Muzzled (21 page)

Dodging my hook to the kidneys, he laughed and dropped a quick kiss on my forehead. “See you tonight, gorgeous. Can’t stop, ’cos I gotta get my dogs home. They’ll be itching to get out of the trailer and stretch their legs.”

“After that clothes peg quip, you’d better bring chocolates if you want to see me tonight, Benjamin. And only the biggest, most expensive box in the shop will do.”

The strident ring of the phone greeted me as I pushed past my two bouncing dogs and stumbled into the lounge room. Geez. Anyone would think I’d been away for a year instead of a day. While dishing out pats and cuddles and exchanging kisses with my welcoming committee, I lifted the hands free from its base and pressed TALK.

“Kat McKinley.”

“Hey, Kat.” It was Dr. Terry Chapman, the vet. “Any luck locating Stanley?”

“No…nothing yet.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll find him.” Terry’s voice, as always, brimmed with confidence. “I’ve contacted the animal rescue services and left the dog’s description at every vet surgery in South Australia. Someone, somewhere, will find your dog and when they do they’ll bring him in.” There was a short pause. “Talking about Stanley, there was something else I wanted to discuss with you.”

I plopped down onto the lounge, lifted the wriggling Tater into my lap and tossed Lucky’s favorite squeaky purple dragon across the room for her to fetch. “Go on. I’m all ears.”

“Due to the confusion at the surgery on Friday, I didn’t get around to explaining what I discovered when I examined Stanley prior to neutering.”

“Confusion? Geez more like World War Three erupting,” I said scratching the special spot behind Tater’s ear. As usual, it made him purr like a cat. “Come to think of it I
do
remember you mentioning something about Stanley’s ear brands—but that’s around the time the poor squashed cat and the legless bird were brought into the surgery and I discovered Stanley was missing.”

“Well, when I checked Stanley, I noticed the ear brand on one ear was difficult to read. Of course this happens often which is why micro-chipping is gradually taking the place of ear branding. Anyway, after studying the ear more closely under a microscope I wrote the numbers down. Got a pen handy?”

I yanked at the front drawer of the coffee table and rummaged around until I found a small notebook and a biro. “Yep. Go ahead.”

“His right ear brand is S418. Okay? Now, it might pay to check this against Stanley’s racing papers because what’s suspicious is the fact that the last number has been changed from a 6 to an 8.”

Perplexed, I stared at the numbers I’d scribbled on the first page of the notebook. Who would change the dog’s ear brand? And why? Was Purple Pants, the man we’d found in the refrigerator, responsible for this? Or was it his killer?

“Another thing,” went on Terry—as if this wasn’t enough to comprehend already. “Did you know Stanley has a white sock on his left front leg?”

“No.”

“You can’t see it because someone has covered the sock with a dark colored dye.”

I stared at the phone. As Alice remarked when confronted by the weird goings on in Wonderland—
this was getting
curiouser and curiouser.

“Plus,” continued Terry, “the white toenails on the same foot have also been dyed.” He paused again and I imagined him running his fingers through his thick hair which is what Terry always did when overexcited. “So…it looks like our dearly beloved GAP dog is actually part of the mystery.”

I frowned. “So it wasn’t Lofty they were after at all?”

“Nope.”

“It was Stanley all the time—and now they have him.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Guess I’ll have to start calling you Sherlock.”

Terry let out a chuckle. “Nah. That Sherlock guy was a wimpy drama queen—left all the work to his side-kick, Dr. Watson. Me—I’d rather be Perry Mason. You know, a day in court to demonstrate the brilliance of my mind, followed by cocktails in a nightclub at five.”

I stood up and began to pace—much to the disgust of Tater who slid off my lap onto the lounge with a disgruntled growl. “Okay, Perry Mason, after all that, I think it’s time we bumped up the search for Stanley. I have a shaky feeling he’s in more trouble than we bargained for.”

“You’re right. I have to attend to my next patient right now, but after that I’ll get onto my contacts, see if they’ve heard anything. There’s something strange going on here.”

