SPIDER MOUNTAIN Page 7

  The dogs had gone out of sight down the creek banks. My boots were crunching through pea gravel, so I knew I must still be on the lodge grounds. I noticed a side path that branched away from the main path to my right. I wondered what personal connection the handsome SBI agent had with Robbins County and the Creighs, and I made a mental note to check that out before I called her, if I ever called her. Her not checking in with the local sheriff’s office was not only unusual but outside of standard procedure. The SBI was usually called in by local law, but occasionally they were investigating said local law.

  Then I saw the two men standing on the path, pointing shotguns at me.

  I stopped in my tracks, just barely restraining myself from saying something stupid like What do you want? Both of them wore dark pants and shirts, and they were sporting full beards. No black hats, but definitely a pair of faces born to decorate a wanted poster. One of them stepped forward and motioned with his shotgun for me to come with them. I hesitated, hoping the dogs would reappear, but when the second man reversed the shotgun in his hands to form a club, I said all right and went with them. Both of them looked perfectly capable of clubbing me senseless and then dragging me to wherever it was we were going.

  We walked quickly down the narrow path toward a pickup truck, with one of them in front and one behind me. Their clothes smelled of wood smoke and pine needles. I thought of a dozen different escape moves, but none of them stacked up well against shotguns at three feet. If they’d meant to kill me, they could have already done that and then thrown my body into the fast-moving creek.

  Once we got out to the parking lot, one of them got in on the driver’s side while the other motioned for me to get into the bed of the truck. The man jumped up behind me, told me to lie down on my belly, and then clipped my wrists and legs to chain manacles welded to the corners of the bed of the truck. He prodded me in the back with the shotgun.

  “Lookin’ to go see the Baby Jesus?” he whispered. His accent was mountain, but not tree-stump ignorant. The pine scent from the man’s clothes was really strong up close. Which was why the dogs had missed them, I realized. It was an old deer hunter’s trick. They’d double back eventually and then go nuts when they couldn’t find me.

  “Not especially,” I said.

  “Then keep still,” he growled.

  Thirty minutes and a gear-grinding climb later up a very dark mountain road, the truck slowed, turned so hard I thought we were going to tip over, bounced over some serious ruts and then choked to a stop. I felt tenderized after all that time on the steel bed of the truck, and I had no idea of where we were, except that it was up. They got me out of the bed and marched me along a crooked path leading still farther up, one of them again leading, one behind. I stumbled a few times as I worked the kinks out, but they didn’t restrain me. After a ten-minute walk through the trees and out across a mountain meadow, I saw dim lights above, where a long log cabin was perched on the hillside.

  They marched me up the slope to the cabin, where I could see two people sitting in rockers on the front porch, flanked by lanterns hanging on the front wall. One of them had to be Grinny Creigh. She was a heavy woman, with short, graying red hair cut in a surfer bowl, a broad forehead, a round, florid, double-chinned face, narrow-set eyes, a down-turned, thin-lipped mouth, and a pug nose. She wore a shapeless black dress to cover her ponderous body. There were massive fat rolls on her upper arms, but plenty of muscle, too. Her ankles had cuffs of fat above them and were indistinguishable from her calves, but she had small feet. In her left hand she held an old-fashioned paddle fan with which she was keeping her face cool. Her right hand held a sweating glass of what looked like tea.

  Sitting next to her on the porch had to be Nathan, Grinny’s son. Even sitting, he was very tall, well over six feet, with elongated arms and legs, massive hands, and an oversized, bony head. He had a pale, square forehead and a long-bearded lantern jaw that made him look like a caricature of Frankenstein’s monster. His beard was long enough to rest on his chest. He wore loose-fitting blue denim overalls over a long-sleeved white cotton shirt and canvas-topped, size really-large Army surplus tropical combat boots. There was a deerskin bag at his feet from which the handles of several knives projected. He watched me with calm eyes while whittling on a piece of wood.

