Spider mountain

9

We got to the front porch about the time Laurie May found her box of shells. I couldn’t tell if she was disappointed at not getting to fire the shotgun or if she just hadn’t had her coffee yet. She peered at us carefully through the cracked front door and then nodded. I think she recognized the shepherds and then us, in that order.

“I knowed someone was down there,” she said. “Didn’t see them dogs, or I’d’a knowed it was you two. Come on in. I got me some coffee makin’.”

Carrie thanked her and we went in. I told the shepherds to stay on the front porch and to leave the chickens alone. They were visibly disappointed. Chickens could be real fun.

“Saw ’em cop cars a-flashin’ on the river road early this mornin’,” Laurie May announced from the kitchen. The cabin smelled of well-done coffee and wood smoke. The aroma could have been coming entirely from the coffee, too. “Was that somethin’ to do with you-all?”

“Yes, unfortunately, it was,” Carrie said. “M. C. Mingo and his crowd are looking for us.”

“What’d y’all do now?” she asked, bringing two mugs of coffee out to the table.

“Came into Robbins County and asked too many questions,” I said. “Went some places we weren’t supposed to. He surrounded us down on Crown Lake and put me in jail.” I told her what had happened after that. Carrie’s eyebrows rose when I described meeting Ace.

Laurie May was studying my face intently. “You don’t look like no outlaw to me,” she said. “Are ye?”

“I’m a retired deputy sheriff, from back east in Manceford County,” I told her. “Apparently M. C. Mingo doesn’t care for outsiders poking around in Robbins County.”

“Laurie May?” Carrie said. “As I told you, I’m a police officer, too. Why don’t you sit down and let me tell you a story.”

When she’d finished, the old lady nodded. “It figgers,” she said. “Folks is always talkin’ about runaways and such. Grinny Creigh’s mean enough, too. But what about them mothers? What’s God gonna do to a mother, sells her own child?”

“Burn her in hell until the end of time,” Carrie said simply, and Laurie May was one hundred percent on board with that solution.

“I’ve been talking to some people in Washington,” Carrie said. “There’s a federal task force looking into child-trafficking rings. There’s word that a ‘shipment’ is expected soon from this part of the state. We need to find them, and stop this mess.”

“Where you gonna look?” Laurie May asked.

“We have no idea,” Carrie said, looking across the table at me. Pile on, she was saying.

“I saw Sheriff Mingo bring a little girl to Grinny’s cabin,” I told Laurie May. “She stood there and yelled at her for a minute. Then she grabbed her and smothered her until she was unconscious. Then Mingo took her away.”

Laurie May was shocked by this, but then a flinty expression settled on her face. “Don’t surprise me too much,” she said. “That son of hers, that Nathan? Folks say he killed a boy at school for laughin’ and makin’ fun of how he looked. Stabbed him through the mouth with one of them long knives he’s got, folks say. Throwed the body in a cave. Ain’t nobody ever seen him again. There’s murder in them Creighs for sure. You say Mingo’s lookin’ for ye right now?”

I nodded.

“Where you gonna hide?”

We both looked at her, and she understood right away. “You wantin’ to hole up here, is that it?”

“We need somewhere to set up a base while we look for those children,” Carrie said. “You’re the only person we’ve met so far up here who’s not afraid of Mingo.”

Laurie May smiled. I think she recognized the sensation of some smoke being blown. “Y’all listen here,” she said. “I ain’t never said I wasn’t afraid of M. C. Mingo. I act all the fool and bluster them boys’a his like I was a crazy woman, but if’n they wanted to, they could do as they damn please. They know it, and I know it.”

“Okay,” I interjected. “Then it’s not right that we put you in any danger. If we can hole up here for the day, we’ll clear out tonight.”

“You hold your horses, there, mister deppity,” she said, wagging a bony finger at me. “I didn’t say y’all couldn’t stay. You just need to know how things really is. Ain’t no point in tryin’ to fool folks, not at my age.” She turned to Carrie. “Fetch my shawl over yonder, missy. I got somethin’ to show ye.”

We walked up the slope behind the house toward a circular grove of old pines occupying a wide swale. When we got closer we could see a tiny log cabin, perhaps twenty feet square, almost totally hidden by the sweeping pines. Based on the color of the chinking, the amount of moss on the foundation stones, and the lean of the stone chimney, I guessed it to be very old.

