MRS. BEEKE

            I shouldn’t be jealous of my two-doors-down neighbor Mrs. Osorio’s birdfeeder, but I am.  I just had to get rid of mine.  Like hers, it was filled with seeds for the house finches, sparrows, and occasional titmouse.  As they ate, they would sing and sing.  But finches are messy and the seeds got all over my patio.  This attracted larger birds that couldn’t get to the feeder like western scrub jays. 

            It also attracted rats.

            “They should call ‘em ratfeeders, not birdfeeders,” said Moses, the exterminator Mrs. Bourn recommended.  “They come down from the hills looking for a steady source of food, find it under birdfeeders, and soon they’re looking for ways into your house.”

            I’d heard the first rat two nights before I called the exterminator.  I had awoken to something skittering above me while I lay in bed.  At first, I thought it was on the roof.  When I realized it was in the attic, I had an unnatural fear that it would nibble its way through the ceiling, land on my chest, and chew at my skin.  I would be too frozen with fear to do anything about it. 

            I hoped it would go away, but when it came back the following evening, I knew I needed help.

            “We can seal up the attic and crawlspace under the house, put mesh around the gutters, drains, and eaves, stuff like that,” Moses said, checking boxes off a page on his clipboard.  “But you live in the canyon.  We can’t do anything about the rats on the outside.  You’re going to have to take the birdfeeder down.”

            I signed his contract and he spent the better part of the afternoon working around the outside of my house.  I could hear him dragging his ladder or grunting as he tried to fit his through the crawlspace door.  He knocked on the front door at five, his clothes stained with sweat.

            “Everything’s done but the attic.  No rats can get in or out, but if there are some up there right now, I need to put traps down.  Then, I’ll come back tomorrow and clear ‘em out.  Good?”

            I nodded.

            I was surprised to see that his traps were the same wooden and metal-spring combination you’d see in a cartoon.  Rather than cheese, however, he daubed a greasy gray substance on each bait clasp before pulling back the trigger bar.

            “The rats love this, but it’s the worst thing you’ve ever tasted.”

            I didn’t want to know why he knew this.

            All through the night, I would wake up every time a trap was sprung.  I kept expecting to hear a cry, some animalistic shriek of pain, but there was nothing.  Only the snap of metal pinging off wood.

            When Moses arrived the following day, he came out of the attic with eight “full” traps.

            “You probably don’t want to know this, but there was a nest up there.  Trap got Mama Rat and five babies plus a couple of others.”

            He put down two more traps in the attic just to be sure and said he’d come back in a week to check on them.  I was to call if I encountered any peculiar smells. 

            I was devastated.  Babies?!  As he drove away, I sank into my sofa.  How could I have been so cruel?  Babies, even baby rats, should have a chance to live, shouldn’t they?

            I don’t know where the rest of the day went.  At some point, I called my son, but my daughter-in-law informed me that he was in St. Louis at a conference.  I went to the grocery store, but I canceled my hair appointment.  When Mrs. Bourn came by two days later, I couldn’t stop crying as I told her everything.

            “It’ll be all right,” she said.  “Rats are filthy.  They spread disease, shit everywhere, and chew through wires.”

            “Not the babies!” I sobbed.  “They chose my house because it had food and was warm.  They thought it would be safe.  This is how I repaid them!”

            I looked up rats on the internet that night.  A woman in Minnesota claimed that rats were treated unfairly and that they were cleaner than birds or squirrels. 

            “They’re nocturnal,” she explained.  “Which is why we’re suspicious of them.  Dogs are naturally nocturnal, too, but we welcome them as pets.”

            I thought about little else for days.  But then one day I walked out the front door, looked right, and saw that Mrs. Osorio feeder was still up.  She hadn’t had a rat problem.  Her birdfeeder was overstuffed with seed and pretty birds hovered nearby.  I counted at least eight diving in and around the little doorways.  Several more sang from nearby tree branches.

            I ran back into the house, slamming the door behind me.  I got the same hot feeling behind my eyes and in my heart that I did when they told me Walter was in stage four of congestive heart failure.  I sank onto my sofa and shook my head.

            “What am I going to do?!” I asked, tears in my eyes.

            And that’s when I felt their feet, light as raindrops, racing up my arms and shoulder.

            “Mrs. Beeeeeeeeeke!  Why are you so sad?”

            “I’m not sad,” I replied, quickly forcing a smile for unexpected company.

            One of them nuzzled my neck.  Another, my ear.  They were as soft as a rabbit fur coat.

            “You don’t have to lie to us, Mrs. Beeke,” said a different high-pitched voice.  “We’re not going to judge you.  We’re not like everyone else, waiting to snigger behind your back.”

            “Aren’t you?”

            “Of course not,” said a third.

            “The reason I’m sad is because it’s not fair.  I love birds.  But I can’t have them around.”

            “Because of us,” a fourth voice said, mournfully.  “We can’t control our nature.”

            “It’s not your fault,” I said.

            “Maybe not,” said a fifth, this one more authoritarian than the others.  “But it is your neighbor’s fault to rub it in as she does.”

            “Not true,” I protested.  “Not true at all.”

            “Yes,” the fifth voice said.

            I could feel his tiny claws tensing around my shoulder blade.  I knew he wasn’t angry at me, just the situation, and I appreciated his concern.

            “She could move it,” he continued.  “She could put it on the side of her house.  She could put it in the backyard.  But no, it’s in the one place visible from your front porch.”

            “That bitch,” said one of the voices.

            “She’s a horror,” said another.

            “Let us help you!” two said in unison.

            “Help me do what?”

            “Feel better about things,” the fifth said again. 

