Paw and Order

by Spencer Quinn

  “Then help me out,” Bernie said. “Show me the modern way.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Start with Suzie Sanchez.”

  “What about her?”

  “Where is she?”

  “No idea,” said Sands. “Is she missing?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “Why would I? All I know is that I told her to be patient. Evidently she ignored my advice.”

  “Patient about what?”

  “Not going to get into that,” Sands said. “I promised her the story when it was time. Can’t do any more than that.”

  “A story about General Galloway?” Bernie said. “Or sleepers? Or both?”

  Sands said nothing.

  Bernie reached out and straightened his cap, Sands leaning away but too slow.

  “Did you actually play baseball for Harvard?” Bernie said.

  “I covered sports for the Crimson,” Sands said. “Not that it makes any difference.”

  “No?” said Bernie, moving slightly closer to Sands. I did the same, got the sweet moving-in feeling that often came before grabbing the perp by the pant leg, which was how our cases usually ended. Sands backed up, but not far, what with his car, still steaming, right behind him. “How come you were sitting on that place, York’s or Carbonneau’s or whatever his real name is?”

  “Sitting on?” said Sands.

  Whoa! He didn’t know “sitting on,” one of our best techniques at the Little Detective Agency? Bernie explained what it was. I didn’t really listen, more interested in that trickle of blood at the corner of Sands’s mouth, which seemed to have started up again. His blood had a strangely powerful smell, way too strong for that tiny amount, if that made any sense, and it didn’t, not at the time.

  “I happened to be passing by,” Sands said.

  “I’ll throw you a bone,” said Bernie. Now we were getting somewhere! I crouched, ready to spring in any direction. But no bone appeared. Instead, Bernie went on, “If you’ve been keeping an eye on him, you can stop. He’s gone and he’s never coming back.”

  Sands shook his head. “The moron. He fell for the dream.”

  “What dream?” Bernie said.

  “The American dream, what else?” Sands said. “There’s never been a plan that couldn’t be screwed up by human emotions.”

  “Such as?

  “Jealousy, in this case.”

  “York got jealous?”

  Sands opened his mouth to answer but at that moment got distracted by something on the front of his shirt. What was this? A tiny piece of metal, like the end of a narrow pipe? He gave it a gentle tug, and out it came. Not so tiny. And then: blood. It gushed out like from a hose on full blast.

  Sands sank to his knees and toppled over onto the reddening street. Bernie knelt beside him, pressed his hands on Sands’s chest. Blood poured right through his fingers, a terrible sight, on and on. Sands gave Bernie a look like he was going to ask for something. Then his eyes stopped seeing, the blood stopped flowing, and he lost the smell of the living.

  Bernie found a coat in the trunk of the Mercedes, covered the Sandman from the top of his head to about his knees. I sniffed at the blood on Bernie’s hands. It bothered me. He wiped them off on the coat, then took out his phone and called Lieutenant Soares. We didn’t stick around.

  • • •

  “Suzie? Suzie?”

  No answer.

  We were back at Suzie’s place, going from room to room, opening every closet, finding zip. I could smell Bernie’s sweat, not the nice, fresh kind that goes with hiking, but the sharper kind that goes with being nervous. Some humans are nervous all of time, all humans are nervous some of the time, and no human, not even Bernie, although he’s close, are nervous none of the time. I pressed against him every chance I got, just letting him know . . . something or other; I couldn’t think what.

  He looked down at me.

  “We’re lost, big guy.”

  That had to be a mistake. I’d been lost once or twice before in my life, but always when I was alone. How could I be lost now? I was with Bernie. And he was with me.

  Bernie went to the sink in Suzie’s kitchen, splashed water on his face. I went to my water bowl in the corner and lapped some up. Water helps you feel better, as I hope everyone knows.

  Bernie looked at me, his face wet and glistening. He can look frightening at times, if you don’t know him. “Come on, Chet,” he said. “Let’s get aggressive.”

