Spider mountain

12

We spent the morning doing logistics, checking out of the fancy lodge and into a much smaller motel closer to the Robbins County side of Marionburg. I called Mose Walsh late in the morning and then met him at the outfitter’s shop. Instead of maintaining their own individual shops, most of the local guides were associated with one of the two storefront outfitters in town. Mose met me at the one on the main street of Marionburg. He was chatting up one of the young salesladies at the register counter when I walked in. There were maybe a half dozen customers in the store, most of them just looking at all the woodsy stuff. Mose said something quietly to the girl that made her giggle and then came over to meet me at the front door.

“Don’t you ever quit?” I asked him. The girl at the register looked like she was maybe fifteen.

“Woman once told me,” he said, in his most dignified Big Chief voice, “that I was so damn ugly that women would be either repelled or attracted, but they’d all be just a bit curious.”

“Like your granddaughter over there?”

“She’s twenty-six, married, but not serious about it, God love her.” He looked around to make sure no one was listening to us. “What’re you guys doing, fucking around with Grinny Creigh and her demon spawn?”

“Us?” I said, pretending total innocence. “We’re just going camping.”

He nodded with his head in the direction of the pack racks, and we walked back there. “Word is,” he said, pretending to examine the pack selection, “that the auto-da-fe down at the lodge parking lot last night was a hit squad of meth mechanics from Robbins County.”

“Really,” I said. “What else does Mr. Word have to say?”

“That your lady friend is wearing a headscarf because one Lucas Carr creased her headbone with his thirty-ought, on orders from Nathan, who is, word says, somewhat indisposed up there on Spider Mountain.”

“Big Chief’s jungle drums are fairly well informed in these parts,” I said.

“All sorts of people go to bars. People go to bars, they drink. They drink, they talk. Big Chief doesn’t talk and actually doesn’t drink a whole lot anymore. Big Chief listens. So then they feel they have to fill the void. It’s fucking amazing, sometimes.”

“Heard any stories about the late Rue Creigh?” I asked.

His eyes widened. “That was you?”

It was my turn to pretend to be interested in the packs. I tried out my version of the Indian grunt. Mose wasn’t impressed.

“God damn, man, and you’re going back up there? Why don’t you just go find a hornets’ nest, pluck it down from the tree, and strap it on like a gas mask?”

I took him by the elbow and steered him to a back window where there were no other people. I told him what had happened with Rue and why we were going back in there, and all the wise-ass went right out of him. He stared bleakly out the window for a full minute, digesting what I’d told him. Then he shook his head resignedly.

“Try as you might,” he said wistfully, “you can’t get away from it. Kids?”

I nodded, then had a thought. “What can you tell me about Bill Hayes?” I asked. “Is he possibly in bad health?”

Mose shook his head. “It’s not him. It’s his wife. She’s dying of some badass bone disease. Docs told him to call the hospice. It’s fuckin’ the guy up, to hear the deputies tell it. What’re you and the SBI lady planning to do about this?”

“At the moment, I have no freaking idea,” I said. “First we have to find them.”

“You’ve got that bassackwards,” he said.

“I’m talking about the children, not the Creighs. Look, maybe you could help.”

He gave me a wary sideways look. “Help?”

“Yeah-you hear stuff. You say people talk to you. Push that process a little bit. Anything about exploiting children in Robbins County.”

He stared out the window again. “I told you, I gave that world up when I came back here,” he said. “Bad for the soul.”

I didn’t say anything. Let him fill the void this time.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Against my better judgment, such as it is. How can I find you?”

“We’ll find you,” I said.

Carrie and I had lunch in Marionburg, went back to the motel to make sure we had everything we needed, and then launched for Robbins County. I’d half-expected to see a Carrigan County cop car follow us out of town, but they apparently had bigger fish to fry. We’d divided our stuff into things to leave behind and gear we’d need up there, and left the excess in the motel room. We took my Suburban. I had Nathan’s shotgun. Carrie’s nasty little mamba stick was back in SBI custody, so now she had a nine in a belt holster.

She’d asked me to check her head wound, and to tell the truth, I wasn’t pleased with what I saw. The sutures were red and a little puffy-looking, and she admitted that she had a headache that wouldn’t go away. I asked her if she’d like to go back to the hospital for a quick checkup and maybe an antibiotic shot or at least another Betadine paint job, but she was adamant about getting on with it. I’d told her what Mose had said about Bill Hayes, and she seemed relieved.

