We drove away, silent for a long time, the car full of Bernie’s thoughts. I loved the feeling of Bernie’s thoughts. They were giants! And the West—which was where we lived, a fact I’d learned quite recently—was a giant land, so we matched up perfectly, Bernie and the land, and me, too, of course. Don’t forget me. I like being in the mix.
Back on the two-lane blacktop, Bernie took a deep breath and all the giant thoughts went still, as though fallen fast asleep. “Got to beware of simplistic ideas, big guy,” he said. Whoa! Those—whatever they were—had never occurred to me. I knew to beware of perps bearing guns, and also bears—ever since that time we’d come between a mama bear and her cubs, mama bears turning out to be amazingly fast on their feet—and now I added simplistic ideas to the list.
“But sometimes,” Bernie went on, “simplistic is better than nothing at all. Water equals life, for example. And the reverse—no water equals death. Isn’t that, way down deep, why I feel so strongly about…”
Whatever Bernie felt so strongly about remained unspoken, so I never found out. But still it was nice to be zooming along in the Porsche, the wind ruffling my fur, lots of wind since the top was down, in fact actually lost, and—and whoa! A roadrunner! A roadrunner was also zooming along, practically right beside us. I’ve chased the odd roadrunner, never successfully. Not yet. And this was not the time. I knew that so well. But then, as we passed him, the little bugger turned his little birdie head and gave me a look with his little birdie eyes. There’s only so much anyone can take. I barked my most savage bark, a great feeling, but not quite great enough. All on their own, the muscles in my legs bunched and got ready for a mighty—
“Ch—et?”
Bernie has a way of saying my name—slowly more than loudly—that causes this strange tapping of the brakes inside me, hard to describe. He laughed and gave me a pat. What was funny? Pat pat pat. I didn’t know and didn’t care.
We passed some big orange mounds, almost hill-sized, but smelling of copper—meaning they weren’t hills but tailings, and this was mining country—and entered a small mining town.
“San Dismas,” Bernie said, as we rolled down the main street and stopped at a red light, the only stoplight in sight. We have two kinds of mining towns out here. The kind with stuff still in the mines is where you see lots of brand-new pickups. The kind where the mines are all mined out is where you see boarded-up buildings. San Dismas was this second kind of mining town.
We pulled over in front of a convenience store. Bernie read the sign. “QwikStop. A long shot, big guy, which should come after all other possibilities have washed out, but let’s do things backwards today.” He paused. “Call it the Beasley method.”
Deputy Beasley was still in the picture? A bit of a surprise, but if Bernie said so, then that was that. We hopped out of the Porsche, me actually hopping, and entered the QwikStop.
Here’s something about convenience stores—and I’ve been in many: they always have Slim Jims for sale. How convenient is that! I followed the Slim Jim smell over to the Slim Jim display. A whole rack! What a fine convenience store—even if business seemed a little slow, what with the only customers being me and Bernie—maybe the best I’ve had the pleasure to visit. The Beasley method—whatever it was, exactly—was working already.
Meanwhile Bernie was at the cooler, picking up a water bottle or two. He carried them up to the counter. The clerk was a very small old lady wearing huge hoop earrings.
“Anything else?” she said, running the little scanner thing over the bottles. Her movements turned out to be surprisingly speedy.
“Got any Big Chew Cherry Gum?” Bernie said.
The woman turned to a shelf behind her. “How many?”
“I’ll take a couple.”
She laid two packs of gum alongside the water. “That it?”
“Yes, thanks,” Bernie said.
Uh-oh. Had I heard right? Not a real question, since I always do—meaning something of the highest importance had slipped Bernie’s mind. I forgave him at once, of course, even before I blamed him, meaning I didn’t actually blame him, blaming Bernie being something I’ve never done and will never do. But none of that stopped me from barking a quiet little bark just to get his attention.
When humans are startled by some sudden sound—a car plowing into a plate-glass window, for example—they do this sort of spasm and whip around to see what just happened. Which was what Bernie and the old lady did now, both of them gazing in my direction, mouths open.
