Tender Is the Bite Read online

  Bernie laughed.

  Olek raised his glass. “To success!” They clinked and drank. Olek raised his glass again. “To a beautiful future for our two great countries, Ukraine and USA!” They clinked and drank some more.

  “What is your opinion of our magical vodka?” Olek said.

  “It packs a punch,” said Bernie.

  Olek smacked his hand on the table. It sounded like a gunshot. “Packs a punch—this is an American expression?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am loving it.” Olek drained his glass and refilled it. “I have boxed in my time. How is about you?”

  “A little,” Bernie said.

  A little? Come on, Bernie. Tell him about that sweet, sweet uppercut. Or … or even better, how about showing him? I changed my position slightly, moving behind Olek’s chair in case he tried to take off. But Bernie stayed seated. Could the uppercut be thrown from a sitting position? I didn’t even know how to start imagining that.

  “So then we have something in common, you and I,” Olek said. “And not only boxing. I, too, am former military man.”

  “You’ve done research on me,” Bernie said.

  “Homework and more homework,” said Olek. “‘Train hard, fight easy’—General Suvorov. I was army, like you. Saw fighting, like you—but maybe not so organized.”

  “Oh?”

  “We sleep next to a five-hundred-kilo gorilla.”

  “The Russians?”

  Olek nodded and took another drink, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Yes, always the Russians. Sometimes we kill them, sometimes we kill with them.”

  A dark look passed over Bernie’s face. “We did some of that, too,” he said.

  “But not with the Russians,” said Olek. “And you yourselves are also a gorilla, maybe one thousand kilos. A nicer gorilla, sure thing, even friendly.” He refilled his glass, topped up Bernie’s. “To the friendly gorilla.”

  They clinked glasses and drank to the friendly gorilla. Then and there, I knew the case had taken a bad turn. I was familiar with gorillas from Animal Planet, had seen one pull a tree right out of the ground, and with only one arm. What else did you need to know?

  Olek had begun to sweat a little bit, but not Bernie.

  “Now how is the vodka?” Olek said.

  “Better and better.”

  “Always the way—with the right sort of man. And you, Bernie, are the right sort of man. Are you coming to work for me?”

  “So we’d be working for you personally?” Bernie said.

  “Oh, no, no, no. For the big boss. You have heard of Romanovych Energy?”

  “No,” Bernie said.

  “Is a very big company, Bernie. One hundred billion capitalization.”

  Bernie said nothing. Was that a negotiating technique? Were we negotiating? Bernie could be a brilliant negotiator when he put his mind to it. Was he putting his mind to it now? I gave him a close look. Now he, too, had started sweating. Maybe it was time to move into the shade.

  “Romanovych Energy is controlled by Marko Romanovych, Bernie, number ninety-seven billionaire in the world. That takes a special man, I’m sure you agree.”

  Bernie nodded. He has a number of nods meaning this and that. I was pretty sure that this particular nod, with an inward look, meant nothing.

  “In fact,” Olek went on, “a prophet.”

  Bernie leaned back. “It takes a prophet to be the ninety-seventh richest person in the world?”

  Olek set down his glass hard, liquid spilling over the rim. “How can anyone make that kind of fortune without seeing the future? To see the future, you must be a prophet.”

  “Then he already knows whether I’ll say yes or no,” Bernie said.

  Olek went still for a moment, his face reddening. Then he shook his head and laughed. “Mr. Romanovych likes a joke now and then. You will be a big success for him.”

  “So we’d be working directly for him?”

  Olek put down his glass, rubbed his hands together. “You have been to Kauai, Bernie?”

  “No.”

  “Paradise,” Olek said. “Paradise in the middle of the sea. The first time I landed there, I thought, so far from America and yet part of America. What does this tell you, Olek?” Olek wagged his finger. “It tells you all you need to know about America.”

  “Which is?” Bernie said.

  Olek made a big circle with his big hands. “The whole waxen ball, Bernie, the whole waxen ball. Think of that when you soon are flying into Kauai.”

  “And what would we be doing when we land?”