 

            I woke up the next morning to the sound of screaming.  I knew it was Mrs. Osorio, but her troubles didn’t interest me.  I went to the kitchen and turned on the coffee maker.  After it warmed up, I made myself a cup and was just drinking it when the police car pulled up.  I went to the window as Mrs. Osorio met them at her front gate.   She’d been crying and her hair was a mess.

            “Don’t the police have better things to do?”

            I’d learned their names.  The one that seemed the youngest was Evi.  The one with the high-pitched voice was Zur.  Reba and Hur were like twins, united in their thoughts.  The authoritarian voice of action was Rekem.

            “I’m sure they do,” I said.

            “She probably just called and called and called until they had to send a car to shut her up,” suggested Rekem.  “She seems the type.”

            “Doesn’t she?”

            I’d hear it all second hand later from Mrs. Bourn.  Mrs. Osorio had a cat named Fabricio.  She kept a window open near her bed so that, at night, he could come and go as he pleased.  He could prowl but also have sanctuary from the canyon’s coyotes.  When he didn’t show up that morning for breakfast, she went looking for him.  The scream I heard was when she found him skinned, diced, and shoved into the now-blood-soaked bird feeder on her porch.

            “They’ll probably blame kids,” offered Evi.

            “They won’t know what to do,” snarked Hur.  “They’ll file it away under vandalism and forget all about it.”

            I nodded.  It felt good and I breathed a long sigh of relief.

 

            It was a week later that it all fell to pieces.

            I went to check the mail in the mid-afternoon.  As I climbed the steps back up to the porch, I chanced to look over to Mrs. Osorio’s house.  Hanging from the same hook as before was a new feeder.  

            I felt lightheaded.  I tried to look away, but my eyes were fixated on it.  There were a number of birds gathered at it already.  That’s when I noticed they seemed to be moving back-and-forth between it and something else. 

            I hurried up the rest of the steps, walked through the house, and into the backyard.  From there, I had a clear view past Mr. and Mrs. Loney’s house onto Mrs. Osorio’s back porch.  Instead of one, she now had six bird feeders around the yard.  They hung from the eaves, on stand-alone poles, and even from trees.  The amount of birds was staggering.

            But that’s when I saw the coup de grace.  Four green parrot, two parakeets, and a cockatiel. 

            There was a rumor in the canyon of a grove of trees where all the pet exotics that escaped from cages went to live and breed.  People talked about seeing green parrots here and there, but I had never glimpsed one.  But now four had come calling on Mrs. Osorio.

            I went inside and threw myself on the bed in tears.  Why wasn’t she besieged by rats for what she had done?!  How as this possible?  She was only two doors down.  What was so different between her yard and mine?

             “Please don’t blame us, Mrs. Beeeeeeeke,” whimpered Reba.

            “It still smells of the cat over there,” squeaked Zur.  “Very inhospitable to our brethren.”

            “But that’s ridiculous!” I howled.  “The cat is dead.  They should know that.  There is food for the taking!  Can’t you let them know?”

            They went quiet for a moment.  Finally, I heard Rekem’s steady, ominous voice.

            “If you want her to have rat problems, she can have rat problems, Mrs. Beeke.”

            “I do, Rekem.  I really do.”

 

            The fire engines arrived just past three in the morning.  They never had an easy time navigating the canyon roads but fires up here were particularly dangerous so they always took them serious.  The first blaze erupted in Mrs. Osorio’s attic, but as I was to learn, four others started elsewhere in the house at the same time.  It took only minutes for it to sweep through her entire home.

            “They say it was the wiring,” Mrs. Bourn explained a few days later as we looked at the charred remains from down in the street, a strong burning smell still hanging in the air.  “They think it got chewed through in a number of different places and an overloaded circuit caused a chain reaction.”

            “How’d she survive?”

            “All her smoke detectors went off at once.  She just made it out the door before the whole thing went up.  She was in hysterics.”

            I didn’t see anything of Mrs. Osorio for the rest of the summer or fall.  A demolition crew came in at one point to tear down what was left of the house.  They were followed by a surveyor and an architect who were followed by a contractor and a construction foreman.  A new house was soon planned and constructed.

            It was at the first of the year that a moving van pulled up out front.  Mrs. Osorio’s daughter directed movers to carry furniture up to the house and Mrs. Osorio showed up later that day.

            She looked like she’d aged ten years.  It took her twice as long as it once did to climb the steps to her front door.  When she got there, she hesitated as if thinking the knob might electrocute her.  She eventually went in and didn’t come out for two days.

            I waited for her to put out bird feeders, but she never did.  By this time, I had put up a number of hummingbird feeders in my yard.  I hadn’t done this before as they fought like cats and dogs, but I’d grown used to it.

            Spring came and I was parking my car one day when Mrs. Osorio waved me over to her front gate.

            “It’s amazing!” she exclaimed, pointing up at her house.  “Can you see them?”

            “What are you talking about?”

            “Come!”

            She led me up the steps to her house and I heard the alarmed chirps of house finches.  Two jumped out from under her eaves and flitted in opposite directions.    

            “They’re nesting!”

            “I know what they’re doing,” I snapped, my mouth suddenly dry.

            I don’t remember how long I stood there, but as soon as it would seem natural, I made excuses and raced home.

            “Did you hear?” I cried.  “Did you know?”

            “We did,” said Rekem.  “We are sorry.”

            “Eat them!  Destroy their nests!  Get rid of them!”

            There was silence.  I waited for them to react.  Only Rekem climbed to my shoulder.

            “We can’t do that,” he said softly.  “You don’t actually want that, either.  They’re not the problem.”

            He nuzzled my neck.  His soft warm body calmed me.  I felt his whiskers on my ear and then my cheek. 

            “But I think you know what is.  And I think you know what to do about it.”

 

            “This way, Mrs. Beeeeeeeke,” Evi whispered.

