Night. I was beside myself. I hurried through the house, checking and rechecking all the rooms over and over, stopping only when I heard something, or thought I heard something, and if I really did hear something it always turned out to be a car driving by, or a plane high overhead, or Iggy barking again. Worse, I hadn’t been able to hang on any longer, although I’d tried and tried, and ended up shaming myself by the toilet in the hall bathroom.
Bernie. Where are you? Something bad had happened—I felt it through and through. The beet strangers had come, and now Bernie was gone, and the whiteboard, too. Bernie gone—gone and maybe in trouble—and I couldn’t get out, couldn’t go find him. Me, in charge of security. I found myself back at the front door, throwing myself at it again and again, with no results. Bernie had been talking about results not long ago, while we worked in the office. What had he said? I had no idea. I barked and barked, savage barking that filled the house, but did no good at all. Then—What was that? I went still, ears perking right up.
But it was only Iggy: yip yip yip. I didn’t even bark back. What could poor old Iggy do? My only hope was—what? What was it? Then I knew: My hope was Bernie coming back, coming through the door. Maybe now? I watched the door, didn’t take my eyes off it, got ready to jump all over him. The door didn’t open. After a while a car came up the street, a loud car that sounded a bit like the Porsche. But we didn’t have the Porsche anymore, did we? I could still see it sailing off that mountain road and burning in the gully far below. This was confusing. Could that be Bernie outside, somehow driving up in the Porsche anyway? The loud car kept going, the engine noise fading, fading, gone. I rose up, started clawing at the door. I was clawing so hard I almost didn’t hear the phone ringing.
I ran down the hall and into the office, stood in front of the desk, watched the phone ring. Ring, ring, and then a voice, a voice I knew and liked. “Bernie? It’s Suzie. If you’re there, please pick up. I’d really like to talk to you. Um. Uh. I’ve made a mistake, Bernie, and I just hope that, um…Well, please give me a call if you can. Bye.”
I leaped up, knocked the phone off the desk. The whole thing—cradle part, speaking part, wires—went tumbling onto the floor, landing behind the desk. And from down there, I heard Suzie.
“Bernie? Are you there? Is that you?”
I let out a bark.
“Chet?”
I barked and barked. Suzie! Suzie!
“Chet? You all right?”
I kept barking. After a moment or so, there was a click, and no more Suzie. I squeezed down under the desk, wriggled on my belly toward the glowing phone lights. Another woman spoke, not Suzie, her voice unfriendly, not a fan of my kind, I could tell right away. “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again.” I barked at her. “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again.” I barked louder. She said it a few more times, all about dialing again, and I got angrier and angrier. Then the phone started beeping, quick and harsh, hurting my ears. I poked at the phone with my paw, but it kept beeping, on and on, unbearable.
I left the office, started hurrying through the house again, a dark house with no lights on. I couldn’t get calm, not with that beet smell in the air, and the constant beeping. In the laundry room, I found an old leather sandal of Bernie’s and chewed it to bits. I barked some more, thought I heard something beside the beeping, went still. Was that a siren? Yes, a siren, far off. I waited for it to get louder, but it did not, got quieter instead, and then came silence, except the beeping, and Iggy once or twice. Soon he went silent, too. Iggy was my buddy. He wanted to help me, just couldn’t. Poor old Iggy. I rose up and clawed again at the front door. What else could I do? I clawed and clawed, getting nowhere. Then a vague memory came to me, a memory of a movie we’d watched, me and Bernie, maybe of Rin Tin Tin, where Rinty opens a doorknob all by himself. Had Bernie even said, “We should learn that sometime”?
But we hadn’t. How did Rinty do it? I slid my front paws down from where they’d been clawing at the door until they bumped against the knob; it gleamed faintly from the streetlight down the block. I pawed at the knob, first with one paw, then the other. Nothing happened. Knobs were supposed to turn; I’d seen them turn so many times, but this one would not. I pawed and pawed, faster and faster, heard a growling sound that startled me for an instant before I realized it was me. After a while I dropped down on all fours, took a little rest, and was just about to rise up and try again when I heard a car on the street.
It came closer and closer. I heard the squeak cars sometimes make when they stop. Then came a moment or two of engine noise—did I recognize that particular engine sound?—and after that, silence. But only for a moment; a car door opened and closed, and footsteps came up the walk. Did I recognize those footsteps? I thought so.
Someone knocked on the door. “Bernie? Are you there?” It was Suzie.
I barked.
“Chet?”
