Spider mountain

20

We left in two vehicles early the next morning, Carrie and I in the Suburban, and Mose in his pickup truck. We’d shown the Bigs the escape route out of Grinny’s place, and they promised to pass that on to any further investigators, assuming there was going to be any further investigation.

Luke took Honey Dee’s bereft mother back to Rocky Falls. He promised to get a statement from her before the county social services system swallowed her up. We let them know where we were headed and why, which they duly noted. Neither of them seemed very encouraging. We told them that Grinny might be lurking in one of the abandoned mine tunnels, and all John could say was that meant we had her where we wanted her-underground. Carrie had wanted to explore that walled-off tunnel, but the kids were a more pressing issue.

I’d apologized to Mose for harassing him in the restaurant the previous night, but he waved me off. “When you mentioned the glass hole and captive kids, I knew I was screwed,” he’d said.

“You really think you never made a difference during your career?”

“I worked homicide,” he’d replied, with that wry grin. “By definition, my ‘clients’ always died.”

“How many killers did you put away?”

“Killers? Real killers? Maybe a half dozen. Mostly it was husbands who lost their tempers, druggies, gangster kids, like that.” He shook his head sadly. “Endless supply.”

“Well, this clan falls into the ‘real killers’ category. They might as well be killing these kids, considering what happens to them.”

He nodded. “I’ll take you up there,” he said. “But I’m not going to fight the Creigh clan for you. I really am too old for that shit.”

And by implication, so was I. We followed Mose out of Marionburg and into Robbins County. It felt strange not having to be on the lookout for cop cars and black hats now that Mingo was gone. I still couldn’t get his final words out of my mind, though. Wrong. Better. Had he been just babbling as his brain shut down? Or did those words mean something? And where the hell was Grinny Creigh?

Carrie had spent an hour on the phone with Sam King earlier, and it sounded as if her predictions of a Bureau-managed shutdown had been correct. The escape of Grinny and Nathan Creigh had been shunted off to the Bureau’s fugitive program, so there would be the standard manhunt-sometime real soon. The fact that there might be children being exploited had been passed to the federal PROTECT task force, and the SBI had been left to dig through the wreckage of Hayes’s and Mingo’s administrations. In other words, the law enforcement bureaucracy had portioned out all the interesting bits to its various constituencies and settled on a PR strategy, so all was right in the world. Grinny Creigh had been designated a “person of interest,” but that was about it.

King had also offered Carrie her job back, but she’d been reluctant to make any decisions about that until she’d exhausted every lead we had or thought we had. She was still convinced that we were the only ones who truly believed there were six little girls out there in the woods somewhere. Personally, I figured they were out there, all right, but not necessarily alive and well. I think she sensed that was how I felt, but she was determined to press on. Having left her behind once and injured twice, I felt obligated to go with her. Besides, underneath all that hard-core internal-affairs armor, she was a sweet, intelligent woman who was valuable in her own right. That was reason enough.

About three miles into Robbins County, Mose pulled over onto a dirt road and stopped. He came back to the Suburban when I pulled in behind him.

“We’ll take this dirt track for about five more miles and then we’ll come to a Forestry Service fire lane. This thing got four-wheel drive?”

I told him it did, and he said okay. “We’ll end up around four thousand feet,” he told us. “The weather’s supposed to be okay today, but there’s a cold front coming in tonight, which might produce a little snow up high. I don’t think it’ll amount to much at this time of year.”

“Where are we actually going?” Carrie asked.

“To a mountain pass. Then we’ll park and hump it the rest of the way up to a small lake with no name. We’ll camp above that tonight, and see what we see the next morning.”

“Do you think the Creighs are out there?” I asked.

“If they went to the glass hole, they could be. Nothing to say they haven’t been here and gone.”

That comment produced a sudden chill in the Suburban. If they’d left, the chances that the kids would be found alive were small and shrinking with every hour.

We reached the ridge overlooking the no-name lake at just before sundown. It hadn’t been a bad climb, other than it had been relentlessly up for two huffing and puffing hours. The scenery was spectacular in all directions, but Mose had been right about a cold front. The northwestern sky was darkening, and the wind had backed around ninety degrees as the front gathered to assault the western mountains.

