Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

I am Mashie Niblick.  I am presently employed as the greenskeeper of the Hoity Toity Golf Club in the big city of Tracy.  I entitle these stories as my wife’s misadventures.  The government paid for my enrollment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and then I became an agent in the espionage business.  I became a greenskeeper out of the need for a cover story, and I enjoyed the job and my latest name and the woman who knew me by no other name…  Okay, my entire life I dreamed of finding someone named Pauline and being the guy who came to the rescue, as in The Perils of Pauline.  It was my thing, and maybe a goofy thing.  But in these misadventures, I usually arrive after she has solved the problem.

This misadventure was like the others in a way, but the danger was elevated to the point where I wondered if we should move back to our Hobbit Hole next to the golf course, an underground home.

My wife, Pauline, was putting Andrew (St. Andrews Niblick) down for a nap.  Baffy (Baffing Spoon Niblick), our three-year-old daughter, was taking the chore of walking the dog seriously.  She was walking her around the invisible fence perimeter in the backyard.  I decided to read a book.

This story has six beginnings and one ending, okay two endings.  I think I will report each beginning punctuated by three loud noises.  So, I will start with me, then go to the Levys – Jacob having been my boss when I retired as an espionage agent, then to Deviled Yeggs, a lieutenant in the police department of the big city of Tracy, then to the Jetsons in their personal Hobbit Hole, then to Pauline, and then to Baffy…

As additional background, the Levys are semiretired, with the bosses in DC not finding a replacement for Jacob Levy.  I knew Deviled Yeggs when I was a confidential informant, but I was secretly tracking down a gun runner and smuggler from Latvia that was using the Latvian community of Tracy as a cover.  Pauline works for the wife of Deviled Yeggs, and now she also does government work as an analyst and interviewer when spies come in out of the cold.  Among her many degrees is a PhD in Psychology.  And since we have a few more spies in the city, Elroy Jetson (a cover name that he fell in love with) became our security chief, protecting us and experimenting with dogs that can “talk” using collars that are equipped with cameras and microphones.  They just seem to talk, but it is all artificial intelligence at work.  But Elroy being the security chief, he can do an instant walkie talkie style group chat with the Levys and Pauline and myself.

That was the first loud noise.

Elroy shouted over our cellphones. “Wi-Fi is out!  We’re under at…”  Probably the “at” was “attack” because our cellphones had just been jammed.  I looked at the television.  I usually had music playing in the background, but I saw “No Signal” dancing across the screen.

I knew Baffy was in the backyard playing with the dog.  Elroy’s monster dogs, all over one hundred pounds, would be contained within the invisible fence, but without Elroy knowing where they were and without any means to communicate with the dogs.

I got up to go to the front of the house.  I saw a car parked in the cul-de-sac with an odd antenna on the roof.  The engine was running and there seemed to only be a driver in the car.  If this guy was jamming signals, and a lone wolf, I could resolve the problem before anyone else responded.

I took a seven-iron, hmm, a mashie niblick if you will.  I went into the front lawn and took a few practice swings.  The guy never flinched.  He was totally engrossed in his computer screens.

I walked up and said, “New to the neighborhood?”

He said some words that sounded Lithuanian or Russian.  I’m a little rusty, but eastern European languages were my specialty.  But then he reached for what looked a lot like a weapon, so I forgot about future chitchat.  I slapped him with the ‘mashie niblick’ a few times.  Note: He will need a lot of dental work.  And I finally got him to go night-night.

I cut out one of the seatbelts in the backseat and tied his neck to the headrest, and with a little duct tape that he had provided to tie the antenna to his roof, I tied his hands behind his back.  I stole his keys and then used my golf club to destroy the antennas and the computers and such in his car.  Another Note: If this was a rental, he was not getting his deposit back.

Probably during the destruction of everything, I missed Baffy’s blood curdling scream, but I heard the report from a firearm, probably a pistol.  I ran toward the backyard.

