The Bare Bones

by Layla Wolfe

  “Yeah,” said Fox, taking his own chair, “acclimate him slowly. Everyone settle down.”

  “Oh man oh man oh man!” whispered Wolf, slapping his knees with tight palms. “I can’t believe I’m finally getting a puppeh!”

  “Lucky bastard,” said Duji.

  “What kind of mix is it?” asked Fox.

  “Leonberger Great Pyrenees.”

  Fox said, “So he’s a great herder.” He turned to Wolf. “What you gonna heard, Wolf?”

  “I’m gonna herd your ass if you’re not careful,” said Wolf, holding out his hands for the giant puppy.

  I had to rub my face in Beetle’s fur for quite awhile before handing him over. “Give me some sugar,” I told him. Once I handed him to the new owner, he was no longer mine. Sure, I “owned” plenty of dogs at my St. Louis ranch. For whatever reason I hadn’t been able to find new homes for them, so I’d kept them on. They were dogs for socializing my rescues. That was their job. And once in a blue moon I’d find the perfect fit, the perfect family, for one of my long-time rescues.

  And did this Wolf Glaser goofball really seem like the ideal dog parent for what was arguably my cutest, fluffiest, most attentive, most heartbroken lil’ guy ever? Beetle was a Mini-Me with his lonely past, the neglect, the parents who didn’t want him. “Your father doesn’t want you,” my mother had told me once when I’d threatened to go move in with him. I knew it was a lie, but it cut deep. A kid too young to make a decent living but with no home to go to, well he was a prisoner in the making. And that’s what had happened. Imprisoned on a bum rape rap for ten whole years.

  Ford was next to me, sinking his fingers into the fluffy guy’s fur. “Slushy set you up with Wolf?”

  I nodded. Beetle’s fur was my drug of choice.

  “The Innocence Project?”

  Again I nodded and took in a big lungful of puppy scent. It was time. “Here you go, champ,” I whispered to Beetle. I handed him over the mosh pit of hands to be delivered to the big goofball, God love him.

  “So, this is what you do for a living now, fly dogs around?”

  With nothing to hold, I had no choice but to face the Prez. “Basically, yeah. I worked with Puppies Behind Bars in prison. I attracted a benefactor who has, well, fulfilled my dream of getting paid to both fly and train rescue dogs.”

  Fox asked, “How do you know which ones are trainable?”

  I shrugged. “It’s something to do with an attention, an attentiveness. They listen. Beyond that it’s just a gut instinct. Sure, I’ve had same failures. I give dogs to those most in need. A Navy combat veteran wanted someone to make her feel safer in her house. The dog I trained was too high energy for her. Wound up with someone else. I never did get that woman a dog.”

  “Then who’s this?” said the French guy, squatting and clapping.

  I soon saw what he meant when a squirmy dog shot into his arms. The little short-haired guy wore a leash, but there was no owner to be seen. I stepped a few steps back into the hallway.

  Unity Mitford—I didn’t know that was her name yet, but I was soon to know all about her in painful and joyous detail—strode down the fluorescent hallway in all her inked and pierced glory. Just from the vague glance I had before she dove onto her knees to grab the leash from the French guy, I catalogued a retro military anchor taking up most of her chest, leading the eyes to her ample boobs, and although it was nippy out, one bare-armed sleeve of flowers and vines.

  I wondered what her back looked like. When she squatted to grab her dog, I caught a gander. The center of her spine balanced out an Indian goddess with snakes for hair, more roses and leaves. I’d seen plenty of this type in prison. I don’t think the majority of them knew what they were decorating themselves with. I roomed with a guy whose Marilyn Monroe resembled Patrick Swayze. One guy intended to have his newborn inked on his shoulder, but it came out looking like a wise old Buddhist—or a rotten old plum. Another poor sap had inked, “Never Don’t Give Up” on eight inches of his arm. One guy X’d out MEGAN and had someone write, “Oops! I meant Marcy.” One bold fem tattooed a bra over his rather large boobs.

  Facial tattoos were the worst. I’d seen a guy with two dolphins for eyebrows. What was that going to look like when he was seventy, eighty? A murderer wrote “Regret (in Chinese)” on his cheekbone. I remember a Neo-Nazi with a Hello Kitty being stabbed through the head smack in the middle of his forehead. Some things are just inexplicable. This is why I have no ink, though I’m former military.

