Pobre Jet,” said the kid. She had beautiful eyes, big and dark. I moved toward the bars of the cage. She patted my head. “Pobre Jet,” she said. Jet was me, Chet the Jet. Was Pobre her name? Was she saying we were some sort of pals, me and her? Made sense to me.
She touched the muzzle over my mouth, ran her fingers over all the straps and clamps and other stuff I could feel but not see. Her face got still and thoughtful, reminding me of Bernie’s face when he was deep in one of his thinking spells. Her thoughts drifted in the air. I didn’t know what those thoughts were, but they felt a lot like Bernie’s. Hey! This Pobre kid reminded me of Bernie! How weird was that? She was just a little kid and didn’t smell at all like Bernie. That combination of apples, bourbon, salt and pepper was his and his alone, while Pobre smelled more like honey and those little pink manzanita flowers that turn out to be kind of tasty. I realized I was hungry as well as thirsty. But that wasn’t important. The important thing was this strange likeness between Bernie and Pobre, even though they weren’t alike.
Pobre glanced around. A quiet evening, the sky turning purple except for a fiery band shining above the distant slope, and nothing stirring, no one around but us. Pobre knelt and laid her sombrero on the ground and then rose—one of those humans who moved so nicely it was hard to take your eyes off them—and said, “Silencio, Jet, silencio.” Whatever Pobre meant had hardly finished zipping right by me when she reached behind my head, fiddled around for a moment or two, and then—and then that horrible muzzle was off me! She tossed it away, into the shadows and out of my life.
I gave my head a quick shake—ah, felt so good—and then pressed my face against her, through the bars. She stroked between my ears with her soft little hand. Meanwhile, my tail was going a mile a minute, which means pretty fast. Pobre laughed, a low, gurgling laugh, very nice to hear, and then her face got serious again. “Por qué no?” she said. She stood on her tiptoes—always an interesting sight, considering how close to losing their balance humans were even when standing flat-footed—and reached as high as she could. Then came a squeak and a soft chunk and the cage door swung open. I stayed where I was, not sure why.
“Ven, Jet,” she said.
I walked out of the cage. Nothing happened, nothing bad, shots ringing out, for example. I was free and clear.
Pobre gave me a pat. “Libre,” she said. “Libre.”
I licked her face. It tasted salty. She turned away, laughing that lovely laugh again, and was still laughing when headlights appeared on the road.
“Oh, no,” she said. Her eyes and mouth opened wide and I caught the smell of fear. “Papá.” And just like that she took off toward the distant hills. I took off after her of course, but she stopped, took my head in her hands, and said, “No, Jet, no.”
Meaning what? I wasn’t supposed to go with her? The headlight beams came closer. Pobre ran off again into the shadows. I hesitated, waiting for some idea, trying to make up my mind. Then the headlights found me, blinding me with their brightness. I took off, too, but the other way, back into the shadows beyond the cage.
The headlights came closer and closer, like two big yellow eyes; angry eyes, I thought, but what sense did that make? A rattly old car pulled up in front of the warehouse and a man got out. He left the car running, headlights on, and in the spillover of the headlight beams I got a good look at him: the little silver-teethed man with the huge hands. Didn’t like him, not one bit: I stayed where I was, motionless in the darkness.
He moved toward a small door by the loading dock, started to open it, and paused. Then he began walking my way. I shrank back, around the far corner of the warehouse, just poking my head out to see.
This guy—farmer, Pobre’s papa, and also a perp of some kind, no doubt about that—approached the cage. He stopped abruptly, yelled something I didn’t understand, swung the door back and forth, pounded his fist into his open hand and yelled again. Then he noticed the sombrero, lying in the dirt. I just knew that was bad. He picked up the sombrero and yelled more angry things, and was still yelling when his gaze fell on me.
Or seemed to; in fact, I went unseen. No surprise: human eyes pretty much stop working at night; I’d learned that time and time again. He banged the cage door shut, walked back to the small warehouse door and went inside, carrying the sombrero.
