The Devil's Elixir

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 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. In 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.”