From Russia With Fur

by Rene Fomby

  From

  Russia

  With

  Fur

  rene fomby

  Book Ness Monster Press

  4530 Blue Ridge Drive

  Belton, Texas 76513

  Copyright © 2019 by Rene Fomby.

  Paperback ISBN: 9781947304116

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental and is not intended by the author.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web: http://www.renefomby.com

  Fomby, Rene. From Russia With Fur.

  Book Ness Monster Press.

  Kindle Edition.

  To Moose and Fat Tony

  Heaven may never be the same

  Contents

  Downtown Chicago,

  One Month Earlier

  Hyde Park,

  Early Sunday Morning

  Downtown Chicago,

  Mid-Morning

  Fat Tony’s Office

  Fat Tony’s Office

  The Dead Fish Bar, 11:30 a.m.

  The Dead Fish Bar

  The Dead Fish Bar

  Downtown Chicago, 12:45 p.m.

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  Q’ute Branch, 1:00 p.m.

  Q’ute Branch, 1:30 p.m.

  Ecuadorian Consulate, 2:30 p.m.

  Ecuadorian Consulate, 3:00 p.m.

  Julia Strange’s Suite, 3:15 p.m.

  Fat Tony’s Office, 3:45 p.m.

  Q’ute Branch, 4:15 p.m.

  Ecuadorian Consulate, 4:55 p.m.

  Home, 5:45 p.m.

  Home, 7:30 p.m.

  Fat Tony’s Office,

  Early Monday Morning

  Russian Tearoom

  Fat Tony’s Office

  Q’ute Branch, Noon

  Ecuadorian Consulate, 12:45 p.m.

  Shedd Aquarium, 1:30 p.m.

  Shedd Aquarium, Shark Tank

  Outside Shedd Aquarium

  Q’ute Branch, 2:15 p.m.

  Fat Tony’s Office, 3:00 p.m.

  Mullin’s Grocery, 4:45 p.m.

  Macy’s Water Tower, 6:45 p.m.

  Macy’s, 6:54 p.m.

  Macy’s, 7:00 p.m.

  Macy’s, 7:03 p.m.

  Macy’s, 7:43 p.m.

  Macy’s, 8:38 p.m.

  Home, 6:15 a.m.

  Back Yard, 7:05 a.m.

  Relocation Bureau, 9:03 a.m.

  Fat Tony’s Office, 9:55 a.m.

  Relocation Bureau, 10:39 a.m.

  Miracle Mile, 11:30 a.m.

  Chicago River, 11:57 a.m.

  Fat Tony’s Office, 5:30 p.m.

  Home, 6:30 p.m.

  Home, 9:30 p.m.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other books by rene fomby

  Downtown Chicago,

  One Month Earlier

  I

  n quieter times, he’d have headed home hours earlier, and already been curled up next to the fire, trying to exorcise the bone chilling cold of the last few months out of his system. Exorcise the demons that had been haunting him for all those months, demons that laughed at him from the pages of almost every report that had crossed his desk lately.

  He shivered in the damp, dark cold of the alleyway as he set the alarm to the office and pulled the door closed, locking it carefully and double-checking to make sure everything was secure. Even on an ordinary day you just couldn’t afford to leave things to chance, to leave any stone unturned. And these days were anything but ordinary.

  Sure, the morning had started off on a good note. Breakfast as usual, gone in a gulp or three, barely tasted. His morning constitutional, a walk down the Miracle Mile. And things had finally seemed to be settling down a bit lately, the whole prison break thing at Southside becoming old news, the hunt for all the escapees slowly fading into history.

  But then the pee-mail had popped up. From M in London, of all people. And the startling news that sent a frozen tendril trickling down his furry spine. The Russians were coming.

  A noise from close behind startled him, and he quickly ducked down and checked over his left shoulder to see who—or what—it was. But then a cane materialized out of the fog-shrouded alley, a cane with a razor sharp tip that plunged immediately into his upper haunches. And then everything went black.

