The Dog Who Knew Too Much (17 page)

And if not exactly that, then pretty close, but what came through clearest was the tone. One thing about human speech— and sometimes I think there’s a bit too much of it, no offense, and besides that wasn’t the one thing I was heading toward, which was about the fact that human speech has two parts happening at the same time. One is the words, often hard to understand—maybe even by humans, but that’s just a thought I once had, back when Bernie and Leda were going through the divorce. That was the only time I saw Bernie cry, not when Charlie’s stuff was getting packed up, but after, when it was just me and Bernie alone in the
house. Never mind that; what I was getting to was that other part of human speech, the kind that’s always a snap to understand: the tone. The tone’s a dead giveaway, dead giveaway being one of Bernie expressions I really like. He has a bunch, which maybe I can go into later. But right now it was all about the tone of speech of the guy named Guy: nasty. I like just about every human I’ve ever rubbed up against—even the perps and gangbangers—except for the nasty-sounding types. This Guy guy was showing signs of being the nasty-sounding type.

“Why are you being like this?” Anya said.

“There’s one I haven’t heard for a while,” said the Guy guy. “Takes me right back to our marriage.” Aha! I had it now. Guy was the ex-hubby. Some kind of investment dude, and maybe Anya was afraid of him, which was why she’d come to us. For a moment, I thought I was real close to solving the whole case. But then:
Bernie!

“Oh?” said Anya. “Your girlfriend—excuse me, girlfriends— understand your behavior? Don’t tell me you’ve put a cap on the lying, the cheating, the temper.”

“The inner bitch,” said Guy. “Another fond memory.”

Uh-oh. Bitch. I’d heard that one before, never really understood the mean tone that always seemed to go with it. I’d known a number of bitches—Lola down in Mexico came to mind, in fact was never quite totally gone from it—and I felt the opposite of mean, whatever that was, about all of them. I even wished there were more!

Anya shook her head. “We don’t have time for this. Devin is missing.”

Guy’s voice rose, now nasty and loud at the same time. “Think I don’t know that?”

“And what kept you? You were supposed to be here Saturday morning.”

“None of your goddamn business,” Guy said. He didn’t like her, no doubt about that. But I had this memory, very faint, of that first time we met Anya in the parking lot at the airport hotel: hadn’t she said something about Guy wanting to get back together with her, which was why she wanted Bernie to be her friend? Did he sound like a dude wanting to get back together? I sniffed the air, picked up not a trace of flowers. Dudes setting out to get back together with women always brought flowers. That was basic. We always got our flowers from Choi’s Palace of Flowers, me and Bernie. The smells in there: they just about knocked me out every time. “She won’t be able to resist these,” Ms. Choi would always say, and Bernie would get a dozen more.

I moved a little closer. Anya was giving Guy a close look.

“What’s with you?” he said.

“You don’t seem very upset,” she said.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Devin, what else?” Anya said. “I’m frantic. But not you. How come?”

“You’re a crazy woman, you know that?”

She looked at him, even closer than before. “I’m getting this sick feeling you know something you’re not telling me.”

“Something like what?” Guy said, his voice going very soft but still nasty. That combo—soft and nasty—was the worst. I barked.

They both turned and saw me, standing in the road.

“Chet?” Anya called to me.

“Huh?” said Guy. “You know that mutt?”

Mutt? That settled it: Guy was definitely one of those humans who rubbed me the wrong way, almost an impossibility.

“Chet’s a wonderful dog,” Anya said.

“I thought you hated dogs,” said Guy.

“Not Chet,” she said, which settled any question that might have been in my mind about what side she was on, even though there wasn’t one. She poked her head out the window.

“Chet? Where’s Bernie?”

“Who’s Bernie?” said Guy.

Anya paused. I could see her face clearly, mouth slightly open, some unpleasant thought darkening the expression in her eyes. That’s a look you see sometimes in people: it means they know they just made a mistake. But if she had, I couldn’t spot it. A wonderful dog: where was the mistake in that?

