Tender Is the Bite Page 8

  “Like what?”

  “I call her a few times a week. Yesterday, I mentioned your name. Grammie asked if you were a Little from Mesquite Road. I checked your card and told her you were. Grammie says your family had a whole big spread up there on the west side of the canyon, way back when.”

  “Long before my time,” Bernie said.

  “But not before Grammie’s mom’s time,” said Weatherly. “That was my great-grammie. Laura was her Anglo name.”

  “What was her Navajo name?”

  “She had several, over time, but she was mostly known by her nickname, which translated to Laughing Girl in English. She died before I was born, but she was an important figure in the family—actually, still is. Grammie says that she—meaning Laura—knew a young man named Ephraim Little when she was growing up.”

  “My great-grandfather,” Bernie said.

  “Do you remember him?”

  “No,” said Bernie. “But there’s a picture of him holding me when I was two or three.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Grammie says the two of them walked together, your great-grandfather and my great-grandmother.”

  “Hiking?” said Bernie.

  “Possibly that, too,” said Weatherly. “But Grammie’s an old-fashioned woman, very straitlaced and genteel.”

  There was a long silence. A roadrunner popped up beside a bush and then popped back down.

  “Oh,” Bernie said.

  Weatherly sat back on the little shelf.

  * * *

  We drove into Zinc Town, cruised along the main street. Bernie slowed down as we passed the Indian art shop and glanced at Weatherly in the rearview mirror. Her gaze was straight ahead. At the stoplight, we took the road that turned to dirt pretty quick and followed it to the EZ AZ ranch house.

  Weatherly nodded. “This is where I served Rottoni with the papers.”

  We parked and got out of the car. “Looks like business has picked up,” Bernie said. “All the ATVs are out. I planned on renting one.”

  We went to the door. Bernie knocked. No answer. Were Poppop and Lukie inside, just lying low? That happens with perps, but although Poppop was perp-like in some ways, there was nothing perpy about Lukie. Sometimes, when perps are lying low, standing absolutely still, I can hear them breathing. I listened my hardest, heard not the slightest sound from inside. Bernie knocked a few more times, peered through a window or two. The house was silent and still.

  We walked—me, Bernie, and Weatherly—across the plain and into the hills, not rushing, just at our normal pace. Still, our normal pace, mine and Bernie’s, is pretty swift. Some newcomers can’t keep up, some can, but just barely, with lots of grunting and groaning, and a few can do it no problem. That was Weatherly’s group, the no-problem type. She was also a very quiet walker for a human, maybe the quietest I’d ever seen. She was starting to make me a bit uneasy, not because she wasn’t a nice person. Weatherly seemed nice enough. So why—

  I shut all that down. Smells were in the air, demanding my attention. Big guy! I said to myself. What do you think’s going down right now? A walk in the park? This is a job, buddy boy! Myself answered back, Then who’s paying? I ignored myself. Not so easy, but in law enforcement, you do what you have to do.

  Smells can tell a story. I assume you already knew that. Sometimes the story can be hard to figure out. You’ve got the individual smells, say pizza and human puke, and then you’ve got when they were laid down. If the puke comes after the pizza, then it’s a simple little tale: some dude ate pizza that made him sick, and then he puked. But what if the pizza comes after the puke? What have you got then? In my job, I deal with problems like that all the time.

  Here’s what I had to work with on the trail up to the mine. First, there were the smells of me and Bernie, but they were not the most recent. Later than us—on top of our scents, if you’re with me—came the scents of two men, one who had a bit of nervous sweat going on, the sour kind of male human sweat, and the other whose smell reminded me of a strange case we’d worked, something about fake rabbis. Had there been a banquet with some sort of reddish soup? I couldn’t remember.

  Anything else in the air? Oh yes, we had a very slight snaky aroma, not unusual in these parts. What was unusual was how it reminded me of my collar. I have two collars, a black one for dress-up and another one for everyday. That other one used to be brown leather, but after a somewhat exciting encounter I’d had on a case we’d worked in Cajun country, my everyday collar was now made of gator skin. Do you ever get a feeling in your head, a kind of pressure, when an idea is just about to take shape? I had that feeling now, but it faded away as we approached the cave. Who wants pressure in the head? Not me, amigo. And just like that, poof, it was completely gone.

