Sheepdogs: Keeping the Wolves at Bay

by Gordon Carroll

  I opened the door for her.

  “Thank yew,” she said with that Sally field voice and Marie Osmond smile. There were seven limos in the garage. The one with the cracked windshield sat at the end of the first line.

  The plates were the same, so was the crack. I ran a finger along the thin edge, tracing its jagged, lightning bolt like line from the driver’s side, half-way across the windshield. “Yep, looks like it.” I turned to her. “You know, I’ve never seen the inside of one of these. Would you mind?”

  “Not at all. It’s unlocked, feel free.”

  I did just that. I looked around, scanning the inside for any clue. I was hoping for a business card or a receipt, anything to tie to Mr. Spock and his boys. I ran my hand along the back edge of the cushion, digging into the crease. I did the same to all the seats. I checked the bar; the TV’s, the phone, the ashtrays. Nothing. Clean as a whistle. Except for the parking slip I’d seen, but been unable to make out that first day. I went to the dashboard and there it was, pushed low into the corner to the far left, on the inside of the windshield. I stepped out of the limo, holding the ticket.

  “What’s that?”

  “A parking pass for the Micro Corp building.”

  “You’re not really here about the windshield, are you?” asked Kendra.

  “No. I’m a private investigator.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” I showed her my license.

  “Do you have a gun?

  “I sure do,” I said. “Just like in the movies.”

  Her eyes got big and her smile even bigger. She covered her mouth with both hands. “Wow that is the kewlest.” She eyed me over. “You’re pretty big. Do you work out a lot? I think it’s neat when older guys try to stay in shape.”

  Older? Did she just call me older?

  She continued without pause. “What are you really looking for?”

  “The men that rented this car the day before yesterday might be involved in a homicide.”

  “They killed someone?”

  “I think so, but I need to find out who rented the limo to be sure.”

  She smacked me lightly on the arm. “Why didn’t you say so? I would have told you if I’d known that.” She strode back out of the garage and to her desk. I followed. Kendra slid and clicked her mouse. “Here it is.” She clicked and double clicked, then clicked again. A laser printer spit out a sheet of paper before I could ask her for the results. She handed me the page. “A Jay Horack paid for the car with cash.”

  “Don’t you require a credit card deposit until you get the car back?” I asked.

  “We sure do.” She went back to typing and clicking. He used a Visa, but it’s a company card.”

  I looked over the sheet and saw Horack’s name, address and phone number. No mention of the company. “Can you find out who he works for?”

  She slid and clicked like an ancient sorceress weaving a spell. “It’s an executive card for a company called Game’s End.”

  “What’s their address?”

  “Oh, they’re just a couple of miles away on Douglass and Juniper. I buy games there some times. They’ve got good prices.”

  “What kind of games?”

  “All kinds,” she said. “ Anthem, World of Warcraft, PUBG, Guitar Hero, Halo whatever version it is, Exodus. You name it they have it. I bought one of the used Tomb Raider games from there years ago. My mom and I used to be killers on Tomb Raider; you ever play?”

  I smiled. “No, I liked the movie, though.”

  She grinned slyly. “You mean you liked Angelina Jolie, huh? You dirty old men are all alike. Just joking,” she added, scrunching her face just like Sally Field used to do in the Gidget movies. “Anyway, they have pretty good deals most of the time. You still have to be careful though. Price shopping is always a good idea.”

  “Game’s End. Can I get the address?”

  “Sure.” She printed it out for me. “Of course I don’t do much Raider anymore. Now I’m mostly into Venus Rising . It’s wicked nasty. I mean seriously. Zalina’s no Laura Croft, but she’s still wicked nasty.”

  “Is that… good?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Duh, of course. You old guys are funny.” She tapped the paper she’d given me. “So, you think they off’d somebody in our limo? Should I call my boss?”

  “No, not in the limo. And I’d rather you didn’t tell your boss just yet. For now, let’s keep this our little secret, okay?”

  “Secret, that’s kewl.” She pantomimed zipping her lips, locking them and throwing away the key. Sally Field all the way.