“Asked you a question,” Guy said. “Who’s Bernie?”

She turned to him. “Just someone I know.”

“New boy toy?”

“No, as it happens. But to quote you, it’s none of your goddamn business.”

Then came a surprise, not a good one. Guy reached out, real quick, grabbed Anya by the back of the neck, and jerked her head in close to his.

“Who. Is. Bernie.”

Anya’s eyes, frightened now, were on Guy. They narrowed a bit and her chin came up, and I knew she was about to do something brave. “Bernie is a private eye—a brilliant private eye that I—I hired to look for Devin.”

“Say that again?”

“You heard me.”

There was a pause. Then Guy backhanded Anya across the face, with that surprising quickness of his, and real hard. She cried out, and maybe yelled something, and maybe he did, too, but none of that really entered my mind because I was on the move.
One bound, another, and on the next I was in midair, soaring right toward that open window on the driver’s-side door, the wind rushing in my ears. Not a big space, and I only partly got through, barreling into Guy’s upper body as he twisted around toward me.

“What the hell?” he said, and whipped one of those backhand blows in my direction. Real quick for a human, but I caught that backhanding hand in my mouth and bit down. He cried out, his voice suddenly high and scared and no longer nasty. Could it have hurt that bad? I didn’t think so and gave my head a quick shake, back and forth, in the hope of sending the message about what was what. But maybe it didn’t get through, because all that happened was more screaming, followed by flailing, and what was this? Brass knuckles appearing from under the seat? Then we were rolling around a bit, and he was fumbling with his free hand for the knucks—a weapon we hate, me and Bernie—and kneeing me in the face, and I was growling, and Anya was shouting, “Chet! Chet!” and then suddenly her door opened and we tumbled out, except for Guy, who somehow stayed inside.

I rolled over a few times, found my feet. By that time, the car had started up. It swung around in a wild circle, tires shrieking on the pavement, and sped off down the mountain road, headlights out, passenger door wide open. The smell of burned rubber rose in the night air. I turned toward Anya.

SEVENTEEN

T
he moon had risen over the treetops and I saw that Anya’s nose was bleeding from both nostrils, the blood like two black streaks on her moon-whitened skin. She sat on the road, hugging her knees and crying softly. Poor Anya. I went over to her and licked off her tears and blood at the same time, a rich and heady mixture, I don’t mind telling you.

She hugged me. “Oh, Chet,” she said. “What’s going on? Where’s Bernie?”

I started panting, not sure why, and sat down beside her. She wiped her face on the back of her arm and pulled out her cell phone. Was that like panting? What a crazy thought: I forgot it immediately. Anya flipped open the phone, squinted at the screen, said, “No goddamn service.” She stuck the phone back in her pocket. “What are we going to do?” Her eyes teared up. I gave her a little nudge with my head. Whatever we were going to do—and I had no ideas on that subject—we’d have to start by getting up.

Anya gave me a look. Her eyes cleared. “I told Bernie the truth,” she said to me. “Maybe I just put the emphasis in the wrong places.”

What did that mean? You tell me. All I knew was this: time to get up. I nudged Anya again, somewhat harder. She put her hand on my back and rose. At that moment, a flashlight shone on the path that led from the cabins down to the parking lot. The beam poked this way and that, then steadied, shining in our direction although not reaching us. We moved toward it. A man called, “Who’s down there? What’s going on?” I recognized the voice. It was Ranger Rob.

We came together at the entrance to the parking lot. Ranger Rob shone the light on Anya, then at me, then at the ground. His leathery face, illuminated from the bottom up, seemed older than before: people’s faces aged quickly sometimes—I’d seen it more than once—and they never went the other way, even when things were going good.

“Ms., uh, Vereen?” he said, his voice not as strong as I remembered it, more like the voice of old Mr. Parsons next door back home in the Valley. “I thought I heard some commotion on the road, maybe an accident.”

“Any word?” Anya said.

“Word?”

“About Devin, for God’s sake.” From the way Anya said that I could tell she was starting not to like Ranger Rob.

