Bones Omnibus (4 page)

Bones glanced down at Bitch, but she was already gone.

“A quarter of a million dollars? That’s crazy! Who keeps that much cash?”

“Somebody who went around the bend a long time ago and wasn’t never coming back.”

The man who asked the question, clad in a black suit and tie, had an all-business haircut that matched his demeanor. He first scoffed, but then nodded, as if recognizing the veracity of the comment. The man who had spoken those words looked like the suited man’s idea of a necessary evil. His long gray hair flowed past his shoulders, and it looked like you could paint a barn with his thick, squared-off beard. He wore torn-up blue jeans, a black T-shirt, black handkerchief and slide, the leather cut with the sigils of the BCRA on the back, and black boots. Tattoos suggesting an aberrant personality crawled up and down his leathered arms.

“Anything on the radio from the cops?” the suited man asked.

“Worked out how it was supposed to.” The tattooed man shrugged, his voice a growl. “They think it was all inside the Cuno clan. Ferris fucked ’em somehow, so they came and knocked on his door. The handcuffs have them thinking Christopher was involved, as they don’t think Aaron could’ve delivered that kind of beating. They’ll spend the next few weeks chasing that angle.”

“Just like you said they would.”

The tattooed man, born Arthur Bigelow but who had gone by Monster for as long as anyone could remember, smiled. The suited man almost shuddered at how aptly the dangerous-looking mouthful of teeth matched the man’s nickname. Still, Monster and his boys had delivered. He nodded to a compatriot, who handed over two thick stacks of banded cash.

“Good work,” the suited man proclaimed. “With the Cuno family out of the way, things should be looking up for
our
organization. We’re looking to assume a lot of their old territories.”

Monster let the suited man, whose name was Jacob Golen and who lived in the Bradford Woods section of the Pittsburgh metro area with his second wife and four kids, crow a bit more. When the fellow suddenly realized how much bluster he was unloading to a man who’d certainly seen a harder part of the criminal world than he had, he silenced himself with a squirm.

One of Monster’s lieutenants, a prison-cut mountain of a man called Doyle, sidled up to his boss with the cash.

“We’re good.”

Monster shook hands with Golen and patted him on the shoulder.

“Safe drive back to the ’Burgh.” Monster nodded.

After Golen and his crew of paid-for muscle took off in a pair of SUVs, Doyle turned back to his boss.

“Why didn’t we just kill him and keep the money?”

“They trust us now.” Monster shrugged. “Next time, our cut’ll be twice as much. But there’ll come a time when we get too expensive, and they’ll start looking at us like a liability. By then, we’ll know what they’re worth to their enemies, and it’ll be a seller’s market.”

Doyle nodded thoughtfully, but Monster knew the younger man had all the brains God gave a woodchuck. What Monster had just described was precisely what he’d just done to the Cuno family. That Golen had no idea how involved his rivals were with the BCRA told him all he needed to know about the man.

As the SUVs bounced out of the field and onto the dirt road that would eventually return them to the world they understood, Monster glanced around for a beer. As he did, he felt the same old peculiar feeling he got in his legs every time he spent more than a few hours on “dry land.” Some of the other guys were already tinkering with the motorbikes their landlocked supply teams had hauled up on trailers, but this wasn’t for Monster. He understood the appeal of bikes, but he’d taken to the rails for a reason. It was like a secret world constantly in motion away from societal mores. It was the last place other than the open ocean where he felt like a proper pirate.

The rails were home.

The men were in high spirits. They knew the killing of Ferris Aaron and the framing of the Cuno family had gone off without a hitch. Well, aside from the death of Knucklehead and the maiming of Webster.

Monster had seen some awful violence in his day. Perpetuated a bit, too. But seeing a bear of a man bleed out from a single well-placed bullet to the shoulder while a skinny kid got half his face and all his fingers shredded off by a shotgun blast and somehow lived to tell the tale? That was one for the books, all right. Sure, Webster had begged for death due to the blast sheering off half his face. But Monster knew Web’s brother back at the camp, Ace, would’ve objected to having his opinion go unheard.

