Sheepdogs: Keeping the Wolves at Bay, Gordon Carroll [howl and other poems .txt] 📗

Sheepdogs

Gordon Carroll

SHEEPDOGS © 2019 Gordon D. Carroll

All Rights Reserved

For Athena, Cassandra, Natalie, Anthony and all the grandkids. How blessed God has made me to have such wonderful children.

Contents

1. Gil

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

5. Max

6. Gil

7. Max

8. Gil

Chapter 9

10. Max

11. Gil

12. Max

13. Gil

14. Max

15. Gil

16. Max

17. Gil

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

21. Max

22. Gil

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

25. Max

26. Gil

27. Max

28. Gil

29. Max

30. Gil

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

35. Max

36. Gil

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

47. Max

48. Gil

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

53. Max

1

Gil

My fingers traced the indented letters of the silver WWJD bracelet on my right wrist. I do that when I’m considering pummeling someone. The punk hassling the girl behind the coffee counter was getting louder. My lips twitched up at the corners.

His suit spoke uptown money, hundred dollar lunches and a fancy little sports car, but his eyes were the hard, black BBs of a rat. He was new money trying to act like old, demanding respect he hadn’t earned.

The girl was fifteenish, a little pudgy, with braces and a few pimples dotting her forehead and chin. Her eyes were shiny and wet, close to overflowing. If my daughter had lived, she might one day have worked in a shop like this.

The rodent shoved his venti-five-pump-double-shot-caramel-blah-blah-blah, back at her, sloshing some of the coffee onto the counter.

I take my coffee the way I did back in the Corps, black, bitter and hot, no preservatives.

When I saw the girl’s bottom lip start to quiver, I pushed back my chair and stood up.

Rat guy was still spouting off. “I said extra hot. You know what extra hot is? Well I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not this. This is like warm spit. Do you get paid to serve me spit? You think I’m shelling out five bucks for spit? Is that what you think?”

It amazes me how in a so-called civilized society, grown adults will let other adults act like spoiled brats, throwing tantrums to get what they want. There were nine other customers in the coffee shop; five men, four women, and none of them did a thing to stop the rat from rattling the bars of its cage. That’s people for you.

I stepped between them, facing the girl about to cry, my back to the jerk with the foul mouth.

Beneath my navy blue, un-tucked, short sleeve shirt, I carried a stainless steel .45 caliber, Smith and Wesson 4506, semi-automatic handgun in a pancake holster. The loose shirt made it invisible. It’s a big gun, thick with metal and heavy as a boat anchor. They make sleeker, lighter guns these days with lots more ammo capacity. But I’m old school and somehow a plastic gun just doesn’t sit right with me. I like a weapon that feels lethal. Besides, if I ever run out of bullets, I can always bash them over the head with it. Know what it feels like to get hit in the head with an anchor? Neither do I, but I bet it hurts.

Besides the gun, I wear a magazine pouch with two loads, my PI badge, an automatic K9 door-popper for my car, and a leather key-holder, clipped to my belt.

Sitting my nearly full cup on the counter next to his, I smiled at the girl as the first tears started to spill from her eyes. “Would you get me a refill, please?” The girl nodded numbly, trying to blink away the tears. I glanced at the WWJD bracelet on my right wrist, remembering how Christ whipped the moneylenders from the temple grounds.

The smile turned into a grin.

From behind me I heard the punk say, “Hey, I was talking here.” He said it mean and hard, just like his eyes.

I sized him up when he first came in starting his tirade; an inch or so taller than my five ten, a little heavier in a pumped health club sort of way, with short cropped, blond streaked hair so caked with mousse or gel or whatever these kids use today to gunk up their hair that it stood up in little spikes. Like the burs on a brush.

A sleek pair of Oakley Monster Dog sunglasses bounced off a heavily muscled, over inflated chest, dangling from a strap. That made me smirk inwardly. Irony.

I have a habit of seeing people through my dog eyes. Superman has his x-ray vision, Ultra Boy his ultra-vision — me — dog eyes. Having trained canines for close to twenty years, I can’t help but notice the same traits and drives that rule the animal kingdom, earnestly at work in my fellow homo sapiens.

You’ve heard the phrase, his bark is worse than his bite? It means that a certain kind of dog, a fear biter, will hackle up, making himself look big and scary, and bark a lot, but that’s the extent of it. He doesn’t really want to fight. It’s like when an insecure guy is walking on the beach with his girl and he sees another guy walking his way, eyeing his woman. What does the insecure guy do? He puffs up his chest, throws his shoulders back, sucks in his gut and holds his arms out from his sides as if his lats and biceps are too massive to exist in the same universe. When a guy does that, he’s sending out a signal, staking his claim, warning others to stay away. In other words, he’s trying to avoid a fight.

He’s not the guy to worry about. He’s a bluffer. The ones you have to be careful of are the Mike Tysons of the world — the early Mike Tyson that is, pre-prison and face tattoo, back when he really was bad — the ones who don’t try to make themselves look bigger or badder. The ones who stare you in the eye and walk right up to you and say, “Come here for a second, bro, I want to talk to you,” in a soothing,