I’d suggested that we spread out on the hike up to prevent concentrating a target in case the Creighs had left sentinels on their trail. Mose was unhappy with that thought, but agreed. He led the way, then Carrie, and I took up tailend Charlie with the shepherds, who ranged between Mose and me for most of the trek. We kept each other in sight but generally maintained a hundred yards or so of separation. An hour before we reached the campsite, both dogs had gone to investigate something on the edge of the fire lane. The something had turned out to be a pile of dog manure. There were some boot prints in soft ground a few feet away, headed up. This occurred twice more as we made our way up the slopes.

I told Mose but decided to wait to tell Carrie. I took it to mean that someone with dogs had come this way recently. It could have been anybody, because this area was either national park or state game land. I’d asked Mose if there was another way up to this lake, and he said sure-any direction would do. But this was the route you’d take if you’d driven a vehicle as close as you could get. One thing I knew: Grinny wasn’t up here. She couldn’t have climbed that slope in less than a year.

We made camp at the edge of a steep, rocky slope that led down to the lake itself. Mose had us set up two shelters using downed tree limbs and the living ends of pine tree branches, under which we rigged our tents and bags. He situated our camp just inside the tree line and faced the shelters into the woods, toward the east and away from the oval-shaped lake below. We’d packed enough gear and supplies for three days, in and out, with the plan being to spend tomorrow exploring the area around the lake and the so-called glass hole. If it was indeed under water, I wasn’t sure what we’d do.

We didn’t build a real fire for security reasons, using a spirit stove instead to heat our food and water for coffee. Mose warned us to set out warm clothes for the morning, as the temps were going to drop pretty fast once that front arrived. He was right about being careful not to show light, as it would have been visible for miles around. We didn’t know who else was out there, but those dog droppings indicated we were probably not alone. Men with dogs meant Creighs in my book.

I had my Remington 700P and a handgun; Carrie had her trusty nine. Mose carried a pepper-spray canister like the ones the park rangers used, as well as a little. 25-caliber boot gun. I’d brought my pocket monocular. The spotting scope had been too heavy to carry this far in-and up-with all the rest of the gear. We left our cell phones in the vehicles; up here they’d just be excess baggage. Mose showed us one useful electronic item he’d brought along.

“This gizmo here is called an EPIRB, which stands for emergency position indicating radio beacon. If we end up needing rescue, you fire this little jewel and a satellite picks up the signal. A report goes to the U.S. Air Force. They always wait for a second satellite hit, so don’t turn it off once you energize it. Then you’ll have an Air National Guard helo overhead in about two hours. Most of the guides out here carry one.”

As the sun went down, the surface of the lake was bright orange. Carrie asked why we hadn’t gone down to the lakeshore to camp.

“Because to see the glass hole, you apparently have to be above the lake,” Mose said. “Like I said, I’ve never been here before, but my buddy said to camp up here and wait a couple hours past sunrise. The light has to be just right to see it.”

“Well, if this is a submerged feature, what could that kid have meant when she said Grinny would put them in the glass hole? She was gonna drown ’em in the lake?”

“By me,” Mose said. “All I know about the Creighs is to steer clear of ’em. Everybody says they’re bad to the bone, and after what you guys have told me, I believe.”

We drank some coffee, laced with a contribution from my trusty flask, and then got ready to secure for the night. Mose said we weren’t quite done yet. He hung the food bag high in a tree against bears and marauding German shepherds, and then went out into the woods with his camp axe. He returned with three ten-foot-long, two-inch-diameter pine branches and told us we were going to make us some bear sticks. He handed us each a branch.

“I give up,” Carrie said, making an icky face when the pine sap got all over her hands. “What’s a bear stick?”

“We’re going to peel the bark off at both ends and then sharpen one end into a spear point,” he replied. “Then if a bear shows up in the middle of the night, we blind him with our flashlights, use the pepper spray to disorient him, and then jab him with these suckers to make him back out of his problem. Beats a gun every time.”

