Paw and Order

by Spencer Quinn

  “Where do we start, big guy?” Bernie said after a while.

  Anywhere. Anywhere at all was fine with me. But hadn’t we already started? And if so, on what? That was as far as I could take it, and I kind of wished I hadn’t begun.

  “Do we trust Aubrey Ross?” Bernie went on. “Not as far as we can throw him.”

  Really? Was that true? Although round in shape, Mr. Ross was on the small side, surely not very heavy. I could picture me and Bernie actually throwing him pretty far, across a room, for example, or even farther. So was that our next move, circling back to Mr. Ross’s place and tossing him around for a bit? Sounded like a plan!

  “What’s his motivation? Where’s he coming from? What does he want? We don’t have a clue. But one thing’s for sure—he was a spy. What do we know about international espionage? Zip. But here’s my guess—there’s no real retirement from the spy game, not until they take you out in a box.”

  Bernie turned down a side street, then another and—and we were circling the block, one of our best techniques! That Bernie! Where did his ideas come from? No telling, but right now were we setting up to throw Mr. Ross around and put him in a box, or just one or the other? Both would have been my preference, but it was Bernie’s call. I waited to find out.

  We pulled over in a shadowy spot on Mr. Ross’s street, his house just in view up ahead. Bernie cut the motor, cut the lights, lit up one of the cigarettes he’d scored off that waiter. The moment I thought of that waiter, I realized how hungry I was, which turned out to be very, very hungry, pretty much starving. Funny how the mind works. You had to control your mind, that was basic in this business, and one of the secrets of our success at the Little Detective Agency. I told my mind in no uncertain terms, whatever those were, exactly, to shut down all waiter thoughts. And what did my mind do? It jumped to thoughts of Max’s Memphis Ribs, our favorite restaurant back home in the Valley. The meat on those bones? Something else! And when you were done with the meat, you still had the bone to work on! Was that a business plan or what? Cleon Maxwell, owner of Max’s Memphis Ribs and a good buddy of ours, had to be rolling in green. Although, funny thing, hadn’t Bernie lent him a grand or two some time back? What was up with that?

  I looked over at Bernie. He took a deep drag, the end of the cigarette glowing bright. Was he worried? I thought so. I was, too. How were we going to shake our money loose from Cleon Maxwell? And then it hit me, maybe the most amazing thought of my life. Cleon could pay us back in ribs! Free ribs forever!

  “Chet! What the hell?”

  Uh-oh. I seemed to be over on Bernie’s seat, kind of sharing it, and perhaps pawing at him at the same time. I backed up, pronto, got a grip.

  He gave me a look. “What gets into you?”

  What gets into me? How about free ribs forever, buckaroo? Bernie’s going to turn that down? I gave him a look right back.

  He sighed. “Everything’s okay, big guy.” He smiled at me, a very nice moment in my day. “I’m guessing you’d like to be back home, huh?”

  Back home? I hadn’t thought about it. But now I did. And all of a sudden, I was missing everything—starting with the big tree in our front yard. I hadn’t marked it in ages! That was bad. I tried not to think of all the members of the nation within taking advantage of me not being there and found I could think of nothing else.

  “I knew it,” Bernie said. “We’ll wrap this up fast, I promise. Although exactly how is—”

  Headlights flashed on in Mr. Ross’s driveway and a gleaming black car came rolling out, Mr. Ross’s round head barely at steering-wheel level.

  “Poke a hornet’s nest, see what flies out, right, Chet?” Bernie said.

  Actually, that sounded totally wrong to me, and I’d had experiences, all bad, with hornets. This must have been one of Bernie’s jokes. We fired up, pulled onto the street, lights off. Next would come . . . hey! I had no idea what was coming next, not the slightest notion. Some of our best work got done that way at the Little Detective Agency. I felt tip-top.

  Bernie’s the best wheelman in the Valley. He can follow from close behind, far behind, across many lanes, even from in front. And once while going backward the other way, although that once was more than plenty, and I didn’t even want to think about it. We followed Mr. Ross onto some busier roads and then a big highway, Bernie switching on the lights and easing back into ­traffic.

