Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (2 page)

“What we got?” Billy asked, nodding towards the junkyard.

“Detective?” Zusak said, turning and nodding to a man who was already walking over. Billy clocked the guy’s outfit, a garish, light blue suit that even an eight-year-old would burn rather than wear to church, and figured the guy either had to spend all his clothing allowance on alimony like he did or had a sideline in robbing funeral homes.

“Missing person, possible homicide,” the detective said after introducing himself as “Detective Nessler.” “The suspect’s name is Wayne Chapas, drives a tow truck for his father’s company. Girlfriend, Tracy LeShoure, went missing over a week ago.”

“Uh-oh,” Billy said.

“We’ve got him dragging his wrecker out here twice this past week,” Nessler continued. “Owner of the yard, guy named Dewberry, led us to the vehicles, but they were clean. We think he used the wrecks to drive her out here but then stashed her in another vehicle.”

Billy nodded but then looked down at Bones. His partner’s nose had already sifted through the myriad of junkyard, forest, and cop-related smells and had isolated the one he was trained to find, all in the time it took for this conversation to happen.

Billy grinned to himself, proud of his buddy. He could be an utter fuck-up, an off-duty drunk with two—count ’em,
two
—ex-wives docking his paycheck, but his dog’s laser-guided missile of a nose made Billy invaluable to the force. Once a target was painted, there was nothing stopping Bones from leading his handler right to it. Billy knew that Bones’s training was 99 percent of the battle, but he felt it was good for his standing in the department to make it seem like their consistent success had at least something to do with him, too.

“You ready to follow-your-nose?” Billy asked, addressing the shepherd as the detective and commander watched.

Bones looked back up at Billy with incomprehension, having already tugged at the leash to indicate that he knew precisely the direction in which their quarry lay. Billy turned to Zusak and Nessler, and nodded.

“He probably just smells the junkyard dogs right now,” Billy lied. “Once we’re in there, he’ll get to it. C’mon, boy. Stop fucking around.”

Billy gave the leash a light flip, and Bones surged forward to the gates of the junkyard, leading him past the other officers as they went.

“If you guys could just stay out here while we’re inside?” Billy insisted to the patrolmen. “I don’t want to confuse Bones none if he catches a whiff of one of you or, more accurately, what kind of meat might be rotting in your over-fed stomachs.”

Rather than take offense, to a man the officers nodded solemnly as Billy and Bones passed through the junkyard gates and soon disappeared from view in the labyrinth of cars and trucks.

•  •  •

It took them forty-five seconds to locate Tracy LeShoure.

She’d been repeatedly bashed in the face; “beyond recognition” was an understatement. An I.D. wasn’t going to be 100 percent without prints, but Billy figured how many other week-old corpses could there be in this junkyard? He stared down at her broken body, which hadn’t been stuffed in the trunk of a car heading straight for the compactor as was more typical but actually crammed inside the twenty-gallon fuel tank of an S10 Blazer. Chapas would’ve had to know what kind of vehicle had such a large tank, had to have brought the tools to remove, then replace it once he’d placed Tracy’s body inside, and probably figured the residual smell of gasoline would cover up any potentially incriminating odor in the time it would take to get through the queue to the compacter. All of this strongly suggested premeditation, which meant Murder One. It was the kind of arrest that led to bonuses, commendations, and weekends off for everybody
but
Billy, and he knew it.

“Here,” Billy said, tossing another chunk of partly melted carob to Bones—the shepherd’s favored reward—as they sat a few feet from the body. Billy knew he couldn’t take in the stillness of the yard and surrounding woods for much longer. Soon they’d have to go back, announce their triumphant discovery, lead the detectives to the dump site, and then be shunted to the side so that the “real police” could take over the scene before the news cameras got there.

Billy popped the last square into his mouth and got to his feet. He half-brushed, half-smeared the remaining carob onto his jeans, then picked up Bones’s leash.

“Good day of work, Bones,” he said, stroking the thick fur between the shepherd’s ears. It wasn’t his fault the department sucked. “Good boy.”

