The Devil's Elixir ts-3 Read online

  I went to work on the rest of Flamehead’s jacket, using the scissors to cut lengthways up the sleeve that was closest to me.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

  I kept going. “You’re wasting his time, not mine, you hear me? His time.”

  I pulled the sleeve apart carefully, exposing his forearm, then the rest of his arm all the way up to his shoulder. His skin was bare.

  I scurried around to Flamehead’s other side and did the same to his left arm, working carefully around the IV lines that were plugged into it. There was nothing on the forearm, but as I peeled back the rest, I saw the tattoo on his shoulder.

  I peeled the fabric away to get a clear view of it. It depicted an eagle holding two crossed M16s in its claws, positioned like crossbones under a skull. Curiously, the eagle was wearing sunglasses and a bandana, and its wings were drawn like they were made of flames.

  I stared at the shades and the bandana.

  Maybe. Just maybe this would be something.

  I pulled out my phone and took two quick snaps of the tattoo, checked to see that they were clear, then glanced up at Abisaab.

  “He’s all yours,” I said, giving her a contrite look. “I’m sorry, it’s important.” It didn’t seem to soften the brunt of her uncompromising glare much, but she managed to grace me with a small nod.

  I was already dialing Villaverde as they wheeled him away.

  “I got a tat off the guy’s shoulder,” I told him. “The guy could be a vet, but it could also be a club patch.”

  “Send it over,” he said. “I’ll shoot it across to ATF.”

  I was stoked. If this was a club patch, the guys at ATF were bound to have some record of them, and we’d soon know who they were.

  I emailed it to him and sprinted back to my car, feeling a small tug of hope.

  22

  Walker watched aghast as the man’s right boot kicked down on his shoulder and flipped him onto his back.

  The Mexican was still looking down on him with cold bemusement. Walker felt an onslaught of blood in his temples and as he stared into the man’s eyes, a sudden realization speared through him.

  This was no “ex-lieutenant” of Navarro’s, no “Nacho” or whatever the hell he’d called himself.

  It was Navarro himself.

  The sonofabitch wasn’t dead.

  The ramifications of that realization sent his already turbulent thoughts into a tailspin as he just lay there helplessly while Navarro held up his hand and adjusted a big silver ring that, oddly, bridged across two of his fingers, the right middle and the fourth next to it.

  “Works like magic, doesn’t it? The tribe it comes from, that’s what they believe—that it’s magic. Which in a way, it is. A potent little neurotoxin cocktail that denervates the motor neurons at the level of the upper spinal cord and causes quadriplegia,” he said with genuine exuberance, like he was marveling at its effects for the first time—something Walker knew firsthand was definitely not the case.

  He’d seen its effects before, in Mexico. On someone they’d suspected of being a snitch.

  The memory drenched him with fear.

  “You’d need a pretty capable anesthetist and some decent equipment to achieve that in an operating room,” Navarro added, “and yet, here it is, just a simple toxin from a jungle spider . . .”

  Navarro got down on his haunches for a closer look at him, and his eyes suddenly lost their wonder and turned more predatory. “The great thing about it is, it doesn’t cripple all your muscles. You may have noticed that some of your nerves—the ones from your neck and above—they still work, don’t they? Which means you can talk. So tell me, amigo,” he said softly, almost in a whisper now. “What is this ‘grotto’ you mentioned, and who is this ‘Scrape’ you were talking to?”

  Walker steeled himself and spat into the Mexican’s face.

  “Fuck you.”

  The Mexican’s face brightened, almost as if Walker’s reply was the one he’d been hoping for. He stared at the biker like he was proud of him again while swinging his arm out behind him without turning back.

  Walker strained to see what he was doing. He saw one of Navarro’s enforcers hand him something but couldn’t see what it was. Then Navarro smiled at him and brought it out, like a magician pulling out a rabbit, holding it up in front of Walker—a pair of garden shears, the one-handed kind with a spring between the blades.