  But this voluptuous lass had empty canvas to spare—so far. And she was a dog lover too.

  Ford was telling her, “This guy just flew that dog in for Wolf. What’d you say you rescued him from, pal?”

  “Tanner Principato.” I shook the Prez’s hand. “He was born to a backyard breeder and had Swimmer Syndrome, where they swim rather than walk. I had to train him for several weeks.”

  Unity stood with her medium-sized hairless dog in her arms. “He looks fine now. I’m dying to pet him. I love fluffy dogs.”

  “So do I,” I admitted. “And this one’s going to be a beaut. What’s your dog’s name?”

  “Oh, he’s not my dog. He was left at my grooming parlor overnight and I can’t get ahold of the owner. Knoxie!” she called to one of the bikers gathered around Wolf and Beetle. “Bellamy’s not down in her shop or office. Do you know where she is? We have to find Lavinia Dock, who left this dog at my place overnight. No answer on her cell or her front door.”

  “No shit,” said Knoxie, breaking away from the group and coming toward us. He rubbed his handsome face thoughtfully. “I would say Lavinia might be on her honeymoon ‘cause she married Tutti Morgan just last Saturday.”

  Ford finished Knoxie’s thought. “But Tutti was at the sideshow last night, selling fentanyl and killing people.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Unity

  I was about to step over to Wolf, surrounded by rough and tumble bikers turned into mushy sweethearts at the sight of a fluffy puppy. It even occurred to me to ask this pilot if there were any more backyard pups from that litter, but I lived in a tiny apartment down on Bargain Boulevard. I could never own one. Which was sheer torture, working at Doggie Style Grooming, making all those adorable dogs beautiful. Well, most of them were adorable. Some were just absolute rats.

  But the second Ford said, “selling fentanyl and killing people,” my heart thudded to a stop. I’d lived with thugs and maniacs my entire life, and I did not approve of Tutti Morgan for Lavinia. Neither did Knoxie’s old lady Bellamy, who’d been raised in a nut house community up in Merry-Go-Round Canyon where they shoved things inside your vag in the name of “therapy.” But Lavinia was pregnant, and the fuckwad reluctantly asked her to marry him, so we had to pretend to be behind her. Let God do the accounting when it was over, you know?

  But good old Wolf pricked up his ears and brought the fluffer over. A wave of crusty outlaws, some of them wrinkled, pierced, and smelly, flowed with him. I put down Lavinia’s dog and sunk my fingers into the fluffer’s fur knuckle-deep, along with about six other guys. We sort of spilled out into the hallway. Sock Monkey, the Prospect who had probably been guarding the door during church, grabbed ahold of the leash of Lavinia’s dog, Diesel. Sock Monkey had a crush on me. Bellamy had told me.

  I said, “He’s got quite a rep for manufacturing drugs, but I’ve never heard of him killing anyone.” I just wanted to draw them out, to hear more. It frankly didn’t surprise me if he’d killed anyone. Bellamy and I were hugely familiar with the bruises that came from being beaten or tossed around. Lavinia displayed them frequently. We used to say things to her but hadn’t brought it up since she’d gotten engaged to the wifebeater. “He can make dope out of the shit in your toilet.”

  Wolf nodded eagerly. “He’s a top-flight chemist, which is why we work with him. Not anymore, though, since three people died in comas on his product last night.”

  I hadn’t heard of that. Sideshows weren’t my style, but I know Lavinia at
tended them. “One wasn’t Lavinia, I presume?”

  “Three guys,” said Knoxie, as he tried to take the doggo out of Wolf’s arms. A tug-of-war ensued, Knoxie and Duji on one side, and Wolf and Faux Pas on the other. Everyone wanted a piece of this darling pupper.

  I wound up winning, because no man can hold out against a woman with an amazing pair of knockers expertly displayed in a push-up bra, though the November days were getting chilly. It just brought mens’ eyes lower, past my bold flaming anchor ink to my bullet-hard nipples, stiff against the cold. Ah, the sweetums’ fur was as soft as the footfalls of departed spirits against my bare chest. “I know what,” I said, not at all trying to avoid the pupper’s kisses. “I’ll call Tutti to come down here to get Diesel. Maybe we’ll find out something from him.”

  Ford seemed surprised I could come up with a genius plan like that. “That’s a good idea. Here, let me take that pup so you can—“

  “No, allow me,” said Roman, a former rock star turned biker.