“That there’s Jessie’s cabin,” Laurie May said, stopping to catch her breath. “It’s got it some blood on the floor, but it’s a beauty for a hidin’ place. My granddaddy built it well more’n a hundred years back.”

The cabin had two shuttered windows, one on either side of the front door, a small front porch, and the single chimney at one end. The logs were of random diameter and black with age. The roof was painted metal that had rusted badly over the years. But the path leading to the porch was clear of weeds and there was no clutter on the porch.

“Blood on the floor?” I asked.

“Jessie’s my only daughter,” Laurie May said. “First born. Came to her beauty early on, married up with a no-good son of a bitch. They had ’em two young’uns right quick, but he was no provider, that one. Liked his whiskey, and liked to beat on her more’n he fancied workin’ for his keep. Right bastard, he was.”

“What happened?” Carrie asked.

“One night they had ’em a big ole set-to,” Laurie May replied. “Wasn’t the first time, neither. He was drunk and beatin’ on her some. Hurt her this time. Drew blood on her. She got the scattergun, told’m to clear on out. He said he’d kill her if she didn’t put it down. That the only thing she’d been good for was them kids. That he loved them and hated her. Hateful talk like that.”

She paused, staring hard at the cabin, remembering. A soft breeze stirred the big pines. Laurie May took a deep breath. “Then she went crazy, done somethin’ awful. She turned that there ten-bore on them little kids. Kilt ’em both dead, right in front of him. She tole him there wasn’t no reason for him to stay around anymore, was there. Then she walked out that door right there, and into them woods yonder. That was twenty-three years ago. Long time, but I remember it like it was last night.”

“What happened to her?” Carrie asked.

“She done disappeared off the face of the earth. I got one letter, months on after it happened. Tole me what happened, what she’d done. How sorry she was. That Larry, that was the bastard’s name, Larry, done drove her crazy. Said she knew she was damned forever. Said one day, she’d come back here and join ’em young’uns. They’s buried back there, behind the cabin. Last time we ever heered from her.”

“And Larry?” I asked.

“That no-count kilt hisself a week later. Took that self-same shotgun and blowed his head right off in his pickup truck. Did it right there on the main street in Rocky Falls. Took him near a whole bottle’a whiskey to work hisself up to it, but he done it, right there in broad daylight. They asked me if I’d bury him back there. I told them to burn his body, so’s it could keep up with his soul.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just drive out of here?”

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

“What if they stop me?”

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

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

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

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

“Santa Claws?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’d be him. Huge nose.”

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

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

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

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

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

“And how about Nathan?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Um.”

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

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

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

“And your evidence for that would be…?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How many was they?” she asked.

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

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

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

She threw some sticks in the woodstove, shook the ash grate, pitched in the cotton waste, and then stirred the soup pot. “Where’s ‘at pretty woman?” she asked.

“Over in Marionburg,” I said. “She managed to get out of Robbins County, but I don’t think she can come back here while Mingo’s people are all stirred up. I’m going to hike out.” I explained some of what I’d learned in the phone call.

“I’ll heat ye some soup,” she said. She clanked the firebox door shut. “You know they gonna be out there in them woods. Prob’ly have ’em dogs with ’em, too.”

“I can’t let them take me again,” I said. “Especially now that my allies have been backed out.”

“Which way you gonna go?” she asked.

“I think the best route will be over the ridges toward Crown Lake. I think the roads will be too dangerous.”

She stirred the soup some more. I realized I was really hungry. The back of my neck had settled down to a warm burn, which I hoped was not an infection getting under way.

“If’n it was me,” Laurie May said slowly, “I believe I’d go t’other way. They gonna be lookin’ for ye to run for Marionburg town. If’n it was me, I’d go up and over that ridge yonder and hide right in Grinny Creigh’s backyard. Ain’t none’a them gonna expect you to do that.”

Including me, I thought, but she had a point. If that shooter had alerted the rest of Nathan’s crew and the sheriff, the woods would soon be alive with the sound of guns being cocked and slavering dogs sniffing out trails. They would in fact never even think to look at Grinny’s place. She saw me considering it and gave me a toothy grin.

“I’ll show ye a shortcut through that backbone ridge yonder,” she said. “Put you into Grinny’s place sideways, other side’a them dogs. They’s a little cave on the bottom side of her front field. Maybe you can hole up in there, watch and see where she’s hidin’ them poor young’uns.”