  He snapped the blades together as a demonstration, then turned his attention farther down Walker’s body.

  “Let’s see . . . what shall we start with?”

  Walker tensed up and tried to lean his head up to see what Navarro was doing, but he couldn’t see much beyond the back of the Mexican, whose arms were busy with something. Then he heard a sickening crunch and a snap, and Navarro turned back to face him. He looked gleeful as he brought something up for Walker to see.

  A finger, held in his blood-soaked hand.

  Walker felt his stomach shoot up to his throat.

  “One down, nineteen to go. Shall we try again?”

  Walker felt rivers of sweat seeping out of him. “Like I said,” he grunted. “Fuck. You.”

  He heard another crunch.

  Another snap.

  He couldn’t stop himself from retching, and although he knew he shouldn’t be feeling any pain, his mind was still conjuring some up for him. He felt his consciousness seeping away.

  Navarro asked, “Well?”

  Walker summoned up the little strength he still possessed and spat at the Mexican. He couldn’t manage anything more than a weak, pathetic spit that missed its target and sank his spirits even further.

  Navarro looked at him like a disappointed parent, then turned away.

  “I don’t have that much time, so . . . how about we forget about the rest of them for now and skip to something much more . . . convincing?”

  He saw Navarro nod to his enforcers, and a perverse, surreal mix of terror and fascination burned through him as he watched the Mexicans bend down and pull his belt and jeans down.

  Then Navarro went to work again.

  23

  The Babylon Eagles.

  That’s what the bastards called themselves.

  Kudos to the guys at ATF—it took less than ten minutes for them to come back with the name after Villaverde sent them the shot of the tattoo I sent him. They also had an address for the Eagles’ local hangout, which was the mother chapter of the club. The gang’s clubhouse was adjacent to a bike garage that acted as their front, on a side street off El Cajon Boulevard in La Mesa. That address didn’t mean much to me, but I punched it into my GPS and was already on my way there. Villaverde would be meeting me there, along with backup—SWAT, ATF, and local PD.

  I was back on the freeway, charging north with a full clip in my Browning, a blue light spinning on my car’s roof, and the gas pedal crunched down as far as it would go.

  Hoping I’d get there before everyone else.

  24

  Walker felt a dizziness he’d never experienced before. The bear of a man had been wounded in battle, years ago. Bullets and shrapnel had cut into him, but he’d soldiered on and returned to the field. Then, since getting back from the Gulf and founding the Eagles, he’d seen his fair share of scrapes. He’d met up with all kinds of blades and seen batterings from brass knuckles and baseball bats. Walker could take a hit. They didn’t call him “Wook” just because of his thick, wild hair and the bushy goatee he wore.

  This was different.

  He was spiraling away, bleeding out. He knew that. But it wasn’t accompanied with any normal pain. It was a weird, far more uncomfortable sensation, an odd pain that came from within. Navarro had told him that this was visceral pain, pain that emanated from an organ itself, pain that doesn’t travel through the spinal cord.

  Pain that ate you away from the inside.

  He hadn’t been able to hold out. He’d told Navarro what he needed to know. And now, he was ready t
o die. Hell, there was no point in living.

  Not like that.

  “What the fuck is this all about?” he wheezed, his mouth barely able to form the words. “What are you after?”

  Navarro stared down at him as he wiped his hands on a wash cloth. “Something I’m afraid you won’t ever have the chance to enjoy, amigo . But who knows? Maybe in another life . . .” He handed the towel to one of his enforcers, and when his hand came back, it was holding a gun. “ Vaya con dios, cabrón.”

  Without flinching, he pressed the barrel of its sound suppressor between Walker’s eyes and pulled the trigger.

  Navarro stood up, pulled his jacket straight and brushed it with his hand, then handed the gun back to the sicario closest to him.

  “Go bring our guest out,” he ordered him in Spanish, “then let’s go find this Scrape.”

