Sheepdogs: Keeping the Wolves at Bay

by Gordon Carroll

  Max stared into his prey’s eyes, seeing the terror shine in the creature’s soul. He didn’t like it, this finding of prey but not being allowed to attack and destroy it at the end of the hunt, but the Alpha’s orders must be obeyed.

  His prey hid under the deck, its body excreting the smell of fear and alcohol. Another smell piggybacked the others. Something foul and sick. Similar to the narcotics he had been trained to find, but different, worse. As though the man’s body were rotting, his flesh combining with the drugs, stewing into an infectious brew. It was an abomination and the rancid obscenity of it affected his keen senses like a physical force driving him to greater frenzy.

  Froth drool slid from his jaws. His nails dug into the grass and dirt beneath him, his body straining closer.

  This creature was warped, polluted, unclean and for some reason its very presence was an affront to Max. Every fiber of his being urged him to charge and obliterate the atrocity hiding just a few feet away.

  A slight change in the wind swirled the man’s spore straight into Max’s face; the fetid stench more than he could bear. Every muscle in Max’s body bunched and coiled, ready to launch as he gave way to his primal instincts.

  “Fooey, nine!” It was the Alpha coming up behind him. Max held his ground, obeying the pack leader.

  But just barely.

  I saw Max start to break and stopped him just in time. He was more amped than usual and I didn’t know why. Fooey is the German word Pfui and its actual translation is something like yuck, but most American handlers use it as a milder form of the word no. Nein, pronounced nine in English is the harsher form of the word no and is used to strongly correct a dog’s actions when misbehaving. Ripping off Gauge’s arm would have been considered misbehaving, thus the need for the harsher correction.

  Ideally a handler should use only a single correction when training, such as fooey or nine, but not both, otherwise the dog will learn to wait until the second command before actually obeying. Being a judge, instructor and trainer, I of course know this and would dock points off any handler I heard doing such a thing during competition or training. So dock me. Stress makes even the best of us screw up.

  Besides, I really needed to see if I could get some information out of Gauges, and if he was isolated in an intensive care ward at a hospital that would be unlikely.

  I foossed Max back to me and knelt down beside him. I had my .45 in my hand, not knowing if Gauges was armed or not. I could see nothing beneath the deck. It was completely black. But I didn’t doubt Max for a second.

  “Hey there,” I said, “you, under the deck. You can either come out from under there and talk to me nicely, or I can send this fine Belgian piranha in to bring you out. You have five seconds to decide. Five — four — three…”

  “I’m commin’ out, man. I’m commin’ out. Don’t let Cujo get me. I give up… I swear.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Come out with your hands in front and make sure they’re empty. If you try anything naughty it will go very bad for you. Besides the dog I’ve got a .45 caliber stainless steel bang-bang pointed at you and I’ll squeeze off a bunch of painful bullets, understand?”

  “I ain’t tryin’ nothin’, man. I swear.”

  He came out from under the deck, hands in front just like I’d asked.

  Max trembled beneath my fingers. He was wired and ready for action. I was afraid he was a little too wired and might go for Gauges. I platzed him and went over to Gauges and patted him down. I found a two-inch pocketknife in his right, front pant’s pocket, but other than that he was unarmed. I holstered my weapon and told him to stand there while I moved Max closer to the fence. Max walked with me but his eyes never left Gauges. I gave Max the ouss command, which is designed to shut him down instantly. Max lay down and quieted, but his muscles still jumped and flexed as though he was fighting a losing battle with his will.

  I went back to Gauges.

  “You ain’t a cop,” he said.

  “No, but I play one on TV, and I know what you’ve been up to. So unless you want me to have the real cops stop by so you can spend the night with your friends in lock up you’d better tell me what I want to know.”

  “Wadda ya wanna know?”

  “Where are Tom and Amber Franklin?”

  “Who?”

  I nodded. “The Denver cops got your stash and pipes from the house, but I happen to know where there’s some stuff they didn’t get. How about a trade?”

