Paw and Order (21 page)

“Ungrateful?” Bernie said.

Mr. Ferretti stepped forward, put his arm over Bernie's shoulder, and led him away, although not away from me, since I was right beside Bernie from the get-go. “I was hoping you'd go back to Arizona,” he said.

“When was this?” said Bernie.

“After I sprung you.”

Bernie stopped, turned to Mr. Ferretti, studied his face. I could feel Bernie thinking real fast. “So you do know who killed him.”

“Negative,” said Mr. Ferretti. “I just know it wasn't you.”

“How?”

“Can't you figure it out?”

What a question! Of course, Bernie could figure out whatever it was. Wasn't he always the smartest human in the room? I waited. And waited some more. A little smile appeared on Mr. Ferretti's face. Was there a problem? All at once, it hit me: We weren't in a room! We were actually at this pit stop, in a kind of invisible soup of piss smells, the invisible part pretty meaningless to me, although probably not to you. The terrible point—I shrank from even letting my mind think it, but good luck with that, my mind so often being its own boss—was that perhaps, at this particular pit stop, Mr. Ferretti was the smar—

No! No! It couldn't be. The sun rises every day. Bernie's Bernie. That's all there is to say.

TWENTY-FIVE

Y
ou don't know who killed Eben, but you know it wasn't me,” Bernie said.

“Correct,” said Mr. Ferretti. “So therefore . . .”

Whoa! Mr. Ferretti was going to take a swing at a so therefore? Didn't he know so therefores were Bernie's department?

Bernie didn't let that happen. Before Mr. Ferretti could say one more thing, Bernie said, “So therefore, your name's Ferretti, two R's, two T's.”

Good for Bernie! Although kind of confusing: didn't we already know that? I certainly did. Sometimes humans were . . . a little slow? No, no, not possible. What a crazy thought! I made it go away and hoped my hardest it would never come back. If humans were a little slow, then we were all in big trouble, and who wanted that?

Mr. Ferretti laughed. “You've got a smart girlfriend,” he said. He glanced at me. “And a smart pooch. Even a cool car, at least in my eyes. All adds up nicely. Go home, Mr. Little. Enjoy your life.”

“I'm enjoying it right here,” Bernie said.

“Then you don't know what's in your own best interest,” Mr. Ferretti said.

“That's still up to me,” Bernie said, “unless there are new laws I'm unaware of.”

“New laws you're unaware of? That's a given. To say nothing of the old ones. For example, the law gives me the power to arrest you on the spot for practicing your craft in this jurisdiction without a license.”

Bernie reached into his pocket, took out a folded-up sheet of paper, handed it to Mr. Ferretti. “Can I sue you for defamation?” Bernie said.

Mr. Ferretti snapped the sheet of paper out straight with a flick of his wrist and gave it a quick glance. “Soares gave you this?”

“Uh-huh.”

Mr. Ferretti sighed. Sighs are interesting. Bernie's mom, for example, a real piece of work who sometimes comes for a visit—please not again anytime soon, the fact being I do not shed, whatever she happens to believe, and if I do, it's no biggie—is a champion sigher, and we've got plenty of sighers in the nation within, but I haven't figured out what sighs are all about. Did Mr. Ferretti and Bernie's mom have something in common? She'd had a sort of big bony nose at one time—nothing on the scale of Mr. Ferretti's, of course—but then some work got done, and more work after that. The truth was, she looked like a whole new person every time I saw her. No problem for me and my kind: her smell remained exactly the same, somewhat reminiscent of Bernie's, which was the best thing about her.

“Too many cooks,” Mr. Ferretti said, giving the sheet of paper back to Bernie.

Mr. Ferretti was right about that. Cooks were better all by their lonesomes, as Bernie and I had learned when we'd attended the Great Western Chili Burger Cook-Off as guests of Cleon Maxwell, our buddy who runs Max's Memphis Ribs, best ribs in the Valley, bar none. Some cook had peed in some other cook's special top-secret barbecue sauce, or maybe it was the other way around, and the next thing we knew, the air was full of flying cleavers and we were on the run, both of us packing a burger, me in my mouth and Bernie . . . in his mouth, too! At least in my memory.

