The Sound and the Furry (28 page)

“Time for a mental list,” he said.

So exciting! We hadn’t done mental lists in way too long. I waited to hear, mental
lists being pretty much a mystery to me, and also Bernie’s department.

“Item one,” he said. “You need a new collar.” He gave me a close look. “Sure like
to know how you lost the old one.” He took another drag. “What went down in the boat,
big guy? How many of them were there? Get a good look?”

The boat? What boat would this be? I’d been on so many boats lately, after a whole
boatless lifetime, that I couldn’t even begin to keep them all in my mind. I took
a swing at it anyway: there was
Little Jazz
, of course, and the pirogue. Hey! Was I off to a good start or what? I left it there
for the time being.

“Item three,” Bernie was saying. I got a vague sort of feeling that maybe I’d missed
something. “I don’t like getting hit on the head and now it’s happened twice.” He
glanced at himself in the mirror. “Tired of people looking at me funny,” he said,
losing me a bit more: why would something that crazy ever happen? He
opened the glove box, took out the Swiss Army knife, found the scissors and
snip snip
cut the stitches out of his forehead. Bernie kept talking the whole time, but taking
in this new side of him—he was as good as any doctor, or better!—used up all my concentration.
“Unrelated coincidence?” he might have been saying. “Don’t know about you, Chet, but
I’m thinking about that Pyro dude who told us Cleotis had split for Houston. Wish
to hell I’d seen—huh, literally—what he had up his sleeve, but let’s suppose it was
a Q. Where does that take us?”

No idea, and all this was impossible to follow. Not only that, but memory of another
boat I’d been on was coming to me . . . coming, coming, coming, and boom! There it
was: Mami’s boat! I could actually see it in my head. Amazing what the mind could
do. No comparison to the body’s ability, but still it was nice to have both. I’m one
lucky dude.

“. . . bringing us to item six,” Bernie said, mashing the cigarette butt in the ashtray
and turning to me. “How come you don’t like Wes?”

Bernie gave me a close look. I gave him a close look back. My tail came alive, doing
what it could from its somewhat cramped position kind of trapped under me on the shotgun
seat. I agreed with my tail, if that makes any sense, not always the case, if that,
too, makes any sense: this was nice, me and Bernie just chillin’ by the bayou. That
was what my tail was selling me and I bought the complete package.

Bernie smiled. “I get the feeling you’re way ahead of me, big guy.” Me? Ahead of Bernie?
Never! We were side by side, to the max. His eyes got an inward look, the way they
did when an idea popped up in his mind and demanded attention. “Suppose . . . suppose
Wes actually has no cats,” he said. “See where I’m going with this?”

I did not, but anyplace without cats sounded good to me.

“And it’s testable,” Bernie said. “Cats or no cats—either way a solid fact. Which
is what we need right now in the worst way.”

Bernie reached toward the key in the ignition like he was about to turn it and start
us up, and then his gaze fell on
Little Jazz
and he paused.

“I’m an idiot,” he said.

Bernie’s a great one for jokes. Once we went to a comedy club downtown with some cop
buddies and they had a few drinks and some betting went on and all of a sudden Bernie
was onstage doing a trick I’d never seen with a tower of beer cans and a volunteer
from the audience who turned out to be a safecracker on the lamb. The laughs he got
that night! Although he hadn’t seemed to recall much about it next morning, and we
never visited a comedy club again.

Instead of heading out for a spin, which was what I’d sensed coming next, we got out
of the car and stepped onto the dock. Bernie walked along it the whole length of
Little Jazz
, his eyes on the boat all the time, and then back the other way.

“What do I know for sure?” he said.

Give me a hard one!
Everything
was the answer. Bernie knew everything for sure, the whole enchilada, although enchiladas
themselves were a bit of a puzzler. I’d once scarfed down not one but two quick whole
enchiladas—pressed for time in a restaurant kitchen that might not have strictly speaking
been part of the case—and while I had no complaints, there was no comparing enchiladas
to lamb kebabs, for example, or baby back ribs.