  Olek leaned forward. “Now we come to the nut and bolt of the affair. You will be consultant number one on the infrastructure of security planning.”

  “What does that mean?” Bernie said. I was with him on that.

  “Mr. Romanovych has acquired a three-thousand-hectare property on Kauai,” Olek said. “He is important man. Important man needs important protection. Therefore we must have security expert to tell the architects, ‘Build higher this wall,’ ‘Here make a watchtower,’ ‘So-and-so road must have remote-controlling gates each three hundred meters,’ etcetera. This is where you are coming in.”

  “Why not you?” Bernie said.

  Olek poked his own chest, quite hard, a move completely new to me. “I am no security expert.”

  “Could have fooled me,” Bernie said, no doubt one of his jokes. There was no fooling Bernie, as I’m sure you’re aware by now.

  Olek laughed, meaning he got the joke, which did not always happen with Bernie’s jokes, probably because they were too funny for most people. “Yes, Mr. Romanovych will be liking your humor.”

  “Thanks,” Bernie said, “but—”

  Olek raised his hand. “No butting. You have been informed the pay schedule?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is not enough for your liking? I am willing to ice up the cake a little more.” He turned to me. “And if you are worried about this excellent specimen of dog in a crate on some commercial flight, I am assuring you that all flights will be in aircraft owned by Romanovych Energy and therefore no crates.”

  No crates? That part of whatever this was sounded perfect. The cake, iced up or not, I could do without.

  Bernie rose, walked to the fountain, reached for the tap, and turned it on. Water began flowing from the swan’s mouth and splashing into the dry pool below. A little green lizard popped out of the pool and skittered away. Bernie gazed at the flowing water for a moment or two and turned to Olek.

  “I’ll think about it overnight and call you in the morning.”

  Olek jumped up. “Who asks for more?” He gave Bernie his card and patted him on the back, the same way he’d poked himself in the chest, meaning hard. “I show myself out, no trouble.” Olek opened the side gate and headed toward Mesquite Road.

  Bernie locked the gate, then went to the table and screwed the cap on the bottle, although there didn’t seem to be much left. Meanwhile, the idea of someone walking on the property, even someone we knew, makes me a little edgy, so I opened the back door of the house—the handle being the easy-peasy kind for human thumbing—and trotted inside. There’s a small round window near the front door, kind of high up but not so high I can’t see out if I stand on my back legs. Which I did.

  What was this? We had a taxi pulling up? That didn’t happen every day. The passenger in the back—a woman with a ponytail—leaned forward to pay the driver. She opened the door, and I got a good look at her. Whoa! Not just a ponytail woman but our ponytail woman—namely, Mavis! Had I solved the case? Wow! Chet the Jet.

  But then, just as Mavis was about to step out of the taxi, Olek appeared, coming from the side of the house next to the Parsonses’ and headed for the long black car parked in our driveway. Mavis saw Olek, but he didn’t see her. She sank back into the taxi, closing the door and ducking down out of sight. Olek glanced at the taxi, then got in his ride. It backed out of our driveway and drove off. Mavis sat up and looked my way. She
saw me. I started barking in no uncertain terms. She spoke to the driver. The taxi pulled a U-ee and drove away, not in Olek’s direction, if you’re following all this coming and going, kind of complicated and maybe not important.

  Bernie appeared in the front hall. I stayed where I was, looking out.

  “What’s all the excitement?”

  He stood next to me. We looked out together, heads touching, and saw no excitement whatsoever.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, giving me a nice pat. “Practically a paid vacation—and a very well paid one at that.”

  No! That wasn’t it at all! But the patting was nice.

  Twelve

  “Vodka in the middle of the day,” Bernie said when we were back in the kitchen. He stood by the sink and drank right from the tap, no glass. Who wouldn’t love Bernie? Nobody, amigo, and the ones who don’t—a surprising number—are a complete mystery to me. He looked my way. “The magic wears off pretty fast.”

