We were outnumbered, some big number against two. When it comes to numbers, two is as far as I go, but it’s enough, in my opinion.
“Easy, boy,” Bernie said, his voice low, between us. “Don’t move a muscle.” How did he know I was just about to charge up that hill at my very fastest, first taking out Captain Panza and after that—well, I had no real plans for after that, but so what? “Sit,” Bernie said.
I sat. Bernie would think of something—he always did. That was one of the things that made the Little Detective Agency such a success, except for the finances part. At that moment I remembered the .38 Special, all chambers loaded and hidden in Bernie’s pocket. Bernie’s a crack shot—which I hope I’ve already gotten across, what with so many examples out there that it was hard to think of even one—so that had to be the plan. Gunplay was a great plan, had worked for us many times. Any second now—and seconds flew by pretty quick—out would flash the .38 Special and blam blam blam! Yes, the .38 Special, blam blam blam, and then—
“Very, very slow,” Captain Panza said, “and at the same time hands up very, very high, you will now walk this way.”
Bernie raised his hands a bit higher. But his hands up there and the .38 Special down in his pocket. Was that going to be a problem? Bernie started up the slope. I moved beside him.
“The dog stays,” said Captain Panza.
“No,” Bernie said. “He comes with—”
BLAM! But not from the .38 Special. This was one of the uniformed dudes firing from the top of the slope. Dirt kicked up at Bernie’s feet, real close, and a sharp stone went airborne and hit my shoulder. Didn’t hurt, not one little bit, and I showed no pain at all.
“You don’t hear well, Señor Little,” said Captain Panza, “a fact I know for sure from you being out here in wild country instead of safely back across the border. So I say again, and for the last time—the dog stays. We have no time for dogs, and especially this one.” A uniformed dude behind Captain Panza spoke in the Mexican way. “You catch that, Señor Little? Sergeant Ponson says we forgot to bring the ark today.”
Bernie knelt beside me, real slow, and also real slow, lowered his arms and wrapped them around me. He looked me in the eye. Bernie has the best eyes. I saw no fear in them and I didn’t smell any, either. He spoke so softly there was hardly a sound at all. “Chet,” he told me, “when I say run, you run. Just as fast and as far as you can.”
Something about running. We were going to be running together, right? So why would I have to be running my fastest, or anywhere near? No criticism of Bernie, but he didn’t run that well, not even for a human, on account of his wound from the war.
Bernie let go and stood up, eyes still on me. “Stay,” he said, louder now. Then he turned and started up the hill again, hands raised.
Stay? But if I stayed, how were we going to run together? Maybe Bernie was going to blast them all with the .38 Special first, and then we’d be running. Did that sound like good strategy, strategy being how we were going to come out on top, me and Bernie? I thought so. And so I stayed, although as Bernie got farther and farther away I shifted some in his direction, but still on my backside, which is a form of staying.
As Bernie reached the top of the rise, a couple of Jeeps drove out from behind the watchtower. The uniformed dudes closed around Bernie, pointing their guns. One of them began to pat him down. Oh, no. What if he found the—
And he did. He took the .38 Special from Bernie’s pocket and handed it to Captain Panza. Captain Panza held the .38 Special up in the light, squinted at it. “What luck,” he said. “This must be the murder weapon.”
“I didn’t murder anyone,” Bernie said, not screaming or even agitated; just the same calm voice he’d use any old time.
Captain Panza pointed the .38 Special down at Darren Quigley, lying in the open, shallow grave. “That looks like a murder victim to me.” He turned to the others. “Muchachos?”
“Sí, sí,” they said. A few of them were grinning, like something funny was going on.
“He’s a murder victim all right,” Bernie said, “but it wasn’t me.”
“No?” said Captain Panza. “If not you, any idea who was the real murderer?”
“I’d like to think it was you,” Bernie said.
Silence up on top of the rise. Everyone went still.
“Maybe,” said Captain Panza, “my English is very bad. Maybe so bad I didn’t understand what you said. Please—por favor—tell me again.”
Bernie took a deep breath—I could see his chest swelling up. Then, in a loud booming voice, a tremendous voice I’d never heard from him before and didn’t know he had, Bernie shouted, “Chet—run!” And he batted the .38 Special out of Captain Panza’s hand.
I ran. The loud boom of Bernie’s voice was like a wave, carrying me, pushing me along even faster than my very fastest. CRACK! A shot rang out. PING! Dust exploded off a rock, right beside me. Then from behind came a thud, and another thud, sounds I knew well, sounds of fighting. I slowed down, looked back, and there was Bernie, still on his feet, locked in a struggle with the uniformed guys. One or two lay motionless on the ground and Bernie was a great fighter, but there were so many of them! I stopped running. Hadn’t Bernie told me to run and not stop? Yes, but now he needed me. I couldn’t make those two things fit together. Meanwhile, I found I was sort of inching my way back down the footpath, toward Bernie. And what was this? Still down in the graveyard but definitely moving my way—a uniformed guy with a rifle.
I knew what rifles could do, of course, one of the most important things I’d learned on this job, but I kept inching down anyway. Bernie—still fighting on that little rise above the trees and the graveyard—needed me. What had he told me to do, again? Couldn’t quite remember and also had no big desire to. I inched down some more, maybe not inching now, more like walking. The uniformed guy stopped. I was still pretty far away, but suppose I sprinted at him, my very fastest, and then sprang right at his throat and—
He raised the rifle. At the same instant came Bernie’s voice, that booming shout, like thunder from the sky. “Chet—run!”