  “Never checks the rearview mirror,” Bernie said. “Good spycraft or bad? Wouldn’t jumpy guys be looking over their shoulders, spies or not? So maybe I’ve got this all wrong and he’s on a pizza run.”

  Pizza was coming next? That would have been my last guess, if I’d been able to come up with even one. Pizza was a very interesting subject, some pizzas—with broccoli and Swiss chard, for example—being pretty easy to take or leave, while others—with sausage or bacon or pepperoni, for other examples—were unleavable. Closer, Bernie, follow closer. Don’t lose him!

  But Bernie didn’t follow closer, hung back even more. “Is Ross even the pizza type?” he said. “I’m having trouble picturing him scarfing up a slice. DeGaulle would be another. Hard to—”

  Mr. Ross cut across a couple of lanes and swung onto an exit ramp at the last moment. A snap for us to stay with him; Bernie had been following from the inside lane, one of his coolest techniques. I glanced over at him: yes, steering with just one finger on the wheel, and that one finger barely touching. You had to love Bernie.

  “Is he headed for the airport, Chet? Is this going to be one of those cases where we go through everything twice?” Whoa! I’d had a nightmare just like that. I was trying my hardest not to let the details come back to me when Bernie said, “The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” and lost me completely. My mind stayed blank right until Ross pulled up at the same terminal where we’d met Maurice St. John. He parked in front of one of the sliding doors. We got stuck behind a bus, and by the time we’d found a space, Ross had gotten out with a small suitcase and was on his way inside. We jumped out and—

  “Hey!” A cop came hurrying over. “Can’t park here.”

  “We’re not parking,” Bernie said. “We’re just—”

  “Can’t park, can’t stop, can’t idle, can’t do nothin’ but load and unload.” He whipped out his ticket book.

  Bernie glanced into the terminal. Way at the back, someone waved Mr. Ross past a line. He vanished through a doorway. Bernie pointed at Mr. Ross’s car.

  “What about him?”

  The cop peered at the gleaming black car. “Diplomatic plates,” he said.

  “So?”

  “They never pay.”

  Bernie shook his head in this way he has, kind of like shooing flies away.

  “Tell me about it,” the cop said. “Realpolitik sucks. Meanwhile, you got Arizona plates. You pay.”

  “Yeah,” said Bernie. “Maybe first I’ll just—”

  A black car a lot like Mr. Ross’s glided up alongside and a man hopped out on the passenger side. He glanced at us with no interest, got into Mr. Ross’s car. Both cars drove off.

  “Realpolitik,” Bernie said.

  “Specialty of the house,” said the cop.

  Specialty of the house? I knew about that. Take Dry Gulch Steakhouse and Saloon, where it happened to be steak tips. I checked the air, smelled no food of any kind. Not gonna happen, big guy.

  • • •

  Two gleaming black cars in a tidy row are even easier to follow than one. They led us back to the city, onto a broad street that cut through parkland, with big buildings on either side. The black cars slowed down. A gate opened in a long brick wall. I glimpsed a big, lit-up building with columns, lots of gardens and statues. The black cars drove in. The gate closed.

  “British Embassy, big guy,” Bernie said. “Aubrey Ross has done a bolt. Way out of our reach and gone.”

  Way out of our reach?
I didn’t get that at all. Was it one of Bernie’s jokes? I checked his face. Not happy. I moved a little closer to him.

  Bernie gave me a pat. “He taught us the expression and then gave a demonstration, just in case we weren’t getting it. A thoughtful guy.”

  We drove on. I wondered about the identity of the thoughtful guy and decided it had to be Bernie. Who else?

  • • •

  “But,” Bernie said, somewhat later, the two of us parked outside—whoa! the same police station where they’d locked Bernie up?—“we threw a scare into him, didn’t we?”

  Who, exactly? And now we were going to throw a scare into the cops? Throwing scares into dudes—was that our new MO? I opened my mouth real wide. Teeth out the yingyang? Oh, yeah, and don’t leave out big and sharp. Also nice and clean, according to Janie, my groomer, who brushes them in a way that makes me feel good all over, all the way to the tip of my tail, as far as you can possibly get from my teeth, which is kind of a puzzler.

