The Dog Who Knew Too Much (12 page)

“The search.”

“Huh? He don’t know about no search. He’s a goddamn dog.”

Bernie’s face darkened in a way you didn’t often see; it tended to scare people. “Language,” he said.

“Language?” said Moondog. “He’s a g—he’s a dog.”

“True,” said Bernie. “And he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

I didn’t? Wasn’t I a pretty good waiter? But if Bernie said I wasn’t, then I wasn’t. Still, a bit confusing, so I barked some more.

“See?” said Bernie.

“Guess so,” said Moondog. He glanced around, fixed his gaze on the mule, now standing on a ledge above the cliff. “But what about Rummy? Can’t just leave him up there.”

Bernie looked up at the mule. “How about calling him?”

Rummy seemed to be watching us, too. Was he still chewing on that straw? Too far away to tell for sure.

“Like calling him works,” said Moondog. “He’s a mule, for Christ sake.”

Bernie turned to me. “Chet?” he said.

What happened after that seemed to go on forever and was dusty, bloody, and noisy. Let’s just get it on record that I went up onto the ledge and persuaded Rummy to come back down and leave it like that.

We left Rummy tied to one of the support beams and freed of his burden—Bernie insisted on that part—and entered the mine, Moondog first, holding a big lantern he’d taken from the duffel, then me and Bernie; he wore the headlamp although we didn’t need it, the lantern being so bright.

“Who was Bonanza Bill?” Bernie said.

Moondog almost stumbled, like he’d missed a step. “What do you know about him?”

“Just that he carved his name on one of the beams,” Bernie said.

Moondog resumed normal speed. “Yeah, that’s what I know, too,” he said.

“So that’s that,” Bernie said.

“Yup,” said Moondog.

I got the feeling that something was on Bernie’s mind and tried to figure out what. But not for long. Soon we came to the split, the big tunnel leading one way and what was left of the small one another.

Moondog shone the lantern in that direction. “Another goddamn cave-in,” he said.

“Were you working that area?” Bernie said.

Moondog glanced back, doing his narrow-eyed thing again. “Whose business is that?”

“Not mine,” Bernie said.

“Goddamn right,” Moondog said, moving on.

“Just making conversation.”

“Goddamn right,” said Moondog again. “And for your information I worked that little tunnel the very first thing on account of what the map—on account of for reasons of my own. Wasted two months—nothin’ there but rock—rock as hard as a witch’s tit.”

“Hmmm,” said Bernie.

“What I’d do to that goddamn Bonanza Bill,” Moondog said.

“But I take it he’s long dead.”

“Not long enough for me,” said Moondog, losing me completely; even Bernie looked a little lost. “They say he’s in here somewhere,” Moondog went on.

“Yeah?” said Bernie.

“But here’s all you need to know ’bout minin’—nobody knows nothin’.”

“Easy to remember,” Bernie said.

“Down thisaway’s where I been working now,” Moondog said, leading us into the big tunnel.

“How’s it going?”

“Whose business is that?”

Bernie smiled at the back of Moondog’s head. “Not mine,” he said. Was something funny? Not that I could tell, but I always liked it when Bernie was enjoying himself.

We kept going. The tunnel started narrowing, and I got the feeling it was sloping down. We passed a broken pickax, a tipped-over wheelbarrow, a rubble pile in front of an opening that had been cut into the rock. After that came another rubble pile, and another, and another, all with hacked-out spaces in the solid rock on the other side.

“You’ve been working hard,” Bernie said.

“Been accused of a lot of shit,” Moondog said, “but not working hard’s never been—” He cut himself off.

We stood before another rubble pile. This one was different from the others and we all saw how right away: poking out of the bottom was a human hand, covered in black dust, almost looking more like a glove than a hand.

“The kid?” Moondog said.

“Oh, God,” said Bernie.

Then Bernie was down on his knees—and so was Moondog—both of them side by side, digging frantically at that rubble pile. I knew it wasn’t Devin, of course, also knew who it actually was, and that we were too late to do anything for him. Otherwise I’d have been in there digging, myself; it’s one of my specialties.