Bones rose to his feet, flecks of mud hanging off his belly fur, even more on his haunches and fore paws. Billy led him through the automobile maze back to the front of the yard, but as Bones trotted alongside his partner, a new scent filled his nose, taking him by surprise. The cadaver dog wheeled around towards the northeast corner of the junkyard, his whiskers aloft and playing in the breeze.

“Whatcha got, Bones?” Billy asked, glancing at the trees.

Bones hesitated for a moment, bobbing his nose up and down in the air. But as quickly as the scent had arrived, it was gone. Bones turned back towards the entrance and pulled Billy forward.

“Crazy dog,” Billy muttered under his breath, however affectionately.

When they reached the gates, Billy announced the discovery to Commander Zusak and Detective Nessler, but neither of then looked surprised or even particularly impressed, which annoyed the human half of the K-9 unit. Instead, they simply asked to be led back to the body, and after Billy and Bones had done just that, the pair was effectively dismissed from the scene, just as Billy knew they would be.

“Asshole,” Billy said, loud enough to be heard if anyone had still been around as he opened up the back door of the Bronco. “Up.”

Feeling the flick of the leash, Bones jumped in back, and as he did so, Billy tossed the leash inside with him before closing the door, being careful not to catch Bones’s tail or paws in it in case he turned around quickly. Then he climbed into the cab and slammed the driver’s door shut.

Once he’d fired up the truck, Billy got an idea. He slapped the Bronco into reverse, backed up a couple of feet, and then executed a three-point turn to head back down Spur 790 to the highway. As he did, he took advantage of the mud and angled his rear tires perpendicular to Commander Zusak’s sedan and hit the gas with just a little too much force, shooting mud across both the commander’s driver’s-side doors.

Satisfied, Billy finished executing the turn and headed away from the junkyard.

•  •  •

“You know what, Bones?” Billy asked, though the dog’s eyes were closed, as he was already napping. “If I was going to kill somebody, there’d be
nothing
left of that body. I’d chop it up, soak the parts for three days in ammonia, and then encase it in cement. After that, I’d drive the whole concrete block to fucking Mexico and shove it into the ocean in one of those fishing coves that’s off-limits to scuba divers. Then I’d burn the house down where I did the killing.”

Billy hesitated when he said this last part, though, knowing how badly burn sites affected Bones’s nose. As so many different materials were burned in your typical house fire—paint, insulation, plastics, chemical sealants, you name it—the noxious combination of smells always served to give Bones what Billy figured was the doggy-equivalent of a really bad migraine as it was his job to inhale all that without any kind of filter just to see if there were any bodies amidst the ashes.

“All right, so maybe not the house fire,” Billy said. “For you, I’d clean it real good, then leave unwrapped Snickers bars all throughout the house but in places only you could…”

These were Sergeant Billy Youman’s last words.

A burning ‘92 Ford Taurus, at a speed approaching ninety miles an hour, slammed into the side of Billy’s truck with the force of a locomotive. The angle was such that it bowed the truck inward, like the top and bottom halves of a running back getting nailed by an oncoming safety. The truck’s roof effectively decapitated Billy as it was torn in half, though his heart had been stopped milliseconds before when the steering wheel was driven through his ribcage by the engine block and his collapsing ribcage squashed his heart like a rotten peach.

The force of the impact also served to blast the back door on the driver’s side open, and Bones was fired out like a furry cannonball. He woke up immediately during his short flight, just long enough to process that something was terribly wrong. But as he began to register alarm, the shepherd smacked headfirst into a patch of muddy grass and was knocked unconscious.

The collision had occurred just as Billy was reaching the highway, though the Taurus had been traveling in a grassy area between the highway’s gravel shoulder and the woods a few feet away, setting alight the odd clump of grass when a piece of flaming debris dropped off and landed in the car’s wake. There was no indicator as to what caused the car to be on fire, but it continued to burn, the flames soon leaping over to the Bronco and engulfing it, too.

