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The Case of the Driving Poodle

Sarah A. Hoyt

Sarah A. Hoyt has published over a hundred stories in magazines such as Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction and Amazing Stories, as well as a broad range of anthologies. Her latest novels are Gentleman Takes A Chance, in her Baen Urban Fantasy Series, Heart and Soul in her Bantam historical fantasy series and (as Sarah D'Almeida) Dying by the Sword in her Prime Crime Mystery series. Look for upcoming mystery Dipped, Stripped, Dead and science fiction DarkShip Thieves. Though she does get in a hairy mood, at times, when under deadline, Sarah Hoyt rejects all rumors that she might be a werewolf.

 

There are jobs you go out and look for. Jobs that come and find you. And jobs you find yourself in, without having the slightest idea how.

When I was twenty-two years old, I found myself—through no fault of my own—in one of these. As best I can explain it, sometime after my tenth application for a retail job had been rejected—as if a master's in classical history were not relevant for work in a shoe shop—I'd blindly sent out an application to work for a neighborhood firm: Nephilim Psychic Investigations. And against everyone's best judgement, the owner and sole proprietor had hired me.

He was an African-American man, of an age somewhere between thirty and fifty, fit without being particularly muscular and good-looking in an understated way, despite receding hair and the look of having been born to be dark-skinned and going about with a permanent pallor. Despite rejoicing in the name of Nephilim Kentucky Jones III—a name that had to be an indication of hereditary madness—he went by Ken Jones, which probably meant he had some grounding in reality.

Maybe. Having gone with him through cases that had ranged from a possessed grill which he had exorcized by reading it a selection of Romantic poetry to a case last week, in which he had repaired a witch's flying broom by dipping it in hot sauce, I will confess that I had to doubt his sanity. And yet his solutions seemed to work, so perhaps I should doubt the sanity of reality.

All the more so since Ken, who'd just picked me up in his tenth-hand Volvo with the hand-lettered "Nephilim Psychic Investigations" painted on the side, was looking cagey and had yet to tell me what exactly we were about to do, even as he took a route towards the suburbs. Howl Acres, to be exact, the newest and most ritzy subdivision inflicted on our fair city.

"Oh no," I said, when it became obvious where we were headed.

He gave me a look that might have been sympathy, but there was way too much calculation behind his gaze, as if he were doing some complex arithmetic behind his eyes. I remembered that our first investigation together—the possessed grill—had been in the suburbs and how much I'd hated it. And how much he probably knew I hated it. I thought I knew what was bothering him. He was afraid I'd throw a fit.

"It's okay," I said, as we drove through the summer evening, the Volvo merrily squeaking and backfiring into the serenity of manicured lawns, immaculate houses painted in earth tones, and families gathered on front lawns. "I think I can survive the suburbs for one more case."

He looked at me, an expression between surprise and a frown. "It's not that," he said. "It's . . . Look . . . " He pulled to the side of the road, in front of a house whose lawn was, mercifully, deserted, and took a deep breath, as though gathering his courage. "It's like this. We're about to go investigate a missing person's case."

"Missing persons?" I said. "But I thought we only did paranormal—"

He nodded, once. "This guy, Brent Barker, has been missing for three weeks," he said. "Wife and two small children. And his wife called me."

"Shouldn't she have called the police?" I asked.

He chewed on his lip.

I'd known Ken for almost a month now, and I'd seen him in all kinds of situations. I'd never seen him look like this. He appeared to be embarrassed and confused in equal measures. Or perhaps up to some complex calculation, as if there were a quadratic equation that absolutely needed to be resolved right now, in his head. But though I had been sort of an inverse wonder at advanced magic, I refused to believe that quadratic equations were paranormal.

"What?" I said. "Why didn't this woman call the police? Or did she? And are you sure that she has the slightest idea what we are or what we investigate? Or did she just look in the yellow pages under PI and got us?"

Ken put the car in park and pulled the parking break. He let out a breath with an explosive sound. "She didn't call the police because her husband is a well-known artist—at least a well-known local artist. He made that sculpture that's in the middle of the plaza at the end of Pythagoras Avenue."