  We sat. After a while, I got the feeling we were sitting on the police station. Sitting on a place is in our repertoire, no doubt about it, but had we ever sat on a police station before? Not that I remembered. My takeaway? We were better than ever!

  The front door of the police station opened, and cops started filing out.

  “Shift change, Chet. Not a long shot, more a medium sort of—” Bernie sat up straight. “Is that him? The one at the back, with the high school swagger?”

  Hard to follow. I looked at those cops. They all seemed to have some high school swagger! I started to wonder whether all cops in the whole wide world—but never got there, probably a good thing, because Bernie nudged me and said, “It’s Nevins, all right. Kind of looks better with crime scene tape wrapped around his head.”

  And it all came back to me, or at least some, some usually being more than enough, in my experience. For example, I was now pretty sure about our plan: We were going to throw a scare into Nevins. I could practically taste it.

  Nevins got into—not an old clunker, exactly, maybe a sort of new clunker, with a dented trunk, like he’d been rear-ended—and drove off. Rear end him one more time, Bernie, rear end the swaggering dude! Hey! All at once, I was on fire. This case would be closing pronto. I leaned forward, front paws on the dash. We followed Nevins, not close enough for rear-ending him, but I held onto the idea. Giving up doesn’t come easily to me. In fact, I got confused for a moment and couldn’t remember what giving up was. Maybe it would come to me. Some things sometimes did. No time for examples at the moment.

  Nevins led us into a neighborhood like lots of neighborhoods I knew, not fancy but also not sketchy, and parked in front of a darkened row house. We pulled over, nicely tucked in between two vans. Nevins got out of his car, walked to the front door of the row house without a backward glance, rattled some keys, and disappeared inside. Not long after, a light went on in a top-floor window. Bernie reached for his door handle, but at that moment a car came slowly down the street, headlights off, like the kind of thing we do ourselves, me and Bernie. Bernie paused and watched the car go by, a familiar sort of car, and I was trying to figure out why when a streetlamp lit the face of the driver, a strong face with a big and powerful nose: my buddy, Mr. Ferretti. Did he have a steak sandwich in there? I sat up real straight, on high alert. I was pretty much starving, if I haven’t mentioned that already. Ferretti slowed down even more, head turning away from us and angling up, his gaze on that glowing window at the top of the town house. He almost came to a stop and then drove on.

  I barked once, one of my low, rumbly barks, but Bernie was already looking at me.

  “What’s up, Chet?”

  What was up? Ferretti, for one thing, steak sandwiches for two. I couldn’t live on air.

  “Sometimes I wish you could talk, big guy.”

  Huh? But I already do, and in so many ways! Bernie had to be tired.

  He opened his door. “Let’s get to know Officer Nevins.”

  I hopped out. Nevins was a cop. Cops liked to eat. You take it from there.

  SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  We stood by the front door of the row house. There were some buzzers on the side, not many, although more than two.

  “Blank, Tina with a smiley face, Mr. and Mrs. Scott, R. Nevins.” Bernie pressed a buzzer.

  A voice came through the speaker. “Yeah?”

  “Pizza,” said Bernie.

  Sometimes—maybe not often—I’m ahead of the game. Like now: hadn’t I just been thinking how cops like to eat? Wow. And pizza was clearly in this case, big-time. What had Bernie said, not that long ago? Something about a pizza-loving perp name of DeGaulle? Hope you look good in orange, amigo. There was only one problem I could see: we actually had no pizza. Other than that, we were in complete control.

  The voice again: “Pizza? I didn’t order pizza.”

  “Says Nevins on the box,” Bernie said. I looked everywhere for a box, spotted none.

  “I’m Nevins, but I didn’t order pizza.”

  “Maybe someone ordered it for you.”

  “Huh?”

  “Like as a present,” Bernie said. “Happens all the time.”

  A pause.

  “It’s paid for.”

  “Be right down.”

