Dog On It (23 page)

We kept going, the only sound coming from the wind; Bernie and I knew how to move in silence. Once I spotted a gleam, hurried to it, sniffed at a shard of glass. Something there? Maybe, just maybe, a hint of mink, my minkness. I changed direction again, went into a slow zigzag, searching, searching. The moon moved across the sky. I picked up this and that—no more minkness, but the soupçon of tomato a couple times, and once the male funkiness, certainly mine—and changed direction and changed again, and maybe once more. Bernie walked along beside me. Sometimes, when I went into my trot, he had to jog, his heavy breathing breaking the silence. Time passed, maybe lots of it. He didn’t say a word. I could feel his confidence. Bernie believed in me.
That made me even stronger than my normal self. I could keep searching all night if I had to.

And then: at last! Up ahead I spotted a sign on a post, even though we were in the middle of nowhere: a sign I remembered, a sign I’d seen the night of my flight from Mr. Gulagov’s. I ran to it, Bernie following. Now he did use the flash, shining it on the sign. I could see how worn it was, the letters faded almost all away. Bernie brushed his hand lightly over the wood and said, “‘Ghost’ something or other, it looks like. ‘Five miles.’” He turned to me. “‘Ghost Town,’ most likely—lots of them around. Were you here, Chet?” “Ghost Town” didn’t mean anything to me, but was I here? Oh yes. I took a step or two closer to the sign and suddenly got hit by my smell, the most potent shot of it so far. I took off.

“Chet! Chet! Slow down.”

I tried to slow down but had a hard time, what with the way the smell kept getting stronger and stronger. I trotted ahead, ran back, circled Bernie, kept going. We went on and on like that, but I didn’t get tired at all, hardly noticed when the moon sank from sight, the stars dimmed, the sky paled. We were on track, following that scent, no doubt about it, every component in place: old leather, salt and pepper, mink coats, soupçon of tomato, plus the funky part. This was it! I started running, couldn’t hold back. For a while I heard Bernie running behind me, but then he stopped. I turned back to look. He wasn’t running, in fact had ramped down to a slow walk. Bernie! Come on! I turned, charged ahead, my scent everywhere, and was reaching full speed when—

What was this? Beer cans? The remains of a fire? A falling-down shack? Oh no. We were back at the biker’s campsite? How could that be? We’d searched all night. I froze, one front paw poised in the air.

Bernie came up beside me. “Looks like we’ve gone in circles, boy,” he said quietly. I lowered my paw, lowered my head, too.

Daylight spread across the desert, revealing how dusty we were, me and Bernie. Dusty because of the wind that had risen during the night? I didn’t know. In the light, I could also see that Bernie had raccoon eyes again. “Sure is pretty,” he said, “the desert at dawn.” Not to me, not at that moment: I felt so bad about my failure I couldn’t look at Bernie’s face. We got in the car, crossed over the Apache Wash, found the track, drove back up into the mountains and back into Sierra Verde. I lay on my seat, tired; but allowing myself to sleep? No way.

“Hungry, boy?” he said.

I was, but allowing myself to eat? No way. Bernie stopped the car. I sat up. We were parked in front of a convenience store. Bernie took the .38 special from his belt, tucked it in the back of the glove box, and was reaching for his door handle when out of the convenience store came a man carrying a bag of groceries. A little dude, very thin, with arm tattoos and spiky hair.

Bernie went still. “Don’t move a muscle,” he said, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear.

I didn’t move a muscle, didn’t even breathe. This little spikyhaired tattooed dude? We knew him, me and Bernie, oh yeah: Anatoly Bulganin, projectionist at the Golden Palm Movie Palace in Las Vegas. We were far from Vegas: I knew that very well. And I knew Bernie. Right now Bernie would be thinking: What’s the little dude doing here? I perked right up.

Anatoly Bulganin, spiky-haired projectionist, walked across the parking lot, popped the trunk of a car, and lowered the groceries inside, not looking once in our direction. Had Bernie told me what a projectionist did? Couldn’t remember, but I knew it was something no good, just from the sound.

“Bingo,” Bernie said, voice lowered.

Bingo? Why bingo? Wasn’t that some strange game Bernie had played one night at the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association fund-raiser, a game he might have won except for an unfortunate incident involving my tail and his card with the little markers?

