Sheepdogs: Keeping the Wolves at Bay by Gordon Carroll (good books to read for beginners TXT) 📕

of Central City and Black Hawk. And right there sat one with The Mills pictured on the front.

Something nagged at me. I pulled the parking stub from the limo out of my pocket. Micro Corp. I went back to the game systems.

Micro Corp Laser Glove. There was no game yet, just a splashy sign announcing Coming Soon! In Time for Christmas! The display was stylish. It looked similar to the Nintendo Wii except the entire computer was housed in the glove. It utilized a revolutionary new co-processor that was smaller than any to date, but able to hold five times as much information. Of course it was.

A sales person came over to me. His tag read Mike and under that Asst. Mgr.

I asked him who the parent company of Game’s End was. He proudly told me it was a subsidiary of Micro Corporation.

Mr. Spock had made a fool of me by setting me up against the mob and wasting my time in Black Hawk, but he wasn’t quite as careful as he thought he was. There’s an old adage that says no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. OJ Simpson found that out as have a lot of others. Mr. Spock hadn’t taken this possibility into consideration. He thought he could keep me diverted with his phony leads and glib comments long enough for him to get what he was after.

Spock was no mobster. He was hired muscle for someone connected with Micro Corp.

I drove to a Kneaders and got some coffee. I fired up my laptop and looked up Micro Corp. It was owned by a bazillionaire named Roger Doors. Mr. Doors made his first hundred million or so back in the late nineties on a game called Bloody Suzy. Suzy was a blonde bomb-shell that made Kendra’s hero, Lara Croft, look like a tom-boy. It was a first-person shooter game where Suzy went around exterminating all the women in town who were becoming zomboids due to the dropping spores of a passing comet. When Suzy killed enough zombie women, she would be rewarded by mating with all the dead women’s husband’s and boyfriends, in order to help keep the species alive.

A wholesome family game for all ages.

Roger Doors sunk over two hundred million into his new headquarters here in the Springs, a pretty big gamble, considering most of the gaming industry, as well as the top programmers and developers were located in California.

Doors had created a new system; The Laser Glove, due out this Christmas. It was marketed as having three new games that would stun the world. Investors were claiming the new system and games would bring in over a billion dollars worldwide.

Mr. Spock worked for someone important in connection with Micro Corporation — bazillionaire owners are usually considered to be important people. Mr. Spock was looking for a new smaller flash drive with something worth killing for on it — Roger Doors was into making video games that raked in hundreds of millions — Roger Doors’ new system ran on a new smaller flash drive called a thumb dot. Teenagers play video games — Shane Franklin was a teenager. Shane wouldn’t tell them where the thumb dot was, even under torture and was killed for it — Shane Franklin had a teenage brother. — and, when I was in Shane’s room talking to his brother I remember seeing a magazine with Roger Doors on the cover.

It was time to talk with Joseph Franklin again.

39

Lisa’s sister, Trudy, answered the door.

“Where’s Joseph?”

She pointed upstairs. “He’s in his room. The other kids are in the backyard.”

I started up the stairs. “I need to talk with him.”

Trudy smiled. The smile looked sad and tired. “I’ll start some dinner. Will you be staying?”

“No. Thank you anyway. I have some work to do. Is Tom back from talking to the police yet?”

She shook her head. “But he called and said he wouldn’t be much longer.”

“Thanks.”

I reached the top of the stairs and paused outside of Joseph’s room. I knocked lightly. Joseph opened the door. He looked surprised to see me. “Are my parents here?”

“We need to talk,” I said.

His eyebrows went up. “What about?”

“Mind if I come in?”

He shrugged and stepped back. I entered. The room was pretty much like any American teenage boy’s room, except there weren’t any posters of nearly naked women decorating the walls. A tablet sat on a desk littered with power cords and a monitor. The computer was missing, stolen in the burglary. There was a bunk bed and lots of books.

“You share a room with Shane?”

He nodded. “Yeah, we all share. That’s the way it is when there’s five kids.”

I sat on the lower bunk and held a hand toward the desk chair. “Have a seat, please.” He shrugged again and sat down.

“Joseph… do you go by Joseph or Joe?”

“Either.”

I nodded. “I like Joseph.” I paused. “I have to talk some straight talk with you, Joseph. What I’m going to say is hard to take. I wish I could let your parents tell you, but there isn’t time. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to give it to you straight.”

He sat back in the chair, eyeing me suspiciously. “You’re kind of scaring me.”

“Yeah, well, this is something to be scared of, but there’s no helping it. Your brother Shane is dead.”

Joseph’s face drained of color. His jaw dropped. Tears welled in his eyes.

“It gets worse. He was kidnapped and murdered. He was supposed to have something someone wants. A flash drive of some kind called a thumb dot. I don’t know exactly what’s on this drive, but I think it’s some new game or something like that. I have to get it. The same people that murdered your brother kidnapped your father and your sister Amber. I was able to save your dad, but they still have Amber. They’re going to kill her if I don’t find it and give it to them.” I stopped, letting the