Bones was out for six or seven minutes. When he came to, the fire was still crackling across both cars with great heat, but the gasoline had burned off rather than exploded, since the truck’s tank had ruptured and poured the less than a gallon Billy typically kept aboard onto the wet grass. His nose full of mud, smoke, and burning flesh, Bones was groggy from a concussion and he tested each leg as he tried to rise. His body ached, particularly his snout, which he’d bashed pretty well against the ground. Though blood was seeping out of a number of small cuts on Bones’s torso, it was his right eye that was giving him the most trouble. A large welt had risen on his brow, which effectively squeezed the eye shut giving him the appearance of a boxer who’d taken too many shots to the face.

But, by some miracle, Bones’s legs appeared not to have been broken, so he managed to walk a couple of steps before collapsing again. When he lifted his head back up, he got his first whiff of Billy’s scent coming from inside the burning truck. Pulling from a healthy reserve of strength built by years of conditioning, Bones lifted himself back up onto his feet and made his way to the truck.

Billy’s body was torn to pieces, and even though he couldn’t see it through the smoke, Bones’s nose told him plenty. Billy’s head was sagging over what was left of the dashboard, hanging on to the rest of his body by about half an inch of skin and sinew. His bones were completely shattered, as the collapsing truck had had the effect of a coffee press on his body, flattening it to match the contours of the wreckage it would now be forever encased in.

Bones filled his nose with Billy’s scent, staring at the truck for a few moments. Finally, he turned away and walked around to the Taurus, where he had picked up the smell of two more dead bodies. The passenger-side door had been torn open, and Bones nosed around inside. What looked like a blonde woman in her forties was in the driver’s seat, her head having spider-webbed the windshield, compacting and exploding her skull into a bloody mess of hair and brains. A much older man was lying across the back seat, but he, too, was dead. The only problem was Bones’s nose telling him that the man had actually been dead for hours
before
the crash.

Bones was about to move away from the car when, suddenly, the body of the old man began to move. Bones jumped back in surprise, reflexively barking at the corpse as if to call Billy over to check it out, forgetting that his master was dead. But as the old man continued to rise, Bones couldn’t help but react with a stream of confused barking. His nose was telling him that the old man was dead, a corpse, but his one good eye and his ears were telling him that the man was beginning to slide out of the back seat of the car and move towards him in a threatening way.

Bones kept barking, refusing to give up his ground even as he was mightily confused. The old man didn’t speak but seemed completely focused on the dog in front of him. As soon as he got a little leverage on the car door, the man lunged at Bones, his mouth open and his hands splayed outwards, as if clumsily trying to grab for his neck. Bones scampered backwards, but even though he was a little worse for wear, the shepherd felt threatened enough to retaliate by pushing forward and sinking his jaws into the old man’s right arm.

Rather than react in pain, the old man simply punched at Bones, flinging him aside. Bones’s weakened jaws released the old man’s arm as the dog careened into the grass, causing his entire body to quiver in pain as the stiffening muscles of his back and sides punished him for his lack of reflexes.

Deeply dissatisfied with this result, Bones immediately rolled over into a crouch, coiled back onto his haunches, and sprang forward. Before the old man could raise an arm in defense, Bones’s jaws were clamped tightly around his throat. With a quick twist of his neck, Bones tore the man’s throat out, the body flopping to the ground, once again lifeless.

Bones stared at the old man for a moment, but once satisfied that he would not be getting back to his feet, Bones walked away from the car and started following a distant, yet familiar scent on the wind, that of Commander Zusak and Detective Nessler. Pretty soon, he was back on the muddy road, effectively backtracking to the junkyard.

As Bones walked, or rather,
limped
along, the scent of Billy’s body began to fade away in the distance. At one point, Bones slowed down and stopped, turning and looking back towards the highway, but the wreck site was long out of view. Bones turned and kept walking.

As he got closer to the junkyard and the parked police vehicles, Bones realized that the smells he’d been following were changing. There were more people now or, actually, more
cadavers
. Stranger, the familiar scents, those of Zusak and Nessler, seemed to have either dissipated or been diluted in some way. They were still there, but something was different. Bones had his nose high in the air, trying to pick out these scents when he heard a strangled cry:

“No! No!
A-NO!!!
NO! NO!”