The Devil's Elixir

  “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 hold 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.”

  “Maybe after what just happened here . . .”

  Villaverde still seemed doubtful. “It’s not in their DNA.”

  I nodded in the direction of the bike shop. “What about the prospects? Even if they weren’t in the circle of trust yet, one of them could have heard something. And one of them might know who was being kept down here.”

  “Absolutely. They seem pretty shaken up as it is, so it should give us a leg up into scaring any leads out of them.”

  As we got back to the main room, I saw the bloody corpses again and it made me think about Soulpatch/Scrape. I was getting a bad feeling about him, and an uncomfortable urgency was goosing the hairs on the back of my neck.

  “We need to find Scrape,” I told Villaverde.

  “His jacket’s got his last known address, last known girlfriend, parents. We’ll have something soon.”

  I thought about the bullet hole in his shoulder. “He would have called in to give these guys a heads-up on what happened at the terminal. Which means the psychos that did this might know about him. They might even know where he’s headed. If they wiped these guys out, they might have the same thing in mind for him. We need to move fast.”

  I felt a mounting frustration. We needed to find him, like, now. There was a solid chance he’d be able to tell us what we needed to know about what this was all about—and who these new players were.

  Just then, I heard some commotion outside the clubhouse’s entrance.

  “No, ma’am,” a man was insisting with a raised voice. “I said you can’t—”

  “Don’t tell me what the hell I can and can’t do,” a woman cut him off forcefully. “This is my husband’s place and I want to see him.”

  Two uniforms appeared in the doorway, visibly trying—and failing—to stop a woman who was pushing and shoving her way past them. She slipped through and barged into the room. She looked like she was in her early forties. She was curvy and had auburn hair that was streaked with highlights, and she was in low-cut jeans, snakeskin boots, and a denim shirt that was tied in a knot around her midriff. She wasn’t someone you’d describe as pretty, but she had something else going, a kind of raw, savage appeal that was hard to ignore.

  Her eyes immediately latched onto the butchered biker, and she stopped in her tracks and just froze, dropping her bag, her hands rushing up to cup her face.

  “Wook!” she screamed, tears bursting across her face. “Wook, oh Jesus, no, Wookie baby, no no no . . .”

  She wobbled and looked like her legs were about to give out from under her. I rushed across the room to help her, with Villaverde close behind.

  “Ma’am, you shouldn’t be here, please,” I said as I reached her, placing myself between her and the biker’s body. “Please,” I repeated, putting my hands on her shoulders.

  “I don’t . . . ,” she muttered, the words trailing off as tears streamed down her face now. Then her voice came back, full of rage. “What happened? What did they do to him?”

  I pulled her in and held her for a moment, trying to calm her and give her a chance to catch her breath. “Let’s go over there,” I said, guiding her into the meeting room while making sure I stayed between her and the dead body. “Come on.”

  I couldn’t avoid passing close to two of the other dead bikers and did my best to shield her eyes from them, but she still caught sight of them and flinched with each new shock.

  I pulled up a chair for her, facing away from the main room. “Please, sit down, ma’am.”

  I asked her if I could get her some water—I don’t know why we always do this, as if water has some magical curative power that lets people just brush away the most traumatic events. I
n her daze, she nodded a yes. Villaverde went out to get some from the bar.

  I had to tread softly, but I also needed to get anything useful from her, fast. I felt the clock was ticking on Scrape, and we were playing catch-up. She said her name was Karen, she was Wook’ s wife—Wook being Eli Walker, she informed us, the club’s president. One of the prospects had called her as soon as the grisly discovery had been made, and she’d immediately rushed over.

  I tried to answer her questions as gracefully as possible, within the limitations of what I could actually tell her, but very quickly, I had to steer her away to what we really needed to know.

  “We need to find Scrape,” I told her.

  She looked at me in total confusion, like I was suddenly discussing the weather.

  “Why?”

  “He’s still out there,” I replied. “He’s wounded, and I think the guys who did this might be after him. We need to find him first or he might end up dead, too.”