            The moon was high as I climbed the slight hill in my backyard.  I pushed through the bent chain-link of my fence to get to the fire road that ran behind all our houses.  I clinked and clanked as I moved.  The weight of all I carried beared down on me.  I shadowed the Loney’s back fence until I reached Mrs. Osorio’s property.  She had a wooden gate and I quietly unhooked the latch.  She’d built a garden up the hill in her yard and I began descending the railroad tie stair steps between rows of plants.  I’d made it three steps before realizing my tail was caught in the gate.  I freed it and kept walking.

            The backdoor was locked but the sliding door on her patio was not.  I pushed it all the way open and moved inside.  I was three steps into her living room when the light flicked on.

            “Mrs. Beeke.”

            Mrs. Osorio, in a pale pink nightgown, was seated on the sofa holding a gun.

            “Squeeeeeeeeak!”

            I flexed my fingers so she could see the razor blades attached to each.  I grinned, which jostled the twin carving knives hanging down from either side of my mouth, tied to my ears with twine.  I tried to flick the tail, too, but the beanbags sewn inside made it too heavy for my reconstructed hip to move easily.

            I was clearly not backing down.

            Blam.

            Mrs. Osorio fired a shot that pinged off one of the frying pan ears I’d covered in cloth and attached to my head using a belt.  It missed me completely, but the impact was enough to spin me around.  I caught myself on a Barcalounger, the razor blades on my fingers shredding the leather upholstery.

            “I called the police the moment I heard you leave your house.  I knew the baby birds would push you over the edge.”

            “Squeeeeeeeak” I shrieked.

            “I couldn’t convince myself that you were so vile that you could kill a cat, but when I heard something the size of a water buffalo shuffling around in my attic the night of the fire, I knew who it was.  But I also knew that no one would believe me.

            That’s when I felt their feet on my shoulder, all five of them.

            “The moment is now,” Rekem whispered.  “Seize it!”

            I nodded and got down on all-fours, and flashed my fangs.  I’d taken them to the knife sharpener at the farmer’s market that morning.  There was no question they’d do the job on Mrs. Osorio’s papery flesh.

            I hissed ferociously and charged across the carpet, the pillows on my back shifting under the gray blanket I’d tied to my midsection.  I saw the fear in Mrs. Osorio’s eyes.

            I didn’t hear the gunshots.  It was as if an invisible hand had simply flattened me against the ground.  I tried to catch my breath but couldn’t.  My fingers were slick with blood drizzling down my arm.

            Mrs. Osorio sat down on the sofa and stared at me, incredulous.  A moment or two later, two police officers came to the door.  She let them in.  Upon seeing me, one called for an ambulance.  They took Mrs. Osorio’s gun but then hurried over to me.

            “Holy shit, are these knives?”

            “And razor blades on her fingers,” Mrs. Osorio chimed in, cold as ice.  “Be careful.”

            They removed the frying pans from the back of my head and rolled me over.  My chest seized up and I realized I was having a heart attack.  As I struggled for air, I felt tiny feet rushing up my arms and legs to my chest. 

            “Mrs. Beeeeeeeeke!” whimpered Evi.  “Don’t leave us!”

            “I’m not,” I sighed, blood misting from my open mouth.

            Rekem gently placed his paw on my mouth.  I kissed it.

            “She’s right.  Soon, she’ll be with us.  Always.”

            I could feel them exhale joyfully.      

            “Yay, Mrs. Beeke!” exclaimed Reba.  “Hooray!”

            “Three cheers for Mrs. Beeke!”

            They clapped their paws together in delight and the room faded away.

Cape Town, New York and Austin

I’m on the road a bit the next few weeks so when I pop back up and you’re like, “Oh, I guess his neverending stream of status updates did abate for a time, no?” here’s where I was.

I leave for Cape Town, South Africa on Thursday to do interviews, location scouting and further research for a movie called “Cape Town” that I’m working on with one of my “Chinese Wall” producers, Paul Goldin. I’ve been to South Africa only once before when a Johannesburg-set project, “An Unfinished Country,” got set up at Miramax and they sent me to down to do much the same thing. I would make a joke about “and-we-see-how-successful-that-was,” but “Country” seems to be inching forward again now with a new director/producer/financiers. Optimism.

“Cape Town” is an action-thriller, I’m already set to meet with some fascinating people in the Department of Justice and see some fascinating sights. I hope that what I glean this go-round will take “CT” to the finish line as it’s a movie I’d really like to see get made and I very much enjoy working with Paul. We share a producer/services company with the currently-in-production-in-Cape-Town Denzel Washington-starring “Safe House” for Universal, so even better, I’m hoping to see some of the top-flight SA crews in action on location which is always fun.

Anyway, I return at the end of the month, land at LAX, race home, shower/change, hit that night’s performance of “Re-Animator: The Musical” (thanks, Lindy!) and then turn around and head back to the airport to go to New York.

The New York trip is for an adaptation. A producer and I sold a pitch to a cabler last year based on a book that had just come out and though I’ve spent time with the author (it’s a memoir) out here, now I’m seeing him on his own turf, watching him in action giving a talk at Princeton and interviewing him more as the script begins to develop. This is a particularly interesting project to me and the people I’m working with are top notch. What they want this to say is not what 99% of other places the book might have been set up would desire from it, which is why it’s a project I really hope gets made. Regardless, I’m learning quite a bit working on it and from being around its author. I’m looking forward to continuing with that.

And then there’s Austin.

