The Case of the Deadly Ha-Ha Game Read online

  Maybe he was trying to be funny. They do that all the time, you know, and we dogs have a terrible time trying to figure out what’s going on. I mean, what’s wrong with calling charcoal lighter charcoal lighter? Call it what it is and then everyone, including us dogs, will know what we’re talking about.

  But that’s not what they do. They make up all these silly names and they’re always trying to be funny, but they’re not. Not funny at all. If you ask me . . . never mind.

  Anyway, the record will show that Loper was a lazy fire-builder and used dangerous explosives to start his mesquite fire. He looked into the fire for a few minutes, then glanced at his watch and said, “Twenty minutes.” And then he and his skinny, ridiculous, mayonnaise-colored legs went back into the house.

  Let me tell you, if I owned a pair of legs like that, I would keep them covered up. I would undress in a darkened room, maybe even a cellar, and I would never expose them to the general public, not even to my loyal dogs.

  But you know, one of the more touching aspects of our relationship with humans is that we dogs keep many dark secrets about our masters. It’s part of our Cowdog Oath. We are sworn never to reveal the dark secrets of their lives.

  Take Slim Chance for example. The general public sees him as a normal man, your average hired hand on your average cattle ranch. Only his dogs know the truth, the awful truth, and it’s so shocking that I’m not at liberty to reveal it.

  Honest, no kidding. I’ve sworn a solemn oath and I sure wouldn’t want to . . . I mean, this kind of stuff is supposed to remain sealed for fifty or sixty years.

  But what the heck, maybe it wouldn’t hurt . . .

  If I revealed several of the darkest truths about Slim, would you promise never to repeat them? I mean, a dog could get himself into a world of trouble if this ever leaked out.

  Tell you what. I’ll let you peek at a secret report about Slim, things known only to his loyal dogs, but you must forget that you ever saw them. Promise? Okay, here we go. Hang on.

  Shocking Revelations File #425-33309-47576B

  For Dogs Only: Top Secret

  Shocking Revelation #1: The elastic in Slim’s undershorts is so old and worn out, he has trouble keeping them up. They slip down, in other words, and one of these days they’re liable to end up around his ankles.

  Shocking Revelation #2: Slim doesn’t change his socks every day. That is one reason his boots stink. The other reason is that his boots are ten years old.

  Shocking Revelation #3: When he does change socks, he chooses socks with holes in them. Some have a hole at the toe, others are worn through at the heel. His reason for continuing to wear them is—this is a direct quote from Slim—“the holes are at the ends and the rest of the sock is still in good shape.”

  Shocking Revelation #4: Slim snores in his sleep. He denies this, but if you want the truth, ask his dogs. Believe me, he snores, and two winters ago, he snored so loud he cracked a window in his bedroom. No kidding.

  End of Top Secret File

  So there we are, the whole book on Slim’s darkest secrets. There may be others, but this will do for now. At this point, you should forget you ever read this stuff. You promised.

  But we were talking about Loper, weren’t we? Yes. He had just started his mesquite fire in the barbecue grill and had gone back inside the house with his ridiculous pale legs, leaving me and Drover to finish our heartless interrogation of the . . .

  Sniff, sniff.

  . . . of the cat, the dumb cat. Suddenly I caught the scent of something good riding around on the evening breeze. Sniff, sniff. And the smell bore a faint resemblance to the aroma of . . . well, fresh steak.

  I whirled around to the cat. “Back to work, Kitty. You had just told this court about your favorite brand of cat food, something called Yummy Tummy.”

  “Yummy Cat, Hankie.”

  “Whatever. And you had told this court that your favorite flavor was . . . what?”

  “Let me think. Strawberry?”

  “No. Forget the strawberry. We have no use for berries. Get to the point.”

  He fluttered his eyelids. “Let’s see, Hankie. Was it . . . chocolate?”

  I pushed my nose into his face and curled my lips. “Out with it, Kitty, you know what we’re looking for. Steak. That’s what you said, and don’t try to deny it.”

  “I said steak?”

  “Right. You said steak. And since you’ve already said it, you can’t take it back. You told this court that your Yummy Tummy comes in steak flavor. You also hinted that if we dogs wished to run some tests on this variety of Yummy Tummy . . .”

