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“For a lady looking for her brother, you don’t seem all that upset he’s missing.”
Calvin wished he had a cigar to chew on, but Hobbes kept throwing them out, insisting they were terrible for his health. Calvin had tried to convince him they were only bad if you actually smoked them, but some arguments with a tiger you just couldn’t win.
The lady with the missing brother should have been wearing something tight and red and expensive, and in Calvin’s mind’s eye she certainly was. Of course, in a perfect world he’d be packing heat with an office on Easy Street and he’d look good in a fedora. Instead she was wearing one of those long hippy skirts and a tank top and the only heat he had was the melting summer sun on the back of his t-shirt. A fedora and proper suit would have killed him faster than a .42 slug to the heart.
He tried to think of hippy-skirt as a Dame, but it just wasn’t working. “Look,” she said, breaking from the script completely. “I pretty much hate his guts and would be happy as all hell to never see him again, but mom’s going out of her head with worry and I’d like to hear the end of it. Everyone else says they can’t help me, and everyone also says that if anyone can, it’s you.” Calvin watched her look around his office, eyes stuttering over Hobbes where he was perched on the filing cabinet. Sometimes it was weird to think he had a life that included filing cabinets. With actual files in them. If you’d told him growing up would include wanting to do work that involved filing of any sort he’d have called you seventeen kinds of crazy and looked for the alien mind slugs.
These days, well… It really did help to keep track of things.
The sign on the door said Calvin & Hobbes, Problems Solved. If someone asked who Hobbes was and didn’t like the answer, Calvin knew they didn’t really need his help. She of the missing brother still hadn’t even asked about Hobbes at all. He wasn’t sure if that was a good sign.
“We can find him,” Calvin told her, drawing her gaze that should have been tear-stained and mascara laden, but wasn’t even damp. He tried not to look at Hobbes just past her shoulder, as the tiger’s tail thrashed in anticipation of a new case. “If he turns out to be somewhere weird, bringing him back is going to be extra. It’s one-fifty upfront, and another two fifty once he’s found, we usually get an address and photo proof.” He leaned back in his chair, and imagined himself a darker office and a hat shading his eyes. “We have a deal?”
It took her a moment to consider it - Calvin assumed it was the price, even though he knew he was lowballing. They hadn’t had anything pressing to do for a few days, and a bored Hobbes generally meant property damage of some sort, and they liked solving the impossible problems everyone else refused.
When she did find her voice, it wasn’t the price that had stopped her. “Everyone else was charging by the day,” she finally pointed out.
Calvin shrugged, trying not to smirk, and Hobbes’ tail lashed back and forth out of the corner of his eye. “Lady, I am so not everyone else. If I charged by the day I’d never afford the rent on this place! Or keep Hobbes fed. I’ll find him by Friday.”
Blink. Blink. Stare. Perfect time to ask about Hobbes, and still nothing. “That’s three days from now,” she pointed out as if they’d said something ridiculous.
Calvin grabbed the snowglobe from his desk and shook it, watching the flakes spin around. People underestimated him and Hobbes all the time, but it never stopped being annoying. Like getting carded every time he bought booze. “Three days. Yup. We gotta be done for the weekend, since we have plans, and besides: missing people are usually pretty easy. Just give me his name and a good picture of him and we’ll find him for you.” Hobbes coughed and Calvin gave Miss Still Hadn’t Introduced Herself what he considered his most charming smile. “We’re the very best in the business.”
Either that won her over, or she realized they were her last shot, since she had gone shopping around. “His name is Matthew. Matthew Abion. And I’m Kate.” Her wallet was held together with duct tape, but she pulled out the money and handed it over without a wince. “Um, not to be rude, but - well. You’re a little young to be a detective, aren’t you?”
Now Calvin really wished he had the suit. Or the fedora. Or at least the cigar. Hobbes was trying to eat his whole arm, muffling his laughter - and failing miserably at it. ”Trust me, I’ve been doing this for years,” he assured her - Susie had talked him out of using Tracer Bullet as his actual name on the door, but wouldn’t that have convinced people he was for real? He took the money before she could change her mind and offered his hand. “For real though: I’ve totally saved the world before. A missing brother’s not really so hard after that.”
When she left, Hobbes uncurled from his perch and stretched, scratching at his stomach. “She was lying,” he observed, looking sideways at Calvin to see his reaction.
“Of course she was,” Calvin shrugged. “Pretty much everyone does. But she paid us.” And keeping a tiger fed, even if only on tuna sandwiches, wasn’t easy on any salary.