Having seen the sculpture—which looked like an assemblage of bicycle parts rescued from a junkyard and soldered together willy-nilly—I understood that it might be important to the wife of the perpetrator to keep quiet about where he might be. Frankly, I was just surprised that he hadn't gone into the witness protection program.

Ken rubbed his nose. "The thing is . . . " he said. "That she called me, because she found my business card in her husband's wallet."

"Oh," I said. And then, as the salient fact hit me, "He disappeared without his wallet?"

Ken shrugged, which was hardly an answer, and I started wondering if our prospective client had, by any chance, killed her husband and buried him in the backyard. In which case, of course, it might be perfectly justified to call Nephilim Investigations. Anyone reading that name would think that of all the detectives in town—heck, in all possible towns—we were the most likely to miss the freshly dug grave in the backyard with the rose bush hastily planted in the center of it—even if it had a nice grave marker in front of it. At least, I'm sure that's what a stranger would think. I wasn't sure that was true.

"Yeah," Ken said and rubbed his nose again, managing to give off an impression of strong embarrassment. "That was part of what worried her. But . . . well, what you need to know is that her husband and I met in a support group."

"A support group?" I said. "Like . . . AA?"

"Yeah," he said, and looked away from me, managing to look about as transparent and truthful as a politician during campaign season. "Something like that."

So, something like that, but not AA.

Ken had told me that he used to be a computer programmer and had lost his job in the tech crash, but he'd never adequately explained why he'd chosen to leave the field behind entirely and to turn, instead, to psychic investigations. Of course, it was possible—probable—in fact that there was no adequate explanation for such a decision.

Or it was possible that Ken had some other problem that contributed to his inability to work a normal job—perhaps drugs, glue sniffing or . . . for all I knew, and considering what I'd seen in the last few weeks, perhaps black magic. Did Ken join a support group to break himself from a pesky tendency to perform human sacrifice? Or was his vice, perhaps, dancing naked in the moonlight?

I felt my cheeks heat at the thought of Ken naked anywhere—something to which, to be honest, I hadn't given much thought, despite having grown to like him very much.

In his turn, he gave me a startled look, his eyes widening in a way that made him seem like a cartoon. "What is it?" he said. "Do I have a blob of sunblock on my nose?"

"Sunblock?" I said.

"Yeah, I put some on just before we left. This summer sun is a killer."

I squinted at the faint sunset, quite unable to see it as a killer of any sort. Though the day had been warm, I doubted it had topped eighty. In fact, so far from looking homicidal, the sunshine didn't even look capable of menacing. And Ken—I ran an eye over his long-sleeved T-shirt and serviceable jeans—while not bad looking had never exactly impressed me as the sort to wear any sort of skin products, sunblock included.

Right. He and this woman's husband had probably met in a group for secret sunblock abusers.

I looked away, mumbling something noncommittal—because I would rather eat live, slimy toads than tell him that I'd been imagining him cavorting around naked. And screamed, trying to jump back as far as I could—which in fact meant I more or less ended up in Ken's lap.

At my window, bending low to look through it, and knocking on the glass right next to where my face had been was a slim blond woman of maybe thirty years of age.

Ken tried to push me off his lap without touching me, something that required more paranormal powers than even he possessed and that, in fact, involved his shrinking back against his car door like a Victorian maiden in distress.

My confused brain registered that he smelled like coconut sunblock even as he said, "Er . . . that is our client, I think."

"Oh," I said, and realizing that really, even in as small and odd a company as ours, it was very unusual to meet a client while sitting in your boss's lap, I threw myself in the general direction of the passenger seat. At the same time, Ken succeeded in opening his door and getting out.

Fortunately this led our client towards him, and left me able to open my door and compose myself, so that I looked—I thought—pretty normal by the time I walked around the car to stand beside Ken. Ken jumped a bit to the side, as if afraid I'd tackle him and sit on his lap by force. I wanted to reassure him that I very rarely did that to my acquaintances, much less to men I worked for, but he didn't give me time. He gestured towards me. "This is my assistant," he said. "Agnes Damon."

The woman nodded vaguely towards me, but it was clear that I was, at best, a distraction. She returned her gaze to Ken and said, in the tone of a woman interrupted in the middle of a heart-wrenching account, "And that's why I called you."