When the Levys heard the broken cellphone call, they went into their panic room and locked themselves in.  But other than all their previous times in their luxury apartment inside their home, known as a panic room, they had no cellphone signal, no Wi-Fi, no cable, and since their external cameras were Wi-Fi, all their screens were blank.  They were in a safe place and were unable to hear the commotion in the next cul-de-sac.  No one could get to them, but no one had a means to tell them the coast was clear.

Lt. Deviled Yeggs was home doing paperwork.  He thought it would be quieter than going into the precinct.  He was wrong.  His house has a wooded path that goes by the eastern edge of Elroy’s Hobbit Hole and ends in our backyard.  The Levys have a path that connects with our path along the way.  The security dogs run free in the Yeggs backyard and the entire yards of the Levys and us.  When Deviled Yeggs lost Wi-Fi, he went through the usual reboots with no luck.  He was busy doing that and missed the scream, but as a policeman, he knew a gunshot when he heard one.  His Glock 19 was in his desk at work.  He got his Sig Sauer P320 (9mm) from his lockbox in the desk.  He put on his vest and went toward our house.

Elroy and Irusya were newlyweds living underground.  Irusya went out the house opening that was hidden near the trail.  The dogs loved walking from one house to the next.  She stood at the crossroads, armed with only a taser.  She heard the scream and started running toward our backyard.  Perry, the Great Pyrenees / German Shepherd mix past her at full stride.  I’ll stop there for now.

Pauline had heard Elroy’s message, but she expected me to handle it.  She had forgotten Baffy was in the backyard with the dog.  Then, she heard Baffy scream.  All she could think of was going to her child’s aid.  She grabbed nothing as a weapon, and she ran into the backyard.

What led to the scream was that Baffy had done something we told her not to do.  Beauty, our full-blooded beagle, has a nice high-tech dog run.  She has a series of flexible flaps that she can run through to go in and out unless we close her door.  She has a heated bed in a heated room with automatic food dispenser and water dish, but then the dog run is where she can do her business when penned with the door shut.  Since the dog run is designed to be unsanitary, we did not want Baffy crawling inside.  But she was inside where the food and water station are located when a huge mountain of a man speaking broken English told her to come with him; they had to see her mother.  She crawled further down the dog run beyond his reach.  When he could not reach her, he got angry and Baffy screamed. 

Baffy’s scream was the second loud noise that only Pauline, Irusya, and the dogs heard.  The dogs responded according to their training.  Caulk went to the supposed danger.  Perry went to observe, but with cover.  And Rhoda roamed from one house to another to respond if the original attack was not the main attack.  If this was a test, the dogs passed the test brilliantly.

Baffy then started kicking the man in the face.  The man was so large, he could not turn to reach her, and he could not escape the dog run.  He was stuck.  Baffy kept kicking the man.  The man finally got one arm free to reach for Baffy, and Beauty bit his arm.  Beagles rarely bite, but Baffy was in trouble and Beauty went into defense mode, since the only exit was filled with a mountain of a man who was stuck.  Baffy screaming, Baffy kicking, and no way out put Beauty into a situation beagles rarely get into.

But help came in the form of Caulk, the Caucasian Shepherd Dog-German Shepherd mix.  She was the biggest of the dogs, and she decided to have one of the man’s legs as her afternoon snack.  Huge teeth digging deep into the man’s leg.

At this point, the man just wanted out of the dog run, but then Pauline arrived.  Pauline has this massage technique.  She discovered how you could rub a particular spot on someone’s back and if you rubbed it just the right way, they would fall asleep for thirty minutes.  But this was still winter in Tracy, and the man was wearing a heavy parka.

Pauline took a risk.  She tried to get the man unstuck.  With all the kicks to the face from Baffy and two dogs biting him, he had little fight left in him.  To get to the spot where Pauline could perform her non-death, non-grip, massage technique, she would have to reverse her thinking.  She had always run her fingers up the back to the outline of the shoulder blades.  But the only way to reach the spot with the man wearing a heavy parka was from the neck.  She had to reverse her thinking of the anatomy.  The man had some fight left, so she kept losing her finger position.