They got the face exposed. The eyes were open but covered in black dust. There was also a round red hole in the forehead. The digging stopped, Bernie’s hands and Moondog’s hands frozen in midmotion, black dust drifting in the lantern light.

“Turk,” said Bernie, sitting back on his heels.

“Uh-huh,” said Moondog.

Bernie turned Moondog.

“You knew him?”

Moondog nodded. “Hated the stupid son of a bitch.”

TWELVE

B
ernie closed Turk’s eyes, gently, like Turk was still alive. One thing I’ve learned about life: when it stops, the smell starts changing right away.

Bernie turned to Moondog. “Did you hate him enough to kill him?”

“You some kind of a cop?” Moondog said. “I don’t like cops.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Bernie said.

The light flickered, like Moondog wasn’t holding the lantern quite steady. I eased over a little closer to him, just in case. “I’m no killer,” Moondog said.

Bernie nodded. He has all kinds of nods, part of his interviewing technique. That meant this was an interview, a fact I’d have to keep in mind. Sometimes whoever we were interviewing turned out to be the perp, sometimes not. It was always fun to find out which, just another reason this job is the best. But back to Bernie’s nod. One of my favorites, and it meant: nothing in particular.

“You don’t believe me?” Moondog said.

“I’m a private investigator,” Bernie said. “It’s not a faith-based job. I deal in facts, and you haven’t been giving me any.”

“Pegged you for a cop.”

“I just told you—I’m not.” Bernie made a little gesture with his chin in Turk’s direction. “But real cops will be in your life soon. Call that fact one.”

Moondog’s eyes shifted. Sometimes that was a sign of a dude getting ready to do something not good. I moved still closer to him.

“Here’s the difference between us and the law,” Bernie said.

Moondog glanced around. “Who’s us?”

“Chet and I, of course,” Bernie said. Moondog gave me a funny look. I gave him a look back, not funny, just my standard look. “We’re flexible,” Bernie said. That was a new one: I’d try to remember it, although the meaning wasn’t quite clear to me. “And the law is not,” Bernie went on. “The law is a system, always grinding away. Smart people try not to get caught in its teeth.”

“You’re sayin’ I’m not smart?” said Moondog.

“Still waiting to find out,” Bernie said.

Moondog opened his mouth. At that moment, I felt one of those tiny tremors from way down in the earth. No sign Bernie noticed it, but Moondog flinched just the slightest bit, and I went back to thinking about his name again, not that I came up with anything new. This time no big jolt happened. Something about plates, Bernie had said. I’ve eaten off plates plenty of times, no problem, but prefer my bowl, hard to say why.

The earth stayed still. Moondog stopped flinching. He took a deep breath and said, “Meth is where I draw the line.”

“Turk was in the meth business?” Bernie said.

The meth business? We’ve come up against it once or twice, here at the Little Detective Agency. There are nasty and powerful smells that go along with the meth business—I’d actually learned them long ago in K-9 school—and I detected not a trace now,
standing over Turk’s body, but what that meant I couldn’t tell you.

“Meth killed Harley,” Moondog said.

“Harley?”

“My brother.”

“Sorry for your loss,” Bernie said.

Moondog gave him a long look. His face softened. “Can’t think what it’s got to do with the kid you’re lookin’ for, but Turk’s mother has a meth lab down by Jackrabbit Junction.”

“Thanks,” said Bernie.

“You didn’t hear it from me,” Moondog told him.

Did that mean jackrabbits were in our future? I’d had fun with rabbits more than once, but never jackrabbits, which sounded like even more fun. Maybe they’d be a little less shifty and I’d actually end up catching one.

We searched the rest of the tunnel—it didn’t extend much farther—and found nothing. By the time we got outside, back in real light, that
WHAP-WHAP-WHAP
was coming from the sky again. The chopper appeared, circled a couple times, and then landed by the creek, the closest flat space around. We made our way down to it, past the overhang with the snow underneath, me and Bernie, Moondog, and Rummy. I took one quick lick at the snow in passing; and so did Rummy.

The chopper sat near the creek, blades still. A tall man in a Stetson climbed out and walked toward us.