“. . . any reason your recipe's better than his, following up on your cliché?” Bernie was saying, losing me completely and all at once, meaning he was now at his most brilliant. The case was as good as solved or even better. I tried to remember who was paying.

“Is that a serious question?” Mr. Ferretti said. “Soares is just a local cop.”

“And you?” said Bernie.

Mr. Ferretti tilted up his chin a bit. I felt that energy wave of his, the chin movement sort of nudging it along. “You know what I am,” he said.

Bernie didn't move at all but seemed to close the distance between the two of them, maybe just by getting bigger, hard to say how, exactly. “It doesn't scare me,” he said.

“No?” said Mr. Ferretti.

“Not personally,” Bernie said. “But for the future of the republic, yeah.”

“A subject above both our pay grades,” Mr. Ferretti said.

Bernie was about to reply when the woman called to him. “Boss?”

We all turned to her. Hey! She and the other dude were way too close to the Porsche—our ride!—and the other dude was reaching—reaching inside!—and . . . what was this? Taking out the shopping bag with the remains of the strange bird? Our shopping bag? One thing and one thing only was clear: I had no time to think. The good news is that's when I'm at my best. No bad news comes to mind. Bernie says I'm a bowl-half-full type of guy, whatever that might mean, although at that moment he was saying something else, like, “Chet!” Or possibly, “CHET!”

Here's a funny thing. There have been times in my life when from the face of someone, Bernie, say, you can tell that shouting is going on, but what I'm actually hearing is more of a whisper or nothing at all. Does that ever happen to you? No matter, the important point being this was one of those times. I was vaguely aware of Bernie whispering my name as I charged my very hardest and fastest—way too long since my last hard and fast charge—right at the dude with the shopping bag. He saw me coming—there's a look humans get in their eyes when they see me coming in full-charge mode, a look I love!—and then started flailing around in a clumsy way, hands coming up, body half-twisting, shopping bag pinwheeling away, all those bird pieces taking separate flight, in short, the exact kind of reaction you want from a chargee, if chargee makes any sense, probably not. And so: I launched! The wind in my ears, the pounding of my heart, the taste of blood any moment now: hard to beat a moment like that, even if you live forever, which has always been my plan.

But right at the highest point of my leap, well above the heads of all humans concerned—which is a nice angle to have on humans, as I'd learned before and was learning again—I caught sight from the corner of my eye of an unwelcome development, namely the woman opening her jacket and going for her pea shooter, a pea shooter I now knew for sure I should have taken off the table when I had the chance. Lucky for me, I'm capable of kind of writhing around in midair and changing my flight plan, which is what I did, snatching that gun—which from the surprising weight must have been more of a stone-cold stopper than a pea shooter—right out of her hand—

“OW!”

—and trotting it over to Bernie. He took it just as Mr. Ferretti was reaching into his own jacket. Bernie turned to him, gun held loose, pointed at the ground, and Mr. Ferretti stopped with the reaching thing, holding his hands nice and steady, out where we could see them. Over by the car, the dude was staring down at the front of his shirt, which had somehow popped all its buttons, and the woman was dabbing at her wrist with a tissue, a tissue that looked just about pure white to me, give or take.

A comfortable silence descended on the pit stop area. I'm sure we were all thinking pretty much the same thing: what a beautiful day, the sky so blue, the leaves on the trees all sorts of colors, a soft breeze. Bernie tucked the gun in his pocket. At last! Going so long without a peacemaker had made me nervous, even though I hadn't realized it at the time. And now? I was back to feeling tip-top, and I knew it, which made everything just that much tip-topper.

“The thing is,” Bernie said, “Chet feels kind of possessive about our car.”

Mr. Ferretti nodded. At the same time, his two helpers were stepping away from the Porsche, kind of rapidly, as though they expected it to blow up any moment. Not a crazy thought on their part! We'd had a Porsche—the one before this, or the one before that, hard to keep it all straight in the mind when your life is on the adventurous side—blow up on us, in some ways a beautiful sight. And in the end, we'd made somebody pay and pay good, although who, exactly, wasn't coming to me at the moment.

Bernie moved over to Mr. Ferretti, put his arm over his shoulder, just the way Mr. Ferretti had done to him at the start of their little walk and talk. “How about your assistants take a moment or two in the SUV?”