And that was the objective, wasn’t it, I reminded myself. Carrie had defanged herself when she resigned from the SBI. She had no legal authority to pursue Grinny Creigh. Neither did I, for that matter, but I was here and she wasn’t. If I could watch the Creigh place undiscovered for a few days, maybe I could actually put some flesh on the bones of Carrie’s theory about Grinny selling children. The transponder was still in place, for now, anyway, so, in theory, I could call out.

Evidence. We desperately needed evidence.

“Okay, I’ll do just that,” I said. “The cave big enough for me and the shepherds?”

She nodded and then told me to sit down and eat. I briefly wondered how she knew about a cave over on the other side of the ridge. On the other hand, she was old enough to know damn near everything about these hills.

An hour later we turned down the lanterns in her cabin, put them in the front windows, and then slipped quietly out the back door. I had my field belt, the spotting scope, a bedroll, water, and the SIG. 45. Laurie May had fixed up a bag of bread and a couple of hard-boiled eggs. The shepherds seemed to sense our need for stealth; they were sticking close and moving in silence. There was a weak moon rising above the mountains, so between her knowledge of the path and a borrowed walking stick, I managed to stay upright as we climbed through the rock rubble toward what she had called the backbone ridge. We seemed to be heading right into the side of it as the ground rose, and I wondered if we were going to have to go straight up and over. But then we walked into a dense stand of gnarled pines whose branches were low enough to require constant swatting. Laurie May was moving surprisingly fast for a woman of her age, which hopefully meant she knew right where she was going. After about seventy-five feet of pine needles and bugs going down my shirt, we broke out in front of a crack in the ridge.

“This here broke clean through the ‘bone long ways back,” she whispered, pointing into a narrow defile, which was in total darkness. “They’s water runnin’ through it, comin’ down off ‘n them sides. Foller it through to t’other side, go down to yer right hand, mebbe twenty rod, to the cave hole.”

“Thanks, Laurie May. I’ll try to come back out after dark tomorrow. If by any chance Carrie contacts you, tell her where I am. If she comes to your place, try to keep her there until I get back.”

She nodded in the darkness, squeezed my hand, and started back into the pines. I approached the passageway through the ridge. Her description of it breaking clean through was accurate. I stepped into the crack and looked up. Sheer rock walls rose on either side of me, no more than six feet between them where I stood but getting wider toward the top, which had to be two or even three hundred feet straight up. The ground underfoot was loose stone and mud, and I could see thin dark streaks of moisture weeping down the sides of the defile. I’m not one to feel claustrophobic, but this passage through the heart of the ridge got me close to it. I tried to imagine what titanic forces could split and then open the whole ridge like this. I had to resist the temptation to keep one hand on the walls to make sure they weren’t closing together on me. The shepherds followed nervously, stopping when I did and picking their footing carefully.

The path through the crack led straight across for about a hundred yards and then slightly downhill, and the water took on some depth as I neared the other end. The air was dank and cold, and the looming rock walls seemed to amplify my every footstep, no matter how careful I tried to be. At the other end the crack narrowed down to no more than four feet, and it took all my willpower not to bolt the last fifty feet.

Finally I reached the other end and stopped just short of stepping out onto clear ground. The hollow containing Grinny Creigh’s place opened in front of me, and I had a good view down the slope and overlooking the buildings and pens around her cabin. My vantage point was a good three hundred or more feet above the cabin in elevation. There was no cover on this side of the ridge except one lonesome pine tree, which was tapping the water seeping out of the crack. I hesitated to just step out there; there were dim lights on inside the main cabin, but all the outbuildings were dark. I was facing the south end of the cabin, so I couldn’t see anything on the front porch where she’d been enthroned the night I’d been there. And might be tonight.

I stepped just out of the crack and sat down to watch for a while, mostly to get my night vision acclimated to the moonlight. Now that I was out of that sheer-walled split in the mountain, I could see much better. The tiny weep spilling out of the crack went straight downhill and disappeared into a brush-covered gully. I used the telescope to scan the compound, looking for any signs of humans or dogs, but there was nothing moving down there. There was a slight breeze blowing across the face of the ridge as cooler air from the upper back ridge poured downhill toward the road and creek way down to my right. Otherwise there wasn’t a sound coming from the hollow.