“Laidlaw,” said Moondog. “Biggest asshole in the county.”

“What does he do?” Bernie said.

“Runs it,” said Moondog. “He’s the sheriff.”

Sheriff Laidlaw came closer. He wore sunglasses, the mirrored kind. I hate all sunglasses, the mirrored kind the most. He also
had a sandy-colored mustache and thick sandy-colored sideburns, none of which I was fond of. The stream was very narrow at this point, not even a single human stride across. The sheriff stopped on one side, us on the other.

He turned his mirrored eyes in Moondog’s direction. “Surprised to see you still in these parts,” he said.

“Free country, ’less something’s changed,” said Moondog.

“Forgot about that sense of humor,” the sheriff said. “One of those family traits, like a harelip.”

Moondog said nothing, but a vein in his forehead that I hadn’t noticed before was now noticeable.

“Sheriff?” Bernie said. “I’m—”

“Know who you are,” the sheriff said. “Boyfriend of the missing kid’s mom.”

“Friend is more accurate,” Bernie said. “More relevant, in light of the situation unfolding, is that I’m also a private investigator.”

The sheriff held out his hand, made one of those thumb and fingers rubbing gestures that meant: give. Bernie took out his wallet, flipped it open, held it up. The sheriff didn’t appear to look at it, those mirrored eyes still on Bernie’s face. I got the idea, maybe wrong, that he was waiting for Bernie to step across the stream and hand over the wallet. Bernie did not. Finally the sheriff did the stepping. He took the wallet, removed his sunglasses—hey, his eyes weren’t interesting at all, flat, small, dull—and checked our license, not the first time Bernie and I had been through this.

Sheriff Laidlaw flipped the wallet closed and tossed it—in a casual sort of way, like he didn’t care if it fell, and Bernie caught it in a way that was somehow even more casual: that Bernie!—and meanwhile the sheriff was saying, “Guess you are at that. But not in this state.”

“Never made that claim,” Bernie said. “But how about we bat
this around some other time?” I was all for that: we have a Pump-sie Green model back home, picked up in a case too complicated to go into now, and Bernie can hit baseballs so far with it that they turn into tiny black dots in the blue. “Right now we’ve got the trip guide lying dead in the mine and the kid still lost.”

The sheriff’s flat eyes got flatter. “Turk Rendell?”

“Shot in the head,” Bernie said. “You’ll want to take a look.”

The sheriff turned, spat into the stream. Spitting always interests me—why men and not women, for example?—but it was important to concentrate so I tried my hardest not to watch that yellowish spit glob bobbing in the blue ripples, growing a tiny tail, then suddenly corkscrewing beneath the surface and disappearing.

“… bona fides,” the sheriff was saying. “I’m acquainted with a number of private operators down your way.”

“Such as?” Bernie said.

“Georgie Malhouf, for one,” said the sheriff.

“I know him,” Bernie said.

“Does he know you—that’s the question.”

“I just spoke at his convention.”

“Yeah?” said the sheriff. “About what?”

“Facial recognition techniques,” Bernie said.

There was a pause. I thought Sheriff Laidlaw was about to spit again, but instead he said, “Let’s see this body of yours.”

Not long after that, we were gazing at Turk’s body again, just the not-covered-up parts, meaning mostly the hand sticking out of the rubble, and the face with the round red hole in the forehead. We had Moondog’s lantern, but not Moondog, who the sheriff had told to stay outside.

“Take that bullet hole away and he coulda died in a cave-in,”
the sheriff said. “We get a moron like that every year or two, searchin’ for a pot of gold. Take Moondog—shoulda been dead years ago.”

“The bullet hole’s not going away,” Bernie said.

The sheriff smiled at Bernie. He had very white teeth, almost glowing. Bernie always said that teeth like that weren’t real. I had a strange thought, not my usual kind at all: did that mean the smile wasn’t real either? What a thought! I hoped that none like it came again, at least not for a long time.

“Never do, do they?” the sheriff said. He pointed at Turk with the pointy toe of his cowboy boot. “Know anything about him?”