  I liked this girl — I really really liked her.

  I stopped at a park and let Max out to take a break. A pretty young woman in shorts, a tank top, high-end running shoes and ear-buds jogged toward us with a cute little toy poodle on a pink leash. I looked over and saw Max locked in a death stare with the fancily bobbed poodle. Before I could shout a warning the poodle snapped forward, pulling the dainty leash out of the running girl’s hand. The dog ran full on at Max, barking at the top of its little lungs.

  Forcing myself not to turn away from the horror I was about to witness, I yelled for Max to platz as I sprinted toward them. I knew I was too late.

  The poodle jumped at Max’s face, still barking. Max reached up with one paw and shoved the smaller animal into the grass, face first. Then Max lay down on top of it and looked at me as if to say, what, you think I’d pick on a shrimp like this?

  I reached under Max, clamped my hand over the poodle’s mouth and pulled it free. The young woman with the ear-buds ran up to me, screaming that my dog murdered her baby. I handed the dog to her, telling her it was fine. She yanked the poodle away but not before it was able to sink its teeth into the heel of my hand. I yelped. Max rolled his eyes again. The woman and her dog stormed off.

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t hurt that dog,” I said pointing a finger at Max. He yawned and started licking himself.

  Game’s End was a medium sized store with just about every type of game imaginable. There were board games, lawn games, drinking games, party games, but most of all there were electronic games for systems and computers. Microsoft Xbox One X, Sony PlayStation 4, Micro Corp Laser Glove, Nintendo Wii, Macintosh, IBM, HP Blackbird, Blizzard, and on and on and on. There was even a section filled with full sized arcade and pinball games.

  Over there I found video poker, black jack, Keno and real slot machines that paid out. I went to the counter and saw brochures for tours of Central City and Black Hawk. And right there sat one with The Mills pictured on the front.

  Something nagged at me. I pulled the parking stub from the limo out of my pocket. Micro Corp. I went back to the game systems.

  Micro Corp Laser Glove. There was no game yet, just a splashy sign announcing Coming Soon! In Time for Christmas! The display was stylish. It looked similar to the Nintendo Wii except the entire computer was housed in the glove. It utilized a revolutionary new co-processor that was smaller than any to date, but able to hold five times as much information. Of course it was.

  A sales person came over to me. His tag read Mike and under that Asst. Mgr.

  I asked him who the parent company of Game’s End was. He proudly told me it was a subsidiary of Micro Corporation.

  Mr. Spock had made a fool of me by setting me up against the mob and wasting my time in Black Hawk, but he wasn’t quite as careful as he thought he was. There’s an old adage that says no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. OJ Simpson found that out as have a lot of others. Mr. Spock hadn’t taken this possibility into consideration. He thought he could keep me diverted with his phony leads and glib comments long enough for him to get what he was after.

  Spock was no mobster. He was hired muscle for someone connected with Micro Corp.

  I drove to a Kneaders and got some coffee. I fired up my laptop and looked up Micro Corp. It was owned by a bazillionaire named Roger Doors. Mr. Doors made his first hundred million or so back in the late n
ineties on a game called Bloody Suzy. Suzy was a blonde bomb-shell that made Kendra’s hero, Lara Croft, look like a tom-boy. It was a first-person shooter game where Suzy went around exterminating all the women in town who were becoming zomboids due to the dropping spores of a passing comet. When Suzy killed enough zombie women, she would be rewarded by mating with all the dead women’s husband’s and boyfriends, in order to help keep the species alive.

  A wholesome family game for all ages.

  Roger Doors sunk over two hundred million into his new headquarters here in the Springs, a pretty big gamble, considering most of the gaming industry, as well as the top programmers and developers were located in California.

  Doors had created a new system; The Laser Glove, due out this Christmas. It was marketed as having three new games that would stun the world. Investors were claiming the new system and games would bring in over a billion dollars worldwide.

