The Sound and the Furry (24 page)

We could see right through the living room and into the kitchen where a man in a sleeveless
T-shirt was kneeling with his back to us by the cabinet under the sink. He seemed
to be rooting around in there with one hand, his other holding a flashlight. All I
could really see of him was his butt and his heavy round upper arms. No biggie. I
already knew who he was: Wes Derrick, the environmental guy with the soft voice and
the soft brown gaze.

Bernie raised the .38 Special. “Freeze,” he said, not loudly, just real clear. The
fur on the back of my neck stood straight up, and I almost missed something, maybe
something I should have been on to already, namely the smell of a second man, also
known to me, but no time for that now, because he was close behind us—oh, no! not
the old hiding-in-the-shadow-of-an-open-door trick!—which wasn’t good at all and—

Cale Rugh burst out of the shadows and whacked Bernie across the back of his head.
Bernie slumped to the floor like he’d fallen asleep all of a sudden. The next instant
I was in midair, hitting Cale throat high—but no! Somehow he’d stepped aside—a real
quick fighter unlike most humans except for Bernie and a few others I’d come across—his
arm whipping through a beam of moonlight, a long-barreled gun in his hand. He hit
me with it, not quite as square as he wanted: I was on the move, too, amigo. Just
as I rounded on him, the flashlight beam swung over and lit his face, all twisted
up.

He shielded his eyes. “Get that goddamn light off me for—”

Too late for you, buddy boy. I leaped again and this time I got him good, leading
with my teeth and finding his gun arm. Cale went down under me, the gun clattering
across the floor and him screaming, “Wes! Wes! He’s gonna kill me.”

Which hadn’t been my intention—messing him up for what he’d done to Bernie was all
I’d had in mind—but killing him sounded like an even better id—No. No it did not.
I was mad, yes, but I didn’t want to do that. Instead, I got my paws on his chest,
lowered my face to his, just to show him who was who. Then he’d surrender, we’d cuff
him, and—

“Wes! The gun! Shoot him!”

I heard Wes scrambling around behind us.

“Don’t like to shoot a dog,” Wes said.

“KILL HIM!”

Wes grunted like maybe he was . . . picking something up. I started to twist around
in his direction. He had the gun all right, but by the barrel, not the grip, meaning
he wasn’t going to shoot, although he might have been planning to use it as a—

The moonlight found his soft brown eyes. He brought the gun butt down on my head.

I fell into a strange dreamy state where I wasn’t quite asleep and could hear pretty
well although I couldn’t move, or maybe just didn’t feel like it. The most important
thing I heard was Bernie breathing, nice and regular, not far from where I lay. Cale
and Wes were close by, too. Soon we’d be jumping up and doing what had to be done,
me and Bernie.

“What now?” Wes was saying.

“I should put a bullet in Little’s head,” said Cale. “Deserves it—he brought this
all on himself.”

“Not sure I’m getting that.”

“By turning down big bucks when he didn’t even have a clue there was anything ulterior
going down. Makes him one of those holier-than-thous. They’re the ones that cause
all the collateral damage—Mack being a case in point.”

“Mack the shrimp dealer?” Wes said. “Did something happen to him?”

There was a pause. “Not that I know of.”

And a longer pause. “Are you hiding things from me?”

“Grow up, Wes.”

Then came a long silence. My head started to throb a bit. I thought about getting
up, maybe in a while.

“What are we going to do?” Wes said.

“That’s better,” said Cale. “No
I
in team. Now’s when your boating expertise comes in.”

“Wouldn’t call myself an expert.”

“Know enough to cause an unfortunate fuel line accident?”

“I guess so, but why?” Wes said. “No way he could ID us from what went on here. Why
don’t we just tie him up or something?”

“Or we could make him sit in the corner,” Cale said. “Christ almighty. You think we
can let him keep roaming around?”

“Guess not.”

“Then we’re on the same page,” Cale said. “But it has to look like an accident, no
matter how half-assed. Bernie here’s connected.”

“To the mob?”