  His eyes darted about. His pupils were the size of saucers. He licked his lips. “I wanna trade, man, but I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout those names you just said. I swear, man.”

  “That’s not what Kevin told me,” I said, using Pimples’ first name.”

  His eyes shifted back and forth. “What did Kev say?”

  I smiled, then took it away. “Well that’s your problem my friend. Only I know what Kev told me. And since you don’t, you won’t know where you can and can’t lie to me. So let me tell you how this is going to work. You are going to tell me everything you know about good old Kev and his doper friend starting from the beginning and if you tell me the truth, the whole truth, I’ll let you have the rest of Kev’s stash, which he was holding out on you. But, the first time you lie to me, even a teensy-weensy lie, I’ll call the cops and have you taken away and you won’t get to shoot up or smoke up all that nice cocaine and instead you’ll get to say hi to the men in jail who love boys in earrings.”

  I saw the gears in that befuddled, drugged brain start to turn. He licked his lips again, nodded as if to himself and then turned those plate-like eyes on me.

  “Deal,” he said. And he told me everything he knew.

  28

  Gil

  When we got back to Gauges’ house I used a Slim-Jim to pop the lock on Baldy’s car and told Gauges he would find the drugs inside. I went to my car, hit redial on my iPhone and told the 911 dispatcher (a woman with a much nicer voice) that I’d seen a man sneak back into the residence the police just left and it sounded like there was another fight going on.

  Hey, I fulfilled my part of the bargain. I never said I was going to let him keep the drugs.

  I pondered on the information he’d given me while driving home. It wasn’t much. He’d been getting stoned with Pimples since high school, no pun intended, and they’d kept in touch, passing dealers’ names back and forth and sharing drugs and girls from time to time. He said today was the first time he’d met Baldy and that the fat guy was his roommate. Short-Shorts was a tweaker from Kansas and had been staying with them for a month or so, trading sex for drugs. It’s a cold, nasty world out there kids. Gauges said Pimples came into some money a few weeks ago and told him he’d hit it big at one of the casinos in Black Hawk… which one he didn’t know. He spotted them for drugs twice since then, an oddity apparently, because Gauges said Pimples hadn’t paid for drugs in years.

  The only other nugget of info Gauges was able to give up was that Pimples was big into video slots and that he’d thought he’d heard them talking about some new computer video slot machine deal going down. He didn’t know anything about Tom or Amber.

  A strike out, but maybe not a complete strike out. There was the possible clue of Gauges going to casinos in Black Hawk and that he liked video slot machines. I supposed it was possible Shane had been mixed up in a gambling ring and that maybe the thumb dot had debts owed or something like that on it. Of course the more likely slant on the information was that Pimples was a cheap gambler and spent his time at the casinos so he could do just that. Great. An entire day spent staking out these bozos when I only had five days to find a mystery digital storage devise thingy. I had no idea as to what was on it or where it might be. And at least two people’s lives were at stake.

  It was just one of those days.

  I pulled into my garage and shut off the engine. It was a quarter to eleven. I opened the door and Max headed straight outside.

  The fridge was pretty bare but I found a couple of froz
en Beef, Rice and Bean Burritos in the freezer. I nuked a little Velveeta and milk, added some salsa and used it as a sauce for the burritos. My wife used to make fun of my love of Velveeta. She called it rubber cheese. Food snob.

  I turned on the TV, grabbed a Pepper and ate a burrito and a half. My system was trying to shut down. I’d had very little sleep, and the boredom of the stakeout had taken more out of me than a three-hour workout. I turned off the tube and climbed into bed, clothes and all.

  The dream started differently at first. I was in our car again. Not the Escalade — our car — the Dodge Caravan we’d bought the year before. There was snow outside piled in big drifts and falling lightly as we drove along… but that was wrong… there was no snow that night… it was warm… still too early for snow… but in the dream the snow fell. The roadway stretched out, almost deserted. Jolene sat next to me, fiddling with the radio. Amber was strapped into her carseat behind me where Jolene had easy access to her by just turning.

