A Cat Was Involved (3 page)

Bobby gave me a hard look. “Had a feeling the whole time you’d screw up,” he said. “You flunk.”

I flunked? What did that mean, exactly? It didn’t sound good. I licked the blood off my muzzle.

∗ ∗ ∗

We drove away from the range. I had the back all to myself. Butch sat up front with Bobby. Bobby dropped Butch off at the Valley PD kennel where we lived but left me in the car. Hey! I wanted to get out, too. But that didn’t happen. Instead Bobby and I went on a long drive that took us across the bridge over the arroyo and back into Vista City, where I’d lived in the old days. We parked in front of a low cement-walled building. Bobby opened my door.

“Let’s go.”

We walked up to the building. Right away I knew there were lots of my kind inside, and pretty soon one of them realized I was outside and started barking. Others joined in. I loved being with my kind—and a whole big gang would be a rare treat—but for some reason I had no desire to enter this place.

Bobby tried the door. It didn’t open. He peered at a sign in the
window and checked his watch. “Missed them by five goddamn minutes.” He banged on the door. The barking got louder. Bobby took out his phone.

“Rick? I’ve got a date tonight and I need a favor.”

∗ ∗ ∗

Bobby and I waited by the car. He leaned against it. I stood beside him. Once he glanced down at me and shook his head. The sun sank in the sky a bit and Bobby’s shadow moved over me, nice and cool, especially since we were getting to the hot part of the year. I shifted into the sun anyway.

Rick drove up, rolled down his window. “This one flunked the leaping test?”

“Yup.” Bobby opened the rear door of Rick’s cruiser. “Just feed him tonight, pretty much anything you’ve got handy. No need in the morning. I’ll swing by early and take him back here.”

“Got it.”

“Thanks, bro.” Bobby turned to me. “In.”

I jumped in Rick’s cruiser and got myself right over to the other side. Bobby closed the door. We rode off.

Rick drove in silence, out of Vista City, back across the arroyo and onto a freeway. He checked me in the rearview mirror.

“Weak link after all, huh?” he said. “How did Bobby put it? A bit of a puzzle? He knows his stuff.”

I lay down, closed my eyes. I’m the type who can fall asleep in no time flat, especially if there’s nothing doing out in the world. Funnily enough, sleep wouldn’t come.

“But I’ve got kind of an idea,” Rick said after a while. “Based on the old if you’re handed a lemon make lemonade thing.”

What was he talking about? Lemons? I had no interest in them at all. As for lemonade, I’d tasted it, not bad, but water was my
drink. Plus right now I wasn’t the slightest bit hungry or thirsty, kind of strange for me. I curled up. Sleep came.

∗ ∗ ∗

Motion stopped. I sniffed the air. Pleasant air, with a strong scent of mesquite, one of my favorites. I opened my eyes and stood up. We were parked in the driveway of a nice little house that had a red tile roof and a yard with a few trees and some spiky desert-type plants. Rick got out of the car. He gazed at the house. “What’s the best approach? He’s so goddamn difficult.” Rick opened my door. “No point holding back—we’ll go in all guns blazing.”

We approached the front door. I’d been involved in all-guns-blazing-expeditions back in my crack-house days and knew that by now the guns should be out and ready, but Rick’s hands remained empty. And then instead of kicking in the door he simply knocked. I got ready for trouble and lots of it.

The door opened. Surprise! There was the Hawaiian shirt dude. Bernie: The name came to me at once. We were going to take him down? I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that. Then I caught the first lovely whiff of him and was sure I couldn’t. His eyes—very interesting eyes, full of both shadows and light—went to Rick, me, and back to Rick.

“Rick?” he said. “Something up?”

“No,” Rick said. “I mean not really.” He gestured toward me. “Remember, um, Butch, here?”

“This is Chet,” Bernie said. “Butch is the lazy one.”

“Chet, right,” said Rick. “Anyway, maybe you could do me a little favor.”

“Like what?”

“Turns out that Chet washed out of the program.”

“He did?”

“Flunked the leaping test.”

Bernie gave me another look, maybe the strangest look I’ve ever gotten from a human: He seemed to see inside me. “That’s weird.”

“Bobby sort of predicted it, actually. Which is where the favor comes in. He tried to drop the dog off at the pound but they were closed. So Bobby needs someone to board him for the night, and I thought of you.”

“How come you didn’t think of you?”

“My original idea, of course, but Oksana’s allergic.”

“Who’s Oksana?”

“New girlfriend. Sort of. So I’d owe you.”