The knob turned. The door opened. There was Suzie, her face all worried. I bolted outside, right by her, round and round the front yard. A hot dry breeze was blowing up the canyon, carrying all kinds of city smells—grease, tar, car exhaust, especially car exhaust, lots and lots of that—masking what I needed, which was beets and Bernie. At last I picked up a trace of beet scent, followed it across the yard and past our trees to the road, where it died out.
“Chet?” Suzie called. “Maybe you’d better come here.” I paused, glanced over at her. She’d turned on the front-door light. Her face looked pale, her eyes huge and dark. Come there? I forgot about that immediately, trotted in bigger and bigger circles around the place where the beet scent had petered out, finally finding it again. Now it led me back across the yard, not through the trees this time but around them and along the narrow paved alley by the house, old man Heydrich’s fence on the other side. A faint current of Bernie came mixing in. Have I mentioned Bernie’s smell? A very nice one, my second favorite, in fact—apples, bourbon, salt and pepper. Beets and Bernie: The mixed-together scent trail took me to the office window and ended right there.
“Chet?” Suzie came up beside me. “What’s wrong?”
I sniffed around, found a trace of the head-clearing smell from the markers Bernie used on the whiteboard, but then Suzie stepped in front of me and her scent—soap and lemons—obliterated it.
“Come on, Chet,” she said. “Let’s go inside.”
I didn’t want to go inside; I wanted to find Bernie, that was all. The next thing I knew, I was hurrying back to the road—where the scent died out as before—then doubling back to the office window.
“Chet? What is it? What’s going on?” Suzie put her hands on the window frame, pushed. The window slid up. “Not locked,” she said. “Is that normal?”
Of course not. Nothing was normal, not with Bernie gone. I gazed up at her.
“How long were you alone in there?” she said.
I started to pant, just a little.
“Let’s get some water,” Suzie said. She stroked between my ears. We walked around to the front door and entered the house. Suzie snapped on more lights. I drank from the bowl in the front hall, all at once very thirsty, then caught up with Suzie as she went from room to room, looking around, checking the closets, even peering under the two beds, Charlie’s and Bernie’s. In the office, she found the phone and cradle on the floor, set it all back on the desk, and the horrible beeping stopped at last. After a pause, Suzie took out her cell phone and dialed some numbers. Almost right away a phone started ringing, not the big one on the desk, but close by. Suzie opened the top drawer and took out Bernie’s cell phone, easy to identify from the duct tape wrapped around it. Bernie’s cell phone rang and rang. Suzie pressed a button and listened for a few moments; I listened, too, heard Bernie’s voice, something about leaving a message. Was Bernie there? I didn’t understand. The duct-taped cell phone was here, meaning there was here. Machines were bad for humans, no doubt at all about that in my mind. I crawled under the desk. Suzie said, “If somehow you get this message, Bernie, please call. It’s Suzie. I’m at your place right now—the door was unlocked, and I think Chet’s been on his own here for some time. So if…Just call.”
From under the desk, I could see Suzie raising the window and peering out—even sniffing the air, which humans sometimes did, although to no effect, in my experience. “Did something happen here, Chet? What did you see?”
Not a thing, but something happened, all right, something bad, had to be bad if those beet-smelling people, Mr. Gulagov and his—
The desk phone rang, right above my head. It rang and rang, vibrating the desktop, and then came a voice I knew: “Yo, Bernie, Nixon Panero here. Maybe got a replacement for your Porsche what got trashed. Gimme a call.” Click.
Suzie said, “The Porsche got trashed?” I came out from under the desk. “Meaning what?” Suzie’s eyes were even bigger and darker now. “It’s no longer on the road? Bernie’s not out driving somewhere?” I circled for a bit, then stopped and barked in front of the empty space where the whiteboard had hung. Suzie gazed at me. I could feel her thinking, thinking hard. “I’m calling the cops,” she said.
***
We waited in the kitchen. Suzie poured some kibble in my bowl, but I didn’t eat. Not long after, Rick Torres arrived, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and bowling shoes—I’d gone bowling once with Bernie but it hadn’t ended well—followed by a cop in uniform. “Hey, Chet,” Rick said, and gave me a pat. He was smiling, didn’t look worried at all. Suzie started talking to him, real fast and complicated, hard for me to catch on. She led the men through the house, going from room to room. I followed. We entered the office last.
“How do you explain the window being unlocked?” Suzie said. “And the front door, too?”
“The thing is,” Rick said, “Bernie can be unpredictable at times.” A quick smile crossed the uniformed man’s face.