Then she heard a frightening sound.  She turned around to see a man raise a pistol to fire at her.  The sound she had heard was the man ratcheting the slide to put a round in the chamber.  Now she watched her life disappear before her eyes as the man aimed his weapon at her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of white.  Was it blowing snow?  No, it was Perry, he flew toward the man’s extended hand, but would he get there in time?  Pauline closed her eyes.  She did not want to see her own death.  The pistol fired.

Pauline thought for a second or two.  The man could not have missed, but she felt no pain.  She opened her eyes, and the man with the pistol was now on the ground, trying to get a vicious dog off him.  Perry had ripped his coat sleeve off.

Then Pauline noticed Irusya behind Perry.  Irusya was wearing a T.R.U.S.T. sweatshirt and sweatpants.  It was not frigid, but it was too cold for that.  It took Pauline a while to figure out what Irusya was doing.  She had a taser, but the only exposed skin was the neck.  A neck shot might hit bone and become totally ineffective, but it could hit the wrong spot and kill the assailant.  With the sleeve ripped off by Perry, the arm was exposed.  Irusya fired her taser.

Irusya called Caulk and Perry off.  Pauline found the spot on each of the thugs.

Elroy and Deviled emerged from the trail with another thug.  They were followed by Rhoda, the Rhodesian Ridgeback.

Deviled said, “This place is a mess, but it seems the bad guys are taking a nap.  Sorry, I used my cuffs on this one.  I was responding to the gunshot.  Is anyone injured?”

Pauline said, “I thought I was dead, but Perry moved his aim point and one bad guy ended up shooting the other bad guy in the foot.  Where did you find your bad guy?”

Deviled sighed, “Rookie mistake.  I followed the sound of the gunshot and the continued sounds of a scuffle.  I walked right past this guy.  He stepped behind me, raised his pistol, and then I heard Rhoda.  I turned around and Rhoda knocked the gun out of his hand, and she had him on the ground pleading for his life.  I tried to get Rhoda to back off, but Elroy came up and said that I was family, but he and Irusya were the masters.  He got Rhoda to heel, and I got this guy in cuffs.  It took us a while to find the gun.  He hadn’t taken the safety off or I might be dead.  That and Rhoda.”

That’s when I came around the corner with Officers Ruthie Toody and Dietrich “Dieter” Koch.

Ruthie said, “Oo!  Oo! Pink snow!  Not a good sign.  Lieutenant Yeggs!  This is a mess!”

Dev laughed, “Ruthie, cuff the two guys that are sleeping.  It looks like we have two that need immediate medical attention.”

I raised a finger, “The driver might need to eat through a straw for a while.  But he’s a little tied up at the moment, and he cannot join the party.”

Elroy smiled, “I was late to the party because our comms started flickering.  I spent some time rebooting.  Dev told me he heard a gunshot.  I was in the house and I heard nothing.”

Ruthie radioed for four ambulances.  Elroy insisted on no comment to the media until we knew what was going on.  The men in black suits from the mystery hanger at the Tracy airport showed up about the same time the ambulances did.  They showed their credentials as a security force, all trained as EMTs.  The ambulance drivers complained, but they complied.  Each ambulance went to T.R.U.S.T. Medical Center with each ambulance crew plus one mystery man in a black suit.  Okay, one was female.  They were given a quiet wing in the ER so that no one else could observe.

Elroy took Caulk with him to the ER.  Elroy was escorted by Ruthie Toody.  The nurses went crazy with a filthy dog entering their hospital, but Ruthie explained that it was police business.  Elroy had a tablet and he and Caulk went to each room.  Some of Caulk’s interrogation was programmed along the way, but some was AI doing follow-up questions, or Elroy typing in a change of approach in questioning.

