SPIDER MOUNTAIN Page 16

  “We’re just camping out here, Sheriff,” Greenberg said. “You know—like an off-site? A time to kick things around, without being bothered by all that e-mail and phone calls. Talk about what we’re going to do about the out-of-control drug problem in Robbins County.”

  Suddenly the shepherds turned to face the lake and began to growl. I turned to look in time to see three flat-bottomed boats emerging out of the darkness. Each boat held two men who were standing and pointing shotguns at us. A third sat in the stern and paddled until the boats grounded in the gravel at the shoreline.

  That damned flashlight, I thought. That had been a signal.

  “Now then,” Mingo said in a much calmer voice, his anger melting away. He had his own sidearm in his right hand. My shepherds weren’t happy with these developments.

  “Everybody just sit tight,” he said pleasantly. “We don’t want any of my deputies here making any mistakes, right? Mister Richter, curb those dogs or they’re going to get shot.”

  “You have to be shitting me,” Greenberg protested. “Pointing weapons at federal agents? Those aren’t deputies—they’re just a bunch of Creigh riffraff.”

  “All sworn this very evening,” Mingo said. “And they ain’t pointing at you, Special Agent. They’re pointing at this murder suspect here. Mr. Richter, walk towards me.” The two agents who’d been asleep in their tents poked heads out and froze when they saw all the guns.

  Mingo turned to Carrie. “You, too, young lady. You’re both under arrest for assault and battery against one Tommy Weil, who swore out an affidavit in my office that you two attacked him with these two savage dogs right there.”

  I thought I knew what was coming next, so I decided to get the shepherds out of harm’s way. “Frick,” I called in a very clear voice. “Frack. Hide!”

  Before any of the humans could react, both dogs bolted, going in different directions into the darkness. One of the men in the boats swung his shotgun, but his target was already out of sight. I could see that Greenberg was about to get into it in a big way, and I gave him a warning shake of the head before walking over to where Mingo stood pointing a gun at me. Carrie didn’t budge.

  Mingo holstered his weapon and then made me turn around and put my hands behind me so he could lock on a pair of plastic cuffs. “I said, you, too, miss. You won’t like it if one of my deputies has to help you.”

  I wondered what the on-watch agents were doing, but I had this sick feeling that they were sitting up there somewhere on a rock with a shotgun at the back of their heads. These guys had come in off the lake without making a single sound, and that was hard to do, the way sound carries over water.

  Carrie got up and walked over to the sheriff, who cuffed her with a second pair of cuffs. He stood back, drew his weapon again, and motioned for us to walk toward his cruiser, being careful to keep his distance while keeping us covered. He opened the back doors and made us get in, then slammed the doors. He turned to face Greenberg and the two agents who were still crouching in their tents.

  “I suppose I should have told you I was coming,” he said, it being his turn to indulge in some mockery. “You know, coordination? ‘Cept I didn’t know y’all were doing anything up in these parts. Y’all have a good evening, hear?”

  He got into the cruiser and turned around to face us. “See that open cuff hooked to the center seat belt?” he asked. I looked down and then nodded. “Put your cuff wire through that. You, too, miss. Then close it. I believe you know the drill, Mister Richter.”

  I thought about just sitting there and making Mingo come back there and do it. But then, even if we took him out, all those so-called deputies were still there, no more than thirty feet away. There’d be some kind of violent conclusion to our efforts, so despite the fact that Carrie was staring at me with obvious telepathic intent, I turned sideways and did as I was told. She let out a long breath and did likewise.

  Mingo started the car, turned it around, and headed back down the bumpy firebreak lane that encircled the lake. I looked back to see what the “deputies” were doing, but they had vanished back out into the lake. Greenberg and his two partners were standing with hands on hips around the fire, glaring at Mingo’s vehicle as it drove away.

  “Well now,” Mingo said pleasantly, looking at us in the rearview mirror. “Young lady, you look familiar to me, but you never did say who you are. Got a name on you?”

  Carrie looked out the window at nothing, completely ignoring the sheriff’s question. We both had to sit partially sideways because of that center cuff.