  We reached the entrance to the mine. The sun was high in the sky now, the strongest thing around by far. In the daytime at this time of year, it’s like the sun is trying to press you into the ground. At the same time, cool air was flowing out of the mine. There are ways around the sun, if that makes any sense.

  Bernie took out his flashlight, stepped inside the mine. I was already there, but Weatherly seemed to be hanging back.

  “Weatherly?” said Bernie. “Some problem?”

  “No, no,” she said. “I … I just … just don’t like mines.”

  “You don’t have to come in.”

  “I do.” Weatherly squared her shoulders—one of the best human moves out there—and followed us into the mine.

  We moved out of sunshine and into darkness, the yellow cone of the flashlight so feeble compared to what was going on outside. I felt a truly enormous thought taking shape in my mind, but before it could, I began to see that there’d been big changes in the mine. The backpack was gone. And so was the sleeping bag and the air mattress. As well as the body—the body of Mickey Rottoni, if I’d been following things right. All of them gone. We kept going to the end of the mine, not very far, a wall of rock, hacked at here and there, but still solid. The mine was empty.

  “Bernie?” Weatherly said. “I don’t understand.”

  Bernie walked around, stabbing the light beam in one corner and then another, kind of fiercely like it was a weapon.

  He turned to Weatherly. Just the lower part of her was lit up, the rest invisible. Her voice came out of the darkness. “I’m angry.”

  “He was lying right there, just like I told you,” Bernie said.

  “I know that, Bernie. I just hate when someone does the right thing on a real tough call and then some bastard makes them pay. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about. And we don’t know that anything tricky happened here. Maybe some hikers came along and took the body down to the sheriff.”

  “And there’s no one securing the crime scene?” Weatherly said. “No one even put up any tape?”

  “Maybe they’re on their way,” Bernie said. “Or—Chet? What’s up, buddy?”

  Nothing really. I seemed to have gone off to one side a bit. Sometimes a patch of dirt interests me. This particular patch seemed a little less smooth than the rest of the mine floor. Not much of a reason to start digging, you might say, and I’d agree. Not that I was actually digging, more like just pawing around, and with only one of my front paws, not putting any force into it. But once, pawing around just like this, I’d pawed up an old silver spoon that we pawned at Mr. Singh’s for fifteen bucks! Not to mention a big helping of Mrs. Singh’s curried goat, a favorite of—

  “Chet? What you got there?”

  Me? Nothing. I knew at once that Bernie was hoping for another old silver spoon, and I hated to disappoint him, so I pawed a little harder and … what was this? I did feel a little something.

  Bernie hunched down and shone the light into the small hole I’d made. The light glinted on a wire. A disappointment, certainly, but—

  “Run!” Bernie shouted.

  When Bernie’s voice gets like that—not so much the loud part, but
the command part—I don’t think. I do. “Run!” I ran. We all ran. One problem. I was so much faster than Bernie and Weatherly that there was no way I wouldn’t be the first one outside. It was my job to be last. That probably explained the slight confusion at the entrance, the odd bump and even stumble—although there was no stumbling by me. Really, people. Who has more legs, me or you? Facts are facts.

  We burst outside and kept running, me hanging back to stay last.

  Bernie looked over his shoulder and yelled at me. “No, Chet!”

  Bernie yelling at me? Oh no. That had never happened before, not once. I must have done something wrong, but what?

  “Go, Chet, go!”