The shepherds lay down on either side of me, and their warm, furry hides were comforting. I settled back against the rock, and my shirt collar reminded me of the rifleman who’d damn near laid me down on the other side. Which further reminded me of the cell phone. I took it out, turned it on, and checked for a signal. One lonely bar, and it wasn’t entirely persistent. I switched it back off since I had no way to recharge it.

After a half hour my back was getting cold, so I decided to find the cave. Having no idea of how long a rod was, I elected to simply go sideways down the ridge, moving slowly and feeling along the rock wall for a cave entrance. I’d gone maybe fifty feet when I heard and then saw the headlights of a pickup truck coming up from the river road toward Grinny’s cabin. I was well above their line of sight but decided to freeze in place and sit down again, trying to make myself small. On a full-moon night they might have seen me, but I figured I was pretty inconspicuous against the gray rock wall of the backbone ridge.

The truck stopped in front of the cabin and shut down its engine and lights. I halfway expected someone to get out and haul yet another chained body out of the truck’s bed. Instead I watched Nathan get out of the passenger side and go into the cabin. Even at this distance he was unmistakable, his stooped figure moving awkwardly up the steps and into the shadow of the porch. I saw a match flare on the driver’s side. That was good-the match would destroy the man’s night vision should he happen to look up in my direction. I was still pretty exposed and considered moving on down the hill. Then I remembered that motion wasn’t the best idea if perchance someone was actively scanning the ridgeline.

Ten minutes later Nathan appeared out of nowhere at the back of the pickup truck. He had two large dogs with him, which he proceeded to heave up into the bed of the truck. I could hear their claws scrabbling for footing. One of them started barking, and I heard a rough voice yell “Shut up” at him. Nathan got back in and the truck started up. The driver turned on his headlights, and now it was my turn to lose all night vision as his brights swept across my position on the hillside. All I could do was hope like hell they weren’t looking up here, because there wasn’t a stitch of cover anywhere. In the event, the truck kept going and soon was out of sight and sound down the hill. I stayed put until I could see again and then continued my way down the ridge in search of the cave.

About three hundred feet from the crack, I felt the rock wall give way to a narrow opening. I had a penlight on my field belt, but decided not to take any chances. I sent the two dogs into the cave instead. Hopefully there wasn’t a six-foot-long rattlesnake denned up in there for the night, because if there was, we were in for some noise. Both shepherds popped out of the cave a minute later, so I decided it was reasonably safe for me to try it out. The opening was only four feet high and perhaps eighteen inches wide, so I had to duckwalk sideways into the cave. The actual cave curled to the right from the entrance. Once inside, I turned on the penlight and checked the ground for snakes and the ceiling for bats. Nobody home.

The cave wasn’t much of a cave-it was just a hole in the rock. It had a sandy floor and went back about ten feet, ending in a crack in the rock that was perhaps a foot wide. The ceiling started out at six feet but rapidly sloped down to no more than four at the back. I shone the light into the crack but couldn’t see anything that resembled a passageway, just more gray rock. Fortunately the cave was dry as a bone. I switched off the penlight.

“Okay, mutts,” I announced quietly. “We’re officially here.”

I shucked my bedroll and the field belt and then moved back to the entrance to see what kind of view I had. It wasn’t terrific. Because of the way the cave entrance made that initial turn, I couldn’t see much of the Creigh place without coming back outside. Fine for the nighttime but dangerous during the day. I went outside and sat down with my back against the rock again. The cave would be okay for holing up, but I needed a watching point that would conceal me and the dogs while giving me a clear view.

There was another problem. Nathan had come back to the cabin to get some dogs. If they were trackers, and if he went to Laurie May’s, they might track me up to and through the crack. After the shooting earlier, somebody knew I was in the area, and probably where I’d come from. In which case, I didn’t want to be holed up in any dead-end cave. They could just stick their shotguns into the entrance and leave the resulting gore to compost.

The cell phone slipped out of my pocket. I picked it up, switched on, and checked for a signal. This time there were two whole bars. I fished around for Carrie’s number and called her. She answered on the third ring, and I moved back into the cave’s entrance.

“Where are you?” she asked. Her voice sounded a bit off.

I told her and then asked her the same question.

“At your fancy cabin,” she said. “My room at the main lodge was on the government’s nickel, which is no longer on offer.”

“Good, I’m glad someone’s using it. I wish I were there instead of out here in this damned cave.”

“You didn’t tell me you had all this scotch here,” she said. “I may have overindulged. Just a little.”