  “Aren’t you going to give us our Mirandas, Sheriff?” I asked. “You know, the one that says we have the right to remain silent?”

  “Consider them given, mister,” Mingo said. “She will answer my questions, by the way. Or you can speak for her. I don’t care which. She might care, though. Pretty thing. Be a shame to have to force the issue.”

  I decided to play Carrie’s game and went silent. Mingo saw the expression on our faces and turned back around. “Okay,” he said. “Easy way or hard way.” He stared again at Carrie in the rearview mirror, as if trying to remember where he’d seen her before.

  Forty-five minutes later I found myself parked in a county jail cell. The sheriff had called ahead, and two oversized uniformed deputies met us at the back of the county building in Rocky Falls. Carrie and I were separated, and I didn’t know where they’d taken her. They didn’t book or print me, which did not bode well.

  I considered my predicament. I was the one in trouble here. Carrie could end her problem by simply telling Mingo she was with the SBI. More likely, Baby Greenberg had already contacted her bosses and Carrie was down the road and gone. But I had no such official protections. Then I remembered that I was officially an SBI operational consultant. So maybe I did have some top cover. Neither of us had had our ID or weapons on when the sheriff and his night boatmen had appeared. But why hadn’t Carrie landed all over the sheriff with a ton of official SBI bullshit? Especially when she was a senior internal affairs Nazi. Why had she just gone along? Maybe there was something bigger going on here than she’d let on. I dropped onto the bunk and put my mind in neutral.

  An hour later I heard steel doors clanging down the cell-block corridor, and then the two very large deputies arrived at my cell door. Shaved heads, six-plus feet high and about as wide, with professionally bored expressions and massive hands. Their fingers kept opening and closing. Name tags both read HARPER.

  “Sheriff Mingo wants to see you,” the Lurch on the left said.

  “We need to cuff you?” the other one asked. He was slightly shorter than the first one, but still tall enough to worry about ceiling fans. They had to be brothers.

  “As in, am I going to give you boys any shit?”

  “Un-hunh.”

  “Can’t see any future in that,” I said pleasantly, as if we were just going out for a nice stroll around the grounds.

  “Got that right,” the first one said, sounding satisfied. His physical demeanor made it clear that even if I did try something, it wouldn’t matter much. “Come on, then.”

  They escorted me down the cell block, but instead of going back into the central building, we went the other way and walked down to what turned out to be the back door of the jail. This led out into the sheriff’s department parking lot, which was about two hundred feet square and protected by a high chain-link fence. A darkened single-story parking garage with two dozen vehicle bays closed in one side and the back. There was a much older wooden structure on the other side, which looked like it might have been the town’s original jail. The lot was lighted by sodium vapor lights. There were few cars, and no one else seemed to be around.

  I tensed as we walked out into the parking lot. The deputies were walking alongside me and were well inside my personal space, but neither one had put a hand on me.

  “This ole boy here thinks we’re gonna beat on him some,” the taller of the two deputies said to the other.

  “Relax, m
ister,” the other said. “We was gonna whale on you, we’d’a done it in the cell with your cuffs on. But you can hold up right here now.”

  I stopped and the big deputies stepped away. The glare of the parking-lot lights put their faces in shadow. “Sheriff says you wouldn’t talk to him,” the first one said. “So he’s done gone and got somethin’ special for you. You stand right there.”

  They backed away from me, continuing to face me, with hands conveniently near their holstered batons. I couldn’t figure out what was going on until I saw Mingo step out of one of the darkened garage bays. He had an enormous German shepherd on a leash. The dog locked on to me from fifty feet away, let out a single, impressive growl, and leaned into his harness.

  “You the one likes to sic them shepherd dogs on folks?” Mingo asked, coming forward. The deputies were well out of the way now, and now they had their hands on their sticks. “Thought you might like to see how that feels. Ace here is fixin’ to show you.”

