“Ooomph,” said Bernie. “Easy there, big guy. Sit down for a minute.”
I sat down, if sitting down could include butt not actually in contact with ground. As for how much time a minute was, my impression had always been hardly any at all.
“Chet! We’re working here.”
This was work? The case had something to do with Bernie patting Napoleon? I wasn’t seeing that, not the least little bit. But it was the kind of thing Bernie would know. I sat back down, my butt practically grazing the ground.
Bernie gave Napoleon one more pat, real quick and with his eyes on me. Napoleon pressed his head up against Bernie’s hand with all his puny strength. Bernie’s gaze shifted to him. “Been through a tough time, huh, little fella,” Bernie said. “Where’s Ralph?”
Ah! I’m not saying I began to get it, but all at once I knew for sure that something gettable was going on. And it was coming to me—coming, coming, coming, right on the edge of where my mind grabs things and doesn’t let go—when I heard a sound from the cabin, specifically the sound of metal curtain rings sliding on a metal curtain rod. I whipped around and there was Wes at the window, eyes, eyebrows and mouth all taking the position of human alarm.
Wes was not my favorite guy to begin with and now I got the feeling he was even worse than I’d thought. I barked. Bernie turned, maybe just in time to see Wes vanishing from the window.
“Let’s go,” Bernie said.
We took off toward the cabin. I heard the screen door slap open, followed by the sound of running footsteps. As we—or maybe just me—reached the side of the cabin, Wes came into view, sprinting toward the green SUV, now just steps away from it.
“Get him, Chet!”
Which I did. In fact, Wes still had one more step to go, meaning he didn’t even have time to grab hold of the door handle; too bad, since that often led to the kind of pulling contest I particularly enjoy—tug of war, really, except it’s done with a perp instead of a rope.
THIRTY-THREE
Babe and Ruth,” Bernie said. “Complete fiction?”
We were back in the cabin now, Wes sitting on the bed, Bernie leaning against the wall across from him, me sitting beside Bernie, Napoleon asleep on a footstool that he’d clawed his way up onto, barely. Wes was as scared as any human I’d ever seen, the smell of his fear filling the room, plus he’d pissed his pants the tiniest bit.
“No,” he said. “They’re real, just not mine. They’re my mom’s cats.”
“Where does she live?” Bernie said.
“Omaha.”
“You close to her?”
Wes’s eyes filled with tears. He nodded. Bernie gazed at him, his own eyes hard and also making some kind of point.
“I’m a good person,” Wes said.
“That remains to be seen,” said Bernie.
“What are you saying?”
“Think about it.”
Wes made a motion to wipe his eyes, not so easy on account of the cuffs. “You want something from me.”
“Everything,” Bernie said. “We want everything. This little scheme you got yourself involved in is falling apart. People are going to jail. I can maybe keep that from happening to you, unless you had anything to do with killing Mack—”
“No, no—that wasn’t me!”
“Who was it?”
“That crazy gangbanger.”
“Pyro?”
“Yeah, Pyro. But he won’t admit it. Those guys never talk.”
“I don’t expect he will,” Bernie said. “How about the night I got knocked on the head and Chet was kidnapped?”
“I had nothing to do with that either.”
The feeling of needing to bite took over my teeth at once, and completely.
“See,” Bernie said, “that just doesn’t add up.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have cats, Wes. And Chet doesn’t like you, went after you on sight the morning Mami pulled him out of the water. Why would he do that?”
“For Christ sake—you’re valuing some sort of dog behavior over my word?”
“Way over, Wes. And how this is playing out, there’ll be plenty of proof. The FBI will be camped out on Little Jazz. You comfortable betting you left no DNA behind against twenty years on a cell block?”
Wes’s mouth opened and closed.
“Here’s a tip,” Bernie said. “Totally undeserved. Anyone who gets into a scrap with Chet leaves DNA behind.”
A new one on me, and I’d been in plenty of scraps. I’d be on the lookout for DNA the very next time, whatever DNA happened to be.