  Standing just inside the front screen door was another woman, whom I recognized as the buxom hottie I’d seen at M. C. Mingo’s office. The two lanterns cast enough light to shadow the interior of the cabin, so I could barely see her expression, but I thought she recognized me. Now here’s an unholy trinity, I thought. For a moment I thought I saw some other faces, smaller, pale ovals bobbing around in the interior shadows behind the young woman, but I couldn’t be sure. I heard some noises off to either side of me and realized that there were other people out there in the shadows. Good deal. I heard some dogs stirring behind a fence made out of solid sheets of galvanized tin roofing nailed vertically to posts and boards.

  “This him?” the fat woman asked.

  “He’s the one,” said the girl from behind the screen door. She pressed her front up against it, creating two white circles against the screen in the shadow of the doorway. I’m sure I was supposed to get all hot and bothered.

  Grinny Creigh leaned forward in her chair, making it and the porch floorboards creak. “Where you from, mister?” she asked.

  “Manceford County,” I said. I’d decided not to waste energy protesting my abduction, hoping that, if I acted calmly, none of them would get violent.

  “You been nosin’ around, askin’ questions down’ere in Rocky Falls?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I did talk to the sheriff.”

  “You the one found that deader in the lake yonder?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How’d you know where to go lookin’?”

  “I’m an investigator. I investigated.”

  Grinny leaned back in her rocker and gave me an annoyed look. My sarcasm was apparently not much appreciated.

  “Got a smart mouth on him,” Nathan said softly. His voice was high-pitched and nasal, like M. C. Mingo’s.

  Grinny tilted her head fractionally, and I sensed the man behind me raise his fist to smack me on the head. I bent forward and whirled to his left, blocking the blow with an upraised left forearm and clubbing him in the groin with my stiffened right forearm. The man gasped as he doubled over, but instead of quitting, he bared his teeth and tried to bite my arm. I drove my right elbow into his temple, dropping him like a stone. My second captor, much older than the first, hadn’t moved yet, so I kicked him in the shin as hard as I could. He yelled, dropped his shotgun, and collapsed over his splintered shin. I extended my knee as he went down, catching him right under the chin in a tooth-clicking crack that knocked him cold. It all took less than fifteen seconds. I turned around to face the people on the porch and found myself looking into the bores of a double-barreled ten-gauge held by Nathan. The girl behind the screen was staring openmouthed at me. My left arm ached.

  Grinny was looking down at me with a furious expression on her face. “You got some nerve, boy,” she growled, “comin’ up here and doin’ that.”

  “I didn’t come up here,” I said angrily. “They brought me. That’s called kidnapping back in the World. You have a reason for doing that?”

  “You ain’t kidnapped. You was brought here so’s I could ask ye straight: What’re you here for? Why you pokin’ around in Robbins County, askin’ folks ‘bout Creighs?”

  “I want to know what happened to that park ranger, the one who was beaten and raped at Crown Lake.”

  “What’s ‘at got to do with us?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “But we want to find out who did that and bring him in.”

  “Who’s we?” Grinny said. Nathan and his shotgun had not moved one inch. The old man groaned on the ground, but the other one exhibited the stillness of the grave. I wondered if I’d hit him too hard in the temple. I hadn’t meant to hit him ther
e, but those snaggly yellow teeth had looked both serious and toxic.

  “The National Park Service,” I replied. “The Carrigan County Sheriff’s Office. The rangers at Thirty Mile station. And probably the decent, law-abiding people in this county, both of them.”

  She snorted at this insult. “They hire you up?”

  “That’s right,” I said. The truth would have been too complicated. Grinny leaned forward, and the heavily stressed rocking chair complained again.

  “Well, you hear me, mister,” she said. “What goes on in Robbins County ain’t none of your bizness nor anyone else’s. If we got menfolk out in them woods doin’ that kinda shit, we take care of it, our way, not your way. Our lawyers come in two sizes: ten-gauge and twelve-gauge. You follow?”

