K-9 Blues (Paws & Claws Book 3) Read online

  Framed!

  Officers Antony and Arnold are the most decorated heroes in the Chula Vista Police Department’s crack K-9 Unit, and their success rate is phenomenal. As far as everyone is concerned they are the epitome of law enforcement dogs – courageous, intelligent, clever, loyal and honest. Law enforcement is their world. Suddenly that world comes crashing down around them. They find themselves accused of wrongdoings unbecoming of their station, of heinous crimes against society, of being bad dogs. In an instant everything changes...from heroes to pariahs, ousted from the only work they ever knew and loved, shunned by those once counted as friends and colleagues. In desperation and disgrace, they seek the assistance of the Three Dog Detective Agency, the “civilians” they had always held in disdain. They are forced to overcome their own prideful natures and ask Levi, Sunny and Yoda to help clear their names, to restore them to their positions, and to bring to justice the real culprits. Once again, the Three Dog Detective Agency must battle evil and injustice, but this time their enemies strike from the shadows and nothing is as it seems; this time evil wears a mask.

  Also by Ralph E. Vaughan

  Paws & Claws: A Three Dog Mystery (Paws & Claws #1)

  A Flight of Raptors (Paws & Claws #2)

  Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories

  Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Ancient Gods

  Sherlock Holmes and The Terror Out of Time

  Sherlock Holmes: The Dreaming Detective

  Sherlock Holmes in The Coils of Time (Gryphon Books)

  Professor Challenger and the Secrets of the Dreamlands

  Shadows Against the Empire: An Interplanetary Steampunk Adventure

  Upon Unknown Seas, Under Strange Stars (short story collection)

  Reflections Upon Elder Egypt: Staring Deep into the Eye of Horus

  H.P. Lovecraft in the Comics

  The Confession (play)

  Oh, Mr Yoda! (play) with Patricia E. Vaughan

  A Walk in the Dark (editor)

  Alternate Lives (editor)

  Ancient Nights (editor)

  Beneath Twin Moons (editor)

  Lost Lands (editor)

  Fantastic Realms (editor)

  The Horses of Byzantium & Other Poems (poetry)

  A Darkness Upon My Mind (poetry)

  The Many Worlds of Duane Rimel (editor)

  The Second Book of Rimel (editor)

  Dreams of Yith (editor/illustrator)

  Fungi From Yuggoth (editor/illustrator)

  Sozoryoku Literary Magazine (editor)

  Cerberus Literary Magazine (editor)

  Running Dinosaur Newsletter (editor)

  K-9

  BLUES

  Paws & Claws #3

  by

  Ralph E. Vaughan

  Dog in the Night Books

  2014

  This is the third volume in the continuing adventures of the Three Dog Detective Agency. The previous books were Paws & Claws: A Three Dog Mystery and A Flight of Raptors. The Three Dog Detective Agency is led by a brave Dachshund-mix named Levi, who is assisted by Sunny, a Golden Retriever, and Yoda, a Pomeranian. They are dedicated to keeping their neighborhood safe. They investigate crimes, help the weak, ensure justice is served, and occasionally save the world. Pictures of the three detectives are included at the end of this present volume, as well as instructions on how to contact them and nominate your own pet as a possible character in a future volume..

   2014 by Ralph E. Vaughan

  All Rights Reserved

  DEDICATION

  This novel is dedicated to all canine law enforcement officers who daily go above and beyond the call of duty to keep us safe and to ensure civilization triumphs over lawlessness. Ofttimes their efforts go unappreciated and unrecognized, but even though they may be mistreated by those who should value them most, they never lose faith in us.

  K-9 Memorial

  ACKNOWLGDEMENT

  Many thanks to noted Canadian artist Cassandra Hueser for nominating and providing information about Swoon, a cat rescued as a kitten from a farm that already had too many cats. Sick, underfed and with no mother, she was nursed back to health and now lives a happy life full of play and joy. Her favorite games are attacking the toes of sleeping companions and terrorizing yarn. Like her companion, Swoon is also an artist. She is an Animal of Character indeed!

