P Deutermann - Spider mountain

Sitting next to her on the porch had to be Nathan, Grinny’s son. Even sitting, he was very tall, well over six feet, with elongated arms and legs, massive hands, and an oversized, bony head. He had a pale, square forehead and a long-bearded lantern jaw that made him look like a caricature of Frankenstein’s monster. His beard was long enough to rest on his chest. He wore loose-fitting blue denim overalls over a long-sleeved white cotton shirt and canvas-topped, size really-large Army surplus tropical combat boots. There was a deerskin bag at his feet from which the handles of several knives projected. He watched me with calm eyes while whittling on a piece of wood.

Standing just inside the front screen door was another woman, whom I recognized as the buxom hottie I’d seen at M. C. Mingo’s office. The two lanterns cast enough light to shadow the interior of the cabin, so I could barely see her expression, but I thought she recognized me. Now here’s an unholy trinity, I thought. For a moment I thought I saw some other faces, smaller, pale ovals bobbing around in the interior shadows behind the young woman, but I couldn’t be sure. I heard some noises off to either side of me and realized that there were other people out there in the shadows. Good deal. I heard some dogs stirring behind a fence made out of solid sheets of galvanized tin roofing nailed vertically to posts and boards.

“This him?” the fat woman asked.

“He’s the one,” said the girl from behind the screen door. She pressed her front up against it, creating two white circles against the screen in the shadow of the doorway. I’m sure I was supposed to get all hot and bothered.

Grinny Creigh leaned forward in her chair, making it and the porch floorboards creak. “Where you from, mister?” she asked.

“Manceford County,” I said. I’d decided not to waste energy protesting my abduction, hoping that, if I acted calmly, none of them would get violent.

“You been nosin’ around, askin’ questions down’ere in Rocky Falls?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I did talk to the sheriff.”

“You the one found that deader in the lake yonder?”

“That’s right.”

“How’d you know where to go lookin’?”

“I’m an investigator. I investigated.”

Grinny leaned back in her rocker and gave me an annoyed look. My sarcasm was apparently not much appreciated.

“Got a smart mouth on him,” Nathan said softly. His voice was high-pitched and nasal, like M. C. Mingo’s.

Grinny tilted her head fractionally, and I sensed the man behind me raise his fist to smack me on the head. I bent forward and whirled to his left, blocking the blow with an upraised left forearm and clubbing him in the groin with my stiffened right forearm. The man gasped as he doubled over, but instead of quitting, he bared his teeth and tried to bite my arm. I drove my right elbow into his temple, dropping him like a stone. My second captor, much older than the first, hadn’t moved yet, so I kicked him in the shin as hard as I could. He yelled, dropped his shotgun, and collapsed over his splintered shin. I extended my knee as he went down, catching him right under the chin in a tooth-clicking crack that knocked him cold. It all took less than fifteen seconds. I turned around to face the people on the porch and found myself looking into the bores of a double-barreled ten-gauge held by Nathan. The girl behind the screen was staring openmouthed at me. My left arm ached.

Grinny was looking down at me with a furious expression on her face. “You got some nerve, boy,” she growled, “comin’ up here and doin’ that.”

“I didn’t come up here,” I said angrily. “They brought me. That’s called kidnapping back in the World. You have a reason for doing that?”

“You ain’t kidnapped. You was brought here so’s I could ask ye straight: What’re you here for? Why you pokin’ around in Robbins County, askin’ folks ‘bout Creighs?”

“I want to know what happened to that park ranger, the one who was beaten and raped at Crown Lake.”

“What’s ‘at got to do with us?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “But we want to find out who did that and bring him in.”

“Who’s we?” Grinny said. Nathan and his shotgun had not moved one inch. The old man groaned on the ground, but the other one exhibited the stillness of the grave. I wondered if I’d hit him too hard in the temple. I hadn’t meant to hit him there, but those snaggly yellow teeth had looked both serious and toxic.

“The National Park Service,” I replied. “The Carrigan County Sheriff’s Office. The rangers at Thirty Mile station. And probably the decent, law-abiding people in this county, both of them.”

She snorted at this insult. “They hire you up?”

“That’s right,” I said. The truth would have been too complicated. Grinny leaned forward, and the heavily stressed rocking chair complained again.

“Well, you hear me, mister,” she said. “What goes on in Robbins County ain’t none of your bizness nor anyone else’s. If we got menfolk out in them woods doin’ that kinda shit, we take care of it, our way, not your way. Our lawyers come in two sizes: ten-gauge and twelve-gauge. You follow?”

“Well, that sounds good,” I said. “But a body or two delivered to the Thirty Mile station might be more convincing.”

Grinny raised her eyebrows, as if she hadn’t thought of that.

“You remember ’em dogs?” Nathan asked. “On the Rocky Falls road?”

I looked at him blankly for a second, then remembered the tall man up on the ridge with the binoculars. Had that been Nathan? I nodded.

“That convincing enough for ye?”

“That was the man who assaulted the ranger?”

“It was. You want meat for your lawyers’n such, you go on down there, pick up what’s left. Ain’t much, I reckon, but you’s the one needs convincin’.”

“Like I was sayin’,” Grinny said. “We take care’a things our way. You get on outta here now, and don’t you come back to Robbins County.”

I assessed my situation. The men in the shadows had gathered closer, but they weren’t doing anything except watching. Yet. The old man on the ground was crabbing his fingers toward his dropped shotgun. When he saw me watching, he withdrew his hand. The other one still hadn’t moved, although he did appear to be breathing now. Nathan’s shotgun still hadn’t wavered. I concluded that this was not the time for speeches. All this complex calculation took me a good three seconds.

“All right,” I said. I turned around and started walking down the meadow toward the tree line by the road. My back prickled in fearful anticipation, but I forced myself to simply walk away without a backward glance at all those shotguns. When I got down to the actual road, the cabin was out of sight. I turned across the hill to the road and picked up the pace. The road was a glorified dirt track, and the woods on either side were entirely dark. It was going to be a long night, I thought, as I rubbed the aching muscles, what was left of them, in my left arm. Then I heard a large dog start baying somewhere behind me, joined quickly by several others. An image of the pack tearing up the fat man crossed my mind and I cranked on a few more knots, although I could stumble only so fast down a rutted road in the dark. The dog noise kept up, but it didn’t sound like it was getting any closer. Grinny Creigh sending me one last message: Keep going, stranger, or worse things can happen than getting shot at. I pulled out my cell phone, but, as I’d expected, there was no service. Cell phone service seemed to be available in inverse proportion to how badly you needed it.

I had walked for almost forty-five minutes, still not reaching level ground or a paved road, when I heard a vehicle approaching from behind me. I stepped off the road into the trees and watched a pickup truck with too much engine come around the corner above me, showing only parking lights. When it drew abreast, the offside window came down and Rowena Creigh’s face appeared.