P Deutermann - Nightwalkers

"Exactly how old is he, Cubby?"

Cubby thought for a moment. "Oh, sixty-something."

I was astonished. The man looked to be in his late fifties, maybe sixty. Which meant that Valeria had to be older than she looked, too. Cubby saw my surprise.

"Yeah, they can fool you," he said, putting away the brush. "They preserved. In more ways than one."

"Who rides these other horses?"

"Ms. Hester, she rides most every day, and Ms. Valeria, too. You talk about overseers-ain't nothin' goin' on they don't know about, the two of 'em."

Then he looked over my shoulder and grinned. The shepherds had encountered the duty barn cat, who was giving them some unmistakable visual cues.

"Better get them dogs up," Cubby said. "That cat right there? He'll tear their asses up."

The cat looked to me like he was enjoying the confrontation with the two circling shepherds. "They're German shepherds," I said. "There's only one way they learn anything."

A moment later the lesson was duly administered. One enormous hiss, a blur of fang and claw, stereo shepherd yipes, and then both dogs were running for the barn door with bloody noses. It was funny, although probably not to the shepherds. The cat sat back down in the barn aisle, licked a paw, yawned, and waited for a rematch.

I asked Cubby for his cell phone number in case I ever encountered the major in some kind of problematic circumstances. Then I took my unruly dogs back to the cottage and rubbed their snouts down with some hydrogen peroxide from my Suburban's first aid kit. That nearly got me bitten. Then my cell phone went off.

It was the lead detective on the Summerfield shootings. He had the bomb squad report. "Everything there but the bang," he said. "Wires, battery, trigger, just no explosive. The lieutenant said it was tailor-made for a sheet of Semtex. Guy apparently forgot to include the good stuff."

Or, I thought, he was telling me that he could have if he'd wanted to. I thanked the detective for calling me and asked if they had anything more on Billie's shooter. Nothing.

"Working it hard, are we?"

"Absolutely," he said. "Important guy like that. Hell, yes. His junkie girlfriend has disappeared, by the way."

"Displaying a moment of good sense, sounds like." I told him about the electronic bullet, and he asked that I turn it in.

"You think there's something you can learn from that?" I asked.

"Na-ah," he said, "but it'll give me an excuse to go see that little blond number over in forensics."

"She's married," I said.

"But reportedly not serious about it," he said, and hung up.

I got another cup of coffee and went out to a tree swing on the lawn to watch the sun come up.

What in the world was I going to do about this ghost? Shooting into my house, triggering a flashbang on my back porch, breaking into our offices, bugging my vehicle and then me, dropping Billie Ray, and now a messenger-delivered letter bomb, conveniently minus the bang.

Hodge Walker said I needed to go on the offensive, but against whom?

Suppose it was James Marlor? You owe me a death, he'd said. No-I owed someone a death. If it was Marlor, then he was seeking revenge for the death of his brother, Sergeant Kenny Cox. I hadn't killed Kenny, though-a mountain lion had done that, and then only after Kenny had provoked the encounter in that bizarre ritual of the cat dancers.

Perhaps Marlor didn't know that. If he'd gone off the grid after faking a suicide, he'd have had no access to the final police report regarding Kenny. Maybe some of the other vigilantes had gotten word to him that Kenny hadn't come back from the mountains and that I'd been with him. That might be sufficient to set a revenge plot in motion, but then, why all the screwing around? You want to take a man down and make sure he knows who did it, you show up in his face and get to it.

I decided to go over to Glory's End and do some more exploring. The shepherds' noses were swollen and they weren't feeling all that great, so I put some baby aspirins in a hot dog and then left them to sulk in the cottage. I did take my SIG, along with my hiking gear-belt and a walking stick. The day was shaping up to be sunny and even warm. I wondered if I'd encounter the major again, or if he'd stay on his own lands today. Depended on where the Union cavalry was operating, no doubt. The first guy who rode up in Union blue, though, I was out of there.

After two hours of tramping through increasingly assertive weeds and briars, I made a mental note to get some kind of vehicle for doing this, no matter what the Auntie Bellums might think. I'd seen a place over near Danville that sold golf carts that had been reconfigured as farm utility vehicles. Carol's protestations notwithstanding, I needed to be able to cover the ground more efficiently than by doing it on foot. I'd already dosed the dogs with Frontline, having picked three ticks off my own body.

I'd gone from the house down toward the river again, and then east, along the riverbank until I hit what I assumed was Bad Whiskey Creek, location of the reported quicksand. I didn't see any ground that looked like it would be treacherous. The banks were rocky and heavily forested, and the stream joined the river at an acute angle. I turned right, back toward the two-lane road, and walked up the west bank of the stream, pushing through lots of sprouting mystery bushes and causing many frogs to plop into the water. The long ridge rose up the other side of the stream; that was the one supposedly containing the coal mine. About a quarter mile back from the river I encountered a beaver dam, and there was a sizable pond behind it. When I tried to get around it I found the quicksand, or at least enough of a bog to cause my boots to sink almost to their tops before I was able to extract myself. I pushed my walking stick down into the muck and hit solid bottom at about three feet. Time to turn around.

I cut across what had been a large crop field and headed back up to the house. The next time out I'd stick to the farm roads and explore that coal mine ridge, and maybe see if I could find signs of a caved-in entrance. Once back at the house, I stood in the brook coming down from the springs and let the water melt the muck off my boots. Then I went up to the front porch, took the boots off to dry in the sun, plopped down in one of the ancient rockers, and did another tick check. When I looked up I saw two very large Dobermans walking calmly up the front steps, looking at me the way I look at a rare steak.

I froze in the chair, conscious of the fact that I'd never heard them coming and that now was not the time to jump up and run for the front door. They came over to my rocker and sat down about three feet away. Their coats glistened, as did their teeth. They didn't so much menace me as just make it clear that I should stay seated and not reach for anything, say, like my SIG, which was hanging on my field belt over on the railing. They were alert but not poised to attack. Yet. That's the big difference between a Dobie and a shepherd: German shepherds are typically friendly animals who can and will defend if their human charge is threatened. They're bred for defense. A Doberman was bred for offense. A shepherd can be taught to attack on command, but they don't take to it like a Doberman does. I was really interested in who might be nearby with the authority to issue that command. Then I heard the front door of the house squeak open behind me and found out.

"Don't turn around, Lieutenant," a man said. The voice sounded like my flashbang caller.

"Wouldn't dream of it," I said. "Not with these two lovelies in my face."

"They're not in your face," he said. "You wouldn't be talking if they were. As long as you sit still, nothing will happen."

"Got it," I said. "So what's the deal here, mystery man? Why are you and me at war?"