  Bernie turned, put his finger across his lips, our little signal for quiet time. I didn’t make a sound, except for the beating of my heart, of course, which never stops going boom boom, boom boom, the very nice background music to my whole life. But not the point. The point was that with all this silence going on, it couldn’t have been easier to hear footsteps coming downstairs, even though they were the quietest of human footsteps, namely the barefoot kind.

  The door opened. Nevins—sweatpants, wife beater, bare feet, and what was this? Pot smell?—looked out, his gaze going to Bernie, me, back to Bernie.

  “Hi,” Bernie said.

  “Where’s the pizza?”

  “We can still get some.”

  “Huh? Wait a sec—I know you.”

  Bernie held up his hand. “No need to thank us,” he said. “Silent gratitude speaks volumes.”

  “Thank you?” said Nevins. “What for?”

  “Rescuing you from that storage closet,” Bernie said. “You’ve forgotten the whole episode? Don’t tell me you were stoned then, too.”

  Nevins licked his lips. I always watch for that in a human; it often tells you more than the talk coming out of them. “Too?” he said.

  “Weed’s one of those real easy smells to pick up,” Bernie said.

  Whoa! Bernie had just picked up a smell? I gave him a close look. Did his nose seem slightly bigger than usual? I thought so! At that moment, Bernie was more beautiful than ever—and his nose hadn’t been small to begin with, not for a human.

  Nevins squinted, making a face you wouldn’t have called particularly pleasant in the first place even less so. “I get it,” he said, kind of inching back in the doorway. “The pizza’s total bullshit.” Somehow—without the slightest thought on my part—I’d managed to inch the same way even more, and was now pretty much behind Nevins. I’d heard of many pizza toppings in my time, but never . . . I left it right there.

  “A pretext, yes,” Bernie said. “Shrewd observation. Kind of surprising that Soares doesn’t have you higher on the depth chart.”

  “What are you talking about?” Nevins said.

  “The pecking order, who’s in line for promotion, who’ll be walking a beat for thirty years—all the usual craziness,” Bernie said.

  Nevins backed up a step, or tried to, but bumped into me, bounced right off, shooting me a wild sort of look. He turned to Bernie. “Who the hell are you?”

  “You really don’t remember?” Bernie said.

  “Try that rescuer shit once more and I’ll pop you in the goddamn mouth.”

 
Oh, no. Don’t tell me I was ahead of things again, and so soon after the last time! But maybe not a surprise: I know Bernie.

  “And we’d be happy to save your ass again, if needed,” he said, just as I’d expected.

  Part of what came next happened very slowly. Nevins’s hands, big and bony, curled into fists. He dropped one of them way down, turned his body, crouching a bit, and launched what’s called a haymaker in this business. And while that was going on my only thought was faster, Nevins, faster! Not because I wanted to see Bernie hurt—nothing worse than that—but even if Nevins was capable of hurting Bernie, here I was right on the scene to put a dead stop to any of that. No, what I hoped for was just a little action before it was all over. Don’t you get in those moods?

  Next came the fast part. Nevins’s fist was still on the way when Bernie’s shot right past it, kind of a blur. Loved that jab of Bernie’s. Hook off the jab, Bernie, hook off the jab! And then step inside with the uppercut! Sweetest uppercut in the whole wide world, but it didn’t happen. Neither did the hook, the jab being enough, which I knew from how Nevins was lying on the hall floor, out cold. Did he have a glass jaw? I hadn’t heard anything shatter—and my hearing is pretty good, probably better than yours—but how could I rule it out? Poor Nevins. Bernie often said that glass-jaw dudes shouldn’t get into fistfights, but there’d been no time for a warning.

  “How about we invite ourselves up for a quick drink?” Bernie said, stepping into the entrance hall and closing the door behind him. Sounded good to me, although I was more hungry than thirsty, as I may have mentioned, pretty much starving if you want the truth. Hadn’t we brought some pizza? For a moment, I got a bit confused.

  Bernie picked up Nevins, who’d gone all limp and floppy, threw him over his shoulder and started up the stairs. He grunted once or twice as we made our way past a landing and up to the top floor, but that was only on account of his war wound. I felt bad for Bernie, but what could I do? And then it hit me.