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

Pause. “Where?”

“First let me hear Amber on the phone so I know she’s alive.”

“Say hello, Amber.” I heard breathing, but nothing else. Then a startled intake of breath and the unmistakable sound of a young child crying.

“What did you do to her?”

“Just a pinch. Let me speak to Mr. Doors.”

I put the phone next to Doors’ ear and punched him in the nose. There was a startled intake of breath, then the unmistakable sound of a grown man crying. I took the phone away.

“Just a punch. Be here in one hour with Amber or I’ll start the eye for an eye routine on your boss with Shane in mind. We’re at Doors’ cabin in Manitou Springs. Come alone, and this time I mean it.”

“I’ll be there.” He hung up.

My shirt was trashed, I took it off. The bulletproof vest beneath had three holes punched in it. I stripped off the Velcro straps and peeled the vest off. I pulled my undershirt off over my head, wincing. Huge welts, with circular bruising the size of my fist surrounded each hit. One of the wounds had swollen enough to break the skin and a trickle of blood ran down from my chest to my belly. The wound along my shoulders and trapezes had started bleeding through its bandage as well.

Doors had stopped crying and moaning. He saw the welts and grinned. “Did Verick do that to you?”

I said, “Mosquitoes.”

“You think those muscles are going to help you against Verick? I saw him break a three hundred pound pro wrestler’s back in Mexico. It took him about five seconds.”

“Wow, a pro wrestler? Scary.”

“You won’t act so tough once Verick gets here.”

I took a step toward him; he cringed back into the chair. “Explain to me how a gazillionaire like you gets hooked up in the murder of a teenage boy and the kidnapping of a two year old girl. How does that happen?”

He straightened up in the chair once he saw I wasn’t going to hit him. “That boy came up with a winner. The Laser Glove and its games will make a couple a billion dollars world wide. Toys, books, movies, whole careers will spawn from it. And WTP is the star attraction. Shane Franklin was a genius. Maybe the best natural programmer I’ve ever seen.”

“If he was so great, why did you kill him?”

He looked down, a smug expression coming to his geeky face. When he looked back at me, utter contempt shone from his eyes. “Shane sent me a demo two years ago. It was raw, but I saw the potential immediately. I took him in, gave him access to AI engines, model developers, story plotters, everything, and all under the table without his parents knowing. I took enormous risks, my whole complex here in the Springs was built on the projected profits that Laser Glove, WTP and two other projects would bring in. And then this punk kid, after all I’d done for him, set him up to be a millionaire, decides he’s going to screw me over and go to a higher bidder.” He shook his head. “No one cheats me.”

“Shane wasn’t going to a higher bidder,” I said. “He had a religious conversion and felt the game was immoral. And even that was after you tried to cheat him out of the rights to the game.”

He sat straight in the chair, the smug look more pompous than ever. “Well, I’m a businessman, and this is business. I would have compensated the boy. It would have been less than ten million, but he would have done alright. And as for the religious conversion, it’s bull.” He made a nasally grunt sound. “I didn’t get where I am by being a boy scout. I have corporate spies in every PC Game designing company in America and most foreign companies. Shane approached my top three competitors for bids on WTP. There was no religious conversion. Shane was selling me out.”

I thought of the pictures of Shane in the pool as a little boy; of him playing with his brothers Joseph and Marshal. The picture of him at Estes Park on the steps of the Stanley Hotel with baby Amber sitting on his lap and a copy of The Shining in his hand. I wondered if back then Shane could ever have imagined his own death would be more terrible than any devised by horror writer Stephen King. Remembering his tortured body at the morgue, I thought not.

Rage bubbled up inside me. I leaned close, the dog coming into my eyes. “He was a seventeen year old boy, and your men tortured him like a pack of animals.”

Doors gulped audibly. “He wouldn’t talk, besides, it wasn’t me, it was Verick.”

“He didn’t talk because he didn’t know where the flash drive was.”

“Thumb drive, and yes he did,” said Doors, his agitation momentarily overcoming his fear. “He did! He was trying to cheat me.”

“Were you there? While he was being tortured, were you there?” I was dangerously close to losing it and just then I didn’t care. I thought of Amber and of my daughter as she died. The sound of the black boots as they crunched on the black scrabble, closer and closer to my precious baby.

“No. But Verick told me…”

“Yeah, your pet muscle told you. Well I saw Shane’s body. I saw what they did to him and I can tell you no one could have kept from talking with what they did!” I was shouting.

Doors’ face blanched and crumpled. He shook his head from side to side. “No-no-no. They scared him, threatened him. There was an accident and he died. That was all. Verick told me… he told me.” Tears ran down his cheeks; the look of horror was anything but fake. “The boy was cheating me, I swear, but I didn’t mean for him to die. It was an accident.”

“Right, and after Shane died by accident you let Verick kidnap Shane’s dad and baby sister. Then you