by Mark Wheaton
In fact, Bones going right to the leash surprised him. He thought of it as a symbol of subjugation. Why would a dog like Bones want to be subjugated? Then he realized that he was thinking of it as a human might, which had little or nothing to do with how the dog saw it. For Bones, the leash was not a symbol of subjugation so much as an indicator of his close relationship to this man who obviously meant the world to the dog. Denny wondered where the man’s body was as it seemed clear that he was sick well before the plague came.
He sat back down in the recliner in the old man’s living room and, having now been awake for more than twenty-four hours, promptly fell asleep.
• • •
Denny woke up about ten hours later in the pitch dark. The first thing he did was grab for his gun and found it just where he’d left it. He hadn’t seen any dog packs roving Las Cruces on the drive in, but that didn’t mean they weren’t watching him.
That’s when he remembered Bones.
He went quickly to the patio door and slid it open, terrified that he might find the butchered carcass of the shepherd lying there, savaged by those very unseen dog packs while attempting to get back in. But, there was no sign of the animal.
“Bones?” Denny asked, in case he had just walked out a little ways into the field beyond. When there was no response, he tried again. “Bones?!”
Still nothing.
Denny went to the kitchen to see if there was any non-perishable food worth eating that might save him a trip to his truck and found only powders, vitamins, and prescriptions, Lionel clearly having been on a mostly liquid diet. Glancing through the prescriptions, he saw several related to the side effects of chemotherapy and realized that Lionel had been dying of cancer.
When the sun finally rose, Denny walked out in the backyard with his rifle and looked around for Bones some more. He called the shepherd’s name repeatedly, but there was no answer. Nothing moved but the birds.
Undeterred, Denny got behind the wheel of the truck, drove around to a dirt road that ran behind the row of houses and continued searching for the dog, slowing to call out his name while being careful not to drive anywhere too dangerous for fear of breaking an axle. While he figured he could easily trade in the truck for Lionel’s Blazer, there was a lot of ground to cover between the scrub behind the houses and Lionel’s back patio. If there were any dogs around, Denny would be greatly exposed to predation. This was the new mindset, Denny realized.
At midday, Denny began running out of fuel, decided that would be the moment he’d give up the search and, half an hour later, stopped the truck to gas up from one of the many cans in the back.
“BONES!” he cried one last time.
But the dog was long gone, having disappeared into the wilderness of his youth behind the home that had been the first and only place Lionel had ever owned, rented out during a couple of years while in Pittsburgh, and then returned to for his retirement, “to be close to his daughter,” he told friends.
After a long moment, Denny nodded to himself, tossed the empty gas can in the back of the truck, climbed behind the wheel, and began following the setting sun back to the west. He glanced into the rearview mirror but continued to see no sign of the German shepherd, though by now he didn’t expect to.
Epilogue
The moment Denny had opened the back door, Bones got the scent he knew he would. It was faint, now months old, but it didn’t matter, as this was what the shepherd was trained for, his specialty. He headed out through the scrub and mesquite trees, and within the hour he’d made it into the Organ Mountains east of the city.
Bones had grown up walking the various trails of the Organ Mountain National Recreation Area and knew the slopes well, the smell of pine and mahogany filling his nose as he headed across the lower steppes and into the higher elevations. He could tell the trail he was following now would take him through the Needles Range and into the distant canyon, one that had a stream through it certain times of the year, which included now, due to the recent rains. Rain in the desert can make a nasty habit of erasing any sign of a tracker’s quarry, something many a lawman discovered in the Organ Mountains dating back to the time of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, but this was precisely why Lionel had chosen the place to train the shepherd.
“Just keep walking,” Lionel had said to a group of trainers and their dogs brought to the mountains for training one day. “If a scent came from that direction a moment ago don’t decide the trail has gone cold just because your dog has lost the scent. He’s got 200 million scent receptors in that nose of his to all five million of yours, and that means it takes a lot more than just rain or cold or other animals to wipe your fugitive away. Humans are surprisingly foul creatures whose stink and oils can be more definitive and potent than a skunk; we’ve just grown accustomed to them. On top of that, you add deodorant, toothpaste, shampoo, cologne, cigarettes, junk food, and everything else your target came in contact with in the last twenty-four hours. And you’re damn right there’s still a trail. For a human, the desert’s a hard place to find somebody. For a dog, it’s like looking for a needle on a white floor. It’s not obvious from every angle, but you can’t miss it if your eyes are open.”
Bones had been a puppy the first time he’d heard Lionel give a variation of this speech, but it meant as much to him as Sanskrit to a roof rat. What Bones took away from this was how the other humans regarded Lionel and how the dogs regarded their trainers. He knew where the target, a Doña Ana reserve deputy named McCaffrey, was hidden, a cave some six miles away where he’d been camping for three days without fire. Bones had been with Lionel and the reservist two months ago when they’d selected the spot and then spent the next six weeks intermittently walking different trails with the young man to drop latent scents. Then, Lionel had the fellow change everything else about his routine, which meant different shampoo, toothpaste, a scentless deodorant, and even a new diet.
It didn’t matter. The dogs located the man within five hours, deep within Fillmore Canyon.
Bones had been along for the ride, mostly, though Lionel was also using him and his scent as an ongoing distraction to the training dogs, two of which were female. Bones performed his role with flying colors, but it would be another eight months before he was involved in an exercise as a trainee.
Now the shepherd was heading back to that same canyon, the scent of his master faint but that of the only human who had been this way in months. The farther away from Las Cruces Bones walked, in fact, the fewer human smells he detected at all. Lionel’s neighborhood had been a veritable curtain of death, each house on the old man’s street containing at least one or two bodies alone. But now, out in the wilderness, as the trail got ever clearer, Bones knew his master wasn’t far away now.
• • •
Bones found Lionel an hour later next to a stream. He was in pajamas and a bathrobe, seated in a red and green beach chair with thick wool socks and hiking boots on his feet. By his side was four-footed quad cane that had been slightly overgrown with moss, the Organ Mountains famous for this type of fast-growing botanical life.
Lionel’s fingers, folded in his lap, had been chewed away, and his eyes had been pecked out by this creature or that, likely the work of birds and possibly a fox, but they had soon discovered that through his body ran a manmade poison meant to slow the progress of the disease that was killing him, which had the additional side effect of rendering his meat inedible to wildlife. The only thing the old man had brought with him other than the chair (no easy task) and the cane was a leash. Unlike the more martial leash Denny had retrieved for Bones in Lionel’s closet, this one was cloth, made for a puppy, and was clutched in his hands.
Bones padded silently around the old man’s chair, taking in his scent and nuzzling his hands. For about an hour, the shepherd sat alongside the dead man with his head resting on his knee, listening to the stream and the occasional bird call coming from overhead.
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.
MONGREL
Mongrel
“Wow, 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?”
&nb
sp; 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.”