Gil Mason/Gunwood USA Box Set Read online

  The Exclusive Gil Mason/Gunwood USA Box Set

  Gordon Carroll

  Contents

  Sheepdogs

  Hair of the Dog

  Feral Instinct

  Gunwood USA

  COPYRIGHT 2019

  * * *

  Gordon Carroll

  All Rights Reserved

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this book are fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Sheepdogs

  A Gil Mason Novel

  For Athena, Cassandra, Natalie, Anthony and all the grandkids. How blessed God has made me to have such wonderful children.

  1

  Gil

  My fingers traced the indented letters of the silver WWJD bracelet on my right wrist. I do that when I’m considering pummeling someone. The punk hassling the girl behind the coffee counter was getting louder. My lips twitched up at the corners.

  His suit spoke uptown money, hundred dollar lunches and a fancy little sports car, but his eyes were the hard, black BBs of a rat. He was new money trying to act like old, demanding respect he hadn’t earned.

  The girl was fifteenish, a little pudgy, with braces and a few pimples dotting her forehead and chin. Her eyes were shiny and wet, close to overflowing. If my daughter had lived, she might one day have worked in a shop like this.

  The rodent shoved his venti-five-pump-double-shot-caramel-blah-blah-blah, back at her, sloshing some of the coffee onto the counter.

  I take my coffee the way I did back in the Corps, black, bitter and hot, no preservatives.

  When I saw the girl’s bottom lip start to quiver, I pushed back my chair and stood up.

  Rat guy was still spouting off. “I said extra hot. You know what extra hot is? Well I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not this. This is like warm spit. Do you get paid to serve me spit? You think I’m shelling out five bucks for spit? Is that what you think?”

  It amazes me how in a so-called civilized society, grown adults will let other adults act like spoiled brats, throwing tantrums to get what they want. There were nine other customers in the coffee shop; five men, four women, and none of them did a thing to stop the rat from rattling the bars of its cage. That’s people for you.

  I stepped between them, facing the girl about to cry, my back to the jerk with the foul mouth.

  Beneath my navy blue, un-tucked, short sleeve shirt, I carried a stainless steel .45 caliber, Smith and Wesson 4506, semi-automatic handgun in a pancake holster. The loose shirt made it invisible. It’s a big gun, thick with metal and heavy as a boat anchor. They make sleeker, lighter guns these days with lots more ammo capacity. But I’m old school and somehow a plastic gun just doesn’t sit right with me. I like a weapon that feels lethal. Besides, if I ever run out of bullets, I can always bash them over the head with it. Know what it feels like to get hit in the head with an anchor? Neither do I, but I bet it hurts.

  Besides the gun, I wear a magazine pouch with two loads, my PI badge, an automatic K9 door-popper for my car, and a leather key-holder, clipped to my belt.

  Sitting my nearly full cup on the counter next to his, I smiled at the girl as the first tears started to spill from her eyes. “Would you get me a refill, please?” The girl nodded numbly, trying to blink away the tears. I glanced at the WWJD bracelet on my right wrist, remembering how Christ whipped the moneylenders from the temple grounds.

  The smile turned into a grin.

  From behind me I heard the punk say, “Hey, I was talking here.” He said it mean and hard, just like his eyes.

  I sized him up when he first came in starting his tirade; an inch or so taller than my five ten, a little heavier in a pumped health club sort of way, with short cropped, blond streaked hair so caked with mousse or gel or whatever these kids use today to gunk up their hair that it stood up in little spikes. Like the burs on a brush.

  A sleek pair of Oakley Monster Dog sunglasses bounced off a heavily muscled, over inflated chest, dangling from a strap. That made me smirk inwardly. Irony.

  I have a habit of seeing people through my dog eyes. Superman has his x-ray vision, Ultra Boy his ultra-vision — me — dog eyes. Having trained canines for close to twenty years, I can’t help but notice the same traits and drives that rule the animal kingdom, earnestly at work in my fellow homo sapiens.

  You’ve heard the phrase, his bark is worse than his bite? It means that a certain kind of dog, a fear biter, will hackle up, making himself look big and scary, and bark a lot, but that’s the extent of it. He doesn’t really want to fight. It’s like when an insecure guy is walking on the beach with his girl and he sees another guy walking his way, eyeing his woman. What does the insecure guy do? He puffs up his chest, throws his shoulders back, sucks in his gut and holds his arms out from his sides as if his lats and biceps are too massive to exist in the same universe. When a guy does that, he’s sending out a signal, staking his claim, warning others to stay away. In other words, he’s trying to avoid a fight.

  He’s not the guy to worry about. He’s a bluffer. The ones you have to be careful of are the Mike Tysons of the world — the early Mike Tyson that is, pre-prison and face tattoo, back when he really was bad — the ones who don’t try to make themselves look bigger or badder. The ones who stare you in the eye and walk right up to you and say, “Come here for a second, bro, I want to talk to you,” in a soothing, pleasant voice, and then bite your ear off.

  About a second after rat-eyes started yelling at coffee-girl, I had him pegged. Courage problem. Not too much courage, that’s never a problem in the world of working canines. And by working, I mean military and police. A lack of courage — now that’s a problem.

