The Sound and the Furry (34 page)

“Specifically,” Bernie went on, “her description of the scene outside Rooster Red’s
in the predawn hours when the stolen shrimp arrived. Too dark to really see the guy
who brought the shrimp—all she said was that he was tall and quote walked like a cowboy.
So where are we?” I waited to find out. This was kind of interesting. “Cale Rugh stole
the shrimp, Chet, or at least masterminded it. After he left, Fleurette saw Mack come
outside. By then it was getting lighter and she saw he was counting money. Not only
did Rugh not charge Mack for the shrimp, or even just give them to him—he paid Mack
to take them. See what this means?”

I saw right off the bat: Cale Rugh wasn’t good with money, kind of like . . . us.
Uh-oh. I didn’t want to be like him in any way.

“Means the shrimp heist was definitely a smoke screen, start to finish. The question
is why.”

We divide up the work at the Little Detective Agency, just part of our great business
plan. Bernie handles the whys. I bring other things to the table.

There was a long silence. We drove through the night, so pleasant. We do a lot of
driving through the night in our line of work. It always ends up the same: your eyelids
get heavy and do what they have to do. Then there’s nothing but the feeling of Bernie’s
thoughts flitting all around, and the lovely motion of the Porsche from underneath.
Did I hear him say, “Wonder if Vannah got hold of that money, even used it to . . .?”
Maybe, maybe not.

Eggs and bacon? I opened my eyes. We were parked in a roadside turnout in open country,
sun just coming up, mist rising over a bayou that glinted through the greenery, the
first rays of sunlight glowing through the mist like it was lit from inside. All of
that quite nice, I suppose, but even nicer was the sight of a food truck—our food
truck!—open for business and only steps away.

Bernie looked over at me. “How about some chow, big guy? Shaping up as a long day.”

Putting those two things together like that? Just another example of Bernie’s brilliance.
Pretty soon Bernie was leaning against the hood, munching on a bacon and egg sandwich
and sipping from a paper cup of steaming coffee, me beside him, keeping busy with
a fat sausage that made wonderful sausagey explosions in my mouth with every bite
I took, plus my water bowl, of course, and from time to time, whenever I looked at
Bernie in a certain way, a torn-off bacon scrap.

“I’m starting to think it’s true what they say about the food down here,” Bernie said.
“You can’t get a bad—”

A black-and-white pulled in, parked not far from us. A trim,
fit-looking cop stepped out, eyes and hair the color of ginger ale, although the hair
was graying: Sheriff Robideau. He went up to the food truck window, ordered something,
then turned to take in the scenery while he waited, and saw us.

“You still around?” he called over.

“And we will be till Ralph Boutette turns up,” Bernie called back. He took another
bite of his sandwich, kind of eating it in the sheriff’s face, if that makes any sense.
It does to me. Who wouldn’t love Bernie at a moment like that?

Sheriff Robideau turned back to the window. The food truck guy, the one with all the
bead chains and the missing teeth, handed him a sandwich and a can of soda. The sheriff
cracked the can open with a real loud crack that sounded almost like a gunshot in
the still morning air. Then he tilted his head back and drained the can, that thing
in his throat that men had and women didn’t seem to—some kind of apple, was that it?
having an apple in your throat all the time sounded unpleasant, but maybe it’s just
me—bobbed up and down. The sheriff crushed the empty can, tossed it on the ground,
and came our way.

He looked at us. We looked at him.

“Your dog’s not wearing tags,” he said.

“He lost his collar,” Bernie said. “Lost maybe not being the right word. More like
Iko tore it off him.”

“Iko the gator?” the sheriff said.

Bernie nodded. “How Chet got all the way down to open water is another question—that’s
where the human part comes in.”

“Got anyone in mind?” the sheriff said.

There was a long pause before Bernie said, “No.”

“Whatever the cause, if you’re staying in the county you’ll have to get tags on him.
It’s a safety issue.”

“I’ll make it a priority.” Bernie took another bite of the
sandwich—a real big one—and said, “How’s the canvass coming along?” Or something like
that—hard to tell, what with Bernie’s mouth so full.

The sheriff’s eyes narrowed in an annoyed sort of way. Maybe he didn’t like listening
to mouthful talk, having something in common with Bernie’s mom in that respect. Has
Bernie’s mom come up yet? She’s a piece of work. Hope we have time to go into that
later.

“Canvass?” the sheriff said.

“Wasn’t your deputy canvassing the citizenry regarding news of Ralph?”

The sheriff nodded. “The citizenry had nothing to say.”

“Meaning no one knew anything, or they knew but were too afraid to say?”

“Strange question,” said the sheriff. “Especially coming from an outsider unfamiliar
with our ways.”

“Consider it withdrawn,” Bernie said.

This seemed like a nice, polite conversation, no raised voices, no threats, no angry
body language—and I don’t miss that one, body language being one of my specialties
at the Little Detective Agency. At the same time, I got the feeling Bernie and Sheriff
Robideau wanted to kill each other.

“Anything else I can help you with?” the sheriff said.

Another long pause from Bernie. “Wouldn’t want to trouble you.”

“You’re no trouble,” said the sheriff. He walked over to the black-and-white and drove
away. Bernie picked up the soda can the sheriff had tossed away and dropped it in
the trash barrel beside the food truck.

The food truck guy leaned out of his window and said, “Hey!”

Bernie turned to him. “Yeah?”

“Couldn’t help but overhear some of your palaver with the sheriff.”

“Uh-huh,” Bernie said.

