Fantastic Detectives

by Dean Wesley Smith

Cha-Cha answered. “La chica no tengas patience. She ran off to find her girl-person.” Cha’s pink-on-tan nose swung toward the shady trail—the path that led from the clearing to the circle of cedar trees that always held the cool air, no matter how hot the day.

  “Damn rookie mistake,” Rocky growled to himself. “Taking off to handle things alone when the pack could do it faster and better...if she would just stop and wait.”

  Bruiser stepped close to Rocky for a private word. “Don’t be too hard on the kid, boss,” the spindly-legged Dane advised in deep, gentle chuffs. “It’s the first time the pup has ever misplaced her girl-person. She just lost her mind and took off. It happens.”

  Rocky nudged Bruiser’s shoulder. “Heard and understood, Sergeant,” he said quietly. Then he raised his voice and communicated to the pack in a high whine. “Does anyone remember Kaya’s girl-person? Did she pet any of you today?”

  He was hoping that maybe one of them had some traces of her scent on their fur. It would help him differentiate her location from all of the other people smells that settled on the trails.

  “Me, me, me, me, Sir. Me, me, me,” barked a low-slung dachshund from the back of the crowd. It was a female dog that Rocky had not met before. “She petted my back with her spidery little person-paws.”

  The dachshund came forward, threading among the legs of the taller dogs, and presented her belly to Rocky with her throat bared and tail wagging. Rocky sniffed her around the collar, under the ears, and between the legs. She was a healthy young dog, ate wet dog food, and lived with a long haired cat.

  Rocky presented his front paw for her to lick, and she did without hesitation and then stood up.

  “Welcome to the pack, little one. What’s your name?”

  “Hilda Dachshund, Sir.” The wiggle of her tail started in the middle of her back and worked in both directions.

  “Okay, Private Hilda. Hold still, we need the scent.”

  Rocky—along with Buddy and Bruiser and Scooter, the fastest and bravest of the pack—snuffled all of the scents from the newcomer’s back. He immediately picked up grape juice, rubber ball, and the bitter scent of dandelion flowers. Underneath, more subtly, he got person-baby shampoo, goldfish crackers, and rabbit fur.

  Rocky’s head popped up a split-second before the others.

  Scooter was the first to say it in his yowling Husky way, “Rabbit, Rocky. The girl has bunny smell on her!”

  The pack boiled over with concern, chuffing and barking and growling.

  “Keep it down,” Rocky hollered over all of them. They obeyed. “I need to know, who saw any of the Rabbits today?”

  They looked at each other, brown-eyes to brown-eyes (except for Scooter’s person-like blue one) and he could see they all tried real hard to think about whether or not they’d seen any of the Rabbits since they came through the gates.

  Rocky was worried. If Kaya’s person-girl had been led away by one of the Rabbits the pack might have more than a quick search on their hands. It might come to a fight, because the Rabbits and the Squirrels had recently made an uneasy alliance with the Coyotes. A dog, or a person, who considered trying to catch one of the harmless-looking Rabbits might suddenly find themselves isolated from their pack and surrounded by snarling, yapping, farting Coyotes.

  He couldn’t blame the person-girl. Rocky himself had fallen for it a few times himself, before the evil alliance. Those Rabbits were gifted artists when it came to temptation. They would hover at the edges of the clearing—just beneath the drooping branches of the yellow-flowered Scotch Broom—and wait until you noticed them. Then they would run; dashing through the sticker bushes, moving fast enough to stay ahead of you, but not so fast that they lost you. Until they wanted to.

  Only Scooter and Rocky had ever caught one of the little bastards. It had been a bloody and savory victory.

  “Oooh, oooh, oooh. Mr. Rocky! Mr. Rocky!” The annoying yap of Zoey Collie pulled Rocky’s attention from his Rabbit-munching memories.

  “Lieutenant Zoey, you saw the Rabbits today?”

  Zoey shook her long mane of chest hair. “No, I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

  Cute, but not real bright that Collie.

  “Then what’s the problem, Lieutenant?”

  Zoey started running in tight circles with a quick little pause each time around to look at the parking lot. “Can I be excused? I hear my Grandpa-person coming down the road. He’s coming. I can’t believe he’s coming.”