I placed the handset back on the base and scooped Tater up in my arms. There was something strange going on alright and I had a feeling Terry’s discovery was a major clue to the secret of the slow dog saga.

Were faster litter mates being used as
ring-ins
and entered in races under the name of their slower relatives?

22

“Ben should’ve tied Germaine’s nose in knots and shoved the whole freaking mess down his throat.” Tanya’s rant indicted if she’d been with me at the time, another of Germaine’s appendages would have copped a similar serve.

It was four hours later—close to 7 pm. The rain had stopped but a strong gusty wind rattled the loose window in the laundry. The one I meant to get fixed and only remembered on windy nights when tradesmen were tucked up at home, downing a couple of pints and fixing their own loose windows. After working and feeding my racing team, I’d settled them down for the night and given my best friend a ring.

Of course the phone call lasted all of two minutes.
What the blue-blazes!,
had been Tanya’s immediate reaction when I told her about someone trying to kill Scott and then she’d promptly invited herself over for dinner and was standing at my front door with two enormous steaks—before I could even warm up the grill.

Ben wasn’t coming for dinner. He’d rung to tell me Pot O’ Gold, his favorite brood bitch, had decided to go into labor five days early, and nothing short of an earthquake would shift him from Goldie’s side until every squirming puppy was safely lined up against the warm milk bar.

It was Erin’s turn to stay with her father this week—so it was just Tanya and me. And that suited us fine.

Our steaks sizzled under the grill, the tantalizing smell sending my stomach into spasms and rumbles of anticipation. While I filled Tanya in on my Port Augusta adventures, I also sorted through dirty clothes ready to bundle in the washing machine. It’s a fact of life that even when there’s a killer on the loose and everything around you gets hectic and scary you still need clean clothes.

“Ben didn’t
need
to get physical,” I told Tanya. “It was enough to hear his spurs jingling as he pushed through the door and ordered Germaine to move away from his girl-friend. You know—in that no-nonsense, bone-melting voice of his that makes me almost wet my pants just thinking about ripping his clothes off and—”

“La, la, la…” Tanya covered her ears with both hands and shook her head. “Just get on with it, will ya?”

I laughed. Tanya’s little black book was legendary, yet she balked at descriptions of what Ben and I got up to under the sheets…or on the floor…or in the cupboard…or…

“Okay. Okay. Anyway, one minute Germaine was throwing a temper tantrum complete with red face and flying spittle and the next he was quaking in his three hundred dollar shiny black loafers and backing right away from me.”

“Typical, chicken-shit bully!” Tanya, who had the job of going through pockets in search of hidden tissues, hurled a pair of my black trackie pants into the washing machine as though she was hurling Germaine off a cliff. “All piss and no wind.”

I grinned. My trusty sidekick oozed self-confidence…and bad axioms. With her at my side, I was sure we could devise a brilliant Plan A—plus several backup plans in case Plan A wasn’t so brilliant after all and slammed us nose first into the nearest brick wall.

I yanked my jumper over my head and tossed it in the machine. Green dribble, courtesy of Lucky, decorated the front. “Germaine’s definitely up to something crooked, but whether he’s worried about the porn I found on his computer or involved in the slow dog scam or he really does know where Liz’s gone—it’s anybody’s guess.” I lifted one eyebrow and focused on my cock-sparrow friend. “Thing is, Tan, we need a plan.”

She hesitated. “We do?”

Surely that wasn’t a squeak? A crack forming in Supergirl’s sexy amour? “How else are we going to find Liz and the dogs involved in the scam?”

“You’re right.” She bent to pick up a pair of my jeans from the clothes on the floor of the laundry, slid her hand into the back pocket. “Er…don’t suppose you got a beer in your fridge?”

Oh! Uh! We weren’t going down
that
path again. “Tan, the only drinks you’ll find in my fridge have too many calories and too much caffeine but
no
alcohol content.”

