Sheriff 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?”
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.