Free The Sound and the Furry by Spencer Quinn Page A

“Meaning you came up empty.”
    Duke glared at him. “None of your damn business.”
    Lord kept laughing, slapped his knee. Bernie opened his mouth like he was about to
     say something, then changed his mind. We hit the road, hadn’t gone a block before
     I leaned across and gave him a quick lick behind the nearest ear. Totally dry, just
     as I’d suspected.
    Bernie laughed, gave me a pat. “You’re in a friendly mood.”
    No, not that at all. But . . . yes, I was!

EIGHT
    C rackpot idea, quote unquote?” Bernie said.
    We were back in the Porsche, crossing a bridge over a wide river, the widest river
     in my life by far, the water shining in the sun. And so much of it!
    “Is that what we are?” Bernie went on. “Someone’s crackpot idea, come to life?”
    I couldn’t help him. When the quote unquote thing starts up, he’s on his own.
    “Do those two birds actually think they can manipulate us?”
    Uh-oh. Birds: not my favorite, as I may have mentioned already. I looked up and saw
     birds right away, more than two. Which two did Bernie mean? I wasn’t sure, but then
     a big brown one with a huge beak dove down toward the water, and a few moments after
     that an even bigger brown one followed it. The first bird plunged right into the water,
     smack, without even trying to slow down, disappeared under the surface and came up
     with—what was that? A fish? And then the two birds were fighting over it. A mistake,
     because the fish wriggled free and fell back into the river. The two birds rose up
     as one, beating each other with theirwings. Even from this high above, I could hear their squawking. We had nothing to
     fear from those two birds. Bernie was right again. I put a paw on his knee. He gave
     me a pat.
    We drove over the bridge, were soon on a two-lane blacktop in flat country, the wettest,
     greenest country I’d ever seen, some kind of creek or canal glistening through the
     trees almost the whole time.
    “Bayou country, big guy,” Bernie said. He sniffed the air. Whoa! How often did that
     happen? “I think I smell something.” Go on, Bernie, go on. But he did not. There was lots to smell, of course, way too much to go into now,
     but sometimes in life one certain smell dominates all the others—take the time all
     the trash haulers in the Valley went on strike—and that was the case in bayou country.
     This was a rot domination zone, no question, rot falling down on and rising up through
     all the other smells out there. Quite pleasant: I liked it here.
    “On the other hand,” Bernie said and then paused.
    On the other hand what? I couldn’t remember the first hand. Once at a party, maybe
     that time some of the guys had a beer keg throwing competition, Bernie’d said that
     if people had a different number of hands they’d think different. But nobody had gotten
     it, whatever it was, and we’d had to leave pretty soon after. That keg bouncing down
     the street after us: what a sight! Especially under a full moon. But that wasn’t the
     point. The point was . . . the thread, the thread. I was in danger of losing it, and
     then the danger passed, and it was gone. I was back to feeling tip-top, or even better.
    “What if the whole family’s in on it, even Ralph,” Bernie continued after a nice relaxing
     silence, “and they’re using us as a cat’s paw against these Robideaus?”
    Whoa! Stop right there! Or even before. Us? A cat’s paw? HadI ever heard anything worse in my whole life? Panting started up, big-time.
    “Nah, no way,” Bernie said, after a moment or two. “Too Byzantine.”
    I got the “no way” part. No way meant forget it, one of my specialties. The panting
     got itself under control. Meanwhile, the road had narrowed, the trees looming in closer
     and closer. Their leaves were dark green, but a kind of whitish fringe grew over everything,
     touching the ground in some places. I’d never seen anything like that whitish fringe.
     The smell was a bit like the