Heart of Barkness Read online

  We sat at a table, not far from the stage, Bernie taking a chair, me at his feet. A waitress in a tank top and Daisy Dukes that she seemed to have grown out of, maybe not having the money for a new pair, poor thing, came right over.

  “Hi, gorgeous,” she said.

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” said Bernie.

  Wow! So quick! And whatever that meant, it was one of those lines that make a big impression: I could tell by the look on her face. If only those people—a surprising number actually—who said Bernie was clueless with women could see him now.

  “Huh?” the waitress was saying. “Not you, fella—I was talking to this big guy right here. What’s his name?”

  “Oh,” said Bernie, his grin fading fast. “Ah.”

  “He got a name or not?”

  “Chet,” said Bernie, crossing his arms over his chest. A human move you see sometimes, the meaning unclear to me, but they never look happy when they’re doing it.

  “Short and sweet,” the waitress said. What was this? She thought I was short? That was strange, but before I had a chance to think about it, she scratched between my ears, her nails nice and pointy, technique as good as it gets, and I forgot whatever it was. Then she spoke in that gurgly tone women use for babies and sometimes for me and my kind, a delightful tone in my opinion. “Who’s the handsomest dude in the Valley?” she said.

  Me! The Chetster! I was the handsomest dude in the Valley! Next to Bernie, of course, goes without mentioning.

  “I’ll have a beer,” Bernie said.

  “Get a load of that tail of his,” the waitress said.

  “When it’s convenient,” said Bernie.

  “Could air-condition the whole goddamn place with it,” she said, before turning and walking away.

  “Do you think she heard me?” Bernie said.

  A tough question. What humans hear and don’t hear is a big subject. Meanwhile, the light, already pretty dim, dimmed some more. Then the bartender, a stubby guy with a toothpick hanging out the side of his mouth stepped onto the stage, went to the mic stand, stood on tiptoes, and said, “Welcome all you ladies and germs. Heh heh. To the one and only legendary Crowbar! Where we’ve got a special treat for you tonight—order any three tequila drinks and the fourth one is free!”

  Over at the bar, an old man with runny eyes clapped his hands, just once. I myself was a bit confused. Tequila was the treat? What sense did that make? Chewies were treats. Slim Jims were treats. Maybe the bartender would soon realize his mistake. My ears went up, meaning they wanted to listen good and close. Here’s a little something you may not know about me: I pretty much let my ears do what they want. So they went right ahead and listened good and close, which was how I knew for sure that the bartender said no more about treats.

  “And now a blast from the past. Put your hands together for the Arizona cowgirl who wrote and sang”—he took a card from his pocket, gave it a quick glance—“‘How You Hung the Moon.’ Let’s hear it for the one, the only, Miss Lotty Pegram.”

  “For Christ sake,” Bernie said, his voice low.

  But maybe the bartender heard him, because he checked the card again and said, “Er, Pilgrim. Miss Lotty Pilgrim.”

  Then came some clapping, kind of quiet, on account of the size of the audience: a few people at the tables, a few at the bar, one baby-faced dude in a denim jacket with cut-off sleeves playing darts in the corner. I could hear the tiny whiz of the darts streaking through the air. Just putting that in so you’ll know how quiet the clapping was.

  Lotty Pilgrim stepped through curtains behind the stage and stood under the spotlight. The bartender made one of those all-yours gestures toward the mic stand. Lotty didn’t look at him. She wore pink earrings, a creamy-colored western shirt with pink fringe, and black leather jeans, and had a guitar slung around her neck. Her eyes didn’t seem so soft as before, maybe on account of all the black makeup around them, but I’m no expert on makeup, with only one real experience, way back in the Leda days, although I have a very clear memory of the taste of that particular tube, available only in Paris, wherever that might be. As for her hair, it was frizzier than at Nixon’s yard, and looked less golden and more silvery. In a strange way Lotty looked both older and younger than before. She stepped up to the mic, played something zippy on the guitar, using just her thumb and two fingers, all her nails long and red, and then, looking at nobody, began to sing a real fast song that had trains in it and car wrecks and prison. A great song in my opinion, and I also liked her voice—happy until the car wrecks and then not so happy. And Lotty no longer looked both older and younger. Now it was just younger.