“Is this going to be like that time we ended up in Canada? I did not like those mounties, and I’m pretty sure the landlords are going to kick you out if the CIA pays another one of their weird visits.”
Calvin ignored the barb - the CIA were just doing their job, same as the mounties, and both had been totally good guys once he’d explained things properly. It had taken a while to get rid of all the bugs the CIA had left behind, but he’d mailed them back, just to be nice. They could totally use them for someone who needed looking after.
He dug out his usual backpack for this sort of work and folded the payment into his wallet. “What do you mean they’ll kick me out? They’ll kick us both out, and then where will you be?” he opened the door to the office and Hobbes bounded past without so much as a thank you, as always. Calvin locked up behind him and headed down the stairs.
The bodega they worked above Calvin was pretty sure was run by renegade Zogwags, but the rent was cheap and they didn’t give him any trouble about Hobbes, and this way he could keep an eye on them just in case they did decide to enslave the Earth next Sunday or whatever it was Zogwags did.
Hobbes liked their kids, because they gave him belly rubs.
“I’m a tiger,” Hobbes was on his back, being currently accosted by two of the Zogwag kids who had their hands buried in his stomach fur. He picked up the thread of their previous conversation as though they’d never stopped. “I always land on my feet. I’d just go live in the wild and hunt for myself. I don’t need you.”
It was an ages old conversation; Calvin was sure he’d pointed out the flaw in this plan since he was five. “Dude, Hobbes: you’ll never catch a wild tuna fish sandwich. And what happens when your can opener breaks?”
Hobbes made a face and rolled out from the kids in one smooth twist and - as always when it looked like Calvin might have the upper hand - completely changed the conversation rather than admit defeat. “Where are we going, anyway?”
Calvin rolled his eyes. “The same place we go every time someone comes to us asking to find someone or something. The fortune teller on Simcoe street. I don’t know why no one uses her. I told the cops how good she was and they’re still just messing around guessing all the time.”
Hobbes shook his head in resigned sympathy. “You humans never make any sense. If the world were run by tigers, now…”
Calvin cut him off before Hobbes could start in on a musical number. “So, do you think Kate is secretly plotting to kill her brother for his half of the inheritance? Or maybe he has blackmail material on her and her ex-russian-KGB boyfriend?”
Hobbes sniffed. “She smelled angry and confused. She kept trying not to look at me - people usually either pay their proper respects or pretend I’m not there a lot better. I say she’s probably another assassin from the Saturnians. They’re still upset you foiled their last plan for world domination, you know.”
“No way,” Calvin looked over at Hobbes and poked his furred shoulder. “She was way too short to be Saturnian. And besides, they suck at planning, she’d have just tried to suck my face off like the last one did.”
“What, like that Nadia girl?”
“Again, Hobbes, there is a really big difference between being kissed and being killed, okay?” Calvin had no idea how many times he was going to have to explain that. Or that cooties was a disease you only caught when you were a kid. Not an argument to have on the street now though. “I meant the old lady who tried to eat my whole face, remember? You complained because she knocked over your lunch.”
“I’d been looking forward to that lunch. Lunch is a very important meal, you know.” Hobbes at his haughtiest made Calvin want to punch him, but he knew better than to try - Hobbes continued,“You don’t interfere with a tiger’s lunch.”
“Or breakfast, or dinner, or midnight snack.” Walking down Main street, people made way for them both, but it was still early enough in the afternoon they weren’t trying to dodge the heavy traffic.
“Exactly!” Hobbes grinned, entirely teeth. “Never get between a tiger and his meal.”
Calvin decided not to point out that Hobbes had continued to eat while he’d had to fight off the Alien with his bare hands, his wits, and a stapler that doubled handily as a Convertible Space Ray of Doom. Hobbes would probably tell him he was building character.
“Let’s just go find Madame Mistique. We can get an early dinner after.”
Hobbes smile got impossibly broader. “Now you’re talking!”
One trip to their favorite fortune teller later and they had a destination: their mark (Matthew) was in France.
“I hate French,” Calvin grumbled, and took a bite of the chillidog he’d grabbed on the way back to his office. “I really hate French.”
Hobbes had already inhaled three chillidogs and was finishing his fourth, licking his claws clean. “I dunno, they taste about the same as everyone else. Sortof gamey. I prefer tuna.”
They walked in silence for a bit. The problem with Hobbes, Calvin thought, was sometimes you couldn’t tell when he was joking or not. “You haven’t really eaten a French guy, have you?”
“Not all of him,” Hobbes admitted, like it was an embarrassment to leave a meal unfinished.
