The Big Question. John R. Erickson
It was too late. He swallowed a lump of cookie so big, it made his eyes bulge. He grinned. “All gone.”
For a long moment of heartbeats, I stood there, trembling with righteous anger, until at last I was able to say, “Drover, in the space of two minutes, you have stolen two cookies from the Head of Ranch Security. This court finds you guilty as charged and you will now be fed to the buzzards!”
“Yeah, but that last one was only half a cookie.”
“The buzzards won’t care. I don’t care. This court doesn’t care and the sentence will be carried out as soon as we can locate a buzzard.”
Suddenly, he pointed a paw toward the north and let out a gasp. “Oh my gosh, there’s one now!”
I whirled to the left, expecting to see…well, a buzzard. How or why a buzzard had sneaked into Slim’s house, I didn’t know, but by George he was fixing to…I did a Visual Scan of the entire room, and we’re talking about Visual Detectors that could pick up the tiniest of details. I saw a chair, a coffee table, a lamp, two coffee cups, a sprawl of old newspapers and magazines, and no buzzards.
“False alarm. There are no buzzards in this room.” I whirled back to the prisoner and saw…a faint cloud of dust hanging in the air. I cut my eyes from side to side, as the truth began nibbling at the edges of my mind. Do you see the meaning of this? The little thief had jumped bail and left the country!
Oh well. Justice has a long memory and a long arm. He would pay for his crimes, and until the Day of Judgment arrived….well, maybe I could, uh, find some replacements for the cookies he had robbed.
Slim and Miss Viola were talking, see, and the plate of goodies was sitting on the coffee table…all alone, shall we say, unnoticed and unguarded. Heh heh. You’ll never guess what wicked thoughts began creeping through the underbrush of my mind, and that’s okay because I’m not sure I want you to know.
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