“I haven’t found that,” Suzie said. “Not at all. I think he’s extremely reliable.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” Rick said. “In all the big things. But every now and then, since the divorce, that is, he kicks his heels up a bit.”
“What do you mean?” Suzie said.
“Like that night at the Red Onion, right, Rick?” said the uniformed cop. “Wasn’t he the one with that gal who played the ukulele? The gal with the ginormous—” Rick made a slight chopping motion with his hand, and the uniformed man went silent.
“No matter what,” Suzie said, “he’d never leave Chet alone in the house for such a long time.”
“I believe that’s happened once or twice, in fact,” Rick said. “Hasn’t it, big guy?” The answer was yes; but I forgave Bernie—things like that could happen. I stood motionless, giving nothing away.
“Even if that’s true,” Suzie said, “which I highly doubt, why wouldn’t he take his cell phone?” She held it up.
“That’s easy,” Rick said. “He hates his cell phone, hates technology in general.”
“But isn’t he working on a case?” Suzie said. “Suppose an important call came through.”
“What case?” said Rick.
“That missing girl, Madison Chambliss.”
Rick shook his head. “There is no case. The girl’s been seen having fun times in Vegas, also called her mom to say she’d be home soon.”
“Does Bernie know that?”
“He does. Whether he’s totally absorbed it yet is another question.”
“Meaning?”
“Bernie can be stubborn—one of the things that makes him so good at his job, and also such a pain at times.”
Suzie gave Rick a quick glance, not friendly. “Maybe he’s working on other cases,” she said. “I think we should check his computer.”
“For what?”
“Any notes he might have made, something to lead us to him.”
“Uh-uh,” said Rick.
“Why not?”
“Why not? Because he could be coming through the door any second, and I wouldn’t want to have to explain why I was snooping around in his files.”
“It’s not snooping. We’re only trying to help. And where’s his laptop? Doesn’t he have a laptop, too?”
“Probably took it,” Rick said. “And Bernie doesn’t need help. Not when it comes to taking care of himself. Don’t know how well you know him, but Bernie’s as tough as they come.”
“Bernie?”
“Guess you haven’t seen him in action,” Rick said. Suzie gazed at him, said nothing. “And he’s only been gone—What? A matter of hours? He’s probably strumming some ukulele as we speak.”
“He doesn’t play the ukulele,” said Suzie.
“Actually, he does,” said Rick. “He’s pretty good.”
Better than that—he was great, although I hadn’t heard him play in a long time. Suzie and Rick were eyeing each other; the uniformed cop yawned, and I yawned, too, even though I wasn’t the least bit tired.
“I’m staying with Chet,” Suzie said.
“Up to you,” said Rick. “When he finally rolls around, tell him I ran that plate he asked about. Registered to some kind of environmental investment outfit, it turns out—the baddest of the bad.”
***
We were alone in the kitchen, me and Suzie. “What does he do for coffee?” she said. On the road, Bernie picked up a paper cup of coffee at any convenience store, but things were less simple at home, with bags of beans in the freezer, a grinder that only worked if pressed on not too hard or too soft, and a coffeemaker that leaked if he put too much water in it. Suzie got the system all figured out after a while, and fresh coffee smell—one of my favorites, although I didn’t care for the taste at all—filled the air. She sat at the counter, sipping coffee, staring at nothing. All of a sudden she checked her watch, startling me a bit, then turned in my direction. “Why did I go to L.A.?” she said. “What’s wrong with me?”
Nothing that I knew.
She poured another cup. “Don’t you like your kibble?”
Not particularly, was the true answer. Steak, if available, was always my first choice, and there were many others in front of kibble. But just to be nice, I went to my bowl and scarfed up a mouthful or two. I was still at it when Suzie put down her cup, hard enough so coffee slopped over the side. She mopped it up with her elbow and said, “I can’t stand this, doing nothing.” She rose, walked to the office, me at her heels, and flicked on the computer. Except it didn’t start up; the screen stayed black. Suzie bent down, checked the plug, tried the switch a few more times. “Is something wrong with the computer?” she said.
How would I know? At that moment I caught a whiff—very faint, almost not there at all—of the head-clearing marker scent, the marker Bernie used on the whiteboard. I followed it, the thinnest ribbon of a trail, to the window. I barked.
“You want out, Chet?”
I did.
