Bad to the Bones

by Layla Wolfe

  Adrenaline rushed through him as everything happened at once. The splash of crimson in the naco’s temple was much smaller than the explosion out the other side. However, he fell back peacefully against the head rest as though he’d taken one too many PMs. The whoosh of traffic roaring past drowned out any gunshot sound to all but the closest and most perceptive outlaws.

  “Down on the ground, pendejo!” Turk bellowed and yanked open the passenger’s door. In a flash the guy rolled out. Lytton gestured to Ziggy in the chase cage, his arm a wide, welcoming arc, telling him to approach the truck.

  “Jesus Roosevelt Christ!” yelled Knoxie, tearing open the driver’s door. He hoisted himself into the cab as he shoved his piece back into his waistband. He was operating on sheer adrenaline now, allowing his automatic caveman instincts to lift the naco driver by the shirtfront and drag him up and over the seat, depositing him in the sleeper cab.

  His next task was to rip the Virgin from the rearview mirror. It came off in a furious shower of white beads. He started to angrily toss it out the window, but realized that would be evidence left behind, so he chucked it over his shoulder. In the rearview, he saw it land in the naco’s lap. He was propped up there in the sleeper like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The Bible that was halfway sticking out beneath the thigh of his Dickies pants irritated Knoxie even farther. He knew he couldn’t toss it, so he snatched the book up and swiftly turned to the Book of Matthew.

  When he found the part that said, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye,” he tore that page out, along with several others before and after it. With a rage he didn’t often allow to bubble to the surface, he stuffed the pages into the naco’s mouth while Lytton and Ziggy thudded items around in the back of the truck. Presumably they were taking possession of the horse, but Knoxie didn’t want them to take it all.

  He wanted to have something to deliver to Bihari.

  He shuffled around in the console through fistfuls of trucking documents and receipts. He saw from an earlier Driver’s Daily Log that a guy named Stuart Grillo had done the Nogales to Phoenix run, when Mr. Presención had taken over. Stuart Grillo. That name sounded fucking familiar. Stuart Grillo had been stupid enough to leave a Motel 6 receipt from Nogales in the console with his name handwritten on it, so on a hunch Knoxie folded it and stuck it in his jeans pocket.

  Knoxie got out, going around the front of the cab in order to tell Turk, “Keep that one. He didn’t do nothing, and I might need him.”

  Turk had an amused look on his painfully handsome face. He held his pistol at the Sinaloan’s head with the gangster side grip. “Yes, master.” Turk had been calling people that ever since they’d discussed Bellamy’s “master” up in Disneyland. “You think I’ll make it back in time for my date with Carrie Gunslinger?”

  Knoxie frowned. “You’re dating that cum factory snatch?” It surprised him because he’d always thought of Turk as being a highly closeted gay. He didn’t know why he thought that. There was no hard evidence, it was just a hunch he’d always had about the guy. He was too impossibly good-looking to be real. “Sure. I’m taking the truck from here.”

  All expression fell from Turk’s face. “You’re…”

  Knoxie nodded. All of his brisk, efficient SEAL experience was coming back to him. “Truck needs a driver to Bihari, doesn’t it?”

  A sly smile came over Turk’s face. Even Knoxie had to grin as he walked to the back of the truck where Lytton and the satanic-looking Ziggy were piling bags of heroin into the cage’s trunk. “Don’t take them all,” Knoxie instructed his brothers, “or I’ll have nothing left to deliver.”

  Hoisting himself up into the trailer itself, Knoxie strode to the garbanzo bean pallets that had been yanked aside to reveal plastic bags of yellowish powder, A-1 bricks stacked up like a bunch of cheap coffee creamer. Knoxie unbuttoned his 501s, primed and ready to whizz all over the remaining four kilos of heroin.

  Behind him, Lytton chuckled. “Are you being literal or symbolic? Look what else we found.”

  Lytton politely waited for Knoxie to finish splashing the smack before handing him a slim white box that was stamped “Haldol.” There were five ampules in that particular box, and Lytton pointed to a cardboard box on the floor that held more slim white boxes.

