Authors: Mark Wheaton
That’s when Bones’s head snapped left and Lionel recognized that the dog had picked up on someone getting close to them in the dark.
“Bones,” Lionel whispered. “
Meat
.”
In an instant, Bones became a different dog. He left Lionel’s side, moved towards the spot where he had detected movement, soon saw that it was indeed a man with a sniper rifle complete with Starlight scope. Bones flanked the man before coming up directly behind him. Though his eyesight during the day was fine for a dog, Bones’s vision was downright eagle-eyed by night.
The sniper, actually a member of the elite Marines Amphibious Reaction Force (
Batallones de Comandos Anfibios
), unofficially on loan to the federal police, had just picked up Lionel in his crosshairs when he heard the sound of Bones’s approach. He whirled around in time to see the shepherd lunge at him through the dark and clamp his jaws directly around his face. Bones then bit down hard and broke the man’s jaw. As he began to scream, a sound drowned out by the near-constant gunfire nearby, the dog angled his snout down and tore out the man’s throat.
Maw now soaked in blood, Bones slipped away from the sniper and continued moving around the action.
Lionel spotted Weevil against one of the motorcycles and moved close enough to signal the fellow, only to get a gun aimed in his direction.
“Dammit, I’m on your side, asshole!”
When Weevil saw who it was, semi-illuminated, since Lionel was in the multiple headlights, some broken, continuing to keep the gun battle bathed in an eerie light, he signaled the deputy over. When Lionel got alongside the biker, he saw that Weevil had been shot in the same leg twice and was losing blood.
“Where’s Arthur?”
“He was the first one dead,” Weevil said, shaking his head pitifully. “Bullet out of the night. He didn’t even see it coming.”
“You guys walked into a trap. One I warned you about.”
“We thought it was part of a setup. Some ATF guy came down and said that he knew you’d talked to us but that Mongrel was dirty and had been informing on the Furies to the Mexican police, who killed him when he asked for more money. He said if we went ahead with the sale, we’d be protected.”
Lionel nodded dumbly. He wondered if he’d ever meet a criminal whose IQ was higher than 100 or, failing that, one who had anything in the way of deductive reasoning skills.
“Well, how many of you guys are left, and how many of them?”
“We got about ten guys that can still shoot. Maybe the same on their side. They were holding back a little, staying with their trucks. When it all went down, they let their snipers do the work, so we never knew how many there were.”
A small swarm of bullets whizzed by overhead and slammed amongst a nearby motorcycle, peeling back strips of metals and shredding the tires. Lionel looked out into the dark and tried to see where the shot had come from, but there wasn’t a second one. But then he caught sight of another man rising behind the truck next to it and, just as that man fired a couple of rifled rounds their way from a large pistol, Lionel aimed at the man’s head and fired. His bullet struck pay dirt, and the air was momentarily misted with blood and jellied brains as the corpse sank back behind the truck.
“Wow, that was some shooting,” Weevil said.
“It’s called ‘drawing their fire,’” Lionel replied. “They’re getting bored and bunkering in. Give them something to shoot at, and they’ll start popping up like jackrabbits.”
Lionel’s point was proved a second later as a hail of bullets poured in, splattering around Weevil’s impromptu hiding place. Lionel flinched wildly as if shot and spied one of the shooters checking to see if he’d landed a bullet. Lionel instantly raised his gun and blasted the man in the eye before then rolling over a couple of feet, catching a lucky angle on a second man, and shooting him in the side of the head. The man vomited a stream of blood and teeth as he sailed to the ground.
“Time to find a new hide,” Lionel said, nodding to Weevil as he began crawling away.
“Wait, what?” protested Weevil. “What about me?!”
“You have a gun. Shoot back.”
Out away from the lights, Bones was tearing out the throat of the second sniper when a familiar smell entered his nose. As the dying man gurgled and clutched at the ragged flesh around his neck, Bones stepped away and sniffed at the air, trying to clear the heavy stench of fresh blood from his nose. He picked up something over to his left, the third spot on a half-circle that had arched over the
federales’
position, their trucks having been parked in a way to make the area directly in front of them a perfect kill zone for the snipers.