  With that, he leaned forward and slipped the leash. Ace came at a run. I didn’t hesitate: I dropped to my hands and knees, bent my head down to my chest, and froze. The huge dog came into me with a roar, but then stopped, practically on top of me. I could smell him and sense his enormous physical presence, but I kept my eyes on the ground and lowered my head even more, exposing the back of my neck. The shepherd came in tight and pushed his nose into my throat and then across the back of my head. I heard Mingo yelling at the dog to “git him.” But Ace backed off and went into rapid-fire shepherd barking, not so much barking at me as showering me with dominance noise, just to make sure the submissive human in front of him got the message. I still didn’t move, and the big dog finally shut up and sat down.

  “Well, I’ll be a sonuvabitch,” Mingo said, walking up. “I was hopin’ you’d run for it.” He came over to where I was still maintaining my submissive position on the concrete. I could sense the dog relaxing and waiting for further orders.

  “Okay, take him back to the cells,” Mingo ordered, snapping the leash back on Ace.

  The two giants came forward and helped me up, and then all three of us began to walk back toward the cell-block door. The sheriff disappeared with his dog back into the parking garage.

  “How come Ace didn’t bite your ass?” one of the deputies asked, as we paused by the back door.

  “Shepherd rules,” I said.

  “But the sheriff was tellin him to git ya,” the other one said.

  “A shepherd is an honorable dog,” I said. “You come at the one he’s protecting, he’s going to tear you up. But if he’s been trained and comes after you on command, and you submit, he’s going to sit down. No matter what Mingo says.”

  “Sheriff wasn’t too happy,” the first one said. The other agreed.

  “I’ll bet the sheriff knows exactly what happened out there,” I said. “You spin up a big dog like that, you have to play by shepherd rules. Otherwise, you don’t have an on-off switch, do you?”

  They thought about that as we went back into the cell-block corridor. They still hadn’t cuffed me and seemed relaxed enough about that. “You really a sheriff’s office lieutenant?” one of them asked me.

  “I was; did my time in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office, then took early retirement.”

  They walked me to my cell and locked me back in. “You boys brothers?” I asked.

  They nodded. “I’m Big Luke,” the shorter of them said. “This here is Bigger John.”

  “Where’s Mark and Matthew?” I asked with a grin.

  They looked at each other, and then Luke said, “Mark’s in Carson prison; killed a man when he was eighteen. He’s gone upstate for twenty years. Matthew drownded in the coal mines two years ago. Just us now.”

  “How long have you two worked here in the sheriff’s office?”

  The Big brothers considered the question. They appeared to want to think about anything they said, which I considered a useful trait in policemen. They also seemed like pretty decent people, and not the kind who would associate with someone who threw unconscious kids into his cruiser like sacks of coal.

  “Goin’ on five years now,” Big Luke said. Bigger John nodded. Five years it was. “We growed up in these parts,” Luke continued. “Went off to the Army for a while, then did this and that, then came home.”

  “What’s the sheriff have you doing?”

  “Traffic, some patrol, sometimes the jail here,” Luke said. “We didn’t do so good in school. Mostly played ball.”

  I thought for a moment. They’d treated me well enough—no cell-block roughhouse or demeaning tricks. “Let me give you something to think about,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Three words. You ready?”

  They looked down at me patiently. John might have been counting.

  “The three words are: federal task force.”

  Luke blinked. John frowned, then looked to Luke for guidance.

  “Federal. Task. Force. Ask around, but do it outside the sheriff’s office. Do not ask the sheriff what it means. But once you find out, think hard on it.”

  The door to the interior offices opened and another deputy called for the hulking brothers to come inside. I sat down on the bunk bed. I wondered what they’d done with Carrie and whether or not she’d identified herself yet as SBI. She might not. I’d seen her set that jaw.

  I thought about escape. There were no other prisoners in this part of the jail. The big deputies seemed friendly enough at this juncture, but I certainly couldn’t take them both down, even if I did manage to surprise them. And then what? The building’s doors were operable only by mag-cards and a key code that I did not know, and getting out of the building would put me right back in the same concrete arena where I’d met the lovable Ace. The question was: If Carrie were to be sprung by her own people, would she be able to spring her “operational consultant”? I needed to get word to someone back in Manceford County. I decided to go to sleep and see what the morning brought.

