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Synopsis
Jeffrey B. Burton's The Keepers is the next installment of the Mace Reid K-9 series, featuring golden retriever cadaver dog Vira and her handler, Mason Reid.
Mason “Mace” Reid lives on the outskirts of Chicago and specializes in human remains detection―that is, he trains dogs to hunt for dead bodies. He calls his pack of cadaver dogs The Finders, and his prize pupil is a golden retriever named Vira.
When Mace Reid and Vira are called in to search Washington Park at three o'clock in the morning, what they find has them running for their very lives. The trail of murder and mayhem Mace and CPD Officer Kippy Gimm have been following leads them to uncover treachery and corruption at the highest level, and their discoveries do not bode well for them . . . nor for the Windy City itself.
The Keepers is an exciting, fast-paced mystery filled with courageous dogs you'll want to root
Release date: June 29, 2021
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages: 288
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The Keepers
Jeffrey B. Burton
LAST NIGHT
David Siskin wondered why he bothered checking into the Courtyard Marriott on his bimonthly trips to Chicago as he always worked late into the evening at the office suite off North Dearborn. A cot in the copy room would save the business money as well as save Siskin mucho time since booking a room at the Marriott for the equivalent of a lengthy nap didn’t help the bottom line.
And, as a real estate investor, David Siskin was all about the bottom line.
His wife, Cherie, had knighted Siskin a workaholic decades ago, before the two had even tied the knot, but she didn’t mean it in a bad way. Cherie had her book clubs, her quilting classes, her floristry, her fundraising for the Alzheimer’s Association—the disease that first stole her mother’s mind and then her life—as well as a half dozen other public-service hobbies that never registered on Siskin’s radar but kept her busy now that the kids were grown. By contrast, outside of work, Siskin had no hobbies. Sure, he suffered through endless rounds of golf as that was part of the game you played to rub elbows with investors and property financiers, but the actual pastime never took hold of him. However, when Siskin hit middle age and began fretting over the expansion of his midsection, he took up biking. Siskin even dumped a couple grand into a Cannondale CAAD. Siskin’s hobby lasted all of a week. He was biking around Lake Nokomis one beautiful summer evening, enjoying both the exercise as well as life in general—until the debacle. Some hothead in a yellow Corvette laid on the horn and didn’t let up. It startled Siskin, sending him into the curb and from thence ass over teakettle onto the sidewalk. Bruised and bleeding, Siskin glanced up in time to witness the Corvette speed past with a middle finger salute held high out of the driver’s side window.
The road bike had been gathering dust in the garage ever since.
Siskin lived in Minneapolis, had all of his life, and—like loads of other business commuters in the Twin Cities—he took the United Airlines puddle jumper to O’Hare and, two or three days later, took it home again. Siskin’s Chicago partners, venture capitalists one and all, didn’t burn the midnight oil like he did. Siskin’s Chicago partners were more clock-watchers—golf-playing nine-to-fivers.
That didn’t bother Siskin. There were no hard feelings.
Siskin’s Chicago partners did their jobs.
They made money. They invested money.
Rinse. Repeat.
Siskin heard sounds from the outer office and wondered who in hell that could be. Margie, the spinster admin who drenched herself in so much perfume that her fragrance lingered long after she’d exited your office, had waved goodbye hours ago. And the night janitor, Juan or Raul or whatever, had already passed through the office suite with his trash cart and vacuum cleaner and dust wand. Siskin glanced at his Rolex Explorer—a gift from Cherie given about the time of his biking debacle—and figured it was time to head over to the Marriott for his nightly siesta.
It was then a throat cleared and Siskin’s head snapped up.
An impossibly large man filled the doorway of Siskin’s office. The unannounced visitor was not basketball-player tall but appeared to be seven feet in height, possibly aided by the pointed-toed cowboy boots on his feet as well as the black fedora on the top of his head. The unannounced visitor was dressed in a classic black suit, cut well for his size and height. The unannounced visitor also sported an unbuttoned brown raincoat that hung down to his ankles and appeared to contain enough fabric to sail a small skiff to China. The man was a living chiaroscuro, a Goliath of light and shadow, and looked as though he’d just muscled his way out of an old black-and-white Humphrey Bogart movie.
“Is this a bad time?” the unannounced visitor said.
Siskin hadn’t been this startled since the unfortunate biking incident at Lake Nokomis. “The office has been closed for hours.”
The unannounced visitor glanced about Siskin’s twenty-fifth-floor office. “You don’t say.”
Siskin saved and exited the Excel sheet he’d been working on and leaned back in his chair. “What can I help you with?”
“Do you mind if I sit?”
