and Bones expanded their search radius to just over a hundred yards from the shack, crossing the railroad tracks at two points. The deputies had shown them where the blood trail began at the side of the dirt parking lot, but it just as quickly vanished.
“Got anything?” Youman asked the shepherd, expecting little.
But Bones just kept walking. So far, he hadn’t alerted to much of anything other than the feces of other animals. But those he eyed quickly, then moved on.
“
Shit
,” Billy exhaled, folding over a piece of gum before popping it in his mouth. When his dog looked up at him expectantly, the handler took a carob dog treat from his pocket and tossed it to Bones. “They’re not going to like a loose end. Or hell, maybe they won’t care.”
The German shepherd scarfed up the carob treat, paying little attention to Youman’s words. But then his ears stood straight up. Youman eyed him curiously and glanced around the woods.
“What do you hear?” the sergeant asked. “Somebody else out here?”
Two long blasts from an approaching freight train echoed through the woods. Billy sighed.
“Let’s go.”
“We’re starting to put it together,” a state trooper Billy knew offered when the handler brought Bones back to the shack. “We found a few texts between the concerned parties. It looks like Ferris Aaron and Christopher Cuno were trying to knock over Chris’s dad to take over the business. We thought Aaron was this small-time player, but he seems to have had quite a few contacts dating back to his prison days. They lured the old man out here with this ploy about Aaron kidnapping the kid. Unfortunately for them, Demetri figured it out and came in guns a’blazing. Ballistics should tell us if we’re missing anything.”
Billy nodded, hoping to avoid having to say that he and Bones had come up dry.
“So, what’re you thinking?” the trooper, who wore the stripes of a station commander, asked. “You want to head back? Or make another circuit of the woods?”
“Maybe one more.” Billy nodded, figuring he shouldn’t pass up an opportunity to redeem himself.
Bones barked. Not a woof of warning or concern, but one of alarm. The shepherd tugged at the leash, fighting to get inside the shack.
“Bones, what the fuck?” Billy cried, trying to get his animal under control.
A second yank, and Bones pulled free from the sergeant. Almost knocking over the troopers posted alongside the shattered back door, the dog burst into the shack and made a beeline for the storeroom. With Billy and the station commander close behind him, Bones went right for a wooden box nailed to the floor in a corner. The shepherd pawed at it and nipped at the edges. He shoved his snout between the one open side and the wall, but couldn’t get inside.
“What’s gotten into your mutt, Sergeant?” an ATF officer Billy recognized but didn’t know asked from the doorway.
“One of your guys take a shit in the corner?” Billy shot back, trying to get a hand on Bones’s leash. The dog pulled away a second time. Knowing a lost cause when he saw one, Billy unhooked the leash from Bones’s harness and let him go.
“What’d you do that for?” the station commander asked.
“He’s alerting to something,” Billy said, “and if I don’t let him find it, he’s going to tear my hand off.”
Bones jammed his nose back into the cubby, only to yelp and leap backward a second later. A whisper-thin trickle of blood oozed from a fresh cut to his snout.
“There’s some kind of animal in there,” the ATF agent suggested dully as Billy pushed his dog aside.
The handler grabbed a corner of the wooden box and yanked it upward. As the top split, Ferris Aaron’s tiny Yorkshire Terrier, Bitch, scrambled out and made a break for it. Just as she was about to reach the door, the ATF agent kicked it closed. The tiny dog skidded to a stop, turned, and ran back toward the wooden box. However, a German shepherd easily twenty times her