“I had a picture book when I was a kid,” Bernie said, “about these two miners who
start digging into a mountain from opposite sides and meet in the middle. Now that
I think about it, my interest in mines probably started with that book.”

What a great story, probably the greatest story I ever heard! Bernie: just when you
think he’s done amazing you, he amazes you again.

“Never liked a story with a moral,” Bernie said. “Don’t like to be hit on the head.”

I gazed at his head, still wrapped in the bandage, although it was nice the stitches
were gone. Poor Bernie. I hated him getting hit on the head, didn’t like getting hit
on my own head either.

“But the moral of the miner story is that there are always at least two approaches.”
He crossed the wooden gangplank to
Little Jazz
’s deck, me following and then somehow ahead. “Can’t tell you who we surprised in
here, but I know what he was up to—searching the place. Did he find what he was looking
for after I was out of the picture? I’m betting you didn’t let that happen, big guy.
So that’s our angle into this particular mine—we’re going to rip the place apart.”

Little Jazz
was a mine? News to me, but I didn’t worry about it for a moment. If ripping a place
apart is on the agenda, you have my full attention.

R
ipping places apart was a kind of search. We’ve done searches out the yingyang, me
and Bernie, most of them lots of fun, some not. The worst was when we opened up that
broom closet in the tidy little kitchen of a tidy little house in Vista City. Too
late. Oh, no: too late. I never wanted to think about that, but it came into my mind
anyway, sometimes at the oddest times, like when Charlie falls asleep on the couch
on one of those days we have him, and I just sit close by, watching him sleep. We’ve
solved every missing kid case we ever took, except the broom closet one. Which was
how I thought of it, although the girl’s name was Gail. The look I saw in Bernie’s
eyes: I’ll never forget it. Later that night, we’d taken care of justice on our own,
which I also won’t forget, even though Bernie had said we should. “Lock it in a deep
dark place, throw away the key, and never think about it again.” I’d tried so many
times.

We boarded
Little Jazz
. The sun was high in the sky, a yellow sky, so hot and heavy, and the bayou looked
kind of yellow, too. I stuck my head over the side rail, opened my nostrils and did
a quick search of my own. Good news: no trace of Iko’s scent. Not that I was afraid
of Iko. Don’t think that for a moment.

The long rubber tube I’d last seen snaking out of a hole in the deck was still there.
Bernie knelt to examine it.

“Clues all over the damn place,” Bernie said. “Didn’t actually check out any of this
when I came to—not priority one at that moment.”

No? What could be more important than clues? I didn’t get it.

Bernie’s gaze went to a dark, dried-up bloodstain on the deck. “Who belongs to that?”

Cale Rugh, if I remembered right, and of course I did. When I’ve tasted someone’s
blood, he tends to linger in my memory.

Bernie came over to me, gave me a pat, the slow and thoughtful kind. “If there’d been
a body on board when we first came here, you’d have known, right?”

What a question! There hadn’t been any body on board, wasn’t one now.

“So we can rule out the creepy possibility that Ralph’s been on this boat the whole
time,” Bernie said. “But suppose whoever we caught searching it wasn’t searching.
What if they were bringing him here, step one in a plan that ended in a fire? See
where this leads? Even if some remains got found, it would look like the strange but
accidental death of a loner no one understood in the first place. So let’s go sniff
around.”

Sniff around? For what? There was no body on board: hadn’t we just been through that?

We sniffed around the boat—living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and through a
hatch door on the upfront—bow! I kept forgetting and it kept coming back to me!—part
of the deck. Bernie actually sniffed once or twice himself. Even when you were doing
something completely useless you could still find lots of fun in life.

