Authors: Mark Wheaton
Weevil shifted uncomfortably as Arthur stared back at Lionel. Over at the bar, the unnamed man with all the guns stared intently at an ad for dishwasher detergent. Finally, Arthur sighed and rose from the table.
“Come on, then.”
Arthur opened a trap door behind the bar and had turned to descend a ladder when Lionel brought Bones around the corner.
“You serious?”
“He goes where I go. But don’t worry. Doubt he’d mark his territory anyplace that smells like this.”
Arthur sighed and continued down the steps, followed by Lionel and Bones. Once they were at the bottom, Arthur pulled the chain on a naked bulb overhead, which illuminated a small room filled with cases of beer stacked to the ceiling. Arthur waved for Lionel to follow him through the narrow room to a large steel locker against the back wall. Lionel glanced around at the boxes, listing with their heavy contents, and imagined that it would be pretty easy to get crushed down there.
As they walked, Lionel watched Bones’s reaction to the myriad of smells, a cacophony of scents from stale beer to intense body odor, but the shepherd wasn’t detecting another human party lurking somewhere in the dark. Figuring he was safe enough, Lionel followed Arthur to locker, but as the biker opened it, he pushed aside the back panel to reveal that it was a doorway leading to a second room beyond.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Arthur said.
“I’ve seen better,” Lionel scoffed, rankling the biker. “Bones?”
Bones immediately darted past the two men, surprising the biker as the shepherd disappeared into the far room. Lionel also slid the nylon retention strap off his pistol holster noticeably enough for Arthur to see.
“Still don’t trust me?”
“You almost beat the brains out of a bank manager in Tucumcari not so long ago that I haven’t seen the photos. You don’t engender much trust.”
Arthur shrugged and followed Bones in, flipping a switch this time to turn on lights that illuminated a much larger space than where the beer was stored. When Lionel entered, he almost gasped.
Around the room, on shelves, and stacked on the ground were machine guns all of a uniform make and model. There were so many of them that it looked like a factory showroom, except for the fact that they were so lazily and haphazardly stacked that Lionel knew the action on probably a quarter of them would suffer. Despite this particular weapon being a favorite of the U.S. military, it could be as dainty as a teacup when subjected to real-world conditions as simple as being improperly stacked or having heavy objects on top of it. It looked more like the way somebody who didn’t care that much would store firewood after enlisting a couple of buddies to run the loads up and down the ladder between beer runs.
The job had been done with haste instead of care.
Lionel looked from where Bones sniffed the weapons up to the proud biker gang leader and decided not to say anything about their condition. He was mentally going over the past few months, trying to remember even the briefest mention of an armory robbery at an army base, but it didn’t ring any bells. He didn’t have to pick one up to know that these weren’t civilian models stolen from a factory or dealer. These had army mods that were done in-house, typically by DOD contractors when they arrived at the base.
He did a quick count and estimated he was looking at just over two thousand weapons.
“Aren’t you gonna ask where I got all these?” Arthur asked.
“More interested in who is going to get them next,” Lionel replied. “I assume they’re going across the border?” When Arthur said nothing, Lionel nodded. “Well, I don’t think they’re going to who you think they are.”
“Does it matter?” Arthur asked. “You’ve still got big gangs running things down there, and sometimes they come over the border. They kill our guys, they kill your guys. We sell them some heavy firepower, maybe those drug-runnin’ bastards’ll just kill each other.”
Lionel nodded, remembering that this was the excuse various white supremacist organizations used to gun-run to the cartels.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Lionel added. “I think you’re selling to
federales
down there. And I think they’re planning to kill you for your trouble and just blame it on the gangs.”
Arthur looked from Lionel to Bones with surprise before shaking his head. “I’ve heard some crazy theories in my day, but that’s about the craziest.”
Bones’s nose was a marvel. The dog himself wasn’t the sharpest tool in the drawer and no one claimed he was, but his olfactory epithelium where the sensory neurons of his smell receptors were housed should have been bronzed and sent to the enforcement dog equivalent of Cooperstown when all was said and done, in Lionel’s estimation.
