you? From what?”
“From her.”
“Her who?”
The answer came a second later. I heard a sound behind us, turned, and saw a two-headed monster rounding the corner and barreling towards us. I stared in disbelief. The bottom half of the monster was a woman the size and approximate shape of an extra-long chest freezer turned on end, snorting like a bull and yelling something that sounded like Blobby Baby. She was wearing too-tight black yoga pants and a black CD101 Radio T-shirt, her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail with a frilly white scrunchie. The top of the monster was Mulligan, clinging to her back and trying to restrain her as she charged in our direction. Tangled up in the woman’s feet was a corgi, ears raised and fangs bared as it barked its little head off.
“Get him out of here, Woody!” Mulligan yelled.
I pushed the bail skip forward and started to run. But it was too late. The woman’s forward momentum overtook me, even with Mulligan trying to hold her back, and we went down in a tangle of limbs and arms and barking canine. I pulled myself free, started to stand up, looked around for the little guy, and had just enough time to back up slightly before the woman’s right fist connected with my left eye. I staggered, caught my balance, staggered again, and fell over. The corgi pounced and clamped its jaws onto my right sneaker, jerking my foot this way and that like a rat it had dug out of a hole. I rolled to my left, reached for something to pull myself up by, and found a fleshy, sockless ankle instead. I grabbed it with both hands and held on tight. For nearly twenty seconds I was back on my uncle’s pig farm being dragged through the mud by a surly sow as the woman fought her way forward hollering “Blobby Baby, Blobby Baby!” and I bumped and scraped my way across the dug-up yard. I’m pretty sure I ran over an expired woodchuck. Finally, just when I thought there was no way sweet potato fries were ever going to cut it, the woman said, in a surprisingly high, girlish voice, “God damn you motherfuckers to hell.” I stopped moving and she fell over with Mulligan splayed across her back like a rodeo rider at the county fair prelims. I took a breath, got to my knees, got all the way up, and rubbed my eye. I was seeing not just stars but entire constellations.
“Let’s get out of here,” Mulligan said. He ran up to the object of his pursuit and took him roughly by the left arm. The man was shaking like a leaf in a November breeze. He didn’t resist. “Thank you,” he whispered.
“Bobby baby,” the woman wailed, lying prone in the yard as she squeezed mud and God knows what else between her fingers. “Bobby baby.”
“I’M TELLING YOU, YOU’RE a natural, Woody,” Mulligan said an hour later, as I sat at the bar at Jury of Your Pours, an uneaten burger and a double helping of sweet potato fries before me. The lovebirds had departed, but the scent of their pheromones still lingered.
I adjusted the ice pack on my eye and took another drink of beer.
“You could have told me about her,” I said, not for the first time.
“I didn’t know.”
“But I bet you guessed?”
“Life’s too short to speculate, don’t you think? Anyway, you did great.”
“Tell it to Big Dog.”
“Dig it,” Mulligan said with a grin.
8
I DIDN’T LOOK MUCH WORSE THE NEXT morning than a guy whose left eye and socket have been replaced by an overripe eggplant. How I felt was another matter. I pulled myself together with a second cup of coffee before setting off for a romp in the park with Hopalong. After breakfast, a shower, and more breakfast, I got in my Honda Odyssey and headed to the northeast side of town.
Maple Ridge High was a 1970s special: flat roof, brick exterior the color of fish sticks, a bank of recessed glass doors at an entrance guarded by poured concrete pillars that brought to mind abandoned Olympic villages. I had to wait to be buzzed in. Once I was inside, a custodian reluctantly pointed me down a gleaming hall toward the office. I could feel the resentment in his eyes like little death rays in my back as I tracked molecular-sized grains of dust onto the newly waxed floor.
I explained to the woman sitting at a desk why I was there. She didn’t reply, but instead stared hard at me, which was a puzzle until I remembered my eye.
“I’m not sure Ms. Paulus has time today,” she said at last. “We’re trying to wrap up the school year.”
“Ms. Paulus?”
“The principal?”
“Right. It won’t take but a minute, promise. Or I can wait.” I leaned forward, folded my hands on the counter and smiled.
She didn’t return the smile. She had a full, brown face and a streak of red in her straightened black hair that nicely matched her lipstick. Her dark eyes were the sort you could fall into if you had a thing for school secretaries who brooked very little crap. She glanced at an open office door behind her and to her right. A poster of a female swimmer doing the butterfly filled the upper half of the door.
“I’ll have to see.” She studied her desk phone for a moment. I couldn’t tell if she was hoping it would ring or deciding whether to call 9-1-1. At last she stood with a frown and click-clacked on red summer heels back to the principal’s office. I looked around the room and caught the custodian glaring at me through the office windows. Like the secretary, he didn’t appear to feel I was conducive to the school’s educational mission. I waved. He stalked off. A moment later the secretary click-clacked back to her desk, followed by a woman with a pen in her hand and impatience on her face.
“I’m Helene Paulus. How can I help you?”
I got the same puzzled look at my eye. I smiled and handed her my card and told her my name and reason for my presence. She took the card and studied it like a copy machine invoice she hadn’t been expecting. When she was done she turned the card over and seemed disappointed the back was blank. I get that a lot. It always makes me think I should buy a set printed with a cartoon of a hound wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat and sucking on a churchwarden pipe, to show I’m a real investigator and all.
She said, “But I thought . . .” She paused. She lowered her voice a notch. “I thought Abdi was overseas.”
“Not as far as anyone knows. We think he’s here.”
“We?”
“The family. And the government, too, for that matter.”
“And you’re a private investigator?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, which I could tell she didn’t like since she couldn’t have been that much older than me. I pulled out my license and presented it.
“Just a couple of questions. In hopes of finding the boy.”
“We can talk in my office,” she said doubtfully, and gestured for me to come around the counter and follow her back. I smiled at the secretary as I passed her desk. She shot me some of the custodian’s death rays. As we entered the principal’s office I looked at the poster on the door. “Dream Bigger,” it said, beneath a photo of the swimmer taken from an underwater angle.
“I
