Authors: Mark Wheaton
But sink deep into the cold seas of the Arctic to decipher the secrets of your own planet’s evolutionary history, and you had to bow and scrape for funding. The only way around this was to bring something back from the abyss you could claim as your own – an important new discovery – that you could then present to a society’s fellowship committee and say, “See?! This is where your money went. This is hard science. This
means
something.”
And as they ooh-ed and ahh-ed, you eased your way into their checkbooks, plucking out just enough for the next trip.
On his most recent voyage, one that had lasted fifteen amazing weeks, Roberto had discovered species numbers eight, nine, and ten, an unqualified, unparalleled bonanza. Even as he was bringing them to the surface, he imagined these three little creatures keeping him going for years, maybe even decades.
Because of that, he had refused to allow the specimens, being transported in large, temperature-controlled saltwater tanks, to leave his sight for more than even a few minutes and had blown out the rest of his department’s annual discretionary budget chartering a flight that would take him from his ship’s disembarkation port in Tromso, Norway, over to Heathrow for a refueling stop and then on to Pittsburgh International Airport. From there, they would then be packed into a refrigerated truck for transport 158 miles down the US-22 and up the I-99 back to Penn.
His worst fear wasn’t a plane crash or temperature gauge malfunction but an auto accident out on the highway. To this end, he had arranged to escort the truck the whole way utilizing a rental, a Toyota Prius, he would pick up at the airport. He imagined himself spotting a runaway tractor-trailer hurtling the wrong way down the road straight for his prized catch and wondered if he’d have the wherewithal to angle into its path with the Prius. He’d even taken the insurance rider for the first time in his life, just in case, though it was $30 a day extra.
However, the entire trip turned out to be hopelessly uneventful, and the moment he arrived in University Park, he had a grad student run the car back to a local franchise of the rental agency. Relieved, he brought the portable specimen tanks into the lab to transfer each of the organisms into their new permanent homes. But his sense of security was misplaced. He couldn’t know what his precious seawater tanks, the result of a relentless, eleven-year grant-writing campaign, had been used for in his absence. How the department head had loaned them out to the Agricultural Soil Science Department in exchange for Lady Lion basketball tickets. How a trio of grad students had been using them in their soil survey experiments for months now. Or how the work study associate whose job it was to clean the tanks had been using a solvent suitable for cleaning containers of soil or fertilizer, but one that would prove to be disastrously inappropriate for something that might later be used to hold any kind of living creature, particularly one capable of polymorphic mutation.
Disastrously inappropriate.
B
ones stood up as the old Bronco bounced along the muddy, tree-lined road, its tires spitting gravel when it listed too far off the trail blazed through the mud by the heavy-use vehicles that made up the only traffic the old road ever saw. There were no houses on Spur 790, and the two mailboxes - one business, one residential – for its one address were way up by the highway, saving the postman a daily twenty-minute round trip in good weather. A day like today, with the sky pissing buckets, would’ve taken even the most intrepid mail carrier upwards of an hour.
“
Shit!
” cursed Billy.
He grabbed the steering wheel to prevent the truck’s back tires from fishtailing over the rise on the right shoulder of the road. If they lost control and slid out of the tracks, that could mean plowing backwards the next six feet into a culvert, and it would be hours before they’d get out.
“You holding on back there?” Billy asked, half-joking.
Bones stared up at the uniformed man behind the wheel but made no reply.
“Almost there, buddy,” Billy said, reassuringly turning up the radio as if to mask further turbulence.
Bones turned away from the rear speaker. He didn’t like the propulsive rock music Billy insisted on blasting when he drove, but it didn’t bother him enough to whine about it. Besides, as soon as Billy’s hand had reached for the volume, Bones could see their destination out the window, surrounded by the usual, familiar activity - flashing lights, people in uniform moving about, a battalion of awkwardly parked squad cars, etc.
Billy pulled the truck up behind the last police car in what he estimated was a line of eight or nine, momentarily wondering how they’d reverse their way out of there when they were done. He spotted two SWAT vans among the vehicles and realized that this must be serious.
