Digging was a habit that Ben had attempted to train out of Caesar from a young age. Not only did Nan Fulton like her rosebushes left alone, Caesar’s digging habit could pose a danger to Ben and himself while on operations. An explosive detection dog could accidentally set off explosives he was trying to dig up. Caesar’s job was just to locate explosives, leaving bomb-disposal experts to do the rest. But Caesar had never entirely lost the digging habit, and it had helped him to get out of trouble several times in the past. Once more, he yielded to the temptation to dig with his big webbed feet.
‘César, what are you doing?’ Juanita whispered, crawling to join him. ‘Are you trying to escape?’
Caesar paused and glanced around at Juanita with a look that was all concentration, then resumed his digging. Before long, he had created a small hole beneath the wall. From outside, a miniature dog snout poked through. It belonged to Rosa, Lola’s pink chihuahua. Withdrawing her head, Rosa gave a yap. It was as if she were trying to encourage Caesar to escape through the hole. The labrador redoubled his efforts. Twice he stopped to try to push his head out through the hole, but each time he found the hole wasn’t big enough.
Finally, the gap was sufficiently large for him to fit his head through. Pulling with his front legs and pushing with his back legs, Caesar was able to wriggle his way beneath the wall and scramble out into the yard beyond.
‘Bravo, César!’ Juanita whispered as she watched his tail disappear through the hole.
Outside, in the long, narrow, weed-infested yard which ran the width of the house, Rosa stood waiting for the big labrador. Excited that she had a playmate, the little pink dog began to run around, yapping. But as much as Caesar loved to play, he wasn’t like most other dogs. He was a highly trained war dog, and he spent more time with soldiers than with dogs. He was missing one soldier in particular – Sergeant Ben Fulton – and was determined to locate him. Caesar shook the dirt from his coat then, looking around in the morning sunlight, he spotted a wooden fence hemming in the rear of the yard.
Trotting to the fence, Caesar gazed up at the top with a thoughtful look on his face. In his mind, Caesar calculated that, if he took a running jump at it, he could reach the top of the fence, clear it and make good his escape. Behind him, Rosa continued to yap, trying to coax him into chasing her. But Caesar’s thoughts went to Juanita. He turned and bounded back to the shed. He could see that Juanita was trying to enlarge the hole from inside the shed, to make it big enough for her own escape. Barking his encouragement to Juanita, he began to dig from his side. As he dug, little Rosa ran around him, continuing to yap.
All this barking eventually attracted Lola’s attention. Hearing the racket, she opened a window and leaned out to see what was going on in the yard. ‘Rosa! What is all the noise about?’ she demanded. And then she saw Caesar digging furiously beside the shed. ‘Vargas! Vargas!’ she called with alarm. ‘Your sniffing dog is escaping!’
Less than a minute later Vargas, Diego and Tommy came rushing into the yard from the house. Caesar momentarily stopped digging and turned to see the gangsters before he resumed digging in an attempt to free his new friend Juanita Del Ray.
‘Got you, poopy dog!’ Vargas declared victoriously, grabbing Caesar’s leash.
Caesar bared his teeth and growled at Vargas.
‘Don’t you growl at me, poopy dog!’ Vargas snarled, prodding Caesar’s bruised ribs with his foot.
This brought a pained yelp from Caesar.
Tommy knelt down on one knee and surveyed the hole beside the shed. ‘Looks like the dog was trying to dig the cop out, Vargas.’
‘Neither of them is going any place,’ said Vargas, yanking the leash and pulling Caesar closer.
‘Aren’t you afraid the dog will bite you, Vargas?’ said Diego. ‘It looks pretty mean to me.’
‘He wouldn’t dare bite me!’ Vargas returned. Gripping the leash tighter with one hand, he removed a SIG Sauer semi-automatic pistol from his belt with his other hand and pointed it at Caesar.
Caesar glared up at him but made no more sounds and did not move. Rosa, meantime, dashed in and fastened her tiny jaws around Vargas’s right ankle.
Letting out an alarmed howl, Vargas kicked his leg around, trying to force the dog to let go. ‘Get off! Get off!’ he bellowed.