“Had me a dog once myself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Name of Doc, on account of he was so goddamn smart. Ten times smarter than yours
truly.”

Which left me no wiser, the only Truly I knew being on the staff at Livia Moon’s house
of ill repute back in Pottsdale, and she’d always seemed smart enough to me.

“Nice name,” Bernie said.

“Thing is, Doc’s passed on.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“ ’Preciate that. Do you believe in the rainbow bridge?”

“I’d like to.”

The food truck guy thought that over. Were we talking about the bridge over the mighty
Mississip? I believed in it totally, having already been on it several times.

“Thing is,” the food truck guy said, “Doc left behind somethin’ I want you to have.”

“What’s that?” Bernie said.

The food truck guy held up a collar. “I like the look of that dog of yours. And his
appetite—reminds me of Doc big-time.”

“Very nice of you, but—”

“Doin’ it for myself,” said the food truck guy. “Would make me feel good, like Doc’s
still out there, havin’ adventures.”

“All right,” Bernie said, his voice turning gentle. “Thanks.”

We went to the window. “Killed it myself,” the food truck guy said, handing Bernie
the collar. “Out bow-huntin’—that’s my relaxation.”

Bernie examined the collar. “Alligator hide?” he said.

“Totally legal,” said the food truck guy. “Kick in the twenty-five bucks for my license
every year.”

“It’s not that,” Bernie said. “I’m just wondering whether Chet might not . . .” He . . .
he sniffed at the collar! Oh, Bernie. Then he held it in front of my nose, maybe thinking
that would help me get a good sniff, too. How nice of him, but I’d already sniffed
all there was to sniff on the collar, which included gator smell, but toned way down,
and also the smell of a member of the nation within, plus some food truck smells,
of course. In short: a great collar. Hadn’t I ended up doing sort of all right with
Iko, coming pretty close to at least holding my own? I wouldn’t mind being reminded
of that, although I had no plans for more swims in the bayou. You can put that right
out of your minds, pronto.

“When his tail gets goin’ like that it means yes,” the food truck guy said. “Doc was
the same way.”

“Cool collar,” Bernie said, as we drove away from the food truck. “Maybe the coolest
there is.”

Plus it felt good around my neck. And then there was the fact that I’d just downed
a first-class breakfast. Who wouldn’t have been feeling tip-top?

“What now, you may be wondering,” Bernie said. Which I hadn’t been in the least. What
I’d been doing was watching the telephone poles zip by and that was about it. “All
I can think of is driving to Houston and marching right into Cale Rugh’s office at
Donnegan’s. Or maybe the office of the CEO—why the hell not?” Telephone poles zipped
by, faster and faster. “I’ll tell you why the hell not. One, it’s too goddamn clumsy,
even for me. Two, it means moving away from the locus of the case.” Locus of the case?
I’d never been more lost in my life. The telephone poles started going by more slowly.
I spotted bullet holes in more than two.

The phone buzzed. Bernie hit a button and a man’s voice came through the speakers.

“Bernie?”

“Yup.”

“Prof here. I showed those equations of yours to a very sharp friend of mine in the
engineering department. They’re stress calculations.”

“Stress calculations?”

“Critical in all sorts of design and construction. In this case, he says we’re dealing
with stress induced by pressure, specifically liquid pressure.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Why not? I’m talking in plain English. Do you see what’s happening here, Bernie?
We’re on a forced march all the way back to the dark ages.”

“Try to make it plainer.”

“A pleasure. Our celebrity madness, mixed with the leveling desires of powerful opinion-setting
segments of society, plus near total amnesia regarding the past and—”

“I meant this pressure business.”

“How can I make that any plainer?”

“Pretend I’m your dumbest student.”

“Don’t have one. The dumb ones stay away because of my reputation for actually handing
out F’s if deserved.”

“Prof?”

“Yes?”

“We’re dealing with high stakes here.”

“You’re referencing in contrast the notoriously low stakes of everything academe?”

Bernie didn’t answer. Prof went on, his voice now a little softer. “Suppose you were
designing a pressure gauge, for example.”

“A pressure gauge?” Bernie leaned forward, hands gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles
turned bone-colored.

“A deliberate choice on my part,” Prof said, “since my friend tells me these are pretty
much classic pressure gauge calculations, as least as they apply to problems involving
liquid pressure. Suppose—to instance a common real-life situation, according to my
friend—you wanted to measure pressure build-up at a well head. Obviously, you’re dealing
with a multivariable calculus involving forces and material compositions, but you’ve
also got to factor in certain dynamic—”

“Well head?” Bernie said, his voice rising.

“At an oil-drilling platform, for example.”

Bernie spun the Porsche in a screaming U-turn that just about brought my breakfast
back up into the world. The telephone poles started zipping by the other way, so fast
they almost blurred into one.

W
ere we flying or what? If I stuck my head above the windshield my ears snapped straight
back, flat against my head. I stuck my head up and kept it there, squeezing my eyes
almost shut against the wind.

Bernie glanced at me and shouted over all the noise, which actually just added to
the noise: I would have heard him just as well, or even better, if he’d spoken at
normal volume. I was so busy considering this interesting noise issue that I kind
of missed what he said, perhaps something about Wes and cats.

It was still pretty early when we swung by Dr. Ory’s trailer. She was just going inside,
a stack of files under her arm and a big bag of kibble—the kind in the blue bag, not
bad at all—in one hand. Bernie hurried forward, got the door open for her. Dr. Ory
had deep purple patches under her eyes, a sure sign of a real tired human.