It Takes a Thief (The Bare Bones MC #7), page 12
“Yes. Mine. He’s a workaholic who’s never home, and the few times he’s there, he just rolls me over and assaults me.”
His eyes were shaded with concern. “Assaults?”
“No, don’t get me wrong, I don’t need no one calling no cops. It’s all consensual, because it’s all I’ve got. But a woman needs a bit more than wham bam thank you ma’am, you know?”
He looked sheepish. His specialty was orthopedic surgery, not anything vaguely GYN-related, so he probably didn’t hear this shit often.
I waved my hand. “Oh, never mind. I guess people feel the need to confess to doctors, don’t they?” I was sort of teary. As a doctor with twenty years’ experience—according to my assessing eye, his salt-and-pepper hair, and the bifocals sticking out of his tank top pocket—he no doubt heard or saw my tearful condition.
“No, don’t blow it off, Madison. How you feel is important. Emotions translate into illnesses—they affect every one of our systems. I was in a similar position as you, except I was the workaholic. My wife wasn’t in the profession, so we had very little in common. I got cancer.”
He said it out front like that, just a statement that hung in the air and made me uncomfortable, because I wasn’t accustomed to hearing people speak so bluntly. “Cancer?” I squeaked.
“Yep. First lung, then a mass on my chest that was pushing on my heart. Between my overwork and cancer, my wife just collapsed. She needed someone lower maintenance.”
He said it all so breezily, maybe paying me back for having confided in him. Judging from the length of his hair, maybe two inches long, he must’ve finished chemo two months before. “So she divorced you after the first cancer?”
“Yep. Can’t imagine what she’d say if she knew about the second. What I’m saying, I guess, is you need to find someone who shares your same goals and interests. That way you can be workaholics together.”
Was he suggesting himself? I actually got hot between the thighs as we finished the final steps of the hike. Someone who shares your interests. Ford and I had come together as teenagers, almost driven together by the neglectful abuses of our parents, who were lovers and roommates. We could’ve been as different as birds and bats, but we still would’ve stuck together as a united front against them.
Penny and the rest were gathered at the bottom of the trail, but Dr. Chesbrough paused and sat on a sandy ledge. With fingers braided between his knees, he looked at the ground. Uh-oh. I’m already getting a lecture. “Are you religious, Madison?”
Having no clue what the correct answer might be, I was honest. “Not at all. I don’t even know if there’s a God.”
“Well, let me tell you something that’s been bugging me lately. If life is supposed to be instructive, and allegedly we’re learning from our mistakes, why does the possibility of divine retribution scare us? Even if we agree that we alone are responsible for our own bad choices, why should God penalize us for mistakes we only made while treading the road to moral improvement and advancement?”
I smiled. Ford never talked like this. I liked the conundrum Dr. Chesbrough posed. “It’s stuff like that that makes me not believe in God. I think it’s all just random. I don’t think anyone’s actually being punished. Sure wish they were, sometimes. But I rarely see the bad guy suffer for the evil he’s done.” I thought of Ford’s twisted, abusive father, shot through the head in the Sonoran Desert. But he’d wrought evil for years before meeting that end. It still didn’t seem enough.
Now he looked at me. “Exactly. We see the bad guy all the time in our ER. Guts hanging out from a knife fight. Tire tracks across their back because they’re so out of it they can’t stand. Husbands whooping wives’ asses, and vice versa. The Rez is a horribly violent place, Madison. When I first came here a few years ago, 83 percent of crimes were violent, or they involved the physical or sexual abuse of a child. Two-thirds had to do with alcohol, despite a nationwide Navajo ban.”
“So sometimes you feel as though you’re pissing into the wind.”
Dr. Chesbrough slapped his thighs. “Exactly. You’ve got it.” He stood. “And now the lesson’s over, young Madison. You passed with flying colors.”
I made one of those annoying proud faces, though I wasn’t sure what I had to be proud for. Dr. Chesbrough let me go first the remaining forty yards, the canyon narrowing so I could touch both sides of the sandstone walls.
And at the bottom, who should the homey Native American be, his crook leaning against the side of his hogan while he carded wool—I kid you not—but Galileo Taliwood. I was shocked because I felt he was belittling the true nature of his lifestyle, demonstrating something as corny as wool carding to the mostly white tourists.