“My god,” the old lady said, “never heard a bark like that in my life, and I used to run a kennel.”
“Sorry,” Bernie said, “I—”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” said the old lady. “How many Slim Jims should I ring up?”
“Make it one of those eight-packs.”
And very soon after that we were all gathered cheerfully at the counter, Bernie paying, the old lady making change, and me sitting quietly, like an obedience school champ. I’d actually been a K-9 school champ, by the way, except for flunking out the very last day on the leaping test. Even though leaping was my very best thing! My memory of the details is a bit sketchy. All I remember is that a cat was involved, and possibly some blood. But that was the same day I met Bernie, so it turned out to be the best day of my life.
“Want your receipt?” the old lady said.
Bernie nodded. She handed him the receipt. He checked it. “Sofia?” he said.
“That’s me.”
“Any chance you’d remember a certain customer from yesterday?”
Sofia gave Bernie a close look. A little old lady, but her eyes were big and bright and didn’t seem old at all. “Depends,” she said.
Bernie reached into his pocket and handed her the other receipt, the one I’d found at the base of the slope in Dollhouse Canyon. Don’t forget we’re a team, me and Bernie. “How about this particular customer?” he said.
Sofia took one quick glance at the receipt and said, “What’s he done now?”
“We don’t know yet,” Bernie said. “What’s he done before?”
“Taken too many shortcuts,” Sofia said. “Are you a cop? You don’t look like one, not exactly.” She tilted her chin at me. “And this guy has that K-nine look, but he’s not quite right for it either.”
Bernie’s face lit up, the way it does when he gets real interested in something. “Not right how?” he said.
“Too independent-minded,” Sofia said.
Bernie laughed and handed her our card. This was the card Suzie had designed for us, the one with the flowers at the bottom. Suzie was Bernie’s girlfriend, although maybe not anymore, what with her being in London, which I knew was far away. And also Eliza was now in the picture. “Can you love two women, Chet?” Bernie had said the other night. “Or is that the road to madness?” The meaning of that had escaped me completely, but I hadn’t liked the sound, so I’d pressed up against him, preventing any movement down any road whatsoever.
But no time for that now. “Never met a private eye before,” Sofia was saying.
“We don’t bite,” said Bernie.
An absolute stunner! True, we didn’t bite often, and only when we had to, but we did bite, as more than one perp now sporting an orange jumpsuit could tell you. And when it comes to biting and the Little Detective Agency, it’s not just me, amigos. Mostly me, yes, but there was one time—this was during the rather surprising finish of the dental hygienist case, best forgotten—when Bernie had brought his own teeth into play. So, what was he up to, here at the QwikStop counter? I locked my gaze on him and kept it locked.
Sofia pocketed the card. “Florian Machado is who you’re looking for,” she said. “He really needs to stop.”
“Stop what?” Bernie said.
“Taking what doesn’t belong to him.”
“Such as?”
“Cell phones, laptops, the odd car or two—whatever’s easy.”
“Wallets?” Bernie said.
“Not to my knowledge. But if it was easy…” Sofia shrugged. “Is that what he did? Snatch somebody’s wallet?”
“Could be,” Bernie said. “What if one of these theft opportunities turned out to be not so easy?”
“You’re asking if he’s violent?”
Bernie nodded.
Sofia shook her head. “Flory’s just a big baby. He’d never hurt anyone. Well, there was that one time, but it wasn’t deliberate. He doesn’t know his own strength, is all.”
“What happened?”
“One of those traffic stop things. He ended up with an assaulting a police officer charge, did some time.”
“Where do we find him?”
“It’s a little tricky.” Sofia drew us a map on a scrap of paper. She pointed with her pen. “Look for a blue boat hereabouts.”
“And then?”
“You’re there. He lives on the boat.”
“A stolen boat?” Bernie said.
Sofia nodded.