  Knoxie waved the box around. “What the fuck is this? Isn’t this some drug from the seventies?”

  “Exactly my thought.” Lytton was actually Dr. Driving Hawk, having a PhD in chemistry. “Haloperidol was used a lot in the seventies to zone out schizophrenics who were being belligerent or argumentative. Around ’07 the FDA issued a warning due to it causing heart attacks and sudden death. It’s still used a lot on elderly folks without their knowledge, although it’s known to make Alzheimer patients worse.”

  “So maybe this is the ‘knockout drops’ the guy was raving about.”

  “Exactly. Judging from what I saw on that mesa, they’d been drugging those poor homeless people with Haldol. Dystonia, dry mouth, muscle rigidity, blurred vision, somnolence…it all fits. It’s contraindicated to put it in someone’s beer, as they just pass out. The heroin is probably just for sale, to make them money.”

  “Mixed with the PM. I’m sure there’s a stash of strawberry flavoring too up in that fucking Rollercoaster Canyon.”

  “Right,” said Lytton. “They’re trying to expand their base, rope in the teen set with the cheese, and I’ve got a beef with that. I want the head of that swami on a fucking platter.”

  “Someone needs to end him,” agreed Ziggy. He jingled his cage keys to indicate he was ready to blow, so Knoxie took control of the Safeway truck with the other beaner as his co-pilot.

  The guy was understandably shaking with terror, so Knoxie learned little on the drive up to Bihari. By the time Knoxie cut off 17 onto 179, he’d learned the guy was from Los Mochis and pretended not to know about the cargo in back. When Knoxie tried to question him about cheese, the guy pretended to think he was talking about cotija and queso fresco. He giggled when he talked about cheese, a sure sign of guilt, but hey. His boss’s bloodied body was in the sleeper with some pages from the Book of Matthew stuffed in his mouth, most of his cargo had been jacked, and he was probably jonesing for some of that Tylenol PM.

  Knoxie had lived in Arizona long enough to know that when the cartels decided to expand their pipeline they flooded it with cheap, pure A-1 heroin to create a city of addicts crying for more. He was surprised the beaners were doing the heavy lifting themselves, not white front men to shield them from the DEA.

  “Who’s this Stuart Grillo?” he asked in Spanish. “His name is all over this paperwork.”

  The beaner shrugged. “I wish I knew. We took over from him in Phoenix. Do you know him?”

  “I think I might,” Knoxie admitted, because it really didn’t matter.

  Knoxie hadn’t buried a guy in a long time. Obviously not since the Special Ops had issued him a Get out of Jail Free card had he been forced to bury a guy. Sure, he probably could’ve bashed the Presención naco over the head with the grip of his gun, wrestled him to the ground in a headlock, tied him up, something of that nature. The truth was, Knoxie was already predisposed to want to put down the driver.

  First, there was all that brainwashed bullshit Bellamy tried to lay on them about her pie-in-the-sky master, who sounded more and more like just another Jim Jones of a fucking rapist. Knoxie didn’t know Bellamy well, but already he’d developed a paternal, protective feeling for her. Fuck, he’d literally saved her ass from certain death out there on the plateau with her flimsy leggings, barefoot, stumbling around with her internal core temperature of ninety-five degrees.

  Then, even after he’d agreed to participate in this run, there had been that phone call from Maddy herself the day before. She told him she believed that Bellamy’s sister Virginia was up at the stupid fucking compound.

  What the fuck? Bellamy had mentioned a sister
in passing, but not that she was still imprisoned up in that loony canyon. No doubt she felt at the time she was protecting Virginia, but that knowledge doubled Knoxie’s intensity to save both girls from the cult. The more intel he could gather here today, the better.

  “You come into Bihari a lot?” he asked Rafael in Spanish.

  “Not much until lately. Suddenly we come a lot with these garbanzo beans.”

  “You pretty familiar with the layout up there, the…map, the location of everything?”

  “Oh, certainly. I need to know everything. It’s my job.”

  “You know where this Swami Shakti pendejo might be living?”