  The runny-eyed guy at the bar clapped again, maybe not as loudly as he had for tequila. A few others joined in, sort of. The loudest clapper by far was Bernie. In the spotlight, Lotty Pilgrim made a slight nod, maybe in his direction, but it was hard to tell in all the dimness. “That was ‘Birthday in Prison,’ available in all the usual streams.” And now she looked at Bernie, for sure. “Zero point zero zero zero three,” she said. “Cents per download—the artist’s share.” Then, after a long pause: “But it adds up.”

  Bernie laughed. What was funny? I didn’t waste any time figuring that out. Laughter is the best sound humans make, and Bernie’s is the best of the best. He was still laughing when Lotty said, “This one’s called ‘Big Surprise,’” and started in on the next song, this one slower than the prison one.

  Here’s my new friend the locksmith,

  ’Case you hid away some key,

  Gonna switch out this and that,

  Keep your sweet distance from me.

  And there was more like that, a fine story, in my opinion. It reminded me of a confusing case we’d worked—a case out in Dry Wells involving a locksmith, his wife, his girlfriend, and the girlfriend’s husband, also a locksmith—but at that moment I got distracted by the sight of Clint, Lotty’s lean-bodied pal or manager or whatever he was, moving in the shadows and placing an empty glass jar on the edge of the stage, just beyond the spotlight beam. That would be a tip jar: you learn these things in our line of work.

  The locksmith song ended. There was less clapping this time, mostly just Bernie. From one of the tables, a man called out, “‘How You Hung the Moon’!”

  Lotty peered into the darkness. “Any other requests?”

  “‘How You Hung the Moon’!” he called again, louder this time.

  Bernie turned to look at the dude: a shiny-faced customer who’d had plenty to drink, the signs of that too many to go into now. He cupped his hands to his mouth, a human thing I’ve never liked. “‘How You Hung the Moon’!”

  Bernie reached into his pocket. Were we packing the .38 Special? Good idea: shiny-faced guys like that had to be stopped before they ruined the evening. Bernie’s hand emerged: no gun. Instead he had his wallet. He opened it, took out a bill, the one with the picture of the old guy rocking the long-haired, bald-on-top look. Possibly a C-note, but don’t count on me for info like that. Meanwhile Bernie was on his feet. He stepped into the shadows at the side of the stage and dropped that bill in the tip jar. I had to have been wrong about the C-note. That was my strong hope, and I’m a real strong hoper. Lotty’s eyes shifted quickly to the tip jar, and then away. In a quiet voice, no louder than those darts, Bernie said, “Play whatever the hell you like.” He came back to the table and sat down.

  Had Lotty heard him? I didn’t know. But she had the beginnings of a smile on her face when she leaned into the mic and said, “This one’s called ‘The Lousy Part of Jealousy.’”

  “The Lousy Part of Jealousy” turned out to be a long song, hard to follow, that might have been about a man who kept running out the back door of some woman’s place for reasons I didn’t quite get. My mind wandered a bit, and when my mind wanders I tend to look around, checking out the action. And what was this? The baby-faced dart player—actually both baby-faced and fuzzy-faced—was on the move, kind of sneaking through the darkness just beyond the pool of stage lig
ht. Sneakiness is something that gets my attention, big-time—just one of the reasons the Little Detective Agency is so successful, if you leave out the finances part.

  There’s a low rumbly bark I make when I want Bernie’s attention in a just-between-us sort of way. I made the low rumbly bark. Bernie didn’t even look at me. Instead his gaze went immediately to the dart player—we’re a real good team, me and Bernie, something to keep in mind—just in time to see the dart-player’s hand … darting? Wow! I came close to what felt like a big understanding. Close but no cigar, which was just as well. I’d once tasted a cigar butt. Never again, amigo. Although there had been another occasion. And one more after that. And possibly—

  But forget all that. The point was the dart-player’s hand darted into the tip jar, then darted right back out, now with a good strong hold on Bernie’s tip. The dart player vanished in the shadows.

