Dog was going down to Alabama to help an old lady who looked like the late Bill Burroughs in drag, if Burroughs had had a stroke. Down to good old Baldwin County.
Her bailbondsman business had been suspended by one of those willful, autocratic, contrarian frontier circuit judges you used to read about in the Spirit of the Times in the 1830s. She couldn't resume her trade until she had apprehended a client who had skipped town & headed, it was said, to Oakland, California.
Dog phoned her up from his tourbus to get the details.
She relayed him the skinny. "Ah believe the rascal hays absconded to that ere Californy," she said.
"Uh huh ma'am. We're on our way to Alabama now so we'll see you in a few days."
"Naow: yew all did hear me say he had absconded to Californy, didn't you."
"Yes ma'am. We're heading to Alabama now."
Dog did some keen sleuth work –– he phoned up a bounty hunter in California named "Topo" (yes, same name as the sentient octopus sidekick in Silver Age numbers of Aquaman) and asked him to catch the guy. Dog preferred to go to Alabama.
He turned up at the stroke lady's place of domicile and said, "You got any jumps we can do."
"Yeou do realize ah'm not allowed to practice out of here don't you?"
"Uh huh ma'am."
"Ah cain't help but wonder wha you didn't go to Californy lahk ah mentioned–––"
"Uh ma'am we like it here just fine in Alabama. Got any jumps?"
They had a couple of jumps, just petty pilferers. Low-grade scum-bait. The mugshots they showed of the "defendants" were obviously still–shots of them taken on the backseat of Dog's SUV, so we knew from the outset that this was going to be a successful bust. They plundered the future to illustrate the past, creating incidentally a paradox and a wormhole in the fabric of the space-time continuum. It sort of ruined the narrative tension not to mention the very substance of reality.
Beth did one of her gnomic trade questions.
"Can I tell you, when two girls get picked up together for shoplifting what do you think that is?" she asked the bailbondswoman secretary.
It was a riddle worthy of the Sphinx.
"...That it's a group ...?" the woman asked, groping, confused, looking plaintively at the camera for a hint.
Breaking the first rule of reality TV.
"That's a drug habit," said Beth all tough and as though it was one of Jefferson's truths that we hold to be self-evident.
The woman, in response, simply shook her head. At Beth –– at drugs –– at the wide world in its dismal decline –– it was not clear.
It was Melville's "NO! in thunder."
Carlyle's Everlasting No.
Elsewhere on the show Dog phoned up a possible number for the suspect.
A woman answered it.
"Who's this?" Dog growled. Unorthodox play.
"Who's this?" came the not–unreasonable rejoinder.
"Ralph G." was Dog's quicksilver response.
"Ralph G.?" goes the voice.
"Whatever," Dog said, and hung up.
He returned to his cohorts and said with ironclad confidence, "That's her."
How did he deduce it.
He just sort of knows.
Guy's a mental savant.
Guy's telekinetic.
That's as maybe but he's had something done, something awful, something dental done.
To his teeth.
He looks like a confounded rabbit.
Even when he shuts his mouth you can see his buck teeth are creating a bulge in his upper lip and they are visible even when he is trying his best to shut his mouth. It lends him a new, awful earnestness. He had his new teeth made too big or I don't know what all happened, result is he looks like a damn red-faced rodent with bright green hair!
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