As Rosa hung on like a limpet, Diego and Tommy roared with laughter at the sight until Vargas finally shook the chihuahua from his ankle. The little dog went rolling across the yard. When she got back on her feet, she yapped defiantly at Vargas from what she thought would be a safe distance.
‘Idiot of a dog!’ Vargas raged, turning his weapon on the pink ball of fluff.
‘Vargas!’ yelled Lola from the window above. ‘Don’t you dare harm a hair of my little Rosa’s body!’
‘The rat dog does not have hair, it has fur,’ he corrected her, lowering his pistol.
‘You will not have hair in a minute,’ Lola fumed. ‘I will tell my husband to have every hair plucked from your body if you hurt my Rosa.’
‘Take it easy,’ said Vargas. ‘I will not harm the rat dog as long as you keep it away from me.’ He returned his attention to Caesar. ‘As for you, poopy dog, we will have to find a better place to keep you and the cop.’
‘Put them in the laundry,’ Lola called. ‘It has bars on the window and is never used anyway.’
Vargas turned to Diego and Tommy. ‘You two, bring the cop to the laundry.’
With that, Vargas led Caesar toward his latest prison, in the heavily guarded mansion of the Green Parrot.
In the busy cantina at Monterrey Police Headquarters, Ben was eating a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs with Lieutenant Peters when he was interrupted by a call from Amanda Ritchie.
‘Don’t you ever sleep, Amanda?’ Ben said good-naturedly.
‘Plenty of time for sleeping on my flight to the States,’ Amanda replied.
This caught Ben by surprise. ‘You’re travelling to the US? Where are you now?’
‘I’m at Sydney Airport, waiting for my flight to Dallas. Then I’m coming to wherever you are. I’ve convinced my editor there’s a big story for me to cover over there.’
Ben frowned. ‘You didn’t reveal that Caesar had been abducted, did you?’
‘No, I promised I wouldn’t, didn’t I! I told my boss I was working on confidential information. He knows from my track record to trust me when I say there’s a big story in the wind, even if I can’t reveal what it’s about straight-away. So, where are you, Ben? Still in San Antonio, or are you now in Monterrey?’
Ben was surprised. ‘Why do you think I’d be in Monterrey?’
‘Rocky Marron was from Monterrey.’
Ben smiled. ‘You’ve done your homework.’
‘That’s my job, Sergeant Fulton,’ she said teasingly. ‘I thought you might be in Monterrey, so I booked a room at the Hilton Garden Inn there.’
‘Monterrey is a dangerous place, Amanda,’ Ben warned.
‘My job has taken me to plenty of dangerous places. You know that, Ben. I’m used to it. Anyway, they’re calling my flight – I’ll see you soon.’
‘Okay. Bye.’ Smiling to himself, Ben hung up.
‘Good news?’ asked Lieutenant Peters.
‘I’m not sure,’ Ben confessed, though he couldn’t deny that he was looking forward to seeing his friend. ‘So, where do we go from here?’ he asked the lieutenant. ‘How do we track down Caesar and your missing sergeant?’
Lieutenant Peters took a sip of his coffee. ‘First, we find the Green Parrot.’
‘Great! What are we waiting for?’
‘This is not so easy. We believe that he lives somewhere in Monterrey, but this is a big city, of several million people. It is easy to disappear here. And none of the few people who do know where the Green Parrot is hiding out is brave enough – or foolish enough – to reveal precisely where.’
‘Okay. But you must have some idea of where he is.’
‘We have heard on the streets th
at his house is a mansion. So, we think he must live in one of the rich suburbs in the south of the city, pretending to be a legitimate businessman. That is all. We need a break, Ben. We need someone to spill the beans and tell us where to find the Green Parrot.’
Ben nodded as he appreciated the problem. ‘You have your ear to the ground out there in the city?’
‘Naturally. We have paid informants. The crazy thing is that people here talk about Marron all the time on social media: “El Loro Verde does this for the poor”, “El Loro Verde did that to make the police look foolish”. They will even say that they had bumped into him at this bar or that restaurant. We never know how much of that sort of boasting is true – if any.’
‘Do you trust what you see on the internet?’
‘Personally, I don’t believe a great deal of what I read on there. To me, the internet is the tool of liars, braggarts and fools. But I’d believe it if someone tweeted they’d seen the Green Parrot at an Elvis tribute performance.’