I came out from my hiding place. I wanted that sombrero. My problem was how to get it. No idea. I listened real hard, hoping to hear Bernie speaking inside me, telling me the plan. Silence. But in those moments when I was standing there, kind of confused, I again caught that knockout smell in the air, Peanut’s scent. I followed it, the easiest tracking I’d done in my whole career.
The smell—growing stronger with every step I took—led me along the front of the warehouse to the door the silver-teethed dude had entered. He’d left it open. I stopped in the doorway and peered inside. This was called recoy or recon or something like that, a very important part of our job according to Bernie, and if he said so, then that was that.
What did I see? A real big dirt-floored space lit only by a few bare bulbs hanging here and there, a mostly empty space except for some crates, a small cage with a monkey inside—actually a mean-looking sort of monkey I knew from the Discovery Channel—baboon? was that the name?—and much more important, another cage, really the whole far end of the warehouse, walled off by floor-to-ceiling chain-link. There was a big gate in the chain-link, and the farmer dude had rolled a wheelbarrow full of bananas next to it and was busy with the lock. Beyond the chain-link, against the back wall: Peanut.
Peanut! I was doing good, no doubt about it. This was the Peanut case and here was Peanut. Were there problems? Maybe, like for example the way Peanut wasn’t standing up, instead lying on her side, her trunk flopped in the dirt, her eye dull and unseeing. The sight made me feel bad, hard to say why. Meanwhile, the baboon’s eyes were real lively. They gave me a look that was too close to a human look for comfort. Then the baboon showed me his teeth. I’ve got a nice set of big sharp teeth myself, but this baboon’s teeth were something else.
I turned back to Peanut. Even lying down she was huge, as tall sideways as the silver-teethed dude standing up. He opened the lock, laid Pobre’s sombrero on the floor, and swung the gate open. Peanut, I thought, up and at ’em! But Peanut just lay there, which wouldn’t have been my move in this situation, better believe it. The next thing I knew I was no longer in the doorway, but actually inside the warehouse, moving softly. For one thing, I wanted that sombrero. Pobre’s sombrero had to be important and whatever made it important would be clear to Bernie right away. My job was to get it to him, plain and simple. Just like that, I understood the whole case.
The silver-teethed dude grabbed a pitchfork and began heaving bananas through the open gate, in Peanut’s direction. I crept across the dirt floor, closer and closer to that sombrero. It lay at the silver-teethed dude’s feet, but his back was turned, what with how busy he was heaving all those bananas. I got right up to him, no problem, and was just lowering my head over the sombrero when the baboon cried out. Crying out hardly describes the sound, maybe the most horrible sound I’ve ever heard, kind of a shrieking and howling combo that raised the hair from the back of my neck all the way down to the tip of my tail.
After that, things happened fast. First—and maybe this wasn’t even first, real hard to say: that’s how fast things were happening—the silver-teethed guy—which is what I’ve been calling him, on account of how uneasy I am about calling him Pobre’s papa—whipped around toward where that awful sound had come from, and of course when he whipped around he saw me, just about to snatch up the sombrero.
His eyes opened wide, although not very wide, because of how narrow they were to begin with. He recognized me, no doubt about that, and the sight of me ticked him off big-time. That had happened before with perps too numerous to mention, Zutty Yepremian, for example, or Sing Jong Soo, and didn’t bother me at all. But when he jabbed the pitchfork right at my head—that bothered me. I darted away from those sharp, pointy ends, then came at him from the side, real quick, but he turned out to be real quick himself, getting the pitchfork between us and jabbing again. I dodged, tried to go underneath, take him out by the ankles, one of my best moves, but down came the pitchfork, blocking my path. And what was this? Holding the pitchfork in one hand, the silver-teethed dude reached into his pocket with the other and drew a gun.