  Hyde Park,

  Early Sunday Morning

  I

  ’d have to call these the dog days of winter. I mean, I don’t really understand why humans call the hottest, sultriest days in the middle of August the dog days of summer—that’s an insult to the canine race—but if ever there was a day meant for a dog, this would be it. The wet, gray blanket that had hung over Chicago almost every day for the past few months was finally headed home, hopefully for good, and even though it was still a bit on the brisk side outdoors, the sun had somehow managed to force its way through the clouds and was blissfully lighting up my backyard like those tiny little heaters my humans still had scattered all throughout the house.

  I carefully poked my nose once, then twice at the new door. My master spent several hours installing it yesterday afternoon, and just this morning he attached a little thingamajig to my collar that was supposed to make it all work, make it unlock the door whenever I needed to head outside. But you know, you can never be too careful with these things. I mean, even with my old low-tech doggie door, I had more than a few unfortunate face-to-face encounters with a swinging door that simply refused to swing when it needed to. I’m talking head trauma that woulda make a hockey star wince.

  But I gotta appreciate this whole computerized doggie door thing. Especially after everything I went through just the other day, framed for the full-scale destruction of our kitchen I had absolutely nothing to do with. Well, okay, I wasn’t exactly on full-scale sentry duty that night, but hey, every soldier gets a free pass out on the town every now and then, am I right? And it’s not like I had any advance warning of the assault. So I think it’s fair to say my humans went more than a little over the top in how they reacted. Just sayin’.

  Okay, yeah, a few dishes got dented up a bit here and there. Not much different than my own water bowl, and you don’t hear me complaining, right? And, yeah, the pull-out drawer on the freezer got pulled out all night long. That could have been anyone’s mistake, and it’s not like I was in any way interested in frozen peas and chunks of meat that could just as well have come from the Alaskan tundra. After several years of being abandoned in the bottom of the drawer, those bags could have been chunks of mastodon meat for all I knew. Or cared. My humans really need to sit down and come up with some kind of inventory system for all that, some way of keeping track of what they’ve stashed away for leaner days in the future, when the handouts don’t hand out all that well. I mean, you think I don’t know where I’ve hidden my own personal cache of half-eaten bones and chewsticks? Got it down to a science, I promise you. A science.

  Okay, where was I? Oh, yeah! The doggie door. The thing is, for about a day or so I was really in the dog house around here. Well, not a real dog house. This is Chicago, after all, and for most of the year an outside shelter isn’t really all that practical, no matter how well it’s insulated. In fact,
that’s the sort of thing PETSEC was meant to address in the first place, humans mistreating the very animals God created humans to protect in the first place. So, when I say dog house, I only mean it in the metaphorical way. I was in a whole lot of trouble. Like I might miss a din-din kind of trouble.

  That’s where Bella fits into the story. I mean, you gotta understand, I love Bella. She’s my very best friend, especially since Killer left town, but—she’s a talker, you know what I mean? Always has something to say, even when nobody’s listening. And that’s especially problematical for us dogs, because God gave us big noses and big ears for a reason, if you catch my drift. Humans have this thing about pretending they can’t hear when their girl friends start up about this and that, but we dogs got no excuse. Well, no excuse when it comes to other dogs. With humans we play deaf all the time.

  Okay, I kinda got off track there. Something about Bella. And the doggie door. Oh yeah! So I’m in serious trouble with my humans, and they’ve kangaroo courted me on the whole kitchen thing—by the way, if you’ve ever met a kangaroo, they punch first and ask questions later, so the court thing makes a lot of sense—when what do you know, Bella corners a full-on bandit of a raccoon in her own kitchen, dead to rights! Sets off an alarm that probably triggered earthquake alerts across the entire state! I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced a Corgi in full bark mode, but it’s a sonic weapon that could wake the dead. Or at least make you wish you were dead. A true force of nature that seems anything but natural.

