The Dog Who Knew Too Much (16 page)

“The old Laidlaw mine?” said the deputies.

The sheriff smiled. He had a very small smile, just a slight uptick at the corners of his mouth, a nasty smile he turned on Bernie. “Been in my family for generations. But not the generations when they were diggin’ out the gold. All we ever mined was dirt. Same for all the wildcatters we let poke around in there. Nothin’ but dirt. So I’m kind of interested in where you got this little—what’s the word? Bauble? Like that word, boys? Bauble?”

“Great word,” said Claudie.

“’Cause he dropped it?” said Mack.

Bernie was silent for a moment or two, one of those silences where I could feel his thoughts, a feeling I loved. It was like the thoughts were in my own head, except I couldn’t see inside them. But what was the holdup? The answer to the question about the nugget was me! I’d found it in the mine and brought it to Bernie. So therefore? So therefore was as far as I went: after that, Bernie took over.

“I found it,” he said.

Bernie was saying he found the nugget? Not me? I could still just about taste the thing.

“Mind tellin’ us where?” said Sheriff Laidlaw.

“Can’t say exactly,” Bernie said. “I spotted it on the hike up when we stopped by the stream for a drink. Not sure I could find the exact place.”

“Bet you’re not,” the sheriff said. His smile faded away.

Bernie gazed at him, not smiling at all.

The sheriff tossed the nugget in the air, caught it on his palm. “What I’m going to do now,” he said, “is take up that suggestion of yours, the one about checking out your so-called alibi with ol’ Moondog. You boys make sure Mr. Little stays comfortable in
my absence.” He left the dining hall, pocketing the nugget on his way out.

We all sat down, the deputies on the table across from us, Mack holding the shotgun across his knees, me beside Bernie.

“What kinda dog is that, anyhow?” Mack said.

Bernie didn’t reply. Some human silences are nice and comfortable, like when Bernie and Suzie are out on the patio, watching the sun go down. Others are not. This silence was one of those. The discomfort grew and grew until it filled the room and then Claudie said, “Reckon he’s exercisin’ his so-called right to remain silent.”

If that was what Bernie was doing, he kept it up. I started getting real restless, but Bernie remained motionless, so I did, too. After a while, the door opened and Sheriff Laidlaw came in. He’d brought Moondog with him.

Moondog looked his normal self—tall and skinny with long stringy hair all over the place—but there was something strange about him, maybe the way he was looking in every direction except ours.

“Moondog here, one of our upstanding local citizens, has come forward of his own volition with some relevant testimony,” the sheriff said. “Haven’t you, Moondog?”

“If you say so,” said Moondog.

“Appreciate your cooperation,” the sheriff said. “Now why don’t you repeat what you told me.”

“The part about how I like three sugars in my coffee?”

“After that,” said the sheriff. “When we were just about finished with the coffee and got to where you found the body.”

“Yeah, um,” said Moondog. He glanced up, the way humans sometimes do when they’re trying to remember something. His
lips moved and sound came out, but so soft I couldn’t make out the words.

“Don’t come over shy on us,” the sheriff said. “Speak up.”

Moondog cleared his throat. “I, uh, found the body and called him over.”

“Him?” said the sheriff. “You’re speaking of Mr. Little?”

“Uh-huh. He didn’t look none too happy about it.” “About what?”

Moondog blinked. “About how I found the body. Isn’t that what I’m sposta—” He went silent, although his lips, thin and cracked, kept moving.

“And then?” the sheriff said.

“And then he said …”

“Said what, Moondog? Let’s move things along.”

“That, um, ah, he hated goddamn meth dealers and wasn’t sorry for what he’d done.”

“Yeah?” said the sheriff.

Moondog nodded.

“Anything else?”

“Ain’t that enough?” Moondog said.

“Do for now,” the sheriff said.

Moondog walked out of the dining hall, eyes on the floor.

The sheriff turned to Bernie. “Got anything to say, hopefully in the nature of a confession?”

“You’re embarrassing yourself,” Bernie said. “That’s all I have to say.”