  I picked up his coffee and turned to him. “You forgot something,” I said.

  “What?” His rat-eyes got a little rattier, his lips turning white, stretching thin. I stepped close, invading his personal space. He held up a hand, chest high, an instinctive reaction. I gripped his wrist with my left, feeling him try to pull back, his face going as pale as his lips.

  Was it fear or rage? My guess was fear. I’d lived with rage the last seven years, since my wife and daughter were murdered, and this didn’t look like it.

  My grip turned hard. Not the kind of hard you get from machines or weights alone, but the kind of hard you develop in a lifetime of living. Real living. I ran away from home when I was fourteen and signed up on a Crabber, fishing the Alaskan coastline. In that line of work, you develop a strong hand quick or don’t make it back alive. I made it back and signed up for another season the next year.

  I slowly rotated his wrist until his thumb pointed straight up. I gently placed his coffee cup against the palm of his upturned hand and tightened my grip, pinching the ligaments and tendons in his forearm, so that his fingers curled around the cardboard.

  A part of me hoped he would go for it. That was the rage talking. A lot of my edges have been rounded since my family’s death, I’ve come to terms with a lot, but there are still a few snags here and there. I’m what my shrink calls a work in progress.

  “Have a nice day,” I said quietly. I leaned in even closer so that my lips almost touched his ear. “Somewhere else.” I leaned back, releasing his wrist, and let him see just a glimpse of what was behind my eyes.

  He turned and left the shop.

  “Thank you.” It was the coffee girl.

  I smiled. “What’s your name?”

  “Mindy Castle.” Her eyes were clear and dry.

  I picked up my coffee and handed her one of my coins. The coins are a lot more expensive than cards, but they last forever and people tend to keep them. “If he comes back in and bothers you, Mindy Castle, give me a call. It w
on’t happen a third time. I give you my word.”

  She nodded bravely.

  I went back to my table, but before I could sit down a tall, thin woman with shoulder length, brown hair, and a sleeping two year old girl in a stroller, walked up to me, holding out her hand. “You must be the private investigator.”

  I offered her my hand. “Gil Mason.” She shook it. I motioned toward a chair and she sat. My ten o’clock appointment had arrived.

  2

  The engagement ring was simple but nice, nothing gaudy or vulgar. Just a small stone embedded in a twisting ring of white gold. The matching wedding band was void of diamonds but continued the twisting motion enhancing the overall appearance.

  You can tell a lot from wedding rings, or the lack thereof. For instance, the twisting grooves of this ring had long since smoothed to gentle slopes. The black antiquing had rubbed away until there was little more than a hint staining only the deepest of cracks.

  The white indentation around her finger contrasted sharply with the nut brown of her tan. The ring and finger told their own story. She’d been married at least a decade; it took some time for a ring to settle like that. She played with it now, spinning it idly as she spoke, tugging it gently toward the knuckle. When a woman fidgets with an object as precious as her wedding ring — moving it closer and closer to that dangerous point where it could slip off and roll away to be lost — she’s subconsciously doing the same thing with her marriage.

  Too bad. She seemed like a nice lady, but staking out wayward husbands isn’t my line.

  “How did you find out about me, Mrs. Franklin?” We sat at a table by the window, my iPad between us. I judge K9 trials and events for police, military and government agencies, as well as private clubs, and keeping up with scheduling is murder.

  She turned the ring with her index finger and thumb. “Please, call me Lisa.”

  I nodded, smiled. “Lisa then.” A splintering of crow’s feet touched the corners of her eyes. They were a light blue, matching the flowered pattern of her shirt. But the eyes themselves lacked something — a luster, the slight shine that lets others know you’re alive. I’d seen this absence before, in the faces of Afghan children after terrorists invaded their village and murdered their parents in front of them. Hope was the missing element, and without it, their eyes looked dead.

  She’d been a beauty once, not so long ago, but years and life eroded her looks, smoothing them in the same way time blunted the ridges of her ring, dulling the sharp edges of her beauty into a mellow, dignified grace that was still very easy on the eyes.

  The little girl made a cooing sound and shifted her position in the stroller. She brought her thumb to her lips and started sucking.

  Lisa smiled and shook her head slowly. She brushed a stray lock of curly hair from the baby’s forehead and looked up at me. “Don’t worry, she won’t wake up. Amber could sleep through a tornado. She gets that from her father.”

  I looked down at the angelic face, seeing my own daughter, Marla, and remembering how we used to push her in a stroller until she would fall asleep from the motion and the gentle hustle of activity all around.

  The curl fell back onto her forehead 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 every dance. My kids attend church regularly. They’re good kids, with good values. My son did not run away.”

  I could have told her how many hundreds of times I’d heard the same arguments from parents who swore up and down that their baby would never run away and hurt them like this and how ninety-nine times out of that hundred the kid would turn up an hour later, sheepish grin on his or her face and that would be that. But I didn’t. It wouldn’t have done any good. I let loose with a better argument.

  “I charge a five thousand dollar retainer, up front. Five more when I find your son. There’s no day charge or expense fee. It’s ten thou if it takes ten minutes or ten years. Once I start a case I never quit until it’s done, even if you fire me.”