Siskin motioned to the guest chair in front of his desk, hoping it was sturdy enough to support the man’s bulk. Mike McCarron flickered through Siskin’s mind. Michael J. McCarron was one of his Chicago business partners and the president of the investment company in which he currently convened with the unannounced visitor. Michael J. McCarron and that Irish sense of humor of his, always ready with an off-color joke, always filling dinner conversation with the high jinks he’d pulled on his wife and children, friends and neighbors, and even some of the raunchier practical jokes he’d pulled during his years at Columbia University. Siskin thought he heard light rustling coming from the outer office and imagined McCarron and one of the other partners hiding behind the door, keeping their chuckles to a minimum after imbibing a single malt or four at a nearby tavern where, evidently, they’d met this guy who looked like a film-noir version of Paul Bunyan and convinced him to participate in some kind of office prank.
“So…” The unannounced visitor spoke again after cramming his heft into the cushioned armchair. “You’re the Jew from Minneapolis?”
“Yes,” Siskin replied, now convinced this stunt was more of McCarron’s tomfoolery, “I’m the Jew from Minneapolis.”
“My name is Cordov Woods, as in a cord of wood.” The big man smiled. “I shit you not. My father laughed his ass off every time he introduced me. But everybody calls me Cord.”
Siskin definitely heard rustling in the outer office. “What can I do for you, Mr. Woods?”
“Do you like idioms? You know, a turn of phrase that contains a special meaning?”
Siskin shrugged. “I haven’t given them much thought, one way or the other.”
“I find idioms fascinating—what they mean, how they came into being. And you’ve no doubt heard the one that goes ‘don’t upset the apple cart’?”
Siskin nodded.
“It’s basically the same expression as ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’ Both idioms generally mean—and pardon my French—don’t fuck with the status quo. Because, if I’m selling apples, I’ve stacked my cart in a tidy structure—an orderly manner—which keeps the merchandise from rolling off the cart and all over the street. Do you see what I mean?”
Siskin nodded again. He felt goose bumps forming, the hair on the back of his neck began to prickle, and he was no longer so certain this encounter was a Michael McCarron–hatched gag at all. He began to suspect that other thing … the one he’d been assured—not assured but promised—would be kept in the strictest of confidence.
“So, if I’m out selling my apples, trying to make a decent living for myself and my family, and then some shit-hog comes along and pulls an apple out from where he shouldn’t. And before you can say fuckity-doo-dah, my employer has me chasing runaway apples all over the goddamned street.” The unannounced visitor stared at Siskin a long moment. “Now why did you have to go and yank that apple off my cart, Mr. Jew from Minneapolis?”
It took Siskin a second to speak, but when he did, he spoke fast—a nervous habit that kicked in whenever he came under pressure. “This is insane. You had to have checked in with the lobby guards at the main desk. They’ve got cameras all over the building … they even track your card in the elevator at this time of night.”
“Tell me about it.” The big man shrugged. “Makes me pine for the olden days. A simpler time. I’ve got several friends, colleagues to be more exact, I’ll never see again unless I visit them at the Stateville Correctional Center. And I ain’t visiting Stateville. Now, all these old colleagues of mine had to do was stay current; just enter the twenty-first century for crying out loud, and they’d have never seen a second inside of SCC.” The unannounced visitor who called himself Cord Woods tried leaning back in his chair. However, considering his bulk, there wasn’t much room to maneuver. “But to your point, I didn’t come in through the lobby and I didn’t sign in at the guard station. As for cameras and elevator cards and all that jazz—another idiom by the way—I’ve got a world-class IT guy that has my back.”
“You’ll never get away with this,” Siskin spoke again, not so fast this time, now feeling as though he were about to vomit.
“You don’t know Jethro. The guy’s an awful conversationalist—don’t even get me started on the lost art of conversation or I’ll wax on all night—but Jethro’s a true magician, he really is, although he may be somewhat autistic or, what’s that other thing that’s not as bad? Asperger’s syndrome? Jethro’s probably more Asperger’s than autistic, but, bear in mind, I’m no expert, and I doubt Jethro’s ever been tested. You see, as long as Jethro kept fetching daddy’s ice beer from the fridge, his parents didn’t give two shits about any irregular behavior on his part. A sorry state of affairs that was, quite frankly, but they’re both now out of the picture—figuratively and literally—since back when Jethro proved his worth. Dear old dad’s ice-beer days are gone forever.” The big man added, “I saw to that myself.”
“What do you want from me?” Siskin knew he’d never be able to retrieve his iPhone from the breast pocket of his suit jacket, so he inched some fingers toward the desk phone.
“First off, I’m not going to hurt you.” The unannounced visitor flicked his head toward the outer office. “Jethro’s going to town on your network server. And he’ll need your laptop, of course, when he’s done with that. If I were you, I’d just sit back and relax.”
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey B. Burton
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