Ben nodded. ‘I’ve heard he’s a big Elvis fan.’
‘The world’s biggest, by all accounts,’ said Lieutenant Peters. He was about to say something when his phone rang. He glanced at the screen and sighed. ‘Excuse me.’
Peters spoke urgently in Spanish for a few moments, then hung up.
‘Good news, Ben,’ he announced with a smile. ‘It looks like my boys have identified the two pistoleros who kidnapped Sergeant Del Ray as the same guys who took your dog in San Antonio. Come to my office and take a look.’
‘The weekly package has arrived from the Velásquez brothers, Padrino,’ Vargas announced, walking into the living room. That package was filled with cash, from Árbol criminal activities.
An old Elvis Presley movie, G.I. Blues, was playing on one of the screens. ‘I have seen this movie a hundred times before,’ said Carlos Marron, not taking his eyes off the movie, ‘but every time I see something new. Look at the jeep in the background there.’ He pointed to the screen. ‘The registration plate begins with “EP”. A clever touch from the producers, don’t you think?’
‘Fascinating,’ Vargas replied. He was not an Elvis fan. ‘What do you want me to do with the package?’
‘You allowed a package into the house?’ Marron sat up and switched off the movie. ‘Estrella could have planted a bomb in the package, you idiot! We could all be blown sky-high! Where is it now?’
Vargas paled. ‘It’s, er, in the garage, Padrino.’
‘Get the sniffer dog to check it out. That’s what it is here for. Now, Vargas! Rápido! Rápido!’
‘Sí, Padrino.’
Vargas hurried away, summoning Diego and Tommy to follow him. The three of them went to the laundry, where they found Juanita sitting on the tiled floor with Caesar lying at her feet.
‘You, bring the dog,’ Vargas snapped, pointing to Juanita.
The sergeant rose to her feet and took up Caesar’s leash. ‘Come, my friend,’ she said to the labrador. ‘Let’s see what they want.’
Caesar trusted Juanita and accompanied her without resistance.
The three thugs took dog and handler down to the garage. ‘Check out that package over there,’ Vargas commanded, pointing to a box sitting in front of one of the garage doors. ‘You have ten minutes to tell us whether it is okay or not.’
He, Diego and Tommy then retreated to the floor above.
Juanita led Caesar to the box, stopping about three metres away from it. ‘What do you think, César?’ Juanita asked her canine companion. She pointed to the box, its openings covered with grey duct tape.
Caesar looked up at her with an expression that seemed to say, What’s that, new friend? What do you want me to do?
‘Is there an explosive device in there, César? Is it an IED?’
Still Caesar didn’t know what she wanted him to do. If he had been working with Ben, he would have received a familiar command: ‘Seek on, Caesar.’ Upon hearing this, he would have immediately gone into explosive-detecting mode. But Juanita didn’t know this.
A bemused Caesar looked up at her, his head tilted to one side. The expression on his face seemed to say, I don’t know what you want me to do.
‘Come, let us take a closer look,’ said Juanita, hiding her fear that the box might explode at any moment. If she was to keep the gangsters happy, she had to do her best to sort this out, hopefully with Caesar’s help. The pair moved to stand right in front of the box. Juanita dropped to one knee beside Caesar and gently tapped the top of the box. ‘What do you smell, César? Can you smell explosives in here?’
Caesar lowered his head to the cardboard and then, turning to look at her, sat down.
Juanita grimaced. ‘Is that your signature?’
But Caesar seemed more interested in her than in the box, and that didn’t fit with what Juanita knew about sniffer dogs. When Toltec detected contraband, he became very excited and wouldn’t take his eyes off the object. Caesar seemed disinterested in the box, which Juanita deduced to mean explosives were not present. She proceeded to strip the duct tape from the top of the box, piece by piece, until she was able to pull back the top flaps. In front of her lay stack upon stack of one-hundred dollar bills. There had to be tens of thousands of dollars in that box.
Vargas and his cronies appeared behind her. ‘No need for you to worry about all that, lady.’ Grabbing her arm, he roughly hauled her to her feet and away from the box.
Caesar turned to Vargas, baring his teeth.
Vargas pulled the SIG Sauer pistol from his belt and pointed it at the labrador. ‘Do not growl at me, César!’ he said menacingly. ‘Not if you know what is good for you.’
