The Iggy Chronicles Volume One Read online

  Old Mr. Parsons knocked on our door. I was lying in the front hall, eyes closed and not really in the mood to open them even though Mr. Parsons was a good buddy. Mr. Parsons had a knock all his own, quiet yet bony, but I’d already known it was him just from the slow bumpitty bump of his steps—he used a walker, couldn’t make it much easier for me than that—and of course how could you miss his old-man smell, kind of like stacks of yellowed crumbling newspapers we’d once toppled over, me and Bernie, revealing a perp whose name escapes me—although no perp ever escapes me and Bernie, not in the end—and . . . and where were we going with this? Easy to lose the thread sometimes: once I had one caught way up inside my mouth. It dangled down and tickled my tongue in a bothersome way. But not now: no thread worries, no worries of any kind. A lovely dream featuring snacks and treats was getting ready to take me in.

  Mr. Parsons knocked again. “Bernie?” he called through the door. “You there?”

  Bernie, my partner in the Little Detective Agency, was here all right but hadn’t yet made an appearance. His snoring, coming from the bedroom down the hall, made a lovely sound, actually musical to my way of thinking. We’d had a late night down at Central Booking, trying to hand over a perp we’d busted, name of Truffles Siminoni, whose MO was all about boosting fancy food from high-end restaurant kitchens. We had lots of pals at Central Booking, everything usually going smoothly, but last night there’d been a hitch—something about the evidence having disappeared, was that it? A pound of caviar, whatever caviar happened to be, or possibly two pounds? While I was wondering about all that, although not wondering hard, Mr. Parsons called Bernie’s name again. His wavery old voice sounded even waverier and older than usual. I rose, gave myself a shake—not the long kind that starts at my nose, goes to the tip of my tail, and then all the way back, and sometimes makes one more round after that!—no, this was a just a quick shake to get going.

  I went down the hall to Bernie’s bedroom, and just as I was about to enter gave myself one of those good long shakes after all. Some things you can’t explain. At that moment I happened to lick my muzzle. Hey! It tasted salty. Another thing I couldn’t explain, and coming so soon after the first one, something about . . . about . . . whatever. The day was off to a good start: that was my takeaway.

  It was quiet and dark in Bernie’s room, and smelled of Bernie. Bernie’s the best-smelling human I’ve ever encountered, no one else even close. He just never stops giving off this wonderful mix of apples, bourbon, salt and pepper, with just a hint of something funky in the background. Who wouldn’t love Bernie? Actually a surprising number of people, starting with his ex-wife Leda, who used to sleep on the side of the bed where Bernie wasn’t at the moment. He lay over at the other edge, all twisted in the sheets, hair mussed up and his eyebrows, too—beautifully thick eyebrows with a language all their own—and one leg sticking out. It happened to be the leg that got wounded in the war, a wound you didn’t see very often, on account of Bernie hardly ever wearing shorts. Sometimes he limps just the tiniest bit, but only when he’s very tired or we’re hiking the steepest trails out in the desert.

  I went closer to the old wound. It was shiny, seemed to pull in all the light in the room; a weak sort of light, what with the curtains closed. Poor Bernie. Licking the old wound seemed like a good idea, although I had a faint memory of that being a Bernie no-no. But why? And did Bernie even have any no-nos? Plus what were no-nos again? I got a bit confused.

  Bernie’s eyes opened, blank and misty at first. Then they cleared and shifted in my direction.

  “Hey, big guy, what’s all that barking?”

  All what barking? I went still, listened my hardest, heard no barking, just one of those strange silences that comes right after some big noise has come to an end.

  “Late night, Chet,” Bernie said, “and a little more shut-eye would—”

  More knocking at the door.

  “Someone at the door?” Bernie sat up. “Good boy,” he said, giving me a pat. “Sorry I’m so slow on the uptake.”

  That had to be one of Bernie’s jokes. Bernie was the smartest human in the room, now and forever. He got out of bed, me making it easier for him by yanking off the covers—no trouble at all, I’m here to help—pulled on sweatpants from a pile on the floor, and headed for the door with me right beside him, or, more accurately, in front. Bernie opened the door and there was Mr. Parsons, leaning on his walker, a breeze riffling his wispy white hair.