Wes’s eyes dampened up again. “All right,” he said. “I was there.”
“Were you the one who hit me on the head?”
“No. I hate violence, that’s the horrible part about all of this.”
“Is it?” Bernie said.
Wes tried to meet Bernie’s gaze, ended up gazing down at his feet. Bare feet, as it happened: Bernie had made him take off his shoes, which he sometimes did in situations like this, for reasons I didn’t know. Was it so there’d be more smells for me to enjoy? That was as far as I could take it, maybe too far, if that made any sense, which it didn’t really, not to me. Taking something too far: my mind isn’t the kind that can get around a concept like that.
“Just one of the horrible things is what I meant,” Wes mumbled.
“Was it Pyro, then?” Bernie said.
“Pyro?”
“Who knocked me out.”
Wes shook his head, gaze still downward.
“Cale Rugh?”
Wes looked up. “You know about him?”
“You do the answers, Wes. I do the questions.”
“Sorry.”
“Tell me about Cale.”
“He’s a cold-blooded bastard.”
“What’s his role here?”
“Security. But he’s not a Green Oil employee. I got orders to cooperate with him.”
“Orders from who?”
“Houston.”
“Meaning headquarters?”
“Yeah.”
“And what Cale mainly needed from you,” Bernie said, “was your boat and your knowledge of the waters.”
Wes nodded.
“Is Ralph alive?”
“I think so.”
“Where is he?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But you were in on the kidnapping.”
“I didn’t even know that was what it was, man. You’ve got to believe me.”
“I don’t have to believe anything,” Bernie said. “You’re still not getting it, Wes. This is the most important day of the rest of your life.”
Wes went real pale, the way people do when they’re about to keel over. “But it’s true,” he said in a weak, low voice, like all his strength was gone. “Cale said we were just going to talk to him, find out why he was making trouble.”
“This was out on Isle des Deux Amis?” Bernie said.
“How do you know all this?”
“Just answer the question.”
“Yes. Sir.”
“Sucking up won’t help you,” Bernie said. “Where’s Ralph’s Zodiac?”
“On the bottom of the lake,” Wes said. “That was Cale’s idea. It was all Cale’s idea.”
“You’re repeating yourself.”
Wes’s eyes did more of their dampening thing. “Sorry,” he said again. Round about then was when my teeth lost the biting urge. Wes wasn’t worth it.
Bernie went to the window, pulled back the curtain a bit, looked out. “What kind of trouble was Ralph making?” he said.
“He’s a total whack job, thinks he’s some sort of scientist.”
“Actually he’s an established inventor with over thirty patents to his name,” Bernie said.
“Not how I heard it,” Wes said. “Ralph’s a garage hobbyist kind of guy, according to Cale, and he came up with a crazy theory that all the new pressure gauges we’re putting in are flawed. He wanted to
sell us some homemade replacement for a million bucks. Company turned him down, of course, which was when he started making threats.”
“What kind of threats?”
“Whistle-blowing stuff. Going to the Feds, shutting us down, all that.”
“Name Patel mean anything to you?” Bernie said.
“Not really,” said Wes.
“Unacceptable answer.”
“Christ, you’re just as bad as—” Wes swallowed whatever was coming next, took a deep breath, and went on. “Ralph mentioned the name out on the island. That’s what set Cale off. But when I asked him about Patel, he told me to shut up.”
“What does that mean—set Cale off ?”
“He just lost it.”
“I got that part.”
“You want the gory details?”
“That’s where the devil is.”
“You’re so right.” Wes took a deep breath. “Cale’s one of those real strong, raw-boned types. Ralph’s just a fat little guy.” He shook his head.
“Go on.”
“Cale beat the crap out of him,” Wes said. “I mean literally. After that, whatever plan Cale had in mind—maybe paying Ralph off, maybe just throwing a scare into him—was out the window.”
“Meaning you had to kill Ralph or take him somewhere,” Bernie said.
