Spider mountain

7

The phone rang at five thirty the next morning; I fumbled for a bedside table lamp and then answered. It was Carrie Santangelo.

“You need to get out of there,” she said without preamble.

“I do?”

“Yep. I called Sheriff Hayes last night after I talked to you. I wanted to know what was shaking with the Robbins County beef. He said he was still waiting for Mingo to make the next move. I told him that you had a working relationship with the SBI and asked if he could keep me in the loop. He said he would.”

“And?”

“I just got a call here in my room from Hayes’s operations office. Mingo sent a telex in, saying he had a warrant for your arrest and would be coming down to Carrigan County at seven this morning to execute it, and would they please have a couple of deputies available to come along. The watch officer called Hayes, and he called me.”

I was fully awake now. “How’d they get a warrant without a body?”

“Robbins County,” she said. “Who the hell knows? But you need to get out of there, and now would be nice. I’ve got a place for you to go. Meet me out front in fifteen minutes.”

She was in the parking lot in an SBI unmarked Crown Vic when I came out, carrying a hastily packed bag and accompanied by two yawning shepherds. “Follow me,” she said, and I fired up the Suburban.

We drove through the predawn darkness to the Thirty Mile ranger station toll booth. There was a chain across the entry road, but plenty of room on both sides to get around it. We drove past the darkened Park Service offices and then down a paved road that led up into the park itself. The paved road became a hard-packed gravel road after a few miles, but that didn’t slow Carrie down. I had to drop back just to be able to see through all the dust. Six miles up the road we pulled into a clutch of log cabins scattered around a woodsy playground area. There were cars parked at the darkened cabins, and it was a busy hiking and camping season if the overflowing trash bins were any indication. Carrie drove through the little village and up a steep side road to a single cabin surrounded by tall pine trees, where she stopped and parked her car.

“This is one of the Park Service ranger cabins,” she told me when I got out. “Except the DEA’s had it requisitioned for the past year. Occasionally the SBI gets joint use.”

“For that investigation that isn’t going on?” I asked. The cabin was perhaps twenty-five feet square, with wraparound porches and a stone chimney at one end. The dogs ran around, Frick checking out the new surroundings, Frack insulting trees.

“Possibly. Come on inside.”

“Presumably there’s no one home right now?” I asked, as she unlocked the front door, barged right in, and started turning on lights. I half-expected a sleepy DEA agent to come stumbling out, gun in hand. There was a single large room, a small loft, and a kitchen-dining room combination occupying the left back corner. There was a bunkroom and a bath in the opposite back corner. A table was set up next to the fireplace, which was covered with wireless communications gear, cell phone chargers, and a desktop PC.

“There are basic provisions in the cupboards,” she said, “and I’ll bring you some fresh stuff once the stores open. But for right now, you’re legally on a federal reservation.”

“And theoretically, county cops have no jurisdiction here.”

“Unless the Park Service accommodates them, which it won’t once I get to someone at their district HQ over in Gatlinburg. You are going to play ball, right?”

“Only if you were serious about the decoder ring,” I said, and she grinned. We both knew that, at the moment anyway, I had little choice but to take their deal.

“Great,” she said. “Why don’t you make us some coffee, and I’ll explain what we need from you.”

She went back out to her car to get her briefcase while I loaded a Mr. Coffee machine I found on the kitchen counter. Carrie came back in and produced a contract and some credentials she had had made up identifying me as an authorized operational consultant for the North Carolina SBI. Over coffee she explained what the SBI wanted me to do.

“We’d like you to go back into Robbins County, on foot, and do a few days’ worth of physical reconnaissance.”

“The Creigh place again?”

“No,” she said. “The hollows around the Creigh place. There are several smaller communities up there-cabins, trailers, even some substantial homes, within five miles of the Creigh place. Some of those people have to be working for them, but there are other people up there who have nothing to do with the Creighs. Retirees on government or coalfield pensions, tenth-generation welfare rednecks composting in their trailers, good old boys with hunting pens.”

“And bad guys, too.”

“Oh, yes: the bootleggers, marijuana farmers, psycho-mushroom pickers, and, of course, the meth mechanics.”

“You guys have a database for the area?”

“ATF does, but they know it’s woefully deficient. Every time feds go up there, Robbins County deputies go along and, they suspect, call ahead. Everyone of interest just clams up. The regular citizens either don’t know or are afraid to run their mouths, and sometimes they’re just loyal to their hills and hollows and won’t talk to outsiders, period. DEA has had the same experience, and the Bureau has flat given up.”

“What makes you think I won’t get the same treatment?”

“Outside law has always come in crowds; we are going to be a couple of hikers.”

I put down my coffee mug. “We?”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” she asked brightly. “I’m coming along.” She started laughing when she saw the expression on my face.

“Oka-a-ay,” I said. “But now you have to tell me what this is really all about, because it’s obviously bigger than drugs.”

“I have a better idea,” she said. “We’ll go up there and look around. After a few days, we’ll back out, and then I think you’ll be able to tell me what this is all about. That way I won’t taint your conclusions.”

“We’re just going to walk the hills and dales, go knocking on people’s doors, talk nice to the moonshiners when we stumble on their stills, evade any of Mingo’s deputies who happen to live out there in some of these houses, and keep telling ourselves that Grinny Creigh won’t find out we’re up there?”

“Something like that, yes,” she said. “Look: We’ve got all the aerial photography, topo maps, suspected smuggling routes, IR plume shots of supposedly abandoned shacks and trailers that go hot at night, arrest trends with links back to Robbins County, in other words, tons of data. What we don’t have is any HUMINT-human source ground truth.”

“But why not? The feds have certainly been looking.”

“Basically, none of the alphabets has ever been able to get probable cause to do search and seizure because M. C. Mingo undoes their every attempt, one way or another. That’s why the feds came to us in the first place. Plus, they’ve been totally unable to get anyone undercover because the bad guys, one, are all related and, two, have known each other since the Blue Ridge first turned blue.”

