The Sound and the Furry (12 page)

“Gonna need a transfusion,” he said, losing me completely. I started panting. If Bernie
needed something, it was my business to know.

“Hot, big guy?” he said. “You can take that swim now, if you like.” He patted the
water with his hand. I got the idea, perhaps in midair.

And then I was splashing right in. Ah! I went under, bobbed up, and started swimming.
Swimming is just like trotting, except underwater. Anyone can do it. The pirogue drifted
toward the far shore of this lake or whatever it was and I swam alongside, just my
eyes and nose above the surface, my style when it comes to swimming.

“Looks like fun,” Bernie said.

Bernie: right again! And even though I wouldn’t have minded if this water’d been a
lot colder, it was still plenty fine.
Come on in, Bernie, come on in!
But he did not. I swam along beside the boat to my heart’s content, which was how
I liked to operate. As we got closer to the far shore, a house appeared, a strange
sort of house with the front part up on stilts right over the water. Sunlight glinted
off a pickup parked in the nearby trees.

“That pickup look familiar to you?” Bernie said.

Or something like that. I make it my business to listen to Bernie and listen good,
but in this case I was distracted by a smell, specifically that froggy snaky smell
mixed up with peppery poop. It got stronger and stronger, seemed to be rising up from
deep down in the lake.

“Sure looks familiar to me,” Bernie said. “Back in the boat, big guy.”

Did I have to?

“Chet! We’re not on vacation here.”

Uh-oh. Was I messing up? I immediately swam to the side of the pirogue, raised my
paws up on the top edge, a total pro. Bernie helped me in. I gave myself a shake,
but a real quick one, wasting no time at all. Then I sat up in the bow, perfectly
still, eyes on that pickup, maybe important for some reason. I actually kind of remembered
it, especially those painted crabs and shrimp on the side.

We rode up to the stilt house, and I saw that the front part was a deck. A sign was
nailed to one of the stilts. Bernie read it: “Beware of Iko.” A wiry dude with a bushy
white mustache walked onto the deck and looked down at us. That mustache brought it
all back: this was the dude who’d bought Mami’s crabs. So there I was totally in the
picture. What was next? Something good: I just had the feeling. Then I noticed the
gun in his belt and wasn’t quite as sure.

Bernie cut the motor, reached out, and got a grip on one of the stilts, holding us
steady.

“Hey,” he said, looking up at the wiry dude.

The wiry dude put his hand on the gun butt. Guns and hands: I watch them real close.
“Lookin’ for someone?” he said.

“That’s exactly it,” Bernie said. “And maybe you can help. I’m Bernie Little and this
is Chet.” Bernie took a quick glance at that gun. “Are you Iko?”

The wiry dude squinted down at Bernie. Then he laughed. “You’re not from around here.”

“True,” said Bernie.

“Where you from?”

“Arizona.”

Ha! We were from Arizona? I’d wondered about that.

“Got a moment or two to talk?” Bernie went on.

The wiry dude made a gesture with his hand. “This here’s my camp.”

“Very nice.”

“Where I come for relaxin’. So if this is gonna be a relaxin’ talk, then yeah. Otherwise
no.”

Bernie smiled. He has different smiles, which maybe I haven’t mentioned before, some
of them actually not even friendly. This particular smile was one he used on perps.
It looked friendly unless you know Bernie. I know Bernie.

“Would fifty bucks help you relax?” Bernie said.

“Not as much as a C-note,” said the wiry dude.

“Imagine a grand,” Bernie said. “You’d be in a stupor.”

The wiry dude laughed again, this time long and loud and to the point of hacking and
even a bit of horking, but off the side of the deck, not in our direction.

I
had me a dog once,” said the wiry dude, whose name turned out to be Mack Larouche.
We were sitting on the deck of his camp—Bernie and Mack in lawn chairs, me on the
floor, which was actually nicer than any lawn chair I’d ever tried, those straps with
the in-between spaces always so uncomfortable—and having drinks—beer for them, water
for me; not the warm, thickish water from the bayou but something much tastier. Mack
gazed out over the lake. “Come to a bad end.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Bernie said. “What was his name?”

Mack turned to Bernie. “Nobody’s ever asked me that before.”