  “Give me the honors,” insisted Faux Pas.

  Even the gruff mineralogist Sax Saxonberg got in on the act. “This baby’s way too cool for the likes of you, Wolf,” he said. “Got any more of them, Tanner?”

  “I’m not a breeder or seller of dogs,” said the pilot. That’s when I noticed how built he was. Under the tight T-shirt that proclaimed he worked for Paws-n-Gauze, he was carved like a Thanksgiving turkey. Something deep in me pinged at this awareness, some ancient acknowledgement that he was hot, I was hot, and we should stand closer together.

  But his arrogant, assholish speech sort of ruined all that.

  “I just brought this guy here as a favor to a mutual friend. I’ll have to show you the ropes, Wolf. Exercises to put Beetle through.”

  “Beetle!” cried Wolf. “I like it! It’s like he’s . . . Beetle.”

  Tanner went on. “I don’t want him around no drugs. You don’t do drugs, do you, Wolf?”

  Wolf looked askance, forming his mouth into a “no.” But no sound came out.

  “No, he doesn’t,” said Lytton with finality. “He fires up a bowl of my excellent medicine once in awhile, but he absolutely does none of that manufactured trash.”

  I smiled at Lytton. I knew his flagship product, Young Man Blue, well. I had posed for several print advertisements for him. I was becoming known, at least in Arizona, as “Unizilla,” the inked and pierced babelicious model who posed fiercely in in barely-there two-piece suits paddling canoes, hands over my bare boobs in grow rooms, made up as a skull for Day of the Dead, or sticking out my ample ass in a thong. Knoxie always said I could make a mint performing for his old boss at Triple Exposure Studios—“It’s What the World is Coming To”—but so far I’d refrained. Performing sex acts in public reminded me too much of my shitty childhood. I was making a name for myself as a ganjapreneur. I’d been hired to attend a few cannabiz expos, just posing outrageously, such as squeezing two ice cream cones down my front, to draw customers while getting stoned out of my gourd. Good thing I had a high tolerance for cannabis.

  Tanner was on the verge of a story. In his gruff, gravelly voice, he continued. “In Tasmania there’s an enormous opium poppy field, strictly for medical purposes, you know. Get this. Users climb the fences, ignore the security cameras, and fill themselves on poppy straw and sap. They stagger around, ruining the crop, passing out, having to be carried out the next day. You can’t throw the book at these trespassers. These mooching thieves are wallabies.”

  Now my mouth was an O. “No shit,” I whispered.

  “Now that’s adorable,” said Duji, pointing at the floor. “Like Peter Rabbit busting into Mr. McGregor’s garden.”

  “Pretty darned cute,” said Tanner, “though the repeat offenders are seriously addicted. You know what? You’ll notice that what’s irresistible in critters is loathsome in people. We laugh at the high wallabies, but we’d be mortified if they were Tasmanian children, you get me?”

  “I get you,” Ford said heatedly. “I have two tykes, as do most of us.”

  “Except me,” piped up Wolf. “That’s one reason I wanted a dog so bad.”

  I could relate to Wolf. My buddy Bellamy was infertile, as was I. Both for very similar reasons. Bellamy made up for it by riding her Harley with an attached sidecar for her very noble and badass Husky.

  “I’m a grandfather,” Duji said, eyes flashing. “I’d bury anyone who gave any of them the shit this Tutti Morgan sells. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it. It’s a living.”

  “It’s a living,” agreed Tuzigoot, a huge, craggy Aztec of a man. He recently had stepped up to running Illuminati Trucking, the construction empire founded by Ford Illuminati, that occupied the other side of the airplane hangar. Ford’s wife Maddy had forced Ford to choose the club over his company. She was one badass old lady.

  “And if they were adults,” Tanner continued, “nonstop eating opium, putting their entire families in jeopardy, our mortification would become loathing. This is the most perplexing thing about addiction for nonaddicts. In the long run, there’s a human making a choice to pick up that drink, that needle, that powder. They bleed money, lose their houses, ruin marriages, all to pursue a high. I’ve known a couple guys taken off the heart transplant list when they kept using.

