To Fetch a Thief: A Chet and Bernie Mystery (Chet and Bernie Mysteries) - Hardcover

Quinn, Spencer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1439157073 ISBN 13: 9781439157077

Publisher: Atria Books, 2010

Synopsis

In the third book in the brilliant New York Times bestselling series featuring a lovable and wise dog narrator, Chet and Bernie go under the big top to solve the most unlikely missing persons (and animals!) case ever.

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. . . .

“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 . . .

Chet has smelled a lot of unusual things in his years as trusted companion and partner to P.I. Bernie Little, but nothing has prepared him for the exotic scents he encounters when an old-fashioned traveling circus comes to town. Bernie scores tickets to this less-than-greatest- show-on-earth because his son Charlie is crazy about elephants. The only problem is that Peanut, the headlining pachyderm of this particular one-ring circus, has gone missing—along with her trainer, Uri DeLeath. Stranger still, no one saw them leave. How does an elephant vanish without a trace?

At first there’s nothing Bernie and Chet can do— it’s a police matter and they have no standing in the case. But then they’re hired by Popo the Clown, who has his own reasons for wanting to find out what has become of the mysteriously missing duo. After Chet takes a few sniffs in Peanut’s trailer and picks up her one-of-a-kind scent, he and Bernie are in hot pursuit, heading far away from the bright lights of the traveling show and into the dark desert night.

Some very dangerous people would prefer that Chet and Bernie disappear for good and will go to any lengths to make that happen. Across the border in Mexico and separated from Bernie, Chet must use all his natural strength and doggy smarts to try to save himself—not to mention Bernie and a decidedly uncooperative Peanut, too.

To Fetch a Thief shows why readers everywhere have fallen head-over-paws in love with the Chet and Bernie mystery series. Top-notch suspense, humor, and insight into the ways our canine companions think and behave make this the most entertaining and irresistible book in the series yet.

About this title

About the Author:

Spencer Quinn is the author of four previous Chet and Bernie mysteries, all of them New York Times bestsellers. He lives on Cape Cod with his dog, Audrey. Visit ChetTheDog.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

ONE

I smell trouble,” Bernie said.

Better stop right there. Not that I doubt Bernie. The truth is, I believe everything he says. And he has a nice big nose for a human. But what’s that saying? Not much.

It’s a fact that trouble has a smell—human trouble especially, sour and penetrating—but Bernie had never smelled trouble before, or if so he hadn’t mentioned it, and Bernie mentioned all kinds of things to me. We’re partners in the Little Detective Agency, me and Bernie, Bernie’s last name being Little. I’m Chet, pure and simple.

I took a quick sniff, smelled no trouble whatsoever, just as I’d expected, but did smell lots of other stuff, including burgers cooking on a grill. I looked around: no grill in sight, and this wasn’t the time to go searching, although all at once I was a bit hungry, maybe even more than a bit. We were on the job, trailing some woman whose name I’d forgotten. She’d led us out of the Valley to a motel in a flea-bitten desert town. That was what Bernie called it—flea-bitten—but I felt no fleas at all, hadn’t been bothered by them in ages, not since I started on the drops. But the funny thing was, even though I didn’t have fleas, just the thought of them suddenly made me itchy. I started scratching, first behind my ear, soon along my side, then both at once, really digging in with my claws, faster and—

“Chet, for God’s sake.”

I went still, one of my back paws frozen in midair. Bernie gave me a close look. “Don’t tell me I forgot the drops?” I gave him a close look right back. Bernie has these faint lines on his forehead. When he worries, they get deeper, like now. I don’t like it when Bernie worries. I pushed all thoughts about scratching clear out of my mind and sat straight up in the shotgun seat—my very favorite spot—alert and flealess.

We were in the Porsche. There are fancy Porsches out there—we see them on the freeways; we’ve got freeways out the yingyang in the Valley—but ours isn’t one of them. It’s very old, brown with yellow doors, and there’s a bullet hole in the back license plate. How that happened is a story for another time.

There was one palm tree on the street in front of the motel, a small one with dusty leaves, and we were parked behind it. That was part of our stakeout technique, hiding behind trees. Maybe it was our whole technique: I couldn’t think of any other parts at the moment. Beyond the palm tree stood the motel, horseshoe-shaped—just one of the many strange things about horses, that they wore shoes—with parking in between. Two cars in the lot, parked far from each other. One, a red convertible, belonged to the woman we were tailing. The other, a dark sedan, had been there when we arrived.

We gazed at the motel door closest to the red convertible. The woman—short, blond, curvy—had jumped out of the car and gone straight inside. Since then—nothing. That was one of the problems with divorce work: no action. We hated divorce work, me and Bernie—our specialty was missing persons—but with the state of our finances we couldn’t turn down anything. How our finances got this way is a long story, hard to keep straight in my head. Early on, there’d been the Hawaiian pants. Bernie loves Hawaiian shirts—right now he was wearing the one with the trumpet pattern—and he got the idea that people would snap up Hawaiian pants. In the end, they got snapped up by us. We’ve got a closet full of them, plus lots more at our self-storage in Pedroia. Later on came the tin futures. The tin futures looked good after some find in Bolivia, but then an earthquake buried everything, so here we were, back on the divorce beat.

