Written for a photo challenge at picfor1000 . livejournal . com.
Nancy had been on the case for two days, and it should have been simple. The owner of the bar was letting students and patrons bet on games. Everyone knew it. Few people had even bothered trying to deny it when Nancy had asked; only the ones who had been involved claimed they didn't know what she was talking about.
She just couldn't figure out how the bar's owner was getting the money. Bar tabs were accurate, not padded. She had set up cameras, had scrutinized the bartender's behavior, that of the patrons. But the interior was dim, the floor a scrabble of peanut shells and grit. It just didn't make sense.
On the third night, Ned came from the bar with two beers and handed Nancy one. Bess was drinking a rum and Diet Coke, the only drink she had trusted the bartender to make when he had shaken his head, deadpan, at the suggestion of a piña colada.
"This is ridiculous," Nancy sighed. "How is she doing it? How?"
Bess shrugged, adjusting the strap of her ruffled pink and white sundress. With the air conditioning on high, Bess's tanned arms were prickled with goosebumps. "Well, the proceeds sure aren't going back into this place," she pointed out under her breath. "What a dump. Peanut shells, sticky upholstery... oh my God, they even let dogs in here!"
A small, dark-haired dog with bug eyes and floppy ears, a white blaze on his chest, sauntered into the bar, nails clicking against the floor. He even looked like he had eyebrows, Nancy thought, and then smirked to herself. She really needed to cut herself off. The dog looked a little scruffy, but wise somehow.
"What are you thinking, Nan? Stakeout tonight?"
Nancy glanced over at her boyfriend, reading his blandly innocent expression all too easily. A stakeout meant time alone together, hours, and inevitable boredom... which meant Ned's usual attempts to alleviate it. She and Ned had tried a stakeout the first night, but it had also been Nancy's first night during her trip to Emerson, so she and Ned had spent more time than they probably should have, getting... reacquainted.
"Aww, come here sweetie!"
Nancy had just opened her mouth to reply to her boyfriend when she saw Bess leaning down, wiggling her fingers at the dog in invitation. "Aww, aren't you a cutie," Bess crooned.
Ned chuckled. "Two seconds ago you were all 'flea-infested mutt,'" he murmured.
Bess shrugged. "It's a cute collar," she said. "And wook at him, wittle enough to fit in my puwse."
Nancy shook her head at the cutesy baby-talk and turned back to Ned. "I think we might need to get a plant," she suggested. "Someone who can come in and find out how to make a bet. That might be the quickest way to take all this down."
"Someone who isn't us," he guessed, then tipped back his beer again. "You think we've been made?"
Bess rolled her eyes as she looked between the two of them. "Emerson's golden couple. Of course you have."
Nancy looked around the bar again, frustrated by the fact that she had to be be missing something. Something right in front of her face, something easy. If only she knew what it was.
The dog wandered away after Bess's petting, and seemed to be begging for scraps, stopping at tables and looking expectantly up at the patrons, waiting a few seconds near barstools and then setting off again. Nancy had noticed the dog once on the surveillance, but she hadn't thought anything of it...
She was just turning back to Ned, to suggest who they might want to bring in, when something in her peripheral vision caught her attention. The dog—something was sticking out of his collar.
"Oh my God," she whispered.
Now that she was watching, she was almost embarrassed at how obvious it was. The dog was approaching tables because he had been trained to do it, to serve as the bookie's agent. He waited beneath one table, then scampered to the next, another folded bill tucked beneath his collar.
"Bess," Nancy whispered. "See if you can get that dog back over here. What were you doing before?"
Bess and Ned glanced over too, and saw what she had. "Oh," Bess murmured. "Oh, here puppy! Come here, cutie!" she called softly, waggling her fingers at ankle-height again.
"That sure is one smart dog," Ned murmured.
"And a smart owner," Nancy murmured, too. "I would never have guessed this, not in a million years. Wow."
Sergeant Weinberg was skeptical when Nancy came to him with the evidence—a slightly blurry cell phone photo Bess had obligingly taken—but, in the absence of other leads, he had to admit it was possible. Nancy had managed to slide one of the bills out while Bess was distracting the dog, even though he had sensed what she was doing and snapped a little; clearly he had been trained not to allow that—and she had found the betting slip folded inside.
Three days later, Nancy's visit to Emerson was almost over, when she received a call. Ned was in class, and Nancy and Bess were over at Theta Pi.
"Nancy? Mind coming by?"
The campus police all knew her by sight and name, and waved when she walked in. Sergeant Weinberg looked a little too smug, though. "So we nabbed the accomplice, and the owner'll have to give him up for adoption. I couldn't imagine anyone else rehabbing him from a life of crime like you, though."
Bess clapped with glee when she saw the little dog in a travel kennel. Nancy looked into the dog's wise eyes, and was just beginning to shake her head, but the dog just gazed steadily at her. Like it knew her.
"Oh... I don't know," she murmured, opening the kennel. The dog sniffed her hand and sat down, and she read his nametag. "What do you think, Togo?"