Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

“Slow down,” I said. “You'll see the little bedbug soon enough.” She ignored me completely, bouncing up and down onto her rear paws and scrabbling with her nails at the nearest solid surface. I guess my mother was right: there's someone to love everybody.

Janet Drive was as deserted as an abandoned landing strip. The clouds had broken, giving the moon a chance to caw triumphantly at the earth until the clouds gathered again to seal off its light. In the meantime, the houses were lighted with a cold, chalky glow. When I'd been a kid and my family had lived for a year on the east coast, I'd filled a jar full of fireflies and read by their light under the covers so my parents wouldn't know that I was still awake. Janet Drive was bathed in the same icy, slightly greenish light.

I pulled Alice up to the curb opposite Birdie's house and snapped open the glove compartment. The little.32 I'd brandished in the house near the airport slipped into my hand as though a surgeon had reconstructed my joints just to fit around the handle. It didn't make me feel much braver, but it was better than nothing. Woofers was standing on my lap and emitting little breathless yelps. I looked both ways and grabbed her collar before I opened the door, possessed by images of a two-ton semi squashing her into the pavement.

“You go when I tell you to,” I said. “Yorkshire terrier or not, I've grown to like you.”

All the lights in Birdie's house were gleaming in welcome. For all I knew, he might have laid out a platter full of French bread and Brie to welcome his child home. He might also have been waiting with a Thompson submachine gun. When I was sure that the street was empty I opened the door and clambered out, Woofers straining eagerly. She was making a peculiar gasping sound. After I realized that she was in danger of strangling against her collar, I let her go. She made it across the street in Olympic time and paused at the end of the lawn, looking back at me.

“Beauty before age,” I grumbled. “Just keep your mouth shut.” One of the many things I didn't need was a howl of canine enthusiasm alerting whoever might be in the house that the detective had arrived.

“Stay,” I whispered, crossing the street. Miracle of miracles, she stayed. I gave the little gun an experimental heft, and then, having managed to cross Janet Drive without being run down by a speeding bus, I reached down and took hold of Woofers' collar again.

“We're in this together,” I told her. She looked up at me wisely, but her manic tail was a dead giveaway. The kid was not in control.

Walking bent over, one hand on the collar and the other on the gun, I negotiated the lawn. I looked like Rip Van Winkle before the kinks wore off. No one shot at me from the house before I reached the front door. No large men in chicken outfits bled through the bougainvillea to cut me into fingers, whatever they were.

The front door was ajar.

“Go,” I said, letting go of Woofers' collar.

She went. She shouldered her way through the door with more strength than it was possible for her to possess, and I snapped a bullet into position in the gun and prepared to follow. I had my foot against the door when she began to cry.

She was making rapid little high-pitched sounds. I pushed the door open, and she came out. Her ears were flat against her head, and her tail was between her legs. She went past me and onto the lawn without looking back.

“Woofers,” I said. “Come here, Woofers.”

She sat down with her back to me and threw a mournful yelp at the moon. The sound of it sent shivers down my back.

“Birdie?” I said, pushing the door open with my foot.

The place was immaculate. It had been clean before, but someone had gone over it with the ultimate dust rag. Surfaces shone as though they were newly minted. The masks on the wall had had their tongues polished.

He was in the bedroom, sitting doubled over on the bed.

The bed was a terrible reddish-brown, covered with crinkly little coils of gift-wrap ribbon. Birdie was wearing an ancient silk kimono that once might have been yellow. Now it was reddish-brown, like the bed. His awful hairdo hung limply over his face, turban renewal gone permanently awry. One hand grasped something long and silvery, an antique Japanese sword.

He'd committed seppuku , Japanese ritual disembowel-ment, one of the world's most painful means of suicide. The gift-wrap ribbon spread over the bedspread was his intestines.

The little shit had had more guts than I'd thought. He'd also had the last laugh.

On the pillow next to his head was a piece of paper with a ragged top edge, torn from a secretary's steno pad. As Woofers mourned at the moon outside, I picked it up and read what he'd written.

FIND THEM YOURSELF, it read. AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT, FUCK YOU.

I was nowhere again.

“Tell me about the scanner,” I said. It hadn't been I much of a drive, but I felt like I'd run a triathlon. Woofers skulked next to me, keeping very close to my feet. She'd begun to cry when I'd tried to leave her in the car.

Morris looked down at her, blinking in semaphore, obviously rattled by my unannounced appearance at nine p.m., obviously wishing Jessica were there. Unless a good woman straightened him out, Morris was always going to be the kind of guy who needed moral support.

“The scanner?” he asked Woofers. He pronounced it as though it were a word he'd memorized phonetically from a foreign language.

“That gizmo,” I said impatiently, “that doodad that you were fooling around with the first day I was here. The Yellow Pages, remember?”

“The scanner ,” he said. “Why didn't you say so?” His room was the usual technological mare's nest. Upstairs his mother was working on a full-size loom to the accompaniment of Dvorak's NewWorldSymphony . It was a family whose members kept to themselves.

“Morris,” I said gently, “forgive me. I'm not a technical whiz like you.”

He scratched the back of his head while he mentally replayed the conversation. There was a child's scrabbled drawing of grass above the pocket of his shirt where he'd repeatedly put away his pens without retracting the points. “You did say scanner, didn't you?”

“Just tell me about the goddamn thing.” I was desperate enough to be slightly menacing.

“It's very simple,” he said, not noticing. “It just absorbs graphic information, digitizes it, and then inputs it onto disk. It has to interface with your software, of course. And your EGA board, if you're not scanning print.”

Wondering what it was about teenagers that made people want to find the ones who disappeared, I drew back my hands-which had stretched involuntarily toward his neck- and said, “Morris. Morris, we're both going to make an effort now. I'm going to try to speak plain old English and you're going to try to understand it. Are we together so far?” I cracked my knuckles.

He started to say something and then looked at me more closely. Then he looked down at my hands, which, I was surprised to see, had moved again and grasped the points of his shirt collar. He shut his mouth and nodded. His Adam's apple did a little bob.

“Good,” I said, pulling my hands back and forcing them into my pockets. “Good beginning. Now, using the scanner, if I follow you, you can take a picture off a piece of paper, put it into a computer, and then print it out again. Is that right?”

“That girl,” he said nervously. “That Japanese girl who was on that lady's client list. The picture I showed you at your house was a scanned image. It was kind of low-res, remember?”

“Morris,” I said threateningly, pulling out my right hand. It balled itself into a fist as we both watched.