  And not long after that, we were out in the canyon back of the house. This was called walking it off, a booze-related activity of Bernie’s that came after the drinking part was over. We headed up the trail that leads to the hill with the big flat red rock on top. Sometimes Bernie runs the whole way, sort of, but not today. Even so, he was huffing and puffing.

  “Not as young as I used to be, big guy,” he said.

  I didn’t believe that for one second, and I was sure Bernie didn’t either. To snap him out of it, I ran circles around him, narrowing in closer and closer with every circle, paws really digging in, clods of dry desert dirt flying every which way, plus pebbles and stones and some plants and—

  “All right, all right.” Bernie laughed and jogged the rest of the way to the top, if jogging was walking-speed movement, only painful looking. He sat on the flat red rock, kind of flopped on it actually, and then just breathed for a while, his chest heaving. After that, we took in the view. On a clear day like this, we could see all the way to the airport, the top of the tower like a small black hat at the bottom of the sky. A plane took off, just a tiny gleam of silver soaring up, and another silver gleam glided down for landing.

  “On one side,” Bernie said, “we have a client, a clear job description, and a fee that’s more than we make in a year.” He gazed at me. I gazed at him. “Okay, two years. And that’s without the bonus. On the other side, we have no client, no job description, and of course no fee, since there’s no client.”

  No client meant no fee? Had I already known that? I sort of thought so, but now I knew it way better. Bernie’s brilliance was like … like … I couldn’t even think of something shiny enough. That’s how brilliant, my friends.

  “All we have is a jumble—does it even qualify as a case?” Bernie thought about that for a while. I watched him think. Then I scratched behind one ear, which felt pretty good, so I scratched behind the other. A light breeze sprang up, carrying a snaky aroma, but distant. The breeze strengthened, and the air cooled a bit. Do you ever have a feeling where everything comes to a dead stop and life is perfect? I had it now.

  “Maybe not a case, but there’s a dead and now missing body, a wounded dog, and an attempt to blow us up, and if not us, then someone.” Bernie made a fist and pounded it into his other hand. I’d never seen him do that before. It got my attention, big-time. I ramped down on the scratching and sat on his feet, ready to do whatever it took. Bernie was angry. I did my best to be angry, too, but couldn’t quite get there. Was that letting Bernie down? I hoped not, but what could I do? How do you make anger happen inside you?

  Bernie reached out and stroked the top of my head. His anger leaked out of him, and the breeze carried it away. “How does surfing sound to you?”

  Surfing? It sounded wonderful! We’d surfed, me and Bernie, on our trip to San Diego, first on the same board, where we did our very best to share, and then on two boards, one for Bernie and one for Chet. The fun we had! Now Bernie laughed, perhaps at what I seemed to be doing, which had to do with wriggling around on my back for no reason, and said, “Aloha, Kauai.”

  I’d heard something about Kauai quite recently, and aloha had come up once or twice at the beginning of our Hawaiian pants venture, but I wasn’t sure where Bernie was going with this. Then he started singing, “Hanalei Bay, Hanalei Bay, where the big rollers roll in day after day.”

  Bernie singing! I hadn’t heard that in way too long, and I’d never heard this particular number, which sounded amazing. Bernie has the best human voice in the world, so when you combine it with an amazing song, well … what else is life all about? I got where Bernie was going with this, where we were both going: San Diego!

  * * *

  Back on the patio, Bernie had his old camo duffel on the table and was hosing off all his flip-flops, of which he had a surprising number. How happy he seemed, still singing about the big rollers. He turned to me with a big smile on his face.

  “Should we pack your other collar, Chet?”

  What a clever idea! You never knew when a fancy occasion might pop up—such as last year’s Valley PD Christmas party with the beer pong tournament, not won by Bernie although he’d gotten to the semis, whatever those were, exactly. I ran into the house, grabbed my leather collar, hanging on a hook in the office, and ran back out. At the same time, someone knocked on the side door of the patio fence, the same door that Olek had left through. That memory led me right to the memory of the taxi and Mavis, and I got a little confused, pausing by the fountain, my black leather collar hanging from my mouth.

