The Unscratchables Read online

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Anthony O’Neill

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2008029756

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0966-3

  ISBN-10: 1-4391-0966-4

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  Stephen Jay Gould…says that we humans are neotenized apes—that is, we are apes that have maintained juvenile characteristics into adulthood, both physical and mental characteristics, and it is these juvenile characteristics that have been responsible for our success as a species. In selectively breeding dogs as we have, there is no doubt that we have neotenized them too. Both morphologically and mentally, dogs have been bred to maintain the juvenile characteristics of play, exploration, and subservience to the leader.

  BRUCE FOYLE, The Dog’s Mind

  Let thy child’s first lesson be obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt.

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  THE UNSCRATCHABLES

  Contents

  Begin Reading

  EPILOGUE

  THE JANGLER STARTED ringing as soon as I nudged open the door. But it was already past ten p.m. and I’d been on my legs for over twelve hours. I only wanted to flop.

  I went to the kitchen cupboard and got out a can of Chump’s. I peeled it open with a fancy electric gizmo—something I’d snared in a squad raffle—so I could eat straight from the can without jagging my tongue. I splashed some water into a bowl. I went to the sofa and hunted for the remote control, but it was buried so deep under soiled blankets and biscuit crumbs I couldn’t even smell it.

  The jangler was still hammering. Probably my ex, wanting to whine. Maybe Spike wanting to play ball. Maybe some prevention-of-cruelty charity begging for cash. But I was too sapped to care.

  Sinking between cushions I felt the remote dig into my flank. I flipped it out, pawed at the controls, and the buzzscreen blinked on. Johnny Wag, famous quiz show host, was tossing the big-biscuit question to reigning champion Professor Thomas Schrödinger. But I had no appetite for brain-bait. I flicked the channel.

  An electoral debate between President Brewster Goodboy and Buster Drinkwater. Goodboy was a cat’s-paw, everyone knew it, but he’d win easily—I’d probably vote for him myself. Drinkwater used way too many big words.

  The jangler just wouldn’t shut up. I flicked the channel again.

  Swinger Cat, a new sitcom from the other side of the river. Everybody said it was real funny—the laugh track sure said so—but I was in no mood for ribtickles.

  A fawning documentary on the CIA.

  A doomsday report on the Persians.

  A horror movie, The Unfamiliar, so old I think it was in black-and-white.

  A public service announcement warning us not to get scared by the fireworks on Democracy Day.

  And finally something I could settle on—a ball game. The Bulldogs were eight runs up on the Hellhounds in the sixth inning. Not exactly tight, but something I could watch without needing to think. I could pick a team—the Bulldogs—and cheer them on. I could bark at the ump. I could gobble my Chump’s. I could slurp my water and slowly drift into snoozeville.

  The jangler stopped—finally.

  But then it started hammering again.

  Now I was really getting my tail up. I’d spent half the morning in court, giving evidence against the Airedale Ripper—a whitecoat who’d carved up his victims with a medical saw and buried the remains in his backyard. Then, before I’d even had time to wolf down my lunch, I’d been called out on a new case—bits and pieces of bone found in the sewer under Chuckside. A whole afternoon poking through doodah, and all we found were a couple of chalky knucklebones—not even good enough to chew on. When I got back to the station the chief ordered me to have a wash—my first in two months—and now I was feeling so clean I almost gagged. I reckoned I could hear fleas in the corner, wondering who I was.

  The Bulldogs whacked one over the fence and the jangler was still clanging.

  I considered ripping the cord out with my teeth. But all of a sudden the buzzscreen was showing an ad for Friday’s prizefight—a double bill of Leroy Spitz vs Deefa Dingo and Rocky Cerberus vs new sensation Zeus Katsopoulos. If Cerberus KO’d Katsopoulos in the first round, like everyone expected, it would make him the greatest southpaw since Butch Brindle. Everyone in San Bernardo was drooling at the prospect.

  But here was the problem. The Reynard Cable Network had won exclusive rights to all UBF matches. And I didn’t have RCN. So all of a sudden I started wondering if it was my old buddy Spike on the line, inviting me around to watch.

  I fumbled the squawker off its cradle.

  “Max McNash.”

  “Crusher—it’s me, Bud.”

  Bud Borzoi was my fetch-dog at the Slaughter Unit.

  I sighed. “What’s up, Bud?”

  “Coupla stiffs, Crusher. In Fly’s Picnic.”

  “You can handle it.”

  “But you’re gonna want to see this, Crusher.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re just gonna want to see it.”

  I sighed again. “Know what sorta day I’ve had so far?”

  “Sorry, Crusher—I wouldn’t be barking if it wasn’t serious.”

  Fang it, the pup could make me feel guilty. “Okay,” I huffed, “but lemme get my bearings first. Where in Fly’s Picnic are you?”

  “Slinky Joe’s Sardine Cannery.”

  “That’s right next to Wharf Twelve, ain’t it?”

  “You got it in one. See you down here in, say, twenty small ones?”

  “Make it thirty. And Bud?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do I need to bring a barf bag?”

  Bud sniggered. “Make it a doggie bag, Crusher, case there’s something you want a second nibble at.”

