Nightwalkers cr-4 Page 21

  "Great place for a shooting gallery," she said softly, staring into those trees.

  "Let's split up," I said. "Separate by about twenty, thirty yards. Divide the targets."

  "Right," she said. I gave her my walking stick and then went left across the rocks. I had heavy-duty field boots on, which gave my ankles a whole lot more support than her L.L. Bean day hikers gave her. She went right, far enough to force two shots, but stayed near enough that we could still see each other. I was counting on the shepherds to give us some warning if there were bad guys up there.

  In the event, there weren't. We climbed through the pines and found both mutts waiting for us in front of what had been the entrance to a smallish tunnel or natural cave in the side of the ridge. There had been two massive vertical beams for the side of the entrance, and one even bigger, tree-trunk-sized beam for the lintel. All three beams were smashed into a collapsed mass of shattered wood and rocks. The tunnel had either caved in or had been dynamited down. Either way, there was no access here, and the entire pile of rocks and crushed timber was studded with dozens of small cedars.

  We poked around the entrance area just to make sure that someone hadn't staged a cave-in, but it seemed real enough. The dogs weren't picking up any interesting scents, which was comforting. I did wonder why the Dobermans had come from this direction and mentioned this to Carol.

  "How about air vents?" she said.

  Good question, I thought. Even if this hadn't been a real coal mine, they might have cut some air vent shafts farther up the ridge. The problem now was that the ridge went almost vertical at the face of the tunnel entrance, rising up maybe two hundred more feet to the top. There was a surprising number of trees growing off this face, slender, spindly specimens in survival mode, trapping water by putting roots down into cracks and crevices along the face.

  "I'm trying to figure out how the tunnel would have gone," I said. "Straight in here, but then where?"

  "If they kept going straight, they'd come out the other side of the ridge," Carol said. "If they turned it, they could go along the drift of the ridge for almost a half mile."

  "I would think it would go down, not horizontally, if they were looking for coal. They wouldn't find coal in the top reaches of a ridge."

  "They're finding it that way in West Virginia today," she pointed out. "They're strip-mining by taking off the tops of mountains."

  She was right. Now that I thought about it, the sheriff had said they'd taken the tunnel sideways down the ridge for six or seven hundred feet.

  "We need to get up top," I said. "Look for any air vents, or even another entrance on the back side of the ridge."

  "I thought your interest in this was a safety issue," she said, eyeing that near vertical face. "This looks pretty much closed up right here."

  "My interest is in seeing if this tunnel, assuming it hasn't collapsed, too, is a base of operations for the guy who's after me. I don't want to go underground. I just want to rule it out."

  "That's good," she said. "I don't like heights, and I hate going underground. You have no idea how hard it was for me to go into that escape tunnel."

  I looked at her to see if she was serious about all that. She was.

  "Okay," I said. "I don't want to go all the way around to the other side of this ridge and make another long climb. It'll take too long. Let's do this: You take the shepherds and go back down to the vehicle. Take it back to the dirt road that goes along the bottom of the ridge and head toward the river."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I'm going to climb hand over hand, using those trees, get to the top, and then walk the top of the ridge down toward the river. I'll keep you in sight, and you should be able to see me. I'll come down off the ridge when I get near the river. That should put you near the quarry."

  "I don't know, Cam," she said, looking up at the ridge again. "If something goes wrong, I can't help you from down there."

  "I guess you could always call the cops," I said and gave her the keys.

  The plan fell apart as soon as the shepherds realized I wasn't in the utility cart. I'd begun my climb only to be interrupted by Kitty barking down at the base of the cliff, while Frick ran back and forth around the collapsed entrance, trying to find a way up. I could see Carol in the distance, standing by the vehicle, her hands up in an I-tried gesture. There was nothing I could do about the shepherds, and I now had my hands full, literally, with staying on the cliff. The smaller trees were shaky as handholds because they were rooted in their imagination for the most part. I pulled a couple out and then had to slide back down until I could grab a more substantial tree trunk. Each slide produced a baby avalanche of gravel and loose rocks. I also found myself puffing more than a little and vowed to get back to daily runs and a lot more exercise, just as soon as I got off this damned cliff.

