Careful, big guy,” Bernie said.
That was rule one when it came to exploring old mines. There were other rules, too, but they didn’t come to mind at the moment.
Bernie approached one of the support beams. “You just never know about these places.” He gave the beam a little shake. “Seems solid enough.” From somewhere up ahead came a thump, muffled but heavy, like part of the ceiling had collapsed. “Hmmm,” said Bernie. Hmmm was always a sign of Bernie doing some serious thinking. He gave the beam another shake. No surprise there: Bernie was a great thinker, always came up with the exact right idea. We listened, heard nothing this time, and kept going. That’s what being on the job’s all about.
Some mines we’d explored were almost roomy, with rusted-out railroad tracks and lots of old equipment lying around. Others were so small we could barely squeeze through. This one was in between. We walked side by side, following the spreading light cone from Bernie’s headlamp. Dust came swirling by, almost like it was flowing out of the mine, and turned golden in the light, a beautiful thing to see.
The floor, ceiling, and walls were solid rock, the surface rough, hacked-at, and reddish. I smelled copper, often the case in old mines, and some human scents, too, but faint and confused. Copper always made things difficult, one of the things you learn in this business. We passed the last support beam—Bernie stopped to read aloud something carved in wood: “Bonanza Bill, June seven, 1876, keep the hell out”—and right after that things began narrowing in around us. Bernie had to stoop a little, but not me, meaning I could go faster, which I did—always best to be in front, of course—and—
“Hey, Chet—where are you?”
Whoa. Had I gotten a little too far ahead of Bernie? I seemed to be beyond the cone of light. I waited. Beyond the cone of light, yes, but that didn’t mean I’d stopped seeing. A little way up the line, for example, the tunnel split in two, one of the openings looking real small.
Light came wobbling up and found me. Bernie, stooping more on account of the ceiling getting lower, rested a hand on my back and peered ahead. “Left or right, big guy?”
Left or right: not the first time I’d heard that question, but I hadn’t made much progress in figuring out the meaning. So, probably not important, our success rate being what it was at the Little Detective Agency. The cases we’d cleared! I could think of two without even trying.
We moved forward, reached the split. Bernie aimed the beam at both openings, and we looked down two tunnels, one big, one small. Bernie reached into his pocket, took out the baggie that contained Devin’s sock and held it open for me. Like I needed reminding! But I took a sniff or two: I’d never want to hurt Bernie’s feelings.
“Chet?” he said.
Sometimes I waited to see what Bernie would do. Sometimes he waited to see what I would do. This was one of those. The problem was the absence of Devin’s scent in either direction. If Bernie thought Devin was in here, then he was, but I couldn’t catch the slightest whiff. Coppery smells were stronger, confusing me more, plus there was now some watery smell, and on top of that, the way scents sometimes stacked up on one another, a real strange smell, kind of like the burned air thing you get after lightning strikes. All of a sudden my mind made itself up, just like that, and I ducked into the small tunnel.
“Chet? Wait—there’s no way I can foll—”
I moved on. That was my job. Bernie shone the light behind me. I followed my shadow. It stretched out, getting longer and bigger. I was huge! Then it disappeared. Why? I glanced back—I can twist my head far around if I have to, a real advantage in a place like this tunnel, with no room to turn my whole body— and saw the light, now shining on a side wall. I’d gone around a kind of bend, and was now in darkness again. The lightning-strike smell got stronger. I slowed down, not liking that smell one bit, even thinking about curling up in a ball. Not that I was afraid or anything like that, but I knew something was about to happen.
And when it did, just a moment or two later, it turned out to be hardly anything at all. Just … what? A very tiny trembling of the ground under my feet? Something like that, here and gone in no time. Then, from not too far away, came a thud that reminded me of the time Bernie was building the patio out back and dropped one of the flagstones. He’d pulled his foot back in the nick of time—that expression comes from this real fleet-footed perp named Nick Beezer, but I really can’t go into that now, except to point out he was fleet-footed for a human, not the same thing as being fleet-footed period, no offense—and the flagstone had broken and the pieces had bounced around. I heard some of those rocky, bouncing-around sounds here in the small tunnel. And then, farther along, a shaft of light appeared, very much like what you see when you’re casing a house at night and some perp inside opens the door. Dust was boiling in that shaft of light. I closed in for a better look.
Well, well, well. A small section of the wall had caved in, and beyond it lay an open space. Not a very big open space, with hacked-at walls and piles of earth and rock, plus more boiling dust. This was a sort of chamber, with light coming in from a very small hole—no bigger than my head—in the rocky wall on the far side; not headlamp-type light, but the real daytime thing. I squeezed through the gap in the near wall, crossed the floor, climbed on top of a rubble pile and peered through the hole.
Hey! I saw the world outside, specifically a steep slope, and at its base an old falling-down cabin, way too ruined for anyone to live in, except that a pair of denim overalls hung on a line. I watched those overalls swaying in the breeze for a while, then turned back toward the little chamber. Light—this nice, strong daylight—was shining on the opposite wall, revealing a thick … seam? Was that the word? Yes, because when we explored old mines, Bernie often said, “Keep your eyes peeled for a seam of gold, big guy. We’ll find it one day.” Never mind that the peeling eyes thing had always made me feel uneasy; the point was I now had in my sight a thick seam that gleamed and glistened in a golden way. I moved off the rubble, my plan being to stand up real tall and lick that golden seam, just so I’d know for sure. I’d licked gold once before—a story all about a watch of Leda’s that I won’t go into now—so I’d done my homework. But before I could get to the wall, I caught sight of something from the corner of my eye.
