The Sound and the Furry (30 page)

Bacon! The dream smell of bacon got so strong that my mouth began to water, and when
my mouth waters I can’t keep my eyes closed. I opened them—and what was this? Bacon!

Yes, bacon of the nondream type, meaning you could eat it. In passing, I noticed other
early morning details: Bernie at the kitchen table, checking out those two thick pipes
again, a cup of steaming coffee at his elbow; Vannah at the little stove, wearing
a tiny bikini, and frying up a gently hissing pan of—BACON. The bacon part was the
main event, of course, not part of the noticed-in-passing details, all of which had
already slipped my mind. Beside that lovely hissing, so full of promise, there was
also the sound of Vannah whistling to herself—and she was good at it. This was all
nice and homey. I rose and was just about to give myself a day-starting stretch—but
a quick one, on account of you-know-what and the need to make plans for getting some—when
I heard someone stepping down on the stern deck. I kind of knew who it was before
I even turned to look, just from the sound of that footstep—female human, light but
firm, strong.

And yes, a woman, light but firm, and strong: Suzie. Suzie!
Those eyes, dark and shining like our countertops back home on Mesquite Road, and
just how she stood and moved, more of a pleasure to watch than any other human I knew,
except for Bernie, goes without mentioning. I hadn’t seen her in way too long. My
tail revved right up.

“Hey, there, Ber—” she started to say, and then she saw Vannah at the stove, who happened
to be hitching up her bikini top, which seemed to have slipped down a bit on account
of maybe being a touch too small for her, which reminded me of a stripper we’d once
interviewed on a missing G-string case that I hadn’t understood from start to finish,
although I’d located the G-string practically from the get-go. But no time for that
now.

“Suzie?” Bernie said, rising from the table in a way I wouldn’t want to call awkward,
although somehow the table ended up overturning anyway, the two thick pipes and the
coffee cup crashing to the floor. “What are you, um—?”

“Labor Day weekend, Bernie?” Suzie said. She looked directly at Vannah; the whistling
died out right in the middle of things, ending in a harsh way. “Maybe you got distracted
and forgot,” Suzie added.

“I’m Vannah,” Vannah said, waving the spatula, which set off more slippage of the
bikini top. “Chief cook and bottle washer. And he’s not as distractible as you’d think.”

Suzie’s eyes went hard and not shiny at all, didn’t even look like her eyes. She turned
these scary new eyes on Bernie. “I know it’s only Friday morning,” she said. “My mistake—I
thought it would be a surprise.” She laughed, one of those abrupt, unhappy laughs
that’s mostly a snort through the nose. “And it sure as hell is.”

“Wait,” Bernie said. He glanced at Vannah, maybe looking for some help. Still getting
her bikini top squared away, she raised
her eyebrows and gave him a bright smile. “This isn’t what it looks like!” Bernie
said, his voice rising. “I can ex—”

“Let’s not embarrass ourselves any further,” Suzie said, and in one smooth motion
she turned and sort of glided right over the rail, stepping onto the dock and walking
quickly to a small car parked beside the Porsche. Without a glance back, she got in
and drove away, not too fast, raising only a small dust cloud on the rutted road.

“Wait,” Bernie called, “wait, wait.” He bolted toward the stern, slipping and almost
falling in the spilled coffee. Bernie got himself over the rail, perhaps not with
Suzie’s ease, but there was always his war wound to consider, and jumped into the
Porsche. I found I was already there, sitting high and alert in the shotgun seat.
Hadn’t Suzie just said something about surprises? And now I’d surprised myself ! Chet
the Jet, in the picture!

Bernie jammed the key in the ignition and turned it hard. The engine went
whirr whirr whirr
. Uh-oh. I knew that
whirr whirr whirr
, although it hadn’t paid us a visit in some time. Bernie tried the key again, stamped
on the pedals, shouted the kinds of things humans shouted during this sort of situation.
If the car didn’t start soon, he’d be banging on it like it was a bad guy, another
machine-smacking human moment.

Pretty soon Bernie was really letting the steering wheel have it. Maybe that made
the
whirr whirr whirr
go away, but in its place came a quiet
click click click
that to the best of my recollection would eventually lapse into total silence. After
that we might see the tools.

Out came the tools. Bernie threw open the hood, leaned way in there, his head disappearing
from view, which meant he didn’t see a taxi pulling up, and Vannah—now in jeans and
T-shirt and carrying a little pink suitcase—getting in the backseat and being
driven away. I sat on the dock. Bernie got out some different tools, squirmed under
the car. Time passed. An oily blackened hunk of metal fell from somewhere in the engine,
rolled across the dock and dropped into the water with a soft splash. Not long after
that, Bernie crawled out from under and said, “That should do it.”

He climbed back into the car. I got in the shotgun seat. “Odds are she’s headed right
back to the airport,” he said. “If we drive like the wind we can still catch her.”

Sounded good to me: driving like the wind was one of my favorite things. Bernie turned
the key. Then came an explosion—although it’s fair to say not a big one—and smoke
rose from under the hood. As for the flames, they were on the small side in my opinion,
hardly worth mentioning.

Later that very same day we’d met some cool dudes—tow-truck dude, auto junkyard dude,
mechanic dude—and the Porsche was running great, even louder than normal, on a brand-new
old engine, and our three shrimpy grand was mostly gone. I felt tip-top, and so did
Bernie, and even if he wasn’t at his very tip-toppest, he wasn’t completely miserable:
I could tell from the expression in his eyes, not quite as murky as they’d been the
whole after-Suzie time so far.

