But it was that. Working for no money, and not for the first time. Have I mentioned Bernie’s grandfather’s watch, our most valuable possession, now in hock at Mr. Singh’s? I was worried, and when I’m worried I like to gnaw things. For example: the rounded edge of the leather trim on the shotgun seat.
“Chet! How many times do I have to tell you?”
Uh-oh. Bernie sounded… not mad-he’d never get mad at me-more like not in his very best frame of mind. I sat up straight and tall, still and quiet, a total pro, on the job and eager for work. Keeping Bernie in the very best frame of mind was part of what I did.
“How about a chew strip instead?” Bernie said, opening the glove box.
Bernie: what can I tell you? The best.
We drove, and while we drove, listened to some of our favorites: “Going Back to Greenville,” “Lonesome 77-203,” “If You Were Mine.”
“Like that trumpet?” Bernie said. “Roy Eldridge, at the top of his game.”
Like it? I loved it. The trumpet did things to me. We listened to “If You Were Mine” again. And again. And one more time. And were still listening to it when we climbed into the mountains beyond the Valley, passed a huge red rock-which was when I started to pay attention to where we were, so easy to get lost in music-and stopped at Boo Ferris’s gate. He came out of the gatehouse, polishing off a burger. I started in on some real crazy barking.
“Chet! Knock it off!”
I knocked it off, just in time to hear my barks echoing in the hills. Hey! Not bad, not bad at all. They even scared me a little.
“I don’t think Chet likes me,” Boo Ferris said.
“It’s not you,” said Bernie. “He’s in a strange mood today.”
“Have you fed him?” said Boo Ferris, suddenly showing signs of being a smart guy.
“Food is not the problem,” Bernie said.
Oh? What made him so sure? True, there’d been that hot dog, but not close to a whole hot dog, and hadn’t it been a long time since then? All at once I was ravenous.
“I noticed last time,” Bernie was saying, “that you didn’t ask what I was doing up here.”
“You were on the list,” said Boo Ferris. “That’s all I need to know.”
Bernie smiled. “Just like the army.”
“Except we’re not taking fire,” said Boo Ferris.
“You were in the service?” Bernie said.
“Briefly.”
Bernie nodded, like that made sense. “Fact is,” he said, “we’re on a job.”
“Figured that.”
“And I’m wondering when you came on duty.”
“Midnight,” said Boo Ferris.
“Long shift.”
“I’m covering for one of the guys.”
“Nice of you.”
“Don’t need much sleep,” Boo Ferris said. “And I can use the money.”
“Know Thad Perry?”
“Seen him come and go.”
“Did he go last night?”
Boo Ferris didn’t back off, exactly, but the way he was standing changed, so somehow he seemed farther away; farther away and not so friendly. “They’re big on discretion up here,” he said.
“Me, too, down where I am,” said Bernie. “So my preference would be to take all that Boo and Bo confusion to my grave.”
Boo Ferris stared at Bernie. “Why is it always me?” he said.
“Interesting question,” said Bernie. “But we’re in a bit of a hurry.”
“Christ,” said Boo Ferris. “You didn’t hear it from me.”
“Goes without saying.”
Boo Ferris glanced around. We were all alone. The sun shone, nice and warm but not too hot up here on the mountain. Boo Ferris took a deep breath. “He drove through. Four a.m. on the nose. Honked like a bastard until I came to the gate. I said, ‘There some problem?’ Just letting him know, hey, I’m a human being. ‘Goddamn right there is,’ he said, but not like he was pissed at me. So I kind of took a close look at him, and I coulda sworn he’d been crying.”
“Yeah?” Bernie said.
“Allergies, you’re thinking?” said Boo Ferris. “Possible, I guess. But he stank of booze, and he had a fat old spliff burning away in the ash tray. So I told him, like, maybe this might not be the right time for a ride. But he went anyway.”
“He didn’t say anything else?”
“Not really,” said Boo Ferris. “Just some weird shit about the time being right if everything was upside down.”
“Upside down?”
“He wasn’t making much sense. But what could I do? Arrest him?”
“Imagine,” Bernie said as we drove down the mountain, “if we had citizens arresting each other all the time, willy-nilly?”
Not sure what that was all about, but I liked the sound of willy-nilly. I was feeling tip-top. And so was Bernie-I could feel it. Perps, bad guys, gangbangers: heads up.
“Of course, I might be wrong,” Bernie said.
About what? Was it even worth a thought, what with Bernie never being wrong, plus don’t forget that thinking can be hard, compared to leaping high walls, for example, or finding your way home when you were all alone and deep in the desert, or… I kind of lost the thread.
