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.