“Since we’re just about in the city anyway,” Bernie said as we pulled out of the junkyard,
“how about we run down Pyro and see what’s up his sleeve?”

I remembered Pyro well on account of the visor that had hidden his eyes, the kind
of bothersome detail that sticks in my mind and made me not like him much, but running
him over? This was going to be a first. We were up to new tricks at the Little Detective
Agency. Bernie? The best.

“Hey!” Bernie said. “What’s with you?”

With me? Nothing much. Maybe I’d just given Bernie a quick lick on the side of his
face, maybe not. It was also possible that there’d been some swerving. A quirk of
the new engine? That was my first thought. No other thoughts came, but in truth I
didn’t wait for them very long.

Soon we were back in that sketchy boarded-up part of town where we’d first found Cleotis.
Now his boxy little shotgun house was boarded up, too, all except for that thick steel
front door, which had a big lock hanging from it. We parked out front and stayed in
the car. Were we sitting on Cleotis’s house again? Any reason not to sit on an empty
one? I had a feeling there should be. That turned out to be one of those feelings
that didn’t go anywhere, often the case and I was cool with it. Bernie took out his
phone and tried Suzie again—I could tell because her face came up on the screen—maybe
for the zillionth time, which is a pretty big number, certainly way more than two.

“C’mon, pick up,” he said.

But she did not.

Bernie put the phone away, gazed at Cleotis’s crib. By that time, the sun was going
down and the crib looked fuzzy in the dying light, like it wasn’t solid. “No Suzie,
a complicated case, and we’ve already spent all of the fee we’re likely to get. I’m
tempted, mighty tempted.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Tempted to
do what? That was my question. I myself knew a lot about temptation, and always ended
up handling it the same way.

Bernie never said what the temptation was. “Wouldn’t be me,” he said after a while.
“Maybe I lack the imagination to slip the harness.”

Bernie in harness? What a terrible thought! And also a puzzler because Bernie wasn’t
wearing a harness—today he had on his
darkest Hawaiian shirt, the one with the nighttime bongo drums, plus jeans and sneakers—and
never once had in all the time we’d been together.

“. . . simple curiosity, too,” he was saying when I tuned back in. “Suppose, for example,
I’m right about Pyro’s wrist. If so, then someone didn’t want us on this case from
the very beginning. Meaning we want to be on it more than ever.” That sounded right
to me. Bernie opened the door. “How about we see if Cleotis got himself a new tenant?”
I was sitting outside the driver’s-side door before Bernie had finished getting out.
He tucked the flashlight into his belt on one side and the .38 Special on the other.
Was there time for him to shoot a few dimes out of the air before we did whatever
we were doing? Probably not.

W
e walked around to the back of Cleotis’s boarded-up shotgun house. The last of the
daylight was gone now, the sky moonless and starless, this neighborhood not the kind
where the streetlights worked. Darkness, sketchy part of town, backside of a sketchy
little house, .38 Special: life was good. I get a feeling when a case is going well,
and I had it now. Was it bothersome that the money was just about gone? Only if I
thought about it. That was the kind of problem I could solve all on my own.

Bernie approached a boarded-up window by the back door, ripped off the boards like
nobody’s business, which made no sense to me, this sort of thing being our business
exactly. Next came the window. This particular window was pretty much our favorite
kind, just one pane. First, Bernie tried to open it: locked. Locked was always my
preference—it meant I got to see Bernie breaking the glass. Bernie was a great glass
breaker—I’d seen him do it with his head! And more than once! But not tonight. Tonight
we were trying to keep the noise level down. I knew that as soon as Bernie took off
his shirt and wrapped it around the .38 Special. After that came a quick
tap tap
at the window, practically silent,
and the glass broke into two pieces that fell inside and landed on something soft,
making the gentlest shattering sounds I’d heard in my career so far.

Bernie glanced around—just an old habit of his, I’d have let him know if anyone was
coming—then put on his shirt, picked a few shards out of the frame, and raised one
foot as though to step inside. That led to a brief moment of confusion ending with
us both safely through the window, me first.

“What a stench!” Bernie said in a low whisper, stench being a smell humans were capable
of detecting but didn’t like. In the nation within, we have plenty of sounds we don’t
like, but not really any smells. Smells are too big a world for simply liking or not
liking, and besides, we get way too busy breaking down the smells, and breaking down
the parts of the parts, and the parts of the parts of the parts! For example, here
inside Cleotis’s crib we had big-time rotting smells, no longer a surprise to me in
this city. You want a part? How about food? We had rotting fruit. How about parts
of that? Rotting bananas and rotting pineapples. See the way this works? We also had
rotting meat, rotting milk, rotting eggs—even humans never miss that last one. The
rotting food part was actually a small part of the big smell picture, which was dominated
by toilet back-up. It reminded me of a case we’d once worked involving rival septic
tank companies owned by two dudes who hated each other. The ways they had of getting
even! But no time for that now. Sometimes the most important smells in our business
are the ones that aren’t there, and this was one of those times; meaning death was
not in the house.

Another quiet whisper from Bernie: “I think I smell rotten eggs.” That was Bernie:
human to the max.

He switched on the light. We were in the kitchen where we’d had our little face-to-face
with Cleotis, but now everything was
smashed up, including the fridge, tipped over on the floor. The floor itself was all
puddly. I was considering the remains of an almost-floating drumstick when Bernie
made a little
click-click
sound in his mouth and moved toward the stairs, the same ones Cleotis’s muscle guy
Herman had climbed when he went up for his rest after the brief ruckus with Bernie.
Bernie and I mounted the stairs, pretty much side by side, although the truth was
I nosed ahead as we reached the top.