Free The Case of the Vampire Vacuum Sweeper by John R. Erickson

house, I switched all circuits over to Master Control’s Locater Program, called “Who’s There?” My ears, which are very sensitive listening devices, began picking up the sounds of barking dogs. I made a course correction, veering left onto a new heading that appeared to be taking me straight toward the . . .
    Holy smokes, straight toward the weaning pen!
    This was looking bad, fellers, and I sure was wishing that I had backup for this deal. But I didn’t. It was me against the . . . whoever it was out there. I went to Full Throttle, grabbed a higher gear, hit Afterburners, and zoomed on and onward into the spooky dark of nightness.
    On the spurt of the moment, I made the decision not to bark. Barking would reveal my presence to the scoundrels, and for this mission, I just might need the element of surprise. In fact, I would need every advantage I could come up with.

    Near the southwest corner of the weaning trap, I throttled back and came to a gliding stop. I peered into the darkness in front of me and saw . . . not much, actually, just the shadowy forms of the calves. They seemed restless, nervous. They were milling around and looking off toward the southeast. I followed the direction of their respective gazes and saw . . .
    There he was! An unidentified stray dog. I studied his swillowet . . . sillywet . . . sihllowet . . . I studied the dark outline of his dark outline and memorized every detail. Description: big guy, long nose, sharp ears, long bushy tail. In some ways he resembled our profiles of a prowling coyote, but I wasn’t so easily fooled.
    See, our intelligence reports had mentioned stray dogs, not coyotes. Heh, heh. Otherwise I might have fallen for the coyote trick. Sometimes our enemies will switch profiles on us, in an attempt to confuse us and throw us off the trail of the track. A lot of dogs will fall for it, but I had seen it before.
    There wasn’t much these guys could throw at me that I hadn’t seen before.
    I peered deeper into the darkness and spotted a second dog. Description: big guy, long pointed ears, sharp nose, bushy tail. He was following the first dog. Did you notice that the description of Dog Two was almost identical to the description of Dog One? That was a pretty interesting clue. It meant that both were using the same Phony Coyote Pro­file. Perhaps they were too cheap to buy two Phony Profiles and had used the same one twice.
    Okay, we had smoked out two of the villains. That left . . . hang on a second whilst I do some calculations.
    4 – 2 = 2
    That left two stray dogs unaccounted for. I scanned the horizon, searching for the other two villains, which would give us our total of four stray dogs. I didn’t find them. Hmmm. Well, that was all right. I had plenty of time. I was in no rush. I would just hunker down and wait them out.
    I hunkered down in the weeds and waited. Several minutes crawled by.
    Have I ever mentioned that waiting drives me nuts? Your active minds find it . . . I absolutely hate to sit around waiting, is the point. I’d rather take a whipping.
    At that point, it dawned on me what had happened. Miss Viola had miscounted. Her report had stated that she had seen “four stray dogs crossing the road,” but don’t forget that she’d seen them at night, in the glare of her headlights. Headlights cast shadows, right? Okay, check out these numbers:
    2 dogs + 2 shadows = 4 impressions of dogs
    Are you following all of this? I know it’s kind of complicated, but notice that by using the Dog­Shadow equation, we have arrived at the correct answer, the very number mentioned in Blue Heron’s intelligence report.
    Oh, Blue Heron was Miss Viola’s code name for this operation. Sorry.
    Well, all the pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place. We had two stray dogs on the ranch, not four, and we had worked out the mathematics on it. Everything checked out and now it was time for me to move into