  “Daniel?” Bernie said.

  “Did I wake you?” said Mr. Parsons.

  “Nah,” said Bernie, “been up for hours.”

  Mr. Parsons seemed to think about that. I was thinking about it, too, but not getting anywhere. I waited to see what Mr. Parsons would come up with.

  “Happen to hear anything during that time?” he said, which was no help to me at all.

  And maybe not to Bernie, either—don’t forget we’re alike in some ways. “Such as?” he said.

  “Coming from our place,” Mr. Parsons said. “Like barking, for example.”

  “Chet was just barking,” Bernie said. News to me. I let it go by, one of my specialties.

  Mr. Parsons shook his head. “I meant Iggy. The thing is, Bernie, I think he’s escaped.”

  Iggy escaped? At last! Another breeze sprang up, much stronger than the one that was ruffling Mr. Parsons’s hair, and coming from the other direction, meaning behind me. Kind of strange, the inside of our house on Mesquite Road not usually being a windy place. I sat down to think about it, and the wind died down just like that. A puzzling moment but not important in the grand scheme, whatever that might mean. The important thing was Iggy, on the loose. Iggy’s my best pal: the fun we’ve shared! I can hardly remember. But all that was way back when, before the electric fence dude came around and made a sale to Mr. and Mrs. Parsons. Then came a mixed-up time where they couldn’t get it working right, even though Bernie went over and straightened everything out more than once, and after that you never saw Iggy outside anymore, only spotted him at the window in their front hall, peering out. His constant high-pitched yip-yip-yip; his stubby sideways tail wag whenever he saw me, the fastest wag I knew, just a blur; and somehow Iggy could keep drooling at the same time! Did I miss him or what? So this was great news, unless I wasn’t getting something.

  “ . . . no idea how he could have gotten out,” old Mr. Parsons was saying. “Locking all the doors is part of my nightly routine.”

  “Did you set the alarm?” Bernie said.

  “The alarm?” said Mr. Parsons, biting his lower lip, something I always look for in a human. In the nation within the nation—as Bernie calls the world of me and my kind—we don’t go in for much in the lip biting way, although getting a bit of lip snagged on a tooth can happen from time to time. I checked—no lip snagging at the moment—and concentrated even harder on what Mr. Parsons was saying, maybe “Doesn’t the alarm set automatically?” or something of that sort.

  “Tell you what,” said Bernie. “Let’s go over and check things out.”

  “Hoping you’d say that,” said Mr. Parsons.

  And so was I, even though I hadn’t realized till Mr. Parsons said so. Life’s full of surprises, almost all of them good.

  •••

  What a beautiful day! That was my thought as I raced across our front lawn—not the grassy kind of lawn but the desert kind, on account of the aquifer, one of Bernie’s big worries, although I’m pretty sure he’s never seen it, at least not since we’ve been together—and did what I had to do, and do pretty urgently once I got started, but the point was I was doing what I had to against my very favorite tree and thinking about nothing, when I started thinking about something, namely if Iggy was on the loose, how come he hadn’t laid his mark on my tree? Wouldn’t he have done that first thing? I know I would have in his—

  “Chet? You coming?”

  What was this? Mr. Parsons was stumping across our driveway toward his place, Bernie walking slowly beside him and looking back at me. Was I coming? Of course! Just as soon as I finished what I was—whoa! Hey! It turned out I was finished—hadn’t even remembered to save a little something for any marking purposes in the near future—and yet was still in place by the tree, one back leg raised very high, which isn’t really necessary, just my style, all the while kind of . . . lost in thought. Lost in thought? That wasn’t me at all. I hurried over to Bernie, although not in a straight line, on account of my security duties, which began every day with a thorough sniff-sniff-sniffing of the front yard to find out what had been going on overnight, in this case invasions by a squirrel, a mouse, and . . . and a cat? A cat had been on our property? And right about here by this stunted little prickly pear plant Bernie can’t get to grow, that cat had caught the mouse, no question about it: once you’ve smelled mouse insides you don’t forget. Now we had cats taking down mice in my territory? What could I do about it? Absolutely nothing except for sprinting around in tight circles, tighter, tighter, tighter, claws digging deep into the dried-out earth, clods flying, clouds of dust rising and—

  “CHET!”