Mr. Ferretti nodded. “Coffee?” he said to Bernie.

“Black,” said Bernie, taking out his wallet.

“That won't be necessary,” Mr. Ferretti said. “Guys?” he said to the others. “If you will? Coffee run. Black for Mr. Little.”

“Uh,” said the man with the open shirt, “we're kind of in the middle of nowhere.”

“Even the middle of nowhere has coffee these days,” Mr. Ferretti said. “Warms the heart about this land of ours.”

The man and woman got in the car.

“If you get a chance,” Bernie called after them, “Chet's fond of Slim Jims.”

Fond? I was flat-out crazy about them! Ever tasted one? Then you know.

The SUV drove off. Bernie walked over to the Porsche, started picking up the bird remains all over again. “Mind bringing that shopping bag?” he said to Mr. Ferretti.

Mr. Ferretti went and got the shopping bag from the far side of the clearing where the breeze had taken it. Nothing shabby about his retrieving skills, although not in my class, hardly bears mentioning. He held the shopping bag open while Bernie dumped the pieces inside, Mr. Ferretti gazing at them kind of sadly. For a few moments they worked together real nice, like good pals. Hey! It turned out that Mr. Ferretti had beautiful hands, although not as beautiful or as big or as anything as Bernie's; also not bearing a mention. But here's something about me: I kind of like mentioning things that don't bear mentioning! What's with that? I'm even tempted to mention whatever it was one more time.

Meanwhile, the last piece of the strange bird was dropping into the shopping bag with a soft clank, and a good thing—I never wanted to see that bird or any part of it again. Mr. Ferretti extended his hand, like he was expecting Bernie to give him the bag, but Bernie did not, taking a step back instead, which reminded me of a sort of a game that one of Charlie's little buddies played with him once, a game that was all about holding out an ice cream cone and then snatching it away every time Charlie reached out for it, and that had led to a miniature brawl between them, stopped but pronto by Chet the Jet, who also ended up with the ice cream cone.

Forget all that. The point is Bernie held on to the bag. “How about we make a deal?” he said.

“To get my own property back?” said Mr. Ferretti. “That doesn't strike me as friendly.”

“We're not friends,” Bernie said. “More like the opposite.”

“Oh?” said Mr. Ferretti. “Even after I got you out of jail? Seems a tad ungrateful.”

“I'll explain,” Bernie said. “Stop me when I go wrong. You knew I didn't kill Eben, but you say you don't know who did, meaning you're sure my alibi was solid. No other possibility that I can see. But my alibi is the kind that almost never holds up. I was asleep at Suzie Sanchez's place, no witnesses. Makes it a real good bet that you had a drone outside her window. No way you'd have been keeping an eye on me—I'd just come to town. You've been spying on Suzie. Suzie's my girlfriend. So therefore, we're enemies, you and me.”

What a great moment in my life! Mr. Ferretti had tried to take the so therefores away from Bernie, and Bernie had snatched them back, just like . . . an ice cream cone. An ice cream cone? An odd thought. I pushed it aside, tried to pay attention.

“You made just one mistake,” Mr. Ferretti said. “We weren't spying on Suzie.”

“The drone just happened to be outside the bedroom window?”

“Pretty much. We had a drone in the vicinity—not this one, by the way, if taking revenge on an inanimate object is motivating you—but its mission had nothing to do with Suzie Sanchez or you.”

Then came a long silence. I could feel Bernie's thoughts zinging around, short and choppy, not like his usual thoughts. Mr. Ferretti watched him think for a while and smiled. I myself puzzled over “drone,” a new one on me.

“So therefore,” he said, “we aren't enemies, you and I.”

What was this? Mr. Ferretti had snatched the so therefores right back? Bernie! Do something!

Which Bernie did, although it was the last thing I expected: he handed over the shopping bag.

“Much obliged,” said Mr. Ferretti. “I'll take my colleague's firearm, while we're at it.”

“Whose side are you on?” Bernie said, the gun remaining in his pocket.

“Side?”

“One of the political parties, maybe? The president? Some candidate?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Mr. Ferretti said. “I'm here to protect the country in the long term.”

“Now you've got me scared,” Bernie said. “I'll be keeping the weapon.”