  “Well, that sounds good,” I said. “But a body or two delivered to the Thirty Mile station might be more convincing.”

  Grinny raised her eyebrows, as if she hadn’t thought of that.

  “You remember ’em dogs?” Nathan asked. “On the Rocky Falls road?”

  I looked at him blankly for a second, then remembered the tall man up on the ridge with the binoculars. Had that been Nathan? I nodded.

  “That convincing enough for ye?”

  “That was the man who assaulted the ranger?”

  “It was. You want meat for your lawyers’n such, you go on down there, pick up what’s left. Ain’t much, I reckon, but you’s the one needs convincin’.”

  “Like I was sayin’,” Grinny said. “We take care’a things our way. You get on outta here now, and don’t you come back to Robbins County.”

  I assessed my situation. The men in the shadows had gathered closer, but they weren’t doing anything except watching. Yet. The old man on the ground was crabbing his fingers toward his dropped shotgun. When he saw me watching, he withdrew his hand. The other one still hadn’t moved, although he did appear to be breathing now. Nathan’s shotgun still hadn’t wavered. I concluded that this was not the time for speeches. All this complex calculation took me a good three seconds.

  “All right,” I said. I turned around and started walking down the meadow toward the tree line by the road. My back prickled in fearful anticipation, but I forced myself to simply walk away without a backward glance at all those shotguns. When I got down to the actual road, the cabin was out of sight. I turned across the hill to the road and picked up the pace. The road was a glorified dirt track, and the woods on either side were entirely dark. It was going to be a long night, I thought, as I rubbed the aching muscles, what was left of them, in my left arm. Then I heard a large dog start baying somewhere behind me, joined quickly by several others. An image of the pack tearing up the fat man crossed my mind and I cranked on a few more knots, although I could stumble only so fast down a rutted road in the dark. The dog noise kept up, but it didn’t sound like it was getting any closer. Grinny Creigh sending me one last message: Keep going, stranger, or worse things can happen than getting shot at. I pulled out my cell phone, but, as I’d expected, there was no service. Cell phone service seemed to be available in inverse proportion to how badly you needed it.

  I had walked for almost forty-five minutes, still not reaching level ground or a paved road, when I heard a vehicle approaching from behind me. I stepped off the road into the trees and watched a pickup truck with too much engine come around the corner above me, showing only parking lights. When it drew abreast, the offside window came down and Rowena Creigh’s face appeared.

  “Need a ride?” she asked.

  I hesitated.

  “C’mon, it’s fifteen miles back to Marionburg. I don’t bite, less’n I get really excited.”

  I said okay and climbed in. The truck was not new, but there was obviously a huge mill under the hood. The interior smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. She was wearing a white sleeveless blouse knotted under her breasts, cutoff blue-jean shorts, and sandals. Her long legs gleamed in the light from the dashboard. She put the truck in second gear and let it roll itself down the road, the engine rumbling in protest.

  “Better’n the way you came, don’t you think?” she asked.

  “I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter,” I said. “But I do appreciate the lift.”

  She laughed. “Grinny wants to see you, she’s gonna see you. One way or another. That’s how it is around these hills. You’d best believe that.”

  “I saw a fat man get run down and torn to pieces by a dog pack the other day,” I said. “Those the same dogs I just heard back there?”

  “Wouldn’t know anything about that,” she said, fishing a cigarette out of her blouse pocket and punching in the truck’s lighter. “That there’s menfolk business.” She looked across at me, a teasing look in her eyes. “I just live there.”

  “Sure you do,” I said.

  She lit the cigarette and returned the lighter. She took a deep drag and blew out a big cloud of smoke. “Uncle M. C. wasn’t too happy with you bein’ in Rob-bins County. You some kinda lawman, ain’t you?”

  “He really your uncle?” I asked, avoiding the question.

  “Hell if I know,” she said, rolling down the driver’s-side window to let a little of the smoke out. “Uncles, brothers, cousins, husbands—what’s it matter when the county phone book has only eleven different names listed?”