  Her out of control circling ran her right into Rocky’s broad chest and he snapped at her to remind her that the pack had more serious things to attend to than a bald, man-person who clapped his hands for fun and liked to play with airheaded Collies. She cowed beneath his long dark muzzle full of long white teeth, but only for a second. As soon as the open-topped red truck-car came into sight the over-excited Scot lost her mind and tore for the gate, rapid-fire happy barks announcing his royal arrival to the whole park.

  Rocky took a step in her direction, but Cha-Cha jumped up and put her tiny little paws on either side of his muzzle, stopping him dead in his tracks.

  “Es bueňo, mi amor. Let her go. He’s a sick man-person. She brings him joy.” Cha-Cha dropped back onto all four paws. “You and Scooter and Buddy and Bruiser can handle this. Right mijos?”

  “You got it li’l Mama,” Buddy said for all of them. He stepped forward and butted Rocky in the chin. “I know where the Rabbits been hidin’, where they been havin’ their babies. I can get us close and then we’re sure to catch her scent.”

  Rocky agreed, but he kept watch on Zoey Collie until her grandpa-person cleared and shut both gates. Then he got back on task. “Okay. Us four, we’ll start with the Rabbit nests and then work our way back toward the circle of cedars. You two Labs go and check the Fetching Meadow and keep an eye out for Kaya Golden. I wouldn’t be surprised if she got herself sidetracked by an old tennis ball again.”

  He had to give the rest of them jobs or they would trail along on the reconnaissance mission to the Rabbit nests or the search for Kaya and get in the way.

  “The mutts will take the trail entrance next to the mud bog and work from there towards the meadow. You three and the new girl,” he motioned to Cha-Cha and her girls, “you short-legged honeys stay here and keep an eye on the People Pack. You’re outgunned anyway if the coyotes are involved. If anybody needs People help, start barking the S.O.S. and the girls will get them herded in the right direction.”

  The pack broke up and got right on their assigned jobs.

  Though Scooter was the fastest in their tracking party, Buddy knew where the Rabbits were so he took point and led them up one of the newest trails in the park. They took turns, two sniffing the ground looking for a hint of the girl-person or the Rabbits, while the other two tracked the scents on the air and kept an eye out for danger. It wouldn’t do to walk into an ambush, and the wild Coyotes were capable of such treachery.

  Rocky worried that his mama-person might be afraid if she looked around to find him for their trail-walk together and didn’t see him playing in the clearing with the other dogs. He hoped that she was so busy making people noises with the rest of the People Pack that she wouldn’t notice he was gone before they got back with Kaya and her girl-person.

  The trail they followed wound through bushes higher than Rocky’s head, dense with new spring growth. The sweet smell was heady and kept pulling at his brain. It was hard to ignore all of the other smells that had been beaten into the dirt of the trail and focus on grape juice and shampoo and dandelion flowers. Every once in a while he would catch a whiff of Rabbit or Squirrel, where one of the rodents had crossed the trail, but Buddy kept going so Rocky kept following.

  Suddenly the four of them turned a blind corner into a stand of Douglas fir trees near the far fence-line of the park and came face to face with Rocky’s worst nightmare: Coyotes, Rabbits, and Squirrels, working together in the park at mid-day. They had Kaya’s girl-person backed against the tall, chain-link fen
ce.

  She was crying quietly with a ring of four Coyotes sniffing at her from a few body-lengths away. Two dozen Squirrels nattered their horrific and confusing chorus from the lower branches of the firs. Ten Rabbits had broken into teams and blocked the three trails that branched from the spot. They may not have been fearsome or deadly, but they were definitely capable of tripping up the bi-pedal child-person if she tried to escape, leaving her fragile neck and back open to attack.

  Rocky understood the fear he smelled coming off of Kaya’s girl-person. People-skin was no match for sharp teeth, and to some animals—wild animals—what lay beneath that skin was delicate, tasty, and irresistible because of its forbidden nature.

  One thing that Rocky didn’t understand was that the girl-person seemed to be holding one of the Rabbits to her chest so tightly that it had given up its struggle and stopped moving. Perhaps she was holding it hostage and that’s the only reason the Coyote pack had not yet attacked.

