SPIDER MOUNTAIN Page 19

  “Damn,” I said. Blood on the floor indeed.

  “Yessir, that’s a fact. But I been a’comin’ up here once a week, seein’ to the cabin. Said she was a-comin’ back, so I keep it ready. Clean. Firewood in the box. Ain’t no facilities, so you’d have to use my privy, but there ain’t no snakes nor a lick’a dirt in it. And ain’t no one goes near this place, neither, ‘cause folks ‘round here think it’s hainted by them young’uns and they daddy, wailin’ with the night wind for all they lost.”

  I felt a shiver steal across my shoulders. There were probably more stories like this told across these hills than we knew.

  “Shall we go inside?” Carrie asked me. I could tell she felt it, too. But the place was a perfect hideout, and at the moment we were fresh out of options. By now Mingo would have even the back roads covered.

  Inside, the cabin was spotless. It was darkish; the front windows and the one door offered the only daylight. There were basically two rooms, one which combined a tiny kitchen, which had a woodstove and a dry sink, with a living room area containing a surprisingly large fireplace, a long farmhouse table, and six antique handmade wooden chairs. A smaller table by the door held four kerosene lanterns and some candles. The other room was a bedroom, which had a four-poster bed raised high off the wooden floor and a single oak armoire. The bed was made up with quilts and handmade pillows. There was another dry sink in one corner, with a brass chamber pot stowed on a lower shelf. There was no ceiling on the bedroom, and, like the front room, it was open to the rafters. The room smelled of old sachet and older dust.

  “It ain’t fancy and there ain’t nothin’ modern about it,” Laurie May said, “but it’ll keep the rain off’n your heads. And looky here.”

  She pulled aside a handmade knotted-rag rug revealing a trapdoor in the bedroom floor. “This here goes under the cabin and out the back. Tight squeeze an’ all, but somebody corners you up in here, you can sneak on out the back.”

  I could just imagine what kinds of things were living under that floor, but it was good to know there was an escape hatch. There was another one of those rag rugs placed off center out in the living room area, which I was not going to look under.

  “Like I was sayin’, I keep it clean and ready for when she comes home. I know it ain’t likely, but a mama’s got her duty.”

  And her hopes, I thought. Of course, if her daughter ever did return, Laurie May would have a whole new set of problems, given what the daughter had predicted she’d do if she ever did come back.

  “This is very generous of you,” Carrie said. “Are you sure it’s all right that we stay here?”

  “Been enough pain and hurtin’ on young’uns in these hills,” Laurie May said. “If’n you can put a stop to it, I’m pleased to be of aid. You gonna have to hide that big vehicle, though—they gonna be lookin’ in barns like that one down there. That and them dogs, too.”

  We moved our stuff out of the Suburban and into the cabin in the pines. There’d been no sign of a major search going on down on the hardtop, and only a few other vehicles moving along the river road, but it was still early. Mingo would have to know I’d had inside help getting out of that cell, and that might have delayed a broader search as he looked to clean house.

  The shepherds plopped down on the porch as if they owned it. They knew where I was, and that was the main thing, except perhaps for chow. We had a fine view of tree trunks, which meant that no one down on the river road could see the cabin, either. Carrie plopped herself down at the big table. “Now what?” she said.

  I sat down opposite. “You’re not wanted for anything. You didn’t break me out of the jail. Why don’t you take the Suburban, go to town, get up with Baby and his crew, make a formal report, and figure something out.”

  “Just drive out of here?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why not? There’s no place to hide that vehicle.”

  “What if they stop me?”

  “They can’t know you’ve quit the SBI. Hard-ass ’em. It’s obviously a law enforcement vehicle.”

  “Unless that deputy last night got a look at me before he went into the creek.”

  “I doubt it. You had your brights on and, like you said, he was really busy trying not to die. Don’t go back roads—take the main road, right on into Carrigan County. Bold as brass. They won’t dare mess with you.”

  She sighed. “I’m not as tough as you might think,” she said.