  Mr. Spock worked for someone important in connection with Micro Corporation — bazillionaire owners are usually considered to be important people. Mr. Spock was looking for a new smaller flash drive with something worth killing for on it — Roger Doors was into making video games that raked in hundreds of millions — Roger Doors’ new system ran on a new smaller flash drive called a thumb dot. Teenagers play video games — Shane Franklin was a teenager. Shane wouldn’t tell them where the thumb dot was, even under torture and was killed for it — Shane Franklin had a teenage brother. — and, when I was in Shane’s room talking to his brother I remember seeing a magazine with Roger Doors on the cover.

  It was time to talk with Joseph Franklin again.

  39

  Lisa’s sister, Trudy, answered the door.

  “Where’s Joseph?”

  She pointed upstairs. “He’s in his room. The other kids are in the backyard.”

  I started up the stairs. “I need to talk with him.”

  Trudy smiled. The smile looked sad and tired. “I’ll start some dinner. Will you be staying?”

  “No. Thank you anyway. I have some work to do. Is Tom back from talking to the police yet?”

  She shook her head. “But he called and said he wouldn’t be much longer.”

  “Thanks.”

  I reached the top of the stairs and paused outside of Joseph’s room. I knocked lightly. Joseph opened the door. He looked surprised to see me. “Are my parents here?”

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  His eyebrows went up. “What about?”

  “Mind if I come in?”

  He shrugged and stepped back. I entered. The room was pretty much like any American teenage boy’s room, except there weren’t any posters of nearly naked women decorating the walls. A tablet sat on a desk littered with power cords and a monitor. The computer was missing, stolen in the burglary. There was a bunk bed and lots of books.

  “You share a room with Shane?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, we all share. That’s the way it is when there’s five kids.”

  I sat on the lower bunk and held a hand toward the desk chair. “Have a seat, please.” He shrugged again and sat down.

  “Joseph… do you go by Joseph or Joe?”

  “Either.”

  I nodded. “I like Joseph.” I paused. “I have to talk some straight talk with you, Joseph. What I’m going to say is hard to take. I wish I could let your parents tell you, but there isn’t time. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to give it to you straight.”

  He sat back in the chair, eyeing me suspiciously. “You’re kind of scaring me.”

  “Yeah, well, this is something to be scared of, but there’s no helping it. Your brother Shane is dead.”

  Joseph’s face drained of color. His jaw dropped. Tears welled in his eyes.

  “It gets worse. He was kidnapped and murdered. He was supposed to have something someone wants. A flash drive of some kind called a thumb dot. I don’t know exactly what’s on this drive, but I think it’s some new game or something like that. I have to get it. The same people that murdered your brother kidnapped your father and your sister Amber. I was able to save your dad, but they still have Amber. They’re going to kill her if I don’t find it and give it to them.” I stopped, letting the news sink in. His hands started to shake. “Joseph, I think you have the drive.”

  He started crying. I let him. He sobbed uncontrollably, his whole body shuddering. He cried until he couldn’t get his breath and started hiccuping. He was hyperventilating. I stripped a pillowcase from a pillow and folded it down into a small bag. I held it to his mouth. A paper sack would have worked better, but beggars can’t be choosers. He got his breathing under control and mopped his face with the pillowcase.

  “I killed my brother — I killed Shane.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “Why don’t you tell me how this all started.”

  He gathered himself, took a deep breath. “Sh…Shane and I started taking college classes last year. We both like video games, Mom and Dad don’t like us to play the violent or graphic ones, but still we did Minecraft and Superhero games and stuff like that. Dad started us learning computer languages when we were little and Shane and me smoked everyone in our classes at college. A couple of guys at school got us into the cool ones, like Dark Souls and Halo and Gears of War, and Shane figured out how to deconstruct the codes so we could see how they wrote the programs. After that, we decided to make our own game. We worked on it for a year, then Shane showed it to our programming teacher and he put Shane in touch with some people down at Micro Corp. We decided to keep me out of it so we could hide it from our parents easier.” He looked at me sheepishly. “I’m a bad liar. The game was still just a demo. It needed lots of work, but Micro Corp. liked it and said it would work perfectly with their new gaming glove that was in production. They said they’d pay Shane ten million dollars for the completed version. Ten million dollars… it sounded like a joke.” He looked up at me, still crying, the tears running into his mouth. “Shane couldn’t sign a contract though ‘cause he wasn’t eighteen.”

