The Case of the Vampire Vacuum Sweeper Read Online Free

and then I plopped . . .
    Yee-ow!
    For Pete’s sake, what was that thing I’d plopped down on? It felt like a rock, maybe even a boulder, and what was a boulder doing in the middle of Slim’s living room? I raised myself to a standing position and began sniffing through the pile of papers, and even went to the trouble of activating Smelloradar.
    A lot of dogs wouldn’t have gone to that much trouble, but I did, for the simple reason that I wasn’t too keen on the idea of sleeping on a rock pile.

    Yes, I did have hopes of getting a little sleep, if I could clear away all the rubble and get Slim off the phone.
    I had a boulder lurking in my bed and I had to find it. I activated Smelloradar and set it for Rock Search. Nothing, a total blank for rocks and boul­ders. But then . . . hmmm, I began picking up faint signals that suggested the presence of . . . bone?
    Impossible. I punched in Deep Sniff and did a more thorough analysis. By George, all the instruments kept bringing up the same results: Bone, grade three, fairly old, possibly steak. Well, a guy has to trust his instruments, so I probed deeper into the paper mess with my nose, and . . .
    I’ll be derned. Found a bone at the bottom of the heap.
    My first thought was that some stranger had wandered into Slim’s shack, gotten lost in all the papers and mess, and perished, leaving a few bones behind. But no, on second thought, that theory didn’t make sense. Nobody in his right mind would wander into Slim’s dirty house.
    But what was a bone doing in the middle of the living room?
    I eased my jaws around the bone, lifted it out of the paper mess, laid it on the floor, and studied it with eyes that were well trained in the field of Bonology. The results were shocking. Not only was this not a steak bone, it wasn’t even a beef bone. It was a turkey neck bone !
    What was a turkey neck bone doing in the middle of Slim’s living room floor? I had no idea. All I can tell you is that many strange things end up on his floor.
    Well, I felt pretty proud of myself for solving the Mystery of the Turkey Neck Bone, and it occurred to me that maybe I should celebrate my success by chewing it. That’s just what I did.
    I had just taken it into my mouth and begun to enjoy the nice crunchy texture of this particular bone, and had lost all interest in Slim’s phone conversation with Miss Viola when, suddenly, he hung up the phone and leaped to his feet.
    I stared at him in shock and surprise. I mean, Slim wasn’t much inclined to making sudden move­ments of any kind. Leaping out of a chair was something you might expect him to do if the house was on fire and burning boards were falling all around him, but here and now?
    I noticed that his eyes were wide with . . . some­thing. Fear. Terror. Something bad had happened. Something was terribly wrong. The bone rolled out of my mouth and I went straight into Heavy-Duty Barking.
    â€œGood honk,” he yelled over the sound of my barking, “Viola’s folks are out of coffee. She’s coming over here to borrow some. She’ll be here in thirty minutes and this house looks like a train wreck. And Hank, shut up your barking!”
    HUH?
    Shut up my . . . okay, sure, fine. I could shut up my barking. I’d just been trying . . . I mean, he’d been the one who’d flowed out of the chair, right? Floed. Flewed. Flowned.
    Leaped. He’d been the one who had leaped out of his chair, right? When people start leaping out of chairs and windows, screeching and rolling their eyes, we dogs are trained to bark. But if he didn’t want his house to be protected and alerted by a highly trained, highly decorated Head of Ranch Security, that was just fine with me.
    I had better things to do than bark, such as crunching that turkey neck bone.
    Now, where was that bone? I poked my nose into the piles of paper and was in the process of . . .
    â€œOut of the way, dogs,