  The head Coyote, a mangy male with a ripped ear who stood taller than the rest, edged closer to the girl-person.

  “Stop!” Rocky barked out at the top of his lungs as he and his three pack mates entered the clearing at full speed. “That child is Off Limits.”

  Rocky arrested his motion by digging his front claws into the soft earth and lowering his rear haunches. Bruiser and Buddy and Scooter slid to a stop and stationed themselves right next to Rocky’s flank. Their presence gave him strength.

  The Coyotes turned in perfect synchronicity to face the incoming threat. Their eyes were pure golden fire around deep pits of chaotic evil. They immediately dropped their chests to the ground, flattened their ears to their heads, and growled in a tone that would have been amusing if a little girl-person’s life had not been at stake.

  The Rabbits and the Squirrels took off; their fuzzy tails the only thing Rocky could see as they raced off to burrows and higher branches on more distant trees.

  The Coyote’s leader broke into a litany of yips that sounded fierce and determined. Rocky had no clue what the wild beast was saying. He didn’t speak Coyote, and he didn’t care to. More importantly he didn’t need to. Violence was a language all its own and Rocky was willing to go there to protect his pack.

  Adhering to the rules of the forest—be it wild places or the relative safety of the dog park—Rocky lowered his head, pulled back his lips to show his teeth, and gave the Coyotes a warning growl that started in his belly and intensified as it traveled through his deep chest and out his mouth.

  “Back the fuck off or I will kill you.”

  It was a universal thing.

  Even Kaya’s little girl-person understood it and whimpered.

  Rocky figured it would translate to the Coyotes.

  And it did.

  The runt of the Coyote pack pissed herself. Rocky could tell by the smell of the urine that she was young still, just about to come into her first heat, and malnourished. A hungry animal, wild or not, could be a dangerous thing if it didn’t have the sense Nature gave a Bumblebee.

  The Coyote pack leader tried to intimidate them with a growl, but Rocky did not let him get it out. He bounced forward onto his stiff front legs and over-growled the smaller animal.

  But the idiot Coyote did not back down. Maybe he couldn’t, maybe his pack was too weak to survive a fight that did not escalate to the final solution. Maybe he was wrong in the head—which was likely, given that the Coyotes had been making alliances with prey animals. Maybe he was just that fucking stupid.

  Rocky did not wait to decide which.

  It didn’t matter.

  With Bruiser, Scooter and Buddy covering his back, Rocky leapt across the gap to the Coyote pack leader and buried his teeth into the Coyote’s neck. He felt the Coyote’s dirt-crusted fur, tough flesh, and stringy meat part between his canines. He heard the panic in the yelp. Smelled the anguish. Understood his enemy’s fear with every part of his body.

  If the Coyote had surrendered, gone limp and tried to show his belly to the sky, Rocky would have let go of his neck without shaking it. But the damn wild beast kept fighting and Rocky put him down. For good.

  It was fast. It was furious. It left behind a pool of blood spreading across the dirt.

  Thankfully the other Coyotes had the sense to stay out of the fight and when Rocky’s head came up to look at them, a few drops of blood dripping from his jaws, they turned as one and fled into the bushes where a hill would allow them to jump over the fence.

  When Rocky could no longer hear the movement of the bushes in the wake of the fleeing Coyotes he turned back to Kaya’s girl-person to deal with the last foe in the clearing. The one she still held captive in her arms.

  It was a difficult thing to do, moving toward a child-person who was obviously in distress, to help her dispatch a foe. Though Rocky wanted to let her handle the last enemy alone, he wasn’t sure that she could. His experience was that child-people had a soft spot for Rabbits. Rocky couldn’t afford to be soft, so he moved toward her at the fence-line with teeth bared, but without adding the growl.

  He focused on the Rabbit, trying to smell whether it was injured; and if so, how badly. He didn’t want to be cruel and cause it unnecessary pain, but he had to take the wild animal with enough force that it could not bite or scratch Kaya’s girl-person in the process. Rocky would never forgive himself if her blood were spilled.

  His nose worked fast, nostrils flaring, because the things he smelled confused him. All the girl-person smells were there: juice, shampoo, crackers, dandelions, and a bit of Rabbit. But not enough Rabbit. Especially not enough for a frightened, injured, or dying Rabbit.