  I shook my head. “But your dad…?” I left the question hanging.

  “We couldn’t ask him. The game we made is called Whack the Pig. It’s all about killing cops. You get so many points for killing a regular street cop, say with a gun or by running him down in a car, and more points for spotting an undercover cop, or for using a makeshift weapon to take out a prison guard. It kind of goes with the whole Black Lives Matter riots and ANTIFA stuff. It’s topical. My dad would kill us if he found out.” He seemed to realize what he’d just said and buried his face in the pillowcase.

  I patted his shoulder. “Easy, Joseph. Take it easy. What went wrong?”

  Joseph wiped his eyes. “They gave us all new computers equipped with their new coprocessors and the thumb dot ports and a bunch of the new dots. The equipment was like nothing we’d ever seen. We finished the rough version in under a month and sent it to Micro Corp. They jazzed it up real nice, improved the graphics and sound and stuff. Then they sent it back to Shane for final checkout and approval. Only we started getting worried because we didn’t have anything in writing and we’d had to do everything in secret so our dad didn’t find out. It would be easy for Micro Corp. to just cut us out completely. We decided to keep the copy they made for Shane and we sent them back a copy with some corrections. Only they weren’t really corrections. We built in a worm that was designed to search out and destroy all files associated with Whack the Pig. That way once they introduced the worm to their system, it would clean all their files and we would have the only copy of our game. Then, when Shane turned eighteen, in two months, we could get our money without them cheating us.”

  It was my turn to take a deep breath. Created a worm that would erase their game from a multi-billion dollar company’s computers? The kids must be geniuses.

  “We knew it was wrong to go against our dad, but him and Shane were fighting a lot. Dad was really pushing God at Shane, saying he wasn’t studying about Him or go
ing to church, or praying. Shane was mad because we’ve learned about God since we were babies and he was getting kind of sick of the whole thing. I mean here we had a chance to make ten million dollars and our game is really cool, but it wasn’t going to happen just because our dad didn’t think it was a Christian thing to do.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Shane met with Mr. Hepperman, he’s the guy we were going through at Micro Corp., and he gave him a contract that said Shane was the original creator of the game and that they were going to pay him the ten million once Shane came of age. Mr. Hepperman took the thumb dot, then laughed at him and said he wasn’t going to sign anything. It was like we thought. They were going to cheat us.”

  Imagine that. I asked, “Did the worm work?”

  “Yeah, it worked great. ‘Cause the next day Mr. Hepperman was waiting for Shane when he got to college. He was mad. He said he would sign the papers as long as Shane gave him the original dot. Shane told him to sign the papers and then he would decide what else they had to do before he gave it to him. Hepperman didn’t like it, but he signed. Shane took the papers and told him he had to talk with a relative that was a lawyer and he would meet with him in a week.” Joseph shook his head. “We didn’t really know any lawyers. We got all the contract stuff off the Internet. Hepperman called Shane the next day and said Roger Doors wanted to meet him at some cabin of his in the mountains down in the Springs. I went with him, but he dropped me a little ways from the cabin so they wouldn’t know about me. Shane said they had lots of stuff to eat and showed him how he could work for them making games for as long as he wanted. It all sounded great and Shane was really pumped. I thought that was that and we were going to be rich, but then a couple nights later I heard Shane crying and when I looked down, from my top bunk, I saw him on his knees praying. He was asking for forgiveness for going against my dad and for making the game and for being greedy and for bringing me into it. I tried to tell him that what we did wasn’t really wrong, and that I wanted to still sell the game. He said no and we fought about it. Finally he said he was going to tell Mr. Hepperman he wouldn’t give them the game and he was going to destroy it right in front of him.”