So Monster let the skinny kid writhe on the train car floor while they tried to save Knucklehead. Monster had hoped Web might kick off on his own on the ride up to the campsite, but despite his screaming and carrying on that each breath was his last, he made it all the way back. By the time they jumped off the freight car, the BCRA leader was at peace with Knucklehead’s death and the younger man’s survival. They fireman-carried Webster to camp, delivering him straight to their medic — really, the one ex-serviceman who remembered any first aid. But the moment Ace saw his brother, he threw up an afternoon’s worth of beer, chips, and hot dogs.

It took hours to stitch up Web’s stumps and remove the pellets from what remained of his face. One of the guys said it looked like Web’s cheek, jaw, and eye socket had been replaced by a tall-stack pastrami sandwich. Monster forced himself not to laugh at this, due to Ace’s presence and the fact that Webster was still conscious.

Now that the Golen meet had gone off without a hitch, Monster figured he owed the brothers a visit. He moved through the fire-lit field, nodding to the men who were blowing off steam for real now that the money had come through. As he reached the medic’s, nicknamed Ratso’s, all-weather tent, Monster plucked four beers out of a nearby ice chest. He popped the tab on the first as he entered, planning to hand it to Webster.

But when he pushed aside the tent flap, he found Ace and the medic already drinking, a somber pall over the proceedings. Webster’s body was stretched out on the ground, two blood-soaked towels covering much of his face, save a single eye staring blankly at the tent roof.

“What happened?” Monster asked, sipping Webster’s beer.

“Subdural hematoma,” Ratso, a man who Monster thought resembled more the Cowardly Lion from
The Wizard of Oz
than a rodent, replied. “Bleeding in his brain, impossible to detect, really, without opening his skull. Brain herniated due to the pressure, and it killed him. If that was the case, however, there’s no telling how much was left to save.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hematomas can crush brain tissue, cut off circulation, limit the oxygen flow around the brain. He could’ve already been brain dead, and we wouldn’t have known it.”

Monster’s eyes shot to Ace. If he thought his kid brother might’ve been saved if taken to a hospital, the incident could sow the seeds of animosity. But when Ace met Monster’s eyes, he simply shook his head.

“He wasn’t coming back from that, Monster, so I’ve got no beef with you or anybody else,” Ace admitted, raising his hands. “To tell the truth, I doubt he’d have wanted to keep going on like that. I appreciate you bringing him back, respecting me as his brother, but this is on him. Not you, not Ratso, not me.”

Monster acknowledged this by soberly raising his beer.

“He was the first motherfucker to the door, ready to kick ass,” Monster pronounced. “Not naming names, but some of the guys were shitting themselves knowing what kind of guns Ferris had in there. Not Web. He was a Marine about it.”

Ace nodded, patting his dead brother on the shoulder.

“Thanks for saying as much, Monster. The one thing I know for certain is that he wouldn’t want to be buried in the city. When Luca died and we did that funeral pyre for him, I remember Web being like, ‘Yeah, that’s what I want for me.’ You think that’d be…”

Ace’s train of thought was interrupted by shouts from outside. Monster grabbed for his sidearm. But then Doyle burst into the tent, a silly grin plastered across his face.

“You ain’t gonna believe this!”

Bitch had limped unseen into the camp. Her front left leg buckled as she stepped, the result of a poor landing moments before. Not that she knew this, but her left carpal bone was broken in two places, her metacarpus in one. But none of this would stop her now that the scent she’d been following for much of the past day hung so heavy in the air.

“Shit, is that a rat?” someone asked, drunkenly heaving a rock in her direction.

She’d stopped and tensed. When the rock landed safely more than two yards away, she kept steadily moving toward the bonfires, tracking the elusive scent.

As her features came into view, one of the men, a bullet-headed bruiser nicknamed Zig-Zag, recognized her immediately.

“Holy shit!” he practically shrieked, a drunken grin spreading over his face. “That’s that bitch from last night!”

No one was quite sure what to make of Zig-Zag’s outburst, but he was adamant.

“I was next to Webster when he took the shot to the face,” he explained. “The dog was hauling ass down the hall. See? She even got winged on the ear.”

“Are you serious?” someone else asked, peering through the darkness at the newcomer.

“Hell, yeah! Same damn dog.”

“You mean she followed you guys all the way back here?” the drunk who heaved a rock at her asked.

“Sure what it looks like,” replied Zig-Zag. “That’s some real Oprah shit, huh?”