“Not me,” Wes said. “It was all Cale, making the decisions.”
“Don’t want to hear it,” Bernie said.
“Sorry.”
“If you say sorry once more you’ll be sorrier than you ever dreamed.”
“S-s—”
Bernie got a look in his eye that made me think something very bad was about to happen to Wes. Wes shrank bank on the bed.
“I’m trying to help, I swear,” Wes said.
“Then help me understand why Ralph’s still alive.”
“That’s all about Ralph being sort of crazy like a fox, maybe. Cale’s worried he left some clue behind, hidden like, that had to be found before anything, you know, happened to . . .”
“Which is why you were searching the boat,” Bernie said.
“Ralph kept saying that there were no clues, but Cale didn’t believe him.”
“Kept saying when Cale was trying to beat it out of him?”
“But I got the feeling he didn’t want Cale to believe him,” Wes said. “Ralph’s kind of . . .”
“Smart?” Bernie said. “Brave?” He glanced over at Napoleon, still fast asleep, snuffling and sniffling away. I could feel him thinking, meaning Bernie, not Napoleon. As for me, I wasn’t sure how we were doing on this interview. Hadn’t it been going on a for a long time? I was ready for action.
Bernie turned to Wes. “Was that Cale on the phone when we arrived?”
“Someone else. They want me to—” Wes took another one of those deep breaths. Sometimes humans did that when they were getting ready to puke. I inched backward a little.
“Want you to what?” Bernie said. “Finish the sentence.”
“I’m not sure what they wanted, exactly.”
“That’s a lie, Wes. They wanted you to do something. You said it wasn’t your job. So let’s hear it.”
Wes licked his lips. “The boat.”
“They want your boat?”
“And me in it.”
“For more dirty work at sea?”
Wes did some more of that awkward dabbing at his eyes with the back of his wrists.
“What kind of dirty work?”
Tears started flowing now. Bernie watched them, his own eyes like ice. “Take Ralph way out,” Wes said. Or something like that, his voice hard to understand, being so choked up.
“Then weigh him down and dump him?”
“No one said anything about weighing down.”
Bernie gave Wes’s bare foot a soft kick, hardly touching him, but somehow that made Wes stop crying at once.
“Where’s Cale got him?” Bernie said.
Wes raised his head, all of a sudden looking like he wanted to try giving us some trouble. The criers were that way sometimes, given to wild mood swings. “Suppose I tell you. Can you sweeten your offer?”
“What offer?”
“About keeping me out of prison.”
“Sure,” said Bernie. “Tell us where Ralph is and I’ll let you walk out of here alive. That’s as sweet as it’s going to get.”
Wes’s mood began swinging back to the teary side. “Number nine,” he said.
“The platform?” said Bernie. “Ralph’s been on the platform the whole time?”
“I don’t know about the whole time.”
“So all those people are aware of what’s going on—the drillers, the roughnecks, the tool pushers?”
Wes shook his head. “Maybe the captain, but no one else. Cale’s got a separate pod on the south end, gated off and out of bounds. Cale or Pyro is always there and Ralph doesn’t come out. The crew thinks they’re guarding the platform.”
“From what?”
“Eco terrorists.”
Bernie made a snorting kind of laugh, not my favorite laugh type, but it sounded just fine coming from him. He went to the window and peeked out again.
“What’s changed?” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Cale’s decided not to keep Ralph alive anymore—how come?”
“Number nine’s going operational tomorrow—sometime tonight, actually,” Wes said. “Could be something about that, but more likely it’s you.”
“Me?”
“You’re pissing him off.”
“So he’s taking it out on Ralph?”
Wes shook his head. “You’ve got him hearing footsteps, in my opinion. He wants to close this out. That’s what he said—‘we’re closing this out tonight.’ ”
Bernie turned from the window and took out his phone. “Dr. Ory? Bernie Little here. I’ve got Napoleon.” He listened for a moment. “I’ll explain later. Can you come get him? Last cabin. I’ll leave it unlocked.” He clicked off.