  I loved the sound of that! It was a kind of love I felt most strongly in my teeth, impossible to explain why. We marched over to Lizette’s house and pounded on the door, Bernie doing the actual pounding, me pounding in my mind.

  THIRTY

  * * *

  In pounding-on-the-door situations, you have to be ready for just about anything. Shotgun blast right through it, for example? It happens. But not this time. No shotgun blast, no huge shaved-head dudes bursting out with cleavers raised high, no drunk shouting, “Nobody home” at the top of his lungs. Instead, we had silence. Bernie leaned forward and—what was this? Put his ear to the door? Like—like he was listening real hard for some sounds inside. I wondered what he was picking up. All I heard was a running toilet, no surprise, toilet running being a big human problem, found in just about every house I’ve ever been in. Once Bernie had gotten so fed up, he’d tried to install a new toilet on his own. What a day that had been! I’ve always been interested in toilets, by the way. Sometimes you can find the very freshest water in them—and sometimes not.

  “Quiet as a tomb,” Bernie said, possibly missing that running toilet. He took out a credit card. Hadn’t I come close to seeing Bernie’s credit card move recently? I sort of remembered it in his hand, and then some door had opened and out had come a UPS dude, making it easy for us. I hoped that wasn’t about to happen now, although I’m fond of UPS dudes in general, especially the ones who drive around with treats in their pockets. No need to stop or even slow down, UPS buddy—just toss it out the open door! And all at once, I really was hoping a UPS dude would step out of Lizette’s house.

  Bernie stuck the credit card in the crack at the side of the door and popped it right—but no. The door didn’t pop right open. Whoa! This was a first, and not of the good kind. Bernie worked the card up and down, wriggled it around, took a breath, started over. Taking a breath and starting over was one of our best techniques at the Little Detective Agency, much more Bernie’s thing than mine. How do you stop once you’ve started? A complete mystery to me. Meanwhile, Lizette’s front door wasn’t opening.

  Bernie stepped back. “This is no ordinary door, big guy,” he said. He stepped back a little more and lowered his shoulder. That meant Bernie was about to smash the door to smithereens! You see smithereens in my job from time to time, one of my favorite sights. Was I up on my back legs, kind of jumping up and down with excitement? Uh-oh. Not professional: I got a grip, and pronto. Bernie lunged forward and then came a deep thud that seemed to shake the whole house, and Bernie—Bernie bounced straight back? “Ow,” he said. The door looked exactly the same as before, not a smithereen in evidence.

  “Nothing ordinary about it,” Bernie said, rubbing his shoulder. “And why would anyone even the least bit ordinary have a fortified door like this?”

  I had no answer, in fact, couldn’t recall the question. All I knew was that the running toilet now sounded a bit louder.

  “What are you barking about?”

  Me? If I was barking, no sure thing, although I amped it right down just in case, it had to be on account of that running toilet and how thirsty it was making me.

  “Someone’s inside after all?”

  Not exactly, but maybe close enough. We’re a team, me and Bernie, and always will be.

  We walked around the house to the screened-in porch. Bernie peered inside. “See that do
or that leads into the house? You can bet the ranch it’ll be a clone of the front one.”

  At the moment, we didn’t have a ranch, although Bernie often said he’d like one someday. But how would we ever have a ranch if we lost it in a bet before it was even ours? This was confusing.

  “. . . sake of argument, let’s suppose,” Bernie was saying, “we just went ahead and did something that was bound to trigger the alarm system. Think the cops’ll come barreling up?” With no warning at all, he threw a beautiful right cross at a section of the screen. We’ve watched a lot of boxing in our time—don’t even get me started on the Thrilla in Manila—plus Bernie knew what he was doing with his fists, so it was no surprise that the screen ripped wide open. We went right through that opening, me—after a brief moment of confusion—first.