A silence fell. Human thoughts could sometimes press down on you. I felt that now, thoughts pressing down, Rick’s and Bernie’s. More just to get out from under them than anything else, I walked around Bernie and into the house.

Rick laughed.

“Wait a second,” Bernie said.

“Maybe he’ll help on the PR end.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

Rick had some sort of answer for that, but I didn’t catch it. By that time I was in the kitchen.

∗ ∗ ∗

What a nice kitchen! Not big, but full of light. On the counter lay some fast-food containers—a very good sign, fast food being one of the best human inventions going—not quite empty and really not all that old, to judge from the odor. The table was mostly covered in papers, a big glass of bourbon—the scent impossible to miss—topping one stack.

“Everything to your satisfaction?”

I turned and there was Bernie watching me from the kitchen
doorway. What was the question? I’d missed it.

“Just don’t get too comfortable,” Bernie said.

That one blew right by me. Was there even such a thing? I wagged my tail, one of my go-to moves.

Bernie watched me for a moment or two, those shadows-and-light eyes of his maybe growing a bit less shadowy. He walked over to the table and took a big drink of bourbon, pretty close to a gulp. Then he shot me a quick sideways look.

“What are you staring at?”

Him, of course. How could he miss that?

He gestured with his chin. “Those are bills I can’t pay, each and every goddamn one.”

I started panting. He raised the bourbon glass to his lips, then paused.

“Thirsty?” he said.

I hadn’t been, but all of a sudden I was. Bernie went to a cupboard, fished around, and took out a bowl, not the metal kind I was used to but a really nice white one decorated with—could it be? A rabbit? I’d chased rabbits in the arroyo, back in my puppy days, but never caught one.

Bernie filled the bowl with water at the sink and set it at my feet. “Wedgwood,” he said. “So no complaints on how you’re getting treated.”

Complaints? Of course not—he was treating me great. I started lapping up the water. Water tastes different in different parts of the Valley. This was the best so far: fresh, cool, with a faint hint of clean rocks.

“Belonged to my ex-wife,” Bernie was saying. “Amazing she left it behind. Not like her at all.”

Something about a wife? I didn’t quite grasp it. My attention
was elsewhere, specifically on this rabbit at the bottom of the bowl, his image growing clearer as the water level went down. I’d never caught a rabbit, as I might have mentioned, and how they hop away so quickly is very bothersome. Plus this particular rabbit at the bottom of the bowl seemed to be wearing a human-type jacket, and somehow that was bothersome, too. Both bothersomes came together and the next thing I knew I was sort of giving the bowl a nudge, somewhat like the nudges Butch and I’d exchanged earlier in the day, but not as hard. I certainly didn’t mean it to be as hard; still, there was no denying that the bowl was airborne. It flipped over once or twice, landed on the floor, and shattered into many, many pieces.

Uh-oh. I looked at Bernie. He gazed at all those pieces. My tail drooped. I’d been bad, messed up, done wrong. And on top of it I’d also washed out of K-9 school. I wanted to go lie down under something in a dark place. Bernie slowly turned toward me, the hardness in his face harder than ever, although still not mean. His mouth started to open. I got ready for shouting and screaming. But no shouting or screaming happened. Instead Bernie laughed. He laughed and laughed, shaking with laughter, tears rolling from his eyes.

“How come—ha ha, ha ha—I didn’t think of that? Ha ha, ha ha.” He got a broom, swept up the rabbit bowl pieces, dumped them in a trash bag, and knotted the top. By that time the laughter had pretty much faded, but then he glanced at me and it erupted again. He dropped the bag on the floor and jumped up and down on it, even doing a sort of dance. That was too much for me, and I started jumping around myself. And that got him going even more, which got me going even more. He ran right at me, pretending or maybe not pretending that he was going to grab me. I wheeled
around and ran right at him. But of course I didn’t want to hurt Bernie, especially now that he was turning out to be such a fun-loving guy, so at the very last instant I simply leaped right over him, clearing his head by plenty, since I didn’t want any sort of accidental clawing to happen.

Bernie stopped laughing, went still. “Whoa,” he said.

∗ ∗ ∗

Bernie got on the phone.

“Bobby? I’ve got Chet here and—No, no—it’s fine, Oksana’s allergic and—Really? That doesn’t sound like Rick’s kind of thing at all. But I’m calling about the leaping test. How high is that bar?” Bernie listened, reaching for a pencil. His hand froze in midair. “He didn’t jump at all? I don’t under—” He listened some more. “Are you talking about the east fence, with that auto body place on the other side?” More listening. “A cat?” Bernie turned to me, his eyes widening.

