Authors: Mark Wheaton
“You know what, Bones?” Billy asked, though the dog’s eyes were closed, as he was already napping. “If I was going to kill somebody, there’d be
nothing
left of that body. I’d chop it up, soak the parts for three days in ammonia, and then encase it in cement. After that, I’d drive the whole concrete block to fucking Mexico and shove it into the ocean in one of those fishing coves that’s off-limits to scuba divers. Then I’d burn the house down where I did the killing.”
Billy hesitated when he said this last part, though, knowing how badly burn sites affected Bones’s nose. As so many different materials were burned in your typical house fire – paint, insulation, plastics, chemical sealants, you name it – the noxious combination of smells always served to give Bones what Billy figured was the doggy equivalent of a really bad migraine, as it was his job to inhale all that without any kind of filter just to see if there were any bodies amidst the ashes.
“All right, so maybe not the house fire,” Billy said. “For you, I’d clean it real good, then leave unwrapped Snickers bars all throughout the house but in places only you could…”
These were Sergeant Billy Youman’s last words.
A burning ’92 Ford Taurus, at a speed approaching ninety miles an hour, slammed into the side of Billy’s truck with the force of a locomotive. The angle was such that it bowed the truck inward, like the top and bottom halves of a running back getting nailed by an oncoming safety. The truck’s roof effectively decapitated Billy as it was torn in half, though his heart had been stopped milliseconds before when the steering wheel was driven through his ribcage by the engine block and his collapsing ribcage squashed his heart like a rotten peach.
The force of the impact also served to blast the back door on the driver’s side open, and Bones was fired out like a furry cannonball. He woke up immediately during his short flight, just long enough to process that something was terribly wrong. But as he began to register alarm, the shepherd smacked headfirst into a patch of muddy grass and was knocked unconscious.
The collision had occurred just as Billy was reaching the highway, though the Taurus had been traveling in a grassy area between the highway’s gravel shoulder and the woods a few feet away, setting alight the odd clump of grass when a piece of flaming debris dropped off and landed in the car’s wake. There was no indicator as to what caused the car to be on fire, but it continued to burn, the flames soon leaping over to the Bronco and engulfing it, too.
Bones was out for six or seven minutes. When he came to, the fire was still crackling across both cars with great heat, but the gasoline had burned off rather than exploded, since the truck’s tank had ruptured and poured the less than a gallon Billy typically kept aboard onto the wet grass. His nose full of mud, smoke, and burning flesh, Bones was groggy from a concussion, and he tested each leg as he tried to rise. His body ached, particularly his snout, which he’d bashed pretty well against the ground. Though blood was seeping out of a number of small cuts on Bones’s torso, it was his right eye that was giving him the most trouble. A large welt had risen on his brow, which effectively squeezed the eye shut, giving him the appearance of a boxer who’d taken too many shots to the face.
But, by some miracle, Bones’s legs appeared not to have been broken, so he managed to walk a couple of steps before collapsing again. When he lifted his head back up, he got his first whiff of Billy’s scent coming from inside the burning truck. Pulling from a healthy reserve of strength built by years of conditioning, Bones lifted himself back up onto his feet and made his way to the truck.
Billy’s body was torn to pieces, and even though he couldn’t see it through the smoke, Bones’s nose told him plenty. Billy’s head was sagging over what was left of the dashboard, hanging on to the rest of his body by about half an inch of skin and sinew. His bones were completely shattered, as the collapsing truck had had the effect of a coffee press on his body, flattening it to match the contours of the wreckage it would now be forever encased in.
Bones filled his nose with Billy’s scent, staring at the truck for a few moments. Finally, he turned away and walked around to the Taurus, where he had picked up the smell of two more dead bodies. The passenger-side door had been torn open, and Bones nosed around inside. What looked like a blonde woman in her forties was in the driver’s seat, her head having spider-webbed the windshield, compacting and exploding her skull into a bloody mess of hair and brains. A much older man was lying across the back seat, but he, too, was dead. The only problem was Bones’s nose telling him that the man had actually been dead for hours
before
the crash.
