Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (44 page)

As the sun set, Bones lay down at Lionel’s feet, inhaled deeply the scents of the nearby juniper and stool. Then he closed his eyes to take a rest.

“W
ow, they really did a number on him, huh?”

Lionel grunted. He hated it when enforcement officers sounded like the police on TV, as it never failed to make him wonder if that’s why they reached for a badge in the first place.

“What do you think happened?” Lionel asked.

The ATF agent, Oliver Mattis, glanced around the warehouse, gazing up into the rafters, rusted copper after years of disuse, and then back down to the dead man chained in a sitting position to a steel chair in the middle of the room.

“It’s hard to say,” Mattis replied. “I mean, obviously they tortured him, but it’s difficult to know if they were torturing him because they wanted information or torturing him once they found out who he was.”

Lionel hesitated. He looked down at the third member of their party, a four-year veteran of the Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Department named Bones who, despite being a German shepherd, was one of the most sought-after members of the force, particularly by visiting federal task force agents assigned to do something about drug trafficking on the New Mexico border.

“Oh, they tortured him for fun,” Lionel said, as if Mattis had misunderstood his question. “Look at his feet. If they wanted information, the burns wouldn’t be so uniform. They’d cook the sole but then turn up the dial so the pain would get incrementally worse. This guy, they were just fucking around. They burned his feet, burned his fingers off, and tore out his teeth, probably with pliers since they don’t look cracked out as if they’d used a screwdriver. Then they torched his groin, then shotgunned his kneecaps, shotgunned his belly and finally shotgunned his face.”

Mattis looked from Lionel to the corpse seated in the chair and was amazed at how easily the sergeant was able to piece that together. “What else can you tell me?”

“It happened last night. It wasn’t done by his own gang. And he probably died screaming.”

“How do you know it wasn’t his own guys?”

“He’s still wearing his cut,” Lionel said, pointing to the leather vest the dead man was wearing, the word “FURIES” stitched into the back in red on white. “That’s the first thing they’d do.”

“So it was the Mexicans.”

Lionel said nothing as he stared at the burned-out husk of a man, an ATF undercover named Jacob Hillenbrand aka “Mongrel” who he’d met over a year and a half ago three counties over when he and Bones had been part of a massive tri-agency drug bust that had netted fifteen tons of marijuana worth about $10 million to the cartels. He looked down at Bones, who continued to sniff at the air. The animal then glanced back to the warehouse entrance where the sound of approaching vehicles could be heard.

“Oh, I think the cavalry’s here. I’m gonna wander Bones back to the kennel and start my report.”

Mattis nodded absently. Lionel led Bones out of the building.

•  •  •

It was a long drive back to Las Cruces in Lionel’s old Chevy Blazer, a vehicle that was now officially a law enforcement ride, as cutbacks at the Sheriff’s Department meant that the sheriff, a whiskery old stick in the mud named Bob Shivers who Lionel would go hunting with anyway, was forced to be okay with it. Lionel got a lot of thinking done in the truck, idly listening to whatever country station currently seemed to be ignoring music (though Lionel was loath to call it that) that had come out after 1985.

With no station to be found this day, he chugged the one working cassette he still owned, George Strait’s
Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind,
into the deck and turned his mind to the discovery of Mongrel’s body. Shivers had rung Lionel himself sometime around four in the morning, saying they’d gotten a tip about a body out at an abandoned manufacturing complex in Perry that was popular with local teens. The timing and location garnered interest from ATF Special Agent in Charge Mattis, who had informed Shivers that one of his undercovers had gone missing under suspicious circumstances and he arranged to meet Lionel at the front gate to check it out.

Sheriff’s Deputy Oudin looked over at the German shepherd taking up much of the passenger seat, another enforcement no-no that Lionel chose to overlook. Every time he tried putting the dog in back, the animal would whine and bay the whole trip as if having suffered a grave injustice.

“What do you think, Bones? Think that was the Mexicans? Or are we being suckered?”

Bones looked up at Lionel as if needing more information and the handler grinned. “You’re absolutely right. Only one way to find out.”

•  •  •

The Furies’ clubhouse had once been a two-farm chicken slaughterhouse out on Route 28. The current occupants didn’t let anyone come through the door without letting them know as such, the first Furies anecdote anyone ever heard.