Though my home is Los Angeles, I feel very much “at home” two other places: Austin and London (inexplicably). I had never heard of the World Horror Convention until my friend, the horror author and essayist Michael Rowe told me about it. As it’s in Austin, Texas at the end of April, I thought it might be fun to go, hang out with Michael (who lives in Toronto and who I may see only once a year) and learn something about horror writing while meeting the people who publish it. For the past year and a half, I’ve been dabbling in horror prose, writing a novel, a series of novellas and a couple of short stories that I’ve made available for download on the Amazon Kindle. I had no illusions that this suddenly made me a professional writer, but the feedback, the reviews (positive and negative) and the literally thousands of downloads proved there was at least some space in the marketplace for what I wanted to write (Ed. Note: your definition here of “proved” may not square with Webster’s – try looking under “wishful thinking”). So, last fall, I wrote a couple of drafts of a new horror novel, sent that off a “couple of places” (got rejected a “couple of places”), but one of the editors wrote saying that he really liked it, but “just didn’t enough have room for it this year.” This, I have since learned is one of the nicest ways someone can reject your work. That said, he asked me to write a novella for them to kind of test me out with no promises whatsoever as to if it would be published. Naturally, I started the next day.

The thing takes place in the South Atlantic, but has a Cape Town component so I dove into the rough draft hoping to finish it in time to be able to rewrite it in South Africa. That happened, so if you see the one guy on your Virgin Atlantic flight not watching one of the myriad of movie choices but is instead hunched over a manuscript that he’s editing in long hand, well, I’ll say “hi” to Denzel for you if I see him.

Anyway, that’s where I’ll be and what I’ll be writing while there.

MONGREL – Part 5

 

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Bones pushed further and further 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, they nodded and relaxed as 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 shoot-out.  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.  When 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 gun shot, 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 laying 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 arm of the agent, 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.

And that’s it for MONGREL. If you’d like to read more Bones adventures, you can check out BONES: THE COMPLETE APOCALYPSE TRILOGY, a collection of three Apocalyptic novellas (BONES, SHEPHERD and ALPHA) of monster-fightin’ dog action, now available from Amazon.com:

Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Trilogy

These stories are also available individually for download to the Amazon Kindle

BONES SAGA BOOK I – BONES

BONES SAGA BOOK II – SHEPHERD

BONES SAGA BOOK III – ALPHA

MONGREL – Part 4

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Go back to Part 2
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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, the 28 having 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 as 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 his Bones’ handlers were in trouble, Bones would respond with prejudice.  He was just over a hundred pounds and when motivated, he could tear a man’s arm off or throat out.  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 their 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.  Then 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’ 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 gun fight.

            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.  Requests immediate backup.” 

            Without waiting for a response, he dropped the mic, stopped the truck and stared out the windshield at the continuing fire fight.  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.

            As they neared, 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 as it looked like Arthur and his guys just rode up in full force thinking they’d come off as intimidating as opposed to a group that played its entire hand before the game had even started.

            That’s when Bones’ 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 where he had detected movement, soon saw that it was indeed a man with a sniper rifle complete with Starlight scope and split out wide, flanking the man before coming up directly behind.  Though his eyesight during the day was fine for a dog, Bones’ 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’ 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 as 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 set-up.  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 that 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.  “<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 A-T-F man?  He was here.>”

            Lionel suddenly looked out over the desert wondering how he could’ve missed him.

Tune in tomorrow for PART 5 of MONGREL or check out the whole thing in BONES: THE COMPLETE APOCALYPSE TRILOGY, a collection of three Apocalyptic novellas (BONES, SHEPHERD and ALPHA) of monster-fightin’ dog action, now available from Amazon.com:

Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Trilogy

These stories are also available for download to the Amazon Kindle

BONES SAGA BOOK I – BONES

BONES SAGA BOOK II – SHEPHERD

BONES SAGA BOOK III – ALPHA

Continue to Part 5

MONGREL – Part 3

Go back to Part 1
Go back to Part 2

Bones’ 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 be 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’ 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 and 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 that 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 dumbass compatriots had likely secured the large cache from some “trusted” fence that had sworn he’d come into a couple thousands 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 up the escalating drug wars by unofficially supplying some real firepower to the Federal cops.  Backchannels had probably become necessary on both sides of the border for a horde of reasons, 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 taped 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 overwatch position, slunk down the bad road without headlights and headed in the direction of the convoy of motorcycles.

Tune in tomorrow for PART 4 of MONGREL or check out the whole thing in BONES: THE COMPLETE APOCALYPSE TRILOGY, a collection of three Apocalyptic novellas (BONES, SHEPHERD and ALPHA) of monster-fightin’ dog action, now available from Amazon.com:

Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Trilogy

These stories are also available for download to the Amazon Kindle

BONES SAGA BOOK I – BONES

BONES SAGA BOOK II – SHEPHERD

BONES SAGA BOOK III – ALPHA

Continue to Part 4

MONGREL – Part 2

Go back to Part 1

Though the bartender offered to put Bones out in a fenced-in area behind the clubhouse, Lionel smiled in a way to suggest that that wasn’t going to happen.  The pool players were sent out to walk the perimeter as Arthur, the other man who’d been in the back office (a morbidly obese fifty-something with scraggly gray facial hair who Arthur referred to as “Tubby”), the bartender who went by “Weevil” and Lionel took seats around a table as the man at the bar, who went unnamed but who Lionel recognized from some past rap sheet, continued sitting and drinking..  Lionel saw that he had two Heckler & Koch 9mm pistols in his belt and, within easy reach of his right hand, a pump-action shotgun hanging under the bar over his knees.

            “Do you believe in luck?” Arthur asked Lionel as the sheriff’s deputy poured a glass of water Weevil brought over into a dish for Bones who appreciatively lapped it up.

            “Not particularly.”

            “Neither do I,” the biker replied.  “So, when people I know should be going away get off, I figure they found themselves in a jam and jumped right into the Feds’ pocket, offering to snitch to keep on the streets.  When a bunch of those guys all gang up to vouch for a newcomer who I sure as hell never heard of, in this case Mongrel, I get a sixth sense about him.”

