Dog On It (29 page)

“I’m staying with Chet,” Suzie said.

“Up to you,” said Rick. “When he finally rolls around, tell him I ran that plate he asked about. Registered to some kind of environmental investment outfit, it turns out—the baddest of the bad.”

We were alone in the kitchen, me and Suzie. “What does he do for coffee?” she said. On the road, Bernie picked up a paper cup of coffee at any convenience store, but things were less simple at home, with bags of beans in the freezer, a grinder that only worked if pressed on not too hard or too soft, and a coffeemaker that leaked if he put too much water in it. Suzie got the system all figured out after a while, and fresh coffee smell—one of my favorites, although I didn’t care for the taste at all—filled the air. She sat at the counter, sipping coffee, staring at nothing. All of a sudden she checked her watch, startling me a bit, then turned in my direction. “Why did I go to L.A.?” she said. “What’s wrong with me?”

Nothing that I knew.

She poured another cup. “Don’t you like your kibble?”

Not particularly, was the true answer. Steak, if available, was always my first choice, and there were many others in front of kibble. But just to be nice, I went to my bowl and scarfed up a mouthful or two. I was still at it when Suzie put down her cup, hard enough so coffee slopped over the side. She mopped it up with her elbow and said, “I can’t stand this, doing nothing.” She rose, walked to the office, me at her heels, and flicked on the computer. Except it didn’t start up; the screen stayed black. Suzie bent down, checked the plug, tried the switch a few more times. “Is something wrong with the computer?” she said.

How would I know? At that moment I caught a whiff—very faint, almost not there at all—of the head-clearing marker scent, the marker Bernie used on the whiteboard. I followed it, the thinnest ribbon of a trail, to the window. I barked.

“You want out, Chet?”

I did.

Suzie let me out the front door. I ran around to the side of the house, back down the alley between our place and old man Heydrich’s. Almost right away I found the marker scent, followed it a few steps past the office window to the coiled-up garden hose, never used because of water issues. And there, behind the hose, in a pool of light from the office window, lay a jagged piece, not very big, of the whiteboard, Bernie’s drawing of the wild-looking bearded man in one corner and some writing below that. I picked up the piece of whiteboard and turned.

“What’ve you got there, Chet?” Suzie said, standing nearby. I went to her, offered it up. She held it to the light. “‘Rasputin’?” she said, squinting at the writing. “‘Ghost Mine’? ‘S.V.’?” She turned the scrap over in her hands; nothing on the back. “Rasputin? Ghost Mine? S.V.?”

Ghost Mine? I barked. And barked some more. From next door came old man Heydrich’s angry voice. “Do something about that dog, God damn it!” I growled. Did I need old man Heydrich right now?

“C’mon, Chet,” Suzie said, her voice gentle.

We went inside. Suzie sat at Bernie’s desk, gazing at the remains of the whiteboard. “S.V.,” she said. “S.V.” She tried the computer again, with no result. Then she took a Swiss army knife from her bag—we’d given Charlie one just like it for his birthday, although Leda hadn’t let him keep it—and took the back off the computer. She stared at the insides, empty-looking to my eyes.
Was that all there was to a computer, empty insides? “Mother-board’s gone,” Suzie said. Way out of my territory, whatever that was. “And I can think of only one thing S.V. might stand for.” I waited. “That town where I found you, Chet—Sierra Verde.” I wagged my tail. Sierra Verde: We were back in my territory. “S.V.—what else could it stand for?”

Asking the wrong party, sweetheart. Suzie reached for her car keys. I was already on my way to the door.

We drove through the night. I smelled biscuits, remembered that Suzie kept a whole box in her car, but didn’t want one. My stomach felt funny, all closed up. Suzie leaned forward, hands squeezing the wheel, her face tense in the lights of oncoming traffic.

She said things like “I don’t believe in fate.” And “How could I ever let Dylan suck me back into . . .” I remembered Dylan: pretty boy, jailbird, loser. He couldn’t have sucked me into anything, not on his best day. The truth was that humans didn’t turn out to be the best judges of other humans. We, meaning me and my kind, were much better. Once in a while they tricked us; some humans got up to a lot of trickery, strangely like foxes, but usually we were on to that type from sniff one.

