We came to the bayou. That two-pointed moon was a little higher in the sky now and shining brighter. Tiny silvery two-pointed moons wobbled on the water. A fish jumped, came down with a silvery splash. “Bass,” said Birdie, which I didn’t get. But it didn’t matter: We were having fun in the night, on our way to do I didn’t know what and didn’t care. But whoa! Was Birdie actually having fun, too? I caught a human smell that just can’t be hidden from me—faint in her case, but there—a sharp and sour scent, the scent of human fear. What was there to be afraid of? And could you still be having fun if you were afraid? I tried to remember the last time I’d really been afraid, and sort of could, but also didn’t want to, so I didn’t. Plus there’s no scaring me; almost forgot.
We entered the palm grove across the bayou from Straker’s World Famous Fishing Emporium, paused at just about the same spot from where we’d watched old man Straker smoke his cigar. The emporium was big, unlit, and boxy, somehow darker than the night. The scent of Birdie’s fear grew stronger. I bumped up against her in a friendly way, all I could think of to do.
“What would anyone want with Black Jack?” she said softly. “I don’t get it.” Another fish jumped on the bayou, and then one more. “A good night for fishing, Bowser.” She headed out of the palm grove, moving toward the bridge, me right beside her, of course. The moment we stepped out of the shadow of the last tree, the moonlight seemed to get much stronger, the metal railings of the bridge gleaming in the night. Birdie stopped. “We’ll be so visible on the bridge,” she said in a low voice. “So I guess …”
I waited to hear Birdie’s guess.
“I guess we’ll have to run!”
Wow! What a great guess, totally unexpected! Running was one of my favorite things in the whole world! How did she know? We took off, tore along the side of the bayou, made a sharp turn onto the bridge—a narrow bridge with a paved road but no sidewalks. Just a few bounds and I was across. I looked back, saw Birdie at about the halfway mark, a fine runner for a human, although you have to feel sorry for humans when it comes to running. I’m always a bit surprised that they don’t topple over after a few steps.
Birdie caught up to me. I nudged against her, just letting her know we were back together and everything was cool. She gave me a quick pat and then we set out along the grassy verge by the bayou, moving toward Straker’s World Famous Fishing Emporium, looming bigger and bigger before us. The bayou itself was on the move, too, making all kinds of hissing and bubbling sounds, and even one a lot like breathing, as though … as though the bayou was a living thing. Was it? I kind of thought so, but don’t listen to me on this sort of stuff. As for sounds, we made none except for the flippy-flop of Birdie’s polka-dot flip-flops, and the boom booming inside my chest, a nice sound that never went away.
Meanwhile, Birdie was walking slower and slower, like something was pulling her back. A long time seemed to go by before we found ourselves in the shadow of old man Straker’s place, the deck where he’d smoked his cigar almost sticking out over us. We paused right there, standing in the patch of yellow flowers, now white in the moonlight. Birdie knelt down, parting the flower stalks with her hands, maybe looking for something. The cigar butt, by any chance? It was actually lying behind her, not far from her feet, as anyone could plainly smell. So Birdie wasn’t searching for the cigar butt? What was she searching for? I thought about that for a while, and then, just to be doing something, I went over and picked up the cigar butt.
“Bowser?” she whispered, turning toward me. “What are you—” She saw what was sticking out the side of my mouth. The taste of cigar butts can’t be at the top of anyone’s list, as you might know, nowhere near bacon bits, for example, or leftover sweet-and-sour ribs in a Chinese-food carton. “Good boy,” she said, taking it from me. “Good, good boy.”
My tail started up like you wouldn’t believe. The fun we were having! Birdie took the flashlight out of her pocket, switched it on, kind of curling her body around the light to keep it from escaping, and shone it on the cigar butt.
“ ‘El Rey de Cuba,’ ” she said.
She switched off the light, gazed up at old man Straker’s place, huge and dark in the night, the deck almost on top of us.
“A lowlife we know, no question about it now,” she said. “And Black Jack’s got to be in there, Bowser. When will we ever have a better chance than right now?”