  Four

  Something sneaky was going down. I knew that in a flash. You might be thinking, Wow, Chet, how fast your mind works! But you’d be wrong. My mind had nothing to do with it. My teeth were the smart ones. Sneakiness gives them this powerful urge, the urge to … to do something, let’s leave it at that.

  There are all kinds of sneaks in this world, human and not human. Take foxes, for example, almost always sneaky. You can tell by how their tails sneak around behind them. Elephants? Never sneaky, in my experience, although you still had to be careful when one was on the scene. Maybe we can get back to elephants later, specifically the time Peanut sat on a perp’s car. How much fun was that? But right now Bernie and I were on the move, leaving the table, and following the dart player—a quick-stepping shadow sneaking toward the front door of the Crowbar. We were being very quiet about it, me and Bernie, almost … sneaky ourselves? A disturbing thought. I got my tail up nice and high and forgot whatever that disturbing thought had been at once.

  The dart player slipped through the swinging doors, glancing back at the very last second. A passing car lit up his eyes, eyes that spotted us, no doubt about it. They widened, one of those perp looks I love. It meant Whoa, is someone after me? Got it in on the first guess, buddy boy! Right about now was when they either reached for a gun or took off. The dart player took off, which is usually our preference.

  We took off, too, through the swinging doors and into the parking lot. Shermie, relaxing on a folding chair and smoking a little weed—the air over all parts of the Valley pretty much smelling of weed twenty-four seven nowadays—glanced up. “That bad, huh?” he said to us.

  We kept running. And what a nice sight—Bernie was running as fast as I’d ever seen him. Which isn’t at all fast, not even for a human, probably on account of his leg wound in the war, but it made me so happy to see him back to running not fast. As for me and my running, let’s put it this way: I was delighted that the dart player turned out to be one of those humans who could really motor, especially after his flip-flops flew off. Why hadn’t he gone into football or track instead of robbery? I wondered about that as I loped along behind him, trying not to catch up too soon and spoil the fun.

  The dart player was headed for a yellow car parked in a far corner of the lot where the pavement stopped and the desert began. Halfway there, he glanced back once more, saw me, and ramped it up, really turning on the jets. I was starting to like this speedy dude, so I let him get all the way to the car and even wrench the driver’s-side door open before I turned on my own jets—whee, baby!—gathered myself for a nice spring, way, way up there, and the next thing I knew I had him by the pant leg. My teeth stopped thinking at that exact same moment.

  “Aiiee!” screamed the dart player, almost like he was in pain. Surely not possible: I could barely taste blood at all. But some humans are tougher than others, this dude being one of the others. “Here,” he said as Bernie arrived, hardly huffing and puffing at all. The dart player tossed the C-note at Bernie. “Why does everything have to be so crazy?”

  Bernie reached out but a gust of wind caught the C-note and wafted it up over his hand, out of the parking lot, and into the darkness. We’d dealt with situations like this before. Bernie’s job was to go after the money, mine to keep doing what I was doing, namely holding the perp by the pant leg. Bernie switched on his pocket flash and moved toward a clump of bushes. I adjusted my grip on the pant leg. The dart player, half in and half out of the car, gazed at me. His eyes had a look you see in some humans, mostly men, a look that says, Now comes something pretty clever.

  “Got a treat in my pocket,” he said. “Just let me go and it’s yours. T-R-E-A-T.”

  How strange! T-R-E-A-T was a way humans said treat when they didn’t want you to know they were saying treat. But didn’t he want me to know that a treat was coming my way if I cut him a break? Kind of weird. Maybe not worth thinking about, on account of the fact that Bernie and I had worked very hard on not accepting treats at moments like this, maybe the hardest thing I’d ever learned. And even if there were times I slipped a bit—who doesn’t in this life?—now was not going to be one of them because I knew from one quick sniff he had no treat in his pockets. And in that same sniff, I picked up his scent, a rather pleasant combo of old sneakers and not showering very often.

  “You don’t like treats?” he said. “What kind of a dog are you?”