The sheriff’s face went red, a redness that began in his neck and rose all the way up to his hairline. “Cuff the son of a bitch,” he said.

The deputies stood up. Claudie unclipped a set of cuffs from
his belt. Mack raised the shotgun. What was going on? They were planning to cuff Bernie? No way that was happening. The fur on my back rose, from my neck to the tip of my tail. Also the growling started up again. Plus was I baring my teeth? Yes, and I bared them some more. Both deputies stepped back. The shotgun swung around toward me. I wasn’t afraid. I got my back paws under me, ready to spring. The deputy’s finger curled around the trigger. Maybe he didn’t know how quick I was.

“Chet,” Bernie said, calm and gentle, like it was just the two of us, kicking back after a good day.

“Looks like you got a mad dog there, Mr. Little,” the sheriff said. “We have ways of dealing with mad dogs here in the high country.”

Bernie’s face changed: he almost seemed like a different man, wild and dangerous. His voice didn’t rise much, but it shook when he spoke. “If anything happens to Chet, I’ll take you down, I promise.”

That smile, small and nasty, appeared again on the sheriff’s face. “Take me down meaning … ?”

“Kill you,” Bernie said. “Is that clear enough?” He glanced at the deputies. “All of you.”

“Sounds like you just threatened murder on three duly constituted officers of the law,” the sheriff said. “You boys hear somethin’ like that?”

The deputies nodded.

“Only a dumb country hick myself,” the sheriff said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if you just opened yourself up for additional charges. DA’s call, of course, but we’ve always seen eye to eye.”

I like most kinds of human laughter, but not the snicker, which is what I heard from the deputies at that moment.

“Just funnin’ with you, Mr. Little,” the sheriff said. “DA’s my kid brother, smartest Laidlaw that ever walked the earth.”

“Meanest, too,” said Claudie.

That led to guffawing, another bad kind of laughter. When the guffawing died down, the sheriff said, “Hands out in front of you, Mr. Little. Let’s do this the easy way.”

Bernie was silent for what seemed like a long time. Then he said, “First get my client, Anya Vereen, in here. I’m putting Chet in her custody.”

“No problem with that last part,” said the sheriff. “But, see, I’m the law, so what comes first is up to me. Hands out.”

Bernie shook his head.

“You resistin’ arrest?” the sheriff said.

The shotgun barrel moved again, the muzzle now pointed at Bernie’s chest. Bernie didn’t move, just sat very still on the bench. Was something real bad just about to happen? I hardly ever got that feeling, but I had it now.

“I do believe he’d dare you to squeeze that goddamn trigger, Mack,” the sheriff said, “so you’ll have to try something different.”

“Different how?” said Mack.

“Think.”

Mack thought, his face scrunching up unpleasantly. Then he swung the shotgun away from Bernie and aimed it straight at me.

“Somethin’ like this?” Mack said.

“Read my mind,” said Sheriff Laidlaw.

Bernie rose and held out his hands.

SIXTEEN

S
heriff Laidlaw snapped the cuffs on Bernie. Bernie didn’t even glance at him. His eyes were on me the whole time and they were saying, “Be a good boy.”

Being a good boy was the last thing I wanted at that moment. What I wanted was to spring on that horrible sheriff and sink my teeth deep into his neck. That probably sounds bad, but it was the truth.

“Ch—et?” Bernie has this long way of saying my name that gets my attention every time, or almost. I stayed where I was. The sheriff and his deputies walked Bernie to the door and out, slamming it shut behind them. Bernie kept his eyes on me the whole time.

The instant he was out of sight, I bolted right to the door, crashed into it hard. It didn’t budge. I rose up and pawed at the knob. We’d been working on doorknobs, me and Bernie, and I’d figured out some, like the kind where humans pressed their thumbs down on a little metal thing, but this knob on the dining hall door—the round kind for turning—was still too much for me. I got both front paws on it, the way Bernie had said, and tried to push down with one and up with the other, or the other way
around, or whatever he had said. Pushing and pulling, pulling and pushing, my claws slipping off the hard metal.

