Bones Omnibus Read Free

with his hands raised. In addition, he had two fairly new AR-15s under his bed should he get
really
lucky and find himself with the upper hand.
    That said, the one thing Ferris hoped to guard against was having his arsenal lulling him into a false sense of security. If he’d had a Rottweiler or pit bull, he imagined any potential robber would find a way to work around that. But Bitch? No one would think twice, and her ears and instincts were just as effective as a larger, expensively trained watch dog.
    “Ferris?!” came a voice from outside. “I know you’ve already got a gun in your hand, but it’s just me. We need to talk.”
    The voice belonged to Christopher Cuno, who had only restocked the fridges with beer and the safe in the bathroom floor with stacks of cash days before. The racketeer’s son had seldom come out to the Bait-N-Booze without ringing first to make sure Ferris was around, and he’d
never
had come at night. Ferris checked to make sure there was a shell chambered in the shotgun before taking the .38 from his pocket and placing it on the counter. The wooden counter looked as rickety as the shack itself, but Ferris had reinforced it with three heavy steel plates.
    Combined, they would stop most anything short of an artillery round.
    Ferris ducked low behind the register, angling the shotgun around until it was aimed directly at the door.
    “You alone?” Ferris asked, hoping to buy time.
    “I’ll be the only one coming through the door, if that’s what you’re asking.”
    “Well, come on, then,” Ferris barked, trying not to sound as resigned as he felt.
    A moment later, Christopher entered with his hands on his head, fingers interlaced, wrists attached by handcuffs. His eyes found the shotgun barrel aimed at his face, and he looked nowhere else.
    “Hey, there, Ferris.”
    Ferris was shocked by Christopher’s appearance — the only reason he didn’t immediately shoot the young man. A wide swath of dried blood coated the beer truck driver’s T-shirt, starting at his neck and forming a “V” that came to a point just above his navel. His nose, broken at several points, looked as if it had been squished into place to prevent it from falling off. His left eye had swelled shut, giving him the appearance of a boxer who never learned to keep his hands up. Ferris hadn’t noticed if Chris had slurred his words, but when the younger Cuno opened his mouth, the owner of the Bait-N-Booze saw that at least six teeth were now missing, and a couple remaining were little more than splinters.
    All that damage, but the primary source of blood appeared to be the slab of glistening meat left in place of the twenty-something’s missing ear on the left side of his head.
    “What the fuck, Chris?” Ferris yelped, his voice rising in alarm.
    “They’ve got Dad out there.”
    “Who is ‘they,’
Chris
?”
    The young man stalled, as if unsure of the answer himself.
    “What the hell do they want with me?” Ferris asked.
    “If you tell them where your money is, they’ll let you go.”
    Ferris rolled his eyes. “Told you that, did they?”
    “Yeah. I’m a dead man. But my leading them here buys my kids their lives.”
    “So why’d they bring your dad? Sounds like bullshit to me.”
    A desperate look of panic flashed across Christopher’s face. Ferris realized that the young man really had believed everything he’d been told. That’s when he heard the noise at his back door, the approach that Christopher’s entrance was meant to distract him from.
    “Sorry about your kids, Chris,” Ferris sighed.
    He picked the .38 off the counter and coldly drilled a bullet into the handcuffed man’s already devastated eye. The blood-swelled protuberance of flesh erupted like a fast-opening flower, sending blood in every direction as the young man wheeled and fell, his bound hands unable to catch him as he face-planted into the doorframe. But before the dead man even slid to the floor, Ferris spun around and