So when Bones had circled Special Agent in Charge Mattis early that morning when they’d met in the manufacturing complex’s parking lot in a pattern that only Lionel knew, one that Bones traced when he smelled burned flesh, he figured Mattis might already have a good idea where they would find the dead body of Special Agent Jacob Hillenbrand, aka Mongrel, and that they’d find it extra-crispy. Lionel went along with the charade, as he had no idea why Mattis had committed the murder of the then only missing agent and then tested him with his observation that the dead agent hadn’t been tortured.
Though an audio recording would not have revealed much, Mattis’ body language immediately registered his fear at having possibly overlooked a detail in his “perfect murder.” Bones, the walking fear-and-lie detector, reacted to Mattis as trained: He sat down and looked in the opposite direction. Only Lionel held the Rosetta stone to translate Bones’s reactions to certain behaviors, and he’d never written it down. Bones was an extension of himself, another tool in the chest that elevated the dog from mere body locator/enforcement animal to a detective in his own right.
“You looking to bust us for these guns?” Arthur asked Lionel with just a hint of menace as they headed back to the ladder.
“The second I do that, the ATF man’ll know I’m onto him,” Lionel shrugged. “I’ve got one case, the death of Mongrel, and that’s the one I’m working. Who am I to stand in the way of free enterprise?”
Arthur grunted. With that, Lionel and Bones headed back up into the clubhouse and exited the premises.
Lionel figured that, despite his protestations to the contrary, Arthur would believe part of what had been told him, and he’d try to solve the problem with an increase in firepower. Lionel kept tabs on the Furies and the activities around their clubhouse for the next couple of days as riders from two other New Mexico chapters rolled in, as well as four bikers from a chapter in Shreveport who came with a trailer full of weapons.
The sheriff’s deputy also did some investigating into the weapons he’d seen, and it only confirmed what he’d suspected: there were no missing guns out there, at least not in that quantity. Lionel realized that Arthur and his dumb-ass compatriots had likely secured the large cache from some “trusted” fence who had sworn he’d come into a couple thousand machine guns and was willing to move them for rock-bottom prices.
So much for not believing in luck
, Lionel thought.
So, night after night, Lionel and Bones would trek out to the desert and wait until some new flurry of activity might suggest the guns were on the move. He’d seen little of Agent Mattis since the discovery of Mongrel and chalked that up to the fact that the SAIC knew exactly when the buy was going to be and hardly needed to pound the pavement to tie up the loose ends of his case.
The only thing that concerned Lionel was his fear that the ATF and the Mexican federal police would get away with this. The way he had it figured, the U.S. government or maybe just Mattis (however unlikely) had decided to help the escalating drug wars by unofficially supplying some real firepower to the federal cops. Back channels had probably become necessary on both sides of the border for a horde of reasons. These included fear of reprisals on American soil from the “north side” chapters of the Mexican gangs and the fact that it would become a political hot button if the U.S. was actively involved in supplying weapons to aid another country’s mess. Also, announcing to the gangs that a large shipment of weapons would soon be crossing the border might prove too enticing a hijacking target once they got to the Mexico side.
Lionel realized that Special Agent Mongrel probably had figured it out, too, and wondered if the undercover’s downfall had been thinking that a group of “innocent” bikers would be taking the fall. He hoped Mongrel had been smarter than that and that his only real mistake had been in taking the matter straight to the wrong person, the fellow who had been overseeing the entire operation in the first place.
Lionel brooded over this in his Blazer, Bones at his side, night after sleepless night as the George Strait tape played endlessly into oblivion. He’d been so focused on the problem at hand that he didn’t notice for an hour that the tape deck had finally eaten the cassette alive, silencing the truck halfway through the appropriately titled,
I Should Have Watched That First Step
.
He was still thinking about this at two in the a.m. five days after his initial confrontation with Arthur when about forty motorcycles showed up outside the clubhouse and men began filling bike trailers with guns loosely wrapped them in blue tarp. After the second gun fell out of its makeshift packaging, Lionel started to feel sorry for the clearly inept bikers.