Ranger Rob shook his head, began talking again about a commotion.

“There was no commotion,” Anya said. “We’re looking for Bernie.”

“Ah,” said Ranger Rob.

“Ah?” said Anya. “What does that mean?”

“Just that there’s been some, uh … shocking news on that score.”

I felt Anya’s hand on my shoulder, clutching my fur. “What are you talking about?”

Ranger Rob had a pickup. He drove us down the mountain road, Anya in the passenger seat, me in the cargo bed behind. It didn’t take me long to discover that someone had been eating potato chips in the cargo bed, and pretty recently, judging from the crispness of the few I found. As often happens when a too-small snack puts in an appearance, I realized how hungry I was, but could I find one more measly chip, or anything else edible—and I’m not fussy—for that matter? I ended up licking the cold metal where the chips had lain, and then moved forward, gazing over the roof of the cab.

The wind blew in my face, a feeling I normally love, but my mind was somewhere else, namely on Bernie. I kept thinking he was back home on Mesquite Road, and I had to get there, too. Was that where we were going now? I peered into the night— hey, the same way our headlights were boring into the mountain darkness?—and caught a quick glimpse of a pair of orange eyes glittering by the roadside. Some big shadowy form faded away into the woods. I sniffed the air and picked up a whiff of that locker-room-laundry-hamper scent I’d first smelled on the trail. A puzzler, but I didn’t puzzle over it for long: my mind swung back to Bernie.

We came to a fork in the road, our lights sweeping over a sign with writing on it. What did Bernie always say at a time like that? “In the words of Yogi Berra, when you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Bernie always got a kick out of that, and so I did, too, although the meaning wasn’t clear. Was Yogi Berra a perp? If so, his days on the outside were numbered, whatever that meant exactly.

Left and right were two directions. They came up over and over, but which was which? I never knew. Ranger Rob picked one of them and we kept going, first through a series switchbacks and then on a long winding stretch with some traffic and the glow of a town in the distance. Soon houses were going by, most of them dark, and we slowed down. The road broadened into the main drag of a small western town, the kind with a diner, a couple bars, a few stores, an office building or two. We’d had lots of adventures in small western towns like this, me and Bernie, so right away I felt pretty good about our chances. Chances for what was a question just starting to form in my mind when we parked in front of one of those office buildings. A blue light shone over the door.

Ranger Rob and Anya got out of the pickup. They both looked at me, standing in the back.

“What about Chet?” said Anya.

“The dog?” said Ranger Rob. “He’d better stay in the truck.”

“Chet?” said Anya. “Stay!”

I hopped out. Did I stay for every Tom, Dick, and Harry? I knew plenty of Toms, Dicks, and Harrys, and stayed for none of them. I stayed for Bernie.

We went into the office building, not a very tall building, made of brick; I only mention that because bricks have a smell I like. There was a bit of confusion at the doorway and I ended up in the lead. The first person I saw was the deputy named Mack. He sat at a desk strewn with papers, eating from a big box of greasy fries; I knew they were greasy from the smears on his face. He looked up at us, selected a long limp fry, dipped it in a little paper cup of ketchup, and stuck it in his mouth.

We stopped in front of the desk. “Deputy?” said Ranger Rob.

“Yup,” Mack said, and went on chewing, mouth open. I knew one thing right away: I wanted those fries.

“Is the sheriff around?” Ranger Rob said.

“Who wants to know?” said Mack.

Ranger Rob blinked. “I do,” he said.

“Let’s see some ID.”

“ID? But you know me. Rob Townshend? Director of Big Bear Wilderness Camp?”

“Sheriff’s orders,” Mack said. “We got a dangerous prisoner locked up on the premises.” He held out his hand, the ends of his fingers red with ketchup.

Ranger Rob gave Mack his ID. Mack gave it right back, didn’t even glance at it. He made a little two-finger twitching motion at Anya. She handed over her ID. This time he looked carefully, and then looked just as carefully at her. “Picture don’t do you … what’s the word?”