That accounted for her voice and slightly slurred words. “Good for you,” I said. “Having second thoughts about resigning, are we?”

“Yep,” she said. “Standing on lofty principle usually means the next step is down. The loftier, the farther down. I should have eaten something. I’ve already got a headache.”

“Regrets?”

“Well…,” she said, hesitating. “I’ve discovered that being in the SBI gave me most of my identity. Now…”

“Now you feel naked,” I said. “No badge, no creds, no gun, no authority. And guess how I know all this?”

“Yeah, I suppose you do. I’m desperate to pursue this thing with the Creighs, but I’m no longer a player.” I heard a hiccup. “May have fucked up.”

“Would they take you back?”

“You know? I’m not so sure. My boss didn’t try very hard to talk me out of it, now that I think about it. Of course, he was pissed over what we’d been doing here in the hills.”

“Drink lots of water,” I said. “Get some sleep. Everything looks better in the daylight.”

“I won’t,” she said. “Daylight means mirrors. What are you going to do?”

“Laurie May suggested I hide out in Grinny Creigh’s hollow because that’s the last place they’d go looking for me. But Nathan just showed up to get some dogs, so my plan may have to change, and soon. There’s no good cover where I am now.”

“I should be out there with you,” she said. “This is my beef.”

“Right now you’re more useful to me in Marionburg,” I said. Especially with a snoot full of scotch, I thought. “I may yet need extracting if these guys get lucky.”

“I suppose,” she said. There was a moment of silence, a noise I couldn’t identify, and then I heard her say “Oh, shit.” Then the connection was broken.

I immediately called back. The phone gave me a canned system message saying it was no longer on the air.

What the hell had just happened? Had the Creighs gone after Carrie? In Carrigan County? I shut the phone off and restowed it. I looked at the shepherds, who were lying there alert, awaiting orders. Something told me to get out of that cave and to go in motion. I told the dogs to stay down and stepped out of the cave to reconnoiter. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that Nathan and his dogs might be on my trail pretty soon, so I couldn’t stay up here on the ridge, and it wouldn’t be terribly bright to let them catch me in that crack in the rock.

Okay, we’d go down to Grinny’s. If Nathan and his dogs had tracked me toward the cabin, he’d think his dogs simply wanted to go back to the pen. I hoped.

I roused the shepherds and we set out down the ridge. There was no cover until I got within a hundred feet of the cabin, and then we slipped into a tree line. I went downhill along the tree line until we got abeam of the cabin itself. I put the shepherds on a long down and crept to the house side of the trees, some thirty feet from the porch. This was where Nathan’s black hats had been standing the night they brought me up to socialize with Grinny. The wind was slightly in my face, which hopefully would keep the dog pack behind the cabin from detecting us. Grinny’s reputed second sight might present a more dangerous problem. There was some light coming through the curtained windows, but it was yellow and diffused, probably lantern light. I couldn’t see anyone inside or on the grounds.

I was trying to figure out what to do next when I heard another vehicle coming up the pasture road below the cabin. It sounded like a modern SUV instead of one of the ancient pickup trucks these folks seemed to favor. Whoever it was knew where he was going and drove right up to the front of the cabin. I settled down in the pine thicket to watch as the vehicle, a dark-colored Chevrolet Tahoe, stopped and shut down.

For a long minute, nothing happened, and then the front door of the cabin opened and Grinny Creigh stepped out onto the front porch. A foreign-looking man got out of the SUV and greeted her in the lilting accent of Southwest Asia. He went halfway up the steps and stopped when she told him to wait there, and then she went back into the cabin.

I studied the man as he waited in the dim moonlight. He was perhaps five-seven or -eight and in his late thirties. He had a sharply outlined, close-cropped black beard that joined his mustache, and he had the prominent nose of Pakistan or perhaps India. He wore khaki trousers and a light windbreaker, under which I could see a cell phone and a pager clipped to his belt. He waited patiently on the front steps, looking around at the mountains and open fields around the cabin as if he’d seen it all before.

The door opened and Grinny Creigh reappeared, carrying a lantern this time and leading a young girl by the hand. The girl was between eight and ten years old and very thin, with flaxen hair and a pinched, frightened face. Grinny gripped the little girl’s wrist as if to make sure she wouldn’t bolt as she raised the lantern to fully illuminate the child. The man on the steps examined her carefully, asking her to turn around a couple of times, and then came up on the porch to lay his hands on her. Given what I was expecting, I was surprised to see that he wasn’t touching her in a sexual manner, but rather examining her, the way a doctor might. He looked into her eyes and mouth, asked her to cough even though he didn’t have a stethoscope, and felt her limbs as if to gauge how well fed she was.

