Chapter 8 of the novel, The Talkiing Mime

Chapter 8

Call the coroner or the pound?

Seeing the dead dog, all I could think about was a pooch named Neal, a martini-guzzling St. Bernard, a stock character on a 1950s television program "Topper." The program had become a fixture on TVLand reruns which I had gotten hooked on last winter when I was down with the flu. I flashed for a moment on Leo G. Carroll, the star, and how he would spar with the dog over the martinis and it made me sad, and a little angry. In death anyway, this dog hardly looked vicious.

Whether Nym was thinking about Neal or not, I don't know. She held the dog's head in both hands for a few minutes, as if the dead animal could tell her secrets. I stayed back by the transom and out of the way of the deputies who had suddenly started to methodically tear the boat apart — confirming for me an earlier guess that they thought there were drugs aboard. I caught several looks from the deputies that warned me not to move too far into the boat, an idea that didn't appeal to me at all, anyway. In fact the sight of the dog confirmed my feelings that perhaps Rocinante should slip her lines and head south, away from what seemed to be a center of mayhem, not a tranquility base.

 "Why do people do this?" Nym said, looking up at me.

I erroneously thought she was talking about the sheriff's deputy pumping four rounds into the dog, then realized she was talking about whomever left the dog locked on the boat.

"The poor thing was probably starving and when he saw someone break through the cabin door. He was delirious, not dangerous."

But the deputy who had done the shooting disagreed from the navigation station where he was standing, pulling out the ship's papers and generally making a mess of the countertop. He voiced his defense in relatively hushed tones — probably so his two partners in the bow cabin of the boat couldn't interject.

"Damn dog came right at me," the deputy said.  It was barking and snapping like crazy. It could have rabies, you know."

Nym and I looked at the deputy — now I even recognized he was the one at the bar last night — and I thought he had a far greater risk of catching herpes from one of the women in the bar  than rabies from this likely pedigreed animal. But I held my tongue. He had just fired four bullets into a dog and still seemed edgy.

Nym felt around the dog's wounds, commenting that he hadn't really bled very much - at least not for an animal his size. "The tag says his name is 'Tiny'" Nym said. "That's two weird names for these people. First the boat, and now a moose of a dog named Tiny. I hate it when people give animals ridiculous names."

Nym's hands had some blood on them from the dog, but even with the blood around the cockpit, it didn't look like the movie scenes where gallons of blood seem to fill the screen whenever anyone is shot. I could see where some of the blood had dripped down between the deckboards, into the oily bilges around the engine — a combination that was going smell as ugly as a roadkill skunk if it wasn't cleaned up.

"What is your protocol for something like this," Nym asked, wiping the blood off her hands with a towel from the cockpit sole. "In San Francisco, we usually would have to treat this like it was a human shoot. People take their pets pretty seriously."

The three deputies paused in their searching, looking at Nym as if she had asked them to explain the quadratic equation to her. Their looks hardened, too, as if they suddenly realized that this perky woman with a badge was actually associated with a district attorney's office — not the cops — and that put her somewhere in the netherland between friend and enemy, depending on the kind of questions she asked.

"We had a warrant, counselor. A warrant to search this barge. And I don't know what we do about the dog, but I'm not worried about it."

I noticed that the deputy speaking had a name tag said M. McGuire, and while I couldn't say much about his choice of fashion in wearing his hat backwards, he did seem to have a grip on procedure, and he was definitely less destructive than his two colleagues who seemed to be under his command, but in a sort of corporal-private relationship.

Nym motioned to me to move over to her and we carefully stepped down into the salon of the boat, which in the interior showed a carefully built luxury yacht, not just a souped-up fisherman's toy. The  floor was teak and holly with built-in mahogany bookshelves, fancy electronics and a stereo. At one end of the salon, a projection television with a screen that looked six or seven feet wide.

In the forward cabin, all three deputies had ripped open a mattress and were spreading the stuffing all over.

"Is this a drug case?" Nym asked. "Because if it is, I would be surprised if they hid the stuff in a mattress."

This time, when the deputies paused, it reminded me of one of those scenes from a horror movie, when the monster suddenly takes notice of the hero and the audience collectively groans at him for drawing attention to himself.

"You know, you'll be a good witness if the owner files a claim for that mutt," McGuire said. "But you are way out of your jurisdiction here and we have a lot of work to do."

I waved to say goodbye, gripping Nym's arm, even though I knew she would be angry later that I was being "husband." But I didn't like the deputies faces and it occurred to me that if they didn't find what they were looking for, we might not be welcome at all.