  Prologue

  The large and unusual dog in the mask uttered a peculiar soft sound, almost like a bark, bringing the meeting to order.

  An attendant dog, trying to hear the Master’s quiet whisper, inadvertently strayed too close. One of two Dobermans always at the Master’s side nipped viciously at the trespasser, drawing both blood and a muffled yelp.

  “Back!” the other Doberman warned. “You know the rules.”

  The offending dog, a Black Lab who went by the name Caller, tucked his tail and started to submit. “I’m sorry, I did not…”

  “Shut up and sit,” growled the Doberman who had put him in his place. His name was Gamal.

  “Silence,” said Aleph, the other praetorian Doberman.

  “The Organization has a problem,” the Master whispered.

  The dozen dogs in attendance strained their ears to hear the Master’s faint words, and struggled to discern his masked form in the deep shadows. The meeting was being held in the parking garage of the Chula Vista Police Department, deep underground, in the far corner of a level used only for storage. All the attendees had entered through various secret entrances, avoiding any detection by surveillance devices on upper levels. Despite the fact they were three levels down, they were still almost within sniffing distance of Chula Vista’s often-praised and highly decorated K-9 Unit, reason enough for caution and whispers. But the Master always whispered, no matter the venue. Many speculated that this dog of mystery and menace had had a throat injury, or an operation, but the truly smart dogs did not speculate at all.

  “Two officers from the K-9 Unit have been sniffing around the edges of our operations,” he continued. The Master’s masked head turned until the eye-slits were centered on Boris, a Sulimov. “You were tasked with warning Officers Antony and Arnold off, while allaying any suspicions they might harbor. In that, you have failed.”

  Boris wanted to turn away from the Master’s hypnotic green stare, as any dog would, but could not. The gray and white dog was descended from the original Sulimov dogs working as sniffers for Aeroflot Security, and had been bred for keen senses of smell and fearlessness. He was afraid of nothing…but the Master, and in that he was not alone.

  “I did my best, Master,” he explained. “But they would not listen to me. I think I might have been successful had only Arnold been involved – he is a Belgian Shepherd, rather easygoing next to the others in the unit; his partner cut me off, chased me away. You just cannot talk to a Cane Corso – rough and by-the-book all the time. I tried to insinuate some ideas with Sergeant Rex about those two, but he just laughed at me. They are well regarded; I am not.”

  “You are very ineffectual, and very disappointing, Boris” the Master accused, his words moving through the shadowy air like hissing cobras. “Does anyone suspect your connection to us?”

  “No, no, absolutely not!”

  “Keep your voice down,” Aleph growled softly.

  “What about Antony and Arnold?” the Master asked.

  “No,” Boris insisted. “Arnold ignored me because he does what Antony tells him to do. Antony, on the other paw, just does not regard me well for some reason. I think he does not like me.”

  The Master held Boris with a mesmerizing green gaze.

  “He does not trust me,” Boris admitted, finally averting his eyes. “He doe
s not…” Overcoming his feeling of shame, he said, “Antony does not respect my breeding.”

  “Anyone with a Jackal in the family tree,” the Master hissed, “should expect other dogs to mark that family tree…often.”

  A muffled growl from Gamal silenced the twitters of laughter.

  The Master’s words stung, but much worst things had been said about him by other members of the K-9 Unit. Though the Unit respected the keenness of his sense of smell, which made him the lead dog in the sniffing division, he was still subjected to the sort of hazing that was usually only meted out to probies for a week or two. Boris looked upon the Master with a mixture of reverence, hatred and fear, a dog unlike any other, a dog who was going to create a new world for them all. The Master was cruel and dangerous, but he provided a pack in which Boris felt he belonged, at least most of the time, and for that Boris was grateful, even worshipful.