They started with the mountain of a man.  He only had one eye that could open.  The nose was splintered into many pieces and the other I swollen shut.  A few teeth were loose.  The doctor insisted that he needed to be prepped for surgery, but Elroy flipped a badge, maybe from a Cracker Jacks box.  That was unkind.  His federal ID was available, but it would betray that he had no jurisdiction other than a security chief for federal assets in the area.

Caulk went to the man’s good eye.  “Yeah! Get a good look!  I’m the dog that had your leg for a snack.  I think I still have some pieces of you between my teeth.  If you don’t start talking, I will eat the rest of you.”  She had a different line for each of the four thugs.

What she got in return was that the mountain was the only one who had passable English skills.  The driver was the only one who knew how to set up the jamming equipment.  The shooter was the backup, and the one that never shot anyone was the backup to the backup, since they knew that the Levys and Yeggs were friends.  He would knock out anyone helping from the other houses.  The shooter was the boss.  The mountain was supposed to knockout the superhero woman (Pauline) and kidnap her.  He thought the idea silly to walk up to the back door of the home of a woman with superhuman powers and ask if she would accompany him, with the help of chloroform, but then again, she had superhuman powers.  They did not know to what extent her powers extended.

When the mountain saw Baffy, he changed the plan.  He would kidnap Baffy and then knock on the door.  Baffy would be set free if Pauline accompanied him to a private plane at the airport.  Only then would Baffy be let go.  He was proud of his plan, but he did not count on Baffy crawling into the dog run and then the 90-degree turn at the door getting himself stuck.  He did not count on a docile dog biting him nor a three-year-old kicking him nearly to death.  And that frustration punctuated by Caulk who was now asking him questions.  A dog who could talk.  And the dog knew he spoke Russian.  The dog was talking to him in Russian!  How could he not respond?  What he did not know was that Elroy was getting a nearly instantaneous translation of the conversation on his tablet.

The driver could not talk other than nodding for yes/no questions.  The other two gave hints that an operative that worked for us during the caper to rescue the Levy’s son was captured and during torture, he said that Pauline ran the operation and she was some kind of superhero.  By a gentle touch, she could make people fall asleep.  No one messed with her.  They were afraid of what else she could do.  So, these thugs came to the USA to kidnap Pauline and find out all her superpowers.  They would draw blood and do DNA alterations to “volunteers” until they had obtained people with those powers.

Pauline had no superpowers.  She had to press hard on the right spot to make them fall asleep.  She thought she had a publishable discovery until Naomi Yeggs told her how that could be used by wicked people.  It was all a misunderstanding, but how did they know we lived in a cul-de-sac in Tracy and that the Yeggs, Levys, and Jetsons were all connected by trails in the woods between houses.  The dogs seemed to be the only thing the thugs did not know.

Elroy then thought that he needed to discuss this with the Levys.  Holy Toledo!  He had forgotten to tell the Levys to come out of the Panic Room.  They have been there in a comm lockout for hours.  Elroy thought he was in bad trouble.

He and Caulk made it back to the Levy’s house and he knocked on the wall.  He used a Morse Code signal that he and Jacob had agreed upon.  Only wearing pajama bottoms, Jacob opened the door slowly with his gun drawn.

Elroy held up his hands. “Only Caulk and me, boss!”  With nothing else to do, Dinah Levy’s libido got the better of her, and they had been having fun for hours.  Why not?  All Comms were down, except they weren’t.  One quick reboot and they had everything restored, thanks to me, Mashie Niblick, and my trusty mashie niblick.  Maybe I can ask Jacob to have DC buy me a new seven iron.  I doubt if they know what a mashie niblick is anyway.  Elroy gave Jacob and Dinah the message pieced together by the interrogation of the four thugs.  Jacob was on the big black jet a couple of hours later.

