To Fetch a Thief

by Spencer Quinn

  “Just curious?” said the guy.

  “No,” Bernie said. He stepped forward and handed over our card.

  The guy gazed at it. “Little Detective Agency,” he said. “Cute.”

  “I’m Bernie Little. This is Chet.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you’re . . .”

  “Tex Rosa,” said the guy.

  “The owner?”

  “That’s right. Which is how come you can take it to the bank that ain’t none of our drivers been anywhere near the fairgrounds this month.”

  “Then it looks like one of them has misled you, or maybe got a little off course, because an eighteen-wheeler with four roses on the side was seen leaving by the back gate.”

  “’Fraid not, pal,” said Tex Rosa. “We’re only runnin’ half a dozen eighteen-wheelers right now. Two’s in Arkansas, three’s in California, one’s down in Sonora—makes six.”

  “But where were they on Saturday?”

  “What I just said—Arkansas, California, Sonora.”

  “Maybe one of your drivers made an unscheduled detour.”

  “Ain’t no such thing no more, not with GPS. I know where every one of my trucks is every goddamn minute of every goddamn day.” Tex Rosa raised his finger, a big fat finger. He wagged it at Bernie, something I knew Bernie hated. “And every goddamn driver knows I know—you can take that to the bank, too.”

  THIRTEEN

  We got back in the car. Where were we with the case? Were we going to the bank? And if so, taking what, again? I didn’t know. The sky was dark orange now, all the low, square buildings and telephone wires black against it.

  “They call this part of town the Roads,” Bernie said. “First time I worked with Stine was right around here.” Hey. Lieutenant Stine. That meant Bernie was talking about his days with Metro PD, which he hardly ever did. “Turned into a bad night.” I waited for more, but no more came.

  We headed out on the dusty road toward the train tracks but just before we got there, Bernie swung down a narrow alley with dark brick buildings on both sides, the kind with painted-over windows. The alley led to another alley, even narrower and darker. We climbed a bit, made a few more turns, and stopped behind a bunch of rusty barrels. Between them we could see down to a fenced-in yard with a low building at one end.

  “The back side of Cuatro Rosas Trucking,” Bernie said.

  I saw a gas pump and next to it a truck with roses on the side. Not an eighteen-wheeler: this was more like the UPS truck that sometimes came down Mesquite Road. Love UPS! The driver always tosses me a biscuit as she zips by.

  Time passed. The sky lost its fiery color and went dim, shadows deepening over the yard. A light went on in the Cuatro Rosas office. “Sometimes it’s what they don’t say,” Bernie said. I thought about thinking about that. After a while, Bernie said, “In this case, not one single question from Tex Rosa about what we were working on. Suppose we were investigating an accident, for example, with potential liability, even criminal charges. Wouldn’t you expect him to be curious? So either he’s a total incompetent or he already knew.”

  Already knew what? Was Bernie still talking about Tex Rosa? I remembered Tex Rosa perfectly, especially those snakeskin boots. The combination of the snakeskin boots and his handlebar mustache suddenly made me nervous, no idea why. Nervousness often leads to gnawing, no idea about the why on that, either. I glanced around; nothing to gnaw on but the dashboard, never a good idea. The problem was that when the gnawing bug hits me, it’s just about impossible to con—

  “Here we go,” Bernie said, his voice low.

  A door opened at the back of the Cuatro Rosas building. Two men walked out, illuminated by light spilling from the doorway. One was Tex Rosa; standing up now, he was bigger than I’d thought, but not as big as the other man. The other man was huge, had long sideburns and a crooked nose, wore a bandanna: Jocko Cochrane.

  “Shh,” said Bernie, just as I felt the growling urge.

  Tex Rosa and Jocko Cochrane moved out of the light and into the shadows but were still easy to follow, although I was aware of Bernie leaning forward and squinting. Humans never looked their best squinting, not even Bernie. But no problem, I saw the whole thing: the two men walking to the truck, Jocko getting in, them talking through the open window—I even picked up a bit of what they were saying, like “next time blow his head off,” and “any bonus for that?” and “how’s five hundred bucks?” Then the truck was turning in the yard and Tex Rosa was on his way back to the office. We turned, too, no lights, Bernie driving fast, and came to a street just as the Cuatro Rosas truck was going by. I got a real good look at Jocko, laughing into a cell phone. Also I smelled bananas, kind of strange. We pulled out and followed.

