Bones Omnibus (25 page)

Whatever the case, the second he was out of the barn, he jogged the short distance to the kennel.

“Heard my dog got fucked up?” he said to Paul, still manning the door.

“Hell if I know,” the young man shrugged, jutting a thumb over his shoulder.

As soon as Billy was inside, his eyes found Bones. The shepherd, in fact, looked just fine, standing in his cage, the one dog not barking in a sea of furious canine faces. Billy thought he looked fine, realizing only too late that this had been a ruse and he had fallen for it.

Henry Knippa, would-be presidential assassin, leaned against a stack of nearby cages, eyeing Billy.

“Goddamn, Megadeth sucks,” Henry scoffed, slashing the coiled-up leash in his hand across Billy’s face.

The impact was severe enough that it sent the cop sprawling backward. As blood gushed from Billy’s mouth, nose, and a cut under his eye, he felt a cool wind coming in from outside as Timothy, Paul, Vickers, and a couple others walked in.

“Where?” Timothy asked.

Henry pulled a knife and quickly worked it into the threads of Billy’s shirt collar. A moment later, he smiled triumphantly as he tugged a near-invisible wire from the lapel. He held it up to Timothy, who thought it looked more like a thick dog’s hair than a transmitter.

Until he saw the tiny teardrop-shaped microphone at the end.

“Now who’s the crazy one, brother?” Henry grinned.

“Was that Henry Knippa?!” Field Supervisor Michaels shouted, his voice practically shaking the surveillance truck. “We’ve got vocal samples to compare it to, right? Somebody tell me if that was Henry Knippa!”

The techs on either side of him worked as quickly as possible, but their computers proved sluggish.

“The cold’s doing a number on our machines,” one of the techs sighed. “It’ll be another minute or two.”

“Another minute, and my man could be dead,” Zusak, who had come along at the last moment in an unofficial capacity, retorted.

“Another minute, and we know if we can move in with deadly force or if this is just one more bullshit extralegal raid,” Michaels shot back. “Your man was the one who wanted to fuck these guys up for the whole nine. Remember, he’s technically a fed right now. They harm a hair on his head, and they’ll spend the rest of their days behind bars.”

“I’m sure Billy’ll appreciate that when the mortician’s sliding him into his dress blues,” Zusak snapped.

Michaels huffed, voicing his displeasure at the remark even if he didn’t have a satisfactory reply.

“This is about the President?” Timothy groaned, incredulous at Billy’s admission. “Not because we’re running girls and drugs and dogs in here? Not because he shot some asshole who’d been feeding you whatever I told him to? But because my dumbass older brother made some kind of
threat
?”

Billy, roped to a chair with dog leashes, nodded weakly. It had taken four more strikes to the head from Henry’s makeshift blackjack to get him to talk, even though he’d mentally accepted that he’d soon give in after the first two. He was in a sort of doctor’s office–looking room, complete with a surgical suite adjacent to where the dogs were held. There were multiple operating tables, cabinets filled with instruments and supplies, a couple of large refrigerators humming against the far wall, and shelves and shelves of drugs. Some looked like vitamins, but others were in tiny single-shot bottles like vaccines. The cop remembered Michaels referring to Timothy as a mad scientist and realized this must be his lab.

“How did they know?” Henry piped up, his face a mask of calm.

It took Billy a moment to realize Henry was addressing his brother and not the police officer.

“Ask yourself that, Timothy,” Henry continued. “You think you’re running this airtight ship, but other than me and you, who knew about my problems with the White House?”

“Fucking everybody, you idiot,” Timothy screamed. “The guys
know
you’re a crackpot! They talk all the time! How come those wonder-mics of yours never picked
that
up?”

“Maybe I didn’t realize how sophisticated they’d become,” Henry surmised. “Could they be talking in code now? Maybe they know I’m listening. So they say one thing, but it means something else, something maybe they’ve got on paper. There’s probably a way to crack it. I mean, I record everything on the mics…”

“You record
everything
?” Timothy asked. “Everything that’s said here?”

