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

or cigarettes filled with marijuana) in the ashtray along with a few pennies and a nickel. In the glove box was a beautifully crafted blue and gold glass pot pipe with burned residue in its bowl. There was a tattered owner’s manual, a screwdriver, two Mild Taco Bell hot sauce packets, and three .38 caliber bullets.

I leaned over the back seat and searched through the trash on the floorboards. Nothing useful. I checked under the sun visors — nada under the passenger’s — an insurance card and the vehicle’s registration under the driver’s — who’d a thunk? I checked the insurance; it was two years out of date. I smiled; the world was making sense again.

Opening the driver’s door I got out and leaned down. Under the seat I found a bunch of junk like under the passenger’s side — minus the panties — and one thing the passenger’s side didn’t have. A crumpled up traffic ticket with an address in Colorado Springs.

24

I was back in my car by the time they came out of the Ice Rink. Only they didn’t come out alone. There was a new guy and a girl with them. They all piled into the car. The new guy was tall and thin with big gauges in his earlobes making them stretch down about three inches. The girl was around nineteen and wearing a tight halter top and cut-off short-short jeans. Her hair was a reddish-blond mixture cut as short as her jeans, and she had pierced eyebrows, nostrils, lips and I didn’t even want to guess at what else.

Gauges and Short-Shorts got into the back together and Baldy and Pimples took their assigned places in the front. They left the area of the old Air Force Base and headed east on 6th. They took a left hand turn, without signaling, on Havana and then a right when they got to Colfax. I followed back about three car lengths as we passed the Anschutz Medical Campus. It used to be Fitzsimons Army Medical Center until the base was closed in 1999. During the nineties a lot of military bases were closed around the country. Aurora PD still uses a few of the old Army buildings on the base. One of their district sub-stations is housed on the east side of the base near Potomac. Their K9 Unit is based out of there. They have a total of seven teams. Three for each side of the house and a sergeant with a working K9 as the team supervisor. All of their dogs are dual purpose, meaning they work either narcotics and apprehension, or explosives and apprehension. Either way, you get one of those land sharks on your tail and you might as well kiss your rump roast goodbye, because they’ll tenderize you right proper.

Baldy pulled into the drive-thru of a Dairy Queen a little ways beyond the interstate overpass. I drove on to the next left, turned, pulled a quick U-turn and waited. Smoke rolled out of both open windows. All four of them were smoking. I wondered how anyone could breath in that atmosphere. If they could survive that, NASA should enlist them for the Mars Mission. What’s a ninety-eight percent mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen compared to a hundred percent mixture of tar, nicotine, toluene, formaldehyde and a dozen other toxic ingredients?

Once they had their sundaes, malts, and Star Kisses they made like a banana and split. They cruised back the way they came until they passed 6th on Havana going on to Iliff where they made a right heading west. Twice cars pulled out from between us leaving me exposed. It didn’t matter. I probably could have hung a sign on my windshield saying “I’m following you boneheads” and honked my horn in a continuous blare and they still wouldn’t have caught on. It’s not that I’m complaining, but a guy likes to know that all the effort he’s taking not to be spotted isn’t wasted. Tailing is a difficult and dangerous art that takes years to perfect and these guys weren’t even trying. It was sort of insulting.

By the time we got to Hampden and Grape I was about ready to hook a towrope to their bumper and take a nap until we got to wherever they were going.

I looked back at Max for some compassion, but he was crashed out on the back seat, snoring.

We went north on Grape a few blocks and I got the feeling they were close to stopping. I pulled over to the curb and let them move on another block. They took a left and I lost sight of them. I stayed where I was.

This area was all residential. Older homes, small with no garages. There were a few carports but they looked to be additions. I gave them another five minutes, then I took out the GPS screen I had sitting on the seat next to me. I’d stuck its magnetized counterpart under Baldy’s driver’s side rear wheel well after searching his car. The GPS screen showed a small map with a car stopped at a location that was highlighted in bright numbers and letters. If I pushed a little block on the touch screen it would have said the address out loud for me.

I guess I could have just waited until they parked and not followed them at all, but like Napoleon Dynamite, I like to keep my skills sharp. Duh!

They parked roughly two blocks north and one block west. I drove down the street at a nice residential twenty miles an hour, dropping down to about one point five miles per hour as I crossed through the moat dug across each intersection that the Denver crews mislabel as “DIPS”, so as not to bottom out my SUV that has the clearance level and steel construction of a tank, but can still barely survive them. I saw Baldy’s ride parked in a driveway right where Spy-Spy said it would be. The house was