is on the furniture and eating his dinner in the living room like some sort of animal. And that bandanna!”
Baxter was wearing one of Hazel’s pink bandannas with yellow ducks on it.
“Baxter doesn’t like bandannas,” she said mournfully, as if something terrible had happened to her dog.
Baxter thumped his tail.
“Okay, all right,” Max said impatiently. “Will you please fill me in with what is going on? With my dog or Brant—either would work at the moment.”
Carly planted the giant sleeve cones on her hips. “Oh, I’m going to tell you, all right. But first, you would not believe how long it took me to figure it out. And it’s not like I have the time to go chasing after stoned dog walkers, you know. I have a life. A very busy life.”
Right. World peace and lobbying-for-equal-pay kind of busy life, he had no doubt. He gestured for her to continue.
“Anyway, when I came home and found an imposter dog in my house who had destroyed my couch pillows . . .” She paused here for the dramatic effect and to give him a look that suggested she thought he had purposely trained Hazel to do that.
Max held up a hand. “I will replace your couch pillows.” Because it was true that Hazel would, from time to time, let her separation anxiety be known.
“Thank you,” she said pertly. “They were not cheap pillows.”
“Fine.”
“Anyway, I did some digging. First, I took your dog to a vet to have her chip scanned, which would have cleared this all up right away, but guess what?”
“Yeah,” he muttered.
“Your dog doesn’t have a chip! How can you not have chipped your dog?”
Max glanced guiltily at the floor. He’d meant to do that, but he hadn’t had time. He was busy, too. “Well? Your dog doesn’t have a tag on his collar,” he said, as if that evened things out.
She folded her sleeves again. “No, he doesn’t. Because he’s chipped.”
“Nevertheless, I would recommend tags.”
“Your dog didn’t have tags.”
Okay, obviously he was not going to win this game. He let dogs on couches and he didn’t get them chipped on day one, and it hadn’t occurred to him to check if Baxter had one. He cast an accusatory look at that dog, as if he should have reminded Max to have him scanned for a chip.
“Nevertheless,” Carly continued, “I kept at it. I called the morgue; I called the hospitals; and finally, at long last, I located that chucklehead in the county jail. I got a copy of the police report and, by the by,” she said, holding up a finger, “if you ever need a police report, I know how to get one. Anyway, I found out that Brant has been selling bags of marijuana under the Pfluger Bridge.” She paused, leaned forward and said gravely, “On the dog walks.”
“Wow.”
“It’s really disturbing, isn’t it? I keep trying to picture it. He just takes our dogs on a walk, then stops off and sets up shop under the shadow of Stevie Ray Vaughan and sells bags of weed? And then what, just moseys on home?”
She gestured in a direction Max assumed in her head was Lady Bird Lake, but was the wrong direction. As Stevie Ray Vaughan was dead, Max also assumed she was talking about the statue erected to the former Austinite at Auditorium Shores. “I agree,” he said. “That is disturbing. I’m actually surprised that Brant has the mental acuity to pursue a criminal enterprise of any size. He doesn’t seem to have the sort of ambition I would think that would require.”
“Agree one thousand percent,” she said. “Anyway, Brant got himself locked up for a few days, and I finally got hold of the cop who arrested him. He’d allowed Brant to call a friend to come get the dogs. He pulled up his phone log and gave me the number.”
Wow. She had done a lot of detective work. He was grudgingly impressed and ashamed that he hadn’t thought to do half of what she’d done.
“His name is Kai.”
“The cop?”
“The friend. His name is Kai and he is Brant’s yogi. He teaches Brant yoga.”
“Huh. Wouldn’t have guessed that, either,” Max said thoughtfully.
“Same,” she said, nodding.
“What about my dog?”
“I’m getting there,” she said in the sort of voice a parent might use on an impatient child. “So. Kai went down to the park to get the dogs, and he got Brant’s list of the dogs and owners, and he delivered the dogs to their homes. But