P Deutermann - Spider mountain

Mingo started the car, turned it around, and headed back down the bumpy firebreak lane that encircled the lake. I looked back to see what the “deputies” were doing, but they had vanished back out into the lake. Greenberg and his two partners were standing with hands on hips around the fire, glaring at Mingo’s vehicle as it drove away.

“Well now,” Mingo said pleasantly, looking at us in the rearview mirror. “Young lady, you look familiar to me, but you never did say who you are. Got a name on you?”

Carrie looked out the window at nothing, completely ignoring the sheriff’s question. We both had to sit partially sideways because of that center cuff.

“Aren’t you going to give us our Mirandas, Sheriff?” I asked. “You know, the one that says we have the right to remain silent?”

“Consider them given, mister,” Mingo said. “She will answer my questions, by the way. Or you can speak for her. I don’t care which. She might care, though. Pretty thing. Be a shame to have to force the issue.”

I decided to play Carrie’s game and went silent. Mingo saw the expression on our faces and turned back around. “Okay,” he said. “Easy way or hard way.” He stared again at Carrie in the rearview mirror, as if trying to remember where he’d seen her before.

Forty-five minutes later I found myself parked in a county jail cell. The sheriff had called ahead, and two oversized uniformed deputies met us at the back of the county building in Rocky Falls. Carrie and I were separated, and I didn’t know where they’d taken her. They didn’t book or print me, which did not bode well.

I considered my predicament. I was the one in trouble here. Carrie could end her problem by simply telling Mingo she was with the SBI. More likely, Baby Greenberg had already contacted her bosses and Carrie was down the road and gone. But I had no such official protections. Then I remembered that I was officially an SBI operational consultant. So maybe I did have some top cover. Neither of us had had our ID or weapons on when the sheriff and his night boatmen had appeared. But why hadn’t Carrie landed all over the sheriff with a ton of official SBI bullshit? Especially when she was a senior internal affairs Nazi. Why had she just gone along? Maybe there was something bigger going on here than she’d let on. I dropped onto the bunk and put my mind in neutral.

An hour later I heard steel doors clanging down the cell-block corridor, and then the two very large deputies arrived at my cell door. Shaved heads, six-plus feet high and about as wide, with professionally bored expressions and massive hands. Their fingers kept opening and closing. Name tags both read HARPER.

“Sheriff Mingo wants to see you,” the Lurch on the left said.

“We need to cuff you?” the other one asked. He was slightly shorter than the first one, but still tall enough to worry about ceiling fans. They had to be brothers.

“As in, am I going to give you boys any shit?”

“Un-hunh.”

“Can’t see any future in that,” I said pleasantly, as if we were just going out for a nice stroll around the grounds.

“Got that right,” the first one said, sounding satisfied. His physical demeanor made it clear that even if I did try something, it wouldn’t matter much. “Come on, then.”

They escorted me down the cell block, but instead of going back into the central building, we went the other way and walked down to what turned out to be the back door of the jail. This led out into the sheriff’s department parking lot, which was about two hundred feet square and protected by a high chain-link fence. A darkened single-story parking garage with two dozen vehicle bays closed in one side and the back. There was a much older wooden structure on the other side, which looked like it might have been the town’s original jail. The lot was lighted by sodium vapor lights. There were few cars, and no one else seemed to be around.

I tensed as we walked out into the parking lot. The deputies were walking alongside me and were well inside my personal space, but neither one had put a hand on me.

“This ole boy here thinks we’re gonna beat on him some,” the taller of the two deputies said to the other.

“Relax, mister,” the other said. “We was gonna whale on you, we’d’a done it in the cell with your cuffs on. But you can hold up right here now.”

I stopped and the big deputies stepped away. The glare of the parking-lot lights put their faces in shadow. “Sheriff says you wouldn’t talk to him,” the first one said. “So he’s done gone and got somethin’ special for you. You stand right there.”

They backed away from me, continuing to face me, with hands conveniently near their holstered batons. I couldn’t figure out what was going on until I saw Mingo step out of one of the darkened garage bays. He had an enormous German shepherd on a leash. The dog locked on to me from fifty feet away, let out a single, impressive growl, and leaned into his harness.

“You the one likes to sic them shepherd dogs on folks?” Mingo asked, coming forward. The deputies were well out of the way now, and now they had their hands on their sticks. “Thought you might like to see how that feels. Ace here is fixin’ to show you.”

With that, he leaned forward and slipped the leash. Ace came at a run. I didn’t hesitate: I dropped to my hands and knees, bent my head down to my chest, and froze. The huge dog came into me with a roar, but then stopped, practically on top of me. I could smell him and sense his enormous physical presence, but I kept my eyes on the ground and lowered my head even more, exposing the back of my neck. The shepherd came in tight and pushed his nose into my throat and then across the back of my head. I heard Mingo yelling at the dog to “git him.” But Ace backed off and went into rapid-fire shepherd barking, not so much barking at me as showering me with dominance noise, just to make sure the submissive human in front of him got the message. I still didn’t move, and the big dog finally shut up and sat down.

“Well, I’ll be a sonuvabitch,” Mingo said, walking up. “I was hopin’ you’d run for it.” He came over to where I was still maintaining my submissive position on the concrete. I could sense the dog relaxing and waiting for further orders.

“Okay, take him back to the cells,” Mingo ordered, snapping the leash back on Ace.

The two giants came forward and helped me up, and then all three of us began to walk back toward the cell-block door. The sheriff disappeared with his dog back into the parking garage.

“How come Ace didn’t bite your ass?” one of the deputies asked, as we paused by the back door.

“Shepherd rules,” I said.

“But the sheriff was tellin him to git ya,” the other one said.

“A shepherd is an honorable dog,” I said. “You come at the one he’s protecting, he’s going to tear you up. But if he’s been trained and comes after you on command, and you submit, he’s going to sit down. No matter what Mingo says.”

“Sheriff wasn’t too happy,” the first one said. The other agreed.

“I’ll bet the sheriff knows exactly what happened out there,” I said. “You spin up a big dog like that, you have to play by shepherd rules. Otherwise, you don’t have an on-off switch, do you?”

They thought about that as we went back into the cell-block corridor. They still hadn’t cuffed me and seemed relaxed enough about that. “You really a sheriff’s office lieutenant?” one of them asked me.

“I was; did my time in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office, then took early retirement.”

They walked me to my cell and locked me back in. “You boys brothers?” I asked.

They nodded. “I’m Big Luke,” the shorter of them said. “This here is Bigger John.”