“The feds want to break up a drug ring, and the SBI wants to clean out a dirty sheriff’s office,” I said. “Seems like a match made in cop heaven. Why not declare them all suspected terrorists and take them down to Guantanamo for a year or so? Hit ’em so hard they can’t recover for a few generations.”

“Because,” she said patiently, “the government is already under siege by lawyers and civil rights activists over the detention of real live car-bombing, throat-slitting, Koran-thumping Muslim fanatics. These people are, for better or for worse, Americans.”

“So are the Crips and the Bloods, but the feds walk all over those guys from time to time, if only to thin ’em out.”

“The feds have people inside those operations. Real-time intelligence. Major deals they can rumble and then seize. Up here, these people are making the shit in caves and the tunnels of old mines. Everyone’s kin. You piss off the boss and you get eaten by dogs, right?”

“And why me, again?” I asked.

“A couple of reasons,” she said, finishing her coffee. “One, you’ve been up there and made it back. Two, you’ve seen some of the players up close and personal. And, three-well, I can’t tell you that one. Yet.”

I stood up and walked around the cabin’s main room. “And, three, as a consultant, if things go really wrong, the SBI can deny me three times before sunrise and keep its bureaucratic skirts clean.”

“Such a cynic,” she said. “We’re not that clever.”

“Oh, right. Okay, try this: Three, I’m officially a fugitive from a warrant in Robbins County. So if things really go wrong, you can say that you were in pursuit of a fugitive, and that’s why you were up there in the first place.”

“Now you’re talking,” she said, again with a grin. “Consider yourself a target of opportunity. If you can get us what we need, great. If not, we’re no worse off than when we started.”

“Which doesn’t necessarily describe where I’d be.”

“That’s one of the perks of going private,” she said.

I smiled. “Damn, Carrie, you really know how to make a guy feel wanted.”

“Oh, you’re wanted, all right,” she said. “Just call M. C. Mingo.”

I had no reply for that, so I tried to change the subject. “You physically qualified to walk the high country?” I asked. “And run, if necessary?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “And I can climb, too. Straight up rock walls, if I have to. Can you climb?”

“Only if the bear is big enough,” I said. Or the pig, I thought, remembering our little scamper up the pine trees.

“Well, there you go, operational consultant. And if I choose to run, you know the bear rule, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t have to outrun the bear, you only have to outrun me. Who’s going to handle logistics? You’re not proposing we tote a bunch of supplies, are you?”

“That’s where Mr. Greenberg and his crew come in,” she replied. “They’re going to go ‘camping’ in the national park. We’ll get up with them once a day to resupply and to report what we’ve seen.”

“Can they act as cavalry if the need arises?”

“Not legally,” she said. “Which isn’t to say they won’t come. But the whole idea is to put a small team on the ground, not a federal horde.”

I sat back down in one of the chairs. “A whole grunch of questions come to mind here,” I said.

“What can I tell you,” she said, flicking her hair away from her eyes. “You said you liked to go camping.”

We set out late that afternoon. Greenberg and his team had hired Mose Walsh to bring in their camping gear at noon by truck, and then they’d staged everything up to a fire-lane road in the park at the upper end of Crown Lake. From there we could walk down through a pass to a gentle valley that was two ridges over from the Creighs’ home base. The plan was for the pair of us to set up a camp just below the ridge at the head of the valley that evening, and then begin our photo “hike” down the first valley and up the adjacent one, returning to the park boundaries by nightfall. Greenberg and his crew would maintain the base while keeping at least one agent in a position from which he could maintain line-of-sight communications with Carrie and me using DEA tactical radios. Mose would handle resupply on a daily basis.

Carrie and I wore civilian backpacks and field belts, and we each carried a shelter half and a sleeping bag rolled on packs supplied, once again, by Mose Walsh. I had a sport-fisherman’s vest, under which I wore my SIG. 45. Carrie carried a weapon I hadn’t seen before, a nasty little number that she called a mamba stick. It looked like and served as a pool-cue-shaped walking stick but could fire up to six. 223-caliber bullets with a flick of the wrist. It was part six-shooter, part rifle. To fire it, all she had to do was pick off the tip of the walking stick, ratchet the base end to the left to cock it, point it, and then press a small button to fire each round-basically a single-action bang stick.

I relaxed a little when I saw her decked out in well-worn outdoors clothes and boots. My gear was similarly well broken in; I spent at least two weekends out of each month somewhere in North Carolina either fishing, hunting, or just taking the mutts out for a spin. Once every two hours one of us would open the radio and ask Can you hear me now, aping those ubiquitous Verizon commercials and probably annoying the shit out of the duty DEA comms agent. We set up our first camp alongside a pretty stream in a high meadow. This put us on the eastern boundary of the national park. The entire valley spread out below us, and we hoped to see some lights below us when darkness fell.

It turned out that Carrie did not cook at all. “My father was an excellent cook and wouldn’t tolerate women in the kitchen,” she said. “At least not until dinner was over and there were pots to be washed.”

“How do you survive?” I asked, as we unpacked our stuff.

“I’m a charter member of the nuclear age,” she said. “I buy it, I nuke it, I eat it. Unless I can con some guy to do better.”

“You could con me,” I said. “But then I’m easy.”

She smiled. “Good-you do the honors around the campfire, and I’ll handle what has to happen in the creek.”

“Deal,” I said. I boiled up a cup of rice over the fire and then added a package of dehydrated chili and the required water. In the coals I made some biscuits in a collapsible Dutch oven and then set up a coffeepot on one side of the coals. The shepherds each got a cup of dry kibble, although they made it perfectly clear that chili would have been a much better deal. We ate in contented silence as we watched the sun go down behind the western mountains, throwing the valley below into deeper and deeper shadows.

“This going to be worth the effort?” I asked.

“I think it will, especially if you come to the same conclusions that we have. Then things might get interesting.”

“That tells me a lot,” I said. “I mean, how are we going to play this?”

“We’re photojournalists,” she said. “We’re doing a photographic essay on life in the mountains on the edge of the Great Smokies Park. We meet the people, photograph them if they’ll let us, their houses, their farms, their dogs, and then interview them as to what life’s really like up here in what the maps label as game lands.”

