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

his head. “There was a woman, a coworker; she had sort of a thing for me. She was younger, and I was flattered. I should have shut her down right away but I didn’t. Nothing happened between us — I mean absolutely nothing — but like I said, I let it go longer than I should have and when I finally told her that I was happily married and that I wouldn’t cheat on my wife, she got mad and called Lisa up and told her a lot of lies. Lisa confronted me and I told her the truth. She believed me, I think, but it put a stumbling block between us. She didn’t want me to touch her — not at first — then, later, when things probably could have gotten better I… I don’t know, I guess my pride got in the way. I was angry at her for believing that I did something when I didn’t and…” he held out his hands as if he couldn’t find the words. “I don’t know, I was just being stupid, so when she tried to soften, to let me come back, I pushed her away. I didn’t mean for it to last, I just wanted to show her how wrong she had been and how it hurt me, but then I hurt her and it’s been going back and forth since then. I don’t know how to stop it. How to bring us back together. And now with Shane gone, and Amber, I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

I felt for him, for both of them. Their marriage was on shaky ground, but like I said before, there just wasn’t time for this now. Amber had to be our only focus. “Tom, I have a plan for tomorrow, but Amber is your daughter, you have to make the final call.”

“Call?”

“There are two ways we can play this. We can let the police know what’s going on. They would call in the FBI and eventually they would probably be able to nail everyone involved.”

“What would happen to Amber?”

“They’ll either get scared, and give her back, or they’ll kill her.”

“You’ve met these men. Do you think they’ll get scared?”

I saw Mr. Spock’s cold eyes. “No. They’ll kill her. And then they’ll try to kill the rest of your family.”

Tom nodded, he had one dead son already, proof of their mindset. “What’s the other option?”

“It’s dangerous. You may have to kill.”

He looked up at me, his face pale but his eyes hard. “Good.”

41

It would be a trap of course. There was no way Mr. Spock would leave all these loose ends dangling around to come back and form a noose to put around his own neck. The important thing was they would have to bring the girl, just as I would have to bring the thumb dot.

I had to forgo my morning workout and cancel a K9 demo. We arrived at Red Rocks, having come in the back way through the small town of Morrison. The roads were twisting, winding, narrow stretches of lightless roadway, with drop offs on one side and massive boulders of sandstone on the other. Back when I was growing up, we used to have Driver’s Education taught in the schools and the instructors would take us up on these roads to teach us. Talk about guts, those guys must have had ulcers on their ulcers. Bad enough having a pimple faced, hormone enraged, indestructible fifteen year-old behind the wheel, but then to have him race around these curves? No thanks.

The mountains loomed ahead, dark and foreboding like an omen of bad things to come. This early in the morning, before the sun was up, the jagged peaks looked like thick, blunt fingers stretching for the sky. Black silhouettes guarding over the lesser mounds of the foothills and infant slabs of sand stone stained red from the earth’s blood.

I found a little patch of ground that wasn’t too littered with rocks and brush, and stashed the Escalade. We were about a half mile from the base of the theater, just a jog for me and Max and Pilgrim, even with my backpack, but Tom was slicked with sweat and huffing pretty hard by the time we reached the big bay door that led to the underground tunnels running beneath and behind the stage.

Most people don’t know that these tunnels exist. The giant slabs known as Creation Rock and Ship Rock form the sides of this natural phenomenon known as Red Rocks Amphitheater. Creation Rock sits to the north while Ship Rock guards the south, their sheer sides funneling down in a half bowl shape to an enclosing disc shaped rock called Stage Rock that completes and seals the bottom of the theater.

Way back in the old days it was called Garden of the Angels, but in 1906 the name was changed to Garden of the Titans. Denver acquired it in 1928. In the thirties FDR’s New Deal workforce, the CCC, constructed the stage, seating, and parking lots, one at the bottom and one up top. They also hollowed out the mountain at the bottom of the stage, creating rooms for performers and stage hands and equipment to be housed. The tunnels also lead to the bathrooms on the north side of the stage as well as under the first few center rows to a platform that sits in the middle of the seating, for lights and soundstage equipment. It took the workers five years to complete the job.

In the mid seventies up into the eighties, a promoter named Berry Fey made Red Rocks literally rock. With seventy to ninety concerts a summer, most of them sold out and beyond. The stated capacity is about ninety-six hundred, but I’ve seen recordings of concerts that topped out at over twelve thousand. Fans would sit in the plant stands, the aisles, on top of the roof of the upper bathrooms; they’d even hang off the rocks.

Man, what I wouldn’t give to