Suzie let me out the front door. I ran around to the side of the house, back down the alley between our place and old man Heydrich’s. Almost right away I found the marker scent, followed it a few steps past the office window to the coiled-up garden hose, never used because of water issues. And there, behind the hose, in a pool of light from the office window, lay a jagged piece, not very big, of the whiteboard, Bernie’s drawing of the wild-looking bearded man in one corner and some writing below that. I picked up the piece of whiteboard and turned.
“What’ve you got there, Chet?” Suzie said, standing nearby. I went to her, offered it up. She held it to the light. “‘Rasputin’?” she said, squinting at the writing. “‘Ghost Mine’? ‘S.V.’?” She turned the scrap over in her hands; nothing on the back. “Rasputin? Ghost Mine? S.V.?”
Ghost Mine? I barked. And barked some more. From next door came old man Heydrich’s angry voice. “Do something about that dog, God damn it!” I growled. Did I need old man Heydrich right now?
“C’mon, Chet,” Suzie said, her voice gentle.
We went inside. Suzie sat at Bernie’s desk, gazing at the remains of the whiteboard. “S.V.,” she said. “S.V.” She tried the computer again, with no result. Then she took a Swiss army knife from her bag—we’d given Charlie one just like it for his birthday, although Leda hadn’t let him keep it—and took the back off the computer. She stared at the insides, empty-looking to my eyes. Was that all there was to a computer, empty insides? “Motherboard’s gone,” Suzie said. Way out of my territory, whatever that was. “And I can think of only one thing S.V. might stand for.” I waited. “That town where I found you, Chet—Sierra Verde.” I wagged my tail. Sierra Verde: We were back in my territory. “S.V.—what else could it stand for?”
Asking the wrong party, sweetheart. Suzie reached for her car keys. I was already on my way to the door.
We drove through the night. I smelled biscuits, remembered that Suzie kept a whole box in her car, but didn’t want one. My stomach felt funny, all closed up. Suzie leaned forward, hands squeezing the wheel, her face tense in the lights of oncoming traffic.
She said things like “I don’t believe in fate.” And “How could I ever let Dylan suck me back into…” I remembered Dylan: pretty boy, jailbird, loser. He couldn’t have sucked me into anything, not on his best day. The truth was that humans didn’t turn out to be the best judges of other humans. We, meaning me and my kind, were much better. Once in a while they tricked us; some humans got up to a lot of trickery, strangely like foxes, but usually we were on to that type from sniff one.
After a while traffic thinned out, and Suzie’s face was mostly in darkness. We left the freeway, started up into the mountains, curves tightening and tightening. From time to time a car came the other way, and I saw the wetness in Suzie’s eyes. I put a paw on her knee. She gave me a pat. “Does he really play the ukulele?” she said. “I’d love to hear that.” An empty stretch of road went by. “I just hope…” She went silent. Was this hoping of hers about the ukulele or something else? Bernie really did play it, back in earlier days, knew all kinds of songs like “Up a Lazy River,” “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” “Jambalaya,” and my favorite, “Hey, Bo Diddley.” Bernie’s own favorite was “Rock the Casbah.” I usually took my bathroom break when that one rolled around.
“I’m smart, that’s the ironic thing,” Suzie said. “Fourteen hundred on my SATs, graduated cum laude—so how can I be so stupid?” Couldn’t follow her on that one. “And I’m getting so sick of irony I want to puke.” Uh-oh. I shifted away from her, closer to the door.
But no puking took place; maybe Suzie’s stomach settled down. That sometimes happened—I remembered an adventure with anchovies that could have turned out much worse than it did. The night went streaking by. Once I caught a golden flash of cat’s eyes, only much bigger. The hair on my back stiffened up. I knew what was out there.
“Is it true—that he’s as tough as they come?” Suzie said. “I’ve known a few tough men—they never made me laugh. Or played the ukulele. On the other hand, there’s the whole West Point thing, his combat experience…Oh God.” She started chewing at one of her knuckles, a sign of extreme human worry; I had a few moves like that myself. “If only we could see around corners,” she said. I liked Suzie, even if she sometimes had trouble making sense. Seeing around corners, for example: Who needed it? Smelling around corners was a piece of cake, told me all I needed to know. And say a piece of cake was actually lying around the corner, well, then I could…I got a bit lost in my own head, and curled up on the seat for a while. Bernie was tough. I’d seen him do amazing things, like with the bikers. Nothing bad could happen to Bernie. My eyes closed.