            “Then how come you let Mongrel in here?”

            Arthur grinned.  “If I kick him out, it looks like I’ve got something to hide.  So, I just let him in with a big smile on my face, treat him like any brother rider and he ends up with nothing to report week after week.  How long do you think the Feds are going to spend taxpayer dollars on an operation like that?   And after ‘Mongrel’ ends up ‘moving on to San Antonio’ or something, how long before any investigator will get operational funding to run another possibly fruitless undercover op against my club?”

            Lionel said nothing but knew the chapter president was making a good point that, sadly, showed a real understanding of law enforcement.

            “So, you’re admitting to me you knew he was an undercover but denying you had anything to do with his murder?”

            “We ever have trouble me and you?” Arthur asked.  “Serious trouble, I mean?  You think I’m going to murder an undercover cop?”

            Lionel didn’t reply, letting it hang out there that it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.

            “Well, I guess you answered that by walking in here like that knowing you weren’t gonna get a bullet in the head,” Arthur said.  “You know us.  We get caught, we do our time.  We’ve never asked for special favors and we’ve never tagged a cop.  We’re not going to start now.”

            “Which leads me to my next question,” Lionel said.  “You have any idea why ATF would want him dead?”

            “You mean other than to justify their expenditures here by showing the big, bad Furies are capable of murder?”

            “Wouldn’t justify a thing if they couldn’t make it stick,” Lionel replied.

            “Good point,” Tubby said, his first words of the powwow eliciting an annoyed glance from Arthur.

            “You got anything going down soon that the ATF would be interested in?” Lionel pressed. 

            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 turned to descend down 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 any place 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’ 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 the 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 as despite this particular weapon being a favorite of the U.S. military, it could be as dainty as a tea cup 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 run. 

            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 just about the craziest.”

Tune in tomorrow for PART 3 of MONGREL or check out the whole thing in BONES: THE COMPLETE APOCALYPSE TRILOGY, a collection of three Apocalyptic novellas (BONES, SHEPHERD and ALPHA) of monster-fightin’ dog action, now available from Amazon.com:

Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Trilogy

These stories are also available for download to the Amazon Kindle

BONES SAGA BOOK I – BONES

BONES SAGA BOOK II – SHEPHERD

BONES SAGA BOOK III – ALPHA

Continue to Part 3

MONGREL – Part 1

“Wow, they really did a number on him, huh?”

            Lionel grunted.  He hated it when his fellow enforcement officers sounded like the police on TV as it never failed to make him wonder if that’s why they reached for a badge in the first place.

            “What do you think happened?” Lionel asked.

             The ATF agent, Oliver Mattis, glanced around the warehouse, gazing up into the rafters, rusted copper after years of disuse and then back down to the dead man chained in a sitting position to a steel chair in the middle of the room. 

            “It’s hard to say,” Mattis replied.  “I mean, obviously they tortured him, but it’s difficult to know if they were torturing him because they wanted information or torturing him once they found out who he was.”

            Lionel hesitated and looked down to the third member of their party, a four-year veteran of the Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Department named Bones who, despite being a German shepherd, was one of the most sought after members of the force, particularly by visiting Federal task force agents assigned to do something about drug trafficking on the New Mexico border.

            “Oh, they tortured him for fun,” Lionel said as if Mattis had misunderstood his question.  “Look at his feet.  If they wanted information, the burns wouldn’t be so uniform.  They’d cook the sole but then turn up the dial so the pain would get incrementally worse.  This guy, they were just fucking around.  They burned his feet, burned his fingers off, tore out his teeth, probably with pliers as they don’t look cracked out as if they’d used a screwdriver, torched his groin, then shotgunned his kneecaps, shotgunned his belly and finally shotgunned his face.”

            Mattis looked from Lionel to the corpse seated in the chair and was amazed at how easily the sergeant was able to piece that together.  “What else can you tell me?”

            “It happened last night, it wasn’t done by his own gang and he probably died screaming.”

            “How do you know it wasn’t his own guys?”

            “He’s still wearing his cut,” Lionel said, pointing to the leather vest the dead man was wearing, the word “FURIES” stitched into the back in red on white.  “That’s the first thing they’d do.”

            “So it was the Mexicans.”

            Lionel said nothing as he stared at the burned out husk of a man, an ATF undercover named Jacob Hillenbrand aka “Mongrel” who he’d met over a year and a half ago three counties over when he and Bones had been part of a massive tri-agency drug bust that had netted fifteen tons of marijuana worth about $10 million to the cartels.  He looked down at Bones who continued to sniff at the air and then glanced back to the warehouse entrance where the sound of approaching vehicles could be heard.

            “Oh, I think the cavalry’s here.  I’m gonna wander Bones back to the kennel and start my report.”

            Mattis nodded absently and Lionel led Bones out of the building.

            It was a long drive back to Las Cruces in Lionel’s old Chevy Blazer, a vehicle that was now officially a law enforcement ride as cutbacks at the Sheriff’s Department meant that the sheriff, a whiskery old stick-in-the-mud named Bob Shivers who Lionel would go hunting with anyway, was forced to be okay with it.  Lionel got a lot of thinking done in the truck, idly listening to whatever country station currently seemed to be ignoring music (though Lionel was loathe to call it that) which had come out past 1985.  With no station to be found this day, he chugged the one working cassette he still owned, George Strait’s Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind, into the deck and turned his mind to the discovery of Mongrel’s body.  Shivers had rung Lionel himself sometime around four in the morning saying they’d gotten a tip about a body out at an abandoned manufacturing complex in Perry popular with local teens.  The timing and location garnered interested from ATF Special Agent in Charge Mattis who had informed Shivers that one of his undercovers had gone missing under suspicious circumstances and he arranged to meet Lionel at the front gate to check it out.