After a while traffic thinned out, and Suzie’s face was mostly in darkness. We left the freeway, started up into the mountains, curves tightening and tightening. From time to time a car came the other way, and I saw the wetness in Suzie’s eyes. I put a paw on her knee. She gave me a pat. “Does he really play the ukulele?” she said. “I’d love to hear that.” An empty stretch of road went by. “I
just hope . . .” She went silent. Was this hoping of hers about the ukulele or something else? Bernie really did play it, back in earlier days, knew all kinds of songs like “Up a Lazy River,” “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” “Jambalaya,” and my favorite, “Hey, Bo Diddley.” Bernie’s own favorite was “Rock the Casbah.” I usually took my bathroom break when that one rolled around.

“I’m smart, that’s the ironic thing,” Suzie said. “Fourteen hundred on my SATs, graduated cum laude—so how can I be so stupid?” Couldn’t follow her on that one. “And I’m getting so sick of irony I want to puke.” Uh-oh. I shifted away from her, closer to the door.

But no puking took place; maybe Suzie’s stomach settled down. That sometimes happened—I remembered an adventure with anchovies that could have turned out much worse than it did. The night went streaking by. Once I caught a golden flash of cat’s eyes, only much bigger. The hair on my back stiffened up. I knew what was out there.

“Is it true—that he’s as tough as they come?” Suzie said. “I’ve known a few tough men—they never made me laugh. Or played the ukulele. On the other hand, there’s the whole West Point thing, his combat experience . . . Oh God.” She started chewing at one of her knuckles, a sign of extreme human worry; I had a few moves like that myself. “If only we could see around corners,” she said. I liked Suzie, even if she sometimes had trouble making sense. Seeing around corners, for example: Who needed it? Smelling around corners was a piece of cake, told me all I needed to know. And say a piece of cake was actually lying around the corner, well, then I could . . . I got a bit lost in my own head, and curled up on the seat for a while. Bernie was tough. I’d seen him do amazing things, like with the bikers. Nothing bad could happen to Bernie. My eyes closed.

* * *

I woke up on the main street in Sierra Verde. The bar with the neon martini glass went by, the glass lit up but only darkness behind it, and no hogs parked out front. From not too far away came a nervous, high-pitched bark, the kind my guys sometimes make in the middle of a bad sleep; and I thought of that place up the next side street, with all the cages and the plume of white smoke. Suzie didn’t turn up the side street, kept going for a few blocks, reached the convenience store where we’d seen Anatoly Bulganin step out with a bag of groceries. No cars outside, but the lights were on and a man sat slumped behind the counter. Suzie pulled over, took out her cell phone.

“Hi,” she said. “Lou? Busy night?” She listened; I heard a man’s voice on the other end. “If you get a chance,” Suzie went on, “I’d like you to run a search for ‘Rasputin’ with ‘Ghost Mine.’” More listening. “Like the crazy Russian monk,” she said. The man on the other end had a loud voice, but I couldn’t make out the words. “No,” Suzie said, “he died a long time ago, and that’s not the point—it has nothing to do with him or the czar. Just a name, Lou. R-A-S-P-U-T-I-N . . . yeah, like Putin, only with ‘Ras’ at the beginning . . . yeah, you’re right—Rastafari is a different kettle of fish.” She clicked off, turned to me. “My dream was getting a job at the
Washington Post,
like Woodward and Bernstein.” Suzie’s dream skimmed by, missed completely on my part. My own dreams were all about hunting in the canyon, chasing down perps, and sometimes dining on steaks smeared with A.1. sauce. I especially liked when Bernie grilled crosshatched patterns on the meat, couldn’t tell you why.

Suzie slid down the windows. Desert air rolled in, cool and fresh, meaning morning was on the way. Suzie hugged herself and shivered, as though it were really cold. “I had a dog when I was
a kid,” she said. “When my parents got divorced, he went to the pound.”

I gazed at her in the light that spilled from the convenience store. A sad story, I knew that—and sure as hell wouldn’t want to end up in any pound myself—but still, I loved . . . well, just about everything, the whole deal.

“You’re a good boy, Chet,” she said, opening her door. “I’m grabbing a cup of coffee.” She got out, went into the convenience store. My stomach still felt all closed up, but I knew they had Slim Jims in there. I could possibly manage a Slim Jim.

Headlights shone in the rearview mirror. I looked back and saw a pickup approaching, not fast. As it came closer, I could see the driver’s face, a pale circle behind the windshield. Very pale, with long shadows cast by big sticking-out cheekbones; and tiny ears; and light-colored hair, almost white even though he wasn’t old: Boris! I knew Boris, all right, wasn’t going to forget someone who’d knifed me, not ever. I sat up high on my seat, almost let out a bark. But I knew that would be bad, knew that Bernie would want me to keep my mouth shut at a moment like this, would have made a little motion with his hand, just between us. Easy, Chet, let’s take ’em down nice and easy.