  First came some deserted streets I didn’t know, and then we were on a freeway with lots of traffic; Bernie switched on the lights. “Thought I heard them talking down there by the truck,” Bernie said. “I’d give plenty to know what they were saying.” I took a quick glance at Bernie’s ear, the one I could see. Nicely shaped and good sized for a human ear: what was it for, exactly?

  We came to the big interchange near the downtown towers—“the stupidest traffic plan in the whole country,” Bernie said every time, including now—and changed freeways. Jocko drove in the middle lane; we tailed him on the inside, always with other cars in between. We were real good at this, me and Bernie.

  After a long long time we left the Valley, which goes on forever in all directions, and entered open country. The sky turned from dark pink to black and the stars came out. “A hundred billion stars in the Milky Way,” Bernie said, “maybe even twice that number. And a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. So what are we doing?”

  What were we doing? We were tailing a real bad guy who’d hurt us with a baseball bat and we were going to bring him down. Bernie had to know that, right?

  We crossed the desert, dark and empty, except for occasional distant towns, like baskets of lights. Why I mention baskets of lights is because once when Leda was decorating the Christmas tree—always an exciting time for me, and I end up outside—the lights were all coiled up in a basket and Bernie plugged them in for a test. This was back when Bernie and Leda were still sort of getting along, before that breakfast where she took a sip of coffee and said, “This isn’t working for me.” At first I thought it was something about the coffee, and so did Bernie.

  Jocko left the freeway for a two-lane highway with not much traffic. We followed at a pretty long distance, through one of those light basket towns and then onto another road that wound up into hilly country. Jocko’s taillights kept disappearing and twinkling back into view as he took the curves. He topped a rise, dropped out of view again. By the time we got up there, the Cuatro Rosas truck was partway down the other side, but no longer on the road; instead Jocko had turned onto an unpaved desert track.

  “Heading south,” Bernie said. From up on the rise we could see a flat plain extending into the distance, the truck’s headlight beams cutting slowly through the night. “Getting pretty close to the border,” Bernie said, and just then the truck’s lights went out. The truck kept going—I could still see it in the starlight. “Christ,” said Bernie, “where the hell?” And then: “I think I see him.” He cut our own lights, fishtailed onto the dirt track.

  We followed the truck—a sharp-edged shadow—across the plain, followed close enough so the dust Jocko raised coated our windshield and got in my nose. “Might even be in Mexico already.” Uh-oh. Mexico. We’d worked down there before, the Salazar kidnapping and another case I couldn’t remember, except for part of a pork taco I’d scarfed up behind a cantina. My guys, not all but some, are different in Mexico—real tough customers, red-eyed dudes, lean and mean. Got into some scraps down in Mexico, and so did Bernie. The Mexican vet had to stitch me up; she stitched up Bernie, too. She was nice, kind of fell for Bernie, which led to complications on account of she forgot to mention her husband. But he turned out to be a real bad shot, so
it ended up okay.

  I glanced around, saw a pair of glowing eyes in the night, and then another. My guys, of the Mexican type? I sniffed the air. No, this was something else, something closer to cat. There were big cats out in the desert, as I knew all too well.

  The track grew fainter and fainter and finally vanished. We slowed down, picking our way around rocks and bushes. Up ahead, the sharp-edged shadow was approaching a long line of low hills. I lost sight of it.

  “Where’d he go?” Bernie said.

  We reached the hills, steeper than they’d looked from a distance. Was there a way in? We drove back and forth along the base of the hills, saw a few gullies leading up, but narrow and rocky. Bernie stopped the car, took the big flashlight from under the seat. We got out.

  Bernie put a hand to his ear. “Don’t hear him,” he said softly. No surprise there, but I didn’t hear anything, either, except for a faraway coyote cry.