  “Santa Claws?”

  She laughed. “Damned Greenberg. What will you do?”

  “Spend some quality time with Laurie May. Find out what I can about the local geography, the neighbors, try to figure out a way to set up a better surveillance hide on Grinny’s place. You think they have a clutch of children hidden somewhere?”

  “Yes, I do. Probably right there at the Creigh compound.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Then what we need is probable cause to go toss that place. That will be my job. Get a warrant. Make it and me official. You be my field director. Orchestrate support from the DEA and whoever else is willing to play.”

  She gave me a challenging look. “Don’t want me along out here?”

  “Hell, Carrie, I’m already in the shitter with the local law. You’ll be a lot more useful running free in Carrigan County than ducking behind a tree every time a cop car goes by. Besides, there’s only one bed.”

  She tried to stay mad but then grinned. “But it’s such a big bed,” she said. “Okay, I’ll go to town. I’ll come back after dark.”

  “Don’t forget the brothers Big,” I reminded her. “They should be making their creep out of Robbins County pretty soon.” Then I had a thought. I told her about Mose Walsh. Maybe he could lend some local knowledge or help them figure out a better surveillance plan.

  She thought for a moment. “I think I remember someone like that—Indian face? He was older than me, but the kids called him Big Chief. Something like that.”

  “That’d be him. Huge nose.”

  She suppressed a quick grin. “If it’s the guy I’m thinking about, it wasn’t about his nose.”

  “Wonderful,” I said with a sigh. “Now you have two reasons to check him out.”

  I spent the day with Grandma Creigh and learned a good bit of useful information. A rocky spine separated her hollow from the other Creigh cabin, and there were two trails leading over that ridge, one high, one low. The people who lived in this hollow did not consort with the gang in the next one over to the north, with the possible exception of the one unfriendly couple we’d encountered down by the river road. They were considered officially no-count by the decent folks in the holler, in Laurie May’s opinion, and thus they were unknown quantities. Someone had alerted Mingo and his troops as to where we’d camped that night, and I thought they were good candidates.

  Grinny Creigh had a fearsome reputation in this part of the county, with the rumored powers and abilities typically ascribed to mountain witches and demons. I told Laurie May I’d experienced that second-sight ability when Grinny had somehow known we were watching from the ridge. She didn’t think that was particularly unusual.

  “Her mama had it, too. Grinny’s big and fat. Her mama was thin and had her this long white witchy hair even as a chile. Green eyes. Sharp little teeth. Teachers was scared of her.”

  “And how about Nathan?”

  There were apparently three constants about Nathan: He never spoke to anyone except Grinny, he was never without his bag of knives, and he obeyed Grinny Creigh with frightening dedication. As a boy, he had gone to the county elementary school for one whole day, during which the other kids had taunted him unmercifully about his freakish looks. One brat in particular, Billy Lee Ranson, had led the torment. At the end of the school day Nathan was seen walking down the dirt road in the direction of Book Mountain with a protesting Billy Lee in tow, literally. Neither of them had ever come back to school. Billy Lee’s older brother had gone up on Book Mountain to see about Billy, and he hadn’t come back, either. The sh
eriff at the time was not especially interested in bothering the clan up on Book Mountain, so the school authorities had decided to cut their losses and get on with the school year. The sheriff was known to be a sensible man, and the Ranson brothers were deemed to be no great loss.

  At midday we saw a patrol car go past Laurie May’s and up the dirt road toward the neighbors at the top of the hollow. I put the shepherds into the little cabin. Laurie May gave me some bread and tea, and I went to the cabin to hole up. I was able to hear the cruiser come into her cabin yard about a half hour later, and then drive away.

  “Said they was lookin’ fer a dangerous escaped prisoner,” Laurie May reported. “Said he burned down the old jail and they’s a’feared he kilt two deputies. I sent’m on his way. Ain’t seen nothin’, ain’t heered nothin’.”

  I told her what had really happened, and that the two deputies should be alive and well over in Sheriff Hayes’s office by now.

