The Case of the Vampire Vacuum Sweeper Read online

  And if my life depended on me marking someone’s tire,

  I’d have a bladder full of ice cubes and couldn’t even fire.

  We’d have bladders full of ice cubes and couldn’t even fire.

  So here we lie, like snowballs on the tundra.

  Freezing tail, this really isn’t fundra.

  What hurts the most is wounded pride: Slim’s flushed us down the drain,

  But our broken hearts are frozen and that helps to kill the pain.

  Yes, our broken hearts are frozen and that helps to kill the pain.

  When we’d finished the song, I turned to Drover with a look of triumph. “There! Now, don’t you feel better?”

  “I guess so. But I’m still cold and this old leg . . .”

  “Drover, I know this is going to be a hard night for you, but . . . how can I say this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let me go straight to the point and speak bluntly. I don’t want to hear your whining and groaning all night. Am I making myself clear?”

  “You mean . . .”

  “Yes. I mean hush. I mean suffer in silence. Lie down, go to sleep, and be quiet.”

  “Well, I’m not sure . . .”

  “Now. Good night.”

  “Maybe it’s a good night for somebody but . . .”

  “Hush, halt, stop, be still, and shut up!”

  He hushed. I heard him flop down on the hard cold boards of the porch. Silence at last! I curled up near the woodpile and took one last yawn. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad night. I mean, we dogs were equipped with warm coats and were used to sleeping outside. It’s just that . . . well, once a guy gets used to the idea of sleeping . . .

  “Hic.”

  My head shot up. My ears shot up. I had just picked up a strange unidentified . . .

  “Hic.”

  . . . sound in the night, and there it was again. It appeared to be coming from . . .

  “Hic.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Drover, by any chance, do you have the hiccups?”

  “Hic. Yeah. How did you know?”

  “Because I heard you. Will you be doing this all night?”

  “Well, I don’t hic know. It just happened all of a sudden.”

  “Hmmm, yes. I see the pattern now. Since I for­bade you from moaning and groaning and whining about the injustice of life, now you’re going to hic about it.”

  “Hic. Sounds reasonable to me.”

  “No, Drover, it sounds totally absurd, just the sort of thing you’d come up with.”

  “Hic. Sorry. I can’t help it.”

  I stood up. “Fine. Hic all you want but I’m leaving. I can’t sleep with you making absurd noises all night. If you need me, I’ll be . . .”

  Oops. I had more or less forgotten about Slim’s Nincompoop Burglar Alarm, and as I was walking away, I hit the end of the string. I guess the momentum of my enormous body gave it a pretty good jerk, because all at once I heard rattling and banging and footsteps coming from inside the house.

  Oh boy. He wouldn’t be happy about this.

  The door burst open and there stood . . . yikes . . . Slim in his red long-john underwear. His hair was down in his eyes and he was holding a shotgun in his hands.

  “Are they here? Did you hear the stray dogs?” He listened for a long, throbbing minute. “No, of course not.”

  Walking on crumpled toes, he came out onto the porch and leveled a bony finger at me. “Listen, Bozo, this alarm system don’t work with you takin’ a midnight stroll. Lie down and stay lied down until you hear them stray dogs. If you wake me up again, I ain’t going to be my usual sweet self. Do you hear what I’m a-saying?”

  Yes sir. I melted into a puddle of dog hair, right there, and didn’t move another muscle. He shook a fist at me and went back into the house.

  Slam!

  Silence.

  Hic. Hic. Hic.

  What a lousy deal. I was cold, Slim was mad, Drover was hiccuping, and there was no chance that I would get any sleep. I would have to spend the whole night bonking the snorkle donkey with grasshopper pie snurd mork zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzz.

  Barking dogs? It was just a dream. But how could it be a dream if I wasn’t asleep? It was a strange world and strange things happened in . . .

  Barking dogs?

  Against my will, someone placed hydraulic jacks under my eyelids and pried them open. My eyeballs rolled around for several moments. My left ear rose, staggered around on my head, and finally snapped into Gathering Position.

  Somewhere out in the night, dogs were barking!

  Chapter Ten: The Phony Coyote Profiles

  It was a very spooky sound.