  So Bella’s humans at some point managed to pull themselves away from Rachel Ray long enough to check out what Bella had been going on and on about, and they found this raccoon cowering in the corner of the kitchen, completely cowed by Bella’s overpowering sonic blasts. (A feeling I can sympathize with, having been on the business end of her toxic tongue myself.)

  Bottom line is, raccoon got reassigned to a new neighborhood, Bella got a gold star, and I got human food as a make-up din-din. Not a bad resolution to the problem, all in all.

  And that brings me back to the new doggie door. As it turns out, raccoons don’t wear collars, so they can’t wear the little thingamajigs that open the computerized doggie doors. Problem solved! Yeah, I had to learn a little restraint, not go blasting through the door full-tilt at every provocation, but at my age that’s probably a good thing. Take things one moment at a time, like when I get fed human food. Not one quick gulp, mind you, but instead take the time to sit back and enjoy it. Three gulps, at least. Okay, two, but who’s counting, anyway? For sure, not any dog near me!

  Back to the doggie door. After a few test nudges, my collar seems to be working out just fine, so I head straight outside for some long-overdue nap time out in the warm morning sun. A quick glance in Bella’s direction tells me she’s not outside yet, and then I remember. She had to go to the hospital this morning to get her nose patched up where the raccoon got in a lucky swipe. And she seemed pretty upset about all that, worried about having a big scar on her face the rest of her life, literally front and center. But that’s okay by me. It’s the little imperfections that really bring out the beauty in a woman, don’t you think?

  Anyway, the sun has already warmed up a nice dog-sized stretch of grass right next to my oak tree—the leaves aren’t out yet, so shade is still a month or so away, but I’ll take the sun right now any day of the week. I circle the sunny spot a few times, just to make sure everything’s perfect, then ease into a nice tight ball. I’m asleep almost before I hit the ground, my paws already starting to twitch in anticipation.

  POW! What the— POW POW! The sudden frontal assault seemed to come out of nowhere. I try to get to my feet, but my legs still seem a little wobbly, and I’ve got way too much sleepy in my eyes to see straight right about now. POW! POW POW POW!

  I manage to drag a paw across my eyes, and then—there! I see him! A giant squirrel! Perched on top of the fence between my yard and Bella’s! And it’s hurling acorns at me with the force of a submachine gun!

  “What the heck?” I sputter. Quickly I dodge behind the trunk of the oak tree, catching one last stinging shot across my haunches as I race for cover. It’s my old nemesis, Sammy Squirrel! Oh, he’s going to pay for this one big time. This time he’s gone too far. I had been just inches from latching onto that bicycle tire. Inches! You don’t come across dreams like that every day, and now it’s all ruined. Lost in the wind forever.

  “Squirrel, what the heck do you think you’re doing?”

  Sammy is smirking at me from on top of the fence. “Good to see you up and about, Moose. Took you long enough. I went through almost half of my stash of ammo trying to wake you up. And acorns like that don’t exactly grow on trees, you know.”

  I am just about to explain to him that, yeah, duh, acorns do grow on trees—on the very same oak tree I was hiding behind, as a matter of fact—when I realize just how stupid that would be. I mean, you can’t have a reasonable conversation with a squirrel, it’s just not done. Tree rats got brains the size of my front dew claws. Part of what makes them all so annoying, cluttering up my backyard, chittering away at nothing all the time.

  “Okay, Squirrel, I’ll give you ten seconds to come up with some good explanation for your behavior, then I’ll—”

  “Then you’ll do what, Yorkie? Climb this fence and come after me? With those tiny little legs of yours? That I gotta see!”

  Yorkie! Why, that little… It only takes one good long look to see I’m no Yorkie. I’m a full-bred Australian Terrier. AKC registered, for that matter. Well, not exactly, to be totally honest. Seems the paperwork for that must’ve got lost in the mail. Right after the parts that marked me as a male got lost, as well. But no question about it, I’m one hundred percent Aussie, tough as they come. Ten pounds of lean, mean fighting machine. I managed to take out that Doberman that attacked Bella virtually single-handedly, didn’t I? If my mistress hadn’t butted in like she did and swatted him down the street with her broom, that dog would’ve have been mincemeat, no question about it.