  8

  The following morning Big Luke brought me a breakfast tray from the jail kitchens with a paper cup of coffee perched on top. He handed it to me through the food slot in the bars and then left. He came back an hour later.

  “Y’all’s lawyer is here,” he announced as he retrieved the breakfast tray.

  Lawyer? What lawyer was that? Not the high-priced esquire from Triboro, certainly. I felt the stubble on my face and wondered when I was going to get some clean clothes and a shaving kit.

  Bigger John came down the corridor, followed by a man with a briefcase. He looked vaguely familiar. John unlocked the cell door and let the man in, re-locked the door, and stood patiently outside. The lawyer handed me a business card, but when I looked at it, all it said was go with it. When the looming deputy didn’t leave, the “lawyer” looked pointedly at him. When John still didn’t get the hint, he asked John to leave so that he could speak in private to his client. John said, “Oh,” and then left us alone. I finally recognized the “lawyer” as one of the DEA agents from Greenberg’s team. He was freshly shaved, his hair was cut, and he was wearing a suit and some lawyerly eyeglasses. He sat down on the bunk, opened the briefcase, and took out a legal pad. He patted the bunk and I sat down next to him.

  “Got some documents you need to see,” he said in a loud voice, pointing at the ceiling, and then showed me what was written on the pad. If anyone was listening to us, this guy wasn’t going to give them an inch.

  Basically the pad revealed that Carrie had been released when her boss and a team of SBI agents showed up at the sheriff’s office that morning. Baby Greenberg had stashed Frick and Frack at my love-nest cabin. Mingo had produced a bench warrant for my arrest and refused to release me, SBI consultant or no consultant. My hearing was tentatively scheduled for a week from today at the Robbins County courthouse.

  Mingo was playing hardball because his cousin, the magistrate for Robbins County, was backing him up. The Manceford County Sheriff’s
Office had been informed of my predicament, as well as my real lawyer in Triboro. SBI had been unable to get Mingo to investigate the logging-truck “accident,” once again because they could produce no evidence, the pile of logs in the creek notwithstanding. My Triboro lawyer was not optimistic on bail, given the relationship between the sheriff and the magistrate, nor did he feel that a recusal motion had much chance of success. SBI was going to work that angle and also request a venue change. Greenberg was setting up a surveillance cell in town in order to make sure there were no late-night rides resulting in a shot-while-attempting-escape deal.

  Any questions?

  I took the pen and told the agent to get someone close to the two big deputies who ran the holding cells and explain what a federal task force was all about and how it might be to their advantage to switch sides before the roof fell in on Mingo.

  What roof is that? the agent wanted to know.

  Make one up, I wrote. They’re outside Mingo’s criminal crew.

  You know that? the agent wrote. I hesitated, but had to shake my head. What’s Carrie Santangelo going to do? I asked.

  She’s in hot water within the SBI because of this, he wrote. Her boss couldn’t explain to his boss what we were all doing out there. He’s pissed. Carrie’s pissed. Baby’s beyond pissed.

  I need some clean clothes and bathroom gear, I wrote.

  The agent shook his head. They’re going to book you and process you into the jail system today, he wrote. Jumpsuit city. Sorry.

  That evening I found myself the sole occupant of that small wooden building attached to the main sheriff’s office headquarters. My theory that it had been the town’s original jail apparently was correct, based on the interior furnishings. It was connected to the main jail wing by a breezeway across one side of the parking area. There were four cells, in a two-across configuration. Each cell had a metal bunk bolted to the floor, a seatless toilet fixture, a steel sink, and a tiny table and chair, also bolted to the floor. Unlike the main building, there were actually one-foot-square barred windows up high in the cell walls, which was fortunate because there was no other ventilation system. The front of the cell and the dividing walls were freestanding bars. The exterior walls appeared to be made of stone blocks. I half-expected to see Marshal Dillon coming through the wooden door leading out to the breezeway.