  “I know them boys,” she said. “They growed up ‘round here, then went off to the army or somewheres. Came back, though. And I know that old jail. One’a my boys got locked up fer brawlin’ in the town. I had to bring him his vittles, on account of because they didn’t have no money to feed no prisoners.”

  “As best we could tell, it was Mingo’s boys who set the fire, so he and I have a score to settle.”

  She wagged a finger at me. “Don’t go talkin’ about scores to be settled,” she said. “That be serious business in these parts.”

  “So’s burning a prisoner to death because he might know too much,” I said.

  I took a long nap that afternoon. The four-poster smelled faintly of pine needles, but it was very comfortable. Both shepherds had eyes on getting up on the bed, but I told them they’d die trying. More terrified yawns. Frack went over to that other rag rug and lay down. Moments later he snorted, got back up, and went to a corner of the room. Blood on and in the floor, I thought.

  At four I took the dogs out. Laurie May was feeding her goats, and reported that there’d been one more cop car come by the place looking for that dangerous escaped prisoner. I took the DEA cell phone and went up the hillside to see if I could hit that transponder and get in touch with Carrie. I slanted my way toward the rocky spine between the hollows so as to avoid any eyes uphill from Laurie May’s along the dirt road. I didn’t need anyone seeing a stranger in the woods and calling Mingo’s people.

  As it turned out, I had to get right up on the ridgeline before I saw any bars in the cell phone signal indicator. I didn’t like being right out in the open, silhouetted on a ridge, so I stepped down into a circle of man-high boulders. It being a DEA phone, the directory was locked, so I just kept hitting the call button and finally raised Baby Greenberg.

  Carrie had made it out to Carrigan County without serious incident. She’d driven right through Rocky Falls without anyone so much as looking at the Suburban. Just outside of town there’d been two sheriff’s office cruisers parked along the road. She’d pulled over and talked to the deputies, asking them who they were looking for. They told her, giving her the clear impression that they believed the cover story Mingo had put out about my escaping and taking out the Big brothers. They asked her if she was in the county on official SBI business, and she told them that she was going to a meeting with some IRS officials concerning irregularities in the Robbins County pay and benefits system. Then she left.

  “That word was probably all over the deputy force within an hour,” Baby said with a laugh. “Anyway, the Big brothers made it in to Sheriff Hayes’s office, where they gave statements about the fire. Carrie wrote up a report to be sent to SBI in Raleigh, in SBI-ese, and Hayes said he’d send it out under his signature.”

  “Well, hell,” I said. “That ought to do it, right? Two of Mingo’s own people testifying that Mingo orchestrated this whole deal?”

  “Um.”

  “What do you mean, um?” The shepherds appeared to be watching something in the trees, so I moved down the ridge to make sure I couldn’t be seen from the fields below.

  “Well, Carrie’s still entirely focused on this supposed child-trafficking business, but now that she’s resigned from the SBI, she’s been cut off on any current intel. And my bosses keep reminding me we’re supposed to be rolling up a meth smuggling and production operation. The fire in the jailhouse and a crooked sheriff don’t interest them very much.”

  “It should—he’s the top cover for your meth crowd out here.”

  “And your evidence for that would be …?”

  “Hell’s bells, can’t you guys go to a grand jury with what you’ve got? I can testify, the Big brothers can testify, you can testify—how much more do we need to get something going here?”

  “My bosses’ say-so, for one thing,” Greenberg said. “And, like I said, they’ve lost interest. In fact, we’re being pulled off to work a possible drug homicide over in Andrews. My line boss, Jack Harrie? He says this thing in Rocky Falls is a genu-wine hairball, Carrie Santángelo’s on a personal crusade, and we’re outta there.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Without backup like a DEA squad, there wouldn’t be much I could contribute.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” Baby said. “I’m going to forget to retrieve the transponder, so you’ll have some comms until the battery dies. Carrie’s been shut out, like I said, so she has to figure out what she’s going to do. I told her that her first mission is to get your ass out of Robbins County.”