  “I don’t get it.” Bernie shone the light around. “No tread marks leading up and it’s way too steep anyway.” We walked around, Bernie shining the light here and there. “So where the hell did he go?” I didn’t know, but the truck’s exhaust fumes were easy to pick up. I followed them to some tall spiky bushes that grew in front of where the hills rose practically straight up; from there the fume scent led back toward the plain. “He turned around?” Bernie said. “How could we have missed him?”

  I went to the spiky bushes—ocotillo, was that the name?—and sniffed at them again. Hey! They smelled like bananas. Bernie came over, shone the light. Nothing to see but the bushes, their long stems with spines sticking out, and the rocky wall behind them.

  We stood there, Bernie thinking, me smelling exhaust fumes and banana scents as they faded slowly away. It was nice being under the stars, the air so clear, the night beautiful. “How about we go up top,” Bernie said, “see what we can see?”

  Sounded good to me. We walked along the face of the hills until we came to one of those gullies and started up. The flashlight picked out little cacti, lots of rocks, an old wagon wheel. No water visible, but I could smell it, practically under our feet. Bernie gave the wagon wheel a look as we went by. “Could be a mine around here.” Bernie was interested in abandoned mines in the desert; that had led to problems in the past.

  We climbed higher. The gully narrowed, twisted around, then disappeared into a fold in the hillside. After that, the climbing got harder, at least for Bernie. He grunted; he panted; the flashlight beam wobbled; little landslides got started. But not by me. Pretty soon I came to a huge saguaro, the biggest I’d ever seen, and found myself at the top. So close to the stars! What a life we had, me and Bernie. And in the distance, another broad plain with a town, not very lit up, in the distance. Were we going down there? I was ready.

  Bernie drew up, stood beside me, huffing and puffing. “Got to get in shape, big guy,” he said. Had to be talking about him, not me, right? He switched off the light, gazed across he plain. “Yeah,” he said, “Mexico for sure—that’s got to be the El Gato pueblo. You know what I’m thinking?” Most of the time I don’t, but now I was pretty sure it had to be that Mexican vet. Wrong. “We’ve had two big things disappear on us, Peanut and Jocko’s truck,” Bernie said. “Can that be a coincidence?”

  I tried to understand. Peanut was in Jocko’s truck? No way that truck was big enough for Peanut. I sniffed around, found no trace of Peanut’s smell. But what was this? Very faint, but in the air: a scent close to frog or toad except fishier, the fishy part sharper and more thinned out than the scent of an actual fish. I’m talking fresh fish, of course; rotten fish is another story. This particular smell—froggy, toady, fishy—meant just one thing: snake. Snakes scare the hell out of me. I’m not ashamed to admit it.

  “Let’s poke around a bit,” Bernie said.

  Were we still looking for the truck? How could it be way up here? I didn’t know, but if Bernie said poke around, we poked around. I like poking around and there’s a lot of it in this job.

  We wandered over the hilltop. Bernie kicked at a rock, as he often did during poking-around sessions. The flashlight beam followed the rock, which bounced down a side slope and dropped into a little dip, out of sight. We started down the slope ourselves. That fishy-toady smell was still in the air, but now mixed with another smell I knew from K-9 school. The fur rose on the back of my neck.

  “Chet—what is it?”

  I hurried to the little dip, gazed down and saw only darkness; but I already knew what was there. Bernie caught up, aimed the flashlight. At the bottom of the dip lay a man, facedown, one arm stretched out to the side. He wasn’t all twisted and broken, the way you sometimes see, even looked like he could be sleeping, although of course he wasn’t.

  “Goddamn it,” Bernie said.

  We moved down into the dip, took a closer look. The man wore loose-fitting dark-colored pajamas and had slippers on his feet. Bernie shone the light on his face, a face I’d seen before, smiling in the video with Peanut, also smiling in the picture on our fridge. His mouth was closed now but his eye, the one I could see, was open. An ant crawled across its surface.

  “Uri DeLeath,” Bernie said.

  He knelt down, slowly ran the beam over the body, examining it inch by inch, but not touching.