“Of course! You never know when something just like this might warrant going back over a few hundred hours of tape. You’re lucky that I…”

Before Henry could finish his sentence, Timothy pulled Vickers’s pistol (and old .357 Magnum he bought with one of his first paychecks day-shifting at a chemical plant) from his belt and fired a single bullet into his brother’s heart. The older man didn’t even have time to shift his facial expression, flopping straight down like a puppet whose strings had suddenly been cut. Everyone in the room gasped, looking as if they fully expected Henry to stand back up and the two brothers to admit the whole thing was staged. But as blood pooled away from the dead man’s body, they knew he wouldn’t be coming back.

“Yeah, well…,” Timothy began, before trailing off, the argument warring on in his head reaching a conclusion.

Billy stared at the corpse in horror, wondering if the Secret Service or sheriff’s deputies outside heard the shot. But then he remembered how soundproof the kennel was and figured they hadn’t.

“Your turn, cop,” Timothy said, opening a wardrobe-sized cabinet where hundreds of thin binders lined multiple shelves. “Each of these binders represents an individual dog. We record their parents’ prenatal regimen, what protocols were followed while they were in utero, and what has continued after they were born. To a lot of people, the word ‘cur’ is synonymous with ‘mongrel’ or ‘mutt.’ But it’s a breed, too, just like a pit bull or a shepherd. Only, it’s hard to define exactly what a purebred cur
is
, so most people don’t try. But that’s what I build.”

He pulled out one of the binders, holding it up for Billy’s inspection.

“This dog has the body of a Rhodesian ridgeback, but the brain of a wolf and the stamina of a malamute. Her name’s Akka, and she’s just about the most dangerous war machine I’ve got in this club. But she’s a daddy’s girl. I’m not letting her in the ring. No, I’ve got to have an animal on me at all times. Better than a gun. Especially one that’s already tasted human blood.”

Timothy nodded to Paul. The young man opened the door to the kennel and headed inside, the barking as loud now as it had been before. Billy thought he heard Bones’s voice amidst the chorus but wasn’t sure. Maybe it was wishful thinking. Paul returned a second later with a massive ridgeback. The animal stood at attention when brought before Timothy.

“No dog’s going to attack you while you’re all tied up,” Timothy said, moving on Billy with the knife his brother had used to pull out Billy’s wire. “But if cut these leashes and kick you out the back door, you think your survival instincts are going to let you stand in one place? Or are you going to run for it, hoping to beat a dog you cannot outrun to your backup, to your car, to the house, wherever?”

“Come on, man,” Billy whispered. “Henry’s dead. Let’s call it a day. I’ll tell ’em whatever you want. You shot him because he was going to kill me or something.”

“Nah,” Timothy shrugged. “I know you mean that now, but you’d change your tune in a week or so. Nothing personal, happens to everybody. Seen it before, is all.”

He cut the last leash and kicked over the chair. Billy was sent face first into a lake of Henry Knippa’s blood.

“Now we know she won’t lose your scent!” Timothy enthused, though the cocky edge to his voice was fading. “Akka loved her Uncle Henry, didn’t you, girl? Smell his blood on that bad man?! Yeah, not saying anything, but maybe that’s the guy who did him.”

Akka bent her head low, her eyes staring straight into Billy’s. The police sergeant shivered in terror. A man like Timothy was one thing, someone you could talk to or reason with.

But this creature looked like an emissary of death, bred to do but one thing. Her eyes were unlike that of any dog Billy had ever seen, those of a monster straight out of a childhood nightmare. He saw nothing of the kindness or even consciousness he so often recognized in the animals of his trade. Its dull gaze was more akin to that of a cobra calmly waiting to strike than anything that smacked of an intelligent, trainable mammal.

Billy shivered, already anticipating the feeling of the beast’s ferocious jaws stabbing into his flesh. He hoped it would be over quickly.

From the moment Henry Knippa had struck Billy in the kennel, Bones had been pounding against the cage door. But among the sergeant’s recent sins, he’d underestimated the strength of the latch keeping Bones’s cage door in place. In fact, the hook stayed put with no give whatsoever.

But Bones didn’t stop, the shepherd single-mindedly bashing its full weight against the door like a madman smashing his head against a padded cell wall. When Paul opened the door to the lab and the scent of not just Billy, but Billy’s
fear
, wafted in, Bones doubled his efforts.

The latch refused to give, however, and it was the hinges themselves that finally clattered to the floor. As the dogs around him bayed louder, the shepherd leaped from the cage and raced to the lab door. Bones tried to bash and claw his way through this as well, but it was solid steel and held tight.