“Galileo!” I cried, falling to the ground next to him. I hugged him, but he remained stiff, as though unused to it. “Why are you carding wool?”
“Because sometimes you have to thin out the sheep,” he explained, logically. To my fellow students, he said, “If you don’t shear a sheep it gets weighted down and is very uncomfortable, so we’re actually doing them a favor. We have sheep shearing competitions.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I thought you were getting out of here, giving your herd to some cousin. Going to live in my house.”
“I would have,” Galileo said sincerely, “but my cousin was arrested for drunk and disorderly. It’s his fourth or fifth time, so they’re keeping him a while.”
I sighed. Penny said, “You know this guy? He’s hilarious. He’s been telling us stories about sleeping in a box, and having a plastic bag of straw for a stuffed animal.”
“I think he was serious, Penny,” said Justin.
Did I tell you Penny is sort of sheltered? Not only was she smoking hot—that was me, eight or ten years ago—her family was rich, and she could’ve chosen any career she wanted, including fashion model or actress. It was to her credit she chose nursing.
Dr. Chesbrough said, “Ol’ Galileo here’s a mainstay of the Rez. You’re taking him out of here, Nurse Illuminati?”
I nodded. “I am, Dr. Chesbrough. He has limited options here, and he’s way too smart to sit around herding sheep all day.”
Everyone was silent. I realized I had spoken offensively. “I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with it. I just know Galileo can do so much more with his life.”
Dr. Chesbrough gave me side-eye. “With your husband’s motorcycle gang?”
How’d he know about that? And I hate people who call it a “gang.” “Not at all. With his shearing skills, he’d make an excellent dog groomer. And he can use his social skills, meet the people of Pure and Easy.” How could anyone argue with that?
Even Dr. Chesbrough nodded. “Well, Galileo, make sure you find someone responsible to take over your herd. That was your mother’s herd. You don’t just want some Tom Dick or Tahoma leading them astray.”
Galileo giggled. “Astray, good one, Ellis. Yes, I shall choose a wise, alive person to herd my sheep. As you know, ‘you can’t wake a person who is pretending to be sleeping.’”
Penny sighed. “Oh. Is that Navajo?”
Galileo said, “One of the boys in my group home always said that. He died.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FORD
I arrived at Lytton’s house on Mormon Mountain so tweaked I sprayed gravel onto the side of June’s truck.
Tobiah, Wolf Glaser, and Lytton met me on the front deck. Tobiah and Wolf were already jostling for position, nudging each other with their shoulders, so Lytton got between them.
“Okay,” I said, standing at the bottom of the stairs like a Shakespearean actor. “What exactly the fuck?”
“Okay, so,” Tobiah started to say, but Wolf cut him off.
“So I was at Leaves of Grass, you know, minding my own business, making pancakes. Suddenly from my office I hear this booming voice with a Southern accent.”
Noodlum. I hadn’t seen hide nor hair from that crackpot since I’d tried to bury him, making me even more uneasy. I’d finally taken Fox up on his offer to track the guy down, taking Fox away from his important bird work. I hated like fuck to do that, but this was a vital club matter. Santiago Slayer was still understandably miffed—normally I wouldn’t use that word, but relating to Slayer it fit—with me for sucker punching him at the policeman’s ball, so he’d taken himself out of the picture. He was nursing a broken nose in Guayaquil, considering going to see giant iguanas in the Galapagos.
I no longer thought Slayer was making a pass at my old lady, but it was too late. She’d left a few days early for Chinle, angry as a bag of wasps. She’s barely spoken to me, only to cast her eyes down and issue instructions regarding Fidelia and Niko from between tight lips.
I tried to apologize. I must’ve said I’m sorry a hundred times. She should’ve been flattered that I thought her worthy of Slayer’s attentions. He usually went for chicks ten years younger than Maddy, although he must’ve been over forty. No matter. Nothing I could say would put a dent in the wall Maddy had put up against me. And she was right—I did always have to leave, always have to go somewhere, always have to reach out to someone or arrange a sit-down, to protect my assets and therefore my family from encroaching scum-sucking rat bastards.