The police activity was centered on the entrance of a large junkyard that seemed out of place this far off the beaten track and so near the woods. It appeared that the yard might have been a relatively modest business at first, a few cars, a handful of old, now-rusty appliances, but as time passed, it had been expanded into the neighboring forest. Rather than cut down trees, the owners had simply extended the high chain-link fence – topped with twin strands of interwoven razor wire – into the forest, where old refrigerators, freezers, and washing machines now stood alongside the trunks of towering eastern hemlocks. The original part of the yard was now filled with hundreds of rusting chassis from cars and trucks of every make and model dating back forty years.
Billy climbed out of the cab, his boots immediately sinking into the soft mud.
“Christ,” he muttered. He slammed the driver’s-side door and opened up the back door where Bones stood on the seat, panting, staring back at him. “Ready to get to work?”
Bones, seeing Billy giving him an expectant look, gave a little woof in response. Billy grinned and reached in, grabbing the large German shepherd’s leash, and then held it out and up, the indicator for Bones to hop out of the Bronco. The pads on Bones’s feet touched the cool mud, which became the first smell that filled his nose, penetrating to the two hundred million scent receptors (one hundred ninety-five million more than a human) buried deep within his mucous membrane. Almost immediately, the smell of wet earth was overpowered by the stench of oil and exhaust fumes. Bones scrunched his nose, snorted a little, and then brought it down directly onto the ground, his eyes focusing on the grubby earth. Forcing aside the manmade smells to focus on the ground underfoot, Bones could soon smell the familiar scent of natural decay. Plants mostly, but also animals, alive and dead. The dead included a deer, likely killed through predation, as well as a rabbit who probably met a similar fate. Both gave off the harsh scent of rotting flesh and tissue, though a second rabbit, a more recent kill, came with the smell of vegetation rotting in its stomach, as the body itself had not yet begun to decay.
“Billy Bones!” came a booming voice from up by the junkyard entrance.
Billy, whose last name was Youman, bristled at the alliterative nickname for himself and his cadaver dog. But seeing that it came from George Zusak, the Zone 2 commander, he bit his tongue and faked a smile.
“Glad they sent you and not Lowe and his mutt,” Commander Zusak said, extending a hand, which Billy shook. “That dog couldn’t find a donut in an empty attic.”
Billy bit his tongue a second time at the idea that Robot, Sergeant Perrish Lowe’s Belgian Malinois, was any kind of mutt (except perhaps in comparison to Bones) and simply smirked as he figured it was what Zusak wanted him to do.
“What we got?” Billy asked, nodding towards the junkyard.
“Detective?” Zusak said, turning and nodding to a man who was already walking over. Billy clocked the guy’s outfit, a garish, light blue suit that even an eight-year-old would burn rather than wear to church, and figured the guy either had to spend all his clothing allowance on alimony like he did or had a sideline in robbing funeral homes.
“Missing person, possible homicide,” the detective said after introducing himself as Detective Nessler. “The suspect’s name is Wayne Chapas, drives a tow truck for his father’s company. Girlfriend, Tracy LeShoure, went missing over a week ago.”
“Uh-oh,” Billy said.
“We’ve got him dragging his wrecker out here twice this past week,” Nessler continued. “Owner of the yard, guy named Dewberry, led us to the vehicles, but they were clean. We think he used the wrecks to drive her out here but then stashed her in another vehicle.”
Billy nodded but then looked down at Bones. His partner’s nose had already sifted through the myriad of junkyard, forest, and cop-related smells and had isolated the one he was trained to find, all in the time it took for this conversation to happen.
Billy grinned to himself, proud of his buddy. He could be an utter fuck-up, an off-duty drunk with two – count ’em,
two
– ex-wives docking his paycheck, but his dog’s laser-guided missile of a nose made Billy invaluable to the force. Once a target was painted, there was nothing stopping Bones from leading his handler right to it. Billy knew that Bones’s training was 99 percent of the battle, but he felt it was good for his standing in the department to make it seem like their consistent success had at least something to do with him, too.
“You ready to follow your nose?” Billy asked, addressing the shepherd as the detective and commander watched.