Now that I had time to look at her, without her face being pressed close to my window like a peering slasher in a horror movie, I thought she might be younger than thirty, but she looked stressed. Strained. Her oval face showed marks of sleeplessness in creases around the eyes and mouth, and her eyes were underlined by bruised half-moons.

"You say," Ken said, reaching in his back pocket and retrieving his small notebook and the pen he always kept there, "that your husband always disappears for about a week a month?"

She shook her head, then shrugged. "Not disappears, as such." She made a small, helpless gesture with her hands. "You see, he is an artist. He creates such lovely things, in metal and stone and—"

They both paused to look at me and I realized I'd snorted. Okay, fine. So I have opinions about art. At least, I'm quite willing to admit there is a lot about art I don't get. Like Who invented this racket? And how come no one is giving me large amounts of cash for piles of rusting bicycle parts? But this was neither the time nor the place. I cleared my throat. "Sorry, sinus."

Mrs. Barker nodded, because, after all, I was just decoration here, and Ken was the one she was talking to. She had started wringing her hands together again, one over the other. "I mean, the creative effort really takes it out of him, and with us having two small children, you know, sometimes he needs to isolate himself to think and . . . and to create."

I could hear the italics, clear as a bell in her voice, but I managed not to roll my eyes, which was good because Ken was writing rapidly in his little notebook. It looked like he'd just written create, underlining and all. "And when he does this creation," he said. "Where does he go? Or does he just travel around?"

"We have a cabin," she said. "Over in Walnut Grove."

Walnut Grove was not exactly a forest. It was in fact another suburb, just to the east of town, where the houses came with a minimum of two acres apiece.

"Is he perhaps there?" Ken asked. "Right now?"

She shook her head. "No, you see?" she said. "I've been there. That's where I found . . . " Her voice disappeared into a burbling of tears.

"You found?" Ken asked, his pencil poised over the page.

"His wallet and his clothes," she said.

Oh, good, I thought. It is definitely a support group for men who like to dance naked in the moonlight.

 

Twenty minutes later, as we stopped in front of a small log cabin, at the end of a shaded lane, I asked Ken, "So, he was probably killed and is in a fresh grave somewhere under one of the trees here . . . " It had taken me a whole twenty minutes to stop myself from asking what exactly they danced to under the trees—waltz? Or was it a country dance? Swing your partner . . .

By the time we'd stopped at the cabin my tongue was raw from being bitten so hard.

Ken looked at me, and shook his head a little, then said, "It's possible, of course. A hunter, perhaps. But very few hunters have silver bullets these days. Particularly in the suburbs."

He got out of the car, and headed towards the house, forcing me to catch up with him. I managed to say, "Beg your pardon? Silver bullets?" just as he slipped the key into the door and opened it. "Do you know something I don't?"

"Obvious, isn't it?" he said, speaking as if from a great distance away. "I mean, she did say he disappeared a week a month, and when I pressed her for dates, it all became startlingly obvious."

"Not to me," I said, wondering if the man were in fact in the sort of league where he did quadratic equations in his head.

But he'd opened the door to the house and gone in. I don't know what I expected. Considering this was the creative hangout of an artist, I thought at the very least there would be a few paint pots strewn about, or perhaps a few rusted bicycle parts.

Instead, the house looked exactly like the type of place one expected Little Red Riding Hood to live in. It was very small, consisting of a great room with a huge fireplace and a couple of lived-in-looking sofas. At the far end there was a kitchenette and a sliding glass door looking out onto a large wooden deck and a profusion of trees.

Upstairs, and running about half the length of the great room, was a loft. A circular staircase led up to it, and I could see, through the railings at the top, a suggestion of a messed bed and a massive wardrobe.

Blinking, I realized the house smelled of dog, and that there were grey-brown hairs on one of the sofas and also that the back door had a large doggie door cut into it.

"He has a dog," I said.

"Possible," Ken said, sounding profound. "But it's far more likely to be a bitch."

"What?" I asked, sure that he must have seen something I'd missed, like perhaps a pink collar, or a food bowl marked "Trixiebelle."

I looked where I would expect the food bowls to be, in the kitchenette, and didn't see any. I traced my way back around the house, looking. Ken was kneeling down by the sofa and had extracted a magnifying glass, heaven knew from where, and was looking at the sofa.

