by R. B. Schow
The Beasts of Juarez
Ryan Schow
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Your Voice Matters
The Betrayal Of Prague: A Look Ahead…
ALSO BY R.B. SCHOW
About the Author
Preface
Due to the lapse in time between the Atlas Hargrove books, and because of several requests from my most devoted readers, I have provided a quick summary of the characters from The Tears of Odessa. These characters will either play a recurring role in The Beasts of Juarez or they receive mention in the book as a factor of furthering the plot. I hope this helps!
CHARACTERS FROM THE TEARS OF ODESSA:
ATLAS HARGROVE: Former SWAT commander for Vacaville PD in Northern California. Assassinated three delinquents who created untold amounts of chaos in Vacaville after holding up a liquor store and running from the police. Atlas is currently serving three life sentences in the Supermax prison known as NorCal State Prison.
ALABAMA HARGROVE: Alabama is Atlas and Jade’s kidnapped daughter. Her location is still unknown. Whether or not she is alive is still unknown. After completing the Russia/Ukraine job of finding Kaylee Barnes, Leopold Wentworth’s private detective found a video surveillance feed showing an older Alabama. So far, this is all the PI has to go on.
JADE HARGROVE: Atlas’s wife. She is from Belarus and speaks fluent Russian. She left Atlas after he was convicted of triple homicide. She is currently seeing a younger man named Rocco Rosato.
LEOPOLD WENTWORTH: Multimillionaire playboy who earned his fortune working in block-chain development. His interests have swayed, though, so now he operates in the world of vigilante justice. By his own admission, however, he and his team are amateurs just trying to get a foothold in the world of extrajudicial anti-terrorism. His aspiration is to take out the criminal element that governments allow and courts can’t prosecute. It’s almost going well…
CIRA KINGSLEY: Cira is Leopold’s on-the-ground tactician, travel coordinator, and an extra body in case the SHTF and they need someone else. She has aspirations to work in the field, but those aspirations aren’t nearly as strong as her desire to be with Leopold. Leopold respects their working relationship enough not to have sex with her and later disappoint her when he moves on to another woman. She ended up sleeping with Atlas in The Tears of Odessa.
KIERA: This young mystery girl is a vicious assassin birthed into the world of covert action for the sole purpose of changing the outcomes of war. She is currently housed at the Blacksburg, Virginia branch of Monarch Industries, a lab that uses genetic modification to turn out super soldiers.
FABIAN DICAMPLI: He is the warden of NorCal State Prison, a man Leopold and Cira managed to blackmail with compromising photos of him with both girls and boys dressed as girls. By blackmailing him, Leopold gained access to Atlas.
SCOTTY CHASE: Scotty is a former law enforcement officer (LEO) who is now a PI that Leopold put on retainer. Scotty and his partner were able to find proof that Alabama Hargrove might still be alive. Per Leopold’s arrangement with Atlas, Scotty only works when Atlas works.
CODRIN PICHLER: This Romanian hacker is one of the best hackers in the world. Leopold uses him in a pinch because of the young man’s understanding of everything digital as well as the dark underworld where Leopold and his team now operate.
YERGHA MUGHERI: One of Leopold’s original assets. In The Tears of Odessa, he was in a hospital bed with broken bones when Leopold called.
ESTELLA BACCARIN: The other of Leopold’s original assets. In The Tears of Odessa, Estella (Esty) was having sex when Leopold called on her for help. She refused to go back to work so soon, prompting Leopold to find other alternatives to lean on (enter: Atlas and Kiera).
KAYLEE BARNES: Kaylee was the young girl who was kidnapped in The Tears of Odessa. Finding her was Atlas Hargrove’s first mission.
KOFI DANVERS: Kofi was one of Leopold’s overseas assets. He served as a local guide for Atlas and Kiera during their time in Ukraine.
Chapter One
ATLAS HARGROVE
Some would argue that more serial killers were born and raised in California than anywhere else in the world. The hot sun and all the pretty girls had the propensity to bring out the worst in people. If this particular argument held water—and more than a few scholars have maintained the merits of such a statement given the company, the hour, and the libations consumed—one could also posit that if there was such a dense population of ruthless killers in the state, one would likely find them at NorCal State Prison under lock and guard.
Baxter “Butane” Kirtman was exactly five foot seven with lean arms, strong hands, and the kind of wild eyes last seen in Charles Manson after he carved an X in his forehead and sent a bunch of kids on a blood-soaked killing spree.
Baxter K., as he was sometimes referred to, or later BBK, used a butane torch to cook his victims alive, eating them a few layers of skin at a time. It was rumored that the last girl he ate took him seven months. How she lived that long under such monstrous distress was a mystery not even the medical community wanted to solve.