He showed us how to sharpen one end and cut ridges into the other for hand traction. I’d never made one of these, but it certainly made sense-especially since it would provide a silent defense option. The finished product was about eight feet long and heavy enough to make even a bear feel it. One of my buddies had shot a bear that rousted his camp-and shot him and shot him and shot him, mostly managing to piss him off. Pepper spray works much better: Anyone can outrun a blind and choking bear; outrunning a pain-maddened bear who can still see or smell you is something else again.

Carrie and I shared one shelter; Mose took the other. My mutts bedded down next to our pine-branch hooch. It was full dark when we hit our bags, and we’d been careful to keep our flashlights pointed down. We parked our spears next to the bags, along with our flashlights. Carrie, as usual, went down in about thirty seconds. I envied her ability to do that. My feeble brain always decided to review the day’s happenings and then all of tomorrow’s potential perils before finally switching into sleep mode.

The first dogs didn’t attack until after midnight, right about the time the cold front swept in over the western ridge and came across the lake looking for us. After our long hike up the slopes, both of us were sleeping pretty hard when I heard the first bursts of rain and wind come up the slopes from the lake to stir up the trees. It was a comforting sound, actually, as we were snug in our bags with the shelters’ backs to the wind, but all that changed when I heard a vicious dogfight break out in front of our shelter. I bailed out of my bag with a gun in one hand and my Maglite in the other in time to see Mose stabbing vigorously down at something between the two shepherds with his bear stick.

I threw the gun back into the shelter, grabbed my own stick, and swept the campsite with the light, illuminating two green eyes behind Mose. I just managed to get the stick pointed before the second dog came through the air and knocked me down. Fortunately he ended up impaling himself, so all he could do was lie there and bleed. I threw him off me, left the stick in him, grabbed Carrie’s stick, and moved to help Mose. I caught a brief glance of Carrie’s white face looking out from our shelter, but, heads-up girl that she was, she had my gun in her hand.

Mose no longer needed help. He had the big beast stuck to the ground with his bear stick while my shepherds savaged its face and head. I called them off and stabbed the thing once in the throat, which stopped most of the noise. My dogs circled it for a few seconds, then went over and began to tear up the wounded one. I dispatched that one, too, and then the rain came in like a solid wall and we all jumped back under our shelters.

“Are you okay?” Carrie asked.

“Got knocked down, but I don’t think he bit me,” I said. We used the Maglite to make sure that was true. I wanted to ask Mose if he was okay, but the wind and rain were coming in strong and there was no way we could talk. I finally got his attention, and he gave me a thumbs-up sign through the sheeting rain.

I looked at my watch. It was two thirty in the morning. We’d been asleep since about eight thirty, so whoever had dispatched the dogs had either been watching us and was really patient, or had just turned them loose in the area and told them to go feed. One thing was for sure-we were back in Creigh country.

The initial storm line blew over in about an hour, with more wind than precip. Then we got a brief epilogue of some stinging sleet, a half hour of flurries, and then just cold. I crawled out to retrieve our sticks and tried to listen for any signs of more dogs, but there was just enough wind up to make that impossible. Carrie was awake, too.

“You think they knew we were camped right here?” she asked. I told her my theories, emphasizing the one that had the dogs running loose in the area. It had been a noisy thirty seconds in the camp, but the wind had been up, and if the Creighs were west of us, or across the lake, they might not have heard the ruckus.

“If they have a base camp up here, they might just turn some of the pack loose at night. The dogs would come back to them for food, but in the meantime, they’re bred to attack strangers. They might just have blundered onto us, or smelled the shepherds.”

“We have to assume they know now, though?” Carrie said.

“Be a good bet,” I said. “They’ll be short two dogs, if nothing else.” It was an uncomfortable assumption, but probably a valid one for a change. The sky was clearing, but the wind was still blowing low-flying scud clouds across the mountaintops, which meant that they came right through the camp, like fat ghosts, accompanied by blasts of sleet. Between squalls I could see Mose sitting like the proverbial Indian in his shelter, stick in hand, staring watchfully into the darkness. It was going to be a long damned night.