Bernie 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.”
“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?”
“A little,” Bernie said.
“Like what?”
Bernie shrugged. He was a pretty good shrugger, although a much better nodder. “He was the trail guide for the kids’ wilderness hikes.”
“That it?”
“Should there be more?” Bernie said.
“Naw,” said the sheriff. “But word of caution—Moondog and his ilk are piss poor sources of information around here.”
Piss poor? That was a new one. I kind of liked it. I myself was piss rich, no doubt about that. I wandered out of the circle of light and lifted my leg against the tunnel wall. Chet the Jet!
Standing there in the darkness, one leg lifted, listening to the nice faint splashing sounds, I looked back toward the circle of light. The lantern sat on the ground, casting an unsteady light upward and making their faces strange, all the shadows leaning in the wrong direction. Not Bernie’s face of course: how could there ever be anything strange about Bernie’s face? But Sheriff Laidlaw looked like a Halloween version of himself, if that makes any sense. I love all the holidays, but not Halloween. If there’s a party, I don’t go: that was how we solved the problem, me and Bernie.
The sky was reddening when we got back outside, and Moondog and Rummy were gone. The sheriff and a uniformed guy stayed behind; Bernie and I piled into the chopper with the pilot—no big deal, I’d flown in a chopper before—and got taken back to the camp. At least that was where Bernie said we were going. Something about the motion made my eyelids get heavy right away. If you’ve logged any chopper time you probably know what I’m talking about.
I dreamed about gold nuggets, piles and piles of them. A lovely dream, on account of the state of our finances, until just before the end, when the piles of nuggets turned into piles of Hawaiian pants. Those Hawaiian pants were real, in case I haven’t made that clear. I opened my eyes. We were on the ground and Bernie was looking at me closely.
“You all right, big guy?”
All right? Way better than that. I was rested, refreshed, rarin’ to go.
“Maybe just a bad dream,” he said, patting my head. “You were whimpering there for a bit.”
Oh, no. How embarrassing. Up in the cockpit, the pilot was busy with the switches, maybe hadn’t heard me. Bernie popped open the door. We hopped out, Bernie not exactly hopping, and stayed low, those blades still whap-whap-whapping. Solid ground felt good under my paws. Had I just been worrying about something? I tried, not hard, to remember, and couldn’t.
The pilot opened a side window and shouted over the noise of blades, “Good-looking dog.”
What a nice pilot!
“Does he like Slim Jims? Got half of one left.”
In fact, the greatest pilot in the world. And quite good-looking himself, with a bald shiny head and a jowly round face, a little bit greasy. I got hit by this crazy notion of licking off that grease. Maybe later.
We moved away from the chopper. It took off, veered in a big curve and soared up the mountain. I looked around, got my bearings. We were in the parking lot at Big Bear Wilderness Camp. The sun, all fat and red, was perched right on a big round mountaintop, but no time to take in the way it was about to wobble and sink from view—a sight I’d seen before, although it never got old—because Anya was running toward us along the path that led down from the main cabin, running so fast and out of control I thought she might fall at any moment. And also—what was this? A yellow Beetle was driving up the canyon road? Car identification wasn’t my best thing, but Beetles were easy and this yellow one easiest of all, on account of the fact that it belonged to Suzie and I’d ridden in it many times.
Anya tore up to us, grabbed both of Bernie’s hands. “Oh my God—you didn’t find him?”
“No,” Bernie said. “But there’s still hope.”
Her big blue eyes opened wider; they had a wild look. “There’s still hope? What do you mean, still? Still? Still? Oh my God.”
“Well,” said Bernie, “the facts are—”
Anya started beating on Bernie’s chest with her fists. “Make me hear it,” she said, her voice rising and rising. “Make me hear hope.”
Uh-oh. A bad situation, and it got worse in a hurry. First, the yellow Beetle drove up and parked. Then Anya, her back to the Beetle, collapsed sobbing into Bernie’s arms. Bernie, looking real uncomfortable, gazed up at the sky, like he wanted help to come down and bail him out. Right about then was when Suzie got out of the car. She had a big smile on her face. It faded fast. Bernie patted Anya on her back, maybe even rubbed it a little. Anya calmed down but still clung to Bernie, kind of wrapped all over him, her hands now clasping the back of his head. Suzie got in her car. At that moment, Bernie’s gaze came down and he noticed the Beetle for the first time.
“Suzie!” he said, trying to free himself from Anya. “Suzie!”
Through the windshield, Suzie’s face looked hard. She fish-tailed around in a tight turn and sped off down the canyon road.