***
I woke up on the main street in Sierra Verde. The bar with the neon martini glass went by, the glass lit up but only darkness behind it, and no hogs parked out front. From not too far away came a nervous, high-pitched bark, the kind my guys sometimes make in the middle of a bad sleep; and I thought of that place up the next side street, with all the cages and the plume of white smoke. Suzie didn’t turn up the side street, kept going for a few blocks, reached the convenience store where we’d seen Anatoly Bulganin step out with a bag of groceries. No cars outside, but the lights were on and a man sat slumped behind the counter. Suzie pulled over, took out her cell phone.
“Hi,” she said. “Lou? Busy night?” She listened; I heard a man’s voice on the other end. “If you get a chance,” Suzie went on, “I’d like you to run a search for ‘Rasputin’ with ‘Ghost Mine.’” More listening. “Like the crazy Russian monk,” she said. The man on the other end had a loud voice, but I couldn’t make out the words. “No,” Suzie said, “he died a long time ago, and that’s not the point—it has nothing to do with him or the czar. Just a name, Lou. R-A-S-P-U-T-I-N…yeah, like Putin, only with ‘Ras’ at the beginning…yeah, you’re right—Rastafari is a different kettle of fish.” She clicked off, turned to me. “My dream was getting a job at the Washington Post, like Woodward and Bernstein.” Suzie’s dream skimmed by, missed completely on my part. My own dreams were all about hunting in the canyon, chasing down perps, and sometimes dining on steaks smeared with A.1. sauce. I especially liked when Bernie grilled crosshatched patterns on the meat, couldn’t tell you why.
Suzie slid down the windows. Desert air rolled in, cool and fresh, meaning morning was on the way. Suzie hugged herself and shivered, as though it were really cold. “I had a dog when I was a kid,” she said. “When my parents got divorced, he went to the pound.”
I gazed at her in the light that spilled from the convenience store. A sad story, I knew that—and sure as hell wouldn’t want to end up in any pound myself—but still, I loved…well, just about everything, the whole deal.
“You’re a good boy, Chet,” she said, opening her door. “I’m grabbing a cup of coffee.” She got out, went into the convenience store. My stomach still felt all closed up, but I knew they had Slim Jims in there. I could possibly manage a Slim Jim.
Headlights shone in the rearview mirror. I looked back and saw a pickup approaching, not fast. As it came closer, I could see the driver’s face, a pale circle behind the windshield. Very pale, with long shadows cast by big sticking-out cheekbones; and tiny ears; and light-colored hair, almost white even though he wasn’t old: Boris! I knew Boris, all right, wasn’t going to forget someone who’d knifed me, not ever. I sat up high on my seat, almost let out a bark. But I knew that would be bad, knew that Bernie would want me to keep my mouth shut at a moment like this, would have made a little motion with his hand, just between us. Easy, Chet, let’s take ’em down nice and easy.
The pickup—light-colored, not as big as ours—drew closer. As it came alongside me, I saw Boris’s face clearly, lit by the green glow of his dashboard lights. He was smiling. That green smile enraged me. I didn’t think—that was Bernie’s department, and he could have it—just sprang out the window, landing on the road behind the pickup. The pickup turned out to be going much faster than I’d judged from inside Suzie’s car. I chased after it, sprinting now, caught up as Boris reached the only stoplight in town. Red, but he drove on through, even stepping on it. Last chance. I gathered myself and leaped, a tremendous leap, one of my very best, up and over the tailgate and down into the bed of the truck, a soft, silent landing.
Or maybe not: Through the narrow back window I saw Boris suddenly turn his head, the pickup slowing. I ducked down, completely still, one more shadow. The pickup sped up again. I raised my head, saw Boris facing front. We rolled through the silent town. From my angle, down low, I could see the tops of the buildings and above them the starry sky, a few clouds moving fast, so wispy the stars shone through them. Then all at once, no more buildings: We headed out of Sierra Verde, down the mountain road and on to the desert plain, the desert plain that stretched all the way to New Mexico.
I lay on a tarp, my back against some coiled rope. I smelled gasoline and gunpowder; and very faintly, my second favorite combo: apples, bourbon, plus that hint of salt and pepper that made it a bit like my own smell. Bernie had been here, right in this very truck bed! A feeling comes to me and my kind when we know we’re on the right track, a sort of tamped-down excitement. I felt it now; the tamping-down part maybe still waiting to kick in.
We were on the dirt track I knew, the bumpy one where Bernie had thought about the old days and Kit Carson, and other Bernie-type things I couldn’t remember. I kept an eye on Boris’s head through the narrow window, a big head, too big for even a thick neck like his. The headlights shone on passing sights I remembered—a tall two-armed cactus like a giant person, spiky bushes I’d marked, a flat rock sitting on a round rock. Later came the dried-up streambed, the low hill, the falling-down shack, and the track fading to nothing. Boris stopped by the remains of the bikers’ campfire and got out. I lay low, maybe not as low as I could, with my head poking over the edge of the tailgate, but I had to see out, didn’t I?