  She looked at me, jittery and nervous, then asked, “Wounded?”

  “He’s been shot.” I let it sink in, then pressed on. “Do you know how to contact him? Do you have the number of his cell?”

  Her eyes darted away and she blinked a few times, finding it harder now to keep eye contact with me.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “This isn’t about you. This is about keeping Scrape alive. I just need to know how to reach him.”

  She hesitated again, then shook her head. “I don’t have his number. But if he was out doing something for the club,” she added with a look that made her subtext about it being something illegal clear, “he wouldn’t be carrying his cell anyway. He’d have a fresh prepaid for the job.”

  I turned to Villaverde. “You find a phone on Walker?”

  “No.”

  I frowned, feeling time slipping away from us, like a sea that was receding before a tsunami. “What about a safe house, somewhere Scrape might go to wait for help. A doctor the club works with, someone’s house maybe? A girlfriend?”

  She was still visibly nervous and kept shaking her head like she didn’t know anything.

  “Please, Karen,” I insisted, gently. “We need to find him.”

  “We’ve got a friendly doc at St. Jude’s who doesn’t ask too many questions, but Scrape wouldn’t go there, not if he has a bullet in him.”

  “Where then? Think, Karen.”

  She looked at me and her eyes narrowed with concentration, like the answer I was looking for required a physical effort.

  Then she said, “The grotto.”

  26

  “I’ve got him. Suspect in custody, I repeat, suspect in custody.”

  Todd Fugate, deputy sheriff with the San Marcos Sheriff’s Station and part of its Gangs and Narcotics squad, felt good radioing in the news. The call had come in from the San Diego office and was a high-priority request from the FBI—not exactly a daily event at the station. Fugate was just pulling out of the Grand Plaza Mall when the call had come in, and he’d jumped on it. The target’s location, a downtrodden warehouse complex tucked in off La Mirada, aka the grotto, was less than five miles down the parkway. Knowing he’d be first on the scene, he hit the gas and rushed over.

  Once he got there, he didn’t even wait for backup to show up. The alert had said the suspect had been shot in the shoulder and was probably traveling alone. It didn’t specify that he was armed. Fugate didn’t need more than that, and, as it turned out, he’d been proven right. The suspect was unarmed and weak and looked like he was about to faint. He gave himself up with zero fuss. Hell, by the looks of it, he was probably relieved that his ordeal was over. Fugate would drive him to the hospital himself—faster than waiting for an ambulance to come all the way out there—and the sonofabitch would soon find himself sitting in a cushy hospital bed with flirty nurses fussing all over his bad-boy ass, which had to be way better than bleeding out in some dingy warehouse all on his own.

  Fugate felt good as he herded the suspect into the backseat of his Crown Vic. He didn’t bother to handcuff him to the steel loop on the floor of the backseats. The man was pretty out of it already. Yes, the deputy sheriff was pleased with himself. The San Diego County Sheriff ’s Office had been, as per the slogan on his black-and-white’s fender, “keeping the peace since 1850,” and right now, on this fine summer’s evening, Todd Fugate felt proud to be making a solid contribution to that noble tradition.

  He was dead less than a minute later.

  He was pulling away from the warehouse when a big SUV appeared at the gate and suddenly, unexpectedly, charged at him. Fugate spun the wheel to avoid the collision, but the SUV’s front bumper clipped his tail and spun him around like a toy and sent him careening sideways before diving nose-first into a ditch by the warehouse’s gates. The deputy looked out through shaken eyes to see the SUV do a quick U-turn before storming back and pulling up so it was blocking his way. Before its wheels had even stopped turning, its doors were flung open and two men were climbing out.

  Fugate threw the car into reverse and hit the gas pedal, but the tires just shrieked and spun aimlessly as the jammed car rumbled in its spot and refused to budge. He gave up and drew his weapon, but he was too late—the men had already sprinted over and had beaten him to it. The first slug hurt like hell as it punched into his lungs, but the pain lasted only a second. The second bullet took care of that as it went through his brain and turned his lights off.