  It didn’t seem long since Bud had been a wide-eyed rookie, hungry for cheap thrills. Now he was making all the quips.

  “Sniff you later,” I said. I tossed the squawker back in place and returned the half-eaten can of Chump’s to the fridge next to the gravy pot. When I switched off the buzzscreen a brawl had broken out between the Bulldogs and the Hellhounds: teeth flashing, hackles bristling—the crowd was lapping it up.

  IF YOU LOOK at a map of San Bernardo, Fly’s Picnic is that rough chunk of the Kennels, about four sprints long and two and a half sprints wide, stretching from the mouth of the Old Yeller River along the shoreline of Belvedere Bay to the newly gentrified suburb of Staffordshire. It’s a mixture of low-down industrial and rag-end residential, crumbling waterfront tenements, sagging storehouses, chemical storage facilities, smoke-belching factories, even an old boneyard.

  But most famously there’s the stink. Oily water, ash, refuse, fish heads, rotting timber, slaughterhouse blood, dead rats, raw sewage—half an hour in
Fly’s Picnic is enough to make anyone swoon. They say the flies get so drunk on germs in the Picnic they drop off walls.

  When I pulled up at Slinky Joe’s it was fifteen minutes shy of midnight. Flanked by factories, the wharf jutted fifty yards into the scummy water: Twice a week fishing trawlers docked here and dumped their loads directly onto the swollen wood. At night the whole area was a den of powder smuggling, offshore immigrants, sometimes carcass dumping.

  I nodded to the guard-spaniels and ducked under the check-ertape, rubbing my aching eyes. Ahead were a couple of police cars, red and blue lights spinning. Another car—a black-and-chrome Lupus, a gangster favorite—was in the middle of the wharf with its doors flung wide. And some crumpled forms on the ground. Two of them, in cheap black suits. At least it didn’t look like I’d uprooted myself for nothing.

  “What’ve you got for me?”

  Bud Borzoi, gangly as a hat rack, was chewing on a toothpick and smelled eager.

  “Two ’weilers, Crusher—recognize ’em?”

  I surveyed the bodies. “Hard to recognize anything, way they are. Looks like they’ve been through a grinder.”

  Bud gave a chuckle. “The Ripper?”

  “I spent the morning in court with the Ripper. Far as I know he’s still in the clanger. Get someone to check anyway.”

  “Roger.”

  “But this don’t look like the Ripper’s MO.” I did a slow circuit of the bodies, trying to find something still in one piece. “Any ID found?”

  “None.”

  “Nothing embedded?”

  “Nothing we can find.”

  “Figures.” The previous year compulsory microchip embedding had been championed by some hard-nosed sections of the government and media. It was at times like this that I wished the law had actually passed.

  “We did find weapons.” Bud nodded to an officer holding up a couple of snaptooth bags—looked like Schnauzer .44s inside.

  I grunted. “They won’t be licensed, like the ’weilers. What about the tooter?”

  “The plates were muddied, but we’re checking the numbers right now.”

  “Registered to a dummy corporation is my bet.”

  “Gangsters?”

  “All ’weilers are. Any witnesses?”

  “Closest we got is a worker from Slinky Joe’s.”

  “Where is he?”

  Bud led me off to the side, where a mangy-looking mutt, a whippet by the look of him, was puffing furiously on a smokestick.

  “Detective Max McNash,” I barked at him. “Got a minute?”

  “Sure.” He was quivering, whippet-style, and stank of sardines.

  “Got a name?”

  “Flasha Lightning.”

  “Parents had a sense of humor?”

  The whippet didn’t know what to say.

  “Okay, Flasha, what’s the meat?”

  “I don’t want no trouble.”

  “Just get your snapper working if you don’t want trouble.”

  The whippet glanced at Bud. “Like I said to the officer here, it didn’t have nothing to do with me, nothing at all.”

  “Been in the pound before, Flasha?”

  He looked wasp-stung. “M-m-maybe.”

  “How long’ve you worked here?”

  “At Slinky Joe’s? Nearly a year.”

  “Night shift?”

  “M-m-ost times.”

  “Seen some interesting stuff ’round here, I bet?”

  His tongue was sweating. “I guess so.”

  “Okay, let’s have it. What happened here tonight?”

  He swallowed. “It was break time, see—”

  “What time?”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “Go on.”

  “And I came out here to suck some tar.”

  “No smokesticks in the cannery?”

  “Uh-huh. So I came out here, see, like I always do, and I heard some guns woofing—”

  “How many shots?”

  “Two. And a splash…and a gut-clawing squeal…like I don’t know what.”

  “Use your imagination.”

  “Like, I don’t know…like something from a horror movie.” His eyes were wide and yellow, like he watched too many horror movies.

  “You’re not much help to me, are you, Flasha? See anything?”

  “I was too scared to look.”

  “You’re telling me you saw nothing at all?”

  “Just, I don’t know…a whirl.”

  “An impression of movement?” That’s what we called it in court.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then what?”

  “I waited awhile, then I crept out across the wharf for a look-see…and…”

  His eyes had glazed and his withers were trembling.