  “Yummy Cat, Hankie.”

  “. . . you would have no objections. Isn’t that what you told this court? Tell the truth, Pete. For once in your life, face the truth and be brave. I know that telling the truth is hard on you cats, but in the long run, it’s the best course.”

  “Well . . . since you put it that way, Hankie, all right. That’s what I said. Yes.”

  “Thank you, Pete. No further questions.” I gave the witness a worldly sneer. I had broken him down with relentless drill-bit questions, and had finally emerged with The Truth.

  Chapter Three: The Mystery of the Yummy Tummy

  And now, Kitty, I will enter the yard and take this investigation to the next level. According to our sources, I have exactly twenty minutes to conduct a thorough Search and Test. You’re excused, Kitty. Thank you, good-bye, and go chase your tail.”

  Sniff, sniff.

  Yes, it was steak, no question about it. Or to bring it more in line with the, uh, investigation in progress, we had every reason to suppose that the mysterious aroma was coming from Pete’s bowl of . . . well, steak-flavored Yummy Tummy.

  Yummy Cat.

  I mean, he’d revealed the information about the steak-flavored Yummy Tummy before we’d ever gotten a whiff of it, right? Hence, following the trail of simple logic, we had every reason to believe that the smells and aromas riding the evening breeze had come from Pete’s cat food. Any dog trained in Security Work would have arrived at that conclusion.

  And since we had obtained a warrant to search the yard and to sample Pete’s cat food, the next step in the investigation was for me to . . . well, do a quick Yard Entry and check this thing out.

  I rolled the muscles in my enormous shoulders and warmed up the huge Jumpus Muscles in my hind legs. “You’d better move, Kitty. Once we launch this thing, we have no control over where it lands.”

  The cat didn’t move, heh heh, which was just fine. I took a deep breath of air, went into a deep crouch situation, and hit the Bonzai Launch button. Smoke, flames, and a loud roar filled the air, and I went flying over the fence. And darn the luck, landed right on top of Kitty-Kitty.

  Heh heh.

  “Oops, sorry Pete, I tried to warn you. Get out of the way.”

  He hissed and growled and moved his freight a few steps away. Oh, and I noticed that he was beaming dark glares in my direction, but at that point I didn’t care what he did, because we had just done a clean penetration into Sally May’s precious yard.

  Once on the ground, we went straight into Infrared Scanners and activated Smelloradar. Infor­­ma­tion streamed into Data Control, and it brought a real surprise. See, before the launch, we had assumed that the, uh, waves of steakness had been coming from Kitty’s bowl near the back porch. But now, as we analyzed the sniffatory data, we came up with a startling revelation.

  The waves of steakness seemed to be coming from the plate Loper had left on the barbecue grill.

  Do you see the meaning of this? I was shocked. Stunned. For you see, it meant that Loper was planning to barbecue a plateload of steak-flavored Yummy Tummy cat food for supper!

  Why would he do such a thing? We didn’t know, had no idea. Maybe they were out of beef at the house. Maybe Loper was too stingy to fix real steak for his f
amily. I mean, that fit, didn’t it? This was the same guy who expected the elite forces of the Security Division to eat out of a greasy hubcap, right? The same guy who was too tight with his money to build the Security Division the kind of huge office complex we deserved, right?

  Well, this sent the case charging into an entirely new direction. See, we had already obtained a search warrant for Pete’s cat food, and . . . do you see where this is leading?

  It meant that we were authorized by a court of law to search out and test a secret stash of Yummy Tummy cat food in the yard, and we now had irre­guffable proof that Loper’s plate contained steak-flavored Yummy Tummy.

  Pretty amazing, huh? You bet it was, and I can tell you that all of us in the search party felt a little . . . well, uneasy about following this astounding new lead in the case. It meant that we would have to take our samples, so to speak, from Loper’s plate, and this threw the case into a High Risk Situation. If we were caught with our noses in the plate . . . well, it could be very bad and very dangerous.

