P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“Shit magnet, reporting as ordered,” I said. The sheriff smiled grimly and offered coffee. He then explained that M. C. Mingo had called over from Rocky Falls and asked him to round up one Mister C. Richter and deliver him to the Robbins County Sheriff’s Office, forthwith, as they say in the big city.

“Says he has a complaint report of a fight at Grinny Creigh’s place on Spider Mountain wherein you assaulted two men, one of whom was sixty-three years old. The Creigh people say one’s got a broken leg and the old guy’s dead from a fist to the head.”

“It was an elbow,” I said. “It still hurts. He have a warrant out?”

“Now that you ask, he didn’t actually mention any warrant. You said last night two guys tried to administer a little discipline and you put ’em down. Care to amplify?”

I went through the fracas in detail, reminding the sheriff that I had been abducted by these two men, chained into the back of a pickup truck, and taken against my will to the hills for my “conversation” with Grinny Creigh. “The older guy was out cold but definitely breathing when I left; the other guy did seem to have a broken leg. But I’ll claim self-defense in the context of a kidnapping. And I will get a warrant for the whole damn clan.”

The sheriff drummed his fingers on his desk for a moment. “Lemme call him back. Why don’t you wait out in the bullpen.”

“Ask him if he can produce a body,” I said from the doorway. “You know, habeas corpus?”

“Don’t tell me my business, young man,” Hayes snapped, and waved me out of his office. He summoned me back in ten minutes. I had taken the time to make a call of my own to my estate attorney in Triboro, J. Oliver Strong, Esq. Lawyer Strong was a wills-and-probate guy, but his firm had a stable of criminal defense lawyers. Strong told me to sit tight and that one of them would call me back within the hour.

“Seems M. C. does not have a warrant,” the sheriff reported. “Although he says he can scare one up one pretty quick. FYI, the magistrate over there is married to a Creigh. The habeas question got a little bit murky, though. He hasn’t personally seen a body, nor have any of his deputies. Whole thing’s ‘verbal’ at the moment, pending lots and lots of further investigation.”

“They’re really all over it, aren’t they.”

“I told him what you said about getting a warrant out for Grinny and her whole crew. He started in with nobody having proof of any abduction until I told him we had witnesses at the lodge, plus the fact of Rue Creigh delivering your tired ass back to the lodge around midnight. That definitely slowed him up some. I asked how likely it was that she’d be offering you a ride in her pick-’em-up truck if you’d just killed one of their people with your bare hands right there in her front yard.”

“What’d he say to that?”

“That it would probably have turned her on. Rue’s got kinda of an exotic reputation in these parts.”

“Yikes. So where are we? I have lawyers in motion.”

The sheriff shrugged. “Ball’s in his court right now. If the Creighs can produce a body, and he can get his warrant, he may or may not follow through with it. He has to know that the feds have been looking for a way into Robbins County for months now.”

“And?”

“Kidnapping is a federal crime. A perfect handle for them to get right into the middle of all this. You know how they do-come in riding one charge and then suddenly growing arms like an octopus. My guess, even if that guy did kick? Mingo’s gonna think on it and then fail to produce a corpus. One less Creigh isn’t worth a federal invasion. In the meantime, however, I need you to stick around.”

“Damn, I was just about to declare victory and leave town.”

“Be still, my heart,” he said wistfully. “Right now I need to see what the jungle drums are saying up in the coves and hollers. Maybe find out who this supposedly dead guy was. And, more importantly, whether or not he has kin of his own.”

“As in, if M. C. isn’t going to handle it, some irate relatives might?”

“As in, you bet your flatlander ass. You better stay out of open windows and keep those dogs with you.”

“They’re out in the car right now. But wouldn’t I be safer waiting this out in Triboro?”

The sheriff scratched an ear. “That might pose me a political problem,” he said. “Folks will be watching to see what happens with this. You and I are sitting here drinking coffee because you’re an ex-cop. If I let you leave the county, I’ll hear about it. So stick around. This won’t take long. And in the meantime, can we get your formal statement about how y’all came to stumble on that body up at Crown Lake?”

I dictated a statement to the sheriff’s secretary, signed it, and drove back to the lodge. I lectured the dogs on the way back about wandering off when there were bad guys hiding in the bushes. They paid close attention for a good thirty seconds before yawning in unison and going to sleep. The defense lawyer called on my way back to the love cabin. I briefed him on the situation. He told me to say nothing to anyone until I knew what the real situation was, and that his retainer for a felony criminal charge was fifteen thousand. I noted the advice and the price and said I’d be in touch if there were any further developments.

Back at the cabin I called Mary Ellen Goode and told her what was going on. She said she’d already heard. Her voice was strained and she was speaking formally.

“Lemme guess, Ranger Bob standing right there?” I asked.

“Yes, sir, that’s correct,” she replied. “Let me look into the matter and call you back.”

I said okay and hung up. I then called Tony back in Triboro and brought him up to date on developments in the provinces. Tony had already heard. The lawyers’ courthouse gossip circuit had been humming ever since my first call to Lawyer Strong. Women had nothing on lawyers when it came to gossiping, unless they were lady lawyers.

“Bare hands?” Tony exclaimed. “That’s what you get for turning into a gym rat. Think you’re the Terminator now or what?”

“It felt a little bit like Sicily,” I said. “All those guys standing around in the dark with their luparas. I guess I’d had enough of being pushed around by toothless cretins. Listen, I need some stuff sent up here.”

After about three months of relative idleness, a friend in the Marshals Service had offered me a job doing routine investigatory work as an independent contractor for the federal court in Triboro. Once Annie Bellamy’s estate cleared, I no longer needed to do anything but read my financial statements, but the walls had begun to close in. Anything was better than just sitting around. It wasn’t exactly demanding stuff-background checks, witness management, short-notice paper scrambles during a court session-but it got me out of the house and interacting with other people again, and it was also a great excuse for Sheriff Bobby Lee Baggett to stop hounding me about getting back out in the world and doing something besides pump iron and brood about getting some revenge down the line.

Sergeant Horace Stackpole, one of my guys who’d been on the original MCAT, took retirement a few months after that and looked me up for a drink. We were joined by another cop and got to talking about what cops can do after leaving the Job. I bitched about the boring nature of the work I was doing, and the third guy suggested that I form my own company and hire only ex-cops, like Horace, and we could all work as much or as little as we wanted to. The courts had an unending need for people who could retrieve information and documents, witnesses who might not know they were witnesses, and other odds and ends quickly. Cops knew how to do all of that, and had the networks to get to certain people and information quickly. I suggested that Horace found the company, but, as he pointed out, I was the one who both had money and didn’t need to work.