  No, let me rephrase that. It wasn’t a spooky sound, I mean, not like coyotes howling or something like that. It was kind of spooky to be awakened in the deep dark of the night, but the sound itself wasn’t spooky. It was the sound of dogs . . . having a blast.

  Having fun. Barking and running loose and enjoying the savage delight of being . . . well, dogs, you might say.

  And that was a little spooky, because on our outfit, dogs are not supposed to be barking and running loose at night and having fun. So . . . was it spooky or not?

  I don’t know. Let’s skip it.

  The point is that I heard the sound of barks dog­ging and came ripping out of a . . . well, maybe it was a deep sleep. In spite of Drover’s hiccuping and so forth, it appeared that I had managed to catch a few winks of frozen sleep, and I was now wide awake and ready to go plunging into Red Alert.

  I barked. Boy howdy, did I bark!

  “May I have your attention please! We are picking up dog sounds east of the house. Red Alert, Red Alert, go to Battle Stations at once!”

  I waited for Drover and Slim to spring into action. They didn’t. You know what they did? Drover wheezed, groaned, and hiccuped. Slim snored. That was it.

  I was astonished. Okay, I would have to go into a higher order of barking, so I switched all circuits over to Massive Barking, took a huge breath of air, and got after it. Same results, only this time Slim also yelled, “Shut up, you idiot!”

  Shut up, you idiot? Was he trying to be funny? Hey, I had been stuck out on the porch for the very purpose of . . . didn’t he realize that . . .

  Ah ha. It was then that I remembered the string. You had probably forgotten all about it, right? Ha, ha. Not me. See, Slim and I had designed this very sophisticated, very complicated high-tech alarm system that used a piece of . . .

  Do I dare reveal our secrets? I guess it wouldn’t hurt, if you promise not to blab it around. Promise? Okay, we’ll proceed into the deep dark secrecy of this device—which, by the way, spies all over the world would love to get their hands on.

  The heart of the device was a strand of hightech, ultra-sensitive fiber optic string. On the house end, the string had been hard-wired, as we say, into a receiving mechanism which we called a Digital Toe. The signals were activated on my end by a special Electron Scanning Guard Dog.

  Pretty impressive, huh? You bet it was. We don’t just blunder through our work in the Security Business. When we take on a job, we equip ourselves with the very latest in world-class hardware, software, and underwear. I’ve tried to tell you this, but you thought . . .

  Better mush on with the story. Where were we? Oh yes, I was just about to activate the so-forth. I paused a moment to loosen up the muscles in my massive shoulders. You see, I wanted to be sure that Red Bird (that was Slim’s code name for this mission) . . . I wanted to be sure that Red Bird got a good clear signal on the fiber optical . . .

  Phooey. For the sake of convenience, let’s just call it a “string.” Once you get started using these heavy-duty technical terms, they can become a burden, don’t you see.

  The point is, I lunged agai
nst the string, sending a strong electrostatic signal down the . . . well, down the string. Red Bird received the message. I knew he did because I heard him screech the code word that meant “Electrostatical message received.”

  The code word was . . .“OW!” Which he screeched in a loud but sleepy voice. Then I waited for him to spring into . . . snoring? He was snoring again! Hey, I had gone to a lot of trouble to send him a good strong message on the . . .

  Okay, if that’s the way he wanted it, I would just send him another transmission, and if this one ampu­tated his Digital Toe, that was his problem, not mine. I backed off, put some slack into the string, and hit it with a full head of steam.

  This produced another “OW” from Red Bird, but it also broke the fiber optical string. I paused, cocked one ear, and listened. More snoring.

  I couldn’t believe this. After all the training and preparations we had . . . what a dumbbell! I mean, we had a pack of wild dogs out there in the night, and Code Name Red Bird was in there sleeping his life away! And so was Drover, the little goof-off, and all at once the success or failure of our mission fell upon my soldiers.

  Shoulders, I should say, fell upon my shoulders.

  A lot of your ordinary dogs would have shut ’er down right there and gone back to bed. Not me. To reach the rank of Head of Ranch Security, I had endured many disappointments and had seen many examples of sheer incontinence. I would just have to wrap this case up on my own.

  I flew off the porch and went sprinting into the Awful Unknown. Twenty yards east of the 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 Stage Two: Advance toward the scoundrels for a closer look.

