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

looked back down at Pimples’ pleading eyes. “What did you and the others do to his daughter?”

“Nothing. She was never here, dude. Mr. Black took her with him.” He switched his eyes quickly from me to Tom and back to me without moving his neck. “I swear, dude. I swear.”

Tom’s voice was choked with rage. “You said you were raping her. A two-year old girl.” He was shouting now.

I de-cocked the .45 and brought it down on top of Pimples’ head. He slumped, unconscious. It was the only way I could think of to keep Tom from shooting him.

“He deserves to die,” said Tom, repeating his earlier threat.

“Forget him. We have to get this girl to a hospital.”

Tom nodded, still pointing the Ruger at Pimples’ head. I wasn’t worried. Tom wasn’t the type that could kill a helpless man.

I went down the stairs, my gun leading the way. Everyone in the living room was still dead or unconscious. I tried not to look at the mess Max left in the corner. The body shuddered and a few wet moans came from what used to be the boy’s face. I didn’t know if he would live or not — it might be best for him if he didn’t. But if he did, he wouldn’t be winning any beauty contest, that’s for sure. Tom and Max followed me out to the car.

35

Max

Max sat in the far back while the Alpha and the new man sat in the front. The female human lay across the seats, unconscious. She had the bad smell on her. Not the fear smell. No, it was the smell of the rotting drugs — like the man he found hiding under the porch. Max could smell other humans on her as well. The man he’d attacked mated with her — he could smell his spore. It had the bad smell too.

Max didn’t think the woman would live. It was more than just her smell. He could feel something not right about her. As though her heat were wrong. She felt confused, scrambled. Max didn’t understand the feeling, but he didn’t like it.

The man next to the Alpha had many complex scents to him. There was fear, but there was rage too. And sadness. He seemed very weak and Max had to wonder why the Alpha should waste any time on him.

The Alpha himself was hurt. There was blood, the scent rich and bright and full of tingling power. But he did not seem weak now. He exuded a strange aura of strength and confidence, a sense of purpose that would not be deterred.

This was worthy of the Alpha. Max could respect this.

What a strange animal the Alpha was.

36

Gil

Jared Darling met me at Aurora South Hospital. He was none too happy.

The Hispanic girl turned out to be a runaway from St. Louis headed for California. She didn’t get too far. She showed signs of extreme sexual abuse, whether forced or just the price of the drugs she consumed, the doctors couldn’t tell yet. She had lapsed into a coma.

My nurse, a hefty old bat with a disposition worse than my secretary Yolanda’s, was happily at work scrubbing out my wounds. The bullet creased my neck, dug into the meat of my right trapezius, punched out the other side, slipped back inside at the shoulder and lodged just under the skin at the top of my bicep. Before Broom Hilda, the battle axe, started in with her brush, a petite brunette that looked way too young to be a doctor had come in and jabbed a needle under the weird lump that rode my bicep. It hurt, but I couldn’t let on that it hurt. Not in front of a little slip of a thing like her. Instead I did what Oliver Queen, The Green Arrow would do. I smiled.

Until I saw the scalpel. “What are you going to do with that?”

“This,” she said, and sliced a clean line across the top of the lump. Apparently she was too new to know it took a little longer than five seconds for Novocain to go to work. She squeezed the sides of the lump and the mashed bullet plopped out into a curved metal pan she held beneath it. It made a hollow “tunk” sound. She held the bullet up between gloved fingers, little smudges of my blood staining the latex a dark red.

“Souvenir?” she asked.

“No, thanks,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach. “I’ve got plenty.”

She looked me over and shook her head. “All those scars. Maybe you should invest in a bulletproof vest.” Everyone’s a comic.

Darling walked in right then and took the pan from the doctor’s hands. “That’s evidence,” he said. Then came Broom Hilda with her brush, and even Darling looked a bit green around the gills.

The back of my neck wasn’t so bad. The bullet had broken the skin and taken a little meat with it, but the cleaning went pretty smoothly. It was the tunnels that really hurt. Pieces of shirt had been punched into my flesh with the bullet and Hilda used an instrument that looked frighteningly like a gun cleaning bore brush to scrub out the wound.

The tiny brunette doctor came back in, tossed on a couple of stitches and handed me a prescription for pain killers and antibiotics. She smiled at me and left the room.

“There’s a bunch of dead people back at that house,” said Sergeant Darling, his belly stretching the material around the single buttoned button of his suit coat.

“Sorry about that.” I winced as I put my shirt back on. “They were all kidnappers, rapists, and probably involved in Shane Franklin’s murder. Besides, they were trying to kill me.”

“Didn’t I tell you to call me before you got into anything? Isn’t that what I said to you?”

“I’m sorry, there just wasn’t time.”

He shook his head and closed his eyes. “What’s the story with the guy and gal in the waiting room?”

“It’s their son that got murdered. The same