Bones Omnibus (2 page)

“How hard do you think it would be to track that girl down?” Ferris asked, a mischievous look forming on his face. “The magazine’s got to have something about her on file, even if it’s just a tax form. For the right price, I’ll bet I can get them to give me her agency’s contact information. I call them up about some big job out here, drop the name of some pro photographer, offer to fly her in, put her up in some swanky joint in Pittsburgh, commission a shoot, et cetera, and it’s just a matter of time, right? I just keep laying out the bread and watch as her eyes get bigger and bigger. Pretty soon, she’ll be ready to negotiate.”

Though Ferris had wandered along this train of thought several times over the last few months, it sounded like he was beginning to convince himself of how easy it might actually be.

A train of a different kind, the Buffalo-bound hot-shot, a hot-shot being a freight that didn’t make any stops from disembarkation point to destination, blasted its horn two more times as it neared the crossing. The headlight’s glow reached the porch of the Bait-N-Booze as the train decelerated slightly.

“Trains used to blast right past here at full speed, regs be damned,” he jeered. “But it’s all robots and computers now. They barely need a driver anymore with all the auto-pilot software that’s been installed. Worse, the speed’s monitored by remote. If they don’t slow down at crossings, the eye in the sky busts ’em when they get where they’re going.”

Ferris scoffed, thinking something taking more time and becoming less efficient due to technology was pretty funny. He remembered hearing of a study once that concluded that people being watched and timed in their tasks actually worked faster. If they ever made
him
part of a study like that, he’d slow that shit down to “near nonexistent.”

That’s when Bitch’s ear twitched. It was a barely noticeable movement, but one that had the effect of quickly sobering her owner. Ferris had learned that even a dog as small as Bitch could pick up the faintest sound coming in from outside. He reached under the counter and grabbed the sawed-off, pump-action shotgun that was seldom more than an arm’s length away. He actually kept a cleaned and loaded .38 in his back pocket, but this was the decoy that he’d let someone take off him if they caught him unawares. There were few folks who knew he was out there alone, but he didn’t put it past any of them to try to take advantage. They would also assume he was armed. The goal was then to have just a couple more guns hidden in propitious locations around the shack that could fall into his hands at the right moment.

Aside from the shotgun, he had two Heckler & Kock 9mm pistols under a false bottom in the cash drawer, a second .38 (this one a Colt snubnose), and then a shotgun over the door of the storeroom that he imagined reaching for if he was ever forced back there with his hands raised. In addition, he had two fairly new AR-15s under his bed should he get
really
lucky and find himself with the upper hand.

That said, the one thing Ferris hoped to guard against was having his arsenal lulling him into a false sense of security. If he’d had a Rottweiler or pit bull, he imagined any potential robber would find a way to work around that. But Bitch? No one would think twice, and her ears and instincts were just as effective as a larger, expensively trained watch dog.

“Ferris?!” came a voice from outside. “I know you’ve already got a gun in your hand, but it’s just me. We need to talk.”

The voice belonged to Christopher Cuno, who had only restocked the fridges with beer and the safe in the bathroom floor with stacks of cash days before. The racketeer’s son had seldom come out to the Bait-N-Booze without ringing first to make sure Ferris was around, and he’d
never
had come at night. Ferris checked to make sure there was a shell chambered in the shotgun before taking the .38 from his pocket and placing it on the counter. The wooden counter looked as rickety as the shack itself, but Ferris had reinforced it with three heavy steel plates.

Combined, they would stop most anything short of an artillery round.

Ferris ducked low behind the register, angling the shotgun around until it was aimed directly at the door.

“You alone?” Ferris asked, hoping to buy time.

“I’ll be the only one coming through the door, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Well, come on, then,” Ferris barked, trying not to sound as resigned as he felt.

A moment later, Christopher entered with his hands on his head, fingers interlaced, wrists attached by handcuffs. His eyes found the shotgun barrel aimed at his face, and he looked nowhere else.

“Hey, there, Ferris.”