“It was a search then, for sure,” Bernie said. He went into
the kitchen, knelt by the sink. “So we pick up where the searcher left off. A search,”
he added, his voice sinking down to muttering level, “a sharper guy would have done
the moment we first came aboard.” I realized that picking up on mutters wasn’t one
of my strengths: I must have heard wrong.

The door to the cabinet under the sink already hung open. Bernie gazed inside, then
started rooting around, and out came sponges, brushes, detergents, steel wool—big
mistake, chewing on steel wool, and there’d be no repetition of that, I wasn’t even
tempted—paper towel rolls, an old coffee pot, a bunch of rags, a jar full of rusty
nails.

“So much junk in life,” Bernie said, his head now inside the cabinet, making him a
bit hard to understand. “How about we start over, say around ten thousand BC?” Ten
thousand BC? That had come up before, a total mystery to me. I moved a little closer
in case Bernie was about to explain what it was all about. Instead, he reached in
deeper, stretching his body flat out, and said, “Wonder what this thing does? Part
of the garbage disposal, or—”

Whoosh! A whole big—maybe not river, more like a fire hose thing—gush of water came
blasting out from under the sink, followed by Bernie, his hair plastered flat against
his head, the top half of him soaked right through, and then all of him, and me, too!
And the gush kept gushing! Meanwhile, how exciting to see Bernie with his hair plastered
flat like that! Like he was a different Bernie! But still Bernie! Hard to explain.
Next thing I knew, we were crowded under the sink together, Bernie grunting and struggling
and using some of the words Charlie wasn’t supposed to hear, and me just crowding.
Then came a metallic clang and the gushing ramped way up, no question about it. Bernie
and I went rolling and sliding across the watery floor. It was almost like surfing!

“The main!” he shouted. “Gotta find the main!”

Did that mean we were done with surfing, so soon? Yes. Things were moving fast, but
that was just the way I like them. We ran out of the kitchen, out of the cabin—some
confusion in the doorway, me ending up in the lead—onto the deck, back around to the
hatch in the bow, and dove right down through it, me actually diving, Bernie sort
of falling. Down below—the only light entering through a small round window up high
on the wall—he picked himself up, me helping, and looked around wildly. I could hear
water flowing across the deck above.

“Where? Where? Where the hell is it?”

Bernie darted into a dark corner, flung some life jackets out of the way, and bent
over a whole mess of pipes coming and going in every direction.

“Gotta be this,” he said, and started pushing and pulling at some sort of lever. It
wouldn’t budge. He grabbed a big wrench, swung hard at the lever, missing it completely,
the wrench slipping from his hand and spinning across this little below-deck storeroom
or whatever it was and clanging on the floor. A floorboard broke loose and came whipping
right back at us. We jumped out of the way, Bernie losing his balance and crashing
into the lever, shoulder-first. It shifted. The sound of running water coming from
above and all around us died away.

Bernie rose, rubbing his shoulder, head bandage dangling loose and then falling to
the deck, where he left it. No blood was flowing anywhere on his head, a nice sight.

“That was easy,” he said.

Which wouldn’t have been my take, but if Bernie said so, then that was that. He picked
up the loose floorboard, took it over to the hole in the floor, started to lower it
in place, and paused. “What have we here?” he said. He reached in and pulled out a
very thick and very short piece of pipe with a big sort of nut at one end, a lot like
the one we had in the car, or even exactly the same. He turned to me, his eyes glittering
in the way they did when we were about to start getting ours.

“Two miners, Chet,” he said. What had that been all about again? I couldn’t quite
bring it back, but the number sounded right.

Bernie brought the other pipe in from the car, set the two pipes side by side on the
kitchen counter. By that time, we had all the water mopped up and everything looked
ship-shape, as Bernie put it, but wasn’t
Little Jazz
a sort of ship? Meaning how could it be car-shaped, or tree-shaped, or any other
kind of shape? I puzzled over that and then I didn’t. All I knew for sure was that
I was Chet-shaped. Good enough for me, amigo.