It was midafternoon when we crossed the county line. We passed the usual tourist traffic on the two-lane main road as people came back from rafting trips and other excursions into Robbins County. We saw one cop car parked for a late lunch or coffee at a roadside eatery, but no other law enforcement activity on the road. If Mingo was expecting us, he wasn’t being obvious about it. The thought had crossed my mind that Hayes or someone in his office might tip off Mingo and his people, but I discarded the notion. Hayes might be afraid of the hard men in Robbins County, but I didn’t think he was part of their operation. He was preoccupied with problems closer to home.

We got to Laurie May’s place without seeing any of the local residents, and we hoped none of them saw us. I wasn’t worried about the honest citizens, but we hadn’t seen any people out in their yards or along the road leading up to her cabin. We stopped in front and waited for someone to come to the door. I saw Carrie playing absently with the stitches on her scalp and wondered how bad that mess hurt.

When no one came to the door, we decided to drive the vehicle around to the back so that it could not be seen from the river road or the lane coming up into the hollow itself. Carrie got out and went to the cabin’s back door and knocked. Nothing happened, so she knocked again, at which point I saw a shadow move behind the door’s curtain. I was still in the car and began easing my right hand down to the shotgun. The door swung open, revealing a short but large and densely bearded man standing in the doorway pointing an equally large shotgun in our general direction.

I probably couldn’t do anything for Carrie just then, not with a shotgun two feet from her chest. Frack saw the man with the gun and began growling. I told him to be quiet.

The man was staring at Carrie, who had frozen in place. “Who’re you?” he asked in a low voice. “What’re you-all doing here?”

“I came to see Laurie May,” Carrie replied, still not moving. I admired her poise-the muzzle of that gun looked like the twin tubes of the Holland Tunnel. “She knows us. Is she all right?”

He took a step backward into the kitchen and summoned somebody inside with a jerk of his head. A moment later his twin appeared in the doorway, holding another shotgun by the receiver, its barrels pointed down at the floor. Then I knew who they were-Laurie May had said she had twin boys, coal miners. The one who’d come to the door was looking over at me, and I nodded pleasantly. The other one slipped back out of sight. He returned after a minute and said something to his brother, who lowered his shotgun. Carrie turned in my direction and told me to come in.

Laurie May was in her bedroom, and when I saw her I swore out loud. Two black eyes, bruises on her face, and her badly bruised broomstick of a right leg stuck out from under the covers and rested on a quilt.

I looked over at one of the twins. “Nathan Creigh?”

He nodded.

“They made me tell ’em,” Laurie May said, blinking back tears. “That be-damned Nathan, he come in here and beat on me with my own walkin’ stick.”

Carrie approached the bed and took the old lady’s hand. “We know, Laurie May,” she said. “We know. And we know you’re no betrayer.”

“I ain’t,” Laurie May said with surprising vehemence. “I ain’t no betrayer. He beat on me. He done cracked my shinbone. He pushed me down, God damn his eyes.”

I introduced myself and Carrie to the twins. They weren’t tall, but they sure as hell were wide. Coal miners. One of them introduced himself as Bags, the other as David. They’d apparently changed their last names to Jones some years back, because neither one of them could abide the Creighs. Bags seemed to be in charge, so I decided to tell him why we were there. The twins listened in silence. Carrie apologized to Laurie May for bringing misery to her house, but Laurie May was defiant.

“My boys here, they fixin’ to go over there and clean out that rat’s nest,” she declared.

“They certainly need that, and more,” I said. “But let me tell you-all why we’re here. Maybe we can join forces.”

Carrie indicated with a nod of her head that I ought to take this back to the kitchen. She stayed behind with the old woman while I went out to the kitchen with the twins. There was coffee brewing, so we sat down around the table to talk. I noticed that there were four more shotguns and a few rifles stacked against one wall, and boxes of ammunition on the kitchen counter. They’d been planning a small war, from the looks of it.

I walked them through the background of why Carrie and I were up here, what Laurie May had done to help us, and what we thought was going on over in the next cove. The brothers listened in stony silence. At first, I got the impression that they were just being polite, letting me tell my story, and then they were going to proceed with whatever it was they’d planned. When I brought up the business of abducting and selling children, they drew closer. They were flinty individuals, toughened in the dark danger of the mines. They had thick shoulders and chests, bony faces, black beards, and gnarled hands that would never be entirely white again. But this talk of selling children visibly disturbed them.