  25

  I didn’t get there first.

  Far from it. And judging by the barrage of pulsating emergency lights that greeted me when I turned off El Cajon, I got a sinking feeling that we were all too late.

  Two squad cars and a couple of unmarkeds were already there, scattered outside the bike shop, with another black-and-white and an ambulance pulling in behind me. A couple of police officers were hopelessly undermanned as they tried to put up yellow crime scene tape around the block while struggling to keep back the growing crowd of gawkers.

  I ditched the car as close to the action as I could and briskly walked the rest of the way, flashing my creds to one of the uniforms who was moving to block me. I found Villaverde across the forecourt of the shop, standing outside what I took to be the clubhouse’s entrance, talking to some sheriff ’s department guys and a couple of grease monkeys in blue coveralls. He peeled off when he saw me and came over.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “In here,” he just said as he led me away. He pointed back at the bike mechanics with his thumb. “One of the club’s prospects found them and called it in. It ain’t pretty.”

  Prospects were hangarounds who’d graduated to prospective members of the club, brother-wannabes who were on probation and hadn’t yet earned their patches.

  He ushered me through a door around the side of the single-story structure and let me into the gang’s clubhouse.

  More like their slaughterhouse.

  I counted six dead bodies in total, scattered around the big room’s perimeter. Five of them had been gunned down and just lay there, bent in various grotesque tableaux of death. A quick, professional job, each of them with two or three holes in them and an additional round between the eyes to finish them off. The bodies and the wounds still looked fresh. They had all died wearing their cuts.

  The sixth was something else altogether.

  He was a big guy, bushy goatee, long greasy hair. He was sprawled on his back in the middle of the room. Like the others, he was in his cuts and had taken a round between the eyes. He also had a couple of fingers missing from one hand. I spotted them across the room, discarded like cigarette butts. The part that drew the eye, though, was his crotch. His pants had been pulled down, and his dick had been cut off. An ungodly, pulpy mess was in its place, and a large puddle of blood had pooled between his legs, spreading down to his feet.

  My gut twisted around itself and coiled up like a boa, and I didn’t bother looking around to see where that body part had ended up. I glanced over at Villaverde instead.

  He gave me a look that mirrored my feelings.

  There was a new player in the game.

  And what we were dealing with needed to get reclassified on a whole new level.

  I took a second to let my insides settle, then asked, “The guys in the shop see anything?”

  Villaverde shrugged. “The guy who reported it saw a car driving off just before he came over. A dark SUV, black, tinted windows. Big car, like an Escalade, but he didn’t think it was a Caddy.” He paused, then added, “You need to see this, too.”

  My eyes surveyed the room as he led me across it. On the side wall, behind a leather couch, was a poster-size mural of the club’s patch, the one I’d seen on Flamehead’s shoulder tattoo. There was a bar, an upright piano, and what looked like a meeting room beyond it, and, oddly, a row of baseball bats hanging by a doorway. Then something else caught my eye. On the far back wall, behind a pool table. A whole bunch of framed photographs.

  “Hang on,” I told him.

  I crossed over for a closer look.

  There were several war poses, the kind of pictures we’d become all too familiar with, of battle-weary soldiers smiling to the camera, flashing V signs with their fingers in a stark desert setting. One of them showed the chopped-up biker and a couple of other grunts standing proud against an apocalyptic background of tanks gutted by depleted uranium shells and burning oil fields. It was obviously Iraq, which means they were either out there in the early nineties or a couple of years after 9/11. Next to the vet gallery were about a dozen similar shots laid out in two rows. Each shot was a black-and-white eight-by-ten mug shot of what I assumed were the club’s full-patch members.