  Jolene found the song she was looking for and John Lennon purred from the speakers, singing Across The Universe. She swayed with the music grinning at me mischievously and singing along, her beautiful voice blending perfectly with John’s. I remembered what I said before my dream-self mouthed the words.

  “A golden oldie.”

  “Just like us,” said my wife, still swaying seductively.

  “Speak for yourself, I wasn’t even born when that song came out,” I said.

  “Neither was I, but sixty-nine wasn’t so long ago really.” And then she was singing along with the chorus and I felt a stab of fear at the words.

  I felt my lips start to form the lyrics to sing along with her and I screamed at myself not to do it. Not to tempt fate — not to challenge fate — but I couldn’t stop myself and I cried inside as I heard my voice singing along.

  And I saw it — up on the overpass — the flash — light reflecting off something — but it was night and there were no other cars.

  I looked at my wife.

  She smiled — swaying — singing.

  But in that instant… I knew… I knew.

  In The Beetles make-believe song world nothing would ever change. But in the real world, in the here and now world, everything was about to change.

  The sprinkle of glass across my face. The sound… so small.

  My training and instinct took over. I jerked the wheel, but it was too late.

  And then I was lying in the street, only it wasn’t a street anymore, it was grass and there was no snow, and it was daytime. I was in the park and Amber was playing in the jet streams of water that shot up from the holes in the cement, only it wasn’t water it was blood, and Amber was begging me to save her — to save her — to save her.

  I came awake, my clothes drenched in sweat, breathing hard. I sat up and looked at my watch. Two-thirty in the morning.

  I stripped, showered, put on a new set of clothes. I went to the living room and called the Denver City Jail. A bored sounding desk sergeant answered. I asked what charges Kevin Burbank was being held on and his bond. He put me on hold for about ten minutes in which time I got to listen to loud static accompanied by a buzz about as annoying as Jim Carey in Dumb and Dumber making the most annoying sound in the world. When he came back on the phone he told me Burbank and his pal had been bailed out a couple of hours ago. I asked him who bailed them out and he told me First Class Bail Bonds.

  I looked them up on the Internet and called them. I told the lady who answered I was trying to get some info on a couple of guys they’d just bonded out. She told me she couldn’t give me any info on clients. I told her I’d be right down.

  After all I wasn’t going to get back to sleep tonight.

  First Class Bail Bonds was a dump, both on the outside and on the inside. A homeless person lay passed out against the wall outside, a crumpled brown paper sack with the neck of a bottle peaking out the edge rested in one limp hand. He’d urinated on himself and the sidewalk shined wet around him. Talk about clichés. Still, he had a smile on his stubbly face and was snoring contentedly.

  I gave the woman behind the counter my most charming smile. She was a black lady with long bushy hair and giant arms and breasts to match. She was sitting behind a counter surrounded by bulletproof glass so I couldn’t see the rest of her. She wore a bright pink top that looked to be at the limit of its stretching ability and chewed gum that popped so loudly I could hear it through the inch-thick glass. Her name-tag read “Sasha”. Sasha saw my smile and looked at me like I was a bug.

  “Hi,” I said, acting like I was taking note of her name-tag, “Sasha.”

  “Do I know you?” she said, popping her gum. “‘Cause I don’t think I know you. You ain’t my brother, you shore ain’t my mother and I don’t ‘member having no white boys even on my crazy Uncle Larry’s side of the family. So don’t you go taking no familiarities with me without me telling you you can. Do we understand each other?” Her gum snapped louder than my .45.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She nodded sharply. “Good. Who you wanting to bail out?”

  “Nobody. I’m the guy that called about Kevin Burbank.”

  Her eyebrows drew down and I was glad there was glass between us. She looked kind of mean. “Don’t you be wasting my time, fool. I told you we don’t give out no information on clients. Didn’t you hear me tell you that on the phone? Course you did. So why you come down here, boy?”

  I opened my wallet and took out a twenty. “It’s very important to me.”