And then before I knew it, she was gone for real, and despair soaked into every cell of my being. I went back to taking Adderall, to sleeping maybe two hours a day if I was lucky. Tracking down Noodlum consumed me, because he was inadvertently responsible for this whole new rift between my wife and me, not to mention the ruin of my highway job and reputation. But Fox found absolutely no trace of the guy and there was no activity on the computers and phones Noodlum had used before—he must’ve switched over to new burners. In fact, interviewing people around Happy Jack showed that no one had even seen a single biker since the explosion. Fox did find the real Cutlass clubhouse, complete with their asinine logo of two crossed swords burned into the wood over the front door. Inside, he found such mortifying and suspicious items as a spanking bench, a bulldog mask, jars of liquid latex, and some random butt plugs tossed aside like yesterday’s plumbing.
How could a motorcycle club just vanish like that?
Of course, I put out feelers among our brother clubs, covering pretty much the entire area from Los Angeles to Vegas to Albuquerque. Nothing. The Cutlasses were as scarce as a liberal in Texas, and I was even starting to get my hopes up that they’d pulled up stakes.
Wolf Glaser continued his story.
“I raced in there, spraying a whole bottle of sugarless maple syrup on the ground as I ran.” I rolled my eyes, as did Lytton. Unnecessary details. “I skidded around the corner, expecting to see you-know-who’s cracked-out crack face on my monitor. But he wasn’t. The screen was frozen on a picture of some old-timey chick on horseback, but it was definitely Noodlum’s voice coming from my speakers.”
“The skill level of a hacker like that,” said Tobiah, “is almost unheard-of. Glaser claims he hadn’t clicked on anything unusual that day and certainly didn’t open any suspicious emails, so to be able to freeze the screen like that—”
“Why the old-timey chick, I want to know?” Wolf frowned.
“—is frankly beyond even my skill level. What’s strange is you say he’s got brain damage. It might’ve actually enhanced the activity of his frontal lobe, the part of the brain known to handle reasoning, planning, and problem solving.”
“Could be,” I said, brushing that particular bit of science aside. “So what’d he say?”
Wolf continued. “Oh, he chortled with glee and that sort of stuff. He congratulated me on stopping the paver from running rampant. He gloated over the fact that we hit the wrong house.”
Rub it in, why not. “Yes, but what was his purpose today?”
“He said we need to be on YouTube at exactly three PM”—we all checked the time on our phones—“for an important message from him.”
We had a few minutes. I asked Tobiah, “You got a safe computer we can use for YouTube?”
“Sure,” Tobiah said. “I’ve got a laptop that’s junky and it’s not networked to anything else.”
I asked Wolf, “And there was no way to tell where the signal was coming from?”
Wolf said, “Well, obviously the computer was frozen as long as he spoke. When it was restored to me, I hacked away, looking for any IMSI catcher or stingray—”
Toby butted in. “An IMSI catcher would be like a fake mobile tower between his real phone and the telecom tower, so Glaser should’ve checked his phone.”
“I did that, you nerd! What kind of peckerhead do you think I am?”
“A very large one, apparently.”
“Boys, boys,” said Lytton, splaying his fingertips on both men’s chests. “We’ve only got a couple minutes. Let’s get to Toby’s laptop.”
Lytton went in his front door first. Tobiah and Wolf tried to enter at the same time. Neither was willing to accede to the other, so they wound up like two stooges, squished in the doorjamb, just waving their trapped arms like they were pantomiming texting. They resorted to trying to kick each other sideways.
“Nerdlinger.”
“Airplane face.”
“Virginity shield.”
“Neo maxi-zoom dweebie.”
“Come on, you dorkmeisters,” I said, shoving each one of them from behind.
They popped free, stumbling and cursing, and we were able to get to Tobiah’s command central before the deadline.
Tobiah’s office, like most rooms in the house, faced out on the stunning Coconino National Forest, where ponderosa pine made spiky ridges. Up at the elevation of Lytton’s house there was almost a tundra-like feel, colorful moss clinging to boulders. Tobiah had worked his way into a sweet scene. He logged onto YouTube.
“I don’t know what’s supposed to happen,” he said.