“Eventually we’ll stumble onto one of Grinny’s retainers,” I said. “And then we’re going to have some problems.”

“There are more righteous people down there than you might suspect,” she said, pointing down at the lights that were beginning to twinkle through the trees down the valley. “According to our aerial maps, a dirt road parallels this creek all the way to where it empties into a river. There are maybe two dozen cabins, houses, what have you, along that road. They can’t all work for Grinny Creigh.”

I fished around in my pack for a nylon windbreaker; even in late summer, the air temperature dropped like a stone once the sun went down. “It just takes one,” I said. “And they’ll recognize me, especially with these dogs.”

“Then we do what we have to do,” she said. “By the way, was that a flask I saw in your pack?”

I looked at her. “You’re a pushy broad, aren’t you.”

“You gonna share?”

“Aarrgh,” I said. “I hate sharing.”

“I can talk all night, if you’d like. I can even sing.”

“Of course you can. I’ll get the flask.”

The first place we came to the next morning featured an immaculate stone cottage surrounded by gardens and small alpine pastures in which sheep congregated. The people who lived there were both retired from the postal service and were refreshingly friendly. I noticed that the line of power company poles extended up the dirt road as far as their cottage, so these people were living comfortably in the twenty-first century. It turned out in the course of Carrie’s questions that they had never heard of the Creighs or of any particular crime problem in or around Robbins County. They also seemed to have no problem accepting our photojournalist cover story.

The next three homes down were similar situations, retired people who had always wanted to live in the mountains and enjoy the privacy and rustic beauty of the Smokies. The closer we got to the bottom end of the valley, however, the less appealing the home places were. Log cabins and stone cottages gave way to trailers, and gardens to collections of junked cars and trucks. Up the valley the dogs had been friendly if alert; at the lower end they were chained to trees or old cars and inclined to drooling snarls. I kept the two shepherds on the creek side of the road; the last thing we needed was a dog fight.

The first two trailers we passed seemed to have no one home except for some angry dogs. The third one, an especially nasty pile of rusted metal, with loose trash, a hard-packed dirt yard, and a lone, scabrous two-year-old playing in an abandoned tire, was occupied by a man and woman of indeterminate age. Several dogs could be heard barking from behind the trailer, and they didn’t sound very happy, either. There was an electric power pole in the yard, but the meter base was empty. Carrie sighed as if she’d seen all this before.

I held the shepherds over by the creek bank while Carrie unslung her pack and approached the yard to ask if they’d be interested in being “interviewed.” The man, a paunchy, hairy, and paranoid-looking individual wearing blue-jean overalls and a filthy T-shirt told her to get on out here or he’d set them dogs yonder aloose. The woman, a stringy-haired stick figure whose dark-rimmed raccoon eyes indicated an end-stage addiction of some kind, hung back in the doorway of the trailer, a cigarette dangling from her lips and a vacant expression on her face. The child playing in the dirt never looked up during the entire interchange. Carrie waved and backed off to rejoin me on the other side of the dirt road. The man finally saw the shepherds and reached down to pick up an axe handle. He yelled something else at us, but whatever he said was drowned out by the barking dogs behind the trailer. I walked ten feet behind Carrie, and made sure the shepherds stayed between us and the hostiles.

The next two trailers appeared to be abandoned. The final place had beef cattle and a two-story nineteenth-century log house, but there was no one at home except for two small collies, who cowered when they saw the German shepherds. The steers looked well fed and the fences were in good order, so it was a working farm. By late afternoon we’d reached the lower end of the valley, where the stream joined a larger one in a pretty waterfall after crossing under a mostly paved one-lane road. There was a perfect campsite on the point formed by the juncture of the two streams, downhill from the paved road and partially hidden behind a stand of stunted pines. It had obviously been used before, based on the blackened ring of stones in the clearing above the streams.

We set up our tents and a small fire and then went to soak tired feet in the cold stream. Our campsite was on the high, western bank of the stream, and we could see a large tree that had fallen across the water about thirty yards upstream. Its top surface had been flattened and there was a single rope handrail, indicating a crossing point for a local footpath. The sun dropped below the ridges behind us at the top of the valley and darkness settled quickly, followed by the temperature. The dogs curled in as close to the hot rocks around the fire as they could.

We had seen fewer people than I’d expected, but there also had been some chained driveways leading back into the woods and slopes where we had elected not to go. I’d let Carrie call the shots as to where we tried and where we simply passed by. She seemed to have a good sense of which was which. I found myself warming to her-she was practical, carried her share of the load, laughed often, and was easy on the eyes. She maintained that quiet reserve I’d observed in many attractive women, who knew full well that men were likely to make assumptions about their character based on looks rather than competence.

That was fine with me. This was not exactly a romantic excursion in the making, and I was still worried about some of the people we’d seen. I kept thinking about that homing dog Nathan had fired down the meadow. I’d also begun to appreciate the problem law enforcement had in coming to grips with criminal enterprises in the mountains; short of bringing in an occupying army, there was no way even to tell how many people actually lived up here. Based on some of the signs we’d seen, the people who’d built homes here valued their privacy and were more than willing to defend it.

We checked our communications with the DEA base camp over on the lake and then heated some food. Afterward we sat around the fire and talked about our experiences in law enforcement. During the whole time we’d been down there, I realized, we hadn’t heard a single vehicle up on the road above. The woods around us were extremely quiet, with no animal or even bird sounds. There was a dim moon, but the stars blazed above us in the crystalline mountain air.

“You know,” I said quietly, looking around at the clearing, “this would be a bad place to be if someone were to come at us in the night. We’d be trapped with our backs against these two streams.”

“You think those people in that one trailer recognized you, don’t you?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “That guy looked pretty hungover, and he obviously didn’t cotton to strangers. And that woman was in bad shape. I’m thinking maybe we should move our bags over across the stream, just in case.”

“Leave the tent halves?”

“Yeah; bank the fire, leave the shelter halves, make it look like we’re sleeping down here. I just think there may be more eyes watching these hills than we know about.”