  Bernie glanced around while I had a quick hard listen, picked up the running toilet as well as a new beeping, very quiet, somewhere in the walls. “And if tearing out the screen didn’t trigger the alarm,” Bernie said, striding across the room to the door that led into the house, “how about this?” He took out the gun. The gun? Which one was this? So many to keep track of. First, before we’d even gotten started, there’d been our .38 Special, now at the bottom of the sea; after that, the pink-handled popgun, found in the flower pot by Mr. Ferretti; and the gun now in Bernie’s hand, taken from Mr. Ferretti’s woman pal by me, Chet the Jet. Wow! Had I remembered the whole thing? The case was as good as closed. How about right now we grab Suzie, hop in the car, and zoom on back to the Valley, music blasting all the way, starting with “The Road Goes On Forever and the Party Never Ends”? A great idea, one of my very best, but . . . but where was Suzie? That was when I realized we had a problem. My tail realized it, too, and went all droopy. I got it back up, nice and stiff. We were pros and on the job, after all, my tail and me.

  Meanwhile, Bernie had the gun pointed at the inner door, right near the knob. “Cover your ears,” he said, which had to be one of his jokes. How would I do that, exactly? I was still wondering when he pulled the trigger. BLAM! Cover my ears even if I could? No way! Not with gunplay sounds in the air. Plus we had the bonus sights of splintering wood, the whole knob and lots of metal parts flying here and there, and the door sagging open. There’s all kinds of beauty in life, sorry if I’m mentioning that so soon after the last mention. But controlling when beauty shows up? Who can do that?

  Back inside Lizette’s house, and everything seemed different from the night of the party. Was it just because then was night and now was day? That’s always a big deal to humans, not so much in the nation within. How about the fact that there’d been lots of noise and now we had silence, except for the running toilet, the faint beeping behind the walls no longer sounding. Maybe, but there was more to it than that. Call it a feeling. We sometimes get feelings in the nation within, feelings that come out of nowhere, but no time for that now.

  “Where do people like to hide things, big guy?” Bernie said. What a question! I’d seen just about everything, including a perp who hid a diamond ring up his nose. We were just about to let him go when he turned out to be allergic to me and my kind—something I really don’t like in a human—and had a sneezing fit, the diamond ring caught by Bernie in midair . . . “basements and bedrooms,” he was saying. “Let’s start in the basement.”

  • • •

  Not a lot in the way of basements where I come from, so this was new to me, and I’m always up for new, except for doors not smashing to smithereens when Bernie bashes them. Were all basements like Lizette’s, with washer and drier and water heater and some other machinery I didn’t know over on one side and lots of boxes, furniture, suitcases on the other? I had no clue, just knew it was nice and cool down here, plus the running toilet sound was much louder, coming from behind a door behind a rack of dresses.

  That was where Bernie started, with the dresses. He looked through them, checking the labels. “Kind of pricey, is my guess,” Bernie said. “What does she do, ostensibly? Something in IT?” He moved on to another rack, this one hung with men’s suits. “These would be Jean-Luc’s,” he said. “Also pricey. Left over from their married life? Or waiting here in case their married life resumes? Meanwhile, he’s been living in that crap hole above the bar.” He turned to me. “See where I’m going with this?” I did not. “Actually,” he went on, “I’m not sure I do myself.” Had to love that Bernie! Not just because of how alike we were, but also on account of all the interesting things he said, like “crap hole,” for example.

  He turned to the boxes and suitcases, started going through them. All sorts of stuff came out and was soon scattered around the basement—more clothes, books, sheets, blankets, CDs—but Bernie didn’t seem interested in any of it. “Is this a we’ll-know-it-when-we-see-it?” he said. “I hate those.”

  Whatever they were, I hated them, too. I made my way toward the running toilet sound. By now that water had to be as fresh as it comes, and my mouth was drier than a dust storm, of which I’d seen plenty.

  “Chet? What are you doing over there?” Bernie came closer. “Smell something?”

  Well, of course I smelled the water, one of the best smells there is—although easy to forget, on account of it being in the air most of the time—but really it was the sound that had drawn me.

  Bernie cocked his head, like he was trying to hear better. “Is that a toilet running?” He drew the gun, walked up to the door and threw it open, gun raised for trouble waiting on the other side.