  “No obvious cause of death,” he said. “No blood, no bullet holes, nothing looks broken, I just don’t . . .” The circle of light paused on DeLeath’s outstretched hand. “Although this hand looks swollen, and what’s this?” He leaned closer. I saw what he was talking about: two punctures in the back of DeLeath’s hand, not big, bruised and purple around the edges.

  We were concentrating so hard on those punctures that I almost didn’t see a quick ruffling movement happening somewhere inside that pajama top and the next thing I knew a snake slithered out of the silky material, not a long snake but thick, and with a real big head and angry eyes. It reared up—so quick—its mouth gaping wide and showing huge fangs, and struck at Bernie.

  Bernie made a startled kind of noise I’d never heard from him before and sprang back, just out of reach. I lunged at the snake’s tail—as far from those fangs as I could get—and trapped the very end under my paws, digging my claws in, but the front whipped around and the snake rose up, eyes right on me, mouth opening, and—and then Bernie clobbered the back of that big head with the flashlight, clobbered it hard. The snake sank twitching down to the ground. Bernie stomped on its head, more than once; in fact, way more. The snake lay still. Bernie’s face looked wild.

  FOURTEEN

  Look like a diamondback to you?” said a guy in a uniform, what kind of uniform I didn’t know. The sun was turning a milky kind of color—milk’s not my drink at all—and lots of different uniformed guys were around—Metro PD, state troopers, Border Patrol, maybe some others. “Looks like a diamondback to me.”

  “I’m no expert,” Bernie said. “Isn’t there supposed to be a clear-cut diamond pattern?”

  “Don’t know about clear-cut, but right there, see? Looks like diamonds.”

  “Sort of.”

  “Or maybe it’s a goddamn sidewinder. But what’s the difference? Poor son of a bitch—what a way to die.”

  By that time, they’d taken Uri DeLeath’s body away, gotten busy with cameras, asked Bernie questions. I was pretty tired and not really listening. All I knew was that the more they asked him the less he said. Bernie had dark patches under his eyes: he was tired, too. A curved sliver of the sun topped the rise, and Bernie’s face went all sorts of hot colors, and with the tiredness at the same time it kind of scared me. Then the sky turned blue and everything was all right. I lay down, my back against a rock that still felt cool from the night, that huge saguaro towering above me. Another conversation started up, maybe about what to do with the snake. It was still going on when we left, me and Bernie.

  The motion of the car was nice. I curled up on the shotgun seat. Bernie was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “What could we have done differently?” About
what? I wasn’t sure, and no ideas came. Bernie rested his hand on my back. Hadn’t we done well? We’d killed that horrible snake without getting bitten. My eyes closed, but right away I saw those two puncture wounds in DeLeath’s swollen hand. I opened my eyes, watched the side of Bernie’s face. My eyes closed again. This time I saw nothing bad, just lots of clouds rolling in.

  “You look like shit,” said Rick Torres, “but Chet looks great.”

  And felt great, pretty much tip-top. I gave myself a nice shake, the kind that ends with a ripple all the way to the tip of my tail. Can’t tell you how good that feels. I’d slept the whole way.

  We were outside Metro PD, central station. It’s downtown, not far from the tall buildings, and has some comfortable benches in front where friends and family of perps sit and wait. They were doing that now, but not on our bench—and not on the benches near us, either, for some reason—which had Rick at one end and Bernie at the other, with me climbing up on the middle as soon as the rippling shake was all done. Sometimes it’s nice to sit up high.

  “Want to know what I think?” Rick said.

  “Probably not,” Bernie said.

  “That’s because you’re a conspiracy theorist.”

  “The hell I am.”

  “No? Are you ready to accept that the guy went a little crazy, saw himself as this great elephant liberator, ended up wandering in the desert, probably with no food or water, and ran into the kind of trouble that’s waiting out there?”

  “No.”

  Rick laughed. “Here we go.”

  “Let’s start with Peanut,” Bernie said.

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Couldn’t tell you, but so what?”

  “So what? If they were wandering around the desert together like you said, there’d be signs.”

  “What kind of signs?”

  “Ever heard of elephant dung, Rick?”