The second one usually had to do with a former chapter president who made his name in the Arizona pen for two things: prison boxing heavyweight champ six years running and longest consecutive time served in solitary in the history of the New Mexico corrections, 262 days.

For Lionel, the clubhouse was officially off limits. He and the sheriff’s department routinely rousted the place after fights or reports of drug dealing. Each time they left, it was made clear with a string of epithets that it would be dangerous for officers to ever show up “by their lonesome,” though they were “certainly welcome to do so.”

But it was still daylight by the time Lionel wheeled the Blazer into the lot, eight bikes lined up alongside the building. He parked, checked his weapon and clambered out of the truck, figuring he’d be fine. Lionel was ex-military and looked like he was carved of granite, a fact that made at least a handful of suspects think twice before engaging the man in a fight. If they got a closer look and realized his somewhat advanced age and reversed that decision, they were introduced to Bones.

“Come on, boy,” Lionel said as he opened the passenger side door and ushered the shepherd out, momentarily considering a leash but then deciding against.

When the pair came through the front door of the clubhouse, the bikers inside pretended not to notice. Four were occupied at two different pool tables, and one sipped a beer at the bar and watched a replay of the previous night’s Diamondbacks game, while another stood behind the bar, loading long-necks into a small, glass-fronted refrigerator.

“Sir, this is a private club and you need a membership to drink in here as we do not carry a liquor license,” the bartender said. “Also, we do not allow dogs. It violates county sanitation ordinances.”

“I’m not drinking and this is a work dog, so he’s exempted,” Lionel said, clocking reactions. He knew the men had been watching him since the second he rolled off the highway and caught furtive glances from the pool-playing men, reflected in a mirrored beer advertisement in the back of the room. “But, truth be told, I’m here about another dog you’ve had in your clubhouse. Name of Mongrel.”

The room went ice-cold. Lionel watched as Bones stiffened, eyeing a door at the opposite end of the room, and knew who must be standing behind it.

“So are we going to keep pretending like we’re all a bunch of assholes or are you going to tell me if Arthur’s here or not?” Lionel continued. “If I need to, I can go get him at his mother’s place. I saw his bike out there, but I know she got the Chevelle out of the shop last week and he’s been seen driving it, listening to Crystal Gayle.”

The back door opened. Bones dropped his head, shoulders, and rear haunches, ready to spring, as a giant, wild-haired bruiser of a man covered in black-ash tattoos stepped out wearing a leather vest, blue jeans, and rattlesnake cowboy boots.

“What the fuck you got against Crystal Gayle?”

“When she sang ‘Cry’ on the radio, it was a crime against God,” Lionel replied. “There’s only one version of ‘Cry,’ the Johnnie Ray version, and she ain’t Johnnie Ray.”

“Fuck yourself. What’s this about Mongrel?”

Lionel turned serious. “Your friend Mongrel is not only an ATF undercover being run out of the Albuquerque office, he’s also dead. They’re looking at you for it.”

“Yeah? Why the fuck would they do that?” Arthur asked.

“Because you’re an easy target with serious priors,” Lionel said. “And, well, the guy who actually killed him was Mongrel’s supervising agent.”

This statement sucked the air right out of the clubhouse. All eyes turned to Lionel. Arthur stared hard at him wondering if he was being put on. “Says who?”

“Says my fucking dog,” Lionel retorted. “Now, are you going to offer me a beer or do I have to send my dog to pee in every pocket of your pool tables?”

•  •  •

Though the bartender offered to put Bones out in a fenced-in area behind the clubhouse, Lionel smiled in a way to suggest that that wasn’t going to happen. The pool players were sent out to walk the perimeter while Arthur, the other man who’d been in the back office (a morbidly obese fifty-something with scraggly gray facial hair who Arthur referred to as “Tubby”), the bartender, who went by “Weevil,” and Lionel took seats around a table as the man at the bar, who went unnamed but who Lionel recognized from some past rap sheet, continued sitting and drinking. Lionel saw that he had two Heckler & Koch 9mm pistols in his belt and, within easy reach of his right hand, a pump-action shotgun hanging under the bar over his knees.

“Do you believe in luck?” Arthur asked Lionel, as the sheriff’s deputy poured a glass of water Weevil brought over into a dish for Bones, who appreciatively lapped it up.