I made sure my keen sense of observation wasn't missing anything, then came back to him. "Ken, there's no food bowl or doggie dish anywhere."

He looked up, as if he were trying to decide whether I was crazy or, perhaps, dangerously crazy. "I know," he said.

"But . . . " I said. "If he has a dog here . . . "

Of course, just as I said it, it occurred to me that perhaps the dog wasn't here all the time. After all, it must be pretty difficult to weld together rusting metal while keeping a dog out of trouble. "Oh, you mean the dog is with his wife?"

He opened his mouth, closed it, reached in between two sofa cushions and brought out a well-chewed rawhide bone, of the sort you buy in pet stores. He waved it up in front of my face. "Aha!" he said. And proceeded to sniff the doggie bone. I mean, really sniff it. As if . . . as if it were some spice whose fragrance he had to identify.

"Uh," I said. Apparently the recovery group was for men who danced naked in the moonlight and who liked to smell doggie saliva. Ooookay. All the reluctant respect I'd acquired for my boss over the last few weeks was fast vanishing, and I was starting to wonder whether I might not have dreamed up all the crazy stuff I'd seen while working for him. Perhaps it was some form of shared hallucination. Perhaps he was in fact so crazy that he managed to make me crazy on contact. Who had ever heard of a possessed grill? Let alone a broom that flew?

I took a step away from him. "I tell you what," I said. "I don't seem to be much use here. Perhaps I should go back to Howl Acres and find out if his wife knows about any activity in his account or . . . "

"To the car," he said, and sniffed as he went. I swear he did. Sniff, sniff, sniff, as if he were trying to trace the source of a burning smell. "It is exactly as I thought."

"Uh . . . " I said, wondering if doggie saliva had some hallucinogenic property. Ken's eyes looked to be the right size, and he wasn't foaming at the mouth or anything, but he still had that well-chewed bone in his hand and he looked, for all the world, as if he were hot on a . . . scent. "Maybe I should drive."

"Don't be ridiculous," he said, opening the door to the driver's side and climbing into the seat. "Get in. Come on. We don't have a minute to waste. You'd never be able to keep this car from stalling."

True as far as that went, I thought, being intimately acquainted with the Volvo's idiosyncrasies. I consoled myself with the thought that even if Ken drove erratically and even if he were stopped, police rarely did a breathalyzer test for dog spit.

I noted with alarm that he kept the doggie bone in his hand and that he sniffed it now and then and also that he kept his window rolled down and sniffed out the window, his nose twitching at the scent. Right. I slid down in my seat and closed my eyes. There is no such thing as a drug made of canine saliva. There is no such things as a drug . . .

The car wove sharply to the left and came to a stop, tires squealing. I opened my eyes, alarmed, to see Ken look at me and say, "Sorry," but he didn't look particularly sorry. What he did look, in fact, was all intent on sniffing the air.

Which was not nearly as disturbing as where we were stopped. I'd seen this place as we drove past it, on the way into Walnut Grove. It was one of those ramshackle buildings one sees sometimes, just outside towns. Made of unpainted wood, it could have been anything, from a club lodge to a diner. What it was, in fact, was advertised in a big sign by the roadside, which must glow neon at night, but which right now, in the fading glow of sunset, was just white with black plastic letters proclaiming WET DOG CAFE and underneath ALL NUDE DANCING.

 

I must have made a sound of distress—thinking I'd finally come to the source of Ken's secret life—because Ken looked at me, concerned. "I'm sorry," he said. "Sometimes, in the course of investigations, one has to go to less-than-savory places."

By that time, my keen sense of observation had helped me spot some posters by the entrance to the building and I'd realized that these showed definitely feminine bodies. So unless Ken had an entirely different form of secret life, this was not where he danced naked under the moonlight.

Which was just as well, as he was charging into it full throttle, and it was all I could do to catch up with him.

When I did, he was inside a dim little entrance area, which smelled, appropriately enough, like a wet dog. Facing him was a guy who would outweigh Ken at least three times—and that was just the weight of his hair. Not that he had long hair. Just a lot of it, on his head, face, arms, shoulders and legs. The T-shirt and shorts he was wearing seemed more like brief interruptions than like clothing, and looking at him one found the words but rugs don't wear clothes running through one's head.