  A half hour later I reached the top of the ridge. I could no longer see the dogs down below, and I hoped they'd gotten tired of being rained on by my clumsy climbing efforts. The view was pretty spectacular from the top. I could see the big house in the distance to the west, and I could clearly see Carol and the vehicle rolling down toward the river and the quarry area to the east. As I watched, two dusty shepherds came out of the woods along the road and caught up with the cart. Carol stopped, invited them to climb into the back, and then looked up toward the ridge. I waved, and she waved back. Okay, back on track.

  The very top of the ridge was solid rock, which looked like granite to me. The scrubby trees began on the nearby slopes, but the backbone of the ridge was like a paved road, maybe twenty feet wide. I was looking for signs of ventilation shafts, but wondered, now that I beheld all this granite, if they'd really run any shafts down to that tunnel. Sheriff Walker had said the tunnel began in a cave, and that almost didn't compute: Caves were usually found in limestone, not granite. Maybe the whole thing was BS, with the efforts of the alleged coal miners confined to blowing up a perfectly good cave. Either way, the ridge didn't seem to be a very promising place for a hidey-hole.

  A blur of motion to my left had me whirling and reaching for my SIG when two deer came bounding past me in those exaggerated leaps they make. They'd come out of a clump of hardwoods down to the left and about thirty yards ahead of me. I put the SIG back and veered off the clear rock path and went down into that grove of trees, where I found a spring. The water looked cool and inviting, but I was mindful of giardia and other parasites, so I washed the sweat off my face but did not drink. There were three game trails leading away from the spring, which was the source of a pretty brook that went splashing down the hillside. A hawk launched out from the side of the ridge below me, screaming indignantly at something.

  Then I froze. I'd been above the deer, and yet they'd come in my direction. The hawk had blasted out of the trees farther down the same side of the ridge. Maybe I wasn't the cause of all this spooked wildlife. I was keenly aware that I could no longer see Carol, or she me, now that I was off the top of the ridgeline.

  I listened but heard only a mild breeze sloughing through the trees and the musical noise of the brook dropping down into a baby waterfall, which seemed to echo.

  Echo?

  I started grabbing small trees again as I let myself down the western hillside, following the course of the outfall from the spring. After about forty feet of going tree to tree, I came to a real cliff, a sheer wall of solid rock. Then I realized it wasn't a cliff at all but a crack in the ridge. It was perpendicular to the ridgeline and about twenty feet across where I was standing, narrowing down to almost nothing about a hundred feet down. It was as if the part of the ridge that sloped down to the river had broken off the main stem of the hill, like a ship whose bow gets too heavy for its keel. There were decent-sized trees on both rims, which is why I'd never noticed this formation from down in the crop fields below. Even more important, directly opposite from where I stood, there was a rope, anchored to the edge of the crack, dangling down into the shadows below.

  Gotcha. />
  We held a council of war at the local pizza joint over beers and some surprisingly good pie. Tony was back from Charlotte, and Pardee back from downtown. I'd invited Carol Pollard to come along. She wanted to help, had local knowledge that we needed, and wasn't afraid to go out in the woods. The fact that she carried a. 357 was a plus.

  Tony had mixed results to report from the world of Charlotte Dobermans. There was an active breed club in the city, but no one remembered anyone asking to acquire two working Dobermans. There was one breeder who said he'd supplied four Dobes to an individual who'd claimed he was an estate manager out in the Asheville area about a year ago. Tony didn't think that sounded like my guy. None of the club's breeders had ever heard of the biker gang's dog supplier, but they did acknowledge that there could be other breeders out there who did their own thing and didn't come to the AKC shows, weren't members of the Charlotte DPC, etc. Otherwise, he'd drawn a blank.

  Pardee had managed to acquire the components he needed to put up a video surveillance system at Glory's End, including both the house and the grounds. He had designed the system so it could be monitored from within the big house or from the stone cottage. I asked him to send a list to Sheriff Walker of all the high-tech widgets we'd come up against since my stalker started his thing, so that he could get the SBI going on providing a possible profile.