Bernie said nothing. I’ve run across some other humans—not many—who are good at saying
nothing, Cedric Booker, for example, our DA pal back in the Valley, and Suzie, too,
come to think of it, but no one in Bernie’s league. Excepting Suzie, come to think
of it again. All of a sudden, I missed her. Bernie missed her, too: sometimes he spoke
her name in his sleep.

“Dog was a she,” Mack said. “I called her Lucinda.”

“After Lucinda Williams?” Bernie said.

“How’d you know that?”

Bernie shrugged.

“You like that song of hers, ‘Metal Firecracker’?” Mack said.

“One of my favorites,” Bernie said.

By which he meant one of our favorites. Easy to slip up on something like that, and
I forgave him even before it happened. But that wasn’t the point. The point was “Metal
Firecracker”! How often we’d zoomed across the desert in the Porsche with “Metal Firecracker”
cranked up to the max or even more on the sound system. Then one afternoon Bernie
had turned to me and shouted over the music, “We’re in a metal firecracker ourselves,
big guy, ever think of that?” And I hadn’t, not one single time. I made up for that
in the following days, big time.

“Me, too,” Mack said. “She sang it for me one night.”

“I knew she was from around here,” Bernie said.

“Lake Charles ain’t around here, not to my way of thinking. But that one night she
was right where we are now, and that’s for goddamn sure.”

“You’re saying Lucinda Williams sang ‘Metal Firecracker’ on this deck?”

Mack nodded. “This was at the height of my heroin addiction.”

“Meaning it was a hallucination?”

“You never know.”

“One of the drawbacks of heroin addiction,” Bernie said.

“You’re so right,” Mack said. “But back then it was a plus. That’s the heart of the
matter.”

“Meaning now you’re clean?” Bernie said.

“Clean enough,” said Mack. “Maybe not squeaky.”

Bernie lowered his bottle, gave Mack one of his direct looks. “I’m paying for squeaky.”

Mack gave him a direct look back. “Fair enough,” he said, lowering his bottle, too.
“Who are you looking for?”

“Any guesses?”

“Any guesses? I thought you were playing straight with me.”

Bernie looked away for an instant and then his direct gaze on Mack was back in place,
but had I ever seen him break off that gaze before? Not that I could remember. I gave
it the old college try, although I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly: every time
we drove by Valley College, the kids—and I love college kids, don’t get me wrong—were
mostly playing Frisbee or smoking weed. Sometimes both at once, true, but that was
about it.

“Ralph Boutette,” Bernie was saying. “You know him?”

“Sure,” Mack said. “I know everyone around here.”

“Were you aware that he’s missing?”

“Not exactly,” said Mack, taking a nice big swig of his beer.

“What does that mean?”

“Heard talk, but I didn’t take it seriously.” Mack licked beer droplets off his mustache.
He had a nice pink tongue, with plenty of size for a human. “Ralph’s an odd duck—everyone
knows that.”

Whoa. Not me, amigo. I was just finding out now. I’d had experience with ducks, not
good. They’re a kind of bird, something I hadn’t been clear on at first, and my history
with birds is nothing but trouble. Bird beaks are surprisingly nasty, and ducks have
them, too, as I came to learn and then learned again and maybe one more time after
that. So my takeaway? If ducks were now in the case, we had problems.

“Tell me about this talk you heard,” Bernie said.

Mack stroked his mustache. “Have to organize my mind, get it all in the right order.”

“My guess is you’re good at that,” Bernie said. “No one ever took the SATs for you,
did they, Mack?”

“Like Ralph did for all his goddamn brothers, plus every
dumbass kid who could scare up twenty bucks?” Mack had a good laugh. “How’d you know
about that?”

“Came up in the course of things,” Bernie said. “Word was that otherwise Ralph’s stuck
to the straight and narrow all his life.”

“Far as I know—the point I was makin’, in fact, over at Rooster Red’s.”

“What’s that?”

“Joint just the other side of the St. Roch line.” He handed Bernie a card. “Good for
one free drink—happen to have an interest in the place.”

Bernie tucked the card away. “There was talk of Ralph going missing?”

Mack nodded. “Some of the boys were saying Ralph got himself mixed up in some serious
shit, and I told them that just wasn’t him. He’s just wandered off somewheres, Ralph
being Ralph.”

“What serious shit are we talking about?”

Bernie cocked his head a little, the way he did when he wanted to listen real close.
I listened real close, too. Getting mixed up in serious shit happened to me once,
even to the point of rolling in it. What had gotten into me? That was what Bernie
kept asking when he hosed me down.