            Sheriff’s Deputy Oudin looked over at the German shepherd taking up much of the passenger seat, another enforcement no-no that Lionel chose to overlook as every time he had tried putting the dog in back, the animal would whine and bay the whole trip as if having suffered a grave injustice.

            “What do you think, Bones?  Think that was the Mexicans?  Or are we being suckered?”

            Bones looked up at Lionel as if needing more information and the handler grinned.  “You’re absolutely right.  Only one way to find out.”

            The Furies’ clubhouse had once been a two-farm chicken slaughterhouse out on Route 28 and the current occupants didn’t let anyone come through the door without letting them know as such, the first Furies anecdote anyone ever heard (the second usually having to do with chapter president Arthur Lankershim’s dime he served in an Arizona pen where he made his name for two things: prison boxing heavyweight champ six years running and longest consecutive time served in solitary in the history of the New Mexico corrections, 262 days).  For Lionel, the clubhouse was officially off-limits as he and the Sheriff’s Department routinely rousted the place after fights or reports of drug dealing and each time they left, it was made clear with a string of epithets that it would be dangerous for officers to ever show up “by their lonesome,” though they were “certainly welcome to do so.” 

            But, it was still daylight by the time Lionel wheeled the Blazer into the lot, spotting eight bikes parked alongside.  He parked, checked his weapon and clambered out of the truck, figuring he’d be fine.  Lionel was ex-military and looked like he was carved of granite, a fact that made at least a handful of suspects think twice before engaging the man in a fight.  If they got a closer look and realized his somewhat advanced age and reversed that decision, they were introduced to Bones.

            “Come on, boy,” Lionel said as he opened the passenger side door and ushered the shepherd out, momentarily considering a leash but then deciding against.

            When the pair came through the front door of the clubhouse, the bikers inside pretended not to notice.  Four were occupied at two different pool tables, one sipped a beer at the bar and watched a replay of the previous night’s Diamondbacks game while another stood behind the bar loading long necks into a small, glass-fronted refrigerator.

            “Sir, this is a private club and you need a membership to drink in here as we do not carry a liquor license,” the bartender said.  “Also, we do not allow dogs as it violate county sanitation ordinances.”

            “I’m not drinking and this is a work dog, so he’s exempted,” Lionel said, clocking reactions.  He knew the men had been watching him since the second he rolled off the highway and caught furtive glances from the pool-playing men reflected in a mirrored beer advertisement in the back of the room.  “But, truth be told, I’m here about another dog you’ve had in your clubhouse.  Name of Mongrel.”

            The room went ice cold.  Lionel watched as Bones stiffened, eyeing a door at the opposite end of the room and knew who must be standing behind it. 

            “So, are we going to keep pretending like we’re all a bunch of assholes or are you going to tell me if Arthur’s here or not?” Lionel continued.  “If I need to, I can go get him at his mother’s place.  I saw his bike out there, but I know she got the Chevelle out of the shop last week and he’s been seen driving it listening to Crystal Gayle.”

            The back door opened, Bones dropped his head, shoulders and rear haunches, ready to spring as a giant, wild-haired bruiser of a man covered in black-ash tattoos stepped out wearing a leather vest, blue jeans and rattlesnake cowboy boots.

            “What the fuck you got against Crystal Gayle?”

            “When she sang ‘Cry’ on the radio, it was a crime against God,” Lionel replied.  “There’s only one version of ‘Cry,’ the Johnnie Ray version and she ain’t Johnnie Ray.”

            “Fuck yourself.  What’s this about Mongrel?”

            Lionel turned serious.  “Your friend Mongrel is not only an ATF undercover being run out of the Albuquerque office, he’s also dead.  They’re looking at you for it.”

            “Yeah?  Why the fuck would they do that?” Arthur asked.

            “Because you’re an easy target with serious priors,” Lionel said.  “And, well, the guy who actually killed him was Mongrel’s supervising agent.”

            This statement sucked right out of the clubhouse.  All eyes turned to Lionel.  Arthur stared hard at him wondering if he was being put on.  “Says who?”

            “Says my fucking dog,” Lionel retorted.  “Now, are you going to offer me a beer or do I have to send my dog to pee in every pocket of your pool table?”

Tune in tomorrow for PART 2 of MONGREL or check out the whole thing in BONES: THE COMPLETE APOCALYPSE TRILOGY, a collection of three Apocalyptic novellas (BONES, SHEPHERD and ALPHA) of monster-fightin’ dog action, now available from Amazon.com:

Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Trilogy

These stories are also available for download to the Amazon Kindle

BONES SAGA BOOK I – BONES

BONES SAGA BOOK II – SHEPHERD

BONES SAGA BOOK III – ALPHA

Continue to Part 2

News from Bonesworld

Lots of Bones-related information to convey. The third Bones novella, “Alpha,” was finished last month and is currently being coded to become available for download to the Amazon Kindle. At the same time, a collection of all three novellas, “Bones,” “Shepherd” and “Alpha” was assembled and will soon be available in print through CreateSpace (I have a copy of the first proof already) and then the same will be available for download to the iPad through the iBookstore, to the Nook from Barnes & Noble’s site and, eventually, the Kobo through Kobobooks.com. I wrote a fourth story, “Mongrel,” and am including it with the collected version. It’s a prequel tale that takes place in New Mexico when Bones worked alongside Sheriff’s Deputy Lionel Oudin, in this instance getting to the bottom of a dead ATF undercover agent codenamed “Mongrel.” Once that’s done, I think Bones is going back in the box for the short term. I plan more short prequel stories and even a couple of post-”Alpha” tales, but that’s not for awhile.