  Whew. That was all? Easy-peasy. I bounded ahead, surging forward with enormous leaps, practically flying, my ears flattened back from a wind of my own making. I glanced behind and saw Bernie and Weatherly running hard. Behind them, a little puff of white smoke appeared in the black opening of the mine. Bernie couldn’t have seen it, but at that moment, he placed his hand in the small of Weatherly’s back to make her go faster, and then: ka-KA-BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  Ten

  Sometime later, we had kind of a crowd around what had been the opening to the mine but was now just more rubble on an already rubbly hillside. There were guys and gals from Valley PD, the sheriff’s office, plainclothes, uniformed, Crime Scene, even a few motorcycle guys from Highway Patrol, although not Fritzie Bortz, an old pal with balance issues, now working for the Border Patrol. It reminded me of a cop convention we’d once attended, me and Bernie, with lots of standing around, taking pictures, hey-how-ya-doin’, and complaining about this and that. The only missing part was the booze, probably a good thing. There’s nothing worse than a roomful of boozy bikers, of course, but a roomful of boozy cops comes close.

  No surprise that I knew several of the participants, which resulted in a few nice pats, some first-rate between-the-ears scratching from Nancy Nix of the Vice Squad, and half a roast beef sandwich. Lots of crime scene tape got put up, an earthmover broke down, and folks started drifting away. Then it was just Bernie and me, plus Weatherly, who had no way of getting back except with us. Plus one other dude who’d climbed up to the top of the hill and was now making his way down, a cop with lots of gold on his uniform and receding red hair. The name came to me at once: Captain Ellis. I couldn’t have said my mind was on fire—that didn’t happen every day—but it was getting the job done, baby. Who could ask for more?

  Captain Ellis picked his way through the last of the rubble and came over to us. His pale face was all sweaty. Those redheaded types didn’t do well in the heat, although I’ve only known a few, all of them breaking rocks in the hot sun, come to think of it.

  “Haven’t seen you in years, Bernie,” Ellis said, “and now all of a sudden we’re practically living together.”

  “There’s a thought,” said Bernie.

  But … but a bad one, right? Because living with Bernie means living with me. And as I believe I’ve already mentioned, Captain Ellis’s voice had a bit of a grating thing going on, which would make me uneasy after a while. My ears are sensitive, perhaps more so than yours, no offense. Also, he had a sweaty smell that bothered me a bit, kind of strange since hardly any smells actually bother me, certainly not that of human sweat. And why wouldn’t he have been sweating, toiling up and down this hill in the heat? But mixed in with the fresh sweat was a hint of the more sour, possibly nervous kind of sweat. Was it the mixture I didn’t like? I just couldn’t figure it out. And no time now. The problem would have to be set aside for later. I told myself to remember to do so, without fail.

  Ellis turned to Weatherly. “I’m puzzled to find you here, Sergeant. I don’t recall seeing you at roll call this a.m.”

  “It’s my day off,” Weatherly said.

  “And an exciting one,” said Ellis.

  “Excuse me?” said Weatherly.

  “Speaking for myself,” Ellis said, “I’ve never had a single day off that involved private eyes and mine cave-ins.”

  Weatherly said nothing. Ellis gazed at her, smiling slightly. Human smiles—and it took me so long to figure this out!—are not necessarily friendly. So there was a time when I might have missed what was going on right now, which was … which was … well, a complicated situation, let’s leave it at that.

  This moment of silence went on a little too long, in my opinion, and then Bernie said, “An explosion, not a cave-in.”

  Ellis rubbed his hands together. “TBD, Bernie, my friend. TBD.”

  There’s violence in Bernie. It doesn’t come out often, just when we need it the most. The rest of the time, it disappears like … like it’s deep in a mine. Whoa! But not the point, which was about the violence inside Bernie, which we certainly didn’t need now. TBD, whatever that was, couldn’t have been much of a threat, not like someone was waving guns around—although strangely enough, everyone in this little conversation was packing, except us. Ellis wore something that had recently been fired, out of sight in a shoulder holster under his shirt, to judge from where the smell was coming from, and Weatherly had something smaller, not recently fired, in an ankle holster under the hem of her jeans. Both of them cops, of course, so no biggie, but still, I wished we’d been carrying the .38 Special. If Bernie didn’t want to bother, I could … carry it myself! What a fantastic idea! And I was only now thinking it for the very first time? Chet! Wake up!

  “An explosion,” Bernie was saying, “as Crime Scene will be documenting for you by tomorrow. But you’ve always been the aggressively wrong type, haven’t you, Von?”

