It was maybe the slowest elevator I’d ever been on. I kept the cuffs on my knuckles, expecting more trouble. I stopped on the fourteenth floor, slipped off and let the elevator continue on to the fifteenth. I went through a long section of cubicles filled with people talking on phones and joking around and getting coffee from the break room.
The stairwell was down the hallway and around the corner. People hardly noticed me. I went into the stairwell and up the stairs. I cracked the door on the fifteenth and saw a clear hallway. Slipping inside, I snuck up to the corner and spotted five security guards waiting. The bell dinged and the doors opened. I didn’t wait. I went the other way. Most office buildings hold to a circular design, but this was the master suite, the floor where the bigwigs worked. There were no cubicles, no gregarious workers talking and laughing and drinking coffee. There was a long reception area by the elevator where the guards were standing, and a series of doors branching off from both ends, running the length of the hallways. The walls were adorned with floor to ceiling sized posters of what I assumed were their best games, displayed in ornate frames that cost more than my house, car and office building combined. I went to the farthest end of the hall and opened a door with a gold plate on it that read Louis Hepperman Vice President. Inside was a man in a suit and tie, typing on a computer, behind a giant redwood desk. He looked up in surprise, taking off his glasses.
Hepperman, that was the guy that tried to cheat the boys out of Whack The Pig.
“Oops, wrong room, sorry,” I said, closing the door behind me and hurrying the width of the room to another door. It was a bathroom, the faucets on the sink shining gold. I grinned. “Oops, wrong again.”
“What’s going on?” said the man, standing.
“Oh, don’t get up,” I said, trying the next door; it opened into another hallway going back in the direction I’d come.
Hepperman picked up a cordless phone. I couldn’t have that, not before I found Doors. I went to the desk, grabbed up the base and pulled the cord from the wall. Hepperman looked at me like I was insane.
“Where’s Mr. Doors’ office?” I asked politely.
His mouth opened, his face turning red, but no words came out.
“You can just point,” I said, trying to be helpful.
“Get out of my office,” he yelled.
I threw the base of the phone into the hollow spot just below his sternum. It knocked the wind out of him and he fell back into his chair, dropping the phone from his hand. It clattered on the floor but didn’t come apart. High dollar equipment.
I was around the desk and on him before he could get his breath back. I gripped the tie and looped the tail around my fist. I pulled it tight, squeezing his throat closed and making his face far redder than it had been a moment ago. “Where did you say his office is?”
He gurgled out an answer I took to be the last office at the end of the hall. I removed the cuffs from my fist and locked both his hands behind his back around the leg of the desk. It looked like it weighed roughly the same as an actual redwood tree. I pulled off one of his shoes and stuffed his sock into his mouth. I wrapped the tie around his head to keep the sock in. Crude but effective. Besides, I didn’t think I would need that much time anyway. I went down the hallway, tried the doorknob, found it open and went in.
Roger Doors was on the phone, sitting behind a glass desk, with his back to me. He didn’t hear me enter. The walls behind and on both sides of him were tinted glass, looking out on a spectacular view of the nearby mountains. He wore a green, short sleeve shirt, faded jeans, and high end athletic shoes. It’s good to be the king. Only his palace was about to implode.
I locked both doors. He was carrying on a conversation with an old friend, making plans to get together in Hawaii. The trip would have to wait. He caught sight of me out of the corner of an eye. I was standing next to him.
He said, “I’ll have to call you back, Jim.” He hung up and turned to me, looking me up and down. “So, you’re the cause of all the commotion going on.”
Doors was younger than I expected, maybe thirty six, lean and sort of nerdy looking.
“No,” I said, “I think you are the cause.”
“Me? How’s that?” He smiled and I almost punched him.
“Arnold Verick, he works for you.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. A lot of people work for me.”
“He murdered a teenaged boy who developed a game for you called Whack the Pig. He kidnapped the boy’s sister. I want her back.”
He took in a deep breath through his nose as though pondering, let it out forcefully. “Whack the Pig? Never heard of it.” He looked up at me. “Do you have any idea how many laws you are breaking?”
Good enough for me. “A bunch, so I guess a couple more won’t hurt.” I punched him on the side of the head. It was a good punch, hard and from the hip, throwing all my weight into it. It landed between his jaw and temple and dropped him instantly and without so much as a grunt. I hefted him over my shoulder; he didn’t weigh much, and went back out the way I had come. Hepperman was still cuffed to the desk with the sock in his mouth, and the back hallway was clear. I took Doors down the stairs all the way to an outside exit door. I checked to make sure he was still unconscious, propped the door with his body, and went to get my car. I drove to the far west parking lot, then hopped the curb and drove across the lawn to the door. I loaded him into the back seat next to Max and drove away.
I called Nick Carlino on Doors’ phone.
“Who is this and how did you get my number?”
“It’s Gil Mason, the private detective.”
“Have you saved the girl?” he asked.
“I’m working on it. I need some help.”
“Continue.”
“First, I need the address to Roger Doors’ cabin in Manitou Springs.”
“The Roger Doors, of Micro Corp. fame?”
“That’s the one. His head of security, Arnold Verick, is the guy that set you up.” There was a slight pause.
“I know the man,” he said. “It makes sense.”
“I thought it might.” There was another pause.
“And?” he asked.
I told him the second thing I needed. After that he asked me to wait for a second. When he came back on the line he had the address for me.