Carrie shivered. “That’s a lovely image. And I suppose I have to cross that damned log up there? In the dark?”

I grinned. “It’s been there a while,” I said. “And there’s a hand rope. Piece’a cake.”

“Unh-hunh. For those of us who don’t like heights, not exactly.”

“I’ll hold your hand,” I said. “Let’s see if there’s some flat ground over there behind those big rocks.”

Getting the dogs across the tree-trunk bridge turned out to be harder than getting Carrie across. We set up a bare-bones camp behind three large boulders. There was a thick carpet of windblown pine needles on the back side, which would make for more comfortable sleeping, but I still sprayed the sleeping bags with DEET before setting them down in hope of deterring the five billion or so ticks and spiders I knew were lurking in that aromatic piney carpet. While Carrie got settled, I went back across the log bridge and climbed up to the road. Using a small LED flashlight, I finally found what I was looking for, two serviceable if rusty tin cans. With my knife and some fine fishing line from my woods vest, I rigged a tripwire consisting of the tin cans with pebbles inside, to cover the approaches to the log bridge on the road side. We might not hear it if we were sound asleep, but the shepherds would.

Then I went down to the original campsite, added a few thick logs to the edge of the fire, piled the stone ring a little bit higher, closed up the shelter halves, and returned to our sleeping hide.

“I miss my tent,” Carrie said from deep inside her sleeping bag as the evening dew began to draw the chill from the ground. I rolled my bag around in the pine needles, took off my boots, and slithered in. Frick came over immediately and curled up.

“Call one of the dogs over if you get cold,” I said, looking over at her, fondly, I realized. All I could see of her was the pale oval of her face against the indistinct material of the sleeping bag. “If that doesn’t work, you can always call me.”

“In your dreams,” she said sleepily.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Is that news?”

“That’s your libido talking,” she said. “Baby Greenberg tell you my nickname at work?”

“That he did.”

“Well, I haven’t been exactly successful in my relationships with men,” she said. “I’ve about given up.”

“If it’s not lust at first sight, then the trick is to become friends and let the physical side come along when you least expect it.”

She sat up on one elbow. “That the voice of experience?”

I told her about how I’d gotten back together with my ex-wife. How we’d operated as just friends until the night when our respective libidos had come up-scope in the hot tub, as sometimes happens. I also told her what had happened to Annie, and that while I wasn’t avoiding relationships, I wasn’t actively looking for one, either.

She was quiet after that, and I had to smile. Our conversation sounded an awful lot like the BS boys and girls say to one another so as to not be seen as taking that first, potentially embarrassing step. I thought she’d gone to sleep.

“You have that thunder stick ready in there?” I asked, just to make sure.

“Mmm-hnnh.”

She drifted off to sleep, but for some reason I wasn’t sleepy. Maybe it was just instinct, but I had a sense that the night wasn’t over yet. It had been too easy, our little hike through the hollow. I reached over to my pack, retrieved the flask, and shucked the sleeping bag. I put my boots and jacket back on and tiptoed over to the one flat rock overlooking the junction of the two streams. The waterfall made a soothing sound as it plashed over mossy rocks and snags. The scent of mud, wet weeds, and dank stone wafted up out of the creek bed, and a few horny frogs sounded off from time to time, defying their reptilian thermostats. The fire flared briefly across the way as one of the larger logs rolled over in a shower of sparks.

I tried to figure out what it was she was waiting for me to detect among the hill people. They had been, all things considered, about as I had expected, an eclectic mixture of retirees, working families, and farmers, as well as layabout white trash. Tomorrow we would walk north along this larger creek and then head up the next valley to rendezvous with our DEA support team. I wondered what they were doing to amuse themselves; probably spying on Grinny Creigh’s lair in the second valley over. The fire across the water looked inviting, and I wondered if I hadn’t become a bit paranoid about nighttime attackers. I poured a second cap of scotch, tossed it off, and went back to my own bedroll. The shepherds were both curled around the indistinct form of Carrie’s sleeping bag. Faithless mutts, I thought. It wasn’t that cold.

I awoke to the sound of a large truck laboring its way up the one-and-a-half-lane road above the creek. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and shivered in the cold air. The two shepherds came over and helpfully licked my face while I struggled to get my arms out of the sleeping bag. Carrie remained asleep. I unzipped my bag, got up, and reached for my boots and jacket. The truck sounded like it was about a half mile away, but it was definitely coming this way. The moon had gone over the mountains to the west, deepening the darkness. Even so, I could see fairly well in the starlight.

I checked my watch, and wondered why a big rig would be coming up the mountain at this hour in the morning. An owner-driver coming home after a ten-day cross-county stretch? I checked my SIG. 45 and wondered if I should wake Carrie. She was certainly physically fit, but she was also an office rat, and all this mountain trekking had put her down like the proverbial log. I moved quietly down to the edge of the big boulders and tried to see across the creek. The fire had declined to a red glow, and the pines above were pitch-black. The truck kept coming. The shepherds had left Carrie and were tight alongside me, ears up.

Finally I saw it, or rather its marker lights. It was running without headlights and coming up in a low gear, the diesel working at high RPM. I could make out the cab lights, and the fact that there was some kind of trailer behind the truck. As it got closer, I could see something black and bulky behind the cab, but couldn’t make it into a trailer. The dogs were fully alert now as they sensed my own rising tension. When the rig finally drew abreast of the campsite, some fifty feet up on the road, I realized it was a logging truck with a full load of huge logs. Even as I comprehended what I was seeing, the tractor veered over toward the edge of the road and then swung hard left as if trying for the dirt road we’d walked down earlier. But the trailer came much too far to the right and the wheels slipped over the road’s edge. The entire load, several thousand pounds of logs, came right off with a thunderous noise, tumbling huge logs down the slope, smashing everything in their path, including our original campsite. One log hit the fire end-on, showering red sparks and embers into the creek in a spray of fire. Most of the logs ended up in the larger creek, and the trailer itself slid down the embankment for about twenty feet before finally stopping and then doing a slow-motion rollover onto its right side. The tractor cab remained on the road above, its engine still roaring, until the driver finally idled it. Carrie appeared at my side, the mamba stick in her hands.