I experienced a sudden urge to shoot them both and rescue the little girl. But for all I knew, this was a county social services doctor or PA making a house call of some kind, even if it was pretty late. The child was thin and frightened, although she didn’t look to be ill. Grinny just stood there looking bored, but not letting go of that slim, bony wrist for one moment. I thought for just a second that I glimpsed another small, pale face peeking through the curtains at what was going on out front, but then it was gone, like a ghost on the move.

The man thanked Grinny and said that everything was acceptable. Grinny turned the child around and sent her into the cabin. Then she turned back to the man, who had stepped down to the walkway.

“If’n we had to, how many could you take in one go?” she asked.

The man thought about that for a moment. “No more than one per night,” he said finally. “And that would be difficult. The airport security would notice.”

“Ain’t sayin’ we’ll have to, mind,” she said. “But there’s been some folks snoopin’ around, and it ain’t been the ones we usually see ‘round here, them drug cops, I’m talkin’ about.”

“Who are they, then?” he asked.

“We don’t know. M. C. had one of’em, but he got away ‘fore we could have a little talk with’m.”

“Is it about the children?” the man asked.

“Like I keep sayin’, we don’t know. But if we git cornered up, you could take all of’em, right?”

“The demand far exceeds the supply, always,” the man responded. “It’s the processing and transport that are tricky. For a sudden oversupply, the costs would be higher, of course.”

“Unh-hunh,” Grinny said in a sarcastic, suspicions-confirmed tone of voice.

“Let me get something out of the car for you,” he said, and turned to go back to the SUV. Grinny stood there for a second and then reached down behind that oversized rocking chair and pulled a shotgun toward her, which she set down behind her against the door. Her huge bulk completely hid it from view.

The man came back from the SUV with something small and black in his hand, and for a second I wondered if he had a gun. Instead he handed it up to Grinny on the porch.

“This is a one-time pager,” he said. “Use it once and I will come at the regular hour. Then throw it away. Never use it again because they are able to track such devices now.” He pointed up into the sky. “From space, using satellites. Imagine. If you must move them all at once, activate the pager precisely at noon on whichever day you use it. Otherwise, activate it at some other time, it doesn’t matter when.”

“All right,” she said, keeping her right hand buried in her housecoat and close to that shotgun.

“I will be back in a few nights,” he said. “I will let your Mr. Mingo know when to meet me.”

She nodded curtly at him and went back into the house, shutting the big wooden door and locking it with some kind of metal bar, which I could hear thump down into place. The man drove off in his SUV. He’d been just far enough away for me not to be able to get the license plate number.

I sat back on my haunches. Some kind of a transaction had just taken place. The little girl had been approved for sale, confirming our worst suspicions about Grinny Creigh. And there might be more of them, either in the cabin with her or somewhere else, based on her question about having to possibly move more than one in a hurry.

But move them where and to what end? He had said something about airports, so maybe the theories about children being sold out of the hills into global sex-slave markets was accurate. I remembered Laurie May’s question about what kind of mamas would do such a thing. What kind indeed.

Two dogs started to bark back in the dog pen. I decided it was time to get out of there. I checked the cell phone, but there was no signal down here at the cabin. The dogs finally shut up after five minutes or so. We moved away from the cabin and went back up the hill, staying in the trees for as long as possible, the shepherds plastered to my side. It was slower going up than it had been coming down, and I was puffing once I made it to the cave. I slipped into the black hole and rested for about twenty minutes, trying to decide what to do next. I kept coming up with the same answer-immediate departure. Then deal with the problem of the children. I tried the cell again. There was a single signal bar showing in the little window, so I told the dogs to stay and stepped back out of the cave to see if I could do better.

My heart sank. I should have heeded my own advice. There was Nathan, standing with two other men in the dim moonlight. All of them had shotguns. A fourth man was wrestling the tracking leads on the two big dogs I’d seen Nathan throw into the back of the pickup truck. I thought about calling out the shepherds, but there were simply too many shotguns.

Nathan swung the barrel of his shotgun toward the distant cabin and tipped his head in that direction. Clear enough.