The desert is dry, but some parts are drier than others. No saguaros, mesquite, or paloverde in the real dry desert, which is mostly rocks and sand and maybe a droopy and dusty bush or two. That was the kind of desert we found as we drove out of San Dismas, past the last mound of orange tailings, toward a distant gray stone butte, which turned out to be not that distant and we arrived in no time, just another one of those strange things that can happen out our way. The pavement ended and we followed a dirt track, past a parked ATV, and to a blue boat up on blocks in the shadow of the butte. A strange kind of sight, for sure. Do I love this job or what?
Bernie turned off the engine. It got very quiet. Bernie said, “I can almost hear the sea.”
I gave him a close look. Although Bernie’s ears aren’t small for a human, they’re not in my class when it comes to hearing, nowhere near. And what did almost hearing something even mean? So therefore … so therefore it had to be a joke! Bernie can be a joker at times. Once he’d done a brief stand-up routine at LaffRiot, something about a bet with a few buddies from Valley PD, very successful from my point of view, although the riot part had pretty much taken over. But … but whoa! Had I just done a so-therefore? So-therefores were Bernie’s department. I brought other things to the table. So therefore—oh, no, not again!—I dropped this whole thing at once, made my mind a complete blank, and felt much better, more like myself. In fact, exactly like myself, which is when I’m at my best.
We walked up to the blue boat. A cabin cruiser: on our San Diego trip—we’d surfed, me and Bernie!—we’d gone out on a cabin cruiser belonging to an old Army buddy of his, a much nicer cabin cruiser than this one, since it didn’t have peeling paint or holes in the hull. “The hardest part of surfing is popping up on the board,” Bernie had said. But of course I was popped-up to begin with, so the whole thing had been a snap. Now here we were working on a case involving boats in the desert and possibly making money—too soon, in my experience, to rule out the moneymaking part completely. Who wouldn’t be feeling tip-top?
We stepped around some flattened beer cans and stopped at the bottom of a ladder leading up to the deck. The sound of snoring came from inside the boat.
“Ahoy,” Bernie said, not loudly and with a flicker of a smile crossing his face, the smile that showed work can be fun. “Permission to come aboard.”
Inside the boat, the snoring continued. Did Bernie hear it or not? I didn’t find out, because the next thing I knew he’d started up the ladder. This was a problem. Don’t think for a moment that I can’t climb ladders. I just run right up them, easy-peasy. The problem was I like to be first in this sort of situation, especially if the other guy is Bernie. So I did what I had to do—
“Chet! For god’s sake!”
—which was to sort of run right up Bernie’s back, one paw—possibly the take-off paw—possibly landing on his head, and spring onto the deck. There! Can’t make something or other without breaking eggs: you heard that all the time. Uh-oh. All at once I was starving! Not now, big guy, said a voice in my head, Bernie’s voice, which was often there. I waited for more, specifically something about steak tips if I was a good boy, but that didn’t happen. Maybe it went without mentioning.
In my most good boy way, I turned to Bernie, now stepping onto the deck, his hair somewhat askew. But that only made him look better! Meanwhile, the sound of snoring was starting to remind me of the thunder we sometimes get in monsoon season.
“Hear that?” Bernie whispered. “He’s snoozing.” He tiptoed toward the cabin. You had to love Bernie, and I did.
The cabin door hung off its hinges. We went through the doorway, me first. Smells were coming the other way, kind of like a river you might not want to swim in: a river all about toe fungus, stale beer, unwashed human male. Shafts of light shone through holes in the walls, falling on a huge drooling guy in a tank top and tighty whiteys sleeping on a bunk; a pizza box open on the floor, one slice left; and up front, on the control console, a black leather wallet. Bernie, a hard look on his face and no longer on tiptoes, strode to the console, picked up the wallet, checked inside. Then he turned to the sleeping dude, a slow turn that … that reminded me of a tank in a movie we’d watched, slowly swinging its big gun around. And then: KABOOM.
“Wakee wakee,” he said. Not a kaboom, his voice soft, if anything, but somehow that soft wakee wakee had kaboom force. The sleeping dude’s eyes snapped open at once.
Very small eyes for such a big potato-shaped head. They shifted Bernie’s way, then to me, and back to Bernie.
“What the fuck?” he said.
“On your feet, sailor boy,” Bernie said. “Hands where I can see them.”