  “I do not care what you have to do, Boris,” the Master continued after order was restored. “But you will remove Officers Antony and Arnold from our business, but without harming or eliminating them. We want them to stop sniffing our butts, not for everyone else to start sniffing.”

  “I’ll get it done, Master,” Boris vowed. “You can count on me. I will not let you down again.”

  “If you do not accomplish your task by tomorrow, you yourself will be eliminated,” the Master whispered. “Another member of the K-9 Unit has been recruited. Failure would make you redundant.”

  “But putting a police dog to sleep…” Boris protested.

  “To the world, you will have just vanished, probably run off,” the Master interrupted. “Do you really think any of your fellow officers will search all that hard for a jackal-dog mix, no matter how keen your sniffer is?”

  Boris hung his head low, feeling hot stares of contempt.

  “Moving on to other matters…” the Master continued.

  Chapter 1

  Levi and Officer Antony stood nose to nose, their muzzles almost touching, their gazes locked in a death match.

  They stood in the driveway of the big brown house on Fifth Avenue, Levi just inside the partially opened double-gate, Antony just outside. Behind Antony stood a rather worried-looking Officer Arnold, who also wore a vest-harness prominently displaying the word POLICE and the embroidered badge of the Chula Vista Police Department.

  Levi was a Dachshund-mix. As a pup, when he had escaped a terrible life to the safe haven of the house on Fifth Avenue, he had been midnight-black, from tip-of-nose to tail-tip, but over the years his coat had become much more…distinguished, more salt than pepper, and the white upon his muzzle and around his eyes at times made it seem as if he wore a mask.

  Flanking Levi were Sunny, a Golden Retriever-mix, and Yoda, a Pomeranian, his colleagues in the Three Dog Detective Agency. Two cats, a Calico named Groucho and a huge black-and-silver tom named Smokey, sat atop a teal-colored Ford Escort Wagon, watching with bemused interest. The two cats who administered the office – Kim, a Torby, and Little Kitty, another Calico – watched the goings-on from a window.

  “Stand aside, Levi,” Antony growled. “We are going to search these premises for Slim Shady.”

  “You are not coming in here,” Levi replied, his voice calm and yet backed with the firmness only a true alpha can muster.

  “Come on, Levi,” Arnold urged in a cajoling voice. “You know Slim Shady is here, and we know Slim Shady is here. There is no use denying it.”

  Levi kept his gaze trained on the lead police dog, a Cane Corso with a faun-colored coat and black muzzle. The other K-9 officer was a Dutch Shepherd, a short-coated golden brindle. Antony had all the fire and speed one would expect from an Italian breed, and though he was the younger of the two police dogs by almost a full year, he always took the lead, with no argument from Arnold, who was much more easy-going.

  Had Levi been a standard Dachshund, he would have been dwarfed by both K-9 officers, but there was nothing standard about Levi. He was a mixed-breed, but while the Dachshund line asserted itself in the length of his body, the barrel-swell of his chest, the form of his head, and the paddle shapes of his front paws (just right for digging deep to flush a badger from its lair) it was the “mix” that made him stand head and shoulders above his Dachshund brethren. He had very long, ridiculously and wondrously long, legs that not only let him make prodigious leaps of which other dogs could only dream, but almost put him eye to eye with Antony.

  “Why do you say that?” Levi asked. “Do you smell him here?”

  Antony growled, baring his teeth. “You know we can’t.”

  “No one can smell anything after last night’s skunking in the alley, you know that,” Arnold said. “It’ll be hours before it settles, before the background odors reassert themselves.”

  “Then I suggest you come back in a few hours,” Levi said. “If you catch a scent of Slim Shady then, well, we’ll see about helping you out, maybe. Perhaps we will let you poke around in the yard a bit. Maybe you can help Yoda find a bone he buried last week and can’t find now…you know, detective work.”

  Standing off to the side, Yoda frowned and murmured: “What bone did I…”

  Sunny shouldered the Pomeranian, nearly knocking the smaller dog over.