Bones looked back up at Billy with incomprehension, having already tugged at the leash to indicate that he knew precisely the direction in which their quarry lay. Billy turned to Zusak and Nessler, and nodded.
“He probably just smells the junkyard dogs right now,” Billy lied. “Once we’re in there, he’ll get to it. C’mon, boy. Stop fucking around.”
Billy gave the leash a light flip, and Bones surged forward to the gates of the junkyard, leading him past the other officers as they went.
“If you guys could just stay out here while we’re inside?” Billy insisted to the patrolmen. “I don’t want to confuse Bones none if he catches a whiff of one of you or, more accurately, what kind of meat might be rotting in your over-fed stomachs.”
Rather than take offense, to a man the officers nodded solemnly as Billy and Bones passed through the junkyard gates and soon disappeared from view in the labyrinth of cars and trucks.
It took them forty-five seconds to locate Tracy LeShoure.
She’d been repeatedly bashed in the face; “beyond recognition” was an understatement. An I.D. wasn’t going to be 100 percent without prints, but Billy figured how many other week-old corpses could there be in this junkyard? He stared down at her broken body, which hadn’t been stuffed in the trunk of a car heading straight for the compactor as was more typical but actually crammed inside the twenty-gallon fuel tank of an S10 Blazer. Chapas would’ve had to know what kind of vehicle had such a large tank, had to have brought the tools to remove, then replace it once he’d placed Tracy’s body inside, and probably figured the residual smell of gasoline would cover up any potentially incriminating odor in the time it would take to get through the queue to the compacter. All of this strongly suggested premeditation, which meant Murder One. It was the kind of arrest that led to bonuses, commendations, and weekends off for everybody
but
Billy, and he knew it.
“Here,” Billy said, tossing another chunk of partly melted carob to Bones — the shepherd’s favored reward — as they sat a few feet from the body. Billy knew he couldn’t take in the stillness of the yard and surrounding woods for much longer. Soon they’d have to go back, announce their triumphant discovery, lead the detectives to the dump site, and then be shunted to the side so that the “real police” could take over the scene before the news cameras got there.
Billy popped the last square into his mouth and got to his feet. He half-brushed, half-smeared the remaining carob onto his jeans, then picked up Bones’s leash.
“Good day of work, Bones,” he said, stroking the thick fur between the shepherd’s ears. It wasn’t his fault the department sucked. “Good boy.”
Bones rose to his feet, flecks of mud hanging off his belly fur, even more on his haunches and fore paws. Billy led him through the automobile maze back to the front of the yard, but as Bones trotted alongside his partner, a new scent filled his nose, taking him by surprise. The cadaver dog wheeled around towards the northeast corner of the junkyard, his whiskers aloft and playing in the breeze.
“Whatcha got, Bones?” Billy asked, glancing at the trees.
Bones hesitated for a moment, bobbing his nose up and down in the air. But as quickly as the scent had arrived, it was gone. Bones turned back towards the entrance and pulled Billy forward.
“Crazy dog,” Billy muttered under his breath, however affectionately.
When they reached the gates, Billy announced the discovery to Commander Zusak and Detective Nessler, but neither of them looked surprised or even particularly impressed, which annoyed the human half of the K-9 unit. Instead, they simply asked to be led back to the body, and after Billy and Bones had done just that, the pair was effectively dismissed from the scene, just as Billy knew they would be.
“Asshole,” Billy said, loud enough to be heard if anyone had still been around as he opened up the back door of the Bronco. “Up, up.”
Feeling the flick of the leash, Bones jumped in back, and as he did so, Billy tossed the leash inside with him before closing the door, being careful not to catch Bones’s tail or paws in it in case he turned around quickly. Then he climbed into the cab and slammed the driver’s door shut.
Once he’d fired up the truck, Billy got an idea. He slapped the Bronco into reverse, backed up a couple of feet, and then executed a three-point turn to head back down Spur 790 to the highway. As he did, he took advantage of the mud and angled his rear tires perpendicular to Commander Zusak’s sedan and hit the gas with just a little too much force, shooting mud across both the commander’s driver’s-side doors.
Satisfied, Billy finished executing the turn and headed away from the junkyard.