“So you think they’re here because of what happened to us?” Antony continued.
“Not directly because of it,” Arnold amended. “They have to be here because of something Slim Shady told them – another reason why to think the Whippet is no longer at their house – so they must be on the same case, but coming at it from another aspect.”
“Makes sense,” Antony admitted. “That Whippet is tied up in it somehow.”
“They may have information we need.”
“Maybe.”
“So it makes sense that we…”
“No!”
“Antony, you are your own worst enemy.”
Antony sighed. “I can’t argue with you about that. Not after all that has happened today.”
“Then…”
“Back off,” Antony warned. “Don’t make me bark-growl you.”
“After today, I think I would bark-growl you right back,” Arnold snapped. “And I might Gibbs-slap you for good measure. It has been a heck of a day.”
Antony chuckled despite the depths of despair still welling within him. It was an indication of how much had changed between him and Arnold. Before this morning Arnold would not have turned on him, and before this morning Antony would not have let him. If this terrible situation ever got straightened out and they found their way back into the good graces of the CVPD K-9 Unit – not that he had any real hope of that – things would not be the same as they had been before. No, Antony vowed, things would not be the same at all, they would be better – he would be a better officer, a better friend, a better dog. All he needed was a chance. He fought the urge to mentally send out a small prayer, for his life was already complex enough without bringing spirit guides into it.
They watched as Sunny and Yoda made their way through the park scanning with eye and ear, making sure they stayed out of reach of both. The Golden Retriever and the Pomeranian gradually closed in on the bridge where they had found Slim Shady.
Levi, on the other paw, looked neither right nor left, neither up or down. He kept his nose to the ground, following some trail that was not visible or obvious.
“I suppose he’s part Bloodhound,” Antony whispered, but the sneer that was inherent in his voice was much gentler it would have been before, almost exhibiting a fondness.
“He’s something,” Arnold agreed. “Levi is a Dachshund-mix, that’s obvious, but what exactly the mix is has always been a matter of conjecture.”
“Yeah. Those legs,” Antony murmured.
“Don’t get into a jumping contest with Levi,” Arnold advised. “We may have him beat in height, but the word is that he jumped the chain-link fence at that fighting school without touching it.”
“Unreliable witnesses,” Antony muttered, but without any real emotion.
Arnold shrugged.
Several yards away from the bridge at the center of the park, where they had approached Slim Shady from two directions in their unsuccessful attempt to keep the Whippet from bolting, Levi paused and sniffed deeply at some spoor. After several moments, he lifted his head, gazed at the bridge upon which Yoda and Sunny were converging, then again lowered his muzzle. Instead of heading for the bridge, he made his way very slowly up the hill toward Park Avenue, almost dragging his muzzle through the grass, so close did he have it to the ground. Abruptly he stopped, standing so still he might have been a lawn statue.
Antony desperately wanted to know exactly what Levi found so interesting, but he could not bring himself to pay the price necessary to acquire such knowledge.
After what seemed an eternity to the two observers Levi finally raised himself from the grass. Sunny and Yoda had already gone under the stone bridge, so it was something of a surprise when Levi did not immediately join them. Instead, he crossed over to a gravel walkway and made his way toward the upper side of the bridge. Prior to reaching the bridge, he paused and sat on his haunches, staring up at a polished slab set between two rough stone columns.
“What’s he doing now?” Antony asked after Levi remained motionless for several minutes.
“Have you ever looked at that memorial?” Arnold asked.
“Memorial?”
“Why do you think this place is called Memorial Park?”
Antony shrugged. “Never thought much about it. It never came up in a case.”
“What Levi is looking at is the memorial the park was built around,” Arnold explained. “Carved into that slab are the names of companions who perished in battle.”
“But why is he standing so still before it?” Antony persisted. “And with his head held low like that?”
Arnold shook his head in disgust. “Antony, sometimes you are beyond belief!”
“Keep it down,” Antony warned.
“You know, Antony, dogs are not the only creatures capable of making the ultimate sacrifice,” Arnold said softly.
“I never…”
“Yeah, I know, you never thought about it,” Arnold finished.
“Okay, so now I know.”
“Had you realized before today that the universe is inhabited by more than you and the law,” Arnold said, “I would not have been the only dog standing there with you this morning.”
“So you think I am the author of my own destruction?”
“In part.”
Antony considered all that had happened, all that might have happened if things were different. “You may have something there.”
Arnold smiled.
A sharp yapping sound cut though the warm air.
The two dogs almost leaped from the cover of the ornamental boulders, responding to their deeply ingrained instincts and training, but they held each other back. Levi turned from his reverie before the memorial slab and joined his fellow detectives under the bridge.
“Can’t see a thing,” Antony grumbled.
“We could always…”
“No!”
“They are exactly were we found Slim Shady this morning,” the Belgian Shepherd noted. “I don’t think there is any way we can say this does not involve us.”
“We’re still not going to go to them for help,” Antony asserted.
“You may change your mind about that,” Arnold said. “We may reach a point where we have no choice.”