“It’s kind of complicated,” Mack said, “and I don’t think it has anythin’ to do with,
um, other developments or what have—”

“Talking about the shrimp heist?” Bernie said, cutting him off. Bernie did that sometimes,
just another one of our techniques at the Little Detective Agency. We’ve got a bunch:
the last one is pretty much always me grabbing the perp by the pant leg. I noticed
that Mack was wearing shorts. No problem. I’d come up against that before, found other
ways. “Gotta think outside the box,” Bernie says, and I’m totally with him on that:
I’d been in boxes once or twice—if a crate wasn’t a box, then what was? Never again.

“Not sure you could call it a heist,” Mack said.

“What would you call it?”

“More of a mystery. A ton of shrimp came into the town dock on a Saturday night and
Sunday morning it was gone.”

“Were they your shrimp?”

“Woulda been—I was set to buy ’em first thing Monday morning.”

“So who took the hit?”

“That’s what’s not too clear, at least to me.”

“Wasn’t it Grannie Robideau?” Bernie said. “I don’t get all this uncertainty. Lord
Boutette stole Grannie’s shrimp. Isn’t that the story?”

“That’s a story, anyways,” said Mack.

“It must have convinced the authorities,” Bernie said. “Lord’s under arrest and awaiting
trial.”

“I heard,” Mack said.

“Let’s go back to the scuttlebutt at Rooster Red’s,” Bernie said. “Want to hear my
guess?”

Mack shrugged.

“Indulge me,” Bernie said. “My guess is there’s a theory going round that Ralph, despite
this lifetime of just about perfect straight-arrowness, barring the SAT caper, was
in on the shrimp heist, and now he’s on the run, or hiding out somewhere.”

There was a long pause. Then Mack said, “You’re kinda quick to understand how things
work in these parts.”

“But you’re not buying it,” Bernie said. “How come?”

“Makes no difference what I think.”

“No?” said Bernie. He rose, walked to the end of Mack’s deck, stared out at Isle des
Deux Amis, very small in the distance. Then he turned to Mack, rubbing his hands together
and looking sort of refreshed, like he’d just splashed cold water on his face, which
he actually did sometimes. And then some on me! The fun we had! But that’s not the
point. The point is this refreshed look thing was all about the technique Bernie called
trying a new tack, for reasons not clear to me, my only experience with tacks being
when I found one on the office floor and decided to give it a little chew. That single
tack was more than enough; I didn’t have the slightest interest in a new one.

“I’m curious about this feud,” Bernie went on. “Boutettes and Robideaus—what’s behind
it?”

Mack shook his head. “Goes back before my time.”

“To when?”

“The Civil War.”

“They were on opposite sides?”

“No, no, nothin’ like that. Our side, the both of them. Know about the Zouaves?”

“They wore colorful uniforms?”

Mack nodded. “That was the problem. The Boutette and Robideau dudes of the time got
into a dispute over who owned this one particular jacket with lots of red embroidery.
Led to a duel, and there’s been bad blood ever since.”

“Christ,” Bernie said.

“Uh-huh,” said Mack. “Another coldie?”

“If you’re having one.”

“Hell, I’m having a dozen—it’s my day off.”

A dozen: not a small number, as I recalled. I’d seen dudes down a dozen beers plenty
of times, never pretty. Mack went inside. Bernie turned to me.

“ ‘Our side’—you catch that?” he said.

Actually not. Mack was on our side? Nice to hear. This case was confusing. But the
money was good. Hey! Good money and it had also smelled of shrimp: I’d caught the
smell when Vannah
handed it over. And hadn’t Bernie and Mack just been going on and on about shrimp?
So therefore? At the Little Detective Agency, in case I haven’t brought this up already,
so therefores were Bernie’s department. I’d taken this particular whatever it was
as far as I could. Not too shabby.

Mack came out with two beers, handed one to Bernie.

“What do you know about Isle des Deux Amis?” Bernie said.

“It’s that there island.” Mack pointed at it with his chin. I liked when humans used
their chins for pointers. I can point, too, no worries about that, but I use my whole
body.

“When was the last time you were on it?”

“Me? Actually on it? Been years.”

“Ever see other people there?”

“Nope. Nothin’ to attract anybody.”