  “You saw the carcasses?”

  “Yeah…”

  “You called the police?”

  He gulped. “I headed inside. The night boss jangled.”

  “You can’t jangle yourself?”

  “I was too…scared.” He kept glancing at the bodies, like he half-expected them to rise up and attack him.

  “No one else saw anything?”

  “I was first out when the break sounded.”

  “Always first out, I s’pose?”

  “I like my tar.”

  I made a show of thinking about it, then nodded. “Time to clock off, Flasha. You’re heading down to the station with Officer Borzoi here.”

  The whippet whined like a creaking door. “I’m not gonna get my pay docked, am I?”

  “Dock your pay or dock your tail—makes no difference to me, pal.”

  I was too dog-tired for this.

  I WAS HEADING back across the wharf when I heard a yelp from behind the police cordon. It was Nipper Sweeney, sparkly-eyed newshound for one of the Reynard Media’s info-rags. Nipper could be like an undigested bone at times—he’d been doing the crime beat for as long as I’d been in the force—but he could also be useful. I ambled over and cocked an ear. “What’s on your mind, Nip?”

  “You owe me, Crusher.”

  “What for?”

  “For the tip on the poisoned Podengo. Who’s dead?”

  “I just got here. When I find out I’ll let you know.”

  “Photo opportunity?” He nudged his photographer, who held up a flash-and-clink.

  “Nothing you can use on a front page.”

  “You’d be amazed what we get on the front page these days. How about letting me through for a scope?”

  “No deal, Nip. You know the run-through. Procedure first. Then happy snaps.”

  “Hoodlums?” Nipper nodded at the bodies.

  “Maybe.”

  “Then who’s gonna care?”

  “Even hoodlums got mothers, Nip.”

  But I didn’t wait for any more niggles. I headed back across the wharf with Bud at my heels.

  “Reckon it might be him, Crusher?”

  “Who?”

  “The killer? Reckon it might be him?”

  “Nipper Sweeney?”

  “The whippet.” Bud jerked his head. “Flasha.”

  Sometimes it surprised me how raw Bud was. “The whippet couldn’t put a scratch in an egg yolk.”

  “He might be an accomplice or sumthin’. He smells nervous.”

  “‘Coz I gave him the jeebies. ’Coz he’s taking more than smokesticks out here, is my guess. But he’s no killer. Bull terriers trust their guts.”

  A meat wagon was already arriving to load up the carcasses. Bud pointed out some bloodstains on the wharf, separate from the ’weilers.

  “Have a sniff, Crusher.”

  “You’ve already taken a scent?”

  “Yeah.” He was giggling again.

  I got down on all fours and took a deep draft over the blood. And almost immediately I gagged. “Fang it,” I breathed, rising.

  “Matches the scent in the Lupus, Crusher.”

  “Fang it,” I said again, and shook myself. I went over to the tooter a
nd stuck my muzzle through the open door, careful to let not a whisker touch the upholstery. I sucked in a good sample. And it was the same.

  “Cat,” I whispered, like a curse.

  “A cat was in the car,” Bud said, grinning.

  I shook my head, not wanting to believe it. “It needs to be verified first.”

  “Course.”

  “Probably an alley cat—a stray.”

  “Hope so, Crusher.”

  “Just another rat-licking alley cat dragged down to the docks to get a bullet in the brainpot. Bang! The ’weilers toss him in the soup. And then they get killed themselves.”

  “That’s the way I figured it.”

  I looked at Bud, staring at me like I was a hero. I looked at the whitecoats scooping the bodies onto stretchers. The police cordon. Nipper Sweeney and a few droopy-tongued onlookers, Flasha Lightning among them. And I felt it, for the first time—the gut sense, the animal instinct, that this case was going to be something different. And not in a good way.

  “Gimme two shakes,” I said. “I need time to think about it.”

  “Sure thing, Crusher.”

  So I mushed over to the end of the wharf, hearing the water lap beneath me, the roosting flies, the rustling rubbish. I looked north, past the hulking factories of Fly’s Picnic, past the wharves and Amity Bridge with its sweeping searchlights, to the great skyscratchers of Kathattan, the glittering salmon-shaped island where the fat-cats lived—the stockbrokers and bond traders, the hedge-fund managers, merchant bankers, fashion designers, psychiatrists, lawyers, advertising executives, yoga instructors, architects, jewelers, feng-shui experts, toy designers, opera singers, and trapeze artists—the whole cream-lapping, wool-juggling, pajama-wearing, fence-sitting, bird-torturing, furball-coughing lot of them.

  I prayed to Our Master that the alley cat wasn’t from there. And I prayed even harder that the ’weiler killer had nothing to do with them.

  I thumped my chest, dislodging something caught sideways—a wishbone from yesterday’s lunch. I spat a blob of saliva into the greasy water—plop!—and scratched a flea out of my ruff. I broke wind. I blinked my stinging eyes. And suddenly I just couldn’t buy it; I just couldn’t accept that it was anything complicated. It couldn’t be anything to do with the fat-cats. It just couldn’t. My brainpot was too overheated for anything else.