P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“Only thing is, I think they’d be way behind me,” I said, recalling Mary Ellen’s comment. “Besides, I didn’t come up here to solve the meth problem. I came to help Dr. Goode find out what happened to her probationer. And I think we got closer today.”

“Interesting that you’re helping her but not the Park Service.”

I nodded. “True, but they’re apparently scared shitless of getting into a blood feud with the Creigh clan, who probably know the park better than any ten rangers. I guess I can see their point.”

“I can’t,” she said. “You let a bunch of crooks, even colorful ones, know you’re scared of them, they get bolder and bolder. What we need up here is a SEAL team. Send them into Robbins County and let them start cutting some prominent throats in the night until all this meth crap stops. Unfortunately, they’re all otherwise engaged these days.”

I laughed. “Don’t remember ever meeting a bloodthirsty SBI agent before,” I said. “Usually you guys are all about the paper chase.”

She didn’t smile back at me. “There’s another thing,” she said. “One we don’t understand at all. The state police collared a guy for vehicular homicide in Robbins County. Basically, a case of serious road rage. Nudged a tourist minivan off a cliff with his pickup because they were going too slow. At one point he implied that they better not mess with him because he worked for Grinny Creigh.”

“The state guys just love to be intimidated.”

“It’s almost as good as resisting arrest. Anyway, long story short, their detective bureau tried to turn him, without success. In the process of questioning him, though, he dangled a tidbit, saying that Grinny was a ‘florist.’ The cops were baffled, and when this guy realized they didn’t understand the code, he stopped talking.”

“A florist? As in, say, hallucinogenic botanicals?”

She shrugged. “Who the hell knows? Street slang morphs daily. Nobody’s ever heard the term. But if you do get involved in Robbins County and hear that word, we’d love to know what kind of new and original evil shit that is.”

She fished in her pocket and produced a business card. “Keep this handy,” she said. “You find a hole in Robbins County that regular law enforcement can drive through, please call me. If I can’t talk my bosses into exploiting it, I’ll take some leave, come up here, and go after it myself.”

“That sounds like there’s a personal angle,” I said.

She looked right back at me. “Anything’s possible, Lieutenant. By the way, I haven’t informed the local law that I’m here. I’d appreciate your keeping that confidence. In the meantime, be careful. The hills really are alive and all that good stuff.”

After she’d left, I slipped on a jacket and took the dogs out for a last call among the defenseless trees. The cabins were mostly dark and the shepherds had ranged ahead down a creekside path. This was getting interesting, I thought. First a DEA agent, and now an SBI agent, both complaining about not being able to penetrate Robbins County, and both offering to partner up if I should succeed. And why should I succeed where law enforcement had failed? All I’d done was to prize some useful information out of the injured probationer. We’d found a body, but there was still no direct evidentiary tie to Janey Howard. I wondered if that “grinning hangman” business meant the guy in the lake, assuming it was a man, had been hanged. It certainly hadn’t been your usual park excursion.

And what in the world was this “florist” stuff? The druggy world came up with more interesting code names for their addictions than even the government. But I’d come up to find out what happened to Janey Howard, not to chase druggies. I think that chasing druggies has become a form of white-collar welfare for law enforcement. As far as I’m concerned, drugs ought to be decriminalized and sold at government outlets for tax revenue. Let the addicts shoot up and die if they want to-meth, heroin, ‘ludes, coke, tranks, ups, downs, you name it, they are all just manifestations of Mr. Darwin’s theory of natural selection. I just wanted to quit finding the miserable bastards climbing through my basement windows.

The dogs had gone out of sight down the creek banks. My boots were crunching through pea gravel, so I knew I must still be on the lodge grounds. I noticed a side path that branched away from the main path to my right. I wondered what personal connection the handsome SBI agent had with Robbins County and the Creighs, and I made a mental note to check that out before I called her, if I ever called her. Her not checking in with the local sheriff’s office was not only unusual but outside of standard procedure. The SBI was usually called in by local law, but occasionally they were investigating said local law.

Then I saw the two men standing on the path, pointing shotguns at me.

I stopped in my tracks, just barely restraining myself from saying something stupid like What do you want? Both of them wore dark pants and shirts, and they were sporting full beards. No black hats, but definitely a pair of faces born to decorate a wanted poster. One of them stepped forward and motioned with his shotgun for me to come with them. I hesitated, hoping the dogs would reappear, but when the second man reversed the shotgun in his hands to form a club, I said all right and went with them. Both of them looked perfectly capable of clubbing me senseless and then dragging me to wherever it was we were going.

We walked quickly down the narrow path toward a pickup truck, with one of them in front and one behind me. Their clothes smelled of wood smoke and pine needles. I thought of a dozen different escape moves, but none of them stacked up well against shotguns at three feet. If they’d meant to kill me, they could have already done that and then thrown my body into the fast-moving creek.

Once we got out to the parking lot, one of them got in on the driver’s side while the other motioned for me to get into the bed of the truck. The man jumped up behind me, told me to lie down on my belly, and then clipped my wrists and legs to chain manacles welded to the corners of the bed of the truck. He prodded me in the back with the shotgun.

“Lookin’ to go see the Baby Jesus?” he whispered. His accent was mountain, but not tree-stump ignorant. The pine scent from the man’s clothes was really strong up close. Which was why the dogs had missed them, I realized. It was an old deer hunter’s trick. They’d double back eventually and then go nuts when they couldn’t find me.

“Not especially,” I said.

“Then keep still,” he growled.

Thirty minutes and a gear-grinding climb later up a very dark mountain road, the truck slowed, turned so hard I thought we were going to tip over, bounced over some serious ruts and then choked to a stop. I felt tenderized after all that time on the steel bed of the truck, and I had no idea of where we were, except that it was up. They got me out of the bed and marched me along a crooked path leading still farther up, one of them again leading, one behind. I stumbled a few times as I worked the kinks out, but they didn’t restrain me. After a ten-minute walk through the trees and out across a mountain meadow, I saw dim lights above, where a long log cabin was perched on the hillside.

They marched me up the slope to the cabin, where I could see two people sitting in rockers on the front porch, flanked by lanterns hanging on the front wall. One of them had to be Grinny Creigh. She was a heavy woman, with short, graying red hair cut in a surfer bowl, a broad forehead, a round, florid, double-chinned face, narrow-set eyes, a down-turned, thin-lipped mouth, and a pug nose. She wore a shapeless black dress to cover her ponderous body. There were massive fat rolls on her upper arms, but plenty of muscle, too. Her ankles had cuffs of fat above them and were indistinguishable from her calves, but she had small feet. In her left hand she held an old-fashioned paddle fan with which she was keeping her face cool. Her right hand held a sweating glass of what looked like tea.