Only, of course, rugs normally also didn't have eyes, and this man did. Little squinty black eyes that were giving Ken the glaring once-over, then turned to me, with just the same sort of unfriendly glare.

Now, I know I'm not a beauty queen, okay? But I'm also not the ugliest thing going. I have a face in the shape of face and what's more important, breasts in the shape of breasts. And very few men in our society look at a woman with that kind of glaring hostility.

"I don't know where you got that idea," he growled in Ken's direction. And in this case, it was definitely a growl, not a manner of expression. "I don't know any . . . "

Ken shook his head. "Brown-black. Possibly a wolf dog. I'm sure of it."

The man glared some more, a low throaty growl rising from between his lips, as his head kind of ducked into his neck, and I expected him to spring forward, growling. "You can't expect us to tell you that."

"Yes," he said. "Yes you can. Do you want me to lay the entire operation open?"

The man charged then. It was weird, because he jumped exactly like a dog would jump, white teeth snapping.

And Ken threw something over his head.

I saw it flash in the half-darkness, before realizing what it was—a necklace. Not a chain, just a necklace, about normal thickness for a necklace. Silver.

I expected the man to snap it with the force of his charge, but instead he jumped back, then slumped down, as if he'd lost all strength. Sweat sprang in his brow, so thick that it shone at the tip of his hair. He whined, a loud whine, and his hand went up, but it recoiled before touching the necklace. He slumped down, panting.

"Tell me," Ken said. "Who was it, and where is he?"

"It was consensual," he said. "He's been coming here forever. I mean, she is like . . . I mean . . . "

"I don't care," Ken said. "Tell me who she is and where she lives."

"T—Trixiebelle," the man said and stammered out an address a few blocks away.

I knew there was a Trixiebelle in the matter, but at this point I wasn't absolutely sure it was a dog.

"These things," Ken said. "Are always a matter of cherchez la female," he said.

"Femme, you mean," I said.

"Something like that."

We were back in the car, and driving fast amid the shaded lanes, stopping only now and then to look at street signs.

"So, he's with some woman?" I said, still confused.

He coughed. "You could say that." He had taken the silver necklace from around the manager's neck, and he looked ridiculously satisfied with himself. "If you had looked at the sofa with a magnifying glass, as I did, you'd have noticed some curly white hairs amid the others on the sofa."

"Oh?" I said, by now so confused that if he had announced to me this denoted the sofa's ability to fly I wouldn't have batted an eye.

He touched the side of his nose. "French poodle," he said. "You can tell by the smell."

From which I deduced that doggie spit had bouquets, but it left me still completely confused. "So, you followed the smell on the leather bone?" I said.

"Only till the café," he said, with a hand gesture in the general direction from which we'd come. "After that, she must have taken him in a car, you see, with the windows closed and the air on, so it was impossible to follow the scent."

"I see." In fact what I saw, clearly, in my mind's eye, was a French poodle driving a car, with a man hog-tied in the passenger seat. Possessed grills, flying brooms, living rugs and criminal poodles. I was going to need medication.

 

Ken pulled up in front of a house, still in Walnut Grove, but bigger than the one from which the artist was missing, with a large fenced yard.

He marched to the door and rang the doorbell. Waited a moment. Rang it again. Meanwhile my keen powers of observation told me that there was no car in the driveway.

"There is no one home," I told him. "No car. The French poodle must be out for a drive."

He nodded. "Yeah, I think so," he said.

He was going to need medication too, I thought, and wondered if they had some sort of company discount, or two for the price of one, particularly as, instead of returning to the car, Ken went galloping to the side of the house and around the fence, to where a sign read, BEWARE OF THE DOG!

"Ken!" I said.

He didn't answer. He was too busy applying shoulder to the gate, to break the lock. From inside a dog barked, whined and growled.

"I think the dog might be dangerous," I yelled just loud enough to be heard above the sound of the gate giving out. It fell in a cloud of dust and Ken charged over its ruins.

To face a huge dog.

Well, dog in a manner of speaking. The creature looked more like a wolf, but a wolf seen by the director of a horror movie. It was bigger than a malamute, with a huge muzzle and white, very sharp teeth.