Bitch’s eyes never strayed from the group as she edged closer to the fire. She would take a step, decide against it, then pull her paw back, a noncommittal chess player keeping her hand on the pieces. As she did this, more BCRA members gathered and made Zig-Zag repeat his story. Most were skeptical, but Zig-Zag considered the split ear incontrovertible evidence.

When Doyle led Monster over, he took one look at the Yorkie and signaled over a bushy-mustached gang member so fat his belly shoved his T-shirt halfway up his chest. His scent was the most familiar to Bitch, and she took a step back.

“She was at Aaron’s place?” Monster asked.

The bushy-mustached guy, nicknamed Bulldog, ironically enough, started laughing, his jowls quaking as he placed his palms on his gigantic stomach as if fearing it might roll away.

“Yeah, that’s Ferris’s toy pooch, all right. Thing used to stay on his counter. When we scouted the place a couple of weeks back, he even let me pet her. You know what she’s called?
Bitch
.”

Monster shook his head, both at Ferris’s sense of humor that outlived the man himself or the misfortune of the poor dog. He squatted in front of her, unable to hide his shit-eating grin.

“Hey, Bitch. I’m the one who put the final two rounds in your daddy. Hope you ain’t too pissed.”

He extended a hand for her to sniff, but she limped backward instead. Pinning her ears to the side of her head, the Yorkie bared her teeth and growled. It took Monster a moment to realize what she was doing, as the sound was barely audible. He hushed the others as she tried to look as fierce as possible. As he regarded the display, Monster’s eyes lit up with amusement.

“That it? Hell, I guess just showing up here passes for tough as nails when you’re that small, huh? Well, shit. Gotta respect that, huh?”

These were the last words Arthur Phillip “Monster” Bigelow would ever say.

That Bones was able to get so close to the camp undetected was a testament to the diversion created by the Yorkie, but also his naturally cautious approach to any situation. By the time he felt that Bitch was being threatened, he was only three feet behind her, albeit cloaked in darkness.

Monster’s throat was only five feet away, easy enough for a German shepherd to cross in a single leap.

As Bones appeared out of thin air, closing fast, the gang leader had only enough time to raise his hands and shut his eyes. His face was contorted with annoyance, the kind of reaction he might have if discovering a prank was being played on him. But a second later, the shepherd having torn out his external carotid artery and superior thyroid artery with one bite, Monster’s eyes flashed open in horror, knowing he’d completely misjudged the danger the presence of the Yorkie in his camp presented.

Blood burping out of his savaged throat in time to his dying pulse, Monster’s body hit the ground, the gang leader clawing for his attacker. But Bones, recognizing a mortal wound, had already closed his bloody maw around Doyle’s thigh, shredding flesh, muscle, and, most importantly, the femoral artery. As Monster’s lieutenant now cried out in agony, Bones turned on Zig-Zag, sinking his teeth into the bald man’s genitals. One jerk of the shepherd’s neck muscles emasculated his victim in a single stroke.

Two more men were to hit the ground before any of the others reacted out of anything but terrified self-preservation. It was Bulldog who skinned his pistol first and fired the first of four rounds at Bones. Unfortunately for him, his shooting was bad enough when he was sober, and a little drink did nothing to improve it. The first three bullets were wasted in the dirt, while the fourth exploded into the foot of the dead Monster.

“
Shit
,” Bulldog cursed, swearing to himself that he’d make the next one count.

As he scanned the darkness for Bones, however, he felt a searing pain in his leg, as if he’d stepped too close to the fire. He gasped, but then looked down and saw Bitch digging her tiny jaws into his Achilles tendon.

“Motherfucker!” he bellowed, violently shaking her off.

The tiny dog tumbled away, landing about three feet in front of Bulldog. He could’ve been blind drunk and still hit her. He aimed his pistol at her and squeezed the trigger, only to have the bullet go wide when the seventy-pound German shepherd landed on his back, sending him face first into the dirt.

“
Goddammit
,” he bayed, trying to roll over.

But that’s when he felt Bones’s hot breath on his neck. A second later, he gasped as his own breath was forced from his throat as the dog’s iron jaws crushed his windpipe.

More shots rang out as the BCRA men finally realized it was their enemy that was outnumbered, not them. But with their senses dulled by alcohol, errant shadows thrown up by the fires drew as many bullets as the German shepherd. When rounds actually met flesh, it was human.