“Perro loco,” he said. He raised the gun. I saw down the barrel, a small round space, black and empty. Bernie’s voice spoke inside me at last: Run, big guy. But I couldn’t. Somehow that tiny black emptiness had me frozen in place. That thick, oversized trigger finger started to squeeze.
And at that moment came a surprise. Somehow, without making any noise, or at least not any that I heard, Peanut was on her feet, and not only on her feet but—you couldn’t call it running, maybe, more like lumbering—yes, lumbering with surprising speed, up and at ’em but even more so than I could have dreamed, and heading right in the perp’s direction; dudes who point guns at me are perps, case closed.
This little perp with the big hands, one on the pitchfork, one on the gun, heard Peanut coming at the last instant—hard to miss now, and come to think of it, the floor was shaking—and spun around. Now his eyes really did get big, big as any human eyes I’d seen. He dropped the pitchfork, tried to bang the gate closed. Ha! That gate bounced right off Peanut and came swinging back, so hard it knocked the perp to the ground and flew off its hinges. He rolled over, and—oh, no, he still had the gun. I dove for his arm, too late. Blam. He got off a round, and a little red hole appeared in Peanut’s shoulder. The perp was adjusting his aim for another shot, swinging the barrel so it pointed at Peanut’s head, when she came rumbling through the space where the gate had been, trampled right over him, and kept charging across the warehouse floor. Did she take out a crate or two on the way? I thought so, because suddenly overturned crates were all over the place, splinters flying, and what was this? Snakes! Masses of snakes of different sizes and colors, tangled up with one another, writhing and hissing in clusters all over the floor. Also the baboon’s cage was a twisted mess and the baboon was on the loose, hooting in that scary voice. And the perp? The perp was writhing around kind of like the snakes, and also hissing, but not the snake-type hissing, more the sort of hissing humans sometimes do when they’re in a lot of pain. He rolled into the space where Peanut had been, dragging the remains of the gate after him, trying to cage himself in but having a lot of trouble since one of his arms was hanging in a funny kind of way.
Meanwhile, Peanut was on the move, that bullet she’d taken not slowing her down at all. She—you couldn’t call it running, exactly, or trotting, although it was pretty close to trotting, but in a gigantic way—made her way to the door that led to the loading dock, one of those metal roll-down doors. The door was closed, of course, so Peanut was about to come to a halt, pull up, stop this trotting or whatever it was, right? Only she didn’t. Peanut just kept going, right into that door. It crumpled and got ripped away, with a metallic tearing sound that thrilled me, I’ll admit it. What else was there to do but follow her? Stay in the warehouse with the snakes, some of whom seemed to be slithering my way? Not my cup of tea, as humans say, and speaking personally tea isn’t my cup of tea, water being my drink, and just then I saw a trough filled with water, standing near the loading dock. Why hadn’t I smelled it? I tried to smell it now and couldn’t: Peanut’s smell smothered all others.
I hurried over to the trough, lapped up my fill—oh, water!—my eyes on all those snakes the whole time. Some of them were enormous! And the fangs! At that very moment a big green one sank its fangs into an even bigger black one and all the writhing sped up and all the hissing grew louder. This was a nightmare.
I ran onto the loading dock. Still some light left and I could see Peanut clearly. She was on the ground, walking toward the perp’s old—what was the word?—jalopy. That was it. She walked over to the jalopy, lifted one of her huge round feet and stomped down, crushing the whole front end. Why? I had no idea, but I liked it, liked it a whole lot. Then Peanut raised her trunk high and blew a beautiful trumpeting sound up toward the darkening sky. I loved that trumpeting sound—as good as Roy Eldridge or better—and was hoping for more, when the baboon blew right by me with a whoosh of air, flew out into the night and disappeared from view, although not before I saw that he had the sombrero.
I jumped down onto the ground and went over to Peanut. This was the Peanut case, meaning she was my responsibility. First, I had to get her attention. That probably meant waiting until she’d finished crushing the jalopy’s back end. It didn’t take long.