The authorities finally caught Baxter after a neighbor’s dog dug a hole under their adjoining fence and squeezed into Baxter’s rather spacious backyard. With unrelenting curiosity and some serious investigative sniffing, the mutt discovered a femur bone that looked scraped clean, save for a few suspicious markings. That night, Sacramento PD paid Baxter a visit, questioned the man extensively, and then took him to the precinct for questioning. They fast-tracked a search warrant after one of the investigating officers unearthed a human skull.
Over the next week, a team of experts exhumed what appeared to be the various parts of more than fifty different bodies. They then located seven more corpses in various stages of decomposition inside a handful of fifty-five-gallon drums situated around his property. The Sacramento native was charged with a whole host of murders. When questioned by the press about the validity of the charges, the spokeswoman for Sac PD simply said, “This will be the easiest case we’ve ever tried, the evidence is that plentiful.”
Days later, when the lead detective paid Baxter a visit in his holding cell, BBK was on the shitter, purportedly mid-dump. In a Twitter post, according to one of the guards who happened to overhear the conversation, Baxter completed that number two then said to the detective, “If you’re looking for Missy Rodriguez, there’s a little bit of her in
the toilet right now. Should I flush or will you add ‘destroying evidence’ to my list of charges?” In a follow-up Twitter post, the guard said that BBK started laughing so hard at his own joke that he started squirting piss out everywhere, almost like an excited puppy with an overactive bladder. For a while, #shittingvictims was trending on Twitter, which only fueled Baxter’s notorious status.
Before Atlas was remanded to the state prison for the duration of his life, back when he was still walking around as a free man, he had followed the case of Baxter Kirtman. Everyone wanted this human filth to burn in hell, and by the time Baxter was hauled before a judge and jury, he had earned a reputation as one of the most ruthless serial killers the state ever produced. That wasn’t the end of the story, though. There was more.
During the start of the trial, after a particularly scathing rebuke by the judge over some procedural misstep, Baxter attacked his own counsel. A doctor had to stitch up the side of the court-appointed lawyer’s face where Baxter had taken a bite out of him.
Now, in the sunny state of California, half of everything is either grossly overpriced or free depending on your economic status. For Baxter Kirtman, in his pathetic economic position, a court-appointed lawyer was one of the services he got for free.
“Easy come, easy go,” BBK said to one brave reporter who dared to ask how he felt about his lawyer’s dismissal.
When the judge brought Baxter K. back into the courtroom a week later with a new court-appointed lawyer, Baxter saw that a Plexiglas shield had been erected between him and his counsel. The modern-day cannibal interrupted his own attorney to tell the judge that having a protective shield up was jury tampering because it caused them to be “prejudicial” about him.
The judge simply shook his head and said, “To be clear, Mr. Kirtman, the Plexiglas shield is not considered jury tampering, so it stays. But I’m not a tyrant, so you can either keep the shield or the bailiffs can cuff you to the table. Today, I’m all about choices.”
“The shield will be fine,” Baxter K. said, defeated.
To ensure there were no more violent outbursts, by court order, Baxter was overfed at each and every meal. During the trial, the slight but violent man put on fourteen pounds of fat, and no other lawyers were eaten.
Now, as Atlas was escorted to the chow hall for lunch, he got in line with the inmates awaiting whatever plate of slop the kitchen decided they wanted to serve and call food. As always, Atlas kept to himself. Flying solo was his MO when he first arrived and this was how it had been in the five months since he returned from Ukraine. He was no one’s road dog. He ate alone, showered alone, still had a cell to himself—thank you, COVID—and he spoke to no one but Trigger, his next-door-celly.
Over the months he had endured whispers about himself as well as the occasional taunting, but when he garnered the attention of the shot callers and their enforcers, things started to change, to escalate. At first, their BS wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. But then something happened. In trying to lay low, Atlas had inadvertently become something greater than the sum of his parts. Without even knowing it, he was feeding the legend of “The killer ex-cop,” eventually turning himself into the one thing he never wanted, and that was to become a constant target.
Three times in the last several months, Atlas was nearly killed. Once by a brave but stupid fish who Atlas beat so badly that the man’s jaw still didn’t line up right, and twice by torpedoes—the enforcers for the gangs inside of NorCal State Prison. Atlas had killed both enforcers, the second murder more violent than the first just to prove a point. The shot callers, as the heads of the prison gangs were called, had unleashed their enforcers on him hoping to either pull him into their gang or put him down for good. That didn’t work. As far as Atlas could tell, his only infraction had been refusing to be anyone’s bitch, June bug, or permanent pocket.