I don’t want to say too much about the Bones stories, but “Alpha” turned out the way I wanted it to and “Mongrel,” which is pretty much a quick, pulpy crime story, comes out of writing “Alpha” and wanting to get a little deeper into the relationship between Bones and Lionel that is hinted at in “Bones” and “Shepherd,” but which defines aspects of “Alpha.” I don’t plan to end the Bones series, certainly, as I enjoy writing in the world, but a lot of other writing projects have leapt to the fore of late.

I should mention “Burial Ground.” It is a collection of all the stories from “Four Nails in the Coffin” (“Last Tuesday,” “Sunday Billy Sunday,” “Bones” and “Night of the Scorpions”) and “Unnatural Selection” (“Meat,” “Stuttering Hunter,” “Spider,” “Shepherd,” “The Posthumous Mind; Or, Please Don’t Touch Me,” “Gare du Nord,” “Disembodied” and “The Enemies List”). It is now available for download to the iPad through the iBookstore and the Nook from Barnes & Noble. A link to that page is here:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Burial-Ground/Mark-Wheaton/e/2940011172465/?itm=6&USRI=mark+wheaton

You can also download it in a myriad of formats from the Diesel e-bookstore:

http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/item/SW00000035755/Wheaton-Mark/Burial-Ground/1.html

And from Smashwords:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/35755

I am currently at an odd crossroads. I’ve had interest from publishers and agents to take my stories into print and leave the self-publishing universe behind. I have courted some of this and wrote drafts of two horror novels that I’ve sent a handful of places. But even as I zipped them off, I realized that I actually enjoy self-publishing. I am considering hiring an editor to edit these books and future ones and, perhaps, take the self-publishing a little more serious, but there is the mitigating factor that I’m still a full-time screen and video game writer and that will always necessarily come first. My hobby before becoming a screenwriter was writing screenplays in between the hours of my day job. Now, my hobby is writing these prose stories, so part of me wonders if the fun of this might diminish if it became a job and I had to suddenly answer to editors, a publisher, etc. I don’t know.

Anyway, in other news I completed a second draft of a screenplay adaptation of “Sunday Billy Sunday” and have been working on it with a great director who really sparked to it as a movie and that’s slowly moving forward. I’m working on a new horror novella, this a semi-sequel to “Spider,” and then a non-horror story that is closer to some of the work I do in movies. Also working up a new horror western short for a comic book anthology and heading back to South Africa next month as another movie project inches along as well. A video game I wrote the script for last year had its title announced, but as they didn’t mention me or any of the rest of the team in the release, I figure I should keep my involvement in the dark, too.

Thanks for reading my stories. I continue to be amazed and humbled by the number of people who read these things and have written in. You keep reading and I’ll keep writing.

Objet d’Office: Frank Kozik prints and Cheap Souvenirs Relating to Yugi Gagarin, Pope John Paul II and Disney’s Club 33 as well as a Machete

There was a moment in the mid-nineties when artist Frank Kozik blew up and I think he lived in Austin around that time, but I’m not sure why I think that. There was an art book entitled Man’s Ruin: The Posters and Art of Frank Kozik that came out and as a kid who liked going to clubs in Houston and Austin to see bands like the Reverend Horton Heat, The Cramps, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and other bands that gravitated towards his aesthetic with their tour art, naturally I got into Kozik’s work, too. At Sound Exchange, the now-dead but one-time seminal Austin records store on the Drag next to the University of Texas campus, they sold prints of Kozik’s work and I bought a few.

I was really into Morphine for a while like everybody was, played them on the radio when I had to do the occasional DJ slot at 91.7 KVRX in Austin where I did my weird radio-theater program, Listening Room Only. I dig this poster because you don’t necessarily see at first that she’s tied to the swing.

KMFDM was my favorite band to see live as a teenager. Saw the “Money” tour, saw the “Angst” tour, saw them for “Nihil,” etc. Kind of haven’t listened to them since.

I can’t tell you if I’ve ever heard a New Bomb Turks song (hell, I might’ve even seen them as an opening act at some point) as I got this as I’m an animation nut and liked the use of Doggie Daddy as well as the brief caption of, “What did you do in the war, Daddy?”

Huge fan of Boss Hog. Still listen to that Girl + EP here and there.

Anyway, this is a very direction-less post as I am doing it while on a conference call with the studio on a bit, but as I’m still on the call I’m going to go ahead and put in photos of the random souvenir objects holding down the rolled prints as part of this is to keep me focused.

A cheap souvenir flask that I picked up at a mall in St. Petersburg, Russia. Welded onto it is a medallion of a cosmonaut and I believe, though I can’t read Cyrillic, that it’s first man in space Yuri Gagarin.

That is a shot glass emblazoned with the logo to Disney’s semi-mysterious Club 33, a private club at Disneyland that is very hard to gain admittance to but is the one place in the park where you can drink. Which I did. A lot.

This is a cheap snow globe of the pope that I bought from a vendor in Saint Peter’s Square in the Vatican moments before hearing then-Pope John Paul II address the faithful from his window (a purple sash hanging over the sill) on a Sunday morning.

On a drive between Los Angeles and Houston one year, I swung into Ciudad Juarez, Mexico for lunch and to nose around as I’d spent some time there in college and ended up buying three cheap machetes to give to friends and one to keep. I would not recommend going to Juarez nowadays, but hey, ’twas a really cool place to hang once upon a time.

Objet d’Office: “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Rolling Stone Issues #95 & #96

I touched on this in the last gripping episode of ‘Objet d’Office’ when I mentioned that I like reading pulp science fiction, horror and crime stories ‘in the original,” meaning: I collect the pulps they first appeared in and enjoy experiencing them with the feeling of the cheap paper, the old ads, the other collected tales and everything else that sort of puts them in a certain place and time so it’s like a complete time capsule that forges your frame of reference in reading the tale.