Our client was a sad-eyed little guy named Marvin Winkleman who owned a ticket agency downtown. Don’t ask me what a ticket agency is. What’s important is that he thought his wife was cheating, and coughed up the $500 retainer. Don’t ask me about the cheating part, either. It’s a human thing; we operate differently in my world. “Just find out, one way or another,” Winkleman said. “I’ve got to know.”

Later, driving away, Bernie said, “Why do they always have to know? What’s wrong with ignorance is bliss?” I had no idea.

We sat. Nothing happened. The dusty palm leaves hung motionless. Bernie got fidgety. He opened the glove box, checked behind the visor, patted his pockets. Poor Bernie. He never bought cigarettes anymore, was trying to quit. After a while he gave up, sat back, folded his arms. Bernie has nice strong arms. I kept my eyes on them. Time passed. Then I heard a faint metallic sound and looked out. The motel door opened and out came the blond woman, patting her hair. I glanced at Bernie. Hey! His eyes were closed. I barked, not a loud bark but the soft kind I swallow in my throat. Bernie’s eyelids flew open. He put his hand on me, sat up straight, reached for the camera, and took her picture.

The blond woman got in the convertible and checked herself in the mirror. Bernie took another picture. She put on lipstick, gave her mouth a nice stretch. I gave my mouth a nice stretch, too, for no reason. “Looks pretty happy, doesn’t she?” Bernie said. She backed out of her space, drove out of the lot and down the street, away from us. Bernie took pictures of the motel, the blinking sign outside, the palm tree, and me. Then we went back to watching the motel room door. “Maybe there’s no one in there,” Bernie said. “Like she just enjoys a solitary little nap out in the desert now and then, making this a wild goose chase.”

Wild goose chase? I’d heard that one before, wanted to go on a wild goose chase very badly, but there were no geese in sight. Once—was this back when the Hawaiian pants returns started coming in?—I’d heard Bernie say, “Our goose is cooked.” But no cooked goose ever appeared. Meanwhile, I was hungry. The smell of burgers on the grill, while not as strong as—

The motel door opened. A man stepped out, a tall man in a white shirt and dark pants, knotting his tie. “Bingo,” said Bernie, I’m not sure why. I knew bingo—a game they played at the Police Athletic League fund-raiser, an event I’d been to only once and probably wouldn’t be back to, what with how exciting it turned out to be, and that unfortunate incident with my tail and all those little plastic chips on the chief’s card—but was this a time for games? Bernie aimed the camera at the man, gazed into it, and said, “Oh my God.” He slowly lowered the camera.

The man glanced around in a quick way that reminded me of lots of perps we’d taken down and walked to the dark sedan at the other end of the motel parking lot.

“Recognize him, Chet?” said Bernie in a low voice.

I wasn’t sure. Nothing wrong with my eyes—although Bernie says I can’t be trusted when it comes to color, so don’t put any money on the convertible being red—but they’re really more of a backup to my nose and my ears, and the man was too far away for me to get a whiff, plus he wasn’t saying anything. Still, he moved in a way that was kind of familiar, stiff and long-legged, like one of those birds that can’t fly, their name escaping me at the moment. The man unlocked the sedan. “Those software geeks,” Bernie said. “I should have known from the flip-flops. It’s Malcolm.”

Malcolm? This divorce case dude was someone we knew already? I checked those feet: long skinny feet with long skinny toes. I remembered the smell of those feet, somewhat like a big round piece of cheese Bernie had once left outside for a day or two. Yes, Malcolm for sure. I didn’t like Malcolm, even though I like just about every human I’ve ever met, even some of the perps and gangbangers. Malcolm didn’t like me, either; he was one of those humans who got nervous around my kind.

Malcolm climbed into his car and drove away. “What the hell are we going to do?” Bernie said. Huh? Weren’t we going to do what we always did when a divorce case worked out like this, which was deliver the evidence, collect the final check, grab a bite somewhere? “Specifically, what are we going to do about Leda?”

Leda? What did . . .? But then I began to see, sort of. Bernie was divorced himself. He has a kid, Charlie, who we only get to see some weekends and holidays. Charlie mainly lives in a big house in High Chaparral Estates, one of the nicest developments in the whole Valley, with Bernie’s ex-wife, Leda, and her boyfriend. The boyfriend was Malcolm. What else do you need to know? Maybe just that Bernie misses Charlie a lot—and so do I—but he never misses Leda—and neither do I. And then there’s Suzie Sanchez, a reporter for the Valley Tribune and sort of Bernie’s girlfriend. Suzie smells great—kind of like soap and lemons—and has a full box of treats in her car at all times. She’s a gem.

Bernie felt under the seat, found a mangled cigarette, lit up. He took a deep breath, blew out a big smoke cloud. I love the smell, would smoke if I could. His whole body relaxed; I could feel it. I could also feel him thinking, a nice feeling, like breezes brushing by. I waited, my own mind empty and peaceful.

“We could tell her,” he said after a while. “Or not tell her.”

He smoked some more.

“If we tell her, what happens? Something, for sure. If we don’t tell her, maybe nothing happens. Nothing is often the best policy.” Bernie’s hand reached out in that absentminded way it does sometimes and gave me a pat. Bernie’s a great patter, the very be...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1439157073
• ISBN 13: 9781439157077
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320