  Rafael became wary, understandably. This was his job, his occupation. Knoxie was obviously not interested in delivering Shakti a load of French ticklers or nipple clamps. Knoxie almost felt sorry for Rafael until he remembered that Rafael had been complicit in spreading cheese heroin at least throughout the whacked-out compound, if not into Pure and Easy itself, since the wingnuts often sold handicrafts and more in town.

  A little persuasion wouldn’t be out of line now. Since the dual marble pillars that marked the Bihari entrance had popped into view, Knoxie yanked the semi over onto the soft shoulder, put it into neutral, and engaged the air brake. Rafael’s face was frozen into a mask of fear before Knoxie even unholstered his piece from his waistband.

  Waving it around casually, he told his copilot, “Look. This is how it’s going to go down, jornalero. I’m a sicario. I’m a hitman. You don’t need to know my boss, but just know that these people up here in Merry-go-round Fucking Canyon are very bad people. They’re imprisoning young women, raping them, drugging them. Drugging teenagers. One of them could be your kid, comprende? Now, I’m not going to just drive up there and take out that swami. That’s not my style. But there’s a girl I’m looking for, and I’ll bet she’s with the swami. You can either help me or…” Knoxie let his voice trail off suggestively. When Rafael didn’t flinch, Knoxie felt obliged to finish his sentence. “Or I could stick you up there in the sleeper cab with your buddy Señor Presención. It’s your choice.” He shrugged.

  Rafael whispered something.

  “What?” Knoxie didn’t want to lean closer, but he felt safe. There was no way Rafael was armed. Knoxie had put the piece belonging to Presención he’d found in the console also into his waistband as insurance.

  “I’m an informant.”

  Whoa. That was an unexpected game changer. Knoxie recoiled back, wrinkling his nose. “You’re a fucking informant? For who?”

  “DEA. They arrested about six of us down in Nogales a few months ago snorting some of Presención’s cheese heroin. I was the only one not deported back to Sinaloa. I’m allowed to remain free as long as I give them information on Presención’s…his activities.”

  “All right, I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that you flipped. It doesn’t go over too well in the brotherhood if it was known I was working with the law.”

  Rafael smiled knowingly. “You bikers are almost as bad as the cartel.”

  “Almost as bad?” Knoxie was insulted.

  “I am not sure who to be afraid of more. If Abel Presención knew I allowed Manuel to be killed and our truck driven by a motorcycle pinche guey, I may as well be dead anyway.”

  “All right. Then we’re on the same page. You show me the swami’s house and I’ll take it from there.” Knoxie looked around suspiciously, as though a federal agent would pop out from behind the nearest boulder. “I don’t like the idea of riding with a fucking snitch who’s probably wired—”

  “I’m not wired!” cried Rafael, lifting his shirt to reveal his bulging, hairless belly. “I’d be discovered in a second if I was wired.”

  That was true. Confidential informants were usually so deeply embedded and undercover they would submit to the most grisly ordeal rather than have their cover blown. In fact, the more the idea sank into Knoxie’s brain, the more he liked it. Rafael could be of assistance to him if they worked together. “You spend the night at Bihari? You’re known to them? How many runs have you made up there?”

  Rafael convinced him he could easily get in, out, and around the compound, so it was in Knoxie’s best interests not to ice him.

  They got past the daimyo at the front gate all right, Knoxie explaining he was filling in for Señor Presención. In particular, when Knoxie mentioned Stuart Grillo, the guards became all palsy-walsy. He knew he had to wrack the recesses of his brain to find the tidbit that would tell him who the fuck Stuart Grillo was. All Rafael would tell him, now that they were butt buddies, is that he was a very disgusting, foul pinche guey. He lived in Nogales and facilitated transport between Sinaloa and the north.

  “See that building on that butte?” Rafael said now. “That’s Wang Cho House, Swami Shakti’s. He’s usually there. He doesn’t like to leave because he’s so sensitive to his surroundings, allergic to everything.”

  “I’ll give him ‘sensitive,’” growled Knoxie, keeping a death grip on the steering wheel. “We’re making a personal delivery to Jim Jones’ temple. I’ll give you your piece back when I leave. You might need it.”

  “Gracias,” said Rafael.