Tough question. Right then I had yet another amazing thought: From now on, I would let Birdie handle all the tough questions. The very next moment, I felt so light I almost rose straight up in the sky! Was I on a roll or what?
“Come on, Bowser. Let’s find a way inside.”
WE WERE BREAKING INTO STRAKER’S World Famous Fishing Emporium? Was that it? I remembered a few break-ins from back in my days in the city. Every now and then the street gangers took it into their heads that a break-in would be just the thing, and then they’d gather up crowbars and jimmies and we’d hit the road and nothing good would ever result. Birdie reminded me of the gang in no way at all, plus she carried no crowbars or jimmies and wore flip-flops, which the street gangers never did, but here we were slowly circling this big dark building. Birdie’s eyes were silvery in the moonlight, actually a bit fearsome if you didn’t know her, but I knew her. Summing it up, she was the best.
We came to a door at the side of the emporium. Birdie rattled the knob, got nowhere. She put her face to a window, stood on her tiptoes, and peered inside. “Can’t see a thing,” she said, hardly making a sound at all, more like only moving her lips. What a team we were, just made for roaming around in the night and doing break-ins! I rose up on my hind legs, put my front paws on the window with the idea of taking a look myself, the only problem being my size and strength, which sometimes escape my mind. Like now, for example. Summing up one more time, I should have placed my paws on that window somewhat less forcefully, in which case the glass might not have broken. As it was, the window did break, not the shattering kind of break you see when a street ganger opens up with both barrels, but merely a division of one big square of glass into a few pieces, all of them falling into the darkness on the other side.
“Oh, no,” Birdie said, perhaps a little on the loud end. The landing of the glass pieces on the floor inside old man Straker’s place was also on the loud end. Birdie went still, the smell of her fear growing much stronger, and cocked an ear. Silence fell, the extra-silent kind of silence that sometimes follows loud noise. Then, from far away, came the hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo of an owl. Birdie heard it, too. “Hey, that sounds like Night Train,” Birdie said, her voice now back in super-quiet mode. “Must mean good luck.” An owl hooting meant good luck? And Birdie knew this owl, an owl name of Night Train? I was still working on these amazing new problems when Birdie knelt and felt the pads on my front paws. “Are you all right, Bowser?” Me? I was better than all right, at the very top of my game. She gave me a pat, rose, and glanced around. The night was still, quiet, peaceful. “Since the window’s broken anyway …” she said.
My thought exactly! Or it would have been, given time. But there was no time, because Birdie was already picking out the few shards of glass still caught in the window frame and climbing inside in a way that looked not so easy: sticking in one leg, twisting around with her hands on the sill, drawing in the other leg, and easing herself down. I didn’t bother with all that, simply dove on through, sticking a nice soft landing on the floor.
We stood together in the darkness. I could hear the beating of Birdie’s heart, not my sort of boom-boom, boom-boom, more of a pit-pat, pit-pat—real quick. “Where do we start?” she said.
Start what? I listened to our two heartbeats, waiting for the confusion to go away. It always does if you wait long enough.
Click. Birdie switched on the flashlight and swept the beam of light around the walls. I spotted a calendar, a few pictures, and mostly just empty wall space, also saw we were in a sort of office with a desk or two, computers, phones, and—and a wastebasket, to which I
sidled over. Not at all to my surprise—I’d known something like this was in the cards the moment I’d touched down in this place—the remains of fast-food chicken nuggets lay under a jumble of balled-up papers in this wastebasket. Fast food: one of the great human inventions, the cage probably being the worst.
Birdie switched off the light. “Why would he hang Black Jack on his wall?” she said. “What am I thinking?” And then: “Bowser? Where are you?” Click, and the light was back on, surrounding me in a bright circle. At that moment I happened to be standing by the wastebasket, one paw in the air, all finished with snack time. “What are you up to?”
Not a thing. I trotted over to Birdie. She didn’t switch off the flash, instead pointed the beam down at the floor. The shadow of a real big dude stretched across the floor. The fur on my neck rose straight up and stayed that way until I realized the big dude was me.