“Spoilsport,” she growled. “You’re no fun at—hey, what’s this?”

I glanced up from a tug of war with Lucky, who’d claimed one of my thick purple socks, to see Tanya holding a small folded piece of colored paper between two fingers.

After tossing my jeans into the washing machine she unfolded the paper, read the print, and frowned. “This was in the back pocket of your jeans.”

“And?”

“It’s Gina Robertson’s address.” Her frown deepened. “And it’s been torn off a GAP brochure.”

And then it hit me. “
Of course!
Scott snuck that to me when I visited him in the hospital. I slipped it into my back pocket—and with all that happened afterwards—forgot about it.”

“But why would Scott give you Gina’s address? What’s Lady Muck got to do with anything? And surely he’d realize you knew where our Goody-Two-Shoes GAP co-coordinator lived. And anyway, why would you
want
to know?”

I was as confused as Tanya and when she passed me the scrap of paper, I turned it upside down and then checked out the back—nothing there—except Gina’s address. “Got me stumped,” I said and my head spun with unanswered questions. “In the hospital we had this officious rent-a-cop breathing over our shoulders, refusing to let us discuss the case. I remember asking Scott if his girlfriend had been in to see him—meaning Liz—and that’s when he pretended to thank me for saving his life. He shook my hand and palmed that piece of paper to me.” I stared at Tanya. “Does this mean Scott thinks Liz is at Gina’s place?”

“But why would your sister go to Gina’s? Doesn’t make sense.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to calm my bongo-drum heartbeat. “Unless Liz had no say in the matter.”

“You mean—”

“What if Liz was kidnapped because she knew too much about the slow dog scam.”

“And she’s been locked up somewhere on Gina’s property.” Tanya’s fists clenched and her top lip curled. “Which
also
means our sainted GAP coordinator is in this up to her long pointed nose.”

“Hard to believe.”

“Well, why else would Liz’s boyfriend palm you that piece of paper?”

I shrugged. Like all the other questions, I had no answer to that one. “Thing is, Tan, what are we going to do about it?”

“Well…” Tanya, the corners of her mouth tweaking, sent me a wicked wink. “We
could
go over and beat the truth out of her. Blacken her eyes, break both arms, string her up on the wall and poke sharp sticks in her eyes.”

“Yeah, that’d be fun,” I agreed, joining in the fantasy. “After that, we could tie her to the back of our car and drag her across a few miles of rough, stony, bush land.”

“Then,” continued Tanya, with an evil laugh that would have done Freddy Kruger proud. “If she
still
won’t divulge her secrets—we could always employ that ex-boyfriend of hers, Cory Palmer. You know, The Chronic Whinger. Hell, we’d only need to let him loose on her for a couple of hours and she’d be begging to give us information—just to stop him whining.”

The thought of Liz locked up somewhere, scared and confused and maybe hurt, brought me back from whimsy to stark reality.

“Or…” I said, switching on the washing machine and leading the way into the kitchen, “we could just keep an eye on whoever goes in and out of Gina’s place during the day and then, as soon as it’s dark, break into the property and take a look through her sheds. See if we can find either the dogs involved in the scam—or my elusive sister.”

“Well…it so happens, my Scrooge-of-a-boss, who was feeling magnanimous due to a rise in profits for the year, has given me a rare flexi morning off tomorrow,” said Tanya lifting the already prepared salad bowl from the fridge and placing it in the middle of the table next to the pepper and salt and tomato sauce. “So…while you’re busy training your dogs, I can do the first shift and you can take over in the afternoon while I go to work.”

She rubbed her hands together and drooled as I set one textbook-cooked steak on each plate together with a pile of caramelized onions.

“Good,” I said as we scraped our chairs up to the table and grabbed our knives and forks like weapons of war. “Then tomorrow night we carry out—
Operation Find Liz
.”

The first bite of tender, slowly grilled fillet steak, medium cooked, dripping juices and oozing flavor, spread like warm honey into every crevice of my taste buds as I chewed.