Cale laughed, a squeaky sound like something was rusty inside. “To some people we
wouldn’t want showing up—military guys, a DA or two, some cops.”

“The Robideaus?”

“Hell no. The Robideaus are who we’re counting on to do the half-assed investigation
of the half-assed accident you’re going to get cracking on.”

“What about searching the place?” Wes said. “The whole point of the exercise.”

“Just do your job and no one’ll ever find it,” said Cale. “Even if the goddamn thing
is here, which I’m not so sure about.”

“You’re telling me that now?”

“I’m starting to have doubts about you, Wes.”

Wes moved away. Then came a quiet time where I might have actually fallen asleep.
Anyway: a blank. A smell brought me back to life, specifically the smell of gasoline,
real sharp in the nose, almost stinging.

I opened my eyes, saw Bernie lying beside me, chest rising and falling in an easy
rhythm. I could feel my own chest doing the same; we’re a lot alike, me and Bernie.
A happy thought, and I lost myself in it until the gasoline smell brought me out of
it. Shifting my head a bit, I looked back through the kitchen and living room parts
of
Little Jazz
to the stern—stern! It came to me!

Wes and Cale stood there in the light of the moon, Wes holding one end of a long tube
that ran down through a hatch in the floorboards, and Cale reaching into his pocket.
He took out a lighter. They were up to no good, what kind of no good I didn’t know
and it really didn’t matter, what with me hating them so much, especially Cale.

Cale took the end of the tube from Wes. “I drop this on the deck and the gas spills
out?”

“Correct,” said Wes.

“Good job. Get in the boat and crank ’er up.”

Wes climbed over the stern and out of sight. A motor made that coughing sound a starting
motor makes. I found that I was on my feet and not feeling too bad, the throbbing
in my head ramped down to something I wouldn’t even call pain. Meanwhile, Cale was
letting go of the rubber tube. It fell to the deck like a wriggling snake and liquid
splashed out, silvery in the moonlight, a few drops landing on his cowboy boots.

“Damn,” he said, quick-stepping back, too late. He flicked open the lighter and a
short flame rose up from it. Cale made
some sort of adjustment and the flame grew longer. Then he lowered the lighter and
got ready to fling it, sideways-style, like a Frisbee. He didn’t see me coming at
all.

And even if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered: that’s how mad I was by then.
THUMP!
Like a big bass drum! Then everything went flying, the lighter rising the highest,
spinning like a sparkler on the Fourth of July—not my favorite holiday, by the way—plus
Cale and me also spinning—not quite as high, but enough to clear the stern of
Little Jazz
. We came crashing into a boat tied to the platform at the back—not the pirogue but
a bigger boat that floated beside it, a green-painted boat with Wes at the motor.
Wes’s eyes got huge; the lighter sizzled as it hit the water; and then we threw down,
trust me.

We had shouting, we had screaming, we had the taste of blood in my mouth. Wes fell
against the motor and all of a sudden we took off backward, zooming away from
Little Jazz
and down the bayou. Wes kicked out at me. Way too slow: I got his ankle between my
jaws.

“Do something, for Christ sake,” he screamed. “He’s biting my leg off.”

I felt Cale’s hand on my collar, pulling, yanking, jerking. I went stiff, all my muscles
straining the other way, one of my best moves. Meanwhile, lights were appearing on
shore, one, two, more.

“The net!” Wes shouted. “The net!”

“What goddamn net?”

“In the bow!”

Cale’s hand left my collar. I squeezed Wes’s ankle good and tight. He screamed again.
The motor was screaming, too. I felt my very wildest. These two perps—and that was
what they were, all right—were going to pay, and pay big time for—

What was this? Something fell over me with a soft thud, almost the sound a blanket
would make. I don’t like blankets on me and this was the same kind of feeling. I let
go of  Wes’s ankle, tried to twist around, but I was all tangled up, tangled in . . .
in a big fishnet! Cale loomed over me, tugging at this and that, and then Wes was
up and tugging from the other direction. I snapped my jaws, got fishnet in my mouth,
bit at it and bit at it, thrashed my body around with all my strength, but the net
closed around me tighter and tighter until I couldn’t move a muscle more than a twitch
or two.