“See that car?” Bernie said. “Blue BMW.” He got out of the Porsche. Anatoly, closing the trunk of the BMW, turned and saw Bernie. Anatoly’s face did funny things. “Hi, Anatoly,” Bernie said. “A little far from home, are we not?”

“I, uh,” said Anatoly. Then, surprisingly quick, he raced around to the driver’s door of the BMW and flung it open, not even taking the time to fully close the trunk, which sprang back up. By then I was springing, too. I landed on the pavement, bounded past Bernie, and launched myself at Anatoly. An instant
too late: The driver’s door slammed shut with him inside, and I hit the hard steel with a thump that sent me somersaulting backward. The next thing I knew, the BMW was peeling out of the lot, missing me by not much.

“Chet? You all right?”

I rolled over, rose, unsteady at first, but then fine. Fine and just a bit mad.

“Let’s roll.”

I was more than ready. We hopped in the Porsche and took off after Anatoly the projectionist. He was doomed, just didn’t know it.

The Beemer roared down the main street, passed the bar with the neon martini glass in the window—no hogs parked outside, but it was still early—and swung up a side street, tires smoking. Bernie didn’t drive nearly as fast—he wouldn’t do that in a populated place—so when we got to the side street, there was no sign of Anatoly. We rumbled up the side street, past the last houses and into open country, and then Bernie floored it. Almost right away the pavement ended; the Beemer was still out of sight, but Anatoly’s dust hung in the air, telltale dust and plenty of it. Our engine made a deep throaty sound, like some powerful beast. Was a car a kind of machine? Couldn’t be. Machines I had problems with, but cars I loved.

The road—getting narrower and bumpier—twisted up and up into the mountains. Bernie was a great driver—have I mentioned that already? We skidded around corners, zooming, but the nose of the Porsche always kept pointing straight ahead. And the look on Bernie’s face? The best, the look of the hunter with the prey in view. Maybe not quite in view yet, but message to Anatoly: You’re toast. I’d been in a few car chases like this—one of the very best perks in our line of work, car chases—and they
always ended the same way, with some perp’s pant leg between my teeth.

The road took us higher and higher, steep rocky slopes looming on one side, a sheer cliff dropping off on the other. Bernie geared down—I loved gearing down, especially how the revving went up at the same time, pushing me back in my seat—Bernie was a master! What was more fun than this? Huh? I ask you.

But where was I?

On Anatoly’s heels, with Bernie gearing down. We leaned in to a sharp curve, a curve where the drop-off side jutted way out, and from there we could see another curve like it up ahead, and rounding that curve, trailed by clouds of dust: the blue BMW, its still-open trunk bobbing up and down. Only a matter of time: a favorite human expression, although not of mine—anything about time had a way of sliding away from me, like a bar of soap I’d once tried to corral on the bathroom floor. But I knew the expression was right for a moment like this, and I started salivating the way I always did when we were about to snap up the perp.

The Beemer disappeared around the bend. Bernie changed gears, and we bombed down a short straightaway, then hit the next bend, the same bend where we’d seen Anatoly moments before. Around the bend, the road narrowed and roughened, rising on another long curving stretch, the Beemer not even halfway up. We were gaining, and gaining fast. Some spiky-headed little piddler was going to outdrive Bernie? Dream on.

We closed in, Bernie downshifting, upshifting, hands and feet doing maneuvers, making adjustments nonstop. Now I could see Anatoly’s head through the back window of the BMW. His head changed angles, maybe because he was checking the rearview mirror. Scary sight, was it not, buddy boy, the Little Detective Agency in hot pursuit? The Beemer sped up, then started fishtailing, the
back end whipping more and more wildly, the whole car skidding closer and closer to the cliff edge, and at the point where it was about to shoot off into the air—did I mention there was no barrier of any kind?—it suddenly straightened, groceries flying out of the trunk, and kept going. An apple soared up into the blue; I had a crazy urge to retrieve it. What was that about? Bad idea, I knew that, but I couldn’t help wondering: Could it be done?