  But there was no trouble, just a small empty bathroom with a toilet and a sink and a bare towel rack. The toilet cover was down. Bernie raised it, gazed into the bowl, jiggled the handle, first step in toilet repair. The toilet kept running.

  “Imagine how much water gets wasted this way,” he said. “A big system, yes, but finite. What’s so hard to understand about that?”

  All of it, in my opinion, and even more, if that makes any sense. I nosed around Bernie, dipped my head in the bowl and lapped up cool, clear water, just about the best I’d ever tasted. This burg—Foggy Bottom, if I was getting things right—had lots going for it. Lovely water, for starters, and after that . . . I’m sure something will come to me eventually.

  Bernie reached over me, took the lid off the tank, something in the tank often being the problem, and I certainly hoped so this time, because the next step—removing the whole toilet—was where the trouble began.

  Bernie peered into the tank. I got my head right next to his and did the same, and there we were, peering together, side by side, our heads touching, our minds practically . . . one! What a thought!

  The only water in the tank was at the bottom, a tiny trickle running in from one side and draining out under a raised flap in the middle. “Float stuck, as per usual,” Bernie said. “What are we dealing with here, eighteenth-century technology? How many ball cocks are jammed just like this in the country right now? Hundreds of thousands? We’re doomed.” He reached into the tank, grabbed the round metal thing—had to be the float—and raised it.

  “That’s funny,” he said, pausing, hand still on the float. “Did I feel something shift in there? What’s in a float except air?”

  I had no idea. Bernie unscrewed the float, held it up, peered into the little hole. “Hmmm,” he said. Then he put the float on the floor and stamped on it, not hard. The metal flattened out, came apart. Bernie bent down, went through the pieces, picked up a baggie. Inside were two sort of books, thin and small, with reddish covers. Bernie took them out, leafed through them.

  “Russian passports, big guy,” he said. “What would I do without you?”

  I didn’t understand the question.

  Bernie turned the pages of the passports. “Mostly in Cyrillic, but there’s some English here and there, maybe a glasnost development.”

  Wow! Whatever was going down, this was Bernie at his smartest. The air in the little bathroom felt just the way it does befo
re lightning flashes across the sky. I crouched down on the floor, no fan of lightning, myself.

  “His real name is Alexei Urmanov, and she’s Yekaterina Urmanova, meaning the marriage is genuine. Genuine Russian sleepers, Chet, plus . . .” He tapped the passports on his palm, glanced at me. “What are you doing down—”

  I barked, real loud, real sharp. Bernie jumped back. “Whoa! You scared me.”

  Oh, no! How was that even possible? But no time to think about it now because I’d heard knocking on the front door. I raced out of the bathroom, through the basement and up the stairs, Bernie following, to judge from the huffing and puffing at my heels.

  THIRTY-ONE

  * * *

  I got to the front door before Bernie, stood straight and stiff, all my muscles taut—a nice feeling when you’re the physical type. Outside a woman called, “Lizette? You there?” I went back and forth on the question of whether to bark, and was still doing it, faster and faster, when Bernie caught up. He stuck the gun in his pocket, keeping his hand in there, and opened the door.

  Yes, a woman, a very interesting woman who brought with her scents of the nation within, plus cats, gerbils, parakeets, horses, and also guinea pigs, which was no surprise, since she was carrying one of the little critters in a cage, a chubby dude with a white face and eyes that looked alert and stupid at the same time, if that makes any sense. There’s one kind of human who smells like this woman and one only, namely the vet kind. Parked in the driveway was a typical vet sort of van, decorated with a panel picture showing one of my kind who appeared to be cuddling with a cat, which is a typical sort of vet van picture, hard to explain.

  “Uh, hi,” the vet said, looking up at Bernie. “Is Lizette home?”

  “Not at the moment,” Bernie said.

  “That’s funny,” the vet said. “I told her I’d be dropping by with Barnum.” She raised the cage.