  Tough question. Some sort of a mix, I’d heard Bernie say, and a hundred-plus pounder, as we discovered the time Bernie picked me up—the fun we had with that!—and stood on the scale. Also, my ears don’t match, which people mentioned now and then. Was that good or bad? I went back and forth on that, and in fact was doing it again when the dart player wriggled around and … what was this? Squirmed right out of his jeans? And kept on squirming—across the front seat, and out the passenger door? Then he scrambled to his feet—one of those guys, it turned out, who didn’t bother with underwear—and hurried across the road and into the scrub on the other side.

  How could he think that was going to work? I zipped around the car to go after him—grabbing pantless perps by the pant leg is one of the highlights of this job—but just then Bernie came back, the C-note in hand, and said, “Forget it, big guy.”

  Forget it?

  He smiled, his smile the brightest thing in the night. “You did real good.” He gave me a nice pat. “We can always track him down if we need to.”

  But, but, but. I was stuck on those buts when Shermie came over.

  “What’s goin’ on?” he said.

  Bernie was bending by the license plate of the dart player’s car and writing on his hand with a pen, just one of the many cool things about him.

  “Guy playing darts robbed the tip jar.” Bernie held up the C-note.

  “That’s a first,” Shermie said.

  Bernie handed him our card, a card designed by Suzie, with flowers on it. Would we be ordering some new cards? An odd thought, which didn’t make me happy. I hoped it wouldn’t come around again.

  Meanwhile Bernie was saying, “Let me know when he comes back for his ride.”

  “Sure,” said Shermie, “but what if we’re closed?”

  “Interesting question,” Bernie said. “Might make sense to temporarily disable it somehow or other.”

  Shermie leaned into the driver’s side, grabbed the steering wheel, and jerked it right out of the yellow car. “Good enough?” he said.

  “It’s a start,” said Bernie.

  * * *

  After the rest of the show—which we watched from a table just inside the door, the kind of spot we’d choose if we were actually working the place, which we weren’t unless I was missing something—we went up to the stage. Lotty Pilgrim was talking to her fans. Actually just one fan, a tall and stooping old man, leaning on his cane, and giving off that old man smell, the same kind you get from a stack of yellowed newspapers.

  “Played it at my wife’s funeral,” the old man was saying.

  “Uh-huh,” said Lotty, unslinging her guitar. She winced and rubbed her shoulder with her free hand. The younger-looki
ng part of her faded. I could see it happening.

  “‘How You Hung the Moon,’” the old man went on. “Meant a lot to her.”

  Lotty nodded and glanced around, maybe expecting somebody. Like Clint, for instance, sitting at the bar and gazing at her over the rim of his glass. He stayed where he was.

  “Have to admit,” the old man said, “I was hopin’ to hear it tonight.”

  Lotty gave him a smile. Humans can be tricky with smiles and you have to watch carefully. This was the kind where the mouth did all the work and the eyes stayed the same.

  “I don’t sing that song,” Lotty said.

  “Uh, I see,” said the old man. He opened his mouth like he was planning to say more, but Lotty spoke first.

  “Thanks for coming.”

  The old man backed away, blinking once or twice. We stepped up, Bernie first and then me, on the move as soon as I knew stepping up was in the picture, and almost immediately in the lead.

  “Great show,” Bernie said. “Love how you pick—like a left-handed Mother Maybelle channeling Slim Harpo. If, uh, you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Well, that’s a new one,” said Lotty. “No, I don’t mind. You play some yourself?”

  “Just fool around on the ukulele. Not worth mentioning.”

  Not worth mentioning? You’ve never heard anything like Bernie on the ukulele, take it from me. Sometimes—like on “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” one of our favorites—I join in with this little woo-woo thing I do. Once, practically the whole neighborhood came storming out of their houses for a listen. Most folks would now be telling Lotty all about that, but Bernie’s not most folks.

  He pointed to the tip jar, still sitting on the edge of the stage, now with a crumpled bill or two at the bottom. “You probably didn’t notice the little problem with the tip jar.”

  “Problem?” said Lotty, glancing over at the tip jar. “I believe I saw you making a contribution. I thank you.”