This extends beyond pulps, though, as I’ve dug up a few other firsts here and there including a bad ass unexpurgated John Stuart Mill Autobiography, a facsimile of George Orwell’s 1984 manuscript in a large, coffee table-type edition and even, in the case of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, the November 11th and November 21st issues of Rolling Stone’s 1971 run, #95 and #96 respectively.

As is public legend, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the story of two Sin City junkets by the already-somewhat-famous Rolling Stone reporter Hunter S. Thompson and lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta ostensibly to do a series of interviews about the murder of Mexican-American TV reporter Ruben Salazar by L.A. County Sheriffs while Thompson covered the Mint 400 motorcycle/dune buggy race for Sports Illustrated that ran the third week of March. During this trip, Thompson began writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and then came back to the city a month later with Acosta to cover the National District Attorneys Association’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs held the last week of April when he continued his “exploratory [read: feverish/drug-fueled] writing.” Thompson wrote up the Salazer story for RS as “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” published in the April 29th edition (#81) while putting together the rest of the Las Vegas piece to be published seven months later by RS and subsequently released in hardback by Random House.

Like a lot of people, this incident and its effect on journalism (an in particular how it has extended into the world of online movie journalism that became almost necessarily personality-based in order to compete with the print world, which I feel is why big, big personalities like AICN’s Harry Knowles and even more so, Drew McWeeny, with his clever and openly antagonist nickname ‘Moriarty,’ became so quickly popular for how they framed movie news) fascinates me (that said, I like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fine, but still think the more vital work is Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, which in concert with Theodore H. White’s brilliant The Making of the President, 1960 and then its dark antecedent, The Making of the President, 1968, tells you so much you need to know about just how much politics changed over those few years).

Anyway, FALILV’s cultural impact is far greater then Campaign Trail ’72 and reading it alongside stories about the reunion of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the rise of Reagan in presidential politics, a story about the death of Duane Allman, a cheeky article entitled “Did Washington Smoke Rope?” that is about exactly what you think it’s about as well as an interview with Sly Stone, is not only a treat, but is useful context – additionally as it’s alongside ads for Al Green, Santana, $2.99 mail-order LPS and then semi-forgotten artists like John Stewart and Don Ellis – to find some of what Thompson is talking about reflected on the pages next to his words.

But one a different level altogether, what I like about reading FALILV in this fashion is because it better highlights the work of Ralph Steadman, the artist whose incredibly visceral inks share the pages, including the stunning, double-page splash that opens Part I and have become famous in their own right. Earlier this year, I picked up a hitchhiker in my neighborhood as I kind of do all the time as I live on a somewhat dangerously windy road and people walking down occasionally thumb a lift either back up or down, particularly this fellow Todd who gets his daily coffee from the Country Store and who tells me he lives in a house with 125 steps. This hitchhiker, however, was a striking, six foot tall red-haired twenty-something that told me she was soon leaving to go to New York to try and break into modeling as she hated being out in Los Angeles trying to break into acting. As I hadn’t really asked for her life story, I don’t even remember her name, I think I dropped her off at Kinko’s on Sunset as I was headed to 7-11 and thinking further about it immediately after, I realized it was a scene right out of a horror movie waiting to happen on either side. Nowadays I stick to Todd.

The point of the story is that during our short time in my car together, this Amazonian refugee forcibly recommended to me The Joke’s Over, Bruised Memories: Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson and Me by Ralph Steadman though I have no fucking idea how that came up (on second thought – she might have been holding a copy under her arm). Furthermore, I had actually bought the book for a dollar from Half-Price Books in Houston and shipped it back after Thanksgiving last year with about a hundred other books as that’s my big annual buying trip but just hadn’t gotten to it yet. I told her this and whether she believed me or not, she went off on why Steadman really understood what art was meant to do and that she found it very inspiring. I wished her luck in the Kinko’s parking lot (her visit may have been headshots-related, as is so often with that Kinko’s), went to tank up on Diet Dr. Pepper and figured I should read the book.

Turns out, the Steadman book is utterly fantastic, so the lesson is, always pick up hitchhikers (okay, so maybe it’s not, but I am a great believer, sort of, in serendipity. An example: I was in New York two years ago and ran into my ex-wife at the corner of 42nd and 8th, right near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, like something straight out of 42nd Street. Hadn’t seen her in half a decade and there she was in a city of 8,000,000 that I’d been in for less than twenty-four hours. Serendipity. Additionally, here’s a tip, if you’re a divorcee and you have to run into your ex-, the absolute top shelf way to approach this is to be able to say that you’re in New York “because the studio flew you there for a script meeting with Steven Soderbergh,” that you’re “not going back to L.A. immediately as you’re being flown to Paris afterwards to meet a director and financier on a different project” and, additionally, make it so that you’ve lost that extra forty pounds you’d been dragging around. To be fair, said ex-wife was coming back from being interviewed on Martha Stewart Radio about her culinary skills so there was name-dropping all around, but still. We ended up chatting at Starbucks and then seeing Young Frankenstein the next night and holy shit, is that an awful musical. And I kept her business card to show my shrink at the time in case it all turned out to be a hallucination).

Anyway, enough digression and discursive nonsense in a story about a story made famous for its digression and discursive nonsense.

Anyway, as anyone who has read the book knows, the whole picking-up-a-hitchhiker-thing has a corollary in FALILV as the two main characters do just that on the road to Vegas and genuinely freak out a poor soul that Steadman immortalized in the first hilarious drawing of the two articles. I highly recommend The Joke’s Over as it’s not a hagiography, it’s not Thompson filtered through the myth-making Thompson and it really does show that much of what is attributed to HST was often, in subtle ways, the work of Steadman who seems to have genuinely inspired the reporter starting with a story in Scanlan’s about the Kentucky Derby (entitled “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”).

Anyway.