“What the fuck?” she whispered, as the last of the big logs rolled over the bank and crashed down into the creek. Frick woofed at all the noise. I told her to shut up.

“Bad luck for the campers over there,” I said. “Notice the truck didn’t come down the hill with its trailer?”

“Which means?”

“Which means this may have been deliberate. He did something to the hitch and the tie-downs before he shed that load. I think we’re supposed to be dead under all that stuff.”

The trucker shut down the engine and doused all his lights. I motioned for Carrie to follow me into the jumble of big rocks. I chose a position from which we could see the tree-trunk bridge upstream.

“Now what?” she whispered.

“Let’s see if anyone comes down there to admire his handiwork.”

With the trucker’s lights off, we could see the hillside across the way fairly well. Nothing happened for a few minutes, but then we heard another vehicle coming. This time it was a pickup truck, approaching from the right, also with no lights. The truck made a normal stop in front of the tractor, which told me the driver had expected it to be there. We could hear doors opening and closing, followed by the sounds of low voices. We heard and then saw four men pushing their way through all the wrecked vegetation and flattened pine trees to the area of the campsite. Two of the men were carrying what looked like shotguns.

“That what you bring to an accident scene?” I whispered. “Shotguns?”

Flashlights snapped on, and I pushed Carrie down behind one of the rocks as I ducked my own head. Moments later two white beams were probing the tops of our rock pile and then the creek bank on our side. I signaled the dogs to lie flat and stay there.

“Ya git ’em?” a familiar voice called from the road above.

“I believe that’s Nathan Creigh,” I whispered to Carrie.

“They ain’t here,” one of the men opposite called back. “Ain’t nothin’ here but some hot rocks.”

“They was there,” Nathan called. “Spread out and find ’em. Look down in that creek.”

“Found a piece’a tent,” another voice called. “Tore all to hell.”

“Then look down in that water, under them logs,” Nathan ordered. “Grinny’s gonna want’a know we seen meat.”

I motioned for Carrie to follow me. We crawled on our bellies along the back of the rock pile until we had a clearer view of the log bridge. Carrie wiggled up alongside me. “Get on the radio and see if you can raise Greenberg’s boys,” I said. “Tell them what happened. I’ll watch the bridge.”

“They’re off the air until morning, remember?” she said.

“Try anyway; they may have left a radio on. Hell, they probably heard that crash. Then come back over here. I’ll cover the bridge.”

Carrie disappeared into the gloom in the direction of our sleeping bags. I could hear the men crashing around the banks on the other side of the creek below me, trying to see under the massive pile of logs. After about fifteen minutes, I finally saw a shadow moving up the bank toward the log bridge. Carrie still hadn’t returned, so I pulled the two shepherds close to me, one on either side, and lay down with them. I put a hand gently over each of their muzzles and stared at the bridge in the darkness. The dogs went very still and watched where I was watching.

I felt them tense and I squeezed their muzzles again, reinforcing the command to not bark or growl. I stared into the darkness, offsetting my gaze to put my peripheral vision on the bridge. I never saw the man start to cross, but I did hear a tinkle of gravel in the tin cans and then a soft oath.

“Wait,” I murmured to the shepherds, whose heads were alongside mine and whose concentration was absolute. I hoped Carrie had heard the tin cans, too, and remembered what that meant. I was flat on the ground a good thirty feet from the bridge. I still couldn’t see anything against the stand of pines. I waited, one hand cupped gently over each dog’s nose.

There. A thicker shadow. The man was alerted, which was probably why he wasn’t using his flashlight. He was creeping, his footfalls masked by the thick blanket of pine needles. I felt Frick gathering herself, so I finally whispered the command: Take.

The dogs launched without a sound into the darkness like two furry torpedoes. I was suddenly blinded by the beam of a flashlight, which then shot into the air as Frick hit the man from one side in the knees while Frack hit him fullon in the chest going at the speed of heat. Two hundred pounds of determined German shepherd knocked the man flat in an instant, and Frack contained his target’s cry by clamping his jaws around the man’s throat and standing over him, growling quietly every time he moved. The flashlight had fallen ten feet away and was still on, pointing at a tree.

I got up and hurried over to retrieve the flashlight. I swept the area of the bridge to make sure no one else was coming and then pointed it down into the man’s terrified face. I was pretty sure the men down in the creek bed couldn’t see anything but the light’s beam, but then I remembered that Nathan was up on the road. There were trees between where we were and the road, but I wasn’t going to take any chances with a long gun. I switched off the light and then felt Carrie at my side.

“Nobody home,” she whispered. Suddenly there was a strong odor of urine. I cupped my hand over the flashlight lens, pointed it down into the man’s face, and switched it back on. Frack still had him by the throat but was looking up at me as if to say, This still necessary? The man’s eyes were rolled back in their sockets and he was entirely still.

“Is he dead?” Carrie asked.

“Fainted,” I whispered, and called Frack off. I ordered them to watch the man and went back over to the rock pile, where we could hear the other men still thrashing around down in the creek bed.

“Y’all got em?” Nathan called down from up on the road.

“They gone,” one of the men answered. “Ain’t no sign of ’em.”

“Look across the creek, then,” Nathan ordered. “That there fire was goin’. That’s where they was.”

“Tommy is doin’ that,” one of the men called back. “Hey, Tommy? Seen anything?”

I nudged Carrie to follow me and went back to where Tommy was still lying on the ground. He was short and thin. His open mouth revealed the blackened, rotten teeth of a meth devotee. His throat was already starting to bruise. I grabbed the man’s legs and pointed Carrie to the other end.

“What’re we doing?” she whispered.

“Throw him down into the creek where they are,” I said. “While they deal with that, we’ll boogie.”

We carried Tommy over to the end of the rock pile and got into position to launch him.

“Hey, Tommy?” the man below called. “Where the hell are ye?”

On a silent three, we heaved the inert Tommy over the bank’s edge and down into the tangle below. I switched on the flashlight and threw it after him. Tommy rolled down the bank in a clatter of stones and pine branches, while the flashlight hit the rocks and ended up in the water.