“So, if not on a wall, where?” Birdie said.
We moved toward a big blocky metal box in one corner, a box with a dial on the front. This was a safe, as I knew from my days with the street gangers. Birdie gave the dial a little spin. That never worked. Dynamite was what you needed, which I’d also learned back in the city. We had no dynamite on us, and there was none around, an easy fact to establish, since dynamite smell can’t be missed.
“And why? Why take Black Jack in the first place? Just to be mean to Grammy? Why go to so much trouble—that’s what I can’t get past.”
She turned, shone the light toward an open doorway. We crossed the room, headed on through into a much bigger space, kind of like the main room at Gaux Family Fish and Bait, with the display cabinets and fishing gear, except this one was much bigger and there was more of everything. And hanging by cables from the ceiling was a real boat, the deck slightly above Birdie’s head level.
“Stupid emporium.” Birdie moved the beam back and forth across the hull of the hanging boat. “Like I’m impressed?” Then her voice changed. “Whoa! What if Black Jack’s in there?” Birdie rose up on her tiptoes again, tried to see over the lip of the hull. It was a bit too high. She shone the beam around the room. It came to rest on a stepladder in one corner. Birdie was turning in that direction when voices sounded outside the front entrance. Whoa! She snapped off the light and went totally still. A growling started up deep in my throat. I don’t like it when strangers appear suddenly, especially at night.
“Bowser!” Birdie whispered. “Shh.”
Shh? That meant what again? I stopped growling so I could concentrate my whole mind on remembering the answer. Meanwhile, the voices got louder, and then keys jingled. Birdie glanced around in a panicky way.
“Quick! In the boat!”
She gave my back a little tap. Jump in the boat? A snap for a leaper of my abilities. Up and over in one smooth jump, and there I was on the deck of this boat hanging from the ceiling. Why was another question. I decided to return to it later. At the moment all my attention was on Birdie as she tried to climb into the boat. In the faint moonlight that penetrated this place, I could see her fingers on the edge of the hull, her fingernails the color of the moon. With a soft grunt, she pulled herself up, scrambled over the top, fell to the deck beside me, held me close. I heard the soft plop of a flip-flop hitting the floor, followed by the front door opening with a whoosh of air, and some dude saying, “Sure this is all right, Stevie?”
“Don’t be such a wimp, Des.” I recognized that voice, a little too loud, a little too edgy: Stevie Straker.
Then came a female voice, kind of familiar. “But what if your dad found out, Stevie?”
“What’s wrong with you two? I got every right to be here. Gonna own the place one day, lock, stock, and barrel.”
“Yeah?” said Des.
“After I graduate college.”
“You going to college?” Des said.
“ ’Course I am. Tulane. All us Strakers go down to Tulane.”
“How much is it worth?” said the girl. “This whole business.”
“Hey, Solange,” said Des. “What kind of a question is that?”
“A nosy one,” Stevie said, “but I don’t care. Millions is the answer, dudes. Millions.”
“Wow,” said Des.
“What about the Gaux?” Solange said. “Are they worth millions, too?”
“The Gaux? You joking? The Gaux haven’t got a pot to pee in. We’d buy them out but it’s not even worth it.”
“What’s the story with that prize fish of theirs?” Solange said.
“How’d you hear about that?” Stevie said, real quick.
“My sister’s friends with that little snotnose Birdie.”
“She’s a snotnose, all right,” Stevie said. “Gonna get hers real soon—like tonight. But I don’t know squat about their precious fish.”
“Huh?” said Des. “I told you a couple weeks ago that—”
“Des? Zip it.”
“What were you going to say, Des?” said Solange.
“Nothin’,” said Stevie. “Des knows nothin’ about nothin’. And the whole story of that stupid fish is just the old bat trying to make trouble for us. We’d of owned it anyway, once we take them over, so what would be the point in stealing the thing?”
“Who said anything about that?” Solange said.
“Nobody,” said Stevie. “The point is they’re losers, big-time. ‘Stop the Gaux’—that’s what my dad says.”
Solange laughed. Des said, “I don’t get it.”