  Rocky stopped and cocked his head, his lips automatically relaxing. Buddy, Bruiser, and Scooter came up along his side, their noses working furiously too.

  “What is it, boss?” Bruiser asked.

  Buddy also cocked his head. “That’s the weirdest Rabbit I ever smelled, man. And I smelled lots of Rabbits.”

  Suddenly Rocky guessed what the girl-person was holding. Not a real Rabbit, but a toy made to look like a Rabbit. He padded up to her—she cringed from him, so he wagged his tail and dropped his ears until she eased—and he gave the bundle in her arms a sniff.

  The subtle plastic smell confirmed it, a toy Rabbit!

  Rocky bounded in a circle. He had a toy Rabbit just like that at home. His mama-person had given it to him and they played with it every day. She would hide it in the most sneakiest places and...

  ...and suddenly Rocky missed his mama-person. He wanted to go and walk the trails with her.

  It was time to go back to the clearing.

  He nudged the Kaya’s girl-person off the fence and then the pack formed a perimeter around her to herd her around the dead Coyote and its blood. They headed back towards the Fetching Meadow, where Rocky washed the blood off his muzzle in one of the silver bowls full of water. As Second, Buddy howled and barked to call the rest of the pack to join them on their way back to the clearing.

  Two at a time the pack accumulated around the girl-person. Kaya and the Mutts were last to arrive. The young Golden almost lost her mind with happiness to see her girl-person in one piece. Jumping. Barking. Sneezing in joy. She even tried to lick Rocky in the teeth to show her appreciation. Damn puppy.

  As the pack approached the clearing, Rocky looked to gauge the mood of both species. Cha-Cha held her head alertly, and her tail wagged to see the pack return safely, but she didn’t huddle overly close to the People Pack which would have happened if any of them had been exhibiting signs of worry.

  If Rocky were a betting dog, and he wasn’t, he might think that they had not even been missed. And that was fine with him, because a true hero didn’t need to be recognized to do his job. All a hero needed was a walk around the park every day.

  Mama-person smiled as Rocky approached her and then pointed his nose toward the trail. Together they entered the trails near the mud-bog and they had another amazing walk. Rocky did have to “misbehave” a little near
the far fence-line and go dashing along a detour trail. He didn’t want his mama-person to see the Coyote he’d killed. She had enough crap like that in her life to deal with.

  At the end of the lap, mama-person re-attached the tether between them and Rocky followed her to the gate, stopping to leave another short message for poor old Snoopy. They stepped through the first gate and waited in the odd limbo-world because a truck-car was moving in the parking lot.

  ***

  Madeline really doesn’t want to open the second gate and leave the magic of the dog park behind. She likes the dogs, and even most of the people, and she always feels better for having been there.

  She digs her truck keys out of her pocket and unlocks the doors from a distance. With the traffic clear she opens the gate and leads Rocky away. He waits patiently at the side of the truck for her to open the passenger door and then he bounds up onto the seat like it weren’t nothin’.

  She scratches his chest and smoothes his ears. “You’re a lucky dog, you know that Rocky?”

  He licks her face as if to say yes.

  “Too bad we can’t change places for the day. How about I go play with Buddy and Bruiser and you can go deal with the assholes at work?”

  She knows by the way he tilts his head and swivels his ears that he has absolutely no idea what the hell she’s talking about. But somehow, if he could understand, Madeline thinks he would take her place. And he’d probably be a really good Agent, too.

  Introduction to “An Incursion of Mice”

  Juliet Nordeen isn’t the only one who gets inspired by her non-human companions. Mine, a clutter of housecats, seem to inspire more than their fair share of tales. I noticed this as WMG Publishing started reprinting my backlist, including all my short fiction. I’ve written a number of dog stories, but cat stories predominate—and some, like The Secret Lives of Cats, have even won me a few awards.

  I write in many genres, but I seem to love mixing mystery with all of them. I write mystery detective novels set on the Moon, mystery romance novels (with fantasy and humor mixed in) under the name Kristine Grayson, and am planning some mysteries in my Fey fantasy series—when I get a chance to breathe, that is. In 2014, my genre mixing has continued with The Enemy Within, an alternate history mystery that comes from my award-nominated story, “G-Men.”