The Devil's Elixir

  I put my BlackBerry back together and watched as one of the paramedics checked his blood pressure while the other used some trauma shears to cut through Flamehead’s Windbreaker and T-shirt to reveal an oval entry wound in his right upper back.

  “BP’s one hundred over palp,” one of them announced.

  “I’ve got one GSW through the lung. Let’s roll him over.”

  They moved together expertly like they’d done this a thousand times before and used the shears again to cut through the front of his shirt. There was a two-and-a-half-inch sucking-air chest wound just below his right nipple.

  The lead paramedic, a striking brunette with steel-blue eyes, a lush mane of wavy hair that she wore tied back, and the name Abisaab embroidered across her chest, examined him with agile, calm hands, then told her colleague, “He’s hypoxic, his oh-two sat is eighty-nine percent and it looks like the bullet punctured his lung. I think he has a pneumo. Get the mask.”

  They quickly strapped a high-flow, non-rebreather oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, then ran a couple of IV lines into his forearm as my phone’s software finally finished its interminable reboot. I felt my spirits sagging as I dialed Villaverde to bring him up to speed.

  I heard the other paramedic, a short, muscular Latino by the name of Luengo, say, “Systolic’s down to eighty,” sounding more alarmed than before, then Abisaab said, “I’ve got frothy blood coming out of the wound, we need to seal it now,” and within seconds they were at full throttle, taping a seal tightly across the wound while keeping one side open. When they were done, Luengo broke away and prepped the gurney.

  “Guys, I need an update,” I told them.

  Abisaab replied without taking her eyes off Flamehead. “His lung’s down and he’s very hypoxic and tachycardic. He can hardly breathe. We need to get him back to the ER to put in a chest tube.”

  I asked, “What are we looking at here?”

  She got my drift and turned to face me, and her eyebrows rose up with a doubtful look, but she didn’t say anything—standard procedure given that the victim was still conscious and quite possibly hearing everything going on around him.

  I stepped back to give them some room and gave Villaverde her read. I heard him blow out a frustrated sigh, then he said, “There’s not much more you can do out there. Why don’t you head on back up to Broadway and look at some faces?”

  Villaverde was right. It was pretty obvious that even if Flamehead made it, I wouldn’t be able to go near him for days. Which infuriated me to no end. For some reason that I still couldn’t figure out, these goons were tailing me, and I didn’t fancy sitting around looking over my shoulder while waiting for this bastard to get his vocal cords back. I needed to find out who these guys were.

  I watched as Abisaab and Luengo lifted him onto the collapsible gurney, then strapped him in.

  “I need to check his pockets,” I told them as I moved in.

  Abisaab stayed on task. “We’ve got to go.”

  “I’ll be quick,” I insisted, my fingers already rifling through his pockets.

  “Sir—”

  “Just give me a second!”

  He had nothing on him—no wallet, no ID. Not that I expected to find anything, but sometimes you get lucky. He did have a cell phone, though, a cheap prepaid, which I pocketed.

  I stepped back to let them take him away, and as they did, I noticed something on Luengo’s arm. The bottom of what seemed like an elaborate tattoo, just peeking out from under the edge of his sleeve.

  An idea slapped me.

  “Hang on, hang on.” I rushed right back up to them and pushed through to get to Flamehead.

  “We have to move him now,” Abisaab objected.

  “I know, just—” I moved the cut fabric of his T-shirt aside, one side, then the other. I couldn’t see anything. I turned to Abisaab and said, “Give me your scissors.”

  “What?”

  “Your scissors. Give them to me.”

  “We have to move him, agent,” she insisted, her eyes drilling into me.

  “So stop wasting his time and give me the goddamn scissors.”

  Abisaab looked at me and must have read the utter seriousness on my face as she shook her head and rummaged in her medical kit before handing them to me grudgingly, like I’d just snapped the neck of her pet cat.

  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 t
alk. 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 to 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.