Excerpt of To Fetch A Thief by Spencer Quinn

"I smell trouble," Bernie said.

Better stop right there. Not that I doubt Bernie. The truth is I believe everything he says. And he has a nice big nose for a human. But what’s that saying? Not much.

It’s a fact that trouble has a smell - human trouble especially, sour and penetrating – but Bernie had never smelled trouble before, or if so he hadn’t mentioned it, and Bernie mentioned all kinds of things to me. We’re partners in the Little Detective Agency, me and Bernie, Bernie’s last name being Little. I’m Chet, pure and simple.

I took a quick sniff, smelled no trouble whatsoever, just as I’d expected, but did smell lots of other stuff, including burgers cooking on a grill. I looked around: no grill in sight, and this wasn’t the time to go searching, although all at once I was a bit hungry, maybe even more than a bit. We were on the job, trailing some woman whose name I’d forgotten. She’d led us out of the Valley to a motel in a flea-bitten desert town. That was what Bernie called it – flea-bitten – but I felt no fleas at all, hadn’t been bothered by them in ages, not since I started on the drops. But the funny thing was, even though I didn’t have fleas, just the thought of them suddenly made me itchy. I started scratching, first behind my ear, soon along my side, then both at once, really digging in with my claws, faster and –

"Chet, for God’s sake."

I went still, one of my back paws frozen in mid-air. Bernie gave me a close look. "Don’t tell me I forgot

the drops?" I gave him a close look right back. Bernie has these faint lines on his forehead. When he worries, they get deeper, like now. I don’t like it when Bernie worries. I pushed all thoughts about scratching clear out of my mind and sat straight up in the shotgun seat - my very favorite spot – alert and flealess.

We were in the Porsche. There are fancy Porsches out there – we see them on the freeways; we’ve got freeways out the yingyang in the Valley - but ours isn’t one of them. It’s very old, brown with yellow doors, and there’s a bullet hole in the back license plate. How that happened is a story for another time.