I knew a human skeleton when I saw one—we’re not beginners, me and Bernie—but it always gets your heart racing. This particular skeleton, lying partly under the rubble, which was maybe why I’d missed it, had no flesh at all on it, or hair: a first for me. And also: no smell, not the faintest whiff. I went closer. The skull rested on its side. This was what lay behind the human face. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Laughter is one of the very best human things, and a kid’s laughter the best of the best—you should hear Charlie when I take him for rides on my back—but there’s a kind of nasty laughter that some humans use—never Bernie—just to be mean to other humans. And when they’re getting ready to laugh that nasty laugh, the expression on their faces is just like the expression on the face of every human skull I’ve ever seen, including the one in front of me. That almost led me to another thought, but not quite, and this wasn’t the time. I sniffed around the skeleton—still smelling zip—and came to the bony hand. Shaped like a hand, yes, but most of the bones weren’t connected, and lying right in the middle was this small rock. A bumpy, golden rock, golf-ball size.
I licked it. Gold, no doubt at all. I picked it up. Was there a word for a little gold rock like this? I waited for it to come to me, and while I was waiting, I smelled that burned air smell again, and at the same time felt a tiny trembling under my paws, like something was going on deep, deep down. That disturbed me, I admit it: I like solid ground under my feet. Then—just when I was remembering the name of the little gold rock, funny how the mind works—the whole world shifted toward one side, the side where the daylight flowed in, and then shifted back, much harder, the other way.
KA-BOOM. The ceiling fell in, and the walls fell in, and the floor fell up, and also darkness fell, complete. I took off—rocks bouncing off me, dust filling my lungs—not toward where the light had been, but toward Bernie. Something huge and strong knocked me down. I rolled over, bumped against rocks that wouldn’t give, bumped against more and more and more rock in every direction, solid rock but on the move at the same time, and started clawing, clawing, clawing, seeing nothing, smelling nothing, hearing nothing—except my heart, pounding like crazy— and feeling nothing but rock, closing in from all around.
Claw, big guy, claw. I heard Bernie’s voice in my head. I clawed, clawed my very hardest with all my paws. And suddenly I popped out into open space, not a big space, but big enough for running. I ran, starting to see a bit, or at least sense where I was in the darkness: back in the small tunnel. Yes, because in the distance I glimpsed Bernie’s light swinging back and forth.
“Chet! Chet! Where are you? Chet! Chet!”
Poor Bernie. He sounded so upset. I flew toward him.
From behind: KA-BOOM. And another KA-BOOM. I glanced back, saw there was no longer a tunnel behind me, just a wave of solid rock chasing my tail. I kicked it up a notch, hit top speed, raced into the cone of light and right smack into Bernie. We both went flying, the headlamp pointing wildly all over the place.
We picked ourselves up, me and Bernie. The headlamp lay on the ground, the light shining straight up. As Bernie bent down to grab it, everything went quiet, all of a sudden the quietest quiet I’d ever known, so quiet that the slight scrape of the headlamp on the rock as Bernie picked it up sounded sharp and clear, like sounds when I put my ear right against the speaker in the Porsche.
Bernie put on the headlamp. We looked around. I saw I was back at the junction where the big tunnel and the small tunnel— what was left of it, hardly any length at all, the rest filled in by the rock wave, finally at rest—came together. The ground was still, the air was still, Bernie and I were still.
He let out his breath. It sounded like a gentle breeze, and smelled good, too: toothpaste, coffee, and a touch of something sweet that was just Bernie. “Plate tectonics, big guy,” he said. “Who’d think to factor that in?”
I missed that one completely. We turned and walked out of the mine. So good to be in the sunshine! Bernie gave me a pat. I dropped the nugget at his feet. That was the name: I’d learned it when we took down Nuggets Bolliterri, who always wore one— although not as big as this—around his neck.
“Chet?” he said, picking it up. “Where’d you get this?” He gazed at me. I gazed at him. Then he held the nugget up toward the sun and gazed at that, slowly turning it in his hand. I sat down beside him, looking at nothing in particular. The nugget was pretty. Nice to have it, no doubt about that. But how were we doing on the case? I wasn’t sure.
Bernie tucked the nugget in his pocket. He turned toward the mine opening. From here it looked just the way it had looked before, all the support beams still in place, no sign of anything going on inside. “Safe to check out the big tunnel?” he said. I waited to hear. “There’s Devin to think about.”
Bernie was right, no surprise there. Finding Devin: that was the job, although wasn’t Anya actually paying us to do something else? I couldn’t remember. Once when Bernie’s mother came to visit, she said, “What I can’t remember can’t be important.” She’s a piece of work—calls Bernie Kiddo, if I haven’t mentioned that already—but I hoped she was right about the memory thing.
I rose. Bernie and I headed back toward the mine. We were just a few steps in when a man spoke behind us.
“Goin’ someplace?” he said.