The Dog Who Knew Too Much Read Online Free PDF Page B

maybe slipping a bit on the second one, but he loweredhis hand to my back and kept his balance, and then he was on the near-side bank.
    “Who wants to try this mushroom?” Bernie said. He and I were the only takers. What can I tell you? Delish. About that time, kind of late in the game, Bernie noticed the cigarette in Anya’s hand. “You smoke?”
    “I’m trying to quit,” Anya said.
    “Me, too,” said Bernie.
    “Sorry,” Anya said and spun the cigarette into the stream. It fell in with a tiny hiss—I love sounds like that!—and bobbed away in the current.
    “Hey,” said Bernie, giving her another one of those second looks of his. “Thanks.”
    Not long after, back in the car, we entered a long rising canyon with mountains on both sides, tall green trees growing on their lower slopes but all rocky and steep above that. The air smelled different from any other air I’d ever smelled in my life, all the scents—of trees and grass and flowers, and the toothpaste Bernie had used that morning, and the smoke on Anya’s every breath even though she hadn’t lit up again—so much stronger and also each one more spread out, with more room for itself, sort of more smells and less air. Made no sense, I know, and I drove the whole complicated business out of my mind just as we turned onto a dirt road and passed under a sign that hung beneath a huge set of horns nailed to a thick wooden beam. Who needs complications?
    “Big Bear Wilderness Camp,” Bernie read. “Eight thousand and ninety-nine feet.”
    Did he say bear ? We didn’t have bears in the Valley, or anywhere in our desert, but I knew all I needed to know about them from Animal Planet, which was that I had no desire to meet one.
    “This is exactly where my altitude headache kicked in when I drove Devin up here,” Anya said.
    “And now?” Bernie said.
    “Nope. I feel fine.”
    So did I. I’d had a headache once, after this time when a perp name of Jocko hit me with a baseball bat, a Willie McCovey model, Bernie said, which we later sold to a collector for a “tidy sum”—“for once, how about a sum so big it’s untidy?” Bernie had said to our buddy Sergeant Rick Torres from Missing Persons in the Valley PD, a joke Rick didn’t get, me neither, and anyway, Bernie invested the money in something or other that soon went belly up, and Jocko’s now breaking rocks in the hot sun, so nothing to worry about there, but the point was that unless I’m dinged on the head I don’t get headaches, which is different for humans. Bernie, for example, wakes up with a headache if he drinks too much bourbon the night before—half a bottle always does the trick—and as for Leda, headaches could strike at any time for any reason, although most often when they were about to go to bed, she and Bernie.
    But enough of that. We crossed a narrow wooden bridge. A stream flowed underneath, wider and faster than the creek I’d drunk from. Not thirsty at all, but I wouldn’t have minded a quick sample. What was going on with all this water? Nothing like travel: you got to see new things.
    We went through a grove of trees—did I spot something dark and shadowy moving deep in there?—and followed the road on a long curve toward the sunny side of the canyon. Up ahead a large, flat clearing backed into the mountainside, and in the clearing stood a few big log cabins—smoke rising from the chimney of the biggest one, eggs and sausages in the air—and across from them at the top of a little rise, two rows of blue tents. Camp!Of course! Everything clicked together in my mind, a lovely feeling that hadn’t happened since the Furillo divorce when I caught the scent of Mr. Furillo’s aftershave on the flight attendant who turned out to be his girlfriend. Case closed, although I didn’t grab her by the pant leg: that’s a no-no in divorce work, a lesson I’d learned early on, and then relearned a few times. But the point was we had a tent, me and Bernie, and had been on