  They parked the truck in front of some loading dock bay doors. Two daimyo armed with Russian ladies stood by, but they barely appeared to notice the grocery delivery truck. No doubt Shakti received many shipments of food and supplies here in his twenty-two bedroom Desert Modern structure. Knoxie, who had been stuck renting mid-century pillboxes more suited to a solitary army private than a family of four, was enraged with jealousy. Here came a faker, a charlatan, a con artist spewing a few Indian-sounding pearls of wisdom, raping women and, no doubt, children in the name of his warped religion. Knoxie had never done anything worse than bang some cum factory skanks. Yet he was the one living above the bar.

  “You can stay here,” Knoxie told Rafael, pocketing the truck keys so Rafael couldn’t bail. “No reason for you to get all up in my beef. But if anyone from the cartel asks, remember. I’m a member of the Cutlasses MC. The Cutlasses motorcycle club. Got it?”

  “Cutlasses,” Rafael repeated in English.

  “Right. I’m just not wearing my cut—my black leather vest—because I wanted to be incognito when I jacked your truck.”

  “Jacked my truck,” Rafael echoed.

  Rafael looked mystified, but Knoxie left it that way. They had two separate missions. Rafael was taking down the Presención cartel. That was fine with Knoxie. He didn’t think The Bare Bones did any business with Presención. If anything, it was those damned Baal’s Minions or the loathed Cutlasses who worked with that particular cartel. No loss if Knoxie inadvertently helped someone take down the Presencións, while also achieving his own mission.

  Gingerly he took one of the peed-upon bricks of dope from the back of the truck. He should’ve had more foresight and left maybe one package pristine, but at least he was wearing gloves for the job. Choosing what looked like a service entrance, he went right on in, unimpeded. In what turned out to be the kitchen, a daimyo with his AK slung across his back was making a sandwich. Knoxie was used to the strange juxtaposition of criminally-inclined tattooed thugs doing everyday things, like eating ribs or trying to remember their PIN to their debit card. The only difference here was, this dude was dressed head to toe in purple, and he had that fucking locket necklace that made the wearer look like a batshit Scientologist.

  So Knoxie just nodded casually at the guy, and the guy nodded back. Knoxie kind of hefted the brick of dope. It must have been a common sight, guys transporting ginormous bricks of horse through the kitchen while you made a sandwich with whole wheat bread and alfalfa sprouts. It angered Knoxie even more that it was okay to do this. Especially when he found a common sort of great room with at least ten nubile attractive sweetbutts—that’s all he could call them, really—draped around in various lounging or yoga positions. They were sweetbutts, club whores, pass-arounds—women dedicated solely to the head case games of that tw
isted swami. Just imagining Bellamy dripping with lavender garments doing the Half Downward Dog on a shag rug pissed him off beyond comprehension.

  “Hello, ladies,” he said, waving the dope around. “Personal delivery. Where can I find Shakti?” He didn’t know how else to address him other than “master,” and he’d rather have a Strawberry Qwik enema than do that.

  One enlightened twat said, “The Blessed One is in the inner sanctuary doing his daily meditation. Can I take that in for you?”

  “Thanks, but my boss told me this needs to be a personal delivery. There’s a message attached to it.” Knoxie didn’t want to show his hand until he found out certain information, though, so he asked the room at large, “Which one of you is Virginia?”

  All ten women looked confused. That was when Knoxie realized that she wouldn’t be called Virginia anymore. So he clarified, “She’s the little sister of Asanga. Two sisters from Cottonwood down in the valley.”

  That helped, and most of the women uttered “Ah!” But the news didn’t appear to be good. The Chosen One who had spoken before said, “She’s, ah, at her place of worship.”

  Remembering that “place of worship” meant “job,” Knoxie laid on the charm. He knew that he had dimples in his cheeks when he smiled a certain way. “Where might that be? Our boss in Sinaloa wants me to tell her something.”

  All the women looked at each other, no doubt suspecting something was up. Virginia’s sister had recently vanished, as far as they knew under a cloud of wrongdoing. Virginia was probably doing the same thing wrong, and no one wanted to be associated with it. One girl started to say, “Her new place of worship is down at the composting—”