  Then we talked about the mysterious rope. Tony immediately suggested we saw three-quarters of the way through it. Next time the guy started down, he'd get a courtesy drop test. I wanted to climb down it and see what was at the bottom. Pardee said that the bottom of that chasm would make a perfect place for my stalker to finish the game. That rope, he suggested, might have been put there for me to find.

  He had a point: My ghost had been ahead of us all the way up to this moment, and there was no reason to think we had the initiative now. Then Carol had a question.

  "Is the bottom of that crack in the rock level with the entrance to the tunnel on the other side?"

  I tried to picture the elevations. "I think it's higher, not lower," I said. "I guess we could find that out with a GPS set. Why?"

  "Because that might be the other way into the old mine," she said. "Or maybe even the back of the original cave."

  "Then one of us has to go down that rope," I said.

  "Or we go down our own rope," Tony said. "Or maybe even use two ropes, so you have backup at the bottom."

  "Or," Pardee said, "we send down a video camera and some portable lights, have a look around at the bottom before anyone goes down a rope."

  "Now we're talking," I said.

  "You guys going to cut the sheriff in on all this?" Carol asked.

  Of course we were.

  "Before you go jumping into the void?"

  "I really want this sumbitch," I said, "but I guess you're right. If they've got a rope team, all the better."

  Tony and Pardee said they needed to get back to Triboro and spend a day in the office, catching up on the things they'd dropped to come help me. I told them I'd get up with Sheriff Walker. If the county guys did take over, we might have to wait for them to get their plans in order.

  "And?" said Tony.

  It took me a moment. They were both looking at me. So was Carol.

  "And," I said, "no Lone Ranger stuff on my part."

  "There you go."

  We went our separate ways. I took the mutts and my tired ass back to the stone cottage. I fed them, as they'd only managed to cajole Carol out of one piece of pizza between them. Then I got a glass of single malt, my cell, and a hat against the rising gnats and went out to the pond swing to call the sheriff. Pardee had assured me that the house was clear of listening devices, but I wanted to be damned sure that whatever the sheriff and I set up remained secret.

  I dialed the nonemergency number for the sheriff's office. The sheriff was busy and would call back, which he did. I told him I needed face time with him, tomorrow if possible, and described what I'd found up on the eastern ridge. I also described the second escape tunnel in the house and the bits of wire. He said he'd drop by the cottage when he was done with his next phone call. He showed up thirty minutes later and said yes to a Scotch, and then we went back out to the pond. The shepherds followed.

  "I didn't mean tonight, Sheriff," I said. "Tomorrow would be just as good."

  "No matter," he said. "It's not like I have any reason to go home at night these days."

  "No lady in your life?"

  "Lost her to cervical cancer a year ago," he said with a sigh. "Took the fun right out of this job, if you really want to know."

  "Damn," I said, remembering Bobby Lee Baggett's comment. "My ex and I had gotten back together after a lot of years, and then some bastard put a bomb in her vehicle. I know precisely what you mean about the juice going out of life."

  "She refused to get an annual physical," he said. "All the women in her family went out relatively early, and she said she wasn't going to mess with God's will."

  "Wow," I said. "What will you do?"

  "I'm thinking of hanging it up when my term's over next year," he said. "Maybe go somewhere else. I don't know. You ever thought about being sheriff of a county?"

  "Me?" I said, surprised. "I guess I could be sheriff, but I could never get elected. For one thing, I can't stand the thought of kissing babies."

  He laughed. "What's wrong with kissing babies?"

  "They emit noxious fluids at both ends, usually when you get near them."

  "Think about it," he said. "You're going to be a prominent landowner, you've got the background, and you've run a company."

  "There's no one at the House ready to step up?"

  "One or two," he said, sipping his whiskey, "but if I campaigned for you, they'd back off. Plus, I can bring you the black community vote. Sine qua non, if you get my drift. Think about it."

  I didn't say yes or no. The idea was much too sudden. I decided to get back to business. "First I have to get this spider off my back," I said.