“We have not reached that point yet.”
“Maybe not,” Arnold agreed, reluctantly. “Before this, though, we relied on our badges and authority to force cooperation. Now we have neither.”
Antony did not want to admit the truth of his partner’s words, but he did not need to. Feeling naked without his police vest, with its embroidered badge and nametag, vulnerable without his police identity disc attached to his collar, he was no longer able to hide his feelings as he had once.
“Come on,” Antony said when it became apparent the Three Dog Detective Agency was not going to come out from under the bridge right away. “We need to figure out how to get Boris alone.”
“That’s not going to be easy,” Arnold pointed out as they made their way down the side of the knoll away from the park. “He has to know that we’re going try something. He may not be smart, but he’s not exactly stupid.”
“Maybe,” Antony allowed. “But I’m hoping he’s just stupid enough.”
Chapter 6
“Are you sure it was Arnold and Antony?” Levi asked.
“Absolutely,” Yoda replied. “I could not make out what they were saying, but I recognized their voices all right.”
“They were hiding behind those big rocks atop the knoll,” Sunny confirmed. “When Yoda alerted me I snuck a glance around the base of the bridge and saw the tips of their ears.”
“The tips of ears?” Levi smiled. “Could it have been two other dogs maybe? Some other dogs…with ears?”
Sunny sighed. “Really, Levi, do I make disparaging remarks about your nose? The shape of a dog’s ears is just as distinctive as its scent or the shapes of its paws; and short of cropping…”
“A barbaric practice!” Yoda inter
jected.
“…very much more difficult to change,” Sunny continued. “It is possible to mask your scent, and by changing your gait you can alter your paw-print, but your ears are your ears…unless you want to go under the knife.”
Yoda, very prideful of his sensitive and preternaturally large ears, shuddered.
Levi laughed softly. “All right, Sunny, you’ve convinced me.”
“They are gone now,” Sunny said.
“What were they doing there in the first place?” Yoda asked.
“Could they have already been to the house and determined that Slim Shady was gone?” Sunny queried.
“How would they know we would be here?” Yoda demanded. “The time element is all messed up.”
“Yoda’s right,” Levi agreed. “The skunk smell is just now subsiding, so now should be when they are arriving at the house to look for Slim Shady’s scent.”
“Maybe they lied about coming back,” Yoda suggested. “If they turned around at F Street and came back to force a search…”
“That would conflict with Antony’s strict sense of the law,” Sunny pointed out. “He would not enter without either a scent or our permission.”
“Break a law,” Yoda quipped. “Break Antony’s back.”
“And I know Arnold is no liar,” Sunny continued. “He may do what Antony tells him – at least most of the time – but he would never let Antony do something he knew to be wrong.”
“Agreed,” Levi said. “Since there is no way they could have known we would be here, the obvious deduction is that they did not return to the house as they said they would do, that their presence in the park was not related to the reason we are here, at least not directly.”
“How do you figure that?” Sunny asked.
“They did not go under the bridge,” Levi replied. “I picked up their scents on the grass away from the bridge, where they would have been when they first came to get Slim Shady, but not under it. If they were investigating something related to Slim Shady they would surely have gone under the bridge.”
“Maybe we interrupted them before they could get under,” Yoda suggested.
“No, Sunny would have seen them if they retreated at our approach,” Levi said. “They were on the knoll when we entered the park and hid when they saw us.”
“Why would they do that? Yoda asked. “They have never shied away from an encounter with us before.”
“And if they did not return to the house,” Sunny added, “should they have not confronted us with questions about Slim Shady?”
“True on all accounts,” Levi said. “They went to the police station, but did not come back to the house. Something must have happened that made them seek a quiet place away from the station to discuss whatever happened.”
“I just realized,” Yoda said. “I heard their voices, heard them moving about behind the boulders, but there was sound I didn’t hear.”
“What was that?” Sunny asked.
“A small metallic sound,” Yoda answered.
“Identity medallions,” Levi surmised.
Yoda nodded. “It’s such a common sound, and generally such a slight sound, that most dogs tend to ignore it altogether, but I am sure there was no trace of the sound at all.”
“Could they have pushed them up under their collars to silence them?” Sunny suggested. “We’ve done that when on surveillance.”
“Why would they if they were merely having a private talk?” Levi mused. “Something odd is going on with Antony and Arnold.”
“Perhaps we should follow after them,” Yoda said. “There might be something wrong.”
Sunny smiled. “Yoda, are you concerned?”
“Of course not!” the Pomeranian protested.
“If there is something wrong, we can follow up with those two later,” Levi said. “Right now, though, we need to follow up on Slim Shady’s activities in the neighborhood. When we confront Arnold and Antony about Slim Shady, it would be better if we had more info than they have.”
They spent the next half-hour searching through the rest of the park, but found nothing more than they had already uncovered. The trail of the strange doglike creature, along with the scents of the two Dobermans, dropped away so suddenly it was clear the smells were being intentionally covered.