  I shifted into Stealthy Crouch Mode and moved eastward on silent paws that made not a . . . SNAP . . . sound. Okay, maybe I stepped on a stupid twig, but otherwise it was a flawless . . . sometimes they put out twigs and various other obstacles, in hopes that we’ll step on them and betray our position, don’t you see.

  It was an old trick. We’d seen it dozens of times, so it was no big . . . the, uh, twig did snap and they heard it. I stopped. Froze. Eased myself down into some weeds.

  Dog One spoke. “Uh. Thought I hearding snap of twig.”

  Dog Two answered. “Uh.”

  I could hardly believe my ears. Do you see what was going on here, the meaning of this intercepted conversation? Holy cats, it promised to blow this case wide open and lead the investigation into an entirely new direction.

  Maybe you missed it, so let me explain. See, Buster and Muggs were not only traveling through our country in Phony Coyote Profile, but they were also using Phony Coyote Dialect! What this meant was that they had gone to a fair amount of trouble to develop disguises for this job.

  I mean, I wasn’t fooled by it, not for a minute, but it was slick enough to fool about ninety percent of the ranch dogs in the Texas Panhandle. In other words, these guys were clever. You don’t often find such a high level of preparation in stray dogs. Most of the time, they’re just dumb mutts from town who drift out into the country to make mischief and get into trouble. But these guys . . .

  This was promising to be a very interesting case, and it was time for me to move into Stage Three—confront them, expose them as frauds and charle­magnes, and order them off my ranch.

  Chapter Eleven: A Slight Miscalculation, Nothing Serious

  Exposing these hoodlum dogs would have been easier and more fun if I’d had Slim backing me up with his shotgun, but he had botched his part of the mission and I was left all alone on life’s front lines.

  That’s not the kind of situation we hope for, but that’s where I was. And it was time for action. I took a big breath of air, rose from the weeds in which I had been crouching, and announced my presence to the mutts.

  “Okay guys, the party’s over. We’ve had you under surveillance from the moment you set foot on this ranch. We know who you are and who you pretend to be. We know why you’re here and what mischief you have in mind. Get off the ranch right this minute or . . .”

  Huh? They seemed to be . . . laughing, you might say. That seemed odd, but I let them laugh. I had an idea that they wouldn’t be laughing for long.
>
  Dog One was the first to speak. “Ha! Coyote always got mischief on mind and coyote make gooder mischief than whole world.”

  Now it was my turn to chuckle. “Listen, Buster, you can drop the phony coyote lingo. It won’t sell, sorry. In the first place, the accent’s wrong. In the second place, you don’t sound dumb enough to be a coyote. In the third place . . .”

  At that very moment the wind shifted and I caught the unmistakable musky odor of . . . that smell was really strong, and I noticed that the hair along my spinebone had more or less raised itself, almost as though . . . and I noticed for the first time that Dog One had . . . uh . . . shockingly yellow eyes and big teeth, real big . . .

  HUH?

  Gulk.

  My mind was tumbling through this latest churn of events. I couldn’t believe this had happened to me, but all the evidence was beginning to suggest that it had.

  Okay, let me explain everything and get you up to speed. Remember our discussion about the Phony Coyote Profile and Phony Coyote Dialect? Well, it had been even phonier than I could have suspected in my wildest dreams, for you see, these guys had used the Ultimate Disguise: They had disguised themselves as themselves!

  And I had fallen for it—hook, line, and sewer. You know who these guys were? Not Buster and Muggs, as you and Miss Viola had suspected all along, but Rip and Snort the coyote brothers. Pretty shocking, huh? You bet it was. And fellers, all at once I was in a world of trouble.

  They were staring at me, licking their chops, waiting for . . . something. Lunch perhaps, or supper. Nothing that would do me any good.

  I tossed a glance back to the house. Slim was nowhere in sight. Racing back to the house was out of the question. I knew I couldn’t outrun them. I turned back to the brothers and tried to squeeze up a casual smile.

  “Well! As I was saying, Snort, it’s great to have you back in our neighborhood. How have you been?”

  “Been hungry.”

  “Yeah? And how’s old Rip?”

  “Been hungry.”