They rolled me up in a ball and shoved me against the side of the boat. All I could
do was bark. I barked, but not loud, on account of hardly being able to open my mouth,
the net pressing in so tight.

The scream of the engine died down, the boat coming to rest and rocking on the water.
High above a cloud, silver at the edges and black in the middle, glided over the moon
and the night went dark.

“I’m bleeding like a pig,” Wes said.

“Don’t want to hear about it,” said Cale. “Let’s go.”

“Back to the houseboat?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you want to finish what we started? The fuel line thing?”

“With every hillbilly in the swamp waking up? I thought you were supposed to be smart.
Head for the rig.”

“The rig?” Wes said.

“Something wrong with your hearing?”

“But what about him?”

“Him?”

“The dog.”

Cale gazed down at me, his eyes in shadow, just two dark holes. “Snack time for Iko,”
he said. “Drive.”

Iko? Had I heard that name somewhere? Was it important?
Bernie!

I heard the engine crank up and felt the boat swing around but couldn’t turn to see
what Wes was doing in the stern, what with being so tangled up. The bow rose up and
we sped across the water. Down on the deck, unable to see over the sides, I saw only
the starless, moonless sky and Cale, picking up his hat from under one of the seats.
It was all crushed up and dirty; I felt good about that. Cale flung it over the side,
then stood in the bow, his back to me and his thin hair streaming in the wind. I barked
just in case he was forgetting what I had in store for him, but couldn’t rouse up
much sound at all, and now I’d somehow got my whole muzzle stuck in one of the net
openings.

Time passed, how much I didn’t know, with nothing to hear but the throb of the engine,
nothing to see but Cale’s back and the night sky. After a while, a jagged hole appeared
in the clouds and the moon poked through. Bernie had explained all about the moon
to Charlie. It had once been part of the earth! Bernie knew just about everything.
He’d know what to do right now, for example. Something quick and blazing with the
.38 Special would have been my guess.

Cale raised his hand, made the slow-down motion. The boat slewed around to a stop.
The engine went silent, and then there was nothing to hear but the water’s peaceful
lapping sounds around us.

Cale and Wes loomed up over me. Cale was closest, so I lunged at him, forgetting all
about the net around me. How crazy was that? The truth was I couldn’t move. How could
anyone forget a thing like that? I tried to snap at Cale through the gap in the netting,
got nowhere with that either.

“You take that end,” Cale said.

They both stooped, both grunted, and next thing I knew they had me in the air, Wes
on one end of the rolled-up net and Cale on the other.

“On three,” Cale said. They started swinging me. “One. Two. Three.”

And then I was airborne, sailing over the water for what seemed like a long time,
my body all twisted up in the net. Three was not a number I had any use for: that
was my only thought.

E
verything is different underwater: the sights, so blurry; the sounds, actually kind
of clear; the smells, not nearly so strong as above water and coming to me in a different
way, impossible to describe; and the feel, which is the best part.

But not now. Now it was all bad. I was spinning slowly in blackness and also going
down. I didn’t want to go down, wanted more than anything to go up. Up was the only
place not so completely black.
Swim, big guy! You’re a good swimmer. Swim!
Bernie’s voice, so clear he could have been right beside me. The truth was he was
even closer than that. I swam toward the place of incomplete blackness.

Swimming is a lot like trotting, except in the water, so I’m good at it, no question.
But not now. Now I could hardly get anywhere, and all because of the net. The net
wanted me to go down. I wanted to go up.
Gotta want it, big guy.
I wanted it! I wanted it! I wanted it more than the net wanted it the other way,
if that makes any sense, probably not. I swam my hardest, my legs making the water
go
whoosh whoosh
. Was I getting somewhere? Yes, the incomplete blackness seemed closer. The net was
still all around me,
tangling me up, but looser down here than on the boat, the water lifting and shifting
the cords of the net, almost the way the breeze ruffles a picnic blanket, say you
and Bernie and Suzie and Charlie were on an outing. Oh, how nice that would be!