We ran for our bedrolls as we heard a commotion break out down below.

“Which way?” Carrie said.

“Cross that log bridge, head up the slope toward the trucks.”

“Toward the trucks?” she asked.

“Last thing they’ll expect,” I said, grabbing my sleeping bag and pack.

“Last thing I’d expect,” she said, but by then we were trotting toward the bridge, the shepherds right behind us. We crossed the log and moved as quietly as we could into the stand of pines below the road and then sideways up the hill. There were three flashlights going down in the creek bed and a lot of shouting between Nathan and his crew in the creek. We reached the road’s edge about a hundred feet to the right of the pickup truck. It sounded as if Nathan had gone down the hill, so we slipped into our packs and moved out onto the road, where we began to jog away from the scene in the direction of the next valley.

After we’d gone for about ten minutes, I stopped and told Carrie to hold up for a moment. I caught my breath and then called in the dogs and told them to sit.

“Okay, guys,” I said, and they looked at me expectantly. “Wanna sing? Hunh? Wanna sing?”

The shepherds started to pant eagerly. I threw back my head and let go with a mellifluous wolf howl for about twenty seconds. As soon as I stopped, Frack stuck his muzzle in the air and did likewise, followed by Frick. I did it again, and the shepherds really got into it this time, yipping and rooing for a good minute.

“Okay,” I said, shutting off the serenade. “Let’s go.”

“What the hell was that?” Carrie asked, as we resumed our trot up the dark road.

“I wanted to spook those bastards,” I said. “Especially when Brother Tommy comes to and tells his tale.”

“Worked for me,” she said.

By sunrise we were hiding out in a barn about three miles upstream. We made contact with the DEA team on the radio and agreed to rendezvous on the southern slopes of Spider Mountain just before sunset. I debriefed Greenberg on the attack of the night before. He agreed to send a vehicle around from Marionburg to see what remained of the logging-truck wreck.

The old barn was concealed from the road by a knoll of trees and was about a hundred feet above it. We had taken turns keeping watch in case Nathan and his boys decided to get their own dogs and do some tracking, but there’d been no movement or traffic along the road until well after sunrise. We waited until midmorning, then set off up the hill.

Our excursion up the second valley produced six home sites, but only one person, an elderly woman, had been willing to talk to us. The rest either ran us off or wouldn’t come out of their trailers and cabins. When the old lady introduced herself as Laurie May Creigh, I’d been alarmed, but it turned out that Laurie May, although related, had no time for the likes of Grinny Creigh and all her evil works. She’d invited us onto her front porch, offered cold tea and some homemade muffins, and told us she’d be pleased to set a spell and talk. The porch was in shadow as the sun began its late-afternoon arc into the mountains.

She said she was eighty-and-some years old, and she looked it, although she displayed no visible infirmities beyond the measured movements of that great age. There appeared to be no electricity in the log cabin where she lived, but the place was clean and orderly, with freshly split firewood piled neatly all along the front and side porches and the yard free of the clutter we’d seen at most of the mountain trailers. There were three small outbuildings behind the cabin, one of which contained a dozen chickens. There was a curious circle of dense pines on the slope above the outbuildings. Her cabin was three-quarters of the way up the slope from the one-lane road and overlooked the crashing creek that had created the hollow in the first place. There was one more homestead above hers.

“ ‘At woman ain’t no damned good,” Laurie May pronounced, banging her cane for emphasis. “We’s kin, you know, but I don’t own to the likes of her. She and that no-good son of hers, that Nathan, they’s the reason folks ‘round here call this hill back yonder Spider Mountain. Real name is Book Mountain. The onliest spider is over yonder in the next holler.”

“We’ve heard some stories,” Carrie said, trying to make it sound casual. I sat on the front steps with the dogs, while Carrie sat in one of the rockers on the porch. I’d decided to let Carrie do the interview, although the old lady seemed willing enough to talk.

Laurie May reached under her rocker for a small leather bag, opened drawstrings, and pinched some dipping tobacco into her lower lip. “They call her Grinny Creigh, but her real name’s Vivian. Once her pap passed, she’n her brothers commenced to fussin’ and feudin’ over who was gonna run the ‘shine business in these here parts. Years ago, that was. The brothers turned up dead, all but one, and that’s when folks started callin’ her Grinny. The live one became sheriff down in Rocky Falls, and he’s of a stripe with Vivian.”

“Who was Nathan’s father?” Carrie asked.

“Some damn viper snake, spit itself out of a log,” Laurie May said promptly. “That boy is downright crazy.” She spat over the porch rail into a much abused flowerbed. “Goes around with a bag’a knives all the time. Nathan and his bag’a knives, folks say. They’s an old gold mine buried in the hill behind her cabin. All played out, of course, but folks say Nathan does things back in there, and I believe it.”

“What kind of things?”

Laurie May spat again. “Ain’t no tellin’,” she replied. “Bad things. Came around here back in the spring, lookin’ for some man ain’t no one ever heered of. I run him off, all right. I called him Dead Eyes right to his face, that’s what folks call him, b’hind his back, mind you. So I told him, I says, you git the hell outta here. Had my Greener right inside the door, and he knew it, too. Him and them damned ugly dogs. Not like these pretty things. Scared my chickens off their layin’ for a whole week.” She pulled an ancient lace handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped the side of her mouth. “Boy ain’t right,” she said, tapping her own forehead.

“We’ve heard the Creighs are running more than just moonshine,” Carrie ventured.

The old lady looked at her over her glasses. “What kinda cops you say you was?” she asked with a sly, toothless grin.

I laughed out loud. “Told you,” I said. The old lady positively beamed.

“We’re state police,” Carrie said, pulling out her credentials while finessing my status. “We came up here to talk to people who live around Grinny Creigh and her crowd.”

“That ain’t gonna happen,” Laurie May snorted. “ ‘Sides me, ain’t nobody livin’ this close to the spider’s gonna say nothin’, if they know what’s good for ’em. That damn Nathan’ll come creepin’ in the night and burn ’em out.”

