Spider mountain

25

Phenomenal didn’t do it justice. Three days later I was sitting at the riverside bar of Rocky Falls’s main hotel when Carrie Harper Santangelo joined me. She’d been spending a lot of daylight hours at the courthouse and the Robbins County Sheriff’s Office, and evenings with Big Chief, who was recovering in the local hospital.

I’d been drinking more and enjoying it more these past few nights, although there had been the occasional bright moments with Carrie.

“Is it soup yet?” I asked, and she smiled. She was doing that a lot lately, especially since she’d introduced me to the oldest hangover preventative known to men and women.

“One more hearing tomorrow and you’re free to go back to beautiful downtown Triboro,” she said. “This one will be on Nathan’s shooting Mose Walsh.”

“I feel really bad about that,” I said. “He tried everything but leaving town to not get involved. I should have just taken no for an answer.”

“As I remember, he showed up on his own out there,” she reminded me gently.

“Yeah, but only after I told him about the kids. He was enough of a cop to get to hurting over that. When they gonna let him out?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “They think they have it under control now.”

Mose had been whacked pretty good by the rifle bullet, which had also creased his chest and cut him from one side to the other. The more serious problem had been a Staph. aureus infection, which raised its ugly head the night they got him back there. He’d been bitten by several insects while lying on the ground, and one of the little dears had given him something far more dangerous than a bullet wound.

“They catch that damned doctor?”

“It’s better than that,” she said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he was a doctor but he wasn’t. He was the senior lab tech at the county hospital, but, unbeknown to them, he had been a doctor once upon a time in wild and wonderful West Virginia. General surgeon. American, not foreign. Lost his medical license because of a prescription drug habit.”

“How’d he get a license here in North Carolina?”

“Apparently, through the good offices of M. C. Mingo.”

“Also hooked up with Grinny Creigh. Fancy that.”

“Un-hunh. Anyway, he went off the grid, ended up here under false everything. He wasn’t claiming to be a doctor, just a tech.”

“But he knew how to harvest pediatric organs.”

“He knew enough to keep it sterile and where the parts were,” she said. “And it wasn’t like he had to keep his victims alive during the surgery.”

“Is he talking?”

She shook her head. “They’re calling him Mr. Miranda. But of course Greenberg is talking, so eventually they’ll wrap him, along with Nathan.”

“Greenberg,” I said, signaling for another drink. “That son of a bitch.” The bar was filling up and the noise level was rising, which was probably a good thing.

“He wouldn’t be the first DEA guy to get too close to his work,” she said. “Feature being blind and going through withdrawal.”

“Works for me,” I said. My two shotgun blasts into the fog had had satisfying results. Baby Greenberg had taken a pellet in each eye and both hands; he was now sightless. Grinny Creigh had been hit eight times, but all in the blubber belt. It had probably hurt like hell, but I hadn’t done any real damage, other than that she’d bled like a stuck pig. The EMTs, all six of them, had struggled to get her slippery carcass onto a backboard and then into a gurney out there in the field. They had her six feet from the ambulance when the one strap long enough to fit around her broke and dumped her on her neck, which, happily, snapped like a twig under the impact of three-hundred-plus pounds of fun, love, and joy. She was now taking up space in a prison quad unit, quite out of her mind with rage.

Nathan was in jail with two hands that didn’t work very well anymore, and he wasn’t talking, either. His lawyer was threatening to sue for police brutality; all that was missing, unfortunately, was the guilty policeperson. I certainly didn’t count, and since Carrie wasn’t with the SBI anymore, neither did she. Greenberg had been wrong about the state’s ability to retrieve bones from the glass hole; its icy depths and the absence of any living creatures in the alkaline crater preserved everything. Nathan was still young enough to do a meaningful life sentence or six.