Bones was about to move away from the car when, suddenly, the body of the old man began to move. Bones jumped back in surprise, reflexively barking at the corpse as if to call Billy over to check it out, forgetting that his master was dead. But as the old man continued to rise, Bones couldn’t help but react with a stream of confused barking. His nose was telling him that the old man was dead, a corpse, but his one good eye and his ears were telling him that the man was beginning to slide out of the back seat of the car and move towards him in a threatening way.
Bones kept barking, refusing to give up his ground even as he was mightily confused. The old man didn’t speak but seemed completely focused on the dog in front of him. As soon as he got a little leverage on the car door, the man lunged at Bones, his mouth open and his hands splayed outwards, as if clumsily trying to grab for his neck. Bones scampered backwards, but even though he was a little worse for wear, the shepherd felt threatened enough to retaliate by pushing forward and sinking his jaws into the old man’s right arm.
Rather than react in pain, the old man simply punched at Bones, flinging him aside. Bones’s weakened jaws released the old man’s arm as the dog careened into the grass, causing his entire body to quiver in pain as the stiffening muscles of his back and sides punished him for his lack of reflexes.
Deeply dissatisfied with this result, Bones immediately rolled over into a crouch, coiled back onto his haunches, and sprang forward. Before the old man could raise an arm in defense, Bones’s jaws were clamped tightly around his throat. With a quick twist of his neck, Bones tore the man’s throat out, the body flopping to the ground, once again lifeless.
Bones stared at the old man for a moment, but once satisfied that he would not be getting back to his feet, Bones walked away from the car and started following a distant, yet familiar scent on the wind, that of Commander Zusak and Detective Nessler. Pretty soon, he was back on the muddy road, effectively backtracking to the junkyard.
As Bones walked, or rather,
limped
along, the scent of Billy’s body began to fade away in the distance. At one point, Bones slowed down and stopped, turning and looking back towards the highway, but the wreck site was long out of view. Bones turned and kept walking.
As he got closer to the junkyard and the parked police vehicles, Bones realized that the smells he’d been following were changing. There were more people now or, actually, more
cadavers
. Stranger, the familiar scents, those of Zusak and Nessler, seemed to have either dissipated or been diluted in some way. They were still there, but something was different. Bones had his nose high in the air, trying to pick out these scents, when he heard a strangled cry:
“No! No!
A-NO!!!
NO! NO!”
Bones lowered his nose and trotted in the direction of the police cars to investigate. What he saw when he arrived were two men tearing at the flesh of a third, a police officer in uniform, face down in the mud, struggling to get to his feet. It was at this moment that the officer managed to lift his head and see Bones.
“Bones!” the man cried.
Upon hearing his name, Bones snapped into action and ran towards the officer. As he did, the injuries he suffered on the road hammered on him with every step, but he still managed to close the distance in less than three seconds and clamped his jaws down onto the leg of one of the two men tearing at the fallen officer. The second he did so, the same scent of death he’d received when he’d bitten the old man in the Taurus filled his nostrils. If seventy percent of taste was smell, Bones’s well-trained nose ratcheted that up to about eighty-five, making the grip he had on this man particularly unpleasant.
Though his intention was to drag the man off the officer, the sheer force of Bones’s attack had done the job for him, shoving the cadaverous fellow back and smacking his head against the door of one of the squad cars. But no sooner had Bones done this than the man got back to his feet, raised his arms angrily at Bones, and let out a deep, angry, guttural growl from behind teeth hanging with bloody strips of flesh.
“
Gnnnnnnh…!!!”
B
ones had originally been trained as a police dog at a small facility outside of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Once he’d become a full member of the Doña Ana Sheriff’s Department, he’d been used in exercises all up and down the U.S.-Mexico border by the local police in concert with the ATF, the INS, and the Border Patrol. The job primarily called for sniffing out drugs and illegals from cars and trucks at the Puerto de Anapra and Puerto Palomas border crossings. His secondary training as a cadaver dog was primarily utilized when anonymous calls about dead illegals out in the Chihuahuan Desert came in — usually, it was believed, from the very coyotes who took them out there.