  “No one likes an addict, but everyone likes an adorable animal. So you’d be surprised to know that critters bust into nature’s pharmacy too. Humans aren’t unique in how they react to drugs. Eighty waxwing birds crashed into a plate glass window in Southern California drunk on pepper tree berries. Scandinavian waxwings binge on boozy berries and fall into the snow frozen—just like the Russian juicers who are found in thawing snowbanks in the spring.”

  “I heard of a horse in England,” said Russ Gollywow, kind of a doofis who sang in an R&B group in his spare time, “who almost drowned in a pool after getting wasted on apples. He didn’t have to apologize to no firemen who pulled him out.”

  “Exactly, my man,” said Tanner. “Cattle and horses around here graze in chaparral and become weak or violent, and ranchers know it’s—“

  “Locoweed,” said Tuzigoot. “Those sauced cattle are constantly stumbling across my construction sites, down the middle of highways.”

  Tanner said, “I’m saying that animals will challenge your assumptions about addiction. I worked with a spaniel once who wouldn’t stay away from his owner’s lake. Turns out he was addicted to licking hallucinogenic toxin from a cane toad’s skin.”

  “You had to detox him,” chuckled Knoxie.

  “Exactly. Addiction is a brain illness, proven by imaging and genetics. But we still get horrified over that one Uncle Dick who falls out of his chair every Thanksgiving and let the cute animals off the hook. There’s no excuse for anyone to make a drug that’s fifty times the power of heroin, having seen what plain garden variety heroin can do. That’s just unnatural. If you want me to fire this Tutti Morgan, I’ll be your fall guy.” He turned to me. “If you want me to interrogate him over his missing wife, I’m your man.”

  Tuzigoot held up his hands. “Better him than me. I’ve got to go find a load of missing K-rail.” And he sauntered off down the echoing hallway.

  Roman, Kneecap, Faux Pas, and Sax all bailed with similar work-related excuses. I have to admit, I was glad when Ford and Lytton looked at Tanner, their eyes piercing him. Any excuse would do to spend more time around this tough pilot. After all, we matched.

  So to hasten shit up, I said, “I don’t really want to be around when you fire Tutti, but I’d like to grill the fuck out of that dirtbag. She’d never leave Diesel there overnight. She’s had him for eight years since rescuing him from a dogfighting ring in Phoenix.” I stared directly into Tanner’s eyes when I said, “And this guy is a professional dog rescuer. Seems like he could help get to the bottom of where Lavinia went.”

  I didn’t blink, not once. I didn’t look away from Tanner. He had smile crinkles at the corners of his eyes, and he looked down on me with amusement.
His three-day-old facial hair gave him a rugged cast, and I’d bet he even had dimples if he smiled. Like me, except mine were created by diamond studs.

  Never blinking tells everyone how scary you are—serious as sepsis. It worked, because soon Ford and Lytton were falling over themselves to pawn the job off on Tanner and me. Because what did they care about Lavinia’s whereabouts? We needed to figure it out before they fired Tutti, because then no one would be able to talk to him.

  “Fine with me,” said Ford. “Except maybe go down to the Bum Steer to meet with the asshole. I don’t want his bad vibes around here.”

  “You’re starting to sound like the hippies on the runway,” razzed his twin brother.

  “Hey, next time you see them,” said Ford, “tell them to grind up their compost more thoroughly. They’re putting whole rotten banana and mango peels all around the leafy greens, and it’s attracting skunks and raccoons.”

  I looked eagerly for Tanner’s confused expressions. Pure and Easy was a one-of-a-kind town, and I was proud of it, for better or worse. Like Ford’s wife Maddy, I came from Cottonwood, and I couldn’t wait to get away from those streets of early sorrow. Bellamy came down from the mesa belonging to a twisted white swami, and Lavinia immigrated from the violent machismo of Sinaloa in Mexico. We were all grateful for the sanctity of our town.

  “Hey,” said Tanner, “skunks and raccoons need to eat too.”

  “Not my radicchio,” said Ford.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tanner

  “So you’re not married?”

  “Ah, no.” Man, Unity was bold. I had to hand that to her. Well, of course she was. Look at how she chose to decorate—and desecrate—her own body.

  She shrugged, her fork dangling from her fingers. We sat at a table at The Bum Steer downtown, apparently a bar and grill owned by the club. The public was free to eat there, but it looked as though only other bikers or lookie-loos did. “I just ask because of your job. Must be hard to maintain a relationship when you’re flying dogs around all day.”