46
I was starting to worry that I’d hit him too hard. His face had swollen about half again its usual size and was already diffusing the area with bruised colors. I slapped him a couple of times and that woke him up. I had him zip-tied to a chair and I have to admit it felt good to see the look of fear and absence of arrogance on his face. Beneath the chair was a western rug that probably cost more than my car.
“Are you insane?” He looked at me as if he thought I was. “This is kidnapping.”
“Now you know how it feels.” I smiled, picked up the backpack and set it down in front of him.
“You can’t do this. You used to be a cop.”
“Now how do you know that?” I wagged a finger at him. “Arnold Verick has been telling you things, hasn’t he?”
He looked about, sweat starting on his forehead. “Where are we?” He looked around, again his eyes growing large. “This is… this is my house.”
“Yeah, your quaint log cabin in the mountains.” The term cabin had to be taken loosely; it spanned at least five thousand square feet, with an Olympic sized pool in the back. The living room floor was wide plank oak, with a cast stone fireplace and a giant flat screen television fitted into the wall above it. It had soaring ceilings and art glass throughout. Large windows looked out on a fantastic view of the city far below on one side and on nature’s abundance on the other. It made my place look like a slum. “I don’t expect anyone to look here for you. It’s a bit much for my taste, but not bad all in all. At least we can have some privacy.”
“Privacy?”
“Yeah, the kind of privacy your men had with Shane Franklin.”
“I don’t know
what you are taking about.” He seemed to gain a measure of courage and with it, the arrogance seeped back into his voice.
“Oh, you want to play games? I like games. I think I’ll start with the games your men played on Shane.” I reached for the backpack.
“Don’t hurt me,” said Doors, his face going white.
“How did you know Shane was hurt?” He just shook his head and looked down. “Okay, I’m going to make this easy. Your man has Amber and I have you. We trade, just like we did with the thumb dot. Only this time I get the girl. So where is he?”
He shook his head again. “I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him since this morning.”
A popular rap song sounded from his phone; the geek trying to be cool. I answered it. “Doors.”
There was a pause, then Spock’s voice. “You have Mr. Doors’ phone, which means you must have Mr. Doors as well.”
“That’s logical.”
“I have the girl.”
“That was very bad of you, we had a deal. I gave you the game.”
“You set a trap. It was well executed.”
“I should have killed you when I had the chance,” I said.
“You never had the chance.”
“I know I hit you at least five times.”
“The vest saved me; and you?”
“Yeah. Next time I’ll aim higher.”
“You can’t keep Doors.”
“If I don’t get Amber back safe and sound I’ll kill him.” Mr. Tough guy, but I meant it. Or at least I think I did.
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 let him set up an ambush to kill me.” I was leaning so close a few drops of blood dripped from my chest onto his jeans. He turned even whiter and looked as though he would vomit. “You have no idea what you’ve started. You say you’re no boy scout and think of yourself as some kind of nefarious corporate mastermind, but what you really are is a petty, maniacal, control freak who’s money has gotten him in way too deep and whose lap dog has slipped his leash and wrapped it around your throat.” I stood up straight, my breath coming hot and fast. “You’ve done too much; caused too much pain, to be allowed to claim ignorance as your defense. As far as I’m concerned you are directly responsible for all the harm that has happened here. Your greed and pride have destroyed a family. The only thing you can do at this point is to order Verick to stop and give up the girl. If you do that and he agrees, and nothing bad happens to the girl, I’ll turn you over to the police and you can get your high priced lawyers to do what they can for you. But that’s
your only chance. If this plays out any other way, you might as well consider yourself a dead man. Because that’s what you will be.”
I didn’t believe Doors would be able to call off Spock, it had gone too far and Spock would kill Doors before he went to jail for him. But I would let him try. I couldn’t absolve Doors of his guilt, but I could offer him this much, this one chance to try and get Amber back safely and right a little of the wrong he had brought about.
I turned my back on him, disgusted. There were things I had to prepare before Spock got here. I was thinking about them and maybe that was why I didn’t hear anything until the unmistakable “chu-chunk” of a slide pumping a round into the chamber of a shotgun sounded behind me.
My vest was sitting on the couch beside my shirt, my gun next to them. They might as well have been on the moon. The transmitter to Max’s collar was still on my belt, but I stationed him outside the house, thinking I had more time. My biggest regret was that I had failed Amber and her parents. I made the turn slowly. I would try and throw Spock off by turning slow then lunging at him, knowing I would take most of the blast head on. I steeled my will to keep going no matter how badly I was hurt. I had to try and kill him before I died. I had to give Amber that much of a chance. I’d failed my own daughter and wife, I would not fail her.
I finished the turn, my calves and hamstrings bunching in preparation, but it wasn’t Spock. It was Joseph Franklin and the shotgun he held was pressed against the base of Roger Doors’ skull.
47
Max
The Alpha had put Max in a down behind a screen of hedges that breasted the front porch. From beneath and between the bushes Max could see the road that led to the cabin. He laid perfectly still, only his eyes moving.
He caught the boy’s scent long before seeing him. The fear smell was there. He watched him walk up from the southeast, go to the Escalade, quietly open a door, rummage around inside and take out the long barreled shotgun. The boy walked within a body’s length of him and peered into a window, cupping one hand and standing on his toes.
Sheepdogs: Keeping the Wolves at Bay Page 22