With all that back-and-forthing, Anatoly had lost a lot more ground. We closed in fast, everything flashing by—curve after curve; the rocky slopes on one side; dust boiling up from the wheels of the Beemer; and the drop-off on the other side—as though we were skirting the edge of the sky itself. I was sitting straight up, even straighter than straight up—in fact, I had my front paws on top of the windshield frame—ready, able, willing. Anatoly checked the rearview mirror again—now I could even see his eyes, open wide in fear, and I could smell his fear, too—and Bernie held up his hand palm out in the sign that meant stop. But Anatoly didn’t stop, even sped up as he took another bend, the Beemer’s rear end losing traction, sliding, sliding; and at that moment Bernie did the most amazing thing: He turned the wheel hard, downshifting at the same time, and shot past the Beemer on the rocky-slope side.

Now we were in front, and Anatoly was eating our dust! How perfect was that? “Next we slow this little caravan down,” said Bernie. One word for Bernie: genius. “And then we ticket him for littering,” he added. Littering? I didn’t get that, was still turning it over in my mind when—Boom! Something went wrong. First an actual boom that seemed to come from right under us—oh no, car trouble now?—and then a black cloud, thick and wet, erupted from under the hood and splashed over the windshield, blinding us.

Things happened fast after that. We started spinning, round and round on the narrow road, spinning and skidding at the same time, skimming the rocky base of the steep slope, sparks flying everywhere, then veering the other way, one wheel spraying loose gravel off the very edge, the rubber maybe even slipping a little bit over, out into nothing, and the whole time Bernie’s face didn’t change at all as he shifted, braked, twisted the wheel this way and that. But we couldn’t see, not through the blackened windshield. And still, all the time, spinning and spinning. Did the Beemer flash by, ahead of us once more? I thought so. But I couldn’t be sure, and at that moment I had other things to think about, like the way we were colliding with the base of the rocky slope again, harder this time, so hard I shot up and out of my seat.

Then came a horrible moment when I soared through open sky—I’ve had nightmares like that—up and up and suddenly down. I landed hard but on all fours. Oh, so good to have all fours. I wasn’t on them for long, flipping over and over, coming to rest at last in the middle of the road, breathless but unhurt. I gave myself a good shake, saw the Porsche up ahead, straightening out, slowing down, Bernie back in control: We were going to be okay. But then—what was that? A huge rock came tumbling down from the steep slope and thudded onto the road, right in front of Bernie. Nothing he could do: The Porsche hit the rock dead on, bounced end over end, took off into the air, and hurtled over the drop-off on the other side of the road, vanishing from view.

Bernie!

The next thing I knew, I was standing at the edge, peering down. Way, way below, the Porsche spun through emptiness, down, down, down, finally crashing on a wide, rocky ledge and exploding in flames. Then it was very quiet, the only sound my own breathing.

Bernie!

“Chet?”

I looked down. There, clinging with one hand to a tiny out-crop in the cliff, was Bernie, face all bloody, almost in my reach. Our eyes met. The muscles in his arm popped out like thick cables as he tried to pull himself up to the edge. But he couldn’t do it, not with one hand, and there was no place for his other hand to grip, the cliff face so sheer. I leaned over the edge.

“No, boy.”

Didn’t hear that. I leaned over the edge some more, front paws digging down into the cliff face, back paws anchored with all my strength on the road. Then I lowered my head, stretching out as far as I could, but it wasn’t far enough. I couldn’t quite reach Bernie.

“Back off, boy.”

Out of the question. We stayed like that, heads almost in touching distance, the muscles in Bernie’s arm straining. Then he got an idea. I saw it in his eyes, had seen that look many times. He reached down with his free hand, unbuckled his belt, slipped it off, got a good grip on one end, then flipped the buckle end up to me. I caught it in my mouth, clamped down with a force that couldn’t be broken.

“On two,” Bernie said. I got ready. “One, two.”

I hauled back with all my might. Bernie held on to the belt, at the same time pulling with his other hand, the one with a grip on that single outcrop in the cliff face. He rose, slow, so slow, but up, and up a little bit more. My muscles—down my neck, down my back, into my legs—were on fire. Up and up came Bernie, eyes now level with the edge. Did he look afraid? Not at all, not to me. He let go of the outcrop and reached out—for one moment held up only by the belt—and got his free hand on flat ground,
pressing down hard. At that same instant I hauled once more with everything I had, and he was up, first his upper body flopping on the road and then all of him wriggling to safety!

He hugged me. “It’s okay, Chet, you can let go.”

I tried to let go of the belt buckle, but it was caught between my teeth. Bernie got it loose. I licked his face, tasting his blood and sweat. He held my head in his hands, gave it a squeeze.