It turned out that their plan was to go through the crack in the middle of the night and then walk down to the Creigh compound and slaughter every living thing, men, women, dogs, pigs, and chickens. It sounded good and traditional, but when I pointed out to them that they’d probably be shot down by snipers before they got within a quarter mile of the Creigh cabin, they were taken aback.

“There’s no more just driving up to the front porch, rolling down the windows, and going to town with shotguns,” I said. “They’re alerted over there. They may have spies in Marionburg who know we’ve left town, and they might even be coming here tonight. I got away from Nathan’s little jail cell, beat him to his knees in the process, and then I had to blow his sister’s head off because she threw down on me. The Creighs are not sitting over there watching television.”

This news really sobered them up. Carrie joined us from Laurie May’s bedroom and asked if she’d been seen by a doctor. They said no, but a healer she trusted had come by, and she’d prescribed bed rest, an herbal remedy for the pain, and immediate revenge. I had to smile.

“What’s your notion on all this?” David asked. His brother looked on with squinty-eyed interest.

“If that woman is selling children to perverted sons of bitches,” I said, “then we first need to find the children, and then take care of her and all her people. Keep in mind, if it is true, there are some mothers out there who’ve done a terrible thing, turning over their children to the likes of Grinny Creigh.”

“Some ain’t got no choice,” Bags said. “I’ve heard something about this before. Way I hear it, Grinny gets ’em hooked on that there meth. Do any damn thing to get some more. Sell their damned souls, they have to. Sellin’ they kids? Ain’t nothin’ to the likes of some of them poor sonsabitches. Goddamned zombies, after a while. That shit even eats their teeth.”

“The kids don’t get a vote,” I said. “Now: Let me tell you where the law stands on all this, because it’s important that you know who we are and who we are not.”

“Let me,” interrupted Carrie, sitting down at the kitchen table. She explained who we were, that the Carrigan County sheriff had told us to get out of the county, and why she, personally, was pursuing the matter. It was this last bit that seemed to make the biggest impression. I guessed it was because she was hunting satisfaction for what had happened to her father and sister. These men weren’t especially interested in the legal aspects of any of it, but a family feud-well, that was different.

As she was talking, I watched her unconsciously rubbing her temples. Whatever was going on with that wound, it wasn’t getting any better. Then she touched the top of her head and came away with pink fingertips. Bags saw it, too, and looked over at me. That did it.

“This little war’s going to have wait one more night,” I announced. “We need to get a doctor to take a look at that, Carrie, before it gets really infected.”

She gave me an annoyed look. “That means getting back out on the roads,” she said. “That’s dangerous.”

“There’ll still be tourists out there, finishing up their day’s vacation. We can come back after dark.”

“It can wait,” she said defiantly.

“No, it can’t,” I said. “Look, you’re going to be useless if you wake up tomorrow morning with a raging infection. Go get a damn shot. The Creighs aren’t going anywhere. Bags, can you get someone to come stay with Laurie May?”

Bags said he could get his wife’s sister, who volunteered over in her local county hospital, to come over from Gatlinburg. I told him I’d take Carrie back into Marionburg and that we’d come back after dark.

“You think ’em Creighs gonna come over here tonight? Lookin’ for y’all?”

“They might,” I said. “Nathan knows we hid out here once, so he may well check it out.” I could see what he getting at: We might drive back into an ambush of some kind. “Let’s do this: You guys stay here until we can get back and work up a plan. If there’s any reason you think we should not approach, put a single lantern in a front window. If you think it’s all clear, put two lanterns, one in each front window.”

“Them Creigh boys show up here, we goin’ to get to it,” David said.

“How’s Nathan looking?” I asked.

“He’s limpin’ some, according to Ma. Still well enough to put the hurtin’ on a defenseless old woman, though, the piece’a shit.”

“They come, you guys thin ’em out then,” I said. “Make it easier for later on.

They both grinned at that prospect. I gathered up Carrie and we went out to the car.

“I still think this is an unnecessary risk,” she said, but I saw her wince when she put her head back on the headrest.

“I meant what I said in there,” I replied. “I need you operational, not delirious with a fever, which is about where you are now, yes?”

She nodded and winced again. “Even my hair hurts,” she admitted.

“Okay, then. Let’s wait at the motel until dark, then go into the ER and see what they say.”

