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Authors: Spencer Quinn

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense

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BOOK: The Sound and the Furry
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Mami went bright red and turned on me, screaming in the loudest, screechiest voice
I’d ever heard. The air around me shook with all these words I didn’t know, but they
sounded not good.

“Chet!” Bernie said. “In the car! Now!”

I was already halfway there, needed no encouragement from anybody. I knew one thing
for sure: Mami was the scariest human I’d ever met.

NINE

A
dented old pickup with painted crabs and shrimp on the side appeared and drove to
the end of the pier. The driver, a wiry dude with a bushy white mustache but no other
hair on his head got out. The wiry dude and Mami did some talking. He counted out
some money. They did some more talking. He called her a bad name. She called him a
bad name back, one Leda had used on Bernie, right before the end. The wiry dude counted
out more money and jammed it into her hand. Then he and Mami loaded crabs into a big
steel tub in the truck bed. The wiry dude drove off, trailing crab smell that showed
no sign of drifting away any time soon even though the crabs themselves were gone.
I felt nice and calm inside. Was it possible I’d messed up in some way? I didn’t try
to remember, just kept my eyes on Bernie. Any moment now he’d be calling me over.
Chet! C’mere, big guy!

But that didn’t happen. I waited, partway out of my seat, front paws on the edge of
the door. Meanwhile, Bernie and Mami were talking—some distance off, true, but I could
hear them perfectly well.

“Ralph keeps the Zodiac right here, tied to this very cleat,”
Mami said, pointing to the metal stick-up thing she’d roped her boat to. “He takes
it places time to time, anchorages he’s interested in, but not without tellin’ somebody,
and nobody got told. Night of the fifteenth she was floatin’ right here. Morning of
the sixteenth—gone.”

“That a Saturday night?” Bernie said.

Mami nodded. “Relevant fact. I can see you have a head on your shoulders.”

Hard to miss: that was my first thought. But maybe it had something to do with Mami
only having the one eye. That was as far as I could take it, but not too shabby, in
my opinion.

“. . . Sunday mornings we get a lot of hung-over worshippers in the pews,” Mami was
saying. “And up at the pulpit, too—sorry to bust your bubble.”

“That bubble got busted long ago,” Bernie said.

Mami spat a thin brown tobacco chew stream down off the pier and into the water. “We’re
gonna get along good you and me, in what they call a like-minded way.”

Bernie tilted his head to one side the way he does sometimes. What does it mean? I
didn’t know. But then came a surprise.

“What does that head tilt mean?” Mami said.

Wow! Mami and I were thinking along the same lines? Did I like that? Not one bit.

“Nothing,” Bernie said. “It means nothing.”

So now I knew. Today was shaping up nicely.

“Men,” Mami said.

I waited for more. Bernie seemed to be waiting, too. But when no more came, he finally
said, “And no one saw or heard from Ralph since?”

“Nope.”

“Does he carry a phone on board?”

“Lotta good it does,” Mami said. “Reception in these parts is like bees in a bottle.”

Whatever that meant, I wanted no part of it. I’d had experiences with bees, unforgettable,
even though I’d tried and tried.

“Did anyone check these places he liked to take the boat?”

“Do we all look stupid to you down here? Stands to reason we did that first thing.”

Bernie gazed at her. Was he trying to see if she looked stupid? And what did stupid
even look like? I had no idea. “Still,” Bernie said, “that’s where I’d like to start.”

“Meanin’ you want me to waste my time babysittin’ you around the damn swamp?”

“Nope. I’ll just need you to draw me a map.”

Mami squinted at him till that one eye was just a slit of bayou green. “You can read
a chart?”

“Yeah.”

“Ex-military by any chance?”

“Correct,” Bernie said. “And I’ll be wanting to rent a boat, if you can point me right.”

“Way ahead of you,” Mami said.

Way ahead of Bernie? That I’d have to see.

Mami had a pickup of her own, even more banged-up than the one that had driven off
with the crabs. It made a clanging noise and also a
scrape-scrape
that bothered my ears the whole time we followed her down the main street, inland
on a dirt road that grew more and more rutted—trees and bushes right up against us,
the spongy-smelling fringes sometimes trailing on our hood—and came to an end at another
bayou. This bayou was very narrow, the tops of the trees on both sides almost meeting
in the middle. There was a dock with a tall squarish boat—kind of like a
trailer—tied up to the end. A small motorboat drifted behind the big one, connected
by a seaweedy rope that sagged in the water.

We parked behind Mami’s pickup and got out.

“Noticed the Stars and Bars bumper sticker on your truck,” Bernie said.

“Got a problem with that?” said Mami.

“I do.”

“My great-great-great fought with General Lee,” Mami said. Up to that point, I’d been
following along pretty well.

“So did mine,” said Bernie. Now I was totally lost, but it didn’t matter because at
that moment I picked up that new smell again, the one that reminded me of frog or
toad or snake, but more peppery, a strange poop-peppery mix. I sniffed my way down
to the water’s edge. There was snake, too—I’d been smelling snake constantly as soon
as we’d entered bayou country—but this new one, so much more interesting, wasn’t snake.
It got stronger and stronger as I came to the water. I gazed down into the dark stillness.
Tiny insects skittered around on the surface here and there. I suppose I could have
licked them up, maybe if the air hadn’t been so thick: I just wasn’t that hungry.
I took a nice drink instead, which turned out to be not the best water I’d ever tasted—too
warm, too flat, too muddy, too salty. But no complaints. I realized how thirsty I
was—crazy how that happens sometimes when you start to drink—and lapped up some more.
And what was this? I tasted a—what’s does Bernie say? Soupçon? That was it: a soupçon,
which maybe means a bit of soup, chicken noodle being my favorite—surprising how often
people leave soup in their bowls—but forget about that. The point is I tasted a soupçon
of that interesting new smell they had in these parts. Hope that makes sense. It does
where I come from.

