Bones Omnibus (22 page)

Becca didn’t particularly like ballet, but it was geographically the farthest from both the Carver Academy and the Drucker apartment. If Becca signed up, there’d be all kinds of leeway with the time spent getting down to it and getting back home.

Time for herself.

More than anything else, this was what Becca wanted right now. She sank back into the seat as the car crossed the RFK Bridge back to Harlem. She felt the river on either side of her in a way she never had before. This time, she refused to look. A shiver traveled up her spine and made her scalp tingle. Her level of fear rose and rose until it was all she could do to keep from screaming.

She closed her eyes tight and waited until for the sound of the car bumping along the bridge to even out to the smooth of the road on the other side of the water. The sound seemed to go on forever, getting louder with every beat. She pressed her hands over her ears, tears now forming in her eyes as she felt herself beginning to hyperventilate.

Only a few more feet
, a tiny voice in the back of her head whispered.
Only a few more feet…

But soon even that voice was blotted out by the piercing wail rushing through Becca’s body like a banshee. She screamed and screamed, the social worker almost slamming into a truck in the adjacent lane.

“What is it?! What happened?” she cried, pulling the car over to the shoulder of the bridge, right under a sign that read:
No Stopping On Bridge
.

The social worker threw on the hazard lights and ran around to the backseat of the car. She opened the door and tried to pull Becca’s hands from her ears.

“What’s the matter, Becca? Talk to me.”

But even as she tried to sound calm, the sight of the little girl in complete hysterics terrified her.

The cars behind them began to slow, a couple of drivers hitting their horns. The ones who could see what was going on silenced theirs, waiting for the disturbing spectacle to ebb. Drivers in the opposite lane braked to better rubber-neck and, inevitably, shake their heads. Even those with their windows up and radios on couldn’t help but hear the terror in the little girl’s screams.

They eventually drove on, but Becca’s voice hung heavy in their eardrums and, for some, would continue to do for days to come. A couple would even check the news or try to look it up online.

But the little girl who couldn’t stop screaming was never to be found.

“S
hepherds ain’t the best fight dogs,” the man with the black widow neck tattoo scoffed. “Pits, rotts, mastiffs like the Canario, some Dogos, maybe a Boerboel, even an Akita or a Kangal, those are dogs bred for the ring. German shepherds? They just don’t get pissed off enough. They’re not born ready to kick ass.”

The tattoo moved and flexed as the fellow spoke. Billy couldn’t take his eyes off it any more than the dog currently being derided at his heel could. When the man’s monologue finally ended, the police sergeant glanced down to his purebred German shepherd, Bones, who sat placidly with his tongue out in a pant. It was true. There really was nothing about the animal that shouted “born to kick ass.”

“But this guy’s a monster,” Billy enthused. “I’ve seen him tear through junkyard dogs, English bulldogs, even a
pit
. I wouldn’t waste your time.”

Black Widow Tattoo
, whose real name was A.J. “Playboy” Vickers, was unmoved. The bent-lip snarl that had been on his face since the temporarily undercover cop had approached the fight check-in table moments before, shepherd at his side, remained firmly in place. He now crossed and uncrossed his boot-clad feet as if waiting for Billy to get the message and shove off.

But the officer didn’t budge.

Instead, he reached into pocket, pulled out the entry fee of twelve twenty-dollar bills and a single ten-spot, and laid them on the table. Then he waited. Vickers let his gaze drop from Billy back to Bones. This time, he decided there was something he didn’t like about the shepherd’s face.

“Fine. You’ve got a hard-on to watch your dog get killed in the ring? We can accommodate you. Just don’t come around here again with a non-fight breed. Got it?”

Billy nodded. Vickers made a show of counting the money, as if looking for one last excuse to turn him away or at least beat him to a pulp. The officer tried to remember what he could of Vickers’ record. There were drug charges and arms charges, a robbery conviction, and a slew of early misdemeanor arrests that went nowhere.

Hardly on par with plotting to assassinate a sitting president
.