Lieutenant Peters turned the folder that lay open on his desk so Ben was able to see the two mug shots. ‘My boys think they have a match. The SAPD sent us the description that Cindy Levine gave of the two men who stole your Caesar. We matched it to the description that the owner of the restaurant gave of the two men who kidnapped Sergeant Del Ray. Both are convicted Árbol pistoleros who escaped in a mass breakout from Apodaca Prison that Árbol staged a few years back.’
Ben studied the photographs, lodging the images in his memory for future reference. ‘What are their names?’
‘The man on the left is Diego Garcia. The other is Tomas el Uno, also known as Tommy the One.’
‘Any idea where they are?’
‘That, my friend, is not so easy to know. Like the Green Parrot, you can’t just look these guys up in the phone book. But at least we know who we are looking for now.’
Sitting on his bed in the early hours of the morning, Ben Skyped his family.
‘Have you got Caesar back yet?’ Maddie asked anxiously. She, Josh and Nan sat on the living-room sofa.
‘Not yet, sweetheart,’ Ben replied wearily.
‘You look tired, Ben,’ Nan remarked. ‘Are you getting enough sleep?’
Ben smiled. ‘Yes, Mum. How’s the drumming going, Josh? Keeping up the practice?’
‘I’ve been too busy searching for clues about Caesar. There’s nothing on the net about him being kidnapped. I’ve searched and searched. I thought I might be able to find something to help, like I did before.’
Josh had certainly been a help to his father in the past. He was the one who had identified where the Secretary-General of the UN was being held hostage in Afghanistan.
‘We’ve kept his abduction a classified military secret for now,’ explained Ben. ‘We don’t want anything about it to get out.’
‘Why?’ asked Josh, puzzled.
‘We didn’t want the media crawling all over the story. That would only complicate matters. News reports could tip off the bad guys about what we know and what we’re thinking.’
‘Oh,’ said Josh. ‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘What do you know, and what are you thinking, Ben?’ asked Nan.
‘We know who took Caesar, and we think we know, roughly, where he is.’
‘That’s great!’ exclaimed Maddie. ‘Just tell those
hobble people to give Caesar back!’
‘It’s not that simple, Maddie,’ Ben responded with a sigh. ‘But we’re working on it. By the way, I’ll be seeing Amanda over here in the next day or so.’
‘I like Amanda,’ said Nan.
‘She’s nice,’ said Josh. ‘Say hello from us,’ Nan added.
Ben nodded. ‘I will.’
‘Keep up the good work, Ben,’ Nan said encouragingly. ‘We know you’ll get Caesar back.’
‘Hopefully sooner rather than later,’ said Ben. ‘All of you keep your fingers crossed that we get a firm lead on Caesar’s whereabouts.’
‘We will, Daddy,’ Maddie responded, holding up her crossed fingers for her father to see.
The next day after school, the familiar sound of Josh’s drumming practice filled the house. Nan smiled to herself and set about preparing dinner. Maddie was sitting at the kitchen table doodling absently on a piece of paper. She seemed unusually introspective.
‘You’re particularly quiet today, Maddie,’ said Nan. ‘Are you worrying about Caesar?’
‘I always worry about Caesar when he and Daddy are away,’ Maddie replied. ‘But Daddy said he would bring him home, so I know he will.’
‘Anything else on your mind?’
Maddie shrugged. ‘Harriet Blaze is getting a new mummy.’
‘Is she?’ Nan raised an eyebrow. ‘How?’
‘Her daddy is getting married again.’
‘Ah. I see.’
‘She said I would get a new mummy one day, too.’
Nan chuckled. ‘Really? What made her say that?’
‘She was being nasty, I think, after I didn’t take Caesar to her birthday party.’
‘Ah. Girls can be nasty like that sometimes. Don’t let her worry you.’
‘I don’t need a new mummy,’ Maddie said firmly. ‘I’ve already got a mummy.’
Nan wondered if she was talking about her. ‘You mean me?’
Maddie giggled. ‘No, you’re my nan. I mean my mummy.’
‘Ah. Of course.’
It had been several years now since the children’s mother, Marie Fulton, had passed away from breast cancer. Maddie had been quite young at the time of her death and didn’t refer to her often.
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