Ferris was shocked by Christopher’s appearance — the only reason he didn’t immediately shoot the young man. A wide swath of dried blood coated the beer truck driver’s T-shirt, starting at his neck and forming a “V” that came to a point just above his navel. His nose, broken at several points, looked as if it had been squished into place to prevent it from falling off. His left eye had swelled shut, giving him the appearance of a boxer who never learned to keep his hands up. Ferris hadn’t noticed if Chris had slurred his words, but when the younger Cuno opened his mouth, the owner of the Bait-N-Booze saw that at least six teeth were now missing, and a couple remaining were little more than splinters.

All that damage, but the primary source of blood appeared to be the slab of glistening meat left in place of the twenty-something’s missing ear on the left side of his head.

“What the fuck, Chris?” Ferris yelped, his voice rising in alarm.

“They’ve got Dad out there.”

“Who is ‘they,’
Chris
?”

The young man stalled, as if unsure of the answer himself.

“What the hell do they want with me?” Ferris asked.

“If you tell them where your money is, they’ll let you go.”

Ferris rolled his eyes. “Told you that, did they?”

“Yeah. I’m a dead man. But my leading them here buys my kids their lives.”

“So why’d they bring your dad? Sounds like bullshit to me.”

A desperate look of panic flashed across Christopher’s face. Ferris realized that the young man really had believed everything he’d been told. That’s when he heard the noise at his back door, the approach that Christopher’s entrance was meant to distract him from.

“Sorry about your kids, Chris,” Ferris sighed.

He picked the .38 off the counter and coldly drilled a bullet into the handcuffed man’s already devastated eye. The blood-swelled protuberance of flesh erupted like a fast-opening flower, sending blood in every direction as the young man wheeled and fell, his bound hands unable to catch him as he face-planted into the doorframe. But before the dead man even slid to the floor, Ferris spun around and sent three rounds from the shotgun blasting down the hall to the back door.

Bitch had been cowering under the counter since Christopher walked in. This was due less to her own fear than what she sensed in her owner. When the driver with the familiar scent, a man who had occasionally brought her treats “from his own dog’s stash,” flopped to the floor, Bitch finally bolted from her hiding place behind two phone books to race toward the safety of the storeroom. Unfortunately this took her directly into Ferris’s zone of fire. When he squeezed off the last of his three volleys, an errant pellet seared through the Yorkie’s ear, slicing it in half.

With a yelp, she hit the floor, sliding to a stop when she hit the baseboard.

“Bitch!” Ferris cried, instinctively lurching forward to recover his dog.

But then everything around him began to explode as high-velocity machine gun rounds tore the place apart. Ferris lunged for the cover of the reinforced counter but caught a bullet in his left heel. The pain was intense, as if someone had wrenched off his foot and placed a red-hot poker on the stump. He forced the feeling aside and crawled for the cash register. Pulling the whole thing off the counter so it clattered violently to the floor, he yanked open the drawer and withdrew the two loaded pistols.

But even as he gripped the automatics in his fists, he knew it wouldn’t be enough to save his life. Whoever waited outside had more than enough firepower to overcome Ferris’s meager cache.

As several more high-velocity rounds tore the small shack apart, the sound of the Buffalo-bound hotshot clattering through the crossing was virtually drowned out. A single last blast from the horn, however, cut through the ballistic cacophony. It would be the last thing Ferris Aaron ever heard.

“Nothing but bad guys up here,” the patrolman was saying. “Eight bodies in all, completely shot to hell. We think one of them is Demetri Cuno and another, the owner of the shack, Ferris Aaron, this big meth supplier. And get this, one of them is in handcuffs with all this ante mortem trauma.”

“And the others?” asked Sergeant Billy Youman from the front seat of his white Ford Bronco.

“At least a couple are Cuno’s goons. Still trying to get IDs. They’re thinking Mr. Handcuffs is Cuno’s kid, Christopher, a real fuck-up he kept on as a driver.”

“So, what do you make of that?” Youman asked, reaching over to scratch between the ears of the large German shepherd sitting beside him on the passenger seat.

“Who knows?” The patrolman shrugged. The shack behind him and a pair of black SUVs parked in front were enveloped by swarming law enforcement officers wearing the uniforms of a variety of branches: local, state and federal. “Somebody was probably out to screw somebody else, it went bad, now they’re all dead. When the detectives ID’d Cuno Sr., they were giddy. Said it felt like Christmas morning. How come they called in a K-9?”