Bernie!

This sort of thing was so much easier with Bernie beside me. But he wasn’t beside me. I heard a car start up outside in the night, heard it moving, the sound fading and fading and gone.

Bernie!

I pawed and pawed at that doorknob, maybe forgetting all about the push-pulling part. The dining hall filled with loud, angry barking. How much time passed before I realized it was me? I didn’t know, but finally I shut up and my paws went still. Then they slid down the door, my claws scratching the wood lightly, and there I was, all paws on the floor. Did that mean I’d given up? I hoped not. We weren’t quitters, me and Bernie.

I stood by the door. After a while, the lights went out, all by themselves. I was used to that: humans had things rigged to go on and off by themselves—take Bernie’s alarm clock, except now it was broken on account of being thrown at the wall too many times. Darkness often bothered humans, but it never bothered me. Sometimes I even preferred darkness. You understand things different in a way that’s hard to explain. Now, in the darkness, for example, I felt a very faint current of air in the dining hall, not coming through the crack under the door, but from the other way, back in the gloomy interior.

I turned and followed that current of air. It led me through the length of the dining hall, past all the rows of tables, to a pair of swinging doors at the back, slightly darker than the darkness. Swinging doors are the kind of doors I like. I pushed right through and entered a kitchen; knew it was a kitchen first thing, of course, the kitchen, besides being my favorite room in any house, always having a smell of its own.

The air current was coming from the far side, beyond some big fridges, gleaming faintly. This air current brought the night inside, kind of like the night was breathing into the kitchen. What a thought! Funny how the mind works, but no time to go into that at the moment. Probably never, in fact: I’d mulled over how the mind works more than once, and never managed to come up with anything. The point was I could feel the night, and looking up, I saw a black square high up on the wall: an open window. Too high? I didn’t think about that until I was in midair. Leaping was just about my very best thing—will I ever forget that last day of K-9 school, flunking out with nothing but the leaping test remaining?—and I soared through that open window, scraping the top of my head, but hardly at all—I could barely feel it—and then soared some more before arcing down and landing lightly on nice mossy ground.

Out behind the dining hall the forest rose in a dark wall. I sniffed around, smelled all kinds of things, but not Bernie, and nothing was on my mind except him.

Bernie!

After some more sniffing, I remembered him being led by the sheriff and those pear-shaped deputies through the front door, and I took off, racing around to the front of the dining hall. Dim lights shone in a cabin or two, and beyond them, near the tents, a campfire burned low. I picked up Bernie’s scent right away, the best human scent there was—so strangely like my own in some ways—and followed it down to the parking lot. There it dwindled away, losing itself in an invisible little cloud of exhaust fumes.

I stood in the parking lot, waiting for some idea to come to mind. When that didn’t happen, I moved over to the Porsche and stood beside it. Definite scent of Bernie around the driver’s-side door. I breathed it in for a while and then found myself trotting
down toward the road, that long, long road that led past the stream, and the grove where we’d found that mushroom, and other things faint in my memory, and finally back home to our place on Mesquite Road. Yes: that was what I wanted, to be home. Home was oh so clear in my memory: I knew where every single bone was buried. I got a move on, ramped up to what Bernie called my go-to trot, a trot I can keep up just about forever. In no time we’d be back together, me and Bernie, doing what we did and feeling tip-top.

I’d barely gotten out of the parking lot when I spotted a big black car by the side of the road, headlights off but inside lights on, and two people sitting in the front. One, behind the wheel, was a man I didn’t know; the other was Anya. They had the windows rolled down and I could hear them talking.

“You’ll have to do better than that, Guy,” Anya was saying. “Start by telling me the truth about why you picked this camp.”

A guy named Guy? That rang a faint bell. I waited for it to ring louder, and while I was waiting, the guy named Guy—one of those very blond dudes, hair almost white, but with dark eyes that really stood out in all that paleness—said something like, “You giving the orders now, babe?”