  I hustled right over. When Bernie talks I listen, and listen good.

  •••

  We went to the back door of the Parsons’s house. It was open just the tiniest bit, but I was more interested in the presence of Iggy’s smell, somewhere between f
resh and yesterday. Iggy’s smell is a little poopier than you usually find in members of the nation within, maybe takes some getting used to. I was used to it. Iggy was my best pal, if I haven’t mentioned that already. The point is he’d been right here, outside the door, no doubt about it.

  “Did you just come through this door?” Bernie said.

  “No,” said Mr. Parsons. “I left by the front. Why?”

  “It’s open,” Bernie said.

  Mr. Parsons gazed at his back door. “It must have been closed last night. Closed and locked.” He bit his lip again. “Locking the doors is on my list of . . .” His thin voice trailed off.

  Bernie himself has a beautiful voice, although you couldn’t always call it soft. It softened now. “How about we take it from the top?” he said. And right then I knew that everything was cool, taking it from the top being one of our best techniques at the Little Detective Agency. Another good one is me grabbing the perp by the pant leg, how our cases usually end. “When did you first notice that Iggy was missing?”

  “When Edna woke me this morning. Iggy usually sleeps at the foot of the bed, but he wasn’t there.”

  “Edna’s back home from the hospital?” Bernie said. “Good news.”

  “They let her out yesterday,” said Mr. Parsons. “Home isn’t home without her. But . . .”

  Mr. Parsons got a faraway look in his eyes. Bernie waited. I waited with him. Waiting was a big part of our job, but were we on the job? And if so, who was paying? Our finances were a mess, going all the way back to the Hawaiian pants episode—of which we now had a warehouse-full down in South Pedroia, having sold not one pair—followed not long after by the tin futures play, gone bad because of an earthquake in Bolivia, or maybe because the earthquake hadn’t happened, the details growing hazy in my mind. Hey! Did that mean there’d come a day I didn’t remember the tin futures at all? Right away I was back to feeling tip-top.

  “But,” Mr. Parsons went on at last, “the reason she’s back . . .” He paused, took a deep, wheezy breath, like he needed it real bad. “ . . . is the doc can’t do anything more for her.”

  “Oh,” said Bernie, and then, “I’m, uh . . .” He looked down at his shoes, which happened to be flip-flops at the moment. “ . . . sorry to, um . . .”

  “Thank you, Bernie,” said Mr. Parsons. “No need to say anything. You’ve always been a great neighbor—and friend, if that’s not assuming too much.” All at once his eyes got teary. He wiped at them with the back of his hand. “Iggy’s such a comfort to her.”

  “Then we’d better find him,” Bernie said. He touched the open door with just the tip of his finger. “An innie,” he said.

  “An innie?” said Daniel.

  “A door you pull, from the point of view of someone inside. Innies are harder for dogs.”

  Mr. Parsons hung his head. “Then I must have left it open after all.”

  “Not saying that,” Bernie said. “It only involves one extra step.” He closed the door; it made a soft click. The handle was one of those stick-out-catch things for pressing down, the easiest kind for me to learn. The round knob type was harder—need two paws for that one—and we’re still putting in time on bolts. Putting in time always ends with a treat. Would I trade this job for any other? Get out of here.

  •••

  We went inside. Bernie closed the door.

  “Chet,” he said. “Open.”

  Open the door? We’d just come in. But I do what Bernie wants and . . . and he’s the same with me! What a thought! And a brand-new one, as far as I know. But no time to stay with it, no matter how much I would have liked to, and that wasn’t really all that much, because I was already up on my back legs, bringing a front paw down on that catch thing. Click went the door, and it cracked open a tiny bit. I stuck the tip of my nose in the crack, gave my head a bit of a twist, and the door opened wide.