Bones trotted over to where the third and final sniper had been and saw that he was already dead, having been shanked in the kidneys multiple times from behind. Though the smell of cordite still hung heavy over the man’s position, his rifle was gone. Bones turned towards the desert and detected a man hurrying away into the night.
Wheeling around, the German shepherd bolted after the fellow.
Lionel shot five more of the
federales
before the last two surrendered. Both were astonished to see that they had been trading bullets with a county sheriff’s deputy.
“We were warned about you,” one of the men said in Spanish.
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Lionel replied in the same language. “You know how fast your government’s going to disavow you and say you were dirty and in with the gangs?”
The men said nothing, but Lionel’s words had rung true.
“Good. Then you’re going to cooperate and help me get the guy who tortured and killed a Federal undercover. Oliver Mattis?”
“Oh, he was here. The ATF man? He was here.”
Lionel suddenly looked out over the desert, wondering how he could’ve missed him.
Bones pushed farther and farther into the low desert scrub, the running man easy enough to track, as he carried three unmistakable scents with him as he went: the dead sniper’s blood, the burned powder of the recently fired rifle, and then a thick sheen of fear in the man’s own sweat. It could’ve been a burning four-story building made of cinnamon (a particular Bones
bête noire
) instead of a desert, and the shepherd would’ve still been able to track the man.
But the agent was making good time. He was in great shape, and his fear was just beginning to give way to optimism. He knew it was still hours before sun-up, so even if local law enforcement got a helicopter in the air, he’d have long since hitched a ride back into Las Cruces with plausible deniability written all over his face when he “learned” of the debacle come eight o’clock.
He still wasn’t sure where he’d gone wrong. The scene some poor local was to have found the next morning was meant to be simple: a bunch of dead bikers in the desert, tire tracks leading to Mexico. Mattis had not anticipated the arrival of Oudin but didn’t think one man would have been able to turn the tide as he had. But after the deputy shot his first two men and the snipers didn’t seem to be able to pick him up, Mattis decided to hedge his bets by getting the hell out of there. He’d ridden in with the
federales
and was cursing himself for leaving not so much as a rental car half a mile down the highway, but knew there’d be traffic on the 28 when he got there.
When he was about three hundred yards from the action, he finally stopped for a moment and wheeled the sniper rifle around, aiming the night scope towards the gunfight. He hadn’t heard a shot for a couple of minutes and wondered if somebody had finally knocked down the pesky cop. Instead, he saw that the two
federales
had surrendered to the man and were probably in the process of giving him up.
“
Motherfucker
,” Mattis cursed before checking to see if there was still a round in the chamber.
When he saw that there was, he drew a bead on Lionel’s chest and was about to pull the trigger when he picked up movement a few feet in front of him. He angled the scope down and saw Bones less than six feet away. He switched his aim, led the dog with the gun’s muzzle, and as the bounding shepherd filled up the scope, he pulled the trigger.
As the shot rang out over the desert, Lionel stared out into the darkness, suddenly worried for Bones. The two
federales
looked a little more nervous than they had a moment before, and Lionel shrugged when the bullet didn’t fly anywhere near them.
“We’re all lit up here. If that rifle was aimed at any of us, we’d be dead. Besides, I’ve got a silent partner out there I failed the mention.”
Lionel realized that he had said that in English and knew it was his concern for Bones speaking. He translated for the
federales
, and they nodded and relaxed, since there wasn’t a second shot. The sheriff’s deputy put handcuffs on both and could do nothing but wait.
A moment or two later, a long stream of flashing roof lights appeared out on the 28 and began racing out to the scene of the shootout. When he saw that they were indeed a phalanx of local and state cops, Lionel finally stepped away from his prisoners and looked out towards the source of the shot. As the first officer pulled up, Lionel quickly turned the scene over to her and then hurried out into the desert, calling back that he feared there might be an officer down out in the scrub.
Truthfully, he didn’t believe that would be the case. Bones could handle almost anything. But there was a lingering feeling of doubt as he hurried through the darkness. He wouldn’t admit it was fear, but there it was.
Though Lionel knew he might be inviting a gunshot, he shouted out into the darkness. “Bones!!”
There was only silence, but then a weak voice came from somewhere out in front of him.