As much as he’d like to haul Vickers in and see if there was anything outstanding they could pin on him, Billy knew he had to leave him alone. Him, and any of the other criminal types frequenting Timothy Knippa’s dog fight compound outside Blairsville that night. No, Billy and Bones had one job: locate Henry Knippa, Timothy’s older brother. Though it was Timothy, a skinny young man born and bred in Indiana County, who’d made a name for himself as the breeder of some of the most ferocious fight dogs in the state, Henry was currently considered the greater threat. This despite having a rap sheet hardly as ostentatious as his notorious sibling.

“Timothy’s like some kind of mad scientist,” Secret Service Field Supervisor Antonio Michaels had explained to Pittsburgh Police Sergeant Billy Youman earlier that day in a monologue that made Billy’s blood boil. “To make the dogs last longer in the ring, he experiments with all kinds of performance-enhancing drugs, mostly different kinds of crystal meth, but also PCP. One of his animals could have its leg hanging by a tendon, but, feeling no pain, it fights on ’til the death. This is why he’s starting to draw real crowds. He’s built up his events into some kind of gladiatorial spectacle. And since he’s also a breeder, he breeds the perfect dogs to go with the perfect drug cocktail. One of our guys even wondered which came first, the drug combo or the dog to go with it? Chicken or egg?”

Billy seethed.

“Why are we finding out about this now?” he demanded. “You know some guy is out there doing this shit, and you just let it ride?”

Michaels glanced at Billy’s superior, a retiring sort named Bob Zusak. Though the look was clearly a request for the lawman to rein in his charge, Zusak said nothing.

To his credit
, Billy thought.

“Timothy Knippa is what the FBI refers to as a ‘shit magnet,’ which is why they had a guy in with his organization in the first place,” Michaels explained. “He attracts the worst shitbags in the state, pulling them out of Philly, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Erie, and bringing them together in Blairsville. There, they can be I.D.’d and checked out. The amount of information gathered due to this guy’s operation is staggering.”

“So if I see him, you’re saying I can’t cave in his skull for all dog-kind, right?”

“That’s
exactly
what I’m saying, Sergeant,” Michaels hissed, more than a little perturbed. “The target is Henry Knippa, and
only
Henry Knippa. He’s the priority above all others. You understand that, right?”

Even if he didn’t want to admit it, Billy understood one hundred percent.

The President was coming to Pittsburgh, and that meant the Secret Service knocked on the doors of everyone who’d sent a threatening letter, made a threatening online post, or just in general implied in some forum that they would like to kill the commander-in-chief.

“There’s a class of psychos that just get fixated on the President,” Michaels had explained when Billy was first brought into the meeting room. “Doesn’t always matter who’s in the White House, either. It’s what the office represents; it’s somehow come around to being identified as the source of all misery. And with the current guy, the number of threatening letters and posts online is through the roof. This helps us do our job, as it’s easier to I.D. the lunatics. I mean, they really believe we’re not monitoring the bug-fuck websites? So, we track all these people down and pay them a visit in person, like you called that number for a free Book of Mormon. Nine times out of ten, they’re shocked to see us, like how could we have found them on the vast World Wide Web? In those case, it’s often an isolated incident, somebody blowing off steam. Dad just got fired, the kids need braces, so let’s do the craziest thing imaginable. But the reason doesn’t matter. We let them know they’re on a list forever, and if they do it again, it’s jail. When the President’s in town, we knock on that door again, just so they know we haven’t forgotten and they should consider staying away from this list of venues. Doesn’t matter if they’re locked up even and couldn’t get near the President if they tried. We still make the visit.”

“So, this Henry Knippa wrote a letter?” Billy asked.

“He
didn’t
, which is why we’re a little more worried than if he had,” Michaels explained. “No, we were alerted to it by the FBI. Their informant who runs with Timothy Knippa heard that Timothy’s brother was this deranged lunatic looking to shoot the President through the eyes. The guys joked about it, but the informant could suss out that Henry had the means and motivation. So he made it so that he ended up at Henry’s place one night. In his house, Henry had multiple guns, a rough layout of the President’s schedule for the Pittsburgh union meet, and a shitload of video files on multiple hard drives showing various recent presidents moving in and out of speaking engagements.”

“Laying out Secret Service protection procedures,” Billy surmised.