  “On, that bone,” Yoda said as he kept his balance. “Forgot about that one, I bury so many. Yeah, serve and protect, and find lost bones. A regular Sherlock Bones, you might say.”

  Neither police dog spared the wild-haired Pom even a glance, though Arnold, from time to time, did cast a soft gaze in Miss Sunny’s direction.

  “Of course,” Levi continued, “if we knew what Slim Shady is supposed to have done, we might even want to find him ourselves. After all, the Three Dog Detective Agency is all about law and order, you know that.”

  “I know you three mongrels…”

  “How rude!” Sunny sniffed.

  “Hey, I’m a pure Pom, even if I am big!” Yoda snapped.

  “Antony, that’s pretty rough,” Arnold cautioned.

  “…and your fur-ball cat pals,” Antony continued, ignoring the outbursts from the others, “do not care one whit about law or order. You do whatever you want, make up your own rules, and flaunt the authority of the regular police.”

  “Actually, they have helped us some…” Arnold started to say.

  Antony silenced his partner with a sharp bark-growl, a control sound sometimes used by an alpha to reassert authority when he felt it slipping away. It was the sort of desperate and preemptive sound that Levi had never felt the need to use. To his way of thinking, any dog who resorted to such a gimmick to retain command and respect was ultimately worthy of neither.

  “Why are you trying to find Slim Shady?” Levi asked.

  “Police business,” Antony snarled.

  “Fine,” Levi replied, starting to shoulder the gate closed, “then go about your police business, but not here.”

  Antony interposed his bulk against the gate, and Arnold moved forward to help him. What they had not counted on was Sunny, who ran forward and hit the police dogs with her shoulder. Although both K-9 officers were solidly built and heavily muscled from their training regimen, they were no match for eighty-five pounds of hurtling Golden Retriever. With the two guardians of law and order out of the way, temporarily, the gate was pulled shut.

  The latch clicked into place.

  “Ouch,” Sunny said softly.

  “Open that gate now!” Antony yelled from the other side. “You can’t push the police around like that!”

  “And you cannot violate our territory without just cause,” Levi replied. “It’s marked, and you know it.”

  “Come on, Levi,” Arnold called. “Can’t we talk this over?”

  With the latch in place, even with no lock hung through the latch, the only way to open the gate from the outside was to pull on a metal wire that passed through a small hole in the gate. With that wire just over five feet above the ground there was no way either dog, even working together, could
unlatch the gate – the wire had to be pulled straight out, so leaping up to snag it would only put a dog in danger of losing a tooth. In effect, the cats controlled the gate.

  Smokey and Groucho leaped from the station wagon’s roof to the yard-waste bin, then to the wooden wall, balancing easily as they gazed down with Cheshire grins at the would-be intruders.

  Antony fumed and shouted impotently. Arnold tried to appeal to their sense of canine camaraderie awhile longer, then fell into a frustrated silence. By that time, however, the three dogs had already moved up the drive to a doorway leading to the back yard where they could talk without fear of being overheard.

  After a period of silent mirth, Groucho and Smokey abandoned their perches, crept along the top of the Escort, then leapt to the roof of the second car in the driveway, a dusty red Ford Aspire seemingly held together by dust, bird droppings and spider webs.

  “You know how those two are,” Levi said softly. “They are not going to give up easily.”

  “They seem to have given in, for at least the moment,” Smokey said in a soft gravelly voice, faintly accented. “Going down Fifth.”

  “They’ll be back, you know,” Groucho said. “Antony never gives up on what he wants.”

  “And this time he wants Slim Shady,” Smokey added.

  “Yes,” Levi agreed. “And rather badly.”

  “How are we going to help Slim Shady?” Yoda queried.

  “Are you sure we should?” Sunny asked. “It appears he may not have been quite honest with us. Antony and Arnold never make a move without what they consider good cause.”

  “Well, if Antony wants the Whippet so badly, then that’s good enough reason for me that we should…” Yoda started to say.