my best efforts.
Doc Booker, not as tall as his brother, was still the tallest human in the whirlpool room. Then came Jiggs, after him Thad, now on his feet and wearing a robe, and Bernie last, the very shortest! Had that ever happened before?
“Love your movies,” said Doc Booker.
“Thanks,” said Thad, only it came out more like “Danks,” what with his nose the way it was.
“My wife would be thrilled to have your autograph,” Doc Booker said. “How about signing my prescription pad?”
“Always the wife,” Thad said, taking the pad and pen Doc Booker handed him and writing on it. “Maybe I’ll prescribe myself a whole mess of Oxycontin.”
Doc Booker laughed. “That’s a good one.” Bernie didn’t laugh, although the corners of his mouth turned up a bit. As for Jiggs, the corners of his mouth-not a very nicely shaped mouth, especially compared to Bernie’s-were way down.
Doc Booker tucked the prescription pad away. “Thanks a bunch,” he said. “Let’s take a look at this situation.” He peered at Thad’s nose, extended his finger as though to touch it, but didn’t, Thad wincing anyway, said, “Totally fixable. You can either come to the hospital where I’ll get you into the OR and reset you under anesthetic-”
“Hospital?” said Thad. “What about the goddamn media?”
“Or,” Doc Booker continued, “if you’re up for it, I can do it right here, quick and dirty.”
“Quick and dirty?” Thad said.
“Sting a little,” said Doc Booker. “But it’ll be over in two seconds.”
“And I’ll be back to normal?”
Doc Booker nodded. “Or even more rugged than before.”
“What the hell?” said Thad. “I don’t want to be more rugged than before. I need to be the exact same amount of rugged, for Christ sake.”
“Got it,” said Doc Booker.
“And no one ever hears about it,” Thad said.
“Bernie has already filled me in,” Doc Booker said. He shook his head. “You’re a brave man, mixing it up with ol’ Bernie.”
Bernie shot Doc Booker a quick look.
“Or not,” said Doc Booker. “Bernie’s bark is worse than his bite.”
Whoa. What a stunner. Bernie’s bark? Bernie’s bite? Neither one had ever happened, not in all the time we’d been together. Maybe Doc Booker was getting the two of us confused. Did that mean that my own bark was worse than…? I lost the thread, and none too soon.
Thad took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “Do what you gotta do. Should I sit down?”
“Nah,” said Doc Booker, and he reached out and in one smooth motion took hold of Thad’s nose and gave it a hard twist.
“In hindsight,” Doc Booker said, “sitting down would have been preferable.”
“Not your fault,” said Bernie.
“I didn’t take him for a fainter,” Doc Booker said.
“I was trying to figure out how to put it,” Bernie said.
“Good luck with that,” said Jiggs.
They gazed at Thad, now lying on a training table, eyes closed and a peaceful look on his face.
“You did a great job, Doc,” Jiggs said.
“Thanks.”
“Just send in a bill.”
“No bill,” said Doc Booker. “Bernie and I go way back. How’s the leg, by the way?”
“No problems,” Bernie said.
Even though there were. But that was Bernie.
Jiggs glanced at Bernie’s leg, maybe about to say something, but before he could, Doc Booker turned to me and said, “Chet’s looking great. Happen to have a biscuit on me.”
Old news: I’d known the instant he stepped into the room, had almost stopped wondering if the biscuit was going to make an appearance. Now I was wondering again, wondering my hardest.
“Down, Chet,” Bernie said.
“Should I make him sit?”
“Way past that,” said Bernie. “Just give him the damn thing.”
Doc Booker reached into his pocket and gave me a biscuit. Maybe I took it, would be more accurate.
“My God, he’s quick,” Doc Booker said. Then came a discussion of how much I weighed-I’m a hundred-plus- pounder-but I wasn’t paying attention, on account of the quality of the biscuit, very high.
We drove past the gate-a different guy on duty now-along the ridge, and started down the mountain. After not too long, we came to a construction site with a partly built house and a Dumpster out front. All of a sudden, Bernie pulled off the road and parked behind the Dumpster. He shut off the engine.
“If you know someone does his homework,” he said, “then you’ve got to do your homework, too.”
At that moment, he noticed the fluffy white towel-just washcloth size, really-in my mouth, and took it away. No problem. My mind was on other things, namely homework. Once Charlie had to do some homework. This was on one of his every-second weekend visits, and did we look forward to them or what? Every-second weekends couldn’t come fast enough! But the point was, I knew about homework. You opened a book or two, did some writing, yawned, gazed around, got up and had a snack, turned on the TV. So I waited for Bernie to take out a book. The sooner the book part, the sooner we’d get to the snack.
No book appeared. Bernie rubbed his shoulder. “How does he know he’s the exact right state of rugged?” he said, losing me completely. I didn’t sense a snack coming anytime soon. Kind of frustrating because there was a ham sandwich, or at least part of one, somewhere in that Dumpster: pretty much impossible to miss the smell of ham.
Bernie glanced over at me.
“You’re slobbering,” he said.
Uh-oh. I wasn’t sure how to stop that. I tried panting. It worked a bit.
Bernie smiled at me and gave me pat. “Let’s just keep in mind the three grand a day,” he said, rubbing his shoulder again.
Bernie’s always been a great thinker, one of our strengths at the Little Detective Agency. I bring my own things to the table. We’re a real good team. Ask some of the dudes sporting orange jumpsuits up at Northern State Correctional.
“Thad Perry,” Bernie said. “I’ve already changed my mind about him three times. Maybe that’s why he’s an actor. What’s that word? Sort of means changeable.”
I waited to hear.
“It’s on the tip of my tongue,” Bernie said.
I gazed at him closely. At first his mouth was closed, then it opened slightly, and I saw the tip of his tongue. A beautifully shaped tongue tip, nice and pink, but there was absolutely nothing on it.
“Suzie’ll know,” he said.
Whoa. Suzie would know what was on the tip of Bernie’s tongue when she wasn’t even here?
Bernie took out his phone, raised a thumb to start pushing buttons, then paused. “But maybe this isn’t the kind of thing I should be doing, now that…” He put the phone away. Why? I’ll leave that to you. All I knew was that he’d been happy when we started down the mountain-you can always tell by his eyes, the clearer the happier, the murkier the sadder-and now he wasn’t.
We sat. “Starts with P,” he said after a while. My eyelids began to get heavy-what a strange thing, how eyelids could put on weight like that-and were just about to close when I heard a car coming down the road, and a few moments later a black SUV with tinted windows rounded a bend and whizzed past us. Tinted windows, but rolled down on the driver’s-side door, and I could see him: Jiggs. He now wore a T-shirt and his huge bare arm rested on the door frame. Bernie turned the key, let Jiggs get by the next turn, and pulled onto the road.
We’ve tailed a lot of dudes, me and Bernie, and once I did some tailing with Suzie at the wheel. She did a fine job for a rookie, but Bernie was an expert. He could follow from far behind, from closer in, from different lanes, even