  "Our spider," he reminded me. "So tell me: You think you were supposed to find this mysterious rope rig?"

  "Entirely possible," I admitted. "If it was my only escape rope, I'd have hidden it in the bushes."

  "Me, too," he said. "I keep coming back to it: If this guy wants you dead, why hasn't he just used a long gun, taken you out on the front porch?"

  "He wants me to 'pay' for something I supposedly did that involved his wife."

  "Pay, as in blackmail?"

  "No, as in mental anguish. Fear of stepping out the door. Always watching my back. He does shit. Pasting the scary mask to the window. The screaming woman trick in the empty house over there. Rifle rounds into my house. He wants to get me so rattled that I can't function. He wants me sitting in bed at night, waiting for him to come. Then he'll use the long gun."

  "Is that how you feel right now? Fearful?"

  "Right now I'm mostly pissed off. I'll take precautions, but I'd sure like to hunt him for a change."

  "He might have anticipated that," the sheriff said.

  "Put something like a climbing rig out in full view, in the hopes that I'd lunge at the chance to get him."

  "Unh-hunh," he said. "That's how I'd read it."

  "You keep saying I need to go on offense here."

  "Why don't you set a trap or two?"

  "Like where?"

  "How's about that second tunnel? You said you found bits of wire and footprints that weren't yours. I can get you a real concussion grenade, not a flashbang. Hell, paint glue all over it, cover it in bird-shot or finishing nails, rig it to a trip wire. Then you and your guys stay the hell out of that tunnel."

  "I like the way you think," I said. "Can you get me two?"

  He laughed. "You never heard that idea from me," he said. "Now, as for the rope: Go back there, with your helpers. Cut through the rope, maybe one-third of the way. Do it right where he'd see it as he was coming up, but not enough to make it break. Let him know you found it, and that you, too, can
play fuck-fuck."

  "It's a start," I said, "but what I want is a finish."

  "What'd your people find out in Charlotte?"

  I told him. Then I asked him what he'd found out about the biker woman.

  "We added some depth to the ID," he said, "but nothing about who may have hired her. Her name was Elizabeth Craney. The bikers called her Betty Boobs. The Charlotte metro cops had never heard of her other than for the Doberman assault case, and Mecklenburg County hasn't had any trouble with her other than a couple of misdemeanors. Her biker buddies, of course, told my guys to pound sand."

  I finished my Scotch. "So we're nowhere, really," I said. "I know he exists and that he's serious; you guys know the dead woman's name."

  "As long as he wants to make a game of it," he said, "you still have a chance at him."

  "I feel so much better."

  "Like I said, set some traps. Vary your routine. Use these dogs. Walk over to that crack in the hill at two in the morning and drop five sticks of dynamite down there. Throw some shit in the game."

  After the sheriff left I continued to sit out by the pond with the dogs. Maybe Valeria would come out to dance for me again, or even the major. It was so peaceful out here on these big tracts of land. No neighbors in sight, no traffic, no sirens. It was exactly what I wanted, but I couldn't have it until I took care of this wee little problem.

  Where was he now? Holed up in some cave, waiting for us to come do something about the climbing rope? Over in my house next door, planting the next nightmare? Or was he up at the big house behind me, having a drink with the Lees and telling them about his adventures? I looked over my shoulder and saw the dim glow of candlelight on the second floor. I'd promised the guys no Lone Ranger stuff, but going over to my own house couldn't be that dangerous. What could go wrong?

  Thirty minutes later the mutts and I were pushing through the pine plantation on the western side of the house, headed for the back barns. I'd left a message on Tony's cell phone that I was going to hole up at Glory's End tonight. I'd brought a short-barreled, semiauto twelve-gauge along with my SIG. The night was clear and cool with sufficient moonlight to see where I was going in the trees. I had no specific plan other than to go over to Glory's End, set up in a place where I could watch the house, and hope that my stalker decided to do something similar. I knew there was a fifty-fifty chance that he might do the same thing over at the stone cottage. Maybe we'd meet on the road in the morning and do a rerun of the OK Corral. The Earps had used shotguns, hadn't they?