“Should we just ring the state police and have them do a pull over, search and seizure?” Lionel asked Bones. The sleepy shepherd didn’t seem to have an opinion, so Lionel sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. They’d just find another way in a few months, and it’d be just as bad for somebody else.”
Once the bikers had left the clubhouse, Lionel pulled his Blazer off the fire road ridge he’d used as an over-watch position, slunk down the bad road without headlights, and headed in the direction of the convoy of motorcycles.
By the time Lionel got down to Route 28, the highway was empty and black as far as the eye could see. Most took Interstate 10 down south towards Texas and Mexico as it was faster, and the 28 had long stretches in various states of disrepair and really led nowhere except to a handful of farms and dead-end dirt roads. He figured the bikers would be riding without lights, so he kept his off, too. Dark roads like this made for easy ambushes, as a couple of men could drop off the road only about twenty feet out in the night and be completely invisible to traffic passing by on the road.
Lionel had his service revolver with him, a .38 he liked for the combination of stopping power and lighter weight in his holster. The entire department had switched to automatics years ago, but Lionel wasn’t a fan. He thought they led to problems in gun actions involving officers, since men would use four bullets instead of one and still miss, as they were over-relying on the fact that their full clip of fifteen to seventeen bullets would allow a miss or two. Lionel had six in his chamber and that was it, but on at least one occasion he had shot six different men with it without reloading.
Others in his department couldn’t put down six guys with three clips.
Of course, Lionel also had Bones, who was, as they say, “good in the pocket.” Bones was fairly normal as enforcement dogs went, but Lionel had done all sorts of additional training with him over the years. If Lionel or any of Bones’s handlers were in trouble, Bones would respond with prejudice. He was just over a hundred pounds and, when motivated, he could tear off a man’s arm or rip out a throat. Lionel had seen Bones in action a number of times but, more importantly, had seen the reactions of those Bones attacked. Nothing took the fight out of a man like seeing a pissed-off German shepherd’s jaws snapping only inches from his jugular.
But Lionel had really developed a couple of “settings” for Bones. One command was all show, shock and awe. Bones attacked, went all vicious, but was there to pin or hold the suspect. Another command was the opposite. When he got that one, Bones went in and killed his target as quickly, quietly, and efficiently as possible, like hunting prey.
So when Bones’s nose told Lionel to turn off on a side road, the trail of forty-something bikes a pretty easy trail to follow, Lionel was able to ascertain which of those two commands he’d probably be delivering when they heard the calamitous thunder of distant guns accompanied by sparks of muzzle flash about a mile ahead.
“Looks like we almost missed the party,” Lionel said and peeled off the road.
He knew this was dicey, given the rough ground and possibility of rocks and cactus ahead, but figured that the shooters would have one eye on the road and wouldn’t welcome interlopers even if they were preoccupied with a gunfight.
When he was within a hundred yards, he finally picked up his radio mic.
“Shooting out in the desert off Route 28 and Afton,” he said, more to cover his ass than anything. “Deputy Sheriff Oudin responding. Request immediate backup.”
Without waiting for a response, he dropped the mic, stopped the truck, and stared out the windshield at the continuing firefight. Though he and Bones had missed the beginning, there seemed to be a lot of people still shooting.
“All right, Bones,” Lionel said, sliding out of the truck cab and indicating for the shepherd to follow. Bones did so and kept a foot behind the sheriff’s deputy as they both hurried through the night to close in on the action.
When they got closer, they could see that about twenty-five men were lying face down in the sand, some wounded, some dead. The bodies were between a large group of parked motorcycles and then three pickup trucks, both sets of vehicles now being used as cover by the surviving bikers and what Lionel took for the Mexican federal agents, though they were dressed in civilian clothes. Lionel wondered where the snipers had been, as he assumed the Mexican agents had brought some out equipped with night vision scopes, since it looked like Arthur and his guys just rode up in full force, thinking they’d come off as intimidating, as opposed to group that played its entire hand before the game had even started.