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

I opened the envelope and pulled out the card. The cover showed the members of the cast from the television show CSI standing around a body, with the words, “The first step to getting well…” I opened it and the song Who Are You by The Who started playing. Inside was a cartoon of the body shooting fluids out of numerous holes, and the words, “…is to check your fluids.” I laughed. “Better now. Thanks.”

She shrugged her beautiful shoulders. “It’s Crime Lab humor. Not everyone gets it.”

“I got it. Thanks for coming.”

She looked me up and down. “All this from a wad of chewed up gum?”

“That’s where it all started.” I tapped the card, which got the song playing again. “It’s all in the fluids.”

“You gonna be okay?”

I smiled slyly. “If I know you, you’ve already hounded all the doctors, so you tell me.”

“Well, the bullet broke a rib, cracked your sternum and chipped your shoulder blade. The channel bore through your right lung, filling the chest with blood which is why the lung collapsed. You had splinters of wood in your head, face and neck — I’m guessing from bullets that were close misses. You’re covered with bruises and abrasions, and you have another recent bullet wound along the back of your neck and through a small section of that nicely muscled trapezes and shoulder that had already been treated. In other words, you’re a mess.”

“But am I gonna be okay?”

She smiled, leaned down, kissed my forehead. “Of course. And you still owe me a date.”

What a kidder. “If only,” I said. “Way-way-waaaay out of my league. But thanks for the pity.”

She shook her head. “I’m going to run down to take a look at the crime scene. I’ll snap a few pictures for your scrap book.” She walked to the door with moves that even Jessica Rabbit couldn’t hope to compete with. She stopped in the doorway and looked at me. “Don’t play the game too long, PI, someone might snatch me up.” She winked and was gone.

“That woman is bad,” said Yolanda, who had long since dried her tears.

“No,” I said, closing my eyes as sleep came to claim me. “She’s just drawn that way.”

51

When Joseph woke up, I was sitting next to his bed in a chair. My IV was on rollers, and the tubes had only gotten twisted up about a million times while I fought to keep my hind quarters private in spite of the stupid hospital gown I was forced to wear.

It was two in the morning and Joseph’s roommate, a ninety year-old man awaiting gallbladder surgery, was fast asleep.

Joseph slept straight through my two harrumphs and three forehead taps. I think it was the tissue I ran lightly over his cheeks, lips and chin, simulating a creepy, eight-legged insect, that finally did the trick.

“We need to talk,” I said.

He closed his eyes and turned his head to the side. I tickled his ear with the tissue.

He didn’t like it. “What do you want?” His words were only slightly slurred by the wires holding his jaw together.

“You didn’t kill your brother.”

“Yesh I did.” His voice was flat, emotionless. So were his eyes. He turned his head to the side again.

Tickle-tickle

“What?” Still the dead voice of an automaton.

“I’m not saying you didn’t do anything wrong. You did. So did Shane. But that’s not why he’s dead. He’s dead because some greedy, evil men murdered him.”

The dull orbs of his eyes slid in their sockets staring through me. “I wush greedy.”

“Yeah, you were, so was Shane.”

“Leave him out of it.”

“Why? He was in as deep as you and he was older.”

Joseph’s head twitched a fraction to the negative. “He shtopped. I didn’t.”

“He was older than you, Joseph, he had greater responsibility.”

“I killed him.”

“You know that’s a lie. You just want to think that so you can kill yourself and stop the pain.” I leaned in. “I’ve got a secret for you. If you kill yourself, it won’t stop the pain. All it will do is shift it over to your parents and your brothers and your sisters. Is that what you want?”

A flicker, something deep in his eyes, anger — fear? “Shut up. I don’t want to talk to you.” He reached for his buzzer to summon a nurse. I pulled it away from him. Another flash of a spark — deep — deep inside.

“I know what you think Shane thought of you.”

He turned his head to the side. “You don’t know anything.”

“You think he blamed you. That he hated you.”

“You don’t…know…anything.” The spark hadn’t touched his voice.

“Yes I do. I know Shane forgave you.”

He looked back at me. His nose wrinkled in disgust. “Becaush he’s my brother?”

“No. More than that. When I first saw what they did to Shane, I made a faulty deduction. I thought no seventeen-year old could have kept a secret through that kind of torture. But I was wrong. Shane was smart — really smart. You are too. So let me ask you this, once they showed Shane that the flash drive he’d given them was a fake, would he have figured out that it was you who switched the drive?”

I saw him thinking. He blinked several times. Looked into my eyes. “Yesh, he would…know.” And now I was sure I saw it, fear, treading water at the back of his brain, threatening to swim forward. Fear, as the realization of his brother’s knowledge and all the ramifications of Shane still keeping silent, worked through that smart, logical brain of his.

“Yes,” I said. “You’re figuring it out, just like I did. Your brother knew that you tricked him, betrayed him. But he never talked. He never told them. They tortured him in ways that should have been able to break any human, but not him. Because he would rather die — rather be tortured to death, than to have you suffer the same fate. Because he loved you, Joseph. And that’s how I know he forgave you. Greater love