“But you’re not afraid of him?” I asked.

“Lemme tell ye somethin’,” she said. “Once ye get my age? Don’t need much sleep, ‘specially at night. I watch. They know it, too. Any snakes come around here get they rattles shot at. They know that, too. ‘Cain’t hold that big ole Greener like I used to could, but I got me a Colt. 44. Come out here in the dark, set down in this here chair, put that thing up on the railing there, I can shoot the nut out of a squirrel’s mouth the long way, if you get my meanin’. Was that y’all they was after last night, all that mess over to the bottom’a Deep Creek?”

I shook my head in wonder. The hills were indeed alive. “Yes, ma’am,” Carrie said. “We think they faked an accident with a log truck, turned it over right where we were camping.”

Laurie May nodded. “That’ll be Nathan,” she said. “That’s his style. Fixin’ to mash ye. One night he came a’creepin up behind this old man’s trailer, over to Benson Bluff? He went and sawed him a tree right down on top of that poor man’s trailer. Wasn’t no chain saw, neither. Did it by hand, quiet, sneaky like. Took’m all night, prob’ly. Used him an oiled whip blade, him an’ one other boy. Patient damn snake, that Nathan. Mashed that old man flat. Folks thought they was gonna have to bury the whole trailer to git the job done right.”

“And the sheriff?” I asked. “Couldn’t he see that it was a murder?”

Laurie May spat again, and I noticed for the first time she was killing insects every time she spat into the flowerbed. “M. C. Mingo’s a Spider Mountain Creigh. Sees what he’s tole to see, that one does. Folks say Grinny’s got somethin’ on him, b’sides they bein’ brother and sister. He come around here, what, a year ago? Stood right out yonder, giving me what fer ‘bout talkin’ to strangers, like I’m a’doin’ right now. Didn’t figger on my boys bein’ home, did he. No, sir. I got four of’em. Big boys. There’s the twins, and then t’other two. Worked them coal mines, over to Tenn-essee. Coupl’a them gittin’ on, but just the same, they ran his potbellied little ass right off. He don’t come back up thisaway no more, I’ll tell you that.”

“What about children?” Carrie asked. “I haven’t seen many children at all up here in our travels.”

Laurie May shook her head. “Mostly old folks up here these days,” she said. “Ain’t no work, no money ‘cept the welfare. Young’ns around here, they pack up to town or one of them cities back east.” She paused as if trying to remember something. “Folks do say they’s a lot of children who flat run off in these here parts. Cain’t blame ’em if they do. ‘Specially if you see some of them mamas. No-good sluts and hoors, the lot of’em. Go ‘round with hardly no clothes on, then act all s’prised when they get a baby stuck on ’em, like they don’t know wherever did it come from.”

She stopped talking when we heard a truck engine drop into a low gear at the foot of the valley and begin climbing the dirt lane that paralleled the creek. Then we heard a second vehicle do the same thing.

“Y’all be gettin’ inside, now,” she said urgently, rocking herself up and out of her chair. “And bring them dogs, mister.”

We went into the cabin, which was as neat and clean as the yard. I noted the antique double-barreled shotgun lodged near the front door. Its twin stood by the back door in the kitchen. Laurie May took us over to what turned out to be the pantry door and opened it. She motioned for me to get my fingers into a hole in the floor and then lift a five-foot-long trapdoor. She gave us a lantern and a match and told us to hide out down in the cellar until whoever it was went away. She passed the backdoor shotgun to me as Carrie went down the steps. Then she went back out onto the front porch.

I wedged the door open and lit the lantern. I pulled out the DEA radio, called Greenberg’s radioman up on the mountain, and told them we were going into hiding in case whoever was coming was the Creigh gang. I described the location of the cabin and then shut it down when Laurie May stepped back into the kitchen and said to hurry, they was almost here. We went down the wooden stairs and I lowered the trapdoor. We could hear her slithering a carpet over the trapdoor and then walking back toward the cabin’s front door, her cane counting time.

“There’s a reason they call it a trapdoor,” I said nervously. “If she’s one of them…”

“I don’t think so,” Carrie said. She took the lantern and looked around. The cellar walls were made of stone, and the floor was packed earth. The shelves along one wall were filled with Mason jars of preserved foods, sacks of flour and sugar, and store-bought canned goods. There were a dozen burlap sacks of lump coal stacked along another wall; a third wall held all kinds of antique kitchen implements, soap, candles, and three more lanterns. There was a kitchen table and three wooden chairs out in the middle of the cellar. The air smelled of chalky dust and old stone. It certainly could have been a trap-there was no other way out of the cellar other than those oak steps. The shepherds sat down next to the steps and watched the shadows being thrown along the walls by the kerosene lantern.

“Why did you ask her about children?” I asked, easing myself into one the chairs. A fine halo of dust rose from the table when I sat down. We couldn’t hear anything from the outside.

“We’ve seen a dozen or so places in two days, and exactly one two-year-old child,” she replied.

“There could have been more,” I said. “The people who didn’t come out, or the ones who told us to get gone-there could have been kids in those places.”

“Then there should have been toys, trikes, big-wheels, swings-kid clutter. I didn’t see any, except at that one place.”

“Well, like she said-there’s no future in these hills for young people, and it’s the young people who have kids. They go to town or just plain away. Makes sense.”

Carrie sat down. “That makes sense for teenagers-I’m talking kids. Four-to ten-year-olds. There’s one combined elementary and middle school and one high school in this county, all in Rocky Falls. They combined the elementary and the middle school three years ago because the elementary school didn’t have enough new accessions to warrant keeping it open.”

“The overall population dropping?”

“Not much change really, and that’s part of the mystery. Now, the county people do admit they have some ‘data holes’ in the higher elevations.”

“Probably more like bullet holes in their county vehicles,” I said. We heard a door close upstairs, and then Laurie May was tapping on the trapdoor with her cane. I went up the stairs and pushed the door open.

“They done gone,” she announced. “But they was a’lookin’ for ye, all right. Nathan and his boys. I told ’em you and the lady done been here. Told ’em you said y’all was headed for Spider Mountain. That put ’em right off they feed, that did.”

