Bones Omnibus (83 page)

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, as 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, and then closed his eyes to take a rest.

An Apocalyptic Interlude

“F
ive bucks! Man, you can’t get anything for five bucks anymore! That was awesome!”

In the back seat of the white Mazda 3, Jess rolled her eyes. Patrick had repeated this for the last ten minutes. Yes, the park ranger had let them in after dark and only charged five dollars. But she’d also seen the potbellied man with the gray, bushy mustache in the too-small uniform and ridiculous hat slip the bill in his back pocket even as he’d made no real attempt to hide his ogling of her chest through the window.

“I thought they were going to kick us right out, or there’d just be a locked gate,” Patrick continued, motor-mouthing like the stoner he was.

“Can we drop it?” Ruthie asked, seated next to Jess. “We know how bad you’d feel if your inability to get out the door this afternoon screwed up our trip.”

Patrick finally fell silent. It was true. When Dan, Jess, and Ruthie had arrived at Patrick’s doorstep to pick up the last of their number for a camping trip over the long weekend, the first-year associate not only wasn’t packed, he was completely naked, his ornate glass water bong in his left hand, an Xbox controller in his right.

“Wait, what day is it?” he had asked through bleary eyes.

One of the cases Patrick was on had been settled in the firm’s favor earlier that week, so most of the team was on mandatory vacation. Meaning, even though they could accumulate no billable hours, they were expected to work on their other cases, on so-called “Approved Office Projects,” which typically meant researching and writing articles for legal journals that a partner would then put their name on, or shepardizing/blue booking the legal briefs of others to make certain the laws being cited and the citations themselves were bulletproof.

Somehow, Patrick had dodged all of this. By telling all comers that he was doing last-minute due diligence on a deal being closed or that he was in the middle of compiling exhibits for a senior partner or was helping a friend by holding the file on another case, he managed to convince the entire firm he was buried in a hurricane of work. In truth, he rested comfortably in the eye of the storm.

At first, Jess had been impressed and looked forward to picking up a few tips over the weekend trip. But now all she could think of was the ham-fisted way Patrick had tried to pick her up at a company party when they were summer associates, only to vomit across a partner’s lawn and pass out seconds after being rejected. Even then, he’d managed to cast suspicion on a junior partner and dodged blame.

A born lawyer
, Jess thought.

Which made it even harder to rationalize that person with the jabbering pothead currently occupying the front seat. Why was he so quickly taken in by the ranger, when all Jess saw was a slightly scummy creeper making a quick buck?

“I think that sign said the C and D sites were up here to the left,” Dan said, breaking the awkward silence following his girlfriend’s remark.

“Which one are we looking for again?” Jess asked.

“4C,” Dan replied, glancing to the ticket he held against the steering wheel with his thumb. “Everybody keep their eyes peeled.”

Jess did as requested, staring into the darkness that seemed to engulf the narrow dirt road leading to the state park’s camp sites. The trees on either side of the car were so close they brushed against the doors and windows, as if they’d made a wrong turn and were blazing a new trail through the woods.

But then they rounded a corner, and the Mazda’s headlights illuminated an elderly couple parked in lawn chairs alongside a bus-sized mobile home. A roaring fire blazed in a pit at their feet with a kettle alongside it, which Jess surmised held either coffee or hot chocolate. An inviting light glowed from within the camper, promising a night in a cozy bed with an electric heater as opposed to a moth-eaten sleeping bag on the cold ground.

To say nothing of its proximity to an indoor toilet.

“Really roughing it, huh?” Patrick scoffed, and rolled down his window to make sure the old couple heard him.

Jess shrank in her seat, hoping they hadn’t heard. But then the old woman looked directly at the car, making eye contact with Jess instead of Patrick. Luckily, she appeared more confused than offended, as if the words had been lost on the wind.

As Ruthie chuckled, Jess caught a quick look from Dan in the rearview mirror. She rolled her eyes, and he grinned. She’d thought he had a nice smile even before she found out he was dating Ruthie, one of the second-years who had already positioned herself in a sort of mentor role to Jess. And in an office where everyone scrambled pitilessly over everyone else, it was nice having someone on your side even if that most often meant helping to shoulder caseloads when Ruthie got swamped.