  “What could you possibly be referring to, old buddy?”

  Without actually moving, Bernie seemed to close some of the distance between him and Ellis. One of Ellis’s hands twitched, made a little motion toward his shoulder, then settled back down.

  “I’ll try to keep you from embarrassing yourself,” Bernie said. “We’ve got three acts here—the killing of Mickey Rottoni, the removal of the body, the planting of the explosive. Probably the same perpetrator for all three, but not necessarily.”

  Ellis turned to Weatherly. “Your friend here’s always been a real deep thinker, in case you didn’t know.”

  Bernie whipped out his phone and thrust it in Ellis’s face, almost hitting him with it. Ellis’s face got blotchy, but he held his ground, glanced at the screen, and said, “A picture, photoshopped or not, is not a body.”

  A muscle in Bernie’s face jumped. I’d only seen that once before, and what came next was hard to forget. But this time, Bernie didn’t move. Staying still at that moment took a lot of strength. I could feel it under my paws.

  Ellis looked at Weatherly again. No muscles jumped in her face, but it seemed to be made from stone. “I am not a deep thinker,” Ellis said. “Merely a humble worker who closes cases. All we know for sure about this one is that a gent name of Mickey Rottoni has gone missing.” Ellis smiled his unfriendly smile. “Since I’m in charge of the Department of Missing Persons, I’ll be running the case.” He touched where the brim of his hat would have been had he been wearing one. “Enjoy the rest of your day off, Sergeant. And, Bernie—always a pleasure.” He walked over to an ATV with a blue flasher on the back and drove away, the blue light flashing even after Ellis and the ATV couldn’t be seen.

  * * *

  We drove back to Amy’s with hardly any talk.

  “What was that all about, you and Ellis?” Weatherly said.

  “Nothing,” said Bernie.

  And a little later, she said, “What’s next?”

  “We’ll work the case,” Bernie said.

  “I’d like to help.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “For who?” Weatherly said.

  “For you,” said Bernie. “You and your career.”

  “The hell with my career.”

  One of Bernie’s eyebrows rose the tiniest bit. Those eyebrows of his! What communicators! “Lou Stine thinks you’ll be chief one day,” he said.
<
br />   I could see Weatherly’s eyes in the rearview mirror. She was back on the little shelf, with me in the shotgun seat, as I’m sure you guessed. Her eyes got very bright. She didn’t speak until we were in Amy’s parking lot, all of us getting out of the Porsche, the normal routine in a back shelf situation. Weatherly turned to Bernie and said, “I owe you.”

  “For what?” he said.

  “Trixie.”

  Bernie shook his head and was still doing it when she kissed him on the cheek, one of those little kisses you see from time to time. A nice way of saying goodbye, I’d always thought, although not all humans do it, and among the not-doing-it types was Bernie. But now came a bit of a surprise. Bernie kissed her back, maybe partly on the cheek but also partly on the lips. Then it was all on the lips, and not over immediately, plus they had their arms around each other. A good thing or a bad thing? I finally decided bad and was moving in to break things up when they broke it up themselves and Weatherly got in her car and drove away. The whole Valley seemed oddly quiet, even disturbingly so. I barked, just a single bark and far from my loudest, but enough, and … what’s the expression? Disorder was restored? Something like that.

  * * *

  Our kitchen table stands by a bay window, with a curved bench seat on the window side. When it’s just me and Bernie, I sometimes eat not on the floor but right at the table, our little secret. After we got home, we had a nice snack at that table, leftover something for Bernie—I couldn’t tell exactly what—and kibble from Rover and Company—where I’d once spent a morning in their test kitchen and am available for retesting at any time—mixed with a bacon bit or two. We both gazed out the window, me because Bernie was doing it and he for reasons of his own. The window looked out on part of old man Heydrich’s front yard, where he seemed to have hammered in a new sign, bigger than before.

  Bernie sighed. Was the sign bothering him in some way? Did he want one in our yard, too? I sketched out a quick plan that began with uprooting old man Heydrich’s sign.