“Not particularly.”

“Neither do I,” the biker replied. “So when people I know should be going away get off, I figure they found themselves in a jam and jumped right into the feds’ pocket, offering to snitch to keep on the streets. When a bunch of those guys all gang up to vouch for a newcomer who I sure as hell never heard of, in this case Mongrel, I get a sixth sense about him.”

“Then how come you let Mongrel in here?”

Arthur grinned. “If I kick him out, it looks like I’ve got something to hide. So I just let him in with a big smile on my face, treat him like any brother rider, and he ends up with nothing to report week after week. How long do you think the feds are going to spend taxpayer dollars on an operation like that? And after ‘Mongrel’ ends up ‘moving on to San Antonio’ or something, how long before any investigator will get operational funding to run another possibly fruitless undercover op against my club?”

Lionel said nothing but knew the chapter president was making a good point that, sadly, showed a real understanding of law enforcement.

“So, you’re admitting to me you knew he was an undercover but denying you had anything to do with his murder?”

“We ever have trouble, me and you?” Arthur asked. “Serious trouble, I mean? You think I’m going to murder an undercover cop?”

Lionel didn’t reply, letting it hang out there that it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.

“Well, I guess you answered that by walking in here like that, knowing you weren’t gonna get a bullet in the head,” Arthur said. “You know us. We get caught, we do our time. We’ve never asked for special favors, and we’ve never tagged a cop. We’re not going to start now.”

“Which leads me to my next question,” Lionel said. “You have any idea why ATF would want him dead?”

“You mean other than to justify their expenditures here by showing the big, bad Furies are capable of murder?”

“Wouldn’t justify a thing if they couldn’t make it stick,” Lionel replied.

“Good point,” Tubby said, his first words of the powwow eliciting an annoyed glance from Arthur.

“You got anything going down soon that the ATF would be interested in?” Lionel pressed.

Weevil shifted uncomfortably as Arthur stared back at Lionel. Over at the bar, the unnamed man with all the guns stared intently at an ad for dishwasher detergent. Finally, Arthur sighed and rose from the table.

“Come on, then.”

•  •  •

Arthur opened a trap door behind the bar and had turned to descend a ladder when Lionel brought Bones around the corner. “You serious?”

“He goes where I go. But don’t worry. Doubt he’d mark his territory any place that smells like this.”

Arthur sighed and continued down the steps, followed by Lionel and Bones. Once they were at the bottom, Arthur pulled the chain on a naked bulb overhead, which illuminated a small room filled with cases of beer stacked to the ceiling. Arthur waved for Lionel to follow him through the narrow room to a large steel locker against the back wall. Lionel glanced around at the boxes, listing with their heavy contents and imagined that it would be pretty easy to get crushed down there.

As they walked, Lionel watched Bones’s reaction to the myriad of smells, a cacophony of scents from stale beer to intense body odor, but the shepherd wasn’t detecting another human party lurking somewhere in the dark. Figuring he was safe enough, Lionel followed Arthur to locker but as the biker opened it, he pushed aside the back panel to reveal that it was a doorway leading to a second room beyond.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Arthur said.

“I’ve seen better,” Lionel scoffed, rankling the biker. “Bones?”

Bones immediately darted past the two men, surprising the biker as the shepherd disappeared into the far room. Lionel also slid the nylon retention strap off his pistol holster noticeably enough for Arthur to see.

“Still don’t trust me?”

“You almost beat the brains out of a bank manager in Tucumcari not so long ago that I haven’t seen the photos. You don’t engender much trust.”

Arthur shrugged and followed Bones in, flipping a switch this time to turn on lights that illuminated a much larger space than where the beer was stored. When Lionel entered, he almost gasped.

Around the room, on shelves, and stacked on the ground were machine guns all of a uniform make and model. There were so many of them that it looked like a factory showroom except for the fact that they were so lazily and haphazardly stacked that Lionel knew the action on probably a quarter of them would suffer. Despite this particular weapon being a favorite of the U.S. military, it could be as dainty as a tea cup when subjected to real-world conditions as simple as being improperly stacked or having heavy objects on top of it. It looked more like the way somebody who didn’t care that much would store firewood after enlisting a couple of buddies to run the loads up and down the ladder between beer runs.