At eleven I was sitting out in a corner of the parking lot behind the Carrigan County hospital. I’d taken Carrie into the emergency room. The triage desk nurse told her it would be an hour’s wait, at a minimum. That had been two hours ago. When Carrie had mentioned “gunshot wound,” the nurse immediately wanted to notify the sheriff’s office, but Carrie talked her out of it, saying that she’d already been treated here for this same injury and the incident was already in the system. I had decided to wait in the car. If there were bad guys looking for us, they’d be looking for the pair of us. Carrie was relatively safe inside the hospital, at least from any marauding Creighs. Staph. aureus was another matter.

I’d made a couple of phone calls back to Triboro. The first was to my office, where I left a message for Tony, telling him what I was up to. Then I put a call in to Bobby Lee Baggett’s office. I wanted to brief him on what we thought was going on up here, but he wasn’t available. His executive assistant promised that he’d return my call in the morning. I called my defense lawyer at home and brought him up to date on the growing list of charges against me in Robbins County. He once again advised me to get back to Triboro as soon as possible, as in, tonight would be good, and warned of lots more fees if I kept at this. It was good to know he kept his focus, but I acknowledged that it was good advice. The problem was that I was in much too deep to back out now. Or so I kept telling myself.

I had parked in the darkest corner of the hospital parking lot to wait. The Dumpster alley was behind me, and I had a terrific view of the back of the Laboratory Services building, which apparently also housed the Pathology fun house. The hospital was a single-story affair stepped in layers along a hill. It consisted of several wings, with a small parking lot up front for the docs and the meat wagons. For ordinary humans and patients there was a larger lot behind the complex, which sloped down the hill, getting narrower as it went. Carrie was supposed to call my cell phone when they were done with her. It was cool enough to open the windows and not be eaten by mosquitoes. Fall was definitely coming on. I was ready.

At some point I must have dozed off, because I was startled awake by the sound of an argument somewhere in the parking lot. The voices were male, urgent, and, strangely, familiar. It sounded like they were trying to keep their voices down. I couldn’t make out what it was about, but when I finally found the source of the racket I sat right up.

And then I slid right back down again. I was in one corner of the narrow part, in the last and lowest row. The argument was in the other corner, and the noise was coming from two police cars, parked nose to tail so that the drivers could talk. They’d parked under a light, so I could see that one of them was Sheriff Hayes. His verbal antagonist was no other than M. C. Mingo.

My blood went cold. Hayes and Mingo meeting in a dark parking lot? Good Lord, was Hayes a part of the criminal matrix in Robbins County? I really, really did not want to believe that. I saw brake lights flare at the back of Hayes’s cruiser, and then backup lights. I slid all the way down below the dash, hoping like hell he wouldn’t recognize my Suburban. Once I heard his cruiser leave the parking lot, I raised my head again in time to see Mingo’s car approaching the back doors of the Laboratory Services/Pathology wing. He stopped, put a phone up to his ear, and talked to someone. Two minutes later, outside landing lights came on and the back double doors opened. A middle-aged man who had a neatly sculpted beard and wore a white coat came out, pushing a gurney. I stared hard, trying to see if it was the same bearded guy I’d seen at Grinny Creigh’s, but the building floodlights were shining in my eyes. Mingo got out of his car and went around to the right rear door of his vehicle, which was out of my line of sight. The two men transferred a blanket-covered something to the gurney, and then they both rolled it back into the hospital. Whatever it was, they handled it gently, as opposed to the way they might have handled a body. A few minutes later, Mingo came out. I went down-periscope and waited for him to drive away. The floodlights near the door went out.

I waited a good five minutes to make sure that there weren’t any other cop cars in or near the lot and that Mingo hadn’t swung back through to check his trail, and then I drove over to the wing into which they’d gone. A smaller sign near the door read LAB/PATH SERVICES ENTRANCE. The doors had small windowpanes, but the hallway behind them was dark. I was tempted to get out and try the doors but decided against it. If they were unlocked, then what? Go inside and snoop around? I didn’t think that would work out. Then my cell phone chirped; Carrie was waiting at the front entrance.

“Was that fun?” I asked her when she got in. Her face was pinched and she sat down gingerly, being careful not to let her head touch the headrest this time.

“Loads,” she said. “They had to remove the stitches and debride it, and then they gave me a shot with some kind of elephant syringe. Now I have seven days of these.” She rattled a pill bottle at me.

