking a step or two away. Meanwhile, Lukie shrank back in the cab.

  “We can’t do that,” Bernie said. “Why would you want us to? We’re trying to find out what happened to your employee, Mickey Rottoni.”

  “He run off somewheres,” said Poppop. “And he was only part-time.”

  “Who told you he ran off?” Bernie said.

  “Everybody’s sayin’ it. And a Valley cop came out here personal to explain it to me. Mickey disappeared himself on account of owing a ton of money to loan sharks, and you’re in on the scam.”

  “What Valley cop was this?” Bernie said, his voice quiet.

  “A high-up—captain, maybe. Red-haired guy.”

  Bernie glanced in the cab. Lukie was still in the shadows away from the window, but I could see he was sitting up very straight.

  “How about we move away a bit, keep this private?” Bernie said.

  “Forget it,” said Poppop. “You go on back under the rock you come from. We’re done talking.”

  Where was Poppop getting his information? We came from a nice house on Mesquite Road. And now, after saying that not very nice thing, was Poppop planning to just get in the cab and drive off? I changed my position slightly.

  “The cop was lying to you,” Bernie said, his voice nice and even like this was a friendly back-and-forth, which I knew from Poppop’s smell that it was not.

  “Could care less,” Poppop said. “I’m outta here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “None of your concern.”

  “What about the business?”

  “Sold out,” said Poppop. “I retired. You sayin’ I got no right to retire?”

  Poppop rolled toward the driver’s side of the cab and found me right there waiting. Not that I was going to do anything. I was just in the proper place if Bernie needed me. The last little bit of daylight made it look like Poppop’s eyes were on fire.

  “Chet,” Bernie said in that same nice and easy tone. I went over and stood beside him. Poppop opened the door, swung up inside, hauled the wheelchair up, and folded it, without seeming to strain hardly at all. But as Poppop began driving away, Bernie noticed the suitcase still on the ground. He picked it up and heaved it onto the moving flatbed, easy-peasy. Lukie watched us through the back window of the cab, his pale little face fading, fading, and gone.

  We stood together outside the ranch house as the night went fully dark and the stars came out.

  “Any point in following them to Colorado?” Bernie said.

  A tough question. I’d actually been to Colorado, on the same case where I’d tasted a gold nugget, a successful trip—we’d even gotten paid—except for the part with the bears.

  Finally, Bernie shook his head and said, “We’ve got other fish to fry.”

  That was a stunner. When fish are anywhere in the vicinity—and that includes in a stream or in the freezer—I know about it. We had no fish with us of any kind. And also no frying pan. I waited for some sort of explanation, but before it could come, I heard the soft purr of a car, still pretty far away but coming in our direction. I barked my low, rumbly bark. I’d … how to put this? Trained him? Something like that, even if it sounded a little odd. I’d trained Bernie on that bark, and he responded right away.

  “Chet?”

  He glanced around, turned his head to one side—a cute human thing for when they’re trying to hear better—and said, “
Someone coming?”

  So quick on the uptake! But that was Bernie. We jumped in the car and drove slowly, headlights off, to a shed not far from the ranch house. Bernie parked behind it. We got out and moved to a corner of the shed, where we could peek out at whatever was going down—just another one of our techniques at the Little Detective Agency.

  At first, nothing at all was going down, except for an owl hooting in the distance. Owls take over the sky at night, and once, I’d seen a white one flying off with a snake, the snake putting up a fight, although not for long. The night can be very special.

  Meanwhile, the car noise grew louder, and then headlights appeared on the Zinc Town road. Not long after that, their beams swept across the face of the ranch house and a big black SUV rolled up, parking exactly where we’d just been.

  Two big men got out, both of them wearing white sneaks, but otherwise all shadowy. The engine kept running, the headlights still on the ranch house. The men walked toward the house, stepping into the light. The smaller of the two—but still big—was Olek, his short blond hair more moon-colored by night. The really enormous one was his driver, Vanko, if I was remembering right, the dude who’d brought the special vodka that Sylvia Rottoni had enjoyed so much and that Bernie had maybe enjoyed too much. Vanko carried a small box, the size of our tool kit back home. Was it full of cash? Had they come to offer us more money? That was my first thought, but from the way Bernie had gone so still, I got the feeling it was wrong.

  Olek and Vanko walked up to the front door. Vanko opened the small box and took out what looked like a drill. So it was a tool kit? How disappointing!

  Vanko got to work with the drill. Olek lit up a cigarette and glanced around, first down the road, but then he started to turn toward us. Bernie made a quick and tiny click-click sound. It meant, Back and down. We got back and down.

  We lay by the shed wall, listening for footsteps. Or at least that was what I was doing. As for Bernie, I wasn’t sure. Wasn’t Olek a sort of buddy? And if not that, he was certainly not an enemy. So there I was, stuck again at the beginning of a so-therefore. Vanko’s drill whined in the night. Then it stopped, and quieter metallic sounds started up. Bernie crept forward on his stomach. I did the same. We peered out, our heads side by side.