Free The Silver Ghost by Charlotte MacLeod Page B

God! The raccoon’s wearing a black felt hat pulled down over his eyes and a pink and green necktie with yellow spots on it. He’s puffing on this big cigar and he talks like Jimmy Cagney. And the chauffeur’s just sitting there. Finally it hits me, I’m having a fight with a raccoon. Then I catch on. Ifs a stuffed coon. The chauffeur’s a ventriloquist and he’s working its mouth and paws with wires or something. So I go up to the front window and say, Okay, wise guy, let’s see your driver’s license.
    “So he still doesn’t look at me or say a word. He just holds out his hand with a card in it. I go to take the card and the whole hand comes with it. I’m standing there looking down at this hand and thinking. Oh my God, when the Chevy takes off like a bullet and there’s the raccoon leaning over the back of the rumble seat waving bye-bye. I ought to have shot the bastard’s tires out, but I was laughing so hard I couldn’t get my gun out. So I just waved back with his hand. I’ve still got the darn thing in my locker down at the station. Do you think that was him?”
    “I hope so,” said Max. “I’d hate to think there was another one like Wouter running around loose. Do you suppose we could get a little more light over here?”
    “Sure, wait a second.”
    Myre nipped over to the workbench, opened a drawer, and pulled out a large battery lantern. “I figured they’d have one like this around the place. Want me to hold it for you?”
    “Just set it on the floor here, if you don’t mind, and see if you can find me a screwdriver or something.”
    “I noticed one in the drawer.”
    Myre brought back the tool and stood watching while Max probed gently at inch after inch of the concrete, like a dentist checking a patient’s teeth for sensitive spots. “What are you hunting for, Mr. Bittersohn?”
    “I don’t know,” Max replied. “It just strikes me that a mere slab of concrete graffiti might be a fairly tame joke for a guy who could invent a talking raccoon.”
    He went on peering and poking, occasionally using his pocket magnifier for a closer look at something that appeared to merit closer attention but turned out not to. At last he was down on his knees, his scholar’s robe making a dark puddle around his legs and picking up dust from the floor. Wouter’s literary efforts might have been amusing to those in the know, but Max was growing bored with inscriptions like JT LOVES ID, which JT couldn’t possibly if JT was one of the Tolbathys’ intelligent grandsons and ID was the obnoxious little Imogene Dork whom Max had last seen pouring maple syrup over her cousin James to sweeten him up at one of Aunt Appie’s awful gatherings. As far as he could see, he was getting nowhere except to the end of his patience.
    Down at the right-hand corner, Wouter had chosen to finish off his cumbersome frolic with nothing more original than a lopsided heart not more than five or six inches high. Inside, Wouter must have used a nail or some small tool to print K.I. + C.K.
    Max jumped to his feet, dusted off his robe, handed Sergeant Myre the screwdriver, and kicked the center of the heart. Instantly and silently, the entire back wall of the alcove swung out at a right angle to the car shed. Instead of scribbled-over concrete, the two men were looking at broad fields of green clover and a narrow bluestoned lane.
    “Why, that crazy son of a bitch!”
    Max’s cry was from the heart. Sergeant Myre yelled, too.
    “Jeez! And I thought getting stuck with a waxwork hand was something. What the hell would make him do a thing like this?”
    “The mere fact that he happened to see how it could be done, I suppose. Wouter wouldn’t have stopped to consider the possible side effects of putting in a door its owner didn’t know he had. I wonder how you shut it.”
    “Maybe you just wait a while and a stuffed raccoon comes along and shuts it for you,” Myre suggested.
    “That’s a reasonable possibility,” Max