“Good thing we came in, then,” I said cheerily. I wasn’t positive, but I thought “debride” meant scraping the wound. Not fun. I drove away from the entrance with all its bright lights and turned back down into the parking lot.

“What’s this ‘we’ shit, paleface?” she grumped, still shifting from side to side in the seat.

“Actually,” I said, and then I told her what I’d witnessed. She exclaimed in disappointment when I mentioned Hayes. Then she asked what had been on the gurney.

“I couldn’t see, other than a mound under a blanket,” I said, knowing what was coming next.

“Was it the right size to have been a child?”

“Yes.”

“Mingo with another unconscious or drugged kid in his car? What the fuck?!”

“I don’t know that it was a child, and they were being more careful than that time Baby and I saw him handle that other child.”

The rest of the lower lot was empty, so if Mingo or even Hayes did come back, we’d be pretty obvious. I parked the car next to a delivery truck that I hoped wouldn’t be moving until the next morning to give us a little cover.

“We’ve got to report this,” she said. “You saw them take a child down at Grinny’s. You watched while she showed a guy who’s probably some kind of back-alley abortionist the latest merchandise. And now here they are, Mingo and Hayes, delivering a child to a pathology lab where some bastard with a degree from Burundi U. is probably sterilizing an eight-year-old girl.”

“Um,” I said, “report to whom?”

She thought for a moment. “Mingo and Hayes collaborating? That has to go to Sam King.”

“Sam King? He’d blow you off, say this is just another interesting tale out of Robbins County. Plus, they were arguing.”

She stared at me. “So?”

“Hayes may have been running him off, not collaborating.”

“But that’s not what Mingo did, is it,” she said, angrily. “They talked, and then Mingo made the delivery.”

“All I’m saying is-”

“What-we do nothing?”

I held my temper. I was pissed off, too. Hayes and Mingo. Not good. “No,” I said, “but let’s see what happens next. If we’re right, somebody will come back and pick up the flower.”

“Mingo might just be disposing of a body,” she said.

“He’d have Nathan take care of that, Carrie. They wouldn’t bring an inconvenient body into town, especially outside of Mingo’s territory, not when they have all that empty country available. They give you any pain meds?”

She nodded.

“Put your seat back. Close your eyes and let that shit work. I’ll keep watch. I got a nap while you were partying in there.”

She let out a big sigh of exasperation but didn’t argue. In fifteen minutes she was asleep. I got out, rummaged in the backseat, and found a car coat to drape over her. It wasn’t really cold, but she was obviously uncomfortable. Her breathing was shallow and her forehead was warmer than it should have been. If we were going to do anything about this tonight, she wasn’t going to be a player, not until that infection was knocked down.

Twenty minutes later, the driver of the delivery truck showed up, got in, and drove the thing away in a clatter of diesel engine noise. We were now sitting out there all by ourselves, and there was no other place to park the vehicle where we could also watch the lab entrance. The truck’s departure woke Carrie up, and I pointed out our predicament. We decided to get out of there before Mingo came back. If he and Hayes did have some kind of understanding, we’d be fair game in that empty parking lot.

“Well, damn,” Carrie said wearily, as we went back into town. “Now what?”

“We go somewhere and get this all down in writing. Then we mail a report to someone who’ll listen.”

“Like who?”

“Like the Bureau? Or maybe that federal task force in Washington Baby was talking about-that PROTECT outfit.”

“And then what-sit back and wait for our government to get off its enormous inertial ass and do something?”

“No, then we join forces with some other interested citizens and see if we can catch these bastards in the act. But first, we obey the old fire department rule: See a fire, tell the fire department, then go see what you can do.”

She looked so down I decided to try a little humor. I leered at her. “Hey, little lady: Wanna go to a motel, fool around a little?”

She smiled despite her frustration. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said. “Will you mind if I throw up in the middle of it?”

“Kinky,” I said approvingly. “I love kinky.”

My lame attempt at humor didn’t really work, though, as neither of us could get our minds off what might have just happened in that lab. As I drove back to the motel, I could just imagine that bastard giving an unconscious little girl some kind of deep sedative and then going to town with scalpels or sterile knitting needles. And somewhere up there on Spider Mountain, was Grinny Creigh keeping a whole stash of potential flowers, which she might want to dispose of in a hurry? From a practical standpoint, I knew we couldn’t do anything for the kid in the lab. But somehow, somewhere, we needed to light a fire under one of the alphabets.