The North Carolina Attorney General’s Office had sent a team of prosecutors into Robbins County to handle the various high crimes and misdemeanors. We had reps from all the federal alphabets poking around, including some I didn’t know about. My official report to the FBI had ended up in mail-room limbo, because, of course, Baby Greenberg had never called anyone down there to go find it. Carrie’s hate mail, on the other hand, had provoked an impressive media shitstorm in Raleigh. Said storm finally galvanized the big Bureau into acknowledging that there was this wee problem up in Robbins County, something which, of course, ahem, they had known about for some time, you realize.

The kids were in county social services protective custody over in Carrigan County, because, as it turned out, there’d been some collusion between the Robbins County Social Services, M. C. Mingo, and Grinny Creigh. Apparently an imbecile’s liver was just as useful as a normal kid’s liver, and the social services reps knew where both kinds were living, courtesy of all those welfare checks. Monsters, all of them. They were claiming coercion, but the bank records would tell the tale.

We kicked around the specifics of tomorrow’s hearing and then went into the dining room to have dinner. And maybe just a spot of wine-I looked forward to some more hangover prevention. Carrie, naturally, never suspected a thing. She’d become adept at reserving some doggie-bag tidbits from restaurants, and I was rapidly becoming second fiddle in the shepherds’ household. She’d been spending more time than I thought was necessary with Big Chief, and I wondered if that professional cocksman was trying to snake me. I’d waxed eloquent a couple of times on how infectious staph could be.

“You going back into the state womb?” I asked her when we’d finished dinner and were waiting for coffee. I’d been curious for some time now, but had been reluctant to ask until it looked like we were winding the thing down.

“I had a sit-down with Sam King just this morning,” she said.

“Lemme guess: The offer’s still technically on the table, but they don’t really mean it?”

“Something like that,” she said. “They mean it, because there are some harpies up in the employment standards division who are more than ready to pounce with a discrimination ruling. But it probably would be ‘awkward,’ as he put it. This case has achieved some real notoriety.”

“And you were the one who went to the media with it, which people in the SBI don’t do if they expect their career to prosper. Especially people in professional standards.”

She laughed. “That’s always a sin in a bureaucracy, isn’t it?”

“Mortal,” I said. “Some pundit inevitably asks why you thought you had to do that if your organization was worth a shit in the first place. Hurts the bosses’ feelings. The Bigs gonna be okay?”

“Them? Who’d screw around with those guys? They’ll be fine.”

I recounted how I’d felt, leaving law enforcement. How I thought my identity had been stolen, or at least lost. How I’d always felt just a bit superior to the average civilian in the street, but now had to watch my speed on the highway just like everybody else. She said she was still feeling that way and wondering if she ought to go back but in some other department.

“I was a senior female civil servant,” she said. “I can force the issue if I want to.”

“You don’t want to do that,” I said. “You’d always wonder about everything that worked for you after that-was it merit or the harpy effect.”

“I suppose,” she said. “But then there are these little niggling details of a mortgage, health care, a car payment, and retirement.”

“You could always do what Mose did-become a wilderness guide. It’s not like you don’t know some interesting places to go see in them thar hills.”

For a moment she got this dreamy expression in her eyes, as if that thought had crossed her mind. Aided and abetted by that conniving fake Injun over at County, no doubt. The one with the big nose, or something. But then she sighed and shook her head. I tried another tack.

“You’re vested in your state retirement,” I pointed out. “And my company can take care of those other matters-we need more lady agents at Hide amp; Seek Investigations. By the way, where do I send my bill?”

She cocked her head to one side. “Your bill?”

“As an SBI operational consultant? I believe we had a contract. I have some really spiffy timesheets made up.”

She started to laugh. “They never canceled that?”

“Not to my knowledge,” I said. “King told me to go home, but he never said, ‘You’re fired.’ I don’t believe you ever canceled it. Far as I’m concerned, I’ve been on the clock the whole time.”

“They’re going to shit little green apples,” she said, still laughing.

“They’ll pay it, too,” I said. “Or I can always try your trick with one of those operational reports going in the mail, now that I know where to send it. Inquiring minds have a right to know. Think of the recruiting impact.”

“ Big green apples,” she said. “I’ll think about your offer. That might be fun.”

Eat your heart out, Big Chief. I ordered more wine.