Blackie, Cheech, & Robert Robot visit Kenya, Africa with Their partners, Lou & DIRK

By Anne Shirley

Blackie, Cheech Le Beak, Lou, and Dirk of the Holistic Detective Agency are taking a trip to Kenya to see the people and the animals and possibly help them. They are joined by Grandma Abby, Shoniqua, and Jared, one of whose distant ancestors may have come from East Africa.

Dr. Robert Robot, a medical robot, comes to bring vaccine and provide medical help to whoever needs it.

Dr. Robert is captured by Chinese thugs and seriously needs a rescue. Can Blackie and Cheech call in animal friends and rescue their friend Robert?

And now grandpa Hercules is missing! Lots of work for our Dog and Parrot detectives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9798887313313

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

About the Author

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Blackie, Cheech, and Robert Robot visit Kenya, Africa with Their partners, Lou and DIRK

Anne Shirley

Copyright © 2024 Anne Shirley

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2024

ISBN 979-8-88731-330-6 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88731-331-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Detailed_road_and_physical_map_of_kenya

Chapter 1

It' s a cold winte r day in River City. Lou and I, Blackie private investigator, are sitting in the PDX airport, waiting for flights that will eventually take us to Nairobi, Kenya. All of a sudden, I smell something that should not be in the airport. It's coming from a briefcase. A bad drug! I alert and sit next to the briefcase. Lou, my human and fellow private detective, is alert. She notifies security, and they approach the briefcase-holding human.

The PDX security sniffer dog is not trying to find this particular bad drug. Police security dogs, I understand, are not trained to find drugs that are prescription because they are legal in small quantities. But private detective dogs, such as myself, have been trained to know that many drugs are used in an illegal way.

Security asks the man's name and asks him to open his briefcase. The man protests and says, Who is this woman and dog who want to look at my briefcase?

Lou presents her card. She says, I am Athena Luigia Anastasopoulos, private eye, and this is my dog, Detective Blackie, trained to sniff drugs among other things.

Security insists the man open his briefcase, and it is full of fentanyl, a nonprescription amount of a very dangerous drug.

The man stammers and says, I am just… I am holding this briefcase for another person. I don't know where he is. I…I should go find him.

Security says, Let's wait here for him and the police. End of case.

*****

We are all really excited to be going to Africa—me, Cheech Le Beak, Lou, and Dirk. And our friends—Shoniqua, Jared, and Grandma Abby Harris—are going with us. They hope to find some of the people who are of the same tribe as one of their ancient ancestors. Robert Robot is coming with us too. He has vaccines to help the people of Nairobi from COVID-19, which is a very nasty virus, and also the latest measles vaccines. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic is still on in the world, and that means more documents and more clerks to check through. All the humans had to get PCR COVID-19 tests before the first flight. The lab results take days. My people are worried that the test results will not come back before the flight. The vet says dogs don't usually get COVID-19, so I don't have to get tested except for rabies and other vaccinations. I'm pretty sure that service dogs don't get COVID-19!

Robert can tell you a lot about viruses. He says they are all over the world, and many of them are very good and helpful. But COVID-19 wants to kill us, and measles kills a lot of unvaccinated kids. And we're not letting it. Evil lurks in the strangest places, and I am a law-and-order Doggie that aims to stamp it out.

I am the nose and hearing security department for the BLDC Holistic Detective Agency team, and I take that seriously. You may wonder what those initials stand for. B is for me, Blackie, a flat-coated retriever bred to be a hunting dog called a Gundog by the uppity-ups who classify dogs. I am definitely not a Gundog unless it is sniffing out guns on the bad guys!

Before Lou, my human was an unfriendly gun owner who shot me in the butt when I went to say hello to a friendly Rabbit. Then he threw me out in the countryside to die. Thank goodness, a friendly person came and picked me up and put me in a shelter. There, Lou found me, and I found her.

Lou is good at her detective job. In fact, Lou is good at everything but smelling, hearing, and seeing at night. Lou is tall, dark—because she's Greek—and muscular, a lot like me except for the tall part. She can walk for hours with snack breaks—think Wonder Woman. She's adored by Dirk Demanis, the D in BLDC Holistic Detective Agency. He was a mess with PTSD. Actually, Lou had PTSD too when she came back from Afghanistan, but I helped her with that, and now she is okay. And Dirk was lucky enough to find a great service dog, Ayuda, who needed to get out of Honduras before she starved to death. Now Dirk can focus.

Dirk is very handsome to ladies. He is great with computers and everything else now that he can sleep at night without worrying about bad guys from Afghanistan.

Chapter 2

You may wonder, what is the C in BLDC? Good question. That C is for the noisy detective Cheech Le Beak. He can be a real pain in the ears, but he is very smart and can talk—which is pretty amazing. Shoniqua and Jared are kids, twelve and eight. I have no idea how old their grandma Abby is, and if I knew, I probably shouldn't say. She's a retired schoolteacher. Her daughter, Shondra, was a logistics officer in Afghanistan with Lou, and Lou promised to be there for her kids when their mom died in battle.

Dr. Robert Robot is pretty young too, but he knows everything that anybody has ever written or talked about. He works on electricity, so he is kind of an instant thinker. He is a medical robot made by the Nippon Robotics Factory in Japan, and he is programmed to do good and only good.

We are not able to bring our dear geologist grandpa Hercules Anastasopoulos and his caretaker, Dave, because Grandpa Herc is losing his mind. It's okay, but he comes up with the strangest stories about what people are doing, probably based on his many years in the jungles of the world. Then he just heads off in any old direction, and he can walk pretty fast. He doesn't know where he is going. He doesn't know what he intends to do, and we can lose him big-time in Africa or even in the airports.

So we are all going to Kenya, Africa, except Grandpa Herc, Dave, and Ayuda. Grandpa Hercules Anastasopoulos is paying out of