  Meanwhile, Bernie twisted the nozzle off, went to the door, and opened it. The first thing I saw was the muzzle of a gun, pointed right at his chest. My back legs bunched under me and—

  “Chet! Stay!”

  But—

  “Stay!”

  There’s a voice Bernie has for really meaning it, and that was the voice I heard now. I stayed.

  Bernie backed up a step, but he didn’t raise his hands into the hands-up position, the usual human thing when a gun gets pointed at them, and neither did he drop the hose. That hose was going to be important very soon. I know Bernie.

  The gunman came inside—a gunwoman, in fact—and closed the door with her heel, a cool human move you see from time to time, although not from bad guys, in my experience. I knew this woman from the truck company office in South Pedroia. The cat’s-eye glasses were unforgettable, and so was her hard face, although I had sort of forgotten that detail. But now I had a grip on it for sure.

  “Something on your mind, Sylvia?” Bernie said, his voice nice and calm, like this was just a regular back-and-forth, no guns around.

  “Don’t want any of your smart mouth,” Sylvia said. She made a little motion with the gun. “Here on in, every word that comes out of it is the truth, or else. And make sure that dog behaves. I like dogs. I don’t like you.”

  “Why not?” Bernie said.

  Sylvia glared at him. Could someone wear cat’s-eye glasses and at the same time be a fan of the nation within? It made no sense, but people who take a shine to me and my kind actually give off a tiny scent when we’re around, and I was picking it up now.

  “Why not?” Sylvia said. “You’ve got some nerve.” She made another motion with the gun, this one wilder than the first. “What have you done to him?”

  I’ve seen humans at gunpoint more than once, comes with my job. It tends to make them panicky. You can hear it in their voices, high and shaky. All I could hear in Bernie’s voice was normal Bernie.

  “Who are you talking about?” he said.

  Sylvia’s eyes narrowed to slits. Since the cat’s-eye glasses were slittish to begin with, this was one of the scariest sights of my whole life.

  “Don’t push me,” she said.

  Bernie didn’t push her. He can be very quick, but pushing was probably on the risky side, what with the way she had the gun—and not a small one, by the way—aimed right at his heart. I could hear his heart beating, nice and calm, and also Sylvia’s heart.
It was beating nice and calm, too, a bit of a surprise. And then there was my own heart, maybe the nicest and calmest. We had three drumbeats beating out a rhythm that had not much to do with the gun, which maybe would have been the first thing you’d have noticed if you’d paid a visit to our patio, and I hope you do someday. Whoa! What a thought! Among other things, I’d gone past two! I’d been past two before—to four, if I remembered right—but I’d somehow missed three. And now it was mine! This was shaping up as a fine afternoon, if only Sylvia would put her gun away.

  Slow and casual, Bernie turned his back to the gun, walked over to the table, and sat down. The vodka bottle and the glasses were still there. For a very strange moment, I felt like I was in his mind, and in his mind was a thought about pouring out two drinks, one for him and one for Sylvia. But I must have been wrong, because instead, he looked at her and said, “Whatever this is, come take a seat. You’ll be more comfortable.”

  “They’re right about you,” Sylvia said, staying where she was. “You’re a ballsy son of a bitch.”

  Ballsy? Bitch? I got a little confused. Maybe Bernie was, too, because he seemed to redden a bit, although that might have been from the sun, now lower in the sky on the street side of the house and partly blocked by old man Heydrich’s enormous palm tree. “Who’s ‘they’?” he said.

  “Never mind that,” said Sylvia. “Look at me.”

  Bernie looked at her.

  “Did you kill Mickey?” she said.

  “No,” said Bernie.

  She watched him for what seemed like a long time. “What’s the name of the dog?” she said.

  “Chet.”

  “Swear on his head. Swear you didn’t kill my nephew.”

  “I do.”

  “Say it.”

  “I swear on Chet’s head I didn’t kill your nephew, Mickey Rottoni.”

  Whatever was happening now was pretty puzzling to me. Puzzles can make my head itchy, way at the back but within scratching distance. I scratched.

  “Not even by accident?” Sylvia said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”