“Oudin….call off your fucking dog.”
Lionel slowed and could make out the weak green light of the battery-powered Starlight scope in the dirt attached to a rifle just ahead. He picked it up, looked through the scope, and spied a dry wash about twelve feet in front of him. He walked and saw SAIC Mattis lying on the hard, cracked ground of the wash bed, looking like he’d broken his leg. Bones, alongside the man, looked up at Lionel, his eyes flashing bright white on the scope. Lionel could see that the shepherd had torn a large bloody gash through the agent’s arm, almost severing it, which probably caused the man to stumble backwards and fall into the arroyo. Blood, which showed up black in the scope, had pooled around the wound, and Lionel knew if he’d gotten there only a couple of minutes later, Mattis would’ve already bled to death.
Setting down the rifle, Lionel clambered down into the creek bed, pulled off his belt, and tied off Mattis’ arm. “You’re gonna lose this, I’m afraid.”
“Yeah, ’cause of your fuckin’ dog, Oudin,” the agent replied ruefully, spitting blood.
“You hear they’re looking to repeal the death penalty in this state?” Lionel replied. “Might do you a disservice. Not gonna be an easy thing, a one-armed ex-fed in the state pen.”
Mattis went silent and then leaned back on the hard ground.
“Your fuckin’ dog.”
“Good day of work, Bones,” Lionel told the shepherd as they drove back to Las Cruces a few hours later, the sun now painting the desert floor in pinks and orange.But when he looked over, he saw that the shepherd, clearly exhausted, was curled up asleep on the passenger seat. Lionel snorted, thought about when he might get some rest himself. With a sigh, he rolled up the driver’s-side window, not wanting the noise of the passing traffic to disturb his snoozing partner.
Homo homini lupus
R
oberto DeMatteis had seven species of animal named after him. Though most people think of an organism’s scientific name, its binomial nomenclature, as solely derived from a combination of the two Latin words for its genus and species, Homo sapiens, Drosophila melanogaster, Ursus arctos, etc., there’s an optional third part to the name that may designate its discoverer. Types of aloe vera plants include Aloe arborescens Mill (named for eighteenth-century botanist and chief gardener of the Chelsea Physic Garden, Philip Miller), Aloe myriacantha Bowie (named for nineteenth-century explorer James Bowie, who discovered a number of new aloe plants in his explorations of the southern tip of Africa), and Aloe perfoliata L. (for Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who created binomial nomenclature in the first place in 1735; why he’s prominent enough to need only an “L.”). In the case of DeMatteis, his namesakes were seven sea creatures that he’d discovered living in the geothermally heated abyssal zones around Arctic hydrothermal vents, including the Riftia pachyptila DeMatteisii and the Paralvinella sulfincola DeMatteisii, as well as five more whose scientific names could all be additionally suffixed with the honorific, “DeMatteisii.”
Roberto was proud of many things in his career as a marine biologist, but nothing compared to the uncovering of these seven animals, placing him in a line that stretched back to men like Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, John James Audubon, even Jacques Cousteau, whose television programs first got DeMatteis interested in the sea (though he was more apt to fabricate stories of seafaring great-great-grand-whatevers). Despite being routinely hailed for his groundbreaking books, lectures, and research in the lab, Roberto would describe his classification of these animals in terms most akin to how a mechanical engineer might refer to the patents of drill bit configurations he or she had invented, something to hang on the wall and be praised. Only instead of having made his breakthroughs utilizing a design computer, only to then hand them off to someone else to manufacture who would then hand them off to someone else to implement, Roberto made the endless dives to secure his treasures and a place in scientific history himself. These dives primarily took him to the vents along the Gakkel Ridge, an oceanic mountain range that ran under the Arctic Ocean from Greenland to Siberia. Each discovery, he figured, had been there for millennian merely awaiting the first human being to ever reach that earthly frontier before revealing itself. Space exploration? Feh. There were still plenty of places on the home world left unexplored, enough to sate anyone’s sense of discovery. Space was just easier, Roberto would claim. Type something into one of those design computers, build a boat with sealed portholes, and chuck it high enough into the air, and they’ll put your name alongside Magellan and Columbus. Sailors both, he would add.