∗ ∗ ∗

“Ever ridden in a Porsche?” Bernie said.

Porsche? The name was new to me. I’d have to keep it in mind. Also new was riding up front, something I’d been hankering to do my whole life. Now here I was, sitting tall in the shotgun seat, a dream come true. Bernie backed out of the driveway and turned onto the street. The sky was all fiery, the way it gets just after the sun goes down, and everything around—this street, the houses on it, Bernie’s face—was all fiery, too, and beautiful. I felt tip-top.

“Needs work,” Bernie said. “Been saving up for a paint job—I was thinking purple.”

Purple? Was that the color of wine? It sounded perfect.

“Truth is,” Bernie went on, “I’ve been saving for a year and I’ve got less than when I started, meaning negative numbers. What does that tell you?”

It told me nothing. Numbers aren’t my best thing. Two is my limit, but it’s a good number—the best, in my opinion.

We got on a freeway ramp, swung up on the freeway: hardly any traffic at all, unusual in the Valley. Bernie hit the pedal, and I forgot all about numbers and paint jobs and everything else. What was with the sound of this engine? A gorgeous howl rose all around us, sending thrills up and down me, tail to nose and back again. We shot forward, my ears whipping straight back in the wind, a feast of smells streaming by—grease, oil, sweat from all sorts of creatures, sewer stuff, tar, smoke, rot. This was living life to the max. I tilted my face up to the sky—turning a pinkish black now, which is what happens to the Valley sky at night—and surprised myself with a sort of woo-woo kind of bark I’d never done before. Bernie laughed and zipped past an eighteen-wheeler so fast it looked like it was going backward.

He glanced my way. “Hungry? When was the last time you ate?”

Good question. Way too long ago, that was the answer.

Bernie fished around under his seat. “Like Slim Jims, by any chance?”

Slim Jims: I’d never heard of them.

“Ah, here we go.” Bernie held a cylinder-shaped thing out to me. Just from the smell, I knew I’d hit the jackpot.

∗ ∗ ∗

We slowed down, left the freeway, drove past a bunch of strip malls that looked familiar. Hey! We were out near the range.

“Here’s the thing about police work, Chet,” Bernie said. “Mostly it’s just getting to the point where you can put two and two together.”

No problem so far: Two was my number.

“The weird thing is that even when you’re at that point, nothing left but the simple addition, some guys still can’t do it. Bobby, for example. Although Rick can, and since they’re brothers I wonder if that rules out a genetic . . .” His voice trailed off but I could almost hear it continuing inside him. That felt rather pleasant for some reason, but I made no attempt to find out what the reason was.

We drove past the range and turned down an unlit, unpaved lane I’d never noticed before. At the end of the lane stood a tall chain-link gate. Bernie switched off the headlights and pulled over to the side of the lane. He put his finger across his lips.

“Quiet as a mouse,” he said.

We got out of the car and approached the gate. Mice were quiet, in his opinion? What a notion! Still, there’d been that Slim Jim. Nobody was perfect.

A big metal lock hung on the gate, glinting pinkish in the night. Bernie took out an enormous key ring, squinted at the keys—humans don’t see well at night, don’t hear or smell well ever; you have to feel a bit sorry for them—tried one, then another. The one after that did the job. Bernie opened the gate just enough for us to slip through and closed it silently behind us.

We moved forward, side by side. Some humans walk in a way that makes the side-by-side formation a bit awkward, no offense. But not Bernie. We had a nice easy rhythm, me and Bernie.

We have lots of car junkyards in the Valley, and this was one of them. On one side was a sort of garage—dark now, but through the windows I could see shadowy lifts and equipment inside. On the other side were rows of cars, cars missing pieces, or just pieces. The whole yard was fenced in with chain-link except for the fence behind the last row of cars. That fence was made of sturdy wooden planks nailed close together so there was no seeing through, just
like . . . I came very close to making—what would you call it? A connection?

The whole yard was dark except for at the very end, where a light was shining. We headed for that light, stepping around an oily pool and moving past a few toolsheds. Beyond the last toolshed, lit by a single naked bulb that hung on the wooden fence, a doorless car was up on blocks. A man in jeans and work boots, his back to us, was leaning in and struggling with the seat, maybe trying to pull it out. What else? The car was yellow; the seat was pink. Bernie walked right up and kicked the heel of one of those work boots, not hard.