  I laughed despite myself. The dirt track ended at a two-lane blacktop, and she turned right. She flipped on her headlights and put the hammer down. The truck jumped forward and I found my seat belt. She wasn’t wearing one. “Rocky Falls looks a little bigger than all that,” I said.

  She grunted derisively. “Rocky Falls ain’t what I’m talkin’ about. I meant the county. You really a lawman?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Used to be, but I’m retired. Now I do investigative work for hire. How about you? What do you do?”

  “Me?” she laughed. “I’m Rue Creigh and I cause trouble. I drive around makin’ all the menfolk crazy and their women huffy. I smoke and I drink and, lemme see, there’s a third thing, but damned if it hasn’t slipped my mind just now. But it’ll come to me.”

  I could just imagine, which was probably the object of the lesson. “Nice truck,” I said.

  “Meanin’ what—how do I come to have it, seein’ as I’m just a layabout?”

  “Interesting choice of words, but let me guess. Grinny Creigh got it for you.”

  “Good guess, lawman. And Ym guessin’ you know how she manages that. But you need to be real careful if that’s what you’re really doin’ up here, ‘cause Grinny don’t abide strangers pokin’ into her business. Got her a regular hateon for that.”

  “I told her why I was here, to find out—”

  “That’s finished business,” she interrupted. “You want some sign of the old boy done that, you’ll need to get you a pooper-scooper.”

  Suspicions confirmed, I thought. I saw a sign indicating we were crossing into Carrigan County and relaxed fractionally. The road paralleled a rushing mountain stream, with towering green hills on either side. There was no moon, but the air was incredibly clear. “That’s awfully convenient,” I said. “But we have only your word for that.”

  “We?” she said. “Got a mouse in your pocket there, lawman? But, what the hell, if it’s proof you want, reach under your seat.”

  Surprised, I felt around under the front of my seat and discovered a small, cold, heavy cylinder among the empty beer cans. I pulled it out. It was a law-enforcement-model pepper-spray canister. There was a decal on it saying that it was property of the U.S. Park Service and, if found, should be returned to the nearest ranger station immediately.

  “This hers?” I asked.

  “Ain’t no one knows, lawman. But the fat boy you saw doin’ the Alpo marathon? He had that thing in his truck. Y’all can make of that what you will. Convinced me. Good enough for them dogs, too.”

  “Nobody from Robbins County has done anything like this to a park ranger before,” I said. “The cops are speculating she witnesse
d something, maybe even tried to interfere.”

  Rowena shrugged and then readjusted her blouse before she fell out of it. “Where you stayin’ at?”

  I told her, and she drove through the town going at least twenty miles over the speed limit. At this hour there was almost no traffic, but I did see a sheriff’s cruiser parked on a side street. They had to have heard that engine, but didn’t seem to be interested. When we pulled into the parking lot at the lodge, however, there were two police cars and a Park Service Jeep out in the middle of the lower lot. Rowena drove right into the middle of the cluster, put the truck in park, and leaned an elbow out her window.

  “Well, here you are, lawman,” she announced, as several cops began to get out of their vehicles. Mary Ellen Goode climbed out of the Jeep, and my two shepherds came bounding out behind her.

  “Well, thanks again for the ride,” I said. “I guess I probably won’t be seeing you again.”

  She pushed both hands through her luxuriant hair, which did interesting things to her superstructure. “Not in Robbins County,” she said with a seductive smile. “But now that I know where you’re stayin’, who knows?”

  Mary Ellen was close enough to the truck to hear that last bit, and I saw a pained expression cross her anxious face. I got out of the truck and closed the door. Rowena waved at me, smiled at all the staring cops, and thundered out of the parking lot. The two shepherds were all over me, but over their fuzzy shoulders I could see that the cops wanted some answers.

  “Where did you get that?” Mary Ellen asked, pointing at the pepper-spray canister in my hand.