* * *
In the Boogerville yard, Beau the Bum sat in Hayley’s Ute, savouring both the dark and the newly crisped air. It was the kind of cold that caused the flowering trees to set their blossoms and the Flying Foxes, as though in anticipation, were having a time in the bottlebrush trees.
There was no need for Beau to be waiting there but he planned, nonetheless, to hold out to midnight. Sometime before then, Cookie had said, he’d sneak out and toss the Afghanistan medal over the fence. The pistol . . . he didn’t know about the pistol. He thought maybe it was lost. Beau knew he was lying. No one in their right mind would lose a pistol.
Beau had assured himself that the lobbing of that package was all he was waiting for. But in truth, something else was bothering him. The Less and Afsoon believed that their mutt, Ava, had been dog-napped by the Duke of Daisley, and Beau, in his simple, un-muddled way, had no reason to question their conviction. She was there alright! Locked up. Probably starved. Maybe flogged, mutilated and treated otherwise horribly.
Hayley, for all her rat cunning and despite locking herself into the bus for the whole of the afternoon, had been unable to come up with a plan for the mutt’s release. In the end, as dark was settling, she’d gone for a walk around the block - to ‘scope things out’, she’d said. And she hadn’t returned; which obviously meant no plan. Beau’s wish was that an idea - any sort of idea - would pop into his head so that, for once, he could know the great joy of beating his sister to the punch!
He put the barrel of the pellet rifle out the window of the Ute and aimed it, first into the bottlebrush and then, in a high arc, toward the Duke’s place.
“Doosh! Doosh! Doosh!” he whispered, imagining the shots flying straight and true. “Give us the hound, Duke. Or kiss your weener goodbye.”
And he chuckled at the image he’d created. And he thought of the fences between him and that wrinkled little target of a weener. And most particularly, he thought of the Folly.