“Will Noodlum just take control of YouTube?” asked Wolfe.
Tobiah scoffed. “I don’t see how that’s possible,” he said, but he didn’t seem too certain.
There was a ding, an incoming email for Toby. The subject matter was Click at your own risk. Seemed a stupid warning to put on a link that would certainly lead to doom and destruction, but Toby had no choice.
“You have to click,” said Wolf.
“He doesn’t have to,” I said.
Wolf said, “But we’re dying to find out! He’s been taunting us and making life hell and getting us in trouble—”
It was Lytton who leaned over Tobiah’s shoulder and clicked on the YouTube link. A fucking ad started playing, an ad for a website you could make yourself.
“Click ‘skip ad,’” said Wolf.
Tobiah waved his spindly arms around. “You can’t click on ‘skip ad’! There is no ‘skip ad’!”
“It’s not one of those you can skip,” said Lytton.
“Maybe there’s some symbolism in this,” said Wolf. “Making your own website? He obviously made a few of his own.”
“You can’t choose the ad,” snapped Tobiah.
“Try now,” said Wolf, just to be obnoxious.
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” cried Toby. “Just let it run its course.”
Lytton and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes again. Tracy had really had a difficult decision, choosing Wolf over Tobiah.
“Okay, here we go,” said Tobiah, practically rubbing his hands together.
“Turn it up, turn it up!” shouted Wolf.
Noodlum’s sleazy, hairy face appeared, nauseating me. All the rage I’d held toward him came rushing back as adrenaline and cortisol raced through my system. His slipperiness, avoiding my capture every damned time, only added to my fury.
The sleazebag talked, grinning the whole time like he was Santa Claus. “I’m so glad you made it to my lovely YouTube channel. On this channel, you can find out my recent activities, check out handmade crafts such as artillery shells, rockets, grenades, and my favorite, the plastic explosive C-4 IED with remote triggering.”
I fumed. That’s what I had used to blow up some innocent bikers.
“You might wonder ‘what does Noodlum have in store for us?’ Well, wonder no more.” He stood, taking the camera with him, so the image was jiggly for several seconds. He got behind the camera, so it steadied, showing an average, bland hotel room that could be found all alongside interstate Route 40. A flash of neon appeared briefly in the window. The curtains, surprisingly, were open.
All four of us turned into statues, leaning closer to the screen.
“Now as you see,” said Noodlum, casual as ever, “we’ve branched out a bit with our wares.”
There was…a woman on the bed? As the camera focused, a young Mexican woman became clear. Hog-tied and gagged, he’d allowed her to see. And I’d never seen such terror on a woman’s face before.
“Holy mother,” said Wolf. “We’ve got to stop this.”
“Who knows how long ago he made this tape?” whispered Toby.
“You can find out,” I said.
Toby nodded.
The unseen Noodlum brandished a buck knife in front of the camera. The focus wavered between the knife and the terrified woman.
“As you can see, she’s completely at my mercy. Just the way I like ’em.” As he brought the needle-sharp tip of the knife to her breastbone, she started screaming. Or screaming as loud as anyone could with a thick cloth gag in her mouth. She rolled this way and that, not being tied to the headboard. Noodlum only had one free hand, and that held the knife, so he stuck her in the back. He tore through her shirt savagely from stem to stern, cutting through her bra hooks, revealing her entire back.
In the same calm, southern accent, he drawled, “See, normally we like to sell these putas to eager buyers up north. But once in a while, we see there is one who is just. Not. Going to play along. In this case, we—”
And he stabbed her right through her ribcage.
“Oh, God!” cried Toby, standing up from his chair so fast it knocked it over. Hands up surrendering, he backed away. “Make this stop! Is this really happening?”
Wolf Glaser, who like Noodlum seemed to have no sensitivity chip for murder or mayhem, grabbed the chair and sat down. He even leaned closer to the screen, as if he was trying to enter a contest by finding a hidden logo in the woods. He avidly watched as Noodlum plunged the knife again and again about halfway to the hilt, adroitly avoiding ribs. I heard him grunting with the effort, and the woman’s screams quickly died down until she was limp. When he stepped back to focus on his work, he was out of breath. Not such a hearty and hale guy, physically.