  “They are watching,” I said. And so were the shepherds. They were still staring into the tree line above me on the transverse ridge. What had they seen? I changed position again.

  “Gotta go,” Greenberg said. “I’ll try to get back into it after this homicide deal. We’ll put your stuff back in that sex pad.”

  “Thanks for that, and tell the lodge I’m still ‘there.’ Tell Carrie she can use the cabin until I can extract, if she wants. She can leave my Suburban there, too. Do you have her cell number?”

  “Carrie Santángelo in the bridal suite,” he said after giving me the number. “Now there’s an image.”

  “With a gun,” I reminded him. “Maybe two. And claws.”

  “There is that,” he said. “Look, again, I’m sorry about this. I feel like we’re abandoning you.”

  “DEA doesn’t have a dog in this fight,” I said. “Go solve your homicide. If these people are taking kids, we’ll get ’em. And besides, I owe M. C. Mingo one fire.”

  I shut off the phone. My side of the slope was darkening into evening shadow. The shepherds were still watching up the hill but didn’t seem as alerted as they had been. I sat down against one of the big rocks and took in the view. The stone was still warm. It seemed so peaceful up here. It was hard to imagine the gritty infrastructure of meth labs, midnight bootleggers, and especially the notion of impoverished women selling their children to the likes of Grinny Creigh. I leaned forward to stow the cell phone in my back pocket and probably saved my life.

  The rock right behind my head exploded into a spray of razor-sharp granite shards, followed by the echo of a booming rifle up on the high ridge. The back of my neck felt like it was on fire as I rolled to one side and deeper into the rock pile. The shepherds came running, but I yelled them down as another round slashed down the hill, spanging off a rock and out into the hollow below. I made like a snake, wriggling between the bigger rocks, conscious of wetness on the back of my shirt. Another round came into the rock pile. This one ricocheted off about five rocks before passing over my head like a supersonic hornet. The shooter knew I was in there and was hoping for a lucky hit. I was looking for that fabled direct route to China through the center of the earth.

  Finally it stopped. My neck still hurt like hell, but it was now dark enough on the hillside that the guy probably couldn’t see us anymore. The distant boom of the rifle was still echoing in my ears, and I remained down on the ground for another thirty minutes until it was almost fully dark. Then I crept toward the edge of the rock pile nearest Laurie
May’s place. The dogs were whining above me, but I told them to stay down until I got clear of the rock pile. Five minutes later I was able to get into some trees and call them down. Crouching low, I trotted down the hill toward my not-so-secret-anymore cabin.

  Somehow they’d found out where I was holed up. Laurie May must have said something or done something to alert one of the visiting cops. I didn’t believe she’d intentionally done anything, but, either way, I couldn’t hang out here anymore.

  I waited at the edge of the woods that concealed her doomed daughter’s cabin and watched her house for several minutes to make sure there wasn’t a reception committee down there. I finally spotted the old lady through one of the windows in the lantern light and decided to go on down. Her front door was open and I called her name. She came to the door and asked if I had been doing all that shooting. Then she saw my collar and told me to come in right away.

  That first round had embedded enough granite dust in the back of my neck to make a good piece of sandpaper, as I discovered when she patiently extracted every speck of it. I was gritting my teeth and wishing for my bottle of scotch by the time she was through. Then she smeared some foul-smelling ointment on the wounded skin that took a lot of the sting away. I was afraid to ask what was in it.

  “How many was they?” she asked.

  “I think just one, with a long rifle and a good scope. He had me pinned in a cluster of big rocks.” I turned around to look at her. “I can’t stay here anymore,” I told her. “They’ll figure it out if they haven’t already.”

  “I ain’t afraid of them no-counts,” she said bravely, as she put away her tweezers and the cotton roll.

  “You tell them when they come that I made you put me up. Tell them I had a great big gun and threatened to shoot your livestock. And we need to burn that bloody cotton—I don’t want them to know they hit me.”