The Whole Business with Kiffo and the Pitbull by Barry Jonsberg

a right turn out of the gate and moved silently down the road. I became aware that I was holding my breath. Kiffo leaned in closer and whispered into my ear.
    â€˜You were saying, Calma smarty pants?’
    â€˜Where the hell is she going at three-thirty in the morning?’ I gasped.
    To be perfectly honest, I had taken Kiffo’s story with a small pinch of salt. Well, a bloody great handful, in fact. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, exactly. I just thought that maybe he had embroidered things a little. You know, the mysterious phone conversation, leaving the house. I’d figured that maybe she had got up in the night and he had taken the opportunity to get the hell out of there while the going was good. And the rest would have been just a bit of macho stuff. Making a big deal out of what had been a humiliating experience. I wanted to apologise to Kiffo but now didn’t seem the right time.
    â€˜I told you, Calma,’ he said, a note of triumph in his voice. ‘Maybe once you could explain away. But who in their right mind keeps on going out in the middle of the night, particularly when they’ve got a job to go to? I tell you, she is up to no good. And we have to find out what it is. Come on.’
    Now I know I have given the impression that I was getting a little tired of that casuarina tree. But I can tell you, when the time came to leave, it had never seemed more attractive. It’s one thing to hang around outside someone’s house, but quite another to follow them down deserted streets at some godforsaken time in the morning. But I had no opportunity to voice my misgivings to Kiffo. He was off like a rat up a drainpipe and I had no option but to follow him. I didn’t fancy trailing the Pitbull, but neither did I fancy hiding under a tree, alone, at that time of night.
    Let me tell you something. In the movies, following a person looks like the easiest thing in the world. All you do is walk a discreet distance behind. When they turn around you feign interest in the shop window of an oriental emporium or something. It isn’t like that in real life. Okay, I know the circumstances were somewhat different. For one thing, there wasn’t an oriental emporium within ten kilometres. But the main thing was that there was very little cover. I mean, if the Pitbull turned around, there we’d be, frozen under a street-lamp. Difficult to explain away as a casual late night jog. Kiffo and I zigzagged from one side of the road to the other, moving from bush to bush, crouching behind the odd parked car. But for a lot of the time we were out in the open. It’s a horrible feeling to know that just one backwards glance would be enough to pin you in a metaphorical spotlight.
    Problem number two. It’s quiet at night. Unbelievably quiet. Even the night insects seemed to have taken a vow of silence. So we couldn’t stay too close on her heels for fear that either she or the evil hound, Slasher, would hear our footsteps. That didn’t bother me, mind. I’d have been happy with a fair distance. Something like twenty-five kilometres, for example. But it did make it difficult to keep her in view. When she turned a corner, we’d run like hell, keeping on the nature strip to deaden the sound. It was okay for Kiffo – he didn’t have to keep a protective arm across his boobs. I was running flat out, and mine threatened to knock my glasses off.
    Problem three. When we reached a corner, we had to peer round very carefully. For all we knew, she could have been a metre or two away and a couple of peering, sweaty, disembodied faces might just conceivably have drawn a little unwanted attention. This meant that all the time we made up on the mad sprint was lost on gingerly peering around the next corner. God, it was a nightmare. Once, we turned a corner and there was no sign of her at all. A couple of roads radiated off and she could have taken any one of them. So we