Boris walked toward the blackened firepit, kicked a beer can once or twice, whistled an unpleasant tune. Then came a zipper sound and soft splashing in the dirt. Men were vulnerable at moments like this. I could take him down right now, no problem. But after that? I didn’t know. Boris zipped up, and the moment passed. He looked up, his gaze suddenly right on me! And then sliding by; his vision—like every human I’d come across—just about useless at night. I sometimes felt sorry for humans, what with their obvious shortcomings, but not for Boris. Boris was bad, and soon he’d be living up at Central State, wearing an orange jumpsuit and breaking rocks in the hot sun.
Boris got back behind the wheel, still whistling. Won’t be whistling soon, buddy boy. From this same spot, with no more track to follow, Bernie and I had set out on foot, in the direction of those distant mountains, pinkish then, invisible now. Boris didn’t go the same way; instead making a long curve past the firepit and toward a jumble of shadowy rocks, the desert floor rough and uneven. We bumped along, Boris twisting the wheel from side to side, lumps of muscle sticking out in his neck, lumpy to begin with. The bumps got bigger, the pickup lurching back and forth. I went sliding off the tarp, thumped against the side of the truck bed. Boris started to glance back, but at that moment we hit an even bigger bump, the whole truck seeming to rise off the ground. He fought with the wheel. I rose up on all fours, went sliding the other way, panting now. Bernie’s smell rose around me. I calmed down, and not long after, the ride got smooth again. I stuck my head out the side, peered ahead, saw we were on a track, long and straight. And not too far ahead rose the mountains that had been pink when Bernie and I had seen them before, but were now a dark band beneath a sky no longer quite as dark. My heart beat faster. Calm, Chet, have to stay calm. I crouched down behind the coiled rope.
***
Up above, the stars grew dim and slowly vanished. We were making a lot of turns now, the motor sounding like it was working hard. I rose and saw we were in the mountains, still dark, except for the very tops, outlined in milky white. The milky whiteness spread, pouring slowly over the land, a very beautiful sight. It was morning. We rounded a bend, passed some huge rusted-out machine of a type I didn’t know, and there, up ahead, stood some run-down buildings—a long, low house, a barn, sheds, and, across from them, a steep slope with a big round hole at its base: Mr. Gulagov’s mine.
Boris parked beside a car I knew, the blue BMW, all dusty now, and went inside the barn. I looked around, saw nobody, and hopped out. I sniffed at the BMW, at the barn door, and along the side of the barn, picking up a trace of my own scent. It led me to one of the sheds, and behind the shed, I found the cage where Mr. Gulagov had kept me. Stay calm, boy. But I growled, couldn’t help myself.
Beyond the shed stood the house. I went to an open window, saw a kitchen. Mr. Gulagov sat at a table, sideways to me, piling up stacks of wadded bills. Ms. Larapova came into view, carrying a coffeepot. They were so close! In an instant I could be in there, showing Mr. Gulagov what was what. But would that be the right move? I waited, and while I waited, Mr. Gulagov said, “Is Boris back yet?”
“I’ll check,” said Ms. Larapova. She poured coffee for him and left the room.
Uh-oh. I backed away from the window. Maybe the best move would be—
A door opened right beside me—how had I missed that?—and Ms. Larapova came out of the house. One slight turn of her head and she’d have seen me, and then what? But Ms. Larapova did not turn her head. Instead, she went the other way, toward the barn, her hair in a long ponytail, swinging back and forth. From somewhere nearby I heard a radio and then a man clearing his throat. Any moment now people were going to be all over the place. I backed away, backed away some more, waiting for some idea to hit me, and all at once, by a low spiny plant growing all by itself between the house and the mine, caught the slightest whiff of Bernie.
I sped up, hurrying this way and that, sniffing, sniffing. Another trace, by a broken shovel; another, near an overturned mine car; and one more, by the railroad tracks that led into the mine. Bernie’s scent grew stronger, much stronger. I followed it through the big round hole and into the shadows.
And there, with his back to a support beam, not very far inside the mine, sat Bernie! His eyes were closed. Was he sleeping? I was so happy to see him that at first I didn’t notice that his feet were roped together; that his hands were bound behind him to the beam; that a choke chain, hooked to the roof of the mine, had him around the neck.