The three canine detectives back-trailed Slim Shady’s scent through the condos to the street that ran between the police station and the park-fronting condominiums. Despite the morning dew and the lapsed time, it had not faded much, and the closer they came to the trash dumpster that was the starting point, the headier became the scent.
“Slim Shady was terrified when he fled the dumpster,” Levi said, raising his sniffer from the trail as they approached the semi-enclosed area. “The smell of his fear is still strong.”
“If even half of what he said is true, I don’t wonder he was scared,” Sunny remarked as she looked around the area.
“Those upper windows on the second level look down on the dumpster,” Levi said, indicating the apartments above them. “There might be a witness.”
“I don’t know,” Yoda said doubtfully. “The balconies are very small, so I don’t think a pet would spend the night on one, not even a cat, and those windows don’t go all the way down to the floor.”
“Besides,” Sunny added, “some condos don’t allow pets.”
“It’s a long shot,” Levi admitted. “But I think it’s worth a try.”
“The noise might have attracted attention,” Yoda said.
“Or made a pet hide,” Sunny countered.
“Sunny, you and Yoda check it out, see if anyone saw anything happen down here,” Levi instructed. “I’ll stay down here and smell what I can smell.”
As the Golden Retriever and the Pomeranian vanished around the wall, seeking an obscure entrance where they would not attract any attention, Levi again turned his nose to the task at paw. He examined every inch of the ground surrounding the dumpster. To the right of the large metal box, between it and the tall cinder-block wall enclosing the dumpster on three sides, Levi came upon the strong scent of raw meat…fresh raw meat.
It was not unusual for animals to come across food that had been tossed out. In fact, such discards constituted a large part of the diets of strays and ferals, but the reasons for the food being thrown out were generally obvious – the tinge of corruption, the staleness of age, or even the dusty mustiness of mold. But fresh meat – still in butcher-paper wrappers, as Levi could smell – was never thrown out, not even at markets where they was a bevy of tricks for making the not-so-fresh look newly butchered.
The short fur on the nape of Levi’s neck suddenly stood up straight, and he knew he was being observed. Without seeming to do so, he looked up and around, searching for a watcher, but there was no one in sight.
The police parking garage, Levi thought. Someone is watching from the shadows, some dog who himself does not want to be seen.
For a moment, a stray scent, strange and almost doglike, drifted upon a warm current of air, then was gone.
* * *
Knowing these was no point in seeking witnesses on the ground floor because of the privacy walls that blocked the condos from casual observation from the street, Sunny and Yoda mounted the stairs, which was not an easy task for either of them – Yoda because of his shorter legs and Sunny due to a slight twinge of arthritis, not an unusual development in a large dog of her age, not that she was telling anyone what that age was.
The landing along the second floor of the condos was quiet, cool and untenanted. All the doors were shut, none of the drapes open at the wide windows.
“How do you want to do this?” Yoda asked.
Sunny uttered a single short sharp and imperative bark.
“Well, that’s one way, I suppose,” Yoda said.
A few moments after Sunny’s bark a moderately sized head eased out a flap door set into the larger door, followed by the entire dog. He was a Welsh Springer Spaniel with a straight silky c
oat colored dark red and white. He looked at Sunny and Yoda with cool brown eyes.
“Did you get locked out?” he asked. “Or should I ask instead, who let you in?”
“What’s your name?” Sunny asked.
“Why?”
“We like to know who we’re talking to,” Sunny explained. “My name is Sunny and this is Yoda.”
Yoda moved forward to perform the standard ritual.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the Welsh Springer Spaniel demanded.
“Sniffing,” Yoda said.
“Keep your distance,” the condo dog advised. “I don’t do that.”
Yoda tilted his head in confusion. “Don’t do what?”
“Sniff.”
“What do you mean, you don’t sniff?” Yoda demanded, taken aback by the breach in etiquette. “You’re a dog, aren’t you.”
“Yes, I’m a pure-bred Welsh Springer Spaniel.”
“And I’m a Pomeranian.”
“Pure bred?”
“Yes, not that it makes any difference,” Yoda countered hotly. “We don’t pay attention to things like that.”
“You should, it makes all the difference in the world.” The dog gazed at Sunny, then at Yoda critically. “Your golden friend is obviously a mix – maybe some Collie in there – but you could be a pure Pomeranian, I suppose, if you weren’t so large, and didn’t look like the inside of a vacuum cleaner. Are you a mutant?”
Yoda bristled at the Spaniel’s words, which made his fur shoot out like the quills of an angry porcupine. “No, I am not a…”
“You do have a name, don’t you?” Sunny interrupted.
“Of course I do!” His tone was snappish, but his emotion did not cause even the smallest ripple to disturb his meticulously groomed coat. “If you attended dog shows…”
“Exploitation of prissy pooches!” Yoda snarled.
“…you’d see my name often, on best-of-show awards,” the dog said, ignoring Yoda’s outburst. “I am Champion Highland Sultan Gaylord Horace Walpole.”
Yoda said: “Hope you didn’t break your jaw saying that.”
“Well, I never!” And the dog started to dive for the flap door.
K-9 Blues Page 8