I didn’t want to run, couldn’t leave Bernie like this but at the same time I had to do what he said, or at least give it the old college try, whatever that happened to—
Muzzle flash, bright orange. CRACK! Thump. All those things came together practically at once, and at the same time the top of a cactus got blown off right by my head. White droplets from inside the cactus went spraying in the air. I felt some on my face. Once this real bad perp took a bullet as he stood beside me, and some of his blood dripped down on my fur.
“CHET!”
I remembered that sticky feeling of blood on my fur, and the smell, too, one of the richest smells there is. I rolled around in the dirt plenty after that time with the bleeding perp.
“RUN!”
I turned and ran back up the hill, not my fastest at first, but another CRACK sped me up. Blood had gotten me going, hard to explain the connection. I tore along the footpath. It got steeper and steeper and vanished forever in a jumble of rocks. From behind I heard ACK-ACK-ACK. I knew that was automatic fire from back in my days at K-9 school—it would have been nice if I’d gotten the certificate on the last day, the day things went wrong—so it shouldn’t have been a big surprise when the dirt in front of me erupted in dust-spewing pockmarks, like during the monsoon rains, but it surprised me just the same. I started taking switchbacks of my own over hard ground, whipping past spiny cacti that whipped back at me—uh-oh, the stinging kind—and all the time behind me: ACK-ACK-ACK, ACK-ACK-ACK. Run! Run! Run! I heard Bernie’s voice now, but not from Bernie actually speaking. Instead I was hearing Bernie in my mind, which happens a lot. ACK-ACK-ACK. I swerved, swerved back, swerved the other way, my whole body low to the ground—steep steep ground that kept trying to tip me over and roll me all the way down—the wind in my ears, high and scary, me not really running now, more like climbing, digging in with my front paws, pushing from the back. ACK-ACK-ACK—and what was that? I felt a buzz right through the fur on my back, a buzz like a big hard insect might make, and then PING—close by a fiery spark shot off the face of a rock. The next moment I was suddenly over the top, going so fast I flew straight up in the air—ACK-ACK-ACK—and then I fell, landing hard on my stomach, but on the far side of the hill, almost a cliff, really; on the far side and safe from human weapons.
I lay there, trying to get my breath back. So weird, that feeling of getting the breath knocked out of you. But no big deal. The point was I heard no more gunfire, heard nothing at all, except for a cascade of pebbles and stones I’d knocked loose on the other side, and soon that went silent, too.
My breath came back. I breathed. Should I be getting up? I really didn’t feel like it at the moment. I felt like just lying on the ground and breathing. Was that a good idea? I didn’t know. Then Bernie spoke in my mind: On your feet, big guy.
I got on my feet. Maybe that hadn’t been Bernie speaking in my mind, but Bernie in real life. Oh, I hoped so. I crept back up to the crest and stuck my head over, just the smallest bit. Wow. I was up so high, had come such a long way. I gazed down the slope—yes, a cliff in places—all the way to the bottom of the box canyon with the graveyard and the trees, trees that looked like tiny garden plants from where I was, and on to the ruined village with the crumbling watchtower. Not a soul in sight, which is human talk for no people. There was at least one soul around, if I understand the term properly, and that was me. But I could be wrong; words were tricky. Not important anyway; what was important was the absence of people. Bernie, Captain Panza, the uniformed men, the rifle dude and ACK-ACK-ACK dude, the Jeeps: all gone. Did I spot a dust cloud on the far side of one of the humps of the two-humped mountain? Maybe. But it might have been an ordinary cloud, the kind that sometimes brings rain. I checked the sky: not another cloud in it, bright blue and the sun kind of glaring. I realized I was a bit thirsty.
Maybe Bernie was down there in the box canyon and I just wasn’t seeing him. I checked again. No Bernie. I barked. Bark bark. And from the box canyon came a bark bark. I barked again. Bark bark bark. And bark bark bark came back. None of my guys were down there, not that I could see. I trotted back and forth on the crest, this trot that happens sometimes when I’m getting beside myself. That’s an expression of Bernie’s. You didn’t want to get beside yourself—that was important in this business. I remembered another important thing—you were never supposed to show yourself at the top of a crest: No better target than that, big guy. I moved down the back side a short way, out of sight.
But soon I found myself trotting back and forth on top of the crest again. Where was Bernie? I barked. The bark came back. And that kept up for a while and then I was beside myself again. I had a faint memory of Bernie explaining the barking thing that was going on, maybe explaining it a thousand times, which had to be a lot. The actual explanation wouldn’t come, but just knowing that Bernie had cleared it all up made me feel better, put me back inside myself.
I stood on top of the crest and breathed. This was Mexico. Things were different in Mexico: that was another saying of Bernie’s. Mexico was different. So therefore? Bernie said that, too, sometimes with his head in his hands. So therefore? Then, after so therefore? things would get real quiet, so quiet I could feel his thoughts, like gentle breezes in the air. Meanwhile, the air around me, this warm and clear Mexican air, was perfectly still.