After a nationwide call went out for cadaver dogs needed in Allegheny County, Bones and his partner/trainer – an older fellow and longtime veteran of law enforcement named Lionel Oudin who had raised Bones from a pup – moved up to Pennsylvania. There, they went to work for the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, doing double duty at the K-9 school attached to the training academy on Washington Boulevard (with plenty of heavy woods across the street for “extracurricular” training), and then assisting with homicide and missing persons cases across all six of Pittsburgh’s new policing “zones.” Only two years into the new position, Lionel took early retirement. When the department asked if they could keep Bones on (“Bones” being the name given to him by Lionel’s now-grown daughter, Amy, despite most figuring it was a vocational nickname), Lionel said “yes” without a second thought. It wasn’t as if he wouldn’t miss his near-constant companion of almost seven years, but he knew how much Bones enjoyed his work and didn’t think he’d adjust so well to sitting on a “doggie bed” all day watching the paint peel.
That’s when Bones was introduced to Sergeant Billy Youman, only his second partner.
Billy couldn’t have been more different from Lionel. Decades younger, unconcerned about his often slovenly appearance, and, counter-intuitively, something of a ladies’ man though anyone in the department would be hard-pressed to describe one of Billy’s typical Friday night hook-ups as a “lady.” For Bones, Billy’s smells were those of a late twenty-something man who sweated fast food and soft drinks, a 180 from Lionel, who patted his face with harsh-scented aftershave and preferred Latin American cuisine, which he’d taught himself to make in his own kitchen. When Bones first walked into Billy’s apartment, he spent days giving every inch the nose-over. When they’d first come up to Pittsburgh, Lionel had rented an old house on the outskirts that had retained pungent smells going back its eighty years. Billy’s apartment had been around for less than fifteen and smelled primarily of the pets that had come before Bones, as the complex was one of the few affordable buildings in that part of Polish Hill that allowed animals. The department paid the pet deposit, though it took Billy three months to push all the paperwork through.
Unlike an officer, whose schooling primarily ended at graduation from the Academy, aside from a few annual and required refresher courses along the way, Bones was constantly in training at the K-9 school. While these workouts were more to train future K-9 officers as well as to get regular cops comfortable and familiar with the K-9 units it might eventually have to work with, it served to keep Bones in an almost permanent state of readiness. He may have known the obstacle courses by heart, but when doing scent training, Billy and the other trainers made sure to change up the exercises to make it ever more difficult for Bones to discover his quarry. It had been decades since thieves rubbed ammonia on their shoes and tossed steaks to throw off police or guard dogs, and TV cop procedurals had taught a generation of criminals how better to cover their tracks.
Now the trick that impressed visitors to the K-9 school the most was watching Bones discover rotten meat that had been buried three or four feet
underwater
, something dogs were allegedly unable to do. Bones would slosh through the training pond, stand on the bank, and then run back and forth to try and catch even the faintest scent of his target long after any residual smell of the burial detail had evaporated. When he inevitably locked in on it and leaped back into the pond to mark the exact spot, the visitors’ eyes would go wide, their jaws would drop, and they would applaud with the same fervor one might reserve for a virtuoso violin performance.
As part of his training, Bones had also learned the finer points of various takedown strategies. This meant grabbing a suspect at the wrists or ankles and holding them long enough for a human officer to arrive and make the arrest. Police dogs were not weapons, as usually the threat of a dangerous animal was all one needed in the enforcement of public order, the primary mandate of a K-9 unit. They weren’t fight dogs, counter to the public perception, and were not trained to kill.
But Bones was different.
Almost immediately after Billy had taken over as Bones’s handler, he saw evidence of the shepherd’s feral instincts and tendencies lying just below the surface, something you wouldn’t see cultivated in an otherwise domesticated animal. It seemed to him that Lionel had wanted to make it so that, in an emergency, Bones was like having a .38 in an ankle holster or a collapsible baton in a hidden pocket. It’s not like Bones was some kind of ticking time bomb ready to explode at any moment, but Billy could tell there’d been some “auxiliary” training from the way Bones would react in this real-life situation or that. The thing was, it only made him feel more comfortable with his dog than less (as long as he never had to draw down against retired Sergeant Oudin, he’d joke to himself). If he ever had his back up against the wall and it was life- or death, he was confident that Bones would step in and defend him to the death.