Bones doubled back, circling the room as he searched for another way out. But then the front door swung open as the next round of dog handlers entered to retrieve their fighters, including a member of Lil’ Mwerto’s entourage who’d brought a Rottweiler named C.J.

“Holy shit! That dog’s loose!” were the man’s last words before the shepherd leaped at his face and tore off his nose and part of his cheek.

As the young man fell back onto the snowy ground, the shepherd raced around to the back of the building. The second handler pulled a pistol and fired after the dog, but missed him completely in the dark.

“We have shots fired,” a voice crackled over the surveillance truck radio, one of the deputies in the woods calling in.

Michaels sighed, knowing the mission was beyond repair.

“Everybody move in,” he ordered. “Find Henry Knippa. Take him alive if possible.”

Inside the barn, the gunshots were a surprise. The spectators all froze, waiting for more.

“Sounds like they’re putting another one down,” Lil’ Mwerto joked into his microphone.

There were a few titters, but the crowd remained anxious. Then one of Lil’ Mwerto’s boys ran into the barn, swinging a pistol.

“Some dog fucked up Hilly.”

But before anyone could respond, the back door of the barn was kicked in. Several sheriff’s deputies swarmed inside.

“Indiana County Sheriff’s Office,” called the first one through the door. “This is a raid. Everybody’s hands where we can see them. No sudden moves. No weapons!”

“Come on, Akka. Let’s get this over with.”

The ridgeback took a step forward. Billy flinched and blinked, feeling the lonely terror of the condemned.

Fuck it
, he thought.

At the moment he’d surrendered himself to the inevitable, however, the back door swung open, and two federal agents hurried in, carrying assault rifles.

“U.S. Secret Service!”

The words had barely left the lead agent’s lips before Akka turned her attention from Billy to the newcomer. Though his machine gun was raised, its butt planted against his shoulder, the lead agent was so surprised by the dog now racing straight for him that he actually looked like he might drop his weapon. By the time he’d recovered his senses, upon seeing that the dog’s jaws were wide and aimed at his throat, it was too late.

The impact of dog against agent was so forceful that the man flew backward through the still-open door and landed in the snow six feet back. A moment later, his hands clutched at his neck as all the air was pushed from his lungs by the weight of the animal standing on his chest, but escaping through the gaping hole in his windpipe rather than his nose or mouth. It took mere seconds for him to die.

Akka then turned on his partner, who fared slightly better, getting off a single shot from his assault rifle before the ridgeback sank her teeth into his arm. But she hardly stopped there. Yanking backward with the force of a Mack truck, the dog popped the agent’s arm from its socket and, with a twist of her head, snapped his humerus and clavicle. He screamed, but then grabbed his gun with his good hand, ready to shoot the dog in the face.

Before he could, however, Timothy stepped over, again with Vickers’s pistol, and fired a single bullet into the agent’s face. The man’s head thudded backward as chunks of brain and skull splattered the snow behind him.

Akka looked up at her master as steam rose from the dead men’s wounds. He sighed and waved her away.

“Do better than your daddy,” he joked, pointing to the woods.

She hesitated a moment longer, but then he aimed the gun at her. Knowing what this meant, she raced off into the snow.

Timothy walked back into the lab and nodded at his men, including Billy in his gaze.

“Part of it is knowing when you’re beaten,” he said.

Without defining the “it” he referred to, Timothy put the pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Billy momentarily thought there were two shots, but then realized the second sound he heard was the bullet smacking into the room’s steel roof after exiting Timothy’s head.

Vickers stared at Billy in surprise, as if realizing how in over their heads Timothy’s guys had gotten within the last ten minutes.

“I’m sorry, man. Call your guys. We’re done. We’ll surrender. This is fucked.”

But without thinking, he picked up his .357 and was about to put it in his pocket when a sheriff’s deputy came through the door from the kennel. Vickers turned, gun still in his hand, and the deputy blasted him almost in half with a shotgun.

“Don’t move!” the deputy cried as Vickers’s corpse thudded to the ground.

Paul and the others raised their hands, and the deputies relieved them of their weapons. When they got to Billy, still on the ground, Billy shook his head.