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

me the number. I called and let it ring about twenty times. No answer. Hmm again. Could be nobody was home. On the other hand maybe Shelly or her son were real heavy sleepers. I had a choice to make. I could sit here all day waiting for Pimples to show, or I could take a more direct approach. Not much of a choice really. I hate sitting around.

There weren’t many people out and about at this time of the morning. Not in this neighborhood. The hole in the front door went all the way through. I phoned inside again and this time I could hear the phone ring. Still no answer. I tried the doorknob. It was locked. I carry a three-piece lock pick set with me but I didn’t think I’d need it. I reached inside the hole and found the deadbolt latch and the knob lock and turned them both. I was inside in under fifteen seconds.

The place was trashed, big surprise, but not as bad as I would have thought from the outside. I checked through the rooms. The master bedroom, obviously Pimple’s mother’s room, was well kept with a picture of who I took to be her, baby Pimples, and daddy Pimples from better days, on a dresser. The bed was made, with the sheets and comforter turned down. I looked from her bedroom into the hallway leading to the trashy living room, and felt sad for her. I doubted the woman in the photograph on the dresser ever thought back then that her little baby would turn out to be a drugged-out kidnapper of little children, or that she would end up living in a nasty house in a nasty neighborhood with no way out.

Pimple’s room squatted across the hall. It was exactly the opposite of his mother’s room. I searched through his bed stand, his dresser, under his bed, his closet, through the clothes littered about the floor and hanging on doors. Thank goodness for gloves.

I was looking for anything belonging to Amber or Tom or Shane. Anything that might have come from the ransacking of the Franklin house. Anything that might point to who Mr. Spock and his goons were or who they were working for.

Time to get serious. I stripped the sheets from the bed and checked the mattress for slits where Pimples might have slipped something inside to hide — nothing. I checked the ceiling, which was warped drywall — nothing. I checked the floor, moldy beer stained carpet — nothing. I checked the desk, the dresser, the bed stand, looking for loose boards, pried open compartments, things taped beneath drawers or under ledges — nothing. I checked the closet again, this time throwing everything out onto the bedroom floor, and on the far wall, way in the back I found — something. A rectangle of drywall had been crudely cut out and then stuck back on. I removed the cover and found a plain wooden jewelry box inside. It was about a foot long, maybe eight inches tall, and eight inches high. And it was heavy. There was a hasp but no lock. Inside the box I found ten stacks of red, five-dollar poker chips. In each of the ten stacks were twenty chips. That came to a total of a thousand bucks worth of chips. Not exactly a fortune, but for a burnout like Pimples it was a pretty decent pot.

The chips were standard casino chips made of clay with the casino’s imprint in the center. The imprint read The Mills Casino in Black Hawk. I slipped one into my pocket and put the rest back.

I put the box in its hiding place and replaced the drywall covering. I threw most of the clothes I’d dumped from the closet back in and made a quick sweep through the house looking for any other clues. I didn’t find any.

I relocked the doors from the outside, using the hole again, and went back to my car.

While I waited for the dynamic drug-heads to show up I began searching for info on the Law Firm of Kinsley, Gifford and Vanderzee, via my handy Star Trek communicator — these days commonly referred to as a cell phone — only handier and packed with more apps than even a Tricorder.

The great thing about the Internet is the incredible amount of information. The bad thing about the Internet is the incredible amount of information. It took me nearly two hours to sort through all kinds of superfluous stuff about the firm. Of course, since I didn’t really know what exactly I was looking for, I could have been wrong about that. So I had to sift through everything until something clicked. And then it did.

The Law Firm of Kinsley, Gifford and Vanderzee turned out to be the legal counsel on record for a certain gambling establishment known as The Mills Casino and Hotel located in beautiful Black Hawk Colorado. What a coincidence.

Bingo! Pun intended.

Clear Creek Canyon was gorgeous as I drove up US 6 toward Black Hawk. The town was known originally as the Town of Mills, because of all the water driven stamp mills that hammered Quartz rock, night and day to get the gold out of it. It’s thought the later name of Black Hawk came from the company in Illinois that shipped up the mining equipment. The company was named Black Hawk after the famous Chief of the Sauk Indians. The stamp mills were basically huge mortar and pestle devices hooked together by a shaft and powered by rushing river water that moved a cam, lifting the incredibly heavy pestle or stamp, and then letting it fall to crush the rock.

History lesson complete.

Nowadays Black Hawk is a gambling town just like its sister, Central City. Colorado voted in limited gaming back in 1990 but tried to curb the negative influences that usually accompany gambling like; addiction, prostitution, drugs, organized crime, things like that, by imposing a maximum bet and