“No?” Stevie said. “You will after tonight.”
“What are we gonna do?” said Des.
“I’ve got this idea—one of my very best,” said Stevie. “First we need spray paint. I know there’s some around here.”
“Want me to turn on the lights?” Des said.
“So anyone outside can see, brainiac?” Stevie said.
Footsteps came our way, two dudes in sneakers, a girl in sandals, the different sounds a snap for me to put together. I felt Birdie going tense beside me, her fingers curling tight in my fur. Closer and closer the footsteps came, now right beside the boat, and then: an enormous thud, the kind made by a human falling to the floor.
“Des! What the—”
“Tripped,” said Des. He grunted and then I heard him picking himself back up. “Tripped on … this … this stupid flip-flop.”
“Gimme,” Stevie said. “Probably left behind by some dumb customer. You wouldn’t believe the morons we get around here.”
“Um,” Des said, “but aren’t they how come you got all those millions?”
“Des?” said Stevie. “You tryna be funny?”
“Naw. Just sayin’.”
Right after that I heard the faint whish of something flying through the air, and the flip-flop landed beside us on the deck of this hanging boat. Their footsteps moved away, crossing the room in the direction Birdie and I had come from. After that came a silence and then Stevie spoke, his voice fainter now, but still perfectly clear to me.
“Hmm. Thought it was over in this corner.”
“The spray paint?” said Des. “What are we gonna do with it?”
“Don’t overthink, Des. Ever heard that one?”
“Don’t overthink? Um, give me a minute.”
Solange laughed.
“What’s funny?” said Stevie.
“Nothing.”
“Not laughing at me, are you?” Stevie said.
“Why would anyone do a thing like that?” said Solange. “Where’s the spray paint?”
“Let’s try my dad’s office,” said Stevie.
Their footsteps moved farther away. A few moments later, Solange said, “I bet it’s something about the Gaux.”
“What is?” said Des.
“The spray painting.”
“Hey!” Stevie said. “How’d you guess?”
“Just lucky,” said Solange. “But now you have to tell. Fair’s fair.”
“Stop the Gaux,” Stevie said.
“Huh?” said Des.
; “Stop the Gaux—we’ll spray it in huge letters all over their stupid shop.”
“And the sign, too!” said Des.
“Now you’re thinking,” Stevie said. “Got a match?”
“Yeah.”
“Light it. The spray paint’s gotta be somewhere.”
I heard the scritch of a match getting lit. An orange glow appeared in the room, and in its light I saw Birdie’s eyes, wide open, alert, afraid—and angry, too. I felt pretty alert myself, but as for fear, I had none. Was there something to be angry about? I tried to think what.
“No spray paint I can see,” Solange said. “Des? What were you going to say about that fish? Don’t tell me you took it?”
“ ’Course he didn’t,” said Stevie. “Des is a wuss.”
“I’m just reasonably cautious,” Des said. “The story with the fish is—”
“Didn’t I tell you to zip it?” Stevie said.
“Might as well let him talk,” said Solange. “I’ll just get it out of him later.”
At that moment, the light got feeble and winked out. We were back in darkness.
“Aw, go on,” Stevie said. “Run your stupid mouth.”
“Okay, Solange,” Des said. “Guess what.”
“I hate when people say that,” said Solange. “Just get to whatever it is.”
“There’s a treasure map hidden inside that fish,” Des said.
“What a load,” said Stevie.
“It’s folded up behind the right eye.”
“Yeah?” said Solange. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Someone in my family. Couple of weeks ago.”
“Not your crazy aunt Maybelline?”
“Well, as a matter of fact—”
“Don’t even want to hear it,” Stevie said. “And it’s complete bull. I told my dad and that’s what he said. ‘Complete bull, Steveroo. Less said about it the better.’ ”
“Your dad calls you Steveroo?” Solange said.
“Got a problem with that?” said Stevie. “Come on. We gotta find that paint. Light another match.”
Scritch, and another orange glow spread through the darkness. Someone in sneakers moved around in the office, making odd crunching sounds.
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