  But again, we’re back to the futility of having an adult conversation with a pea-brained squirrel, so I gotta just let it go.

  “You’ll get yours someday, Squirrel, I promise you that. But, back to the subject, why did you think it might be a good idea to bean me with a pile of acorns, especially given it’s the first nice day we’ve had around here in months?”

  Sammy chitters something under his breath I don’t quite catch, then sets the two acorns he was holding in his paws down on the top rail of the fence and turns toward me with a serious look. “To be honest, Moose, the less time I spend around a bark-brain like you the better. But I got instructions from the top. You’re wanted downtown, like on the double. There’s some secret meeting going on down at headquarters.”

  “Headquarters? Downtown? What the heck are you chittering on about?” Even on a good day, squirrels never make much sense, and this one is losing me completely. What business could I possibly have downtown? I mean, I’m a suburban pooch, I don’t know a soul out in that godforsaken neck of the woods. Well, not a soul except—

  Sammy cocks his small head sarcastically. “PETSEC, you lap dog idiot! Who else do you think would have a headquarters in downtown Chicago? The stock market? McDonalds? Sheesh!”

  PETSEC? Boy, I hadn’t heard that name since the whole Killer thing, since we broke my best buddy out of his death row cell down at Southside Prison and got him settled into a new home. Which reminds me, I am way overdue paying him a visit and catching up…

  The squirrel tosses another acorn in my direction, rather haphazardly this time, and it bounces harmlessly off the grass in front of my feet. “Did you hear me, furball?” he shouts. “Headquarters wants your brown overstuffed butt downtown like yesterday, so you better get a move on. And with those tiny little legs of yours, it’ll probably take you a month to get there, anyways, if you even make it at all.”

  I look down at the acorn, then back up at the squirrel. PET
SEC or not, this guy still had some ‘splaining to do. “What in the world would PETSEC want with me? And how in the world are you connected with them? That’s a pet protection organization, after all. No squirrels allowed.”

  Sammy spat on the ground in front of the fence. “Believe it or not, Yorkie, we squirrels are an integral part of the organization. We make up the very core of PETSEC’s perimeter alert system. The Distant Early Warning Squirrels, they call us. DEWS, for short.”

  “But you can’t be part of PETSEC, for gosh sakes! You’re not pets,” I splutter, completely confused by now. Squirrels? In PETSEC? It’ll never happen.

  The squirrel’s lips pull back threateningly, baring all his teeth. Gotta say, never seen a tree rat do that before now. “Who says we’re not pets, Mooselet? We’re just outside pets, is all, like a lot of cats. Why, the humans have been putting out nice little squirrel feeders since the dawn of time, filled to the top with delicious morsels of seed, just in case we ever run short of nuts. Sometimes they even put little covers on them, to keep the raccoons out. And, truth be told, we probably need PETSEC’s protection even more than you purse doggies do.”

  That’s preposterous, and I make no bones telling him so. “Yeah? And why is that, exactly? You guys got it made. Free food, free housing up in the trees. No natural predators.” I have to pause for a second on that one. But, to be fair, I’ve never actually caught a squirrel before. Don’t really know what I’d do with one if I did. I mean, what self-respecting dog would ever want one of those mangy flea-bitten things in its mouth? Just the thought of it would put me off kibble for a month, I tell you. But, back to the conversation. Squirrels have a way of distracting me.

  A haunted look crosses Sammy’s face for just a fleet second. “You got no idea, Moose. You got no idea what we squirrels go through on a day-to-day basis. I mean, you ever been shot at by a human in your own back yard? They even hand out pellet guns to their little humans and send them outside to hunt us down. And just for the fun of it, mind you. They kill us just for the fun of it. I mean, I can understand it if they’re all starving to death and hunting for food, like they did back in the day. That’s just the circle of life, after all, and you can’t blame someone for trying to feed their family. But—”