  “No way Iggy could do that,” Mr. Parsons said.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Bernie said, slipping me a treat. “Dogs can amaze you.” Or something of the sort. Much more important was the fact that I’d gotten a bit ahead of myself: Bernie hadn’t actually slipped me a treat. How had that happened, or not happened? Where was my treat? Hadn’t I just opened the door? Didn’t I get a treat when I opened doors? Unless we were on a dangerous job, of course, and there was no time. But we weren’t on a dangerous job. We were in Iggy’s house. I kept my eyes on Bernie’s hands, waiting for one of them to dip into a pocket and produce a treat.

  “But Iggy’s such a short little guy,” Mr. Parsons was saying.

  That was supposed to be news? News was that we had a big problem and it was getting bigger: Bernie didn’t even have a treat on him!

  “Chet? What are you doing?”

  What was I doing? Possibly nosing up against one of Bernie’s pockets? Not right, I was pretty sure about that, but wouldn’t you be doing the same thing? Open a door, you get a treat. What was I missing? I tried to remember one single time when—

  “Chet! For God’s sake!”

  “What’s bothering him?” Mr. Parsons said.

  “Probably just excited about seeing Iggy,” Bernie said.

  Huh? Wasn’t this visit all about Iggy being in the wind? So why would I be excited about seeing him when he wasn’t here? But, funnily enough and all of a sudden: I was excited about seeing him, and totally. How do you like that?

  Something you might not know about me is how fast I can ramp up to full speed. It’s like this: Boom! Or even quicker than that! But no time for thinking now. In fact, that’s one of my core beliefs. You can take it to the bank, although maybe not our bank, where we’re having a little problem with Ms. Oxley, the manager. I tore across the back hall of the Parsons house, through the kitchen, past Iggy’s water bowl, just about full to the top, into the front hall, then—with no warning at all, caught completely by surprise!—stopping on a dime, the kind of stop where the whole rug comes loose and for a moment you’re surfing, the way Bernie and I did on our trip to San Diego—a story I’ll try to go into later—and the next thing I knew I was back at Iggy’s bowl, lapping up every single drop of his water, except what might have gotten spilled. Then came a pivot so fast I almost puked—hey! no almost about it!—and I was back in the front hall, where I caught a glimpse of the rug—Persian, was that the name?—sort of crumpled under a big plant that had somehow tipped over, scattering a surprising amount of dirt all over the—But that was all I glimpsed. You can only glimpse so much.

  Here’s another thing about me: I feel tip-top most of the time, but I’m really only at the tip-toppest of tip-top when I’m bounding. So imagine my mood as I bounded up the stairs in the Parsons house, taking the whole flight in pretty much one bound. And it was there, touching down on the second floor, when I realized that back at Iggy’s bowl I’d picked up a whiff of a smell I knew very well from my days in K-9 school—from which I’d flunked out on the very last day for reasons I couldn’t remember or maybe hadn’t known in the first place, but it turned out to be a great day, on account of that was when I met Bernie—namely the smell of a gun that’s been fired, not recently but some time, for sure. Mr. and Mrs. Parsons went to the range, or maybe took potshots in the canyon? A bit of a surprise. But I like surprises—they can really get me going—and in one more bound, or even less, I was in Mr. and Mrs. Parsons’s bedroom. Lots of fun to be had in bedrooms, as I knew from—

  Uh-oh. And here was another surprise, the kind I’d forgotten about: the bad kind. Mrs. Parsons wasn’t in her bed. Instead she lay on the floor, twisted around with one arm underneath her, but her face turned toward me. Her eyes were open. She saw me, no doubt about it, and her eyes were trying so hard to tell me something. I went closer, gave her a soft nudge on the shoulder with the side of my head, all I could think of to do. Her mouth opened and she tried to speak. No sound came. Her tongue made little movements. Human tongues—not much to them, really—are usually pink. Mrs. Parsons’s tongue looked almost white. That scared me. I went to the top of the stairs and started barking.

  •••

  Once in a while we had to go to Desert Springs Hospital, me and Bernie, usually when a perp needed stitches, say in the pant leg area. So I knew the drill, which mostly involved sitting.