  I narrowed my eyes and did a complete 360-degree sweep of the immediate vicinity. Drover was watching from the other side of the fence. Pete was staring at me with his big, cunning eyes and flicking the end of his tail back and forth. But the important thing was that our, uh, friends in the house were . . . well, in the house, which meant that . . .

  Sniff, sniff.

  . . . which meant that we had a job to do, an important job. We’d been trained for it and there was no turning back now. We took one last reading of our location and punched in the numbers for our final approach.

  Would you care to take a peek at those numbers? I guess it wouldn’t hurt. The numbers, in the order of their entry into the system, were 323, 12, 90, and 3. Pretty impressive, huh? You bet, and those were all real numbers, not some kind of decoy numbers.

  Well, having done all the so-forth, I began creeping toward the barbecue cooker on paws that made not a sound. Ten feet. Eight feet. Six feet. Four feet. (Those are distance figures, by the way, not the number of feet or paws on my body.)

  Three feet away from the target, I heard a whiny voice behind me. It said, and this is a direct quote, it said, “Hankie, the cat bowl is over by the porch.”

  That was Pete, of course, and for a moment I was gripped by a sudden impulse to laugh, but I resisted. Instead, I turned my head and replied in a low voice, “Never mind, Kitty. We’ve just received some information that is going to blow this case wide open.”

  And then I returned to Stealthy Crouch Mode and resumed my relentless pursuit of the truth. I had to know. Was Loper actually feeding cat food to his family?

  Two feet. One foot. By this time I could feel the heat, the terrible heat of the roaring fire in the cooker. Many dogs would have quit right there, shut ’er down and aborted the mission because of the high danger factor. Not me, fellers. The searing heat merely sniffened my resolve to follow this thing to a conclusion . . . stiffened my resolve, shall we say, no matter where it led, no matter whose life was scorched by the Fire of Truth.

  Yes, the steaks were high. The stakes, that is. High stakes.

  I stopped and made one last visual sweep of the yard. Then, without a sound, I went to Hydraulic Lift on the back legs and raised myself to the level of the . . . uh . . . plate.

  Sniff, sniff.

  WOW!

  And at that point, I made another amazing discovery. You won’t believe this. See, you probably thought we would find (1) a plate full of Yummy Tummy Kitty bits or (2) a plate full of T-bone steaks. Isn’t that what you thought? Go ahead and admit it.

  Well, you were wrong, and you’d better hang on for this. Even I was surprised, nay, shocked, by the discovery that awaited me when my eyes fell upon the contents of the plate.

  It didn’t contain mere Kitty food, and it wasn’t loaded with a huge stack of fresh, luscious T-bone steaks.

  Make a guess. I dare you.

  No.

  No, that’s wrong, too.

  Nope, not that either.

  No, sorry, you had three guesses and you missed. If you’d had a hundred guesses, you still would have missed.

  Chicken? No.

  Sausage? Not even close.

  Ribs? No, and we’re out of time for guessing.

  Here’s the answer, which you will find shocking and hard to believe.

  The plate was piled high with Yummy Tummy cat food, just as we had suspected, but it had been molded into the shape of T-bone steaks!

  This was an amazing discovery.

  I mean, those counterfeit steaks looked so real, most dogs would have been fooled. And they not only looked real, but they smelled real. No kid­ding. They smelled exactly like real genuine steaks, and your ordinary dogs would have fallen for the trick—hook, line, and sewer.

  Ordinary dogs would have backed away and left the yard, thinking that those fraudulent cat food T-bones were the genuine article, and therefore off-limits to all dogs. But I saw through all the tricks and disguises, and knew, in my deepest heart of hearts, that those so-called steaks were just a shabby imitation of the . . .

  Sniff, sniff.

  . . . a pretty good shabby imitation of the real thing, but an imitation nonetheless. They were nothing but cat food, molded and shaped into a near-perfect counterfeit of real steaks, and since I had been authorized to sample and test Pete’s cat food, I had no choice but to . . . uh . . . proceed with the . . . uh . . . procedure.

  Operating now on nothing but cunning and superior intelligence, I fitted my enormous jaws around one of the st . . . around one of the, uh, counterfeit meat products, shall we say, and lifted it off the plate. I hit the Down Button and let the Hydraulic Legs Mechanism ease me back to earth. Cutting my eyes from side to side, I turned and made a dash for the fence.