Meanwhile, Bernie was saying something about upside-down. “… no more than a thin thread, and it’s not even clear that he was even listening.”
Whoa. Thread? Lost, or just too thin? Was he talking about me? I always listened to Bernie. Now, sitting tall in the shotgun seat, ears up, stiff, and open to the max, I listened my hardest. I heard a plane, the faintest hum, from somewhere high high above. Gazing up, I saw one of those white trails planes leave in the sky-they turn gold at the end of the day, a puzzler but very beautiful-with the tiny silver plane at the front, although the sound wasn’t coming from there, instead from farther back on the white trail. What was that all about? The white trail made the sound? That was as far as I could take it.
Meanwhile, Bernie was saying something about having nothing better to go on, so why not? “Let’s roll the dice.”
Uh-oh. Please, not the dice. The last time-in a late-night dive in the diviest part of South Pedroia after the Police Athletic League fundraiser-we’d had to take Bernie’s grandfather’s watch to Mr. Singh, and at the moment Mr. Singh already had it, if I haven’t already pointed that out. So what would be our move if a financial emergency turned up, the kind of financial emergency that always enters our life when dice get rolled or cards get dealt? If only Bernie would just stick to arm wrestling: we’ve made some serious green from arm wrestling. Serious green: my mind got stuck on that idea and stayed there.
We climbed a mountain pass, up and over, and then we were out in the desert. Bernie’s hands relaxed on the wheel. I gazed at his hands, so beautiful, and even that one slightly twisted finger: beautiful, too. Soon we left the freeway and had a nice stretch of two-lane blacktop all to ourselves, pink hills rising on both sides, the kind of pink hills that shrink farther away the closer you get to them. Who could get tired of that?
“Coronado came right through here,” Bernie said.
Coronado? A perp of some kind, and not the first time Bernie had mentioned him-he always pointed out places where Coronado had been, but Coronado had moved on every time, one of those slippery customers who stayed a step or two in front of us. Message to Mr. Coronado: your day will come.
We rounded a long curve-things heating up now, the heat actually visible, wavering like rising curtains in the air-slowed down and bumped off the pavement and onto a dirt track. It led us up a slope, not very steep, toward some big rocks. Hey! I’d been here before. We often revisit places at the Little Detective Agency, just one of our techniques.
The track started looking more and more like the desert, and then you couldn’t tell the difference anymore. Bernie stopped the car by a lone creosote bush, its branches all yellow with flowers. I loved the smell of creosote bushes, a sharp smell that cleared my mind like nothing else. And today my mind was clear to begin with! I took a deep sniff or two, making my mind clearer than clear, the clearest ever. Chet the Jet!
We started up toward the rocks, side by side, Bernie sweating almost right away in the heat-a lovely smell-and soon we were in the slot canyon or whatever it was, this narrow space with sheer rock rising on both sides. Bernie pulled himself onto the top of the flat rock at the end of the canyon-I was already up there, waiting for him, and glanced around. Nothing to see that hadn’t been there before, namely the drawing on the cliff face with-what had Bernie said? — the sun and a guy dancing under it?
Bernie pointed at the guy in the drawing. “Upside down like that means they’re dead.” That was Bernie! Right there, thinking along with me. That made me feel great, so great I just about forgot that I had no clue what we were doing here, or where we were with the case, if it was a case.
Bernie was gazing up at the walls of the slot canyon, steep on the two sides, a little less steep at the end with the drawing. He walked here and there. I walked here and there with him.
“I expected-” he began, and at that moment I went still. “Something up, big guy?”
Beyond a doubt. Here, in the corner where one of the side walls met the end wall: cat. A smell I don’t miss-take it to the bank. Not our bank, where we’ve been having problems with the manager, Ms. Oxley, but forget all that. The point is that a cat had been right here, not too long ago and not just any cat.
Before I’d even realized that this corner actually formed a sort of-not a trail, really, more like simply a doable scramble to the top-I was halfway up.
“Chet! What are you doing?”
And maybe some more like that, but I wasn’t really listening, my attention focused on my back legs. When it comes to steep scrambles, all the push is from the back legs-maybe something you know already-with the front legs just marking the next set point and helping out with a bit of pull. It’s all in the timing, of course-Bernie often talks about timing-and here’s how I handle the timing: I don’t even think about it. Pound, pound, pound, and the next thing I knew I was cresting the top of the wall, a whole avalanche of rocks and pebbles clattering down behind me. I looked back, and there was Bernie, hands over his head and running for cover.
Uh-oh. I started panting, not sure why. Certainly not from this quick little climb, over in a flash. Down below the cascading came to an end and Bernie moved back toward the base of the wall, unhurt. The panting stopped.
