Sheepdogs: Keeping the Wolves at Bay by Gordon Carroll (tools of titans ebook .TXT) 📗

and I felt an incredible urge to reach down and move it with my finger. What I wouldn’t give to touch my daughter’s face again. Just to hold her, to kiss her one last time. I gave into the impulse and adjusted the little ringlet, it felt as fine as mist against my skin. Amber cooed gently around the cork of her thumb and reached up with her free hand, gripping my finger in her plump little fist. Her lids half opened and a smile touched her lips. She cooed again and went back to sucking. I gently pried my finger loose, feeling a pain in my chest.

Lisa Franklin must have seen something in my eyes. She looked at me with a question.

“I hope you don’t mind that I brought her. If it’s a problem…”

I held up a hand, my eyes stinging. “No. No problem at all. She’s beautiful.”

“Thank you.” She twisted the ring; blinked twice. “A friend of mine, Tammy Eisgner, I babysit for her sometimes, told me you helped her when no one else would.”

Tammy Eisgner, pretty and petite. One of my first clients. She worked as a park ranger at Colorado National Park. There’d been trouble with a fellow worker she dated once. He turned into a stalker and things began to get a bit dicey. Nothing quite bad enough for police intervention, but plenty bad enough to creep her out. Besides, in my experience stalkers always escalate unless swiftly and firmly handled.

I swiftly and firmly handled him. He transferred and that was that.

“Tammy got married?”

“About three years ago. She has two boys.”

I rolled my eyes, feeling a little chill at the thought that four years could have passed already. Time has a sneaky way of slipping by.

“She still has your coin, like the one I saw you give the girl over there.”

“My business card. I give them to my friends.”

Her eyebrows dipped down, making her look very serious. She looked at the girl behind the counter. “Is she your friend? She acted like she didn’t know you.”

“She’s a new friend.”

Her eyebrows drew down even farther. “Why?”

I took a sip of coffee, the steam swirling up in misty ribbons, the smell rich, the taste sharp. I turned off my iPad. I’d almost finished with my K9 scheduling when muscle head started bothering the girl. “She needed a friend just then, don’t you think?”

Lisa Franklin looked down, her long, thin fingers playing at the ring. The nails were not long but well kept, like the rest of her. She was a worker, this one.

“I need help,” she said, and I saw tears drip onto her lap. “The police won’t do anything. My husband, Tom, he says I’m overreacting…but I’m not. I swear I’m not. A mother knows when her child is in trouble.” Her voice caught in little hitches and she looked down at baby Amber. “I’m so scared. Please, please help me.”

I placed a coin on the table, slid it over with one finger until it rested at the very edge where she couldn’t help but see.

“Tell me about it.”

3

I never meet potential clients at my office for the first visit. I used to, in the early years after getting canned from the Sheriff’s Office, but after having my office trashed, my tires sliced, and my windows smashed when I refused to take certain cases, I gave up on the practice. Let Starbucks, and Caribou and Peabody’s foot the bill.

Besides, it smelled a lot nicer here. It’s not just the coffee either. There’s plenty of breakfast fodder. Muffins, brownies, coffee cake, scones; enough sugar to melt even Superman’s steel abs into floppy, molten slag.

I picked up Lisa’s order from Mindy Castle and set the extra-hot, venti (which is Starbucksian for really big) vanilla latte in front of her and took my seat. She looked a little better. Her eyes were red from crying, but she was getting herself back under control.

“Excuse me,” I said in my best Michael Myers impersonation, “but I believe I asked for the large.”

She gave a half laugh. “I saw that movie, Axe Murderer something or other, right? That’s a terrible impersonation.”

“Everyone’s a critic. The movie’s So I Married an Axe Murderer,” I said. “In the poet’s coffee shop, like in the beatnik period. It reminds me of Dobie Gillis.”

She smiled, big this time, and it lit up her face, melting the years. “The one with Bob Denver — what was that other show he was on?”

“Gilligan’s Island,” I said. “I grew up on ancient reruns. Hogan’s Heroes, McHale’s Navy, Father Knows Best, Dragnet — all of them. When I was nine I wanted to change my name to Beaver Munster Buffy Pugsley Howell the third.”

The smile widened showing perfect, white teeth. Say what you want, those old shows still have the power to make people laugh.

“Why did Tammy Eisgner think you might need my services?”

That killed the smile. “My son’s missing.”

“How old is he?”

She looked down at Amber, still sleeping soundly. She twisted the ring on her finger. “Seventeen.”

“How long has he been missing?”

Turn-turn. “Five days.”

Five days, that’s nothing for a seventeen year old. Back when I worked a uniform on the streets, kids ran away all the time. We wouldn’t even take a report till they were gone at least seventy-two hours. These days, what with kids having their own rides and bank accounts and phones and internet access letting them hook up with people all over the country, five days is like spending the night at a buddy’s house.

“That’s not very long, Lisa.”

“Not for some people,” she said, still looking at Amber. “But my kids are different.” Now she did look up and I saw a shine of pride in her eyes, a strength that hadn’t been there a minute ago. “I have five children, Mr. Mason. I am very active in their lives. I’m on the PTA, I’m a den mother for both my sons’ and my daughters’ scout troops. I volunteer for every school function and chaperone