  Another shocking discovery awaited me. There was little Drover, staring at me with wild, greedy eyes. “Oh boy, a steak! I get bites!”

  With my mouth filled with st . . . with counterfeit meat products, I said, “This isn’t a steak, Drover,” only it came out as, “Miff miffn’t a mafe, Mofer.”

  And at that very same moment, I caught a flash of movement out of the right corner of my periphery. It was Pete, Mister Kitty Moocher, and he too was staring at me with big greedy eyes.

  “Well, Hankie, I think I’d like bites too.”

  To which I growled, “Get away from my treasure, Kitty,” only it came out as, “Mitt amay fumm mah measure, Mitty.” Or something like that.

  Do you think the greedy little creep took the hint? Oh no. I’d done all the work, taken all the risks, made a flawless penetration into the yard, and had captured a specimen of st . . . of phony cat food meat products, and now Pete wanted to share the loot.

  Ha. How foolish of the cat. Did he think I would just stand there and let him drool and slobber all over my st . . . all over my evidentiary piece of counterfeit so-forth? Heck no! I dropped the, uh, specimen and went to Tiger Teeth and Savage Glares.

  But at that very moment . . . I couldn’t believe this, you won’t believe it either . . . Drover leaped over the fence, snatched up my court-appointed evidence, and ran off with it! Drover did that! Drover, the same guy who’d been moaning and crying about his bad leg, remember?

  Well, you know me. Would I just stand there and allow the runt to steal important court-appointed evidence? No sir. I went straight into Turbo Four and caught the little thief just as he was nearing the northwest corner of the house. I rolled him and snatched the precious evidentiary material from his thieving jaws and . . . huh?

  Pete was right there, waiting like the little glutton, the little moocher he truly was. Before I knew it, he had latched onto the st . . . the specimen, and suddenly we found ourselves engaged in a deadly game of tug-of-war. He pulled south and I pulled north. He had turned on that police siren yowl of his and his ears were pinned down on his head.
r />   Me? I tugged with all my might and snarled a warning. “Miff muff muffin murkle, Mitty!”

  Pretty scary, huh? Well, it got even worse.

  Chapter Four: Pete’s Slip of the Tongue

  Drover, little Mister Buttinski, jumped up and took a bite on the northwest corner of the st . . . of my evidence. Now we had a tug-of-war going in three different directions. But just then . . .

  Oops.

  The back door flew open. We froze, all three of us, froze like . . . something. Like frozen statues of frozen ice in the freezing frozenness. Someone came out the door.

  Gulp.

  Did I dare abandon my treasure and run? That would have been a sensible thing to do because, let’s face it, the person who had just emerged from the house might very well be . . . Sally May.

  Remember her? Sally May of the deadly broom. Sally May of the Thermonuclear Moments. Sally May who didn’t allow dogs in her yard, and who had shown some indications that she . . . well, I had reason to believe she just didn’t like me.

  It was a tense moment. I heard footsteps. My heart almost stopped beating. I rolled my eyes around and saw . . .

  WHEW!

  It wasn’t Sally May, as you might have supposed, but Little Alfred, her five-year-old son—and also a great pal of mine. I knew he would understand about the counterfeit Yummy Tummy steaks. The boy and I had been through many dark moments and harrowing experiences, and we’d built up a great relationship based on trust.

  In his deepest heart, Little Alfred knew that I wasn’t the kind of dog who would . . . well, steal a steak in broad daylight. He would never believe such a pack of lies and gossip about his beloved . . .

  He saw us, Alfred did. His jaw dropped open and his eyes widened. And then he let out a gaps and said, “Uh-oh! Y’all got into my dad’s steaks!”

  Gasp. He let out a gasp, not a gaps.

  Okay, what we had here was a situation that had gotten out of control. It appeared that my pal Alfred had fallen for the obvious, and suddenly it occurred to me that I would never be able to explain all the ins and outs of this case—that I had entered the yard to test Pete’s cat food, that Loper’s steaks had turned out to be made of . . .