The thugs had gotten the information from the organization that Jacob was still unofficially in charge of, since they had not promoted anyone.  Heads were going to roll.  On one hand, they had a leak that had to be plugged.  On the other hand, they had the information that some criminal elements in foreign countries thought that Pauline had superpowers and the enemy wanted it.  Elroy should have been warned.  Other operatives should have been mobilized to prevent the thugs from getting to Tracy, much less all the way to the cul-de-sac.

But one thing that Elroy was able to do was to send a message back to the bosses of these thugs.

The AI not only copied the thug boss voice pattern to a deep fake message, it copied the colloquial idioms he used and the Russian dialect for the region where he was raised.  The boss also had a specific speech impediment, always pronouncing a certain combination of letters incorrectly.  And without realizing it, the thug boss betrayed his codeword.  The boss back in Lithuania or Russia would receive the message, but if the message did not end with the codeword, it was to be ignored.  What was the codeword?  “Rosebud.”

Of course, the thug boss was not going to give the report.  Perry had to do it.  The report was as follows:

The woman that was identified in America as a superhuman woman was simply a well-organized mother.  She has no special abilities or skills.  The information that we received was in error when it only seemed that she touched people to put them to sleep.  Possibly a hypnotic suggestion.  The information we received led us into a trap.  We barely escaped with our lives, so the people who gave us the location in Tracy are not to be trusted.  All of us are wounded, and two of us may not survive. … Rosebud.

So, if Jacob does not succeed in plugging the leak, the criminals on the other end of Elroy’s message may put a price on their head.

And if the government decides to exchange these thugs for Americans being held in eastern Europe, their tales of talking dogs may get them placed in a special home somewhere.

But was this over?  Pauline noted how Irusya was walking in the snow with only a sweatshirt and sweatpants, but Pauline was fighting for her life, in the snow, with flannel pajamas and bare feet.  We could have used hydrogen peroxide to remove all the blood, but she threw the pajamas away.

Baffy kept bravely saying that she kicked the man IN THE FACE.  But later, when the adrenaline subsided, she crawled into my lap and cried.  She had kicked a man in the face.

Naomi came over and took each of us aside to talk to us about the trauma.  She apologized.  She was not the best at this particular aspect of therapy, but the best was one of the patients.  It was a Pauline specialty.  The only one that Pauline worked with was Dev Yeggs.  He was a policeman.  He worked homicide.  He was used to the circumstances, but he could not get over how the man had hidden from his view and he allowed the man to get behind him.  If it were not for Rhoda…

But we had another counselor come by.  The veterinarian who works with Arabella came by.  Caulk, Perry, and Rhoda had done as they were trained.  They quickly got back into the normal groove.  But Beauty was a different matter.  She was uncomfortable in her dog run.  The triple threat vet suggested a cage in the garage for a while.  Then get her to enter the dog run for treats or food and water.  And we had to be patient.

No one has introduced the triple threat vet.  His name is Vincent Edward Threatt, initials V.E.T.  He ran out of money in veterinary school, and he joined the Army as a military policeman, training and handling dogs.  He finished his schooling while in the service.  So, he advertises that he is the triple threat vet.  Vet as in his initials, with the last name of Threatt, an English name.  Vet as in veteran.  Vet as in veterinarian, the triple threat vet.

Credits

The Perils of Pauline was a movie serial that started in 1914. It defined many serials that followed, including the Perils of Pauline “moment,” the cliffhanger that caused you to return to the theater for the next installment.

Hospitals will allow service animals to have entry, and Caulk qualified, but they had no time to give her a bath.  And Ruthie Toody going with Caulk may seem unusual, but she had played with the guard dogs before.  This means that Ruthie has been imprinted on the dogs as being family.  Thus, Dieter Koch was not with them.

There have been volumes written about the last words of Citizen Kane, the 1941 movie.  The movie’s main character’s last words before he died was “Rosebud” but the only reference to Rosebud in the movie was that it was painted on the side of a little red wagon in his youth.  Maybe a time when things were simpler.  So, in making it the codeword here, I thought I could muddy the waters for all those movie critics.