“You never know,” Bernie said. “Everyone in Hollywood’s got a script in the drawer.”
“So maybe he’s off in a cabin somewhere, banging away on his laptop,” Luxton said. “Because no one can find him.”
“Wouldn’t know anything about that,” Bernie said. “My job’s making sure Thad Perry keeps his nose clean, and last seen he was stone cold sober and looking forward to breakfast. Chet here had a nice time playing with Brando.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Thad’s cat. You met him. He and Chet are pals.”
Luxton made the kind of sideways gesture with his hand that humans have for whisking away flies. Where I come from we have tails for that, but I’m not saying one way’s better than the other. No time to think about that, or the fact that some humans miss out on what’s going on with other creatures, almost like they’re not there, because problems were coming at me in waves. I was pals with Brando? When had that happened? And what was this about breakfast? I remembered no breakfast. Breakfast is not something I forget. So therefore-whoa! I came very close to doing a so-therefore. But so-therefores were in Bernie’s territory. I backed off.
“What’s pissing me off,” Luxton was saying, “is this feeling I get that you’re not taking the job seriously.”
“Yeah?” said Bernie. “That’s really what’s pissing you off?”
Luxton’s face darkened like a shadow was passing over him, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. “What else would it be?”
Bernie looked right at him. “You tell me,” he said.
Luxton looked at Bernie right back. “Hope you know what you’re doing, buddy.”
“People keep saying that,” Bernie said.
Luxton drove off. Not long after that, Nixon had the Porsche all fixed.
“What do you think?” Nixon said.
“The new door is yellow?” said Bernie.
“Golden,” said Nixon. “I’d call it golden. See how it’s shiny?”
“The rest of the body is red.”
“Not the martini glasses.”
Bernie gazed at the car.
“I could paint the door to match, but you won’t have it today,” Nixon said.
“Need it today.”
“Now Chet has a golden door,” Nixon said. “Think of it that way.”
Bernie looked thoughtful.
“All depends on how you think about things,” Nixon said.
“You’re right, Nix,” Bernie said. “So tell me how I should be thinking about the fact that Cal Luxton just swung by.”
Nixon opened his mouth, closed it, shuffled his feet, the kinds of things guilty perps did. What was going on? Nixon had been a perp, of course, and we’d sent him away, for what I no longer remembered, but now weren’t we friends?
“Coincidence?” said Bernie. “Or not?”
Nixon gazed down at the ground.
We pulled into the empty parking lot of the old Flower Mart late in the afternoon. The wind blew hot and hard, full of grit. The sky, so red and dusty, made me uneasy. Bernie took the. 38 Special out of the glove box and tucked it in his belt. We got out of the car and walked around the boarded-up warehouse to the back. No one there. Bernie checked his watch.
“We’re a little early, big guy,” he said. “But early’s good when it comes to meetings like this.” Early: a tricky one. It had something to do with late, the exact relationship murky. But if Bernie said it was good, then that was all I needed. We paced around a bit, checked the rusty railroad tracks, the space where the Dumpster had been, and the nailed-shut back door which I knew from before wasn’t really nailed shut. We paced around some more, returned to the door. Bernie tried it. Nailed shut after all? It wouldn’t open.
He knocked. “Mr. Albert?” he called. “Mr. Albert?”
No answer. Sometimes I hear when someone’s around, sometimes I smell it, and sometimes I just get a feeling. Right now I got the feeling that no one was inside.
We waited. Time passed, how much I couldn’t tell you. Bernie checked his watch. The wind blew hotter and harder, and the sky turned redder and darker. We huddled in the doorway. Huge roiling clouds rose in the distance, much more solid-looking than regular clouds; the air got drier and drier, and dust blew into my eyes and ears. Bernie gave me a little pat. It was kind of nice, here in the back doorway of the old Flower Mart, just me and Bernie. I had no desire to be anywhere else.
“Why wouldn’t he show?” Bernie said. “Any reason why he’d want to screw Jiggs around? Probably a shitload.”
Uh-oh, not that. I thought of one of our very worst cases, not the details of the case, all gone now, but just the nighttime ending when the flatbed truck we were hiding on rolled over and all the portapotties came tumbling loose. I got ready for anything.
“Would help right about now if we had a solid theory of the case,” Bernie said.
A solid theory of the case: hadn’t heard that in way too long. Soon after the solid theory of the case came me grabbing the perp by the pant leg, which was how our cases closed just about every time, although not the portapotty case, which I’d rather skip for now.
The wind died down in a strange way, and as it did, the huge roiling clouds grew and grew and there seemed to be less air to breathe. I panted a bit, my tongue getting coated with dust.
“Is it basically about money?” Bernie said. “Maybe, but there’s a sicko element. Three killings, knife the weapon in every one. Knife because it’s handy at the moment, that’s one thing. Knife by choice is sicko. So therefore?”
Good news: we were back in so-therefore territory, Bernie at the controls. I waited, and waited some more, but Bernie went silent.
The sun, real low now, all of a sudden peeped through dust clouds, a deep, deep red like a light flashing on, and then quickly off. After that it got much darker and the wind started back up and in no time blew even stronger than before. All sorts of scraps began flying around, and I smelled the desert like I never had, huge and mighty.
We huddled closer together, Bernie kneeling down beside me. “Goddamn dust storm,” he said, raising his voice over the wind, which now had a voice of its own, like an angry creature working itself up to a howl. “No way he’ll be coming now. We’ll just have to wait this out.”
Fine with me. The dust storm moved in, rising and rising, towering over us. The sound rose, too, hurting my ears in the worst way, and I could barely see a thing, even though the sky wasn’t as dark as night. Besides, I see pretty well at night; the problem now was this strange thickness in the air, unlike the emptiness of night air, if that made any Whoa. What was that? A tiny sound barely cutting through the enormity of noise, kind of like a propeller going whap-whap-whap, or maybe actually more of a tick-tick-tick. That tick-tick-tick reminded me of something. I tried to think what.
“Christ,” Bernie said, and began rubbing his eyes, all teary like he was crying, an impossibility, of course. Now we were dealing not just with dust, but sand, too, desert sand somehow airborne, rasping like sandpaper against my muzzle and pock-pock-pocking the bricks of the warehouse, and on account of the pock-pock-pocking mixed into the roar of the storm-this strange dry storm, way drier than normal dry, hard to explain-I lost track of the tick-tick- tick. In short, we weren’t at our most alert, me and Bernie, and in that moment the tick-tick-tick ing suddenly came closer, and a dark car partly emerged from the reddish swirl of the dust storm and stopped in front of us.
Bernie, hand over his eyes to block that sand, didn’t see the car and probably hadn’t heard it, either, not a big surprise since I’d barely picked up on that tick-tick-tick myself. The driver’s window slid down and the driver peered out.
Not Cal Luxton, which was my first thought. This was the white-haired dude, not old, more like Bernie’s age: white hair kind of long, heavy black eyebrows, narrow little mouth; and those liquid black eyes. In the passenger