  Her gum popped and she sat back. “I ain’t some cheap ho you can buy off with a Jackson. Do I look cheap to you?”

  I took out another twenty — held it up.

  She sat up, looking mean again. “I said I don’t take no Jacksons. Clean out yo ears, boy.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought you meant in the singular.” I put the bills back in my wallet and took out a fifty.”

  She shook her head as though I were slow. “You got any Franklins in there?”

  “I don’t want to buy their records I just want to look at them.”

  “I like Mr. Franklin. Any man willing to fly a kite in the rain just so he could discover ‘lectricity is okay with me.”

  “Well I’m fresh out of hundreds, so it’s Grant or nothing.”

  She shrugged her big shoulders. “Nothing gets you nothing.”

  I shrugged my shoulders back at her and turned to leave.

  “How many Grants you got in there?”

  I stopped. “Just the one.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  A slight smile worked across her lips. “You find another one in there an I’ll let you call me Sasha.”

  I smiled back. “How about a Grant, two Jacksons and three Hamiltons?” I held open my wallet for her to see everything I had, which was exactly three singles more than I had offered.

  She nodded, popped her gum and smiled real big. She had beautiful white teeth. “Raise me three Washingtons and we got us a deal.”

  I laid the money in the little tray she slid out from under the glass. “A deal it is… Sasha.”

  She flashed me that beautiful smile again and slid copies of Pimple’s bonding papers back out to me on the tray.

  She had them there all the while.

  A lawyer from the very high-priced law firm of Kinsley, Gifford and Vanderzee named Ralph Ramsden had bonded Kevin Burbank, AKA Pimples, out. Same deal for Baldy. I’d dealt with lawyers from their firm a few times when I was still a cop. They were heavy hitters, one of the best legal defense firms in the state, if not the country.

  Pimples had been charged with possession of a Class II Controlled Substance, Possession of Drug Paraphernalia, Third Degree Assault on a Peace Officer and Obstruction of Justice. His bond was ten thousand dollars, cash, property or surety, which meant First Class Bail Bonds made a straight fifteen hundred bucks apiece on the deal. Three thousand smackers. Not bad for an hour’s work. Of course they were also getting
paid for taking the risk, but since the firm of Kinsley, Gifford and Vanderzee were the proxy cosigners of the bond, there wasn’t much risk to be had on this deal. Even if Pimples didn’t show for court there was no doubt the rest of the bail would be paid in full.

  Of course, there was no way a couple of slugs like Pimples and Baldy could afford Kinsley, Gifford and Vanderzee, so the question was, who had paid for them? And why?

  Perhaps I would visit their office tomorrow. Trying to sweat information out of lawyers like them would be as useless as trying to sweat info out of Sasha. I guess I’d have to use my charm. I hoped that would work better than it had on Sasha, I was all out of money.

  My watch showed it to be ten to four. Too early for the lawyers. I decided to try Pimple’s house. By now Baldy should have gotten his car from Gage’s place and maybe they were hanging around out front talking about their big day. Right.

  I pulled across the street from the house. The lights were out and the torn screen mesh of the open storm door flapped in the breeze. The three junk cars were still in the driveway as was the old Merc by the curb. No sign of Baldy’s car.

  Hmm. I could wait but it seemed useless for now. If he was inside he was probably sleeping. Besides, my cooler from earlier was practically empty and the ice was all melted. A stakeout with no snacks is like a day without sunshine. I took out the other two driver’s licenses I’d confiscated from Baldy and Skull Shirt. Baldy lived about ten miles away in Adams County. Skull Shirt lived in Sheridan, closer to my place. I drove to Baldy’s.

  When I got there I found a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn, if you could call it a lawn. The place made Pimple’s house look like a palace. There were no curtains. I looked inside and there was no furniture either. I saw a bunch of trash and a charred circle over by a corner where someone tried to start a fire. Around the back I found a boarded up window and two other windows that were broken out. I could have gone inside but the place was obviously deserted.