“Well you are absolutely not allowed to eat anyone on this trip, Hobbes, or it will be just like the thing with the mounties, and I won’t buy you any tuna for a month.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“Eat another French guy and see what I’ll dare.” Calvin was pretty good at explaining away most of Hobbes peculiarities, but he really didn’t think he could manage hiding a half eaten person. And the mounties had been really upset about that moose…
The reason he’d chosen the office above the bodega was for supplies. Well, that and the rent was cheap. They didn’t head upstairs but around the back - Hobbes found the perfect box while Calvin unslung his backpack to dig out the most important tool of their trade: a black King Size Sharpie with chisel tip. It was Calvin’s job to set the Transportalizer Coordinates and make sure they had an emergency exit just in case they ended up stuck in a corner like that one time in Reno. No one wanted a repeat of Reno.
“You good to go, buddy?” Hobbes had found goggles somewhere, even though they weren’t actually flying - too far and too hot, and Air Transit Control always got techy with them on the radio.
“Don’t rush me.”
“You know,” Hobbes mused as Calvin added a setting for France to the dial. “You should really let those guys buy one of these. We could retire and never run out of tuna again.”
The Transportalizer flashed around them, and there was the jarring sensation of moving from day to night. Calvin set the self destruct once they were out, glaring at Hobbes as the Transportalizer folded in on itself and disappeared. “Do you have any idea how much damage someone could do if it fell in the wrong hands? The last ones who tried were part of the Zorg Empire! Come on, if we find the parts I can build a Locationator and we can track him down before one of us turns into a mime.”
“You know, I think I ate a mime once.” Hobbes sniffed. “Part of one, anyway. He didn’t stay in character after the first bite.”
Calvin closed his eyes and hoped that any mimes that found them would have the good sense to stay away.
---
Despite a Locationator and portable Translator and Hobbes insisting he could sniff anyone out, it took almost two days to find Matthew Albion. They ended up a few hours outside of Paris proper. (Wait, Calvin had said, there’s more than just Paris? and he’d been whacked with no less than three baguettes. He hated French, but the French had no problems understanding his English.) They stood staring at the sort of farm house estate that could swallow a whole city block back home, debating on how to approach. They hadn’t really expected a garden and a… goat tied up outside. Usually when they were tracking someone down it tended to be a lot less…. picturesque.
It tended, truth told, to involve finding people who maybe didn’t want to be found and sometimes a fight or two or sometimes getting someone out of a tight spot. Up until now, it had never involved a Zogwarg wearing an apron storming down the path from the homestead toward them and waving not a deathray but a dishtowel. A dishtowel in one tentacle, and there were suds clinging to two others. Calvin stared, Hobbes stared. The Zogwarg couldn’t decide what language to curse at them in. Calvin could follow galactic Standard, but not when every other word was French and probably not covered in his high school classes. (He might have paid more attention, if they were.)
They might have stayed shocked still if the second person down the path hadn’t run toward them with the deathray that should have been in the Zogwarg’s tentacles and screaming (in English) about how they would never take him alive. Panicked aliens with dishrags were hard to manage - they reminded Calvin too much of his mother, especially when they screeched. Death rays, though: those he knew how to handle, and Hobbes had been itching for a fight.
He caught the death ray as Hobbes pinned the human (probably human) to the ground. Calvinturned the death ray onto the Zogwarg, just in case they tried anything. And then everything went sideways as the Zogwarg started to cry.
---
That was how they ended up inside the lovely, very, very French cottage/bungalow thing that had crochet dust covers on everything and absolutely no sign of any Zogwarg militia or weapons of mass destruction or mind slugs or anything that was usually just part of the Zogwarg experience, as it were. Instead Ms Albion offered them coffee and Matthew bandaged up the claw marks Hobbes had left in his shoulder and there were a dozen Zogwarg grubs sitting at Hobbes’ feet, staring in simple adoration as he told them about all the great things Earth had to offer, especially if they chose to hide as a tiger.
Even for a Thursday, this was weird. Calvin almost wished the coffee was poisoned because at least thatwould have made sense - but instead it was delicious, and Ms Albion handed him a plate of cookies to go with it. Tentacles were not supposed to look anxious, Calvin had always thought, and yet she was using all eight to tidy up a kitchen that was spotless enough for his mom to be happy.
“Kate is my sister,” Matthew explained, surprisingly calm about the whole tiger attack once he’d realized Calvin and Hobbes had been sent by Kate and not anyone else. “But I’m surprised she cared to want to find me. The whole family isn’t exactly happy with me right now.”
