Free Thereby Hangs a Tail by Spencer Quinn

Bernie had even asked to see someone’s bruise, but not this time.
    “Anything you can tell me about the car or pickup, whichever it was—the color, for example?”
    Nance shook her head.
    “Anything that would help identify the attackers?”
    “They were masked, as I said.”
    “But you might have caught a glimpse of skin color, or heard an accent.”
    She shook her head again.
    “Anything distinctive about their clothes?”
    Nance closed her eyes. Humans often did that when they were concentrating extra hard; made no sense to me at all.
    “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry I can’t be more help.”
    “There’s a way you can.”
    “How?”
    “We need a client.”
    “I don’t understand,” Nance said.
    “In order for me to talk to the police, to have standing in the case, we need a client, someone to hire us.”
    “You’re asking me to hire you?” Nance said. “After . . . after . . .”
    She glanced at me. “Why would I want to do that?”
    “Because we’re good at this kind of case,” Bernie said. “Missing persons. You can check us out—it’s what we do.”
    “Besides,” said Nance, “I don’t have that kind of money.”
    “We’ll work for a nominal fee,” Bernie said.
    Uh-oh. I knew nominal from experience: a big word meaning nothing.
    “I couldn’t even do that,” Nance said. “Not without approval.”
    “Whose?” said Bernie.
    “Mr. Borghese’s,” Nance said.
    “Can we call him?” Bernie said. “Right now? In cases like this, time is with the enemy.”
    Nance’s eyes, glittering in the sun, went to me again. I’d been standing, but I sat down, couldn’t tell you why, and looked calm, steady, highly trained; reliable through and through. “I’ll take you to him,” she said. “He’s at the ranch.”

EIGHT

    I ’d been to a ranch once before—a real working ranch, as Bernie said—on a family trip back in the Leda days. Bernie bought cowboy boots for everyone—Charlie, Leda, himself. No footwear for me, thanks, as I may have mentioned already. The fun we had, starting with the looks the old ranch hands gave Bernie when he came down to breakfast in his cowboy boots and his favorite Hawaiian shirt, the one with the orange flowers. But those looks all changed when the hands put on a shooting contest, Coke bottles on a fence rail, and asked Bernie, with these little smiles on their faces, if he’d like to try his luck. Blam blam—smithereens! No surprise to me, but later he turned out to be pretty good with the lasso, too. And Charlie—he’d loved the lasso. He’d tried to lasso me, just for fun, and I’d let him come close, on account of him being Charlie. But no one puts the lasso on me, for fun or not.
    All I hadn’t liked about the ranch were the horses. What’s up with them? Totally unreliable, always twitching for no reason, but humans don’t seem to get that, go on and on about how beautiful they are until I just want to trot over toward one of those weird legs, the real skinny part, and give it the tiniest . . . but I would never do that, at least not again, after what happened that time at the ranch.
    Why I’m going into this is because the first thing I saw as we drove up to the Borgheses’s ranch was a big white horse prancing in a corral with a white rail fence. Something about him made a bad impression on me right from the get-go. A ranch without horses—now that would be just about perf—
    “Chet! Knock it off !”
    Knock what off ? The barking? That was me? I opened my mouth real wide, let my tongue flop out, tried to look innocent. My lip got caught on one of my teeth; it took some time to straighten all that out.
    We followed Nance on her bike. Hey, she could ride, leaning into the turns, revving the engine with a vroom vroom vroom that had me sitting straight up. Nance led us through a gate with a big sign above, stretching over the whole road. “ ‘Rio Loco Ranch, 1846,’ ” Bernie said. “They say Wild Bill Hickok stayed here.” Wild