It was Youman’s turn to shrug. “There was a blood trail leading away from the scene. They think there might another body or two in the woods.”

“Happy hunting.”

Youman pulled the Bronco past the roadblock and looked for a place to park. There were at least two dozen vehicles spread around the perimeter, but he finally pulled into a space alongside a state trooper’s sedan. He took the German shepherd, Bones, by the leash and led him out. As he closed the driver’s-side door, a pair of familiar Allegheny County deputy sheriffs approached from the scene.

“Billy Bones!” called the lead deputy, smiling wide, clearly a man happy to be out of the office for the day.

“Aren’t you a good two counties outside of your jurisdiction?” the dog handler asked.

“Nah.” The deputy grinned. “Looks like a couple of the weapons used might’ve been boosted from a shop in Port Vue. We just might close a case today.”

Bully for you
, Billy thought.

Ten minutes later, Billy and Bones expanded their search radius to just over a hundred yards from the shack, crossing the railroad tracks at two points. The deputies had shown them where the blood trail began at the side of the dirt parking lot, but it just as quickly vanished.

“Got anything?” Youman asked the shepherd, expecting little.

But Bones just kept walking. So far, he hadn’t alerted to much of anything other than the feces of other animals. But those he eyed quickly, then moved on.

“
Shit
,” Billy exhaled, folding over a piece of gum before popping it in his mouth. When his dog looked up at him expectantly, the handler took a carob dog treat from his pocket and tossed it to Bones. “They’re not going to like a loose end. Or hell, maybe they won’t care.”

The German shepherd scarfed up the carob treat, paying little attention to Youman’s words. But then his ears stood straight up. Youman eyed him curiously and glanced around the woods.

“What do you hear?” the sergeant asked. “Somebody else out here?”

Two long blasts from an approaching freight train echoed through the woods. Billy sighed.

“Let’s go.”

“We’re starting to put it together,” a state trooper Billy knew offered when the handler brought Bones back to the shack. “We found a few texts between the concerned parties. It looks like Ferris Aaron and Christopher Cuno were trying to knock over Chris’s dad to take over the business. We thought Aaron was this small-time player, but he seems to have had quite a few contacts dating back to his prison days. They lured the old man out here with this ploy about Aaron kidnapping the kid. Unfortunately for them, Demetri figured it out and came in guns a’blazing. Ballistics should tell us if we’re missing anything.”

Billy nodded, hoping to avoid having to say that he and Bones had come up dry.

“So, what’re you thinking?” the trooper, who wore the stripes of a station commander, asked. “You want to head back? Or make another circuit of the woods?”

“Maybe one more.” Billy nodded, figuring he shouldn’t pass up an opportunity to redeem himself.

Bones barked. Not a woof of warning or concern, but one of alarm. The shepherd tugged at the leash, fighting to get inside the shack.

“Bones, what the fuck?” Billy cried, trying to get his animal under control.

A second yank, and Bones pulled free from the sergeant. Almost knocking over the troopers posted alongside the shattered back door, the dog burst into the shack and made a beeline for the storeroom. With Billy and the station commander close behind him, Bones went right for a wooden box nailed to the floor in a corner. The shepherd pawed at it and nipped at the edges. He shoved his snout between the one open side and the wall, but couldn’t get inside.

“What’s gotten into your mutt, Sergeant?” an ATF officer Billy recognized but didn’t know asked from the doorway.

“One of your guys take a shit in the corner?” Billy shot back, trying to get a hand on Bones’s leash. The dog pulled away a second time. Knowing a lost cause when he saw one, Billy unhooked the leash from Bones’s harness and let him go.

“What’d you do that for?” the station commander asked.

“He’s alerting to something,” Billy said, “and if I don’t let him find it, he’s going to tear my hand off.”

Bones jammed his nose back into the cubby, only to yelp and leap backward a second later. A whisper-thin trickle of blood oozed from a fresh cut to his snout.

“There’s some kind of animal in there,” the ATF agent suggested dully as Billy pushed his dog aside.