“They say what they were going to do?” I asked.

“Heard one say they was gonna go get the dogs, put a track on ye. Best leave now, and don’t go nowheres near Grinny Creigh.”

“We’re going to go right up to the top of this valley, and then we’ll probably head out,” I said. “I’ve seen that dog pack.”

“Ain’t we all,” Laurie May said. “But Mr. Samuel Colt works on dogs, same as men.”

“Thank you for speaking to us,” Carrie said.

“Most folks up here is decent folks,” the old lady said. “But not on Spider Mountain. Folks knows, but they skeered.”

“That’s why we’re here, Ms. Creigh,” Carrie said. “We want to fix that problem real bad.”

The old lady nodded. “ ‘Bout time,” she said. “Folks been a’wonderin’.”

Baby Greenberg took a sip of coffee from a metal cup, winced, and threw the remainder of the coffee into the fire. “Goddammit, Rupe,” he said, “if I wanted asphalt I’d have asked for some.”

Special Agent Rupert Jones shrugged his overlarge shoulders. “Never said I could make coffee,” he said. “Don’t drink that shit, myself.” Then he and one of the other agents left to take up their night watch positions on the slopes above Crown Lake. The other two agents had already rolled into their bags.

We were gathered around what was technically an illegal campfire on the edge of Crown Lake. The duty radioman had picked us up at the top of the valley after we’d left Laurie May’s and driven us down the firebreaks to the DEA campsite. Dinner had consisted of cold pizza from Marionburg, courtesy of the agent who’d driven the lower valley road to see about the logging-truck accident. The logs had all still been down in the creek, but there’d been no sign of the truck or trailer.

“If you were a truly special agent,” I said, “you’d have some scotch in one of those briefcases over there.”

“Why, is your flask empty?” Carrie asked innocently.

“Very,” I said, making a mental note to get her for that.

“Well,” Greenberg said. “In fact…”

He got up and returned with a bottle, which duly made the rounds. My shepherds were curled up close to the fire. Once the three of us had properly equipped ourselves against the rapidly cooling mountain air, Greenberg threw another log on the fire and asked the essential question. “So: Now what’re you gonna do?”

“I think we’ve established that this is definitely Injun country,” I said.

“Gosh, you think?” he asked.

“With a damned good intel and surveillance network,” Carrie said. “They knew we were up there and where we’d settled for the night. And they had no qualms about squashing their problem.”

“So we have grounds for taking action,” I said. “But even if you guys came in force, swept up all the black hats you could find, including Grinny and Nathan, would you have a case for court?”

We all knew the answer to that question.

“How about the old lady?” Greenberg asked. “Could she point us toward some concrete evidence?”

“I don’t think so,” Carrie said. “She knows what’s going on and who’s who in the zoo, but I doubt she ever comes off that place. Apparently she has sons who see to her needs.”

“She said there are lots of decent people living up there alongside the Creigh nest, but what she’s doing doesn’t really affect them,” I said. “And according to Laurie May, if they do poke their nose in where it doesn’t belong, big trees fall on their cabins at night.”

“Shit,” Greenberg sighed. “We’re nowhere. Again.”

“I say you all quit creeping around the hills, playing their game, and take a federal crew into Grinny’s place, have a look at that abandoned mine that’s supposed to be under her cabin. I recognized Nathan as being in charge of what happened last night, so there’s probable cause.”

“They’d say it was an accident with a logging truck,” Greenberg pointed out. “Shit happens. The guy who came across the creek looking for you was only checking for possible victims.”

“With his shotgun? And with all the logs in the creek?”

“You know and I know, but think what a lawyer could do with that in front of a judge who may or may not love the government and all its works. I mean, that applies both before and after any search. I’d hate to find a ton of evidence at Grinny’s only to lose it because the search gets tossed.”

Greenberg’s radio crackled into life. “Incoming,” reported one of the agents on the hill.

“How many?” Greenberg asked.

“One vehicle. Stand by.” Then he came back. “Looks like a sheriff’s patrol car.”

“Ours or theirs?” I wondered aloud.

By then we could hear a vehicle approaching along the shoreside dirt road. Its headlights pitched bizarre shadows on the boulder piles just above us.

“Some ranger coming to check out the fire inside the park grounds, maybe?” Carrie asked. Greenberg groaned.

The vehicle stopped about a hundred yards away. Its headlights switched off and a single individual got out, flipped on a flashlight, and started walking toward the fire. The shepherds were up and alert; I ordered them to sit down as M. C. Mingo himself stepped down the bank and into the firelight. He was in uniform and had his right hand on his gun butt. He turned off the flashlight, stared at me for a long moment, ignoring Carrie, and then addressed himself to Greenberg.

“You’re Special Agent Greenberg?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“And who are you, miss?”

Carrie didn’t answer him. She sat back in her folding camp chair and gave him a bored look. I noticed that her right hand had drifted down to the side of her chair, where the Mamba stick was perched. I’d taken my SIG off earlier and put it in my tent with the rest of my gear.

“And who might you be?” Greenberg asked.

“You know damn well who I am, and so does this suspect over here. Why haven’t you turned yourself in, Mister Richter?”

“Waiting for a warrant, Sheriff,” I said. “Sheriff Hayes knows where I am, and then, of course, we’re going to want an extradition hearing. In front of a real judge, even.”

Mingo glared at me, then at Greenberg. “What are you people doing up here? You’re DEA agents. Why wasn’t this coordinated with my office?”

“I believe we’re in the national park,” Greenberg said, looking around innocently.

“Not all the time,” Mingo said. He was tapping the flashlight against his right palm impatiently.

“Yes, all the time,” Greenberg said. “Haven’t strayed from the park since we’ve been here.” His tone of voice was faintly mocking, and I could see that Mingo’s temper was rising. The flashlight tapping became more intense, and the light actually switched on.

“You’re required by your own regulations to inform local law enforcement whenever you’re going to conduct an operation. Why wasn’t this done?”

“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, mister,” 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.