  I immediately recognized several of them: the one who’d just been Bobbitted; the guy who shot Michelle and who I crushed in half; Flamehead; Soulpatch was also up there, all brooding and defiant. Like the others, he was grudgingly holding up a black tablet that displayed his booking number and where he’d been arrested—in this case, the La Mesa Police Department. It was a local arrest, so if he wasn’t already on the club’s ATF file that was now sitting on Villaverde’s smartphone, getting his name wasn’t going to be an issue.

  “These are the guys who were tailing me,” I called out to Villaverde, tapping the frame with the back of my fingers.

  Villaverde joined me for a look.

  “This is the one the security guard shot,” I said, indicating Flamehead. “And this is the guy who ran off.”

  “Okay, let’s get a name and put an APB out on him.” He pulled up his ATF file and called over one of the cops to get the alert out.

  I had mixed feelings about what we’d walked into. On the one hand, the entire club seemed to have been wiped out. At least, all the full-patch holders. Six dead here, Michelle’s killer, the one she’d stabbed, Flamehead, and Soulpatch. Ten in total. There were twelve portraits on the wall, but the missing two could have been long-dead members who still had their faces on the wall for posterity. If these were the guys who’d kidnapped the scientists from the research center and come after Michelle, they were no longer a threat to anyone. However, an even more savage group seemed to have taken their place, and they were still out there. And with the bikers dead, we were back where we started in terms of figuring out who we were dealing with.

  Unless we could find Soulpatch.

  Before they did.

  “Ricky Torres,” Villaverde announced, “road name Scrape.” He showed me the image on his phone. It was a different mug shot from the one that was up on the wall, but it was the same guy, no question.

  I nodded, and he gave the uniform the go-ahead to spread the word. As the deputy headed off, Villaverde flicked a nod toward the side door and told me, “Over here.”

  He led me through the door and down a narrow staircase to a basement. It was one big, messy, windowless room. All kinds of crates and boxes were lying around it, and the air was stale with dust and rot.

  “Check this out,” Villaverde said, pointing at some pipes that ran along the bottom of one of the walls, by a far corner of the room.

  There were nylon cuffs on the ground by the pipes. They’d been cut open. Two of them. The corner was also littered with empty fast food wrappers and soft drink cups. I leaned in for a closer look. They looked and smelled relatively fresh.

  Whoever had been tied up down here hadn’t been gone long.

  I stared at the plasticuffs. “Maybe this is where they brought the two scientists.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t see them keeping them here for months.”

  “Maybe this is where they ho
ld them before handing them over. Which means they might have grabbed someone else more recently.” I turned to Villaverde. “We need to look at missing persons reports. Maybe another chemist.”

  I glanced around again, and something by one pair of cuffs glinted in the light and caught my eye. I edged closer to it. It was a contact lens.

  I pointed it out to Villaverde, and—given that he had gloves—he collected it and slipped into an evidence bag.

  I thought about the timing, and despite the fact that whoever was tied up down here could well turn out to have nothing to do with Michelle or the kidnapped scientists or the shoot-out upstairs and that they could all be separate deals that the bikers were involved in, the timing was troubling me. These guys seemed to have too many balls in the air for these events not to be connected. I found myself wondering if the massacre upstairs didn’t have something to do with whoever had been living off the cheap burgers down here, and, if so, how it could possibly relate to Michelle. There were still too many unknowns, which was frustrating me. The key was figuring out who had hired the bikers. Which got me thinking about who else might know that.

  “You said this was the mother chapter of the club?” I asked Villaverde as we made our way back upstairs.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “So there are other chapters?”

  “A few,” he said, scrolling through the ATF file again. “Here we go. The club has three other chapters scattered across the state and, weirdly enough”—he looked up—“one in Holland. As in Holland, Europe.”

  “We need to talk to the nearest ones, the ones they might be closest to. They might know who these guys were working for.”

  Villaverde’s brow furrowed with skepticism. “Sure, but club business like this—it’s usually compartmentalized. I doubt other charters would be in on what these guys were up to. And even if they were, they wouldn’t talk to us about it.”