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