They passed two more occupied campsites before the road split off, C sites to the left, D to the right.

“
Finally
,” Patrick groaned. “I’m starving!”

But there was something in the way he said “starving” that made Jess realize Patrick was planning to make a move on her that night, this despite numerous assurances from Dan and Ruthie that this wouldn’t be the case.

I wish Scott was here
, Jess thought.
Dad was right. He was the one
.

They found 4C, little more than a short gravel driveway, a fire pit, and a square concrete slab that a single tent might be pitched on. Jess knew it would go to Dan and Ruthie but didn’t mind so much. Even though it was summer, the ground would be colder. Despite this, Jess knew she wouldn’t feel like they were actually in the great outdoors unless she felt the bumps and ridges of small rocks, twigs, and the uneven ground beneath her tent floor.

The idea of this, half a recollection of times past times spent in the woods, banished all previous thoughts of aseptic beds in claustrophobic, overheated mobile homes.

The wind picked up as they unloaded their gear, the tops of the nearby trees swaying against the backdrop of a vast star field. Jess threw on her fleece and dragged her tent to an area upwind of the eventual fire. Patrick, who clearly had never been camping before, began setting up his almost at the edge of the fire pit, directly downwind.

“We need to get a fire going,
pronto
,” Ruthie suggested, pulling a grocery bag of plastic forks, knives, and plates from the Mazda’s trunk. “It’s freezing out here.”

“No, let’s get these up first,” Dan countered, hauling his four-person tent out of the trunk. “Once we get a fire going, we won’t want to move, and then we’ll be tired. Two minutes later, we’ll be debating whether or not we can crash in the car overnight.”

Jess stifled a chuckle. Throughout undergrad, every time a friend of hers or Scott’s invited themselves along on one of their camping weekends, she’d get a refresher course in the “ancient arguments of the tenderfoot,” as her father had called them.

“They don’t want to elevate the food supplies, they don’t want to carry their trash out of the park, they think the best way to start a fire is to use more lighter fluid, they get hungry and immediately want to eat instead of finishing the task at hand, and on and on,” he would say. “The good news for you is they’ll be the ones eaten by the bear or consumed by the forest fire while you’re hightailing it out of there.”

Jess smiled at the many memories of camping with her late father that came flooding back. He’d been an avid outdoorsman like his own dad, so the disappointment he felt when Jess’s older brother, Rich, showed no interest in “hitting the trail” was palpable. When his daughter, on the other hand, would stand at the back door and cry until somebody let her play in their wooded backyard, this from the time she was one year old, a special daddy-daughter bond was quickly forged.

“Won’t putting up the tents take forever?” Ruthie pressed. “We could have a fire going in no time.”

“These tents are easy,” Dan said, shrugging off the remark. “A bitch to get back in the box later, but setup takes five minutes.”

Ruthie was dubious, but Jess, who had the two-person model of the same brand as Dan, knew he was right. The eight tent poles were connected by elastic cords and, when unfolded, snapped rigidly into place. These were then inserted into narrow sleeves along the tent seams to form the tent’s exoskeleton: four eight-foot poles to stretch out the square base and four twelve-foot poles to give the tent its arching shape. As the edges of the sleeves were color-coded to match the rods, even a novice would have no problem putting the tents together.

As Jess pulled her tent from its box and laid out the poles, she saw Dan eyeing her progress. There was an unspoken challenge in his gaze.

Accepting it, she quickly stretched the canvas over the ground, putting stakes at each corner. Dan did the same, unfolding his tent poles and hastily slipping them through the sleeves like a fencer’s thrust. Jess pulled ahead, but then mistook an eight-foot pole for a twelve and had to draw the rod out again.

“What, are you guys racing?” Patrick asked, having dumped the tent he’d bought off Amazon the previous week, scattering the pieces everywhere. When neither Jess nor Dan replied, so focused on the task at hand were they, he burst out laughing. “Okay, now that’s pathetic!”

But the two kept at it, and soon Jess found herself four stakes from victory. She pounded the first two down with her rubber mallet, but then heard the impossible.

“Done!” cried Dan, holding up the empty tent box.

Shit
, Jess sighed.