“Everyone belongs somewhere,” one of the guards finally told him, a transfer from San Quentin. “Find a home and a family, or you’re going to spend half your life in solitary.”
Doing nothing, Atlas had later learned, was him being a sucker ducker, a guy who was always trying to steer clear of trouble. Trigger, his next-door-celly, said, “The best way to get somewhere bad is to try to be everywhere while being nowhere. I hope I’m being clear on this.”
“You’re not,” Atlas had said, giving the statement little credence then but thinking a lot about it after the last thirty-day stint in the hole.
Having been attacked three times, Atlas was the proud recipient of seven stab wounds, four fractured bones, a cracked molar, and a trio of fading pink scars where some barbarian scratched his face with dirty fingernails. And still, Atlas kept to himself. If anyone thought they could own him, turn him out, or break him, now they were thinking twice. That was the way it had to be. To survive in NorCal, one had to adapt. But he wouldn’t conform. Before he managed to lose that soft, timid edge, the legend of the killer ex-cop was a tale too large for any real man to fill. But now Atlas was living up to both monikers: killer ex-cop and sucker ducker. Unfortunately, what he had done and who he was would ensure that he would always have to watch his back.
When he did burpees, push-ups, sit-ups, punches, and kicks, he did so knowing his time was likely short and he had to be ready for a fight. But whoever came after him—be it the guards or the inmates—he was going to make sure they ate their own asses before he was done with them.
While fine-tuning the countless self-defense moves he had learned in the academy and on his own in the line of duty as a former SWAT commander at Vacaville PD, he dreamed of breaking someone’s back and neck enough to shove their head up their own ass. Something like that was impossible, of course, but by the time someone smoked his ass or he was back door paroled (dead in prison), he vowed to at least try.
Atlas’s daily workout regimen kept him fit and supercharged, but it also kept him relatively sane. By relatively sane, that meant he harbored a constant agitation—a barely-checked rage that seemed to fester just below the surface. His life was unsettled, to say the least. Aside from the obvious problems prison life brought to him, his daughter was alive and being held captive somewhere, his ex-wife was shacking up with some supermodel pretty boy named Rocco, and Atlas had had a taste of freedom in Russia and Ukraine five months ago with no follow-up from either Leopold or Cira since then. Now, all he had for stress management was maintaining his physically imposing size and being ready to go flat-out fucking aggro at a moment’s notice.
After doing two fifteen-day stretches and a thirty-day stint in the hole, he was starting to rethink his plan. As of now, he just needed a break to clear his head. A little direct sunlight wouldn’t hurt either.
“Hey,” Trigger whispered as he passed Atlas in line, his tray of “food” in hand. “Keep your eyes open.”
Atlas had been thinking about Jade right then. Ever since he’d mailed his ex-wife a current photo of their stolen daughter, Alabama, he was expecting her to visit. For the first few months, she didn’t come and it drove him crazy. Had she truly put her daughter’s disappearance behind her like it no longer mattered, like Alabama was just gone and that was it? Jade’s boyfriend, Rocco, wasn’t much more than a dick and a pretty face. Would he even care about another man’s missing kid? Atlas wanted to think so. Unfortunately, he’d become rather pessimistic lately.
Now, however, he shifted his thinking to what Trigger just said. Was something about to go down? Looking around the chow hall, feeling for the ripples in the pond, he wondered what spooked Trigger. He was smart enough to know that one of these guys could have a shiv, a lock in a sock, or some other makeshift weapon with his name all over it.
“You’re about to get fucked, yo,” the guy behind him said. “Watch your six. And don’t tell anyone I gave you the grapes.”
He turned slightly expecting to feel the electric charge of a prisoner about to unleash the beasts. He didn’t get that feeling, though. The guy who gave him the info, or the grapes as it was called
, was an inmate named Charles. Word had it the former comedian gave up the big show in Hollywood to take care of his dying parents. Now he was doing a dime for knocking off some Broadway sissy who wouldn’t stop running his mouth about the merits of communism or something like that. Charles was the guy who brought the cart of books around. He’d given Atlas a copy of 1632, an immensely entertaining novel by Eric Flint. Aside from being well-read, apparently Charles kept his affiliations with others loose as well.
“Thanks for the heads up,” Atlas said under his breath.
“If you need to chill your melon, the eagle has landed,” he said. Charles was a lugger as well—a guy who could get you smack. Atlas wondered if the man had a line on more than just heroin. Like a cell phone, perhaps?
“I’ll let you know if I need anything,” Atlas said. “Thanks, though.”
“I have magic cookies, too.”
Atlas gave a low chuckle and said, “I bet you do.”
When it was his time for chow, he held out his plastic bowl. Fearing what was coming, he asked, “Shit on a single today?”