However, it couldn't possibly be a wolf, because last I had checked, wolves did not have red, glowing eyes.

You'd think that Ken would be running back to the car, or perhaps—considering that this thing looked large enough to outrun the car, or perhaps to grab it by the back bumper and prevent it from moving—cowering behind the fence. Or at the very least pulling out the doggie bone and offering it as appeasement.

But no. In proof of the fact that he needed medications way more than I did, he was in fact crossing his arms on his chest, tapping his foot and glaring at the dog as if the dog were his puppy and Ken had just found a suspicious wet spot in the brand new rug. "I thought you knew better than that, Brent. Have you no shame?" he said.

I don't know what the wolf answered due to the fact that I don't, in fact, speak wolf. It was a low growl, deep in the massive throat over which the hairs rose, in canine fury. Its eyes looked bigger and glowed even redder, and as its looked at Ken, saliva dripped from its jaws. I knew, without being told, that he was seeing Ken as a very large chew toy.

I also knew—suddenly—what this was all about. After all, Ken had called the man by the missing artist's name. Which meant . . . that Brent Barker was in fact this huge, growling wolf. Which meant that the wet dog was . . .

The wolf's muscles bunched, as it prepared to spring. I reached into Ken's pocket, where I'd seen him put the necklace he'd used on the owner of the café.

As the werewolf sprang, I threw the necklace, just right. It went over the wolf's head and around his neck.

A naked, middle-aged man rolled to the ground, whining.

 

"But I don't understand," I said. "Why didn't he go back to his wife right away? I guessed that he was used to going to that house for a week a month, when the moon was full."

"Probably," Ken said.

We'd driven Brent Barker back to his cottage and he'd gotten decent before driving him back to his marital abode. There, Ken had told Mrs. Barker that Brent had been kidnapped. He'd also recommended that Brent tell his wife about the affair he'd had with Trixiebelle, the dancer in the Wet Dog Café.

"Then how come this time he didn't come back?"

Ken looked pained, as if I were forcing him to go into distasteful subjects, which I realized I, in fact, was, as he said, "Trixiebelle was in heat."

"Oh," I said, not getting it at all. "The poodle."

He looked at me as if I'd lost my mind. "The were poodle," he said. "When a were female is in heat she gives off a kind of pheromone that will keep a were male in canine form and . . . well . . . helpless. Brent couldn't leave her if he wanted to."

"Did he?" I asked.

Ken shrugged. "He seemed willing enough to go back to his wife," he said.

"But not to tell her the truth," I said.

"Well . . . " he said. "Would you believe it, if you hadn't seen it?"

Hell, I hardly believed having seen it, and I was seriously considering getting medications, just in case.

"So," I said, following my own line of reasoning and remembering that Ken was in a support group with Brent. "Does this mean you too are a werewolf?"

He looked at me so suddenly that he almost drove off the road. His expression was of pure surprise and I didn't think it was because I'd figured out his secret. "Wha—?" He asked. "No!"

"A were poodle?" I asked.

He made a sound that wasn't a growl, but might have been laughter. "No were anything."

"So this group you're in with Brent Barker . . . "

He shook his head. "Eating disorder," he said.

"Oh." Well, he didn't look either too thin or too fat, so the group must work. "Sorry."

"No problem," he said.

"But if his wife doesn't know what he is," I said, changing the subject quickly. "How is she going to prevent Brent from straying?"

Ken inclined his head and smiled a little. "Well, his wife knew that she had called psychic investigations, see . . . So I privately told her that her husband had been under a spell cast by this woman."

"And?" I said.

"And that from now on when he's out of her sight, she should make sure he wears that silver necklace, which has special powers to repeal spells."

"But that means he won't be able to change, doesn't it?" I thought, thinking of all the hair on that sofa and the chewed rawhide bone, speaking of happy doggy days. "He's not going to be happy."

Ken shrugged. "He brought it on himself. He had no business getting involved with Trixiebelle to begin with. If they didn't already have a relationship, she wouldn't have had that kind of power over him when she went into heat." He grinned at me, a happy grin. "My guess is that from now on his wife will keep him on a short leash."

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