We backed out of the cabin, carefully stepping by the dog.  I bent over and gave him a little pat on the head, dead or not.

The wind was starting to come up, and as we rowed back, Nym turned around several times, looking at the boat and listening to the sounds of things crashing from as the deputies continued their rough quest for something. She was quiet, which I decided to interpret as thoughtfulness about the shooting, and not pique at me for encouraging our exit.

At Rocinante, Jerrod and Jacob lounged in the cockpit, feigning complete indifference to anything short of an Elvis sighting, but we hadn't even grabbed the ladder to tie up the dinghy before they began screeching like spider monkeys, firing questions at us about the shots, and who was killed and what did they look like, and was there blood...

"I bet they were looking for the body that goes with the hand," Jerrod said. "Murder. Right over there!

Nym groaned as we swung up onto the ladder and handed the lines for the dinghy to the twins. "Only in a very bad, very bad novel, would there be a body on that boat," she said. "Those deputies are after some of drugs, I think. That's one reason they were so trigger happy. I think they expected resistance."
     And it was dog they shot,"she said, " I think it scared the deputies quite completely. It's dead, boys. The shots were one of the deputies killing it."
     Jerrod and Jacob looked at Nym, uncomprehending. "They shot a dog?" they said in unison. "What assholes."
     Before that train got too far down the tracks, I jumped into the conversation and said we needed to get about our day with some boat work and plans for heading south again. The boys grumbled, but starting eying the dinghy and the shoreline where some surfers had arrived and just started catching some low rollers.
     Alone later with Nym, I asked her why she didn't press the officers about what the warrant was for and she said that she decided to get that information from our friend Undersheriff Wilma Krebs, later in the day.
     "Those deputies told me more than they should have anyway," she said. "And by the way, I don't think they were looking for drugs. No dog of their own to sniff the drugs out."
     Duh, I thought to myself, I knew that.
     In the distance, we could see the deputies were already putting up that familiar yellow crime scene tape - police tape - around the cockpit of the boat. Then we saw the dog - or at least something large wrapped in a blue blanket, being hauled by two of the deputies and put into the Sheriff's boat.
     "Apparently there's no need for any shooting team," Nym said. "In San Francisco, that boat would be swarming with people. And probably somebody from the Humane Society."

The trip to The Talking Mime had stolen away all of the morning, and I went below decks and cracked open a beer at my navigation station. I began writing a letter to my publisher, telling her that my book outline would be coming within say, three weeks, giving myself a long deadline for a 10-page outline, but not so long that I could ignore it completely.
     Jacob and Jerrod stayed on deck for at least an hour, watching the deputies finishing their taping and then roar off in the Sheriff's boat, back to shore. The boys came below, still muttering about the deputy shooting the dog, and still somewhat puzzled.
     The afternoon disappeared for me in a haze of writing and puttering on the boat. Jacob and Jerrod rowed over past The Talking Mime several times to check it out. Many other small boats did the same, curious about the yellow tape. At one point, I noticed several people up on the outside deck of The Anchor Inn, looking through field glasses at the boat. Nym was buried in her yellow notepad.
     But then the sun started sinking towards the horizon and the fog rolled in, making The Talking Mime disappear, then reappear, winking in and out of the fog bank on the edge of the anchorage.
     Later, right after sundown, Nym whipped up a great chicken dinner in the galley and the four of us ate quietly while I pondered what I needed to do to get the boat ready for the rest of our trip.

Nym and I shared a bottle of wine and talked about what she wanted to do (keep asking questions) versus what I wanted to do (sail south, soon). The boys begged to take a night row in the dinghy around the anchorage to look at boats in the dark.
I vetoed the idea, though I noticed some dinghy traffic coming and going from the Anchor Inn dock and a few cruising the anchorage.

And as is so often the case for me, a couple of glasses of wine, and the big dinner sent me to my bed in the aft cabin by 9 p.m. - ostensibly to read. Nym climbed in shortly thereafter, sans her yellow notepad and we both fell asleep, the rocking of the boat as gentle as a cradle.
     An odd day, I thought, disturbed by everything that had happened.
     It was just at first light the next morning, as I worked my way out of a dream, that I heard Jacob holler from the boys' bunks in the V-berth, his voice cracking like he was still 13-years-old.

"Dad! Dad! 
The boat's sinking. 
I am NOT kidding.
Get up!
Get up now."

Chapter 9, Shouting fire in a crowded theater