“This is
Little Jazz
, Ralph’s houseboat,” Mami was saying.
“You best bunk down here. Nearest motel’s a rat hole. I don’t recommend it.”

Made perfect sense. Shut-eye in a rat hole? I knew I wouldn’t get much.

“And any explorin’ you want to do, just take that there pirogue. Mix is fifty to one,
and keep the goddamn prop offen the bottom. There’s a chart on the console inside—red
X’s is where he likes to go.” She tossed him a set of keys.

Bernie caught them—real easy, the way Bernie catches stuff—and said, “One more thing.”

“What’s that?” said Mami, pausing with her hand on the open door of the pickup.

“Why didn’t you file a missing persons report?”

“Didn’t you go over all that with Duke and Lord? ’Cording to my information, you did.”

“Just confirming it,” Bernie said. “The cops here are aligned with or possibly members
of this other family, the Robideaus. Does that sum it up?”

Mami didn’t reply. She got in the pickup, sitting sideways to us so we couldn’t see
her good eye, only the patch. That was scary, if I happened to be the type who gets
scared, which I’m not.

“I’m going to take a wild guess,” Bernie said.

There was a long silence. Then Mami said, “Go on if you’re gonna.”

“That fellow boater of yours back in town was Grannie Robideau,” Bernie said.

Mami snapped her head around, glared at Bernie with her good eye. The patch-only angle
suddenly seemed better to me. “She’s no goddamn fellow of mine and you best watch
your mouth, pretty boy.”

Pretty boy? No one had ever called Bernie pretty before. Bernie’s
very good-looking, of course, certainly one the best-looking people in the whole Valley,
but pretty? Pretty was all about Tulip and Autumn, for example, two very nice young
women—and off-the-scale patters—who worked for our pal Livia Moon at her house of
ill repute back in Pottsdale, and not about tough men like Bernie, and Bernie was
a tough man, never forget that.

Bernie’s face didn’t change at all. He made no mention of the pretty boy thing. Instead,
he said, “What’s the story on the load of shrimp Lord stole from her?”

“Who told you that?”

“Lord himself, although not directly.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Mami said.

“In fact, he ended up denying it, if I followed him correctly. But his denial was
the kind guilty guys come up with, at least in my experience. So now that the cat’s
out of the bag, what went down?”

Now that what? I sniffed the air and detected not a trace of cat. Was that because
the cat was in fact still in some sort of bag? Not likely. Bags don’t stop me: I can
smell every single item in a grocery bag. And what bag was he talking about? I trotted
over to a tree and raised my leg. It was all I could think to do.

“I got nothin’ to tell you,” Mami said. “G’wan back to where you come from, far as
I’m concerned. Blood is thicker than water.”

Take it from someone who’s tasted both: Mami was totally right about that. But how
did she know? She had to be watched like a hawk. I’d watched plenty of hawks watching
me out in the desert, knew how it was done.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Bernie said. “But we’ve worked a lot of cases, Chet and
I, and one thing I can tell you is that the results are always better when there’s
trust between us and the client.”

“Yeah?” said Mami, turning the key. “Then how about this’ll be the exception that
proves the rule?” She backed away from the dock in a fast, tight turn, then slammed
to a stop, the pickup rocking back and forth. “Get one thing clear. Lord didn’t grab
those shrimp. A whole goddamn ton—you think he could pull off something like that?
And where’d those shrimp end up—ask yourself that.” Then Mami hit the gas and zoomed
away on the rutted road, trailing dust that formed a golden cloud in the sunlight
and slowly vanished. This was a lovely spot in its way.

Bernie looked at me. “I should have handled that better.”

What a crazy idea! He’d handled whatever it was perfectly. We walked onto the dock,
a floating dock that was kind of unsteady under our feet. At first I didn’t like it
and then I did.

“And proves was a way of saying tests at one time,” he said. “So exception that proves
the rule doesn’t even mean what she thinks.”

That zinged over my head, here and gone. We stepped up onto the deck of
Little Jazz
.

My very first ever time on a boat! I liked its old wooden smell from the get-go. We
walked around the whole deck from back to front and back again, went down a few steps
into a sort of living room, the floor covered with a strange shaggy sort of rug.

“Welcome to suburbia, circa 1963,” said Bernie.

I didn’t get any of that except for the welcoming part. Very nice of Bernie to say,
but not necessary: we were partners, after all.

Bernie opened a low door, crouched down, and peered into a small dark space. “What’s
keeping this thing afloat is my question,” he said.

Not mine. It hadn’t even occurred to me. All I knew was that we were floating, no
problem, and also that a pita chip was somewhere
in the vicinity, the smell of a pita chip being just about impossible to miss, at
least in my world. In a moment or two I’d found it behind a stool at the eating counter
in the kitchen part of the boat. I downed it in one not-very-crunchy bite, totally
satisfying. Freshness doesn’t matter at all when it comes to pita chips; does it ever
matter with any foods? None came immediately to mind.

Meanwhile, Bernie was sitting at the control console, examining some papers. “If I’m
reading this chart right, one of Ralph’s anchorages is less than a mile from here,”
he said. “How about we check it out in that pirogue and then see if we can hunt up
some chow?”

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