“For marrying a Zogwarg?” Hobbes asked, poking one grub with a careful claw until it fell onto it’s back and then curled like a pillbug into a ball. A moment of twisting later and it rolled back onto it’s multiple little feet and chittered in amusement. Hobbes obliged by repeating the process for the rest.
“Well, they’re not happy about Emily and me…” Matthew began.
“Emily?” Calvin choked on his coffee.
“Emiilnok’tch’a’kreeeeeeet Ily,” Ms Albion explained. Calvin added seeing a Zogwarg blush as being the second creepiest thing he’d ever seen after watching one cry.
“Emily,” Matthew repeated. “But mostly they were angry that we came here to get out from under Mother’s thumb. She had very… specific ideas about things that Emily and I didn’t agree with.”
“So you ran away to France?” Calvin could feel in the tingle at the back of his neck that he was missing something big. Matthew helpfully enlightened him a moment later.
“Ah, well, France is part of it.” Matthew shrugged, looking embarrassed. “We'd always wanted to visit. Mostly, though, it’s the whole going back to 2014. They’re all still in 2203, except Kate, I guess. Mother must have saved up to send her.” He eyed Calvin and Hobbes both in curiosity. “How did you find us, anyway?”
---
On Friday afternoon the heatwave broke and Calvin managed to get the air conditioner working again.Transmorgifiers and Death Rays never gave him trouble, but window-based AC units were clearly evil - or so he’d argued with Hobbes until the door opened and Kate Abion walked in, eyes darting around the office warily. “You said you’d found him?”
Calvin picked up her file and flipped it open to the handful of photos Hobbes had snapped during their visit. Matthew Albion was clearly living quite happily, and had apparently married a Zogwarg. No accounting for taste, but as long as they weren’t hurting anybody it wasn’t any of his business. (Susie was always on his case about judging people as it was, and they had been surprisingly nice after getting tackled by Hobbes and all.)
“He’s in France, living it up in the land of coffee and bread that really hurts if they hit you with it. You didn’t say you wanted him back, and honestly there’s no way I’m taking on a Zogwarg without an army at my back so if you want to try, it’s up to you. I promised not to start another interspecies incident for at least six months, and that was only five weeks ago.” Calvin shrugged, and picked up the snowglobe again, not looking at the Dame straight on. “We got you his phone number, and he says he has plenty of space for another. They’re going to name one of the grubs after you. The one with the ridged back.”
“She’s cute,” Hobbes added, just to see her flinch, coming around to her side. “Really. She skreees better than the rest. And it’s rude to ignore a guy just because he’s a tiger, you know.”
The Dame was speechless, and Calvin wondered how it was going to go. “He says you should give him a call before you decide anything. Me? If I had a way out of a bad situation, I’d take it. Especially since this one comes with great wine. Though I guess you’re going to get stuck with babysitting duty.”
Kate dug into her pocket and for a moment it was tense - Hobbes poised to leap and Calvin pretending to stare at the screaming snowman inside his globe, ready to throw it if Kate tried anything. It wouldn’t be the first time a client didn’t like the results, and who knew what sort of future gadgets she had stashed away.
All she pulled out was her wallet, still covered in duct tape. Three crisp hundreds were set down on the desk with a shaking hand, and she picked up the file with the photos and phone number and tucked it to her chest.
“I’ll…. think about it.” And now she was a Dame, proper, and Calvin was the detective who had solved the case and she had hard choices to make but that was life, wasn’t it? And heck, it had been a pretty good year so far. If the world had survived to 2203, she could probably make a place for herself in the here and now easily enough.
If he had a cigar he’d have blown a ring of smoke. As it was he set the snowglobe down and watched her leave and sighed when Hobbes did, flopping back in his chair.
“Was it just me, or was that whole thing anticlimactic?” Hobbes complained. “I mean, missing brother, lying dame, aliens! France! Shouldn’t we have had a laser battle somewhere? A chase across the Seine? I’m pretty sure one of us was supposed to get shot at, or at least she could have tried to kill us both instead of paying when we found her brother.”
“I know, right?” Calvin thumped his chin on one hand, elbow propped on the desk. In the background there should have been the sound of rain and distant sirens. Instead it was the kids downstairs and one of the neighbourhood dogs. The world only ever seemed to meet him halfway on how it was supposed to be.
“Some people just don’t know how a mystery is supposed to work, Hobbes.” He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and pulled out a can of soda.
It was probably only fair. Sometimes he only met the world halfway himself.