P Deutermann - Nightwalkers

An evening breeze stirred all the willows around the pond. They looked like a circle of pale green hula dancers out there as the shadows lengthened over Laurel Grove. I heard an engine start up behind the big house, run for a minute, and then shut down. Cubby must have achieved a victory over whatever it was plaguing the tractor.

I made my decision: Screw it. I wouldn't run. I'd get Tony and Pardee to come out here and camp out in the cottage with me, while Horace put his nose to the ground. Tomorrow I would go out to the county airfield and hire a plane. If my stalker was serious about getting it on out here, I didn't have time to scout all of Glory's End on foot, but from a small plane, I could assemble a collage of aerial pictures in an hour or so. Now I needed to make a list-weapons, survival gear, personal protection vests, tactical comms, and perhaps some even bigger perspective pictures from Google Earth.

"C'mon, fuzz balls," I said. "Don't just lie there and shed. We've got work to do."

From four thousand feet, Glory's End still looked like a green rectangle with three large ripples in it. The one on the western edge was the ridge above the old rail line where the major kept his morning coffee camp. The ridge in the middle contained the house and outbuildings, and the last one, on the eastern side, overlooked croplands on both sides as well as the flooded quarry. The Dan River showed a slate color on the northern edge, and the Laurel Grove plantation extended along the two-lane, overlapping my property by a few miles on each side. I could see the millpond but not the cottage.

I'd done this before, but not with the specific objective of aerial pictures. Tony and Pardee sat in the backseat of the four-seater we'd chartered, taking the pictures, while I just studied the farm's layout from the air, trying to make a tactical assessment of where someone could be hiding. I was also looking for ambush sites, and vantage points from which one man could see a lot of ground. The topography was clearly visible, but the pilot said that as the summer progressed and the trees filled in, treetops would become the dominant feature on the ridges, and whatever crops were planted would fill in the fields.

We circled the plantation for about fifteen minutes, and I paid particular attention to the eastern side of the last ridge, looking for signs of a coal mine. There was one area where the trees looked thinner than the rest, but nothing definitive. Then I had him fly us over to the Virginia side. I'd been wrong about the property directly opposite being devoid of habitation. There was a large plantation house, semiobscured by a dense grove of really big trees, about a half mile back from the river. The roof was gone, and it looked like there had been a fire. There were four walls, blackened wreckage inside, and four massive chimneys, two on each end. One of those had lost its top. The house was large enough for someone to hide in, but it certainly seemed thoroughly abandoned. The outbuildings resembled those on Glory's End.

Next I had him fly downstream for a few miles past the property. I wanted to see if there were signs of an encampment or a possible base of operations for my ghost. Nothing seemed to qualify. The adjacent farm to the east had its center of operations on its eastern border, leaving an expanse of fields and woods between their house and mine. On the western side there was a vast pine plantation with no houses visible except for a few mobile homes up along the road. We flew back upstream. The barely submerged channel pillar foundations for the Civil War-era railroad bridge were now clearly visible from directly above. I pointed out the site of the train robbery and its attendant cemetery to my two associates.

"Where's the nearest private airstrip?" I asked the pilot.

"Private? None around here," he said. "The regional airport is that way about ten miles. The FAA won't allow any private strips within its terminal control area."

"How about helicopter pads?"

"Wherever they want," he said, banking away from the direction of the airport as a small passenger jet hissed overhead, letting down for an approach.

An hour later we had lunch in town. Pardee had brought up one of the office portables. He said he could download all the pictures he had taken and then produce a mosaic. Tony was clicking through all the overhead shots on his camera's view-screen.

"Whole lotta trees going on down there," he said. "Those three ridges-more trees and big rocks."

"Your point being?"

"My point being that it would be pointless to go patrolling in that kind of terrain. I say we set up at the big house, make him come to us."

I nodded. I'd pretty much decided the same thing. We could go tramping all over that plantation and not find my stalker until we stumbled into an ambush. If we made him come to us, we could focus our defensive assets. The only problem would be if he decided not to play our game. He could always just walk away, for now, and see how long we were willing to hole up on the hill.

"Or," Pardee said, "we make it look like we're holed up in the big house but then set up on the perimeter." Pardee had been in the army and did not like the idea of being trapped in a house without any scouts out.

"He know that house?" Tony asked.

"I think he does," I said. "He caught me on the porch and then left by going back into the house, not around it. He's at least been inside, and maybe even knows stuff we don't."

"Then there's our plan," Tony said. "Let's get set up there and then go find all the secret passageways and hidden dungeons."

"How much help will we get from local law?" Pardee asked while the waitress cleared our table. As three obvious strangers sitting in one corner, we'd attracted some curious stares from the locals.

"Once we get set up," I said, "I'd like to invite Sheriff Walker out to the house, show him what we're doing. You see how these locals are looking at us. It's a really small town. Maybe he and his people can watch for strangers, especially ones with two big Dobes."

"What's the Rockwell County operation like?"

"Small," I said. "Nowhere near as big as Manceford County, but it's not Mayberry RFD, either."

"So no chance for round-the-clock assets?"

"I wouldn't think so. We're gonna be on our own unless it spills over into the community. Then I just don't know."

"We'll need comms with them, something besides 911."

"Right," I said, "and we need to be careful about what we say in both the house and the cottage. Have to assume they're both bugged."

"Where the hell does a civilian get surveillance devices, bugs, and all that stuff?" Tony asked.

"If he was in that business for a long time, he could have accumulated some shit," Pardee said. "Like I have."

"Did he sound old?" Tony asked.

"What, like me?" I asked.

Tony rolled his eyes.

"He didn't sound young, but he had that white film all over his face. He mostly sounded like a guy with a mask on."

"I can get us some commercial surveillance gear," Pardee said. "Is there power over there?"

"Some, if you don't mind pennies in the fuse slots."

"Electronics don't eat many amps," Pardee said. "I can get it swept. Then maybe rig a video system and I can set up a local cell phone network."

"One last thing," Tony said. "Who's gonna cook?"

While Tony and Pardee went back to Triboro to get more gear, I met with Carol at the cottage. I told her that I was going to suspend the renovation project for a little while in order to take care of a problem.

"This that stalker thing you were talking about?"

"Yup. He's followed me out here, and now we're apparently going to settle things."

"Brilliant," she said.

I looked at her.

"Why don't you just go on vacation?" she asked. "Give it to the sheriff and get out of the way? Then regroup and-"