The Dog Who Knew Too Much Read Online Free PDF

stuff like that? Not me and Bernie.
    “Are you armed, Bernie?” Anya said.
    “Nope.”
    Oh, too bad. A little gunplay is always exciting, and the .38 Special is often in the glove box. So: this wasn’t a real job, more like a vacation trip. All of a sudden my eyelids got real heavy. Does that ever happen to you, so fast that you barely have time to get comfortable before they slam shut?
    “… actually a pretty good father,” Anya was saying. A dream I was having—all about chasing a chubby javelina in the canyon behind our place on Mesquite Road, a chubby javelina that from out of nowhere sprouted a rattlesnake rattle on its twisted little tail in that way dreams have of abruptly getting away from you—broke in tiny pieces that zoomed away and vanished, like spaceships in those sci-fi movies when Bernie and I went through a period of watching sci-fi movies, over pretty quickly, one good thing about it.
    “Not that he sees much of Devin,” Anya went on, “but he’s never missed a child support payment and he’s paying the whole shot for the camp—it was even his idea.”
    We weren’t moving. I poked my head up over the door. We were parked at the side of a narrow road, flowers everywhere and a creek bubbling by. Hey! It was still a dream!
    Then I saw Bernie and Anya. She was on the near side of the creek, dipping her bare foot in the water. Bernie was on the other side, sort of wandering around at the edge of a forest—the first forest I’d seen in real life, although I knew them from the Discovery Channel—like he was looking for something.
    “It’s not a fat camp, exactly,” Anya was saying. “More of a build-you-into-a-man wilderness thing.”
    “Uh-huh,” said Bernie, a sort of uh-huh he had for when he wasn’t really listening.
    “Not that Devin doesn’t have a weight problem,” Anya said. “It breaks my heart sometimes. Kids can be so cruel.” She took a pack of cigarettes—uh-oh, Anya smoked cigarettes?—from the pocket of her jeans—how they fit in there was hard to say, her jeans being so tight—and lit up, flinging the match in the stream. “Tell me why that is?”
    “Ah,” said Bernie, suddenly stooping by a tree trunk and pulling something out of the ground. “I thought this might …”
    “What’s that?” said Anya.
    Bernie held it up. “Boletus edulis,” he said.
    “A mushroom?”
    “Yup.”
    “Edible?”
    “Delicious.”
    I hopped out of the car, no particular reason.
    “Are you sure?” Anya said. “When I was a kid my dad told me never to eat wild mushrooms.”
    “Yeah?” said Bernie. “My dad showed me how to find the good ones.”
    Bernie’s dad was suddenly in the picture? He never talks about his dad, who died a long time ago. His mom, a real piece of work, lives in Florida with the husband who came after the husband after Bernie’s dad, with possibly one more husband in there somewhere. I met her once: she called Bernie Kiddo! But I know now that wasn’t enough reason to do what I did, and it will never happen again, supposing she pays us another visit.
    “He sounds like a cool guy,” Anya said.
    Bernie didn’t say anything.
    “Your dad, I’m talking about,” Anya said. “Are you still close?”
    Bernie shook his head.
    “That’s too bad,” Anya said.
    “Yeah,” said Bernie. He looked over at me. “C’mon, Chet, grab a drink of this nice mountain water.”
    Exactly what I was thinking, or just about to think. The next thing I knew I was standing midstream up to my shoulders, lapping up just about the best water I’d ever tasted—fresh and cold, with just a little hint of something stony from the water flowing over smooth clean rocks.
    “Amazing,” said Anya.
    “What is?” said Bernie.
    “The way he really seems to understand you.”
    Bernie gave her a funny look, like he didn’t quite get what she was talking about. Neither did I. He took a long step onto one of those smooth rocks in the stream—careful, Bernie!—and another,