“Chet? You all right?”
All right? More than all right-I was feeling my very best. And at the same time, here I was at the tip-top of this ledge or cliff or whatever it was. I came very close to having an interesting thought.
“What’s up there?”
I turned and started on a little recon or recoy or whatever it was, something that we at the Little Detective Agency always did in new places. Yes, I was standing on top of a cliff, but on the back side it sloped down gradually, open ground on one side and some enormous boulders on the other. I trotted along that line of boulders, a no-brainer-my favorite way of doing things and one of the best human expressions going-on account of that was where the scent took me.
You see these big boulders-much taller than a man-out in our desert; Bernie has a whole explanation about how they got here, which I’ll try to remember the next time he brings it up. Once in a while a boulder or two will have a small sort of shelf cut into it, where you might find some creature resting in the shade, a lizard, say, or possibly a rattler or a diamondback-a lesson I’ve learned in the past and hoped never to learn again. So I wasn’t surprised to find a shelf in the face of one of those boulders, and a creature lying in the shadows. But not a lizard, rattler, or diamondback: it was Brando.
Brando gazed down at me. I gazed up at him. He yawned, a real big yawn. His teeth? Huge for someone his size, and cat teeth were amazingly sharp, another one of those lessons I’ve learned and relearned. After a bit, he closed his mouth and turned his head away from me. That was infuriating. I barked, my short, sharp, annoyed kind of bark. No reaction from Brando. I barked again, shorter, sharper, more annoyed. His eyes closed.
His eyes closed? He was planning on taking a nap while I was down here barking my head off? Could I jump up to that shelf? No way. Somehow climb the rock? Too steep, straight up and down. No other ideas occurred to me. I sat down and shut up.
Brando’s eyes opened. He slowly rose, kind of unfolding himself into a long stretch-he turned out to be a not-bad stretcher, I had to give him that-and came to the edge of the shelf and stared at me. I stared back at him. Then, still with his eyes on me, Brando began to-how to put it? — walk down that sheer wall. And not in any hurry! About halfway down, he uncoiled and came gliding to earth-somehow at his own speed and not at the earth’s, if you get what I mean, and I actually don’t. He landed without making the slightest sound or sending the tiniest vibration through the ground. Now if he yawned again, I was going to Brando didn’t yawn. Instead he walked right past me, within easy pawing distance and no longer looking my way, and headed for a boulder farther down the slope. I-don’t want to say followed, more like I walked behind him, just as though I happened to be going in the same direction. And the next moment, that was what I believed, pure and simple: Brando and I were on similar courses, total accident.
Our similar courses led us around the farther-down-the-slope boulder. On the other side stood one of those gnarly palo verde trees, the yellow kind, and sitting with his back to the trunk was Thad Perry. He looked real bad: shirt torn, feet bare and bloody, eyes red and glassy, lots of powder caught in the sweat on his upper lip, like a white mustache. He had a gun in his hand, and was using it to make markings in the dirt.
Thad looked up, saw Brando.
“Go ’way, Brando,” he said, or something like that, his voice all messed up.
Brando lay down, curled up in a ball. Thad raised his gaze a bit, saw me. He blinked a few times, and then his gaze seemed to find me again.
“What the hell?” he said. He raised the gun, slowly and shakily, and pointed it at me.
Then, from farther down, came running footsteps, heavy and not very fast. I looked that way and saw Bernie pounding hard up the slope, all sweaty and dusty.
“Thad,” he shouted. “No!”
Thad turned to him. The gun swung in Bernie’s direction. Bernie kept coming. The gun wobbled a bit in Thad’s hand and then he did something I’d never seen before or even imagined. He shifted that gun around and aimed it right at the side of his own head.
We didn’t scare easily, me and Bernie, but we were scared now. I could see it on Bernie’s face, and as for me, I was terrified, terrified for the very first time in my life, my heart beating so hard in my chest I almost couldn’t stand it.
“Don’t,” Bernie said, closer now. “Nothing’s that bad.”
Thad, his eyes still on Bernie, said, “Fuck you. Fuck them all.”
I was already moving, had possibly been moving from the moment Thad had drawn down on Bernie. I zoomed over a low cactus, got my legs under me, and launched myself. Thad saw me at the last instant, and then came a dust cloud, the crack of gunfire, and a shot ricocheting off a nearby rock. KA-ZING! I got a good hold on Thad’s wrist, tasted his blood. He yelled something I missed and the gun fell to the ground. Bernie ran up and grabbed it.
“Let him go, big guy.”