  He wasn’t alive to see them drag his charge out of the car and shove the wounded man into the back of their SUV, nor to see them drive off unchallenged.

  Which was just as well.

  27

  We were back at square one.

  Soulpatch—sorry, Scrape or Torres or Dickhead or however you want to refer to him—was gone. Flamehead—or, more accurately, Billy “Booster” Noyes, as it turns out—was in ICU at Scripps Mercy with a big tube down his throat. The rest of the bike brothers were in permanently suspended animation on aluminum trays down at the morgue.

  We also had a dead deputy who probably had no idea that this morning was going to be his last.

  And we had plenty of questions.

  Questions that hounded me as night fell and I finally made my way back to the hotel, ready to toss the memory of this crappy day into the incinerator section of my mind and move on to tomorrow.

  I was tired and bummed out, and seeing Tess was like a tonic to my senses. She had Alex already asleep, which was a good sign, although I knew he wouldn’t be out for the night. I checked on him, saw him curled up in his kiddie sheets and with a bunch of plush and plastic toys crowding him, and I got the impression that he looked more restful than he had the night before.

  Tess was a tonic all around.

  I sent Jules home for the night and saw her out, giving her a breather to catch up with her life after she’d been drafted in all weekend. Then I ordered a club sandwich from room service, relieved the minibar of a couple of beers, handed one to Tess, and hit the couch with her.

  I gave her the short version of my day while wolfing down the club, filling her in about what we’d discovered at the clubhouse while leaving out the gorier details. Telling her about my days always helped in that the storytelling exercise allowed me to step back and look at what was going on from a broader, clearer perspective. It also highlighted the questions that were key to figuring out what was going on.

  Questions like, why were they following me? Why did they take Scrape and not shoot him on the spot? The one that trumped them all, of course, was, who killed the bikers? Was it someone who had hired them to come after Michelle and/or whoever was being held in the basement, or were the killings unrelated? Timing, and my gut, suggested the former, and that’s what I was going with. So the question, beyond the who, was why? Did they get greedy and fall out over the money? Had they become a liability to whoever hired them, and if so, why? Did they mess up—in which case, was killing Michelle a mistake? But then again, maybe they didn’t know she was dead. Then I thought,
maybe their employer felt they’d outlived their usefulness—given that they had a tail on me yesterday, they clearly didn’t have what they were after. Maybe whoever it was had decided to take matters into his own hands. Which, given what Eli Walker went through, wasn’t a reassuring thought.

  Tess then took over and told me about her day, and I let my mind throttle back to idling speed and just glide along as I listened to her voice and watched her face light up with animation. Then her face crumpled up with that inquisitive look that I had a real love-hate relationship with—love, because being doggedly inquisitive was part of the allure of Tess Chaykin, and hate because, well, it usually meant trouble—and she got off the couch and went into the bedroom and came back with a few sheets of paper that she showed me, drawings she said she’d found on Michelle’s desk, among her papers.

  “Alex’s?” I asked.

  “Yeah, must be. They’re similar in style to others at the house.”

  I flicked through them. Not to put too much of a Louis C.K. spin on it, but yeah, they were cute, but that was pretty much it as far as I was concerned. Then, animated Tess came to the forefront and took over.

  She pulled one of them out and put it on top of the others. “What do you see?”

  I struggled a bit. “Two vaguely human-like figures. Or aliens maybe?”

  She flashed me the look. “People, doofus. Two people. And I think this one’s Alex,” she said, pointing at the one on the right. “This thing, in his hand. That’s his Ben toy, his favorite. He asked me to bring it back from the house.”

  I couldn’t see it. “Did you ask him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  The nose crinkled. Again, part of the allure. “It’s not a happy drawing.”

  “Not a happy drawing. Why, because there aren’t any rainbows and butterflies in it?”

  I do love the winding up part.

  “Look at his face,” she insisted. “See the open mouth, the big eyes. It looks to me like he’s scared. And this guy, facing him. The dark clothes. Something in his hand.”