The pickup—light-colored, not as big as ours—drew closer. As it came alongside me, I saw Boris’s face clearly, lit by the green glow of his dashboard lights. He was smiling. That green smile enraged me. I didn’t think—that was Bernie’s department, and he could have it—just sprang out the window, landing on the road behind the pickup. The pickup turned out to be going much faster than I’d judged from inside Suzie’s car. I chased after it, sprinting now, caught up as Boris reached the only stoplight in town. Red, but he drove on through, even stepping on it. Last chance. I gathered myself and leaped, a tremendous leap, one of
my very best, up and over the tailgate and down into the bed of the truck, a soft, silent landing.

Or maybe not: Through the narrow back window I saw Boris suddenly turn his head, the pickup slowing. I ducked down, completely still, one more shadow. The pickup sped up again. I raised my head, saw Boris facing front. We rolled through the silent town. From my angle, down low, I could see the tops of the buildings and above them the starry sky, a few clouds moving fast, so wispy the stars shone through them. Then all at once, no more buildings: We headed out of Sierra Verde, down the mountain road and on to the desert plain, the desert plain that stretched all the way to New Mexico.

I lay on a tarp, my back against some coiled rope. I smelled gasoline and gunpowder; and very faintly, my second favorite combo: apples, bourbon, plus that hint of salt and pepper that made it a bit like my own smell. Bernie had been here, right in this very truck bed! A feeling comes to me and my kind when we know we’re on the right track, a sort of tamped-down excitement. I felt it now; the tamping-down part maybe still waiting to kick in.

We were on the dirt track I knew, the bumpy one where Bernie had thought about the old days and Kit Carson, and other Bernie-type things I couldn’t remember. I kept an eye on Boris’s head through the narrow window, a big head, too big for even a thick neck like his. The headlights shone on passing sights I remembered—a tall two-armed cactus like a giant person, spiky bushes I’d marked, a flat rock sitting on a round rock. Later came the dried-up streambed, the low hill, the falling-down shack, and the track fading to nothing. Boris stopped by the remains of the bikers’ campfire and got out. I lay low, maybe not as low as I could, with my head poking over the edge of the tailgate, but I had to see out, didn’t I?

Boris walked toward the blackened firepit, kicked a beer can once or twice, whistled an unpleasant tune. Then came a zipper sound and soft splashing in the dirt. Men were vulnerable at moments like this. I could take him down right now, no problem. But after that? I didn’t know. Boris zipped up, and the moment passed. He looked up, his gaze suddenly right on me! And then sliding by; his vision—like every human I’d come across—just about useless at night. I sometimes felt sorry for humans, what with their obvious shortcomings, but not for Boris. Boris was bad, and soon he’d be living up at Central State, wearing an orange jumpsuit and breaking rocks in the hot sun.

Boris got back behind the wheel, still whistling. Won’t be whistling soon, buddy boy. From this same spot, with no more track to follow, Bernie and I had set out on foot, in the direction of those distant mountains, pinkish then, invisible now. Boris didn’t go the same way; instead making a long curve past the firepit and toward a jumble of shadowy rocks, the desert floor rough and uneven. We bumped along, Boris twisting the wheel from side to side, lumps of muscle sticking out in his neck, lumpy to begin with. The bumps got bigger, the pickup lurching back and forth. I went sliding off the tarp, thumped against the side of the truck bed. Boris started to glance back, but at that moment we hit an even bigger bump, the whole truck seeming to rise off the ground. He fought with the wheel. I rose up on all fours, went sliding the other way, panting now. Bernie’s smell rose around me. I calmed down, and not long after, the ride got smooth again. I stuck my head out the side, peered ahead, saw we were on a track, long and straight. And not too far ahead rose the mountains that had been pink when Bernie and I had seen them before, but were now a dark band beneath a sky no longer quite as dark. My heart beat faster. Calm, Chet, have to stay calm. I crouched down behind the coiled rope.

* * *

Up above, the stars grew dim and slowly vanished. We were making a lot of turns now, the motor sounding like it was working hard. I rose and saw we were in the mountains, still dark, except for the very tops, outlined in milky white. The milky whiteness spread, pouring slowly over the land, a very beautiful sight. It was morning. We rounded a bend, passed some huge rusted-out machine of a type I didn’t know, and there, up ahead, stood some run-down buildings—a long, low house, a barn, sheds, and, across from them, a steep slope with a big round hole at its base: Mr. Gulagov’s mine.