“What’s going on?” Was said.
“Call Cale,” he said. “Tell him you’re on.”
Over on the footstool, Napoleon stretched his stubby legs, sighed in a snuffling way, and slept on.
THIRTY-FOUR
Here’s how much I was loving boats: even though I’d had no desire to ever get back on this particular boat—meaning Wes’s—after not long at all I was having the time of my life, and if not that, at least a pretty good one. The motion, the soft night air, the salty smells—we were out in the open ocean now—the moonlight, the starlight, Bernie’s strong hands on the wheel, the .38 Special glinting in his belt: what more could anyone ask for? As for what we were actually doing, all I knew was that it had to be the exact right thing. For a little while I worried about who was paying, and then a wavetip came slopping over the side and smacked me on the face. What fun, and totally unexpected! I shook off the water.
“Hey!” Bernie said. “You’re getting me wet, big guy.” But he was smiling.
Wes was doing the opposite of smiling, the corners of his lips bent down, his eyes worried and scared. This boat of his had a small covered space in the bow, a sort of little cabin, and Wes was sitting in it, on the deck, hands cuffed in his lap. He didn’t appear to enjoy boating. So how come he had a such a nice boat? A puzzler. No reason to puzzle over most puzzlers for long, so I turned and watched the spreading white wake the boat was making, a sight I could watch forever. When I’d had enough of that, I raised my gaze to the land we’d left and all its twinkling lights growing smaller and smaller. I’d seen sights like this in the desert, although not quite the same, with some difference I was considering thinking about when all at once a huge creature rose up on the surface of the sea, just off to one side of the boat.
Had I ever seen a creature this big? Not even close. It seemed to be sort of shaped like a fish, but not really. That head! So enormous. Its eye, so huge, saw me, no question about it. Not just saw: the creature was watching me, wat
ching me kind of like . . . Bernie does sometimes, meaning in this very nice way that says, “Hey, Chet, you’re a fun dude to hang with.” This creature—a really smart creature, although not in Bernie’s class, goes without mentioning—was giving me that kind of look and also keeping up with us no problem while not making any effort I could see. Then through this sort of hole in the top of its head, the creature shot a tall jet of water straight up in the night sky, a gleaming fountain in the moonlight. A creature that could make its own fountains! Now I’d seen everything.
“Chet! What are you barking at?”
I swung around to Bernie and barked some more. He had to see this.
“What? What?”
I turned back toward the water, Bernie following my gaze. The creature was gone.
“Easy, big guy. Need to be on the top of our game tonight.”
But—
Sometime after that, the moon now lower in the sky, some lights rose up ahead, a small group of lights and not very bright. Bernie slowed the boat, and as he did I picked up the distant whap whap whap of chopper blades. The whap whap whap grew louder, became WHAP WHAP WHAP, and then high above appeared two white lights with a flashing red one at the back, which was all you saw of choppers at night. It made a big circle out past the small group of lights, came back toward us, maybe dipping down a little, and then zoomed off in the direction of land.
“Who’s that?” Bernie said.
Wes gazed at the sky. “Don’t know,” he said. “Maybe one of ours?”
Bernie throttled back a little more. We bobbed up and down in the water in a soothing sort of way. I was considering a brief nap when Bernie left the wheel and walked up to the cabin, crouched in front of Wes.
“You understand how this is going down?” he said.
“I take us in at the south end,” Wes said. “I don’t tie up. Cale brings Ralph down in the lift. I act normal.”
“You’re leaving out an important detail,” Bernie said.
“If I screw up, you shoot me.”
Bernie nodded. He took out a key, removed Wes’s cuffs. Wes rose, rubbing his wrists, and went to the wheel. Bernie made the little click-click sound meaning “come,” and the two of us moved under the cabin roof in the bow. A roof is always nice, makes you feel safe. Bernie sat on a boat cushion. I curled up beside him. From there I had a good view through a small round window.
The Sound and the Furry Page 26