“Exactly.”

“So you heard about this, got a warrant, and Henry rabbited before you could make an arrest?”

“Worse,” Michaels sighed. “We hit the house when he wasn’t there to try and lock up the guns. It was in a residential area, after all. But then he never came home. A few hours later, we found the informant with his brains blown out on a river bank. Also, at least half the guns the informant told us about were missing.”

Billy didn’t need a calendar to remind him the President was set to arrive in less than thirty-six hours. There wasn’t a dog handler on the force who didn’t know they were expected to pull double duty over the three days.

“Can’t you tell the President to stay away?”

“If the President altered his schedule to accommodate every credible and imminent threat, he’d never leave the residence. So I hope this gives you a window into the pressure and time constraints we’re facing. We need to get Henry Knippa into custody, and we’re grasping at straws to make that happen. Will you help us?”

When it came down to it, what bothered Billy wasn’t just that the FBI and U.S. Secret Service were so cavalier about letting a horrific dog fighting enterprise operate with impunity in order to keep tabs on crooks. It was that once Billy had said he’d go along with their operation, they’d laid out the shittiest, most half-assed, and undercooked plan he’d ever heard.

“I mean, they want to just send a fresh face into the lion’s den with a non-fight dog a week after a paid federal informant takes one in the ear?” Billy complained to Bones once they were back in Billy’s apartment, preparing for their first mission as undercovers. “They can talk all they want about how close our tactical backup’ll be, but if shit goes down, it’s our ass, not theirs. We’ll be dead before they get out of their trucks.”

But if the German shepherd was intimidated by the mission, he didn’t show it. Instead, the dog ate his dinner and settled down next to Billy’s bedroom window to watch the gray winter clouds roll in.

“I mean, who knows who’s going to be in there, right?” Billy continued, tossing on a faded Megadeth T-shirt, blue jeans, and work boots, hoping they didn’t scream “costume.” “No one’s checked out the place. Plenty of guys know my face, not just from some lowlight collar, but sitting there staring at me in the witness box as I testify against them. This isn’t the way undercover work’s supposed to go.”

As he made this final statement, Bones raised his head and eyed his handler’s outfit before settling back down and going to sleep.

At seven o’clock, Billy loaded Bones into his Bronco and made the hour-long drive to the town of Derry. Derry was only fifteen minutes from the Knippa farm. The plan was to use the local Pennsylvania State Police barracks parking lot as a staging area before splitting up and moving out.

The Secret Service agents were there, as well as a tech on loan from the FBI. As the tech approached the dog and his handler, he held up what looked like two silver threads.

“These are your mics,” the tech on loan from the FBI told Billy and Bones as he came over, holding what looked like two silver threads. “One is for the dog’s collar and one for your shirt. I just have to make a quick incision in the material, and in it goes.”

Billy leaned down, allowing his shirt to be operated on, but then removed Bones’s collar for the tech to work on.

“I’m not saying he’ll bite you, but he hasn’t bitten anybody for a couple of weeks now. I can tell he’s getting the itch.”

The tech scoffed.

“If I didn’t think you could control your animal, would I be standing here?” he drawled, pouring the Bronx over his accent.

But when he looked down at the shepherd for some kind of reassuring
we’re all friends here
tail wag, he received nothing but a cold, closed-mouth stare. It was as if Bones was weighing his options; bite him in the leg? Or in the balls?

Billy grinned and stroked Bones’s head.

“Looks like he’s gonna let you off easy. Guess he figures he’ll get to bite a whole bunch of folks later.”

Being forty miles east of Pittsburgh off Route 22, the Knippa farm was two counties away from Billy’s Pittsburgh jurisdiction. To get around this, the Secret Service, coordinating through the local FBI field office, had the dog handler and his animal formally assigned to the federal investigative team. Billy knew this typically took weeks of paperwork and red tape, and assumed the fast turnaround came from his chain of command covering their collective asses in advance should he or Bones get shot or killed. Even Indiana County officials, initially reluctant to allow a Pittsburgh cop and his dog on their turf, changed gear once they realized a few signatures absolved them of any and all responsibility.