P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“‘Taking care of business’?” I said. “That still the official motto here?”

I could see that Big Luke was just a bit nervous; perhaps it was because John wasn’t around. I decided to try a little probe. “You ever hear of a woman named Grinny Creigh?” I asked.

Luke’s eyes flared in recognition. He looked around as if to make sure no one had heard that. “I gotta go now,” he’d said. “Supper’s down at five.”

Supper had turned out to be a bag of limp greaseburgers from the town’s one and only fast-food joint, which was definitely not one of the national chains. As darkness settled, I wondered why I’d really been moved out to this old building. If indeed there were no other prisoners, it would have made more sense to put me right next to the front office in the modern jail wing. The small building was appropriately gloomy; there was only a single overhead light in the aisle between the cells. Through the windows I heard a dog barking; it sounded a lot like Ace, who was probably out patrolling the parking lots now that night had fallen. It was no wonder the two brothers weren’t too worried about any escape attempts, not with old Ace on the job. Anyone slinking around the parking compound at night would invoke a very different set of shepherd rules.

I looked into the bag. The fries had congealed on the bottom into a starchy mass. I ate one of the hamburgers, drank some watery Coke, and then pitched the bag through the bars into a trash can in the aisle-way. I missed my nightly scotch. My liver probably did not.

After a few hours I heard some vehicles entering and leaving the compound, which I surmised meant a shift change. It was nothing like the mass movement of private and official vehicles that took place in the much larger Triboro Sheriff’s Office, but the noises coming through the tiny windows were familiar. Fifteen minutes later, all was quiet again.

I flopped down on the lumpy bed. The building was about as devoid of human comforts as a building could be. No radio, no television, no apparent ventilation or air-conditioning, no telephone, that single incandescent light, and the smell of old wood. There wasn’t even a ceiling, just a maze of wooden rafters and beams from what had to be the nineteenth century, if not older. The floor was made of thick wooden planks of random width, with well-worn tread marks down the center. The door hardware looked to be made of wrought iron, and there was even a set of supports for an inside locking bar to keep lynch mobs at bay.

I got up and examined the cell door’s lock, which was of the old-fashioned skeleton key design. If I’d had a coat hanger I could probably have worked it open. But to what end? That big oak door had to be two or three inches thick, and there was probably another one of those locking bars in place on the other side. Besides, there was no usable metal in the cell whatsoever; in that regard, it was an entirely modern jail. I sat back down, wondering if the light stayed on all night. I could see no light switch. I wracked my brain to think of some way of getting that cell door unlocked, but it seemed truly hopeless. They’d taken not only my clothes and shoes but my watch and, of course, my pocketknife; the jumpsuit had no belt and my prison shoes fastened with Velcro.

Face it, sunshine: They got you. I drifted off to sleep.

I awoke in near total darkness. Someone had finally turned out the light, and the reflected light from the sodium vapor towers around the parking compound provided the only illumination. Without a watch, I had no idea what time it was. I heard a sound coming from the end of the aisle nearest the door to the outside: metal scraping on metal. A key?

I got up off the bunk; I’d fallen asleep in my jumpsuit. I pressed my face to the bars at the front of the cell and tried to see the door, but it was too dark. Then I saw a thin vertical line of light appear and heard a hinge squeak. The line held steady and then widened until I could see a figure standing at the door. Then there were two, and from the size of them, I recognized the big brothers. Big Luke came in while Bigger John stayed by the door as lookout. Luke was holding something in his hand and, for a scary moment, I wondered if I’d been all wrong about the Big brothers. I backed away from the bars until I saw the ring of keys.

“Come on,” Luke rumbled quietly.

“We going to play with Ace again?” I asked as Luke unlocked the cell door. John was no longer visible.

“Mingo’s comin’ with his mountain boys,” Luke said. “Fixin’ to burn this place. Come quiet, now.”

That was pretty damned clear. I didn’t look back. I followed Luke down the aisle, out the door, and into the parking lot, where John had a cruiser waiting in the shadow of the old jail building. Luke opened the right front and back doors. “Git in,” he ordered. “And git down on the floor.”

I slid into the backseat and Luke shut the door quietly. I then rolled sideways and got down on my knees behind the front seat. Luke got in and John drove the car forward. I heard gates sliding, then felt the car go down a ramp and accelerate into the street. I could see the top windows of the main office as we drove by. I didn’t see anyone looking back at me.

It occurred to me that I might be going for a ride in the mobster sense. Being the sole occupant of the old jail building made it easy for someone to take me out of the complex. I began to think of my next move.

“Okay,” Luke announced. I got back up into a normal sitting position as John took a couple of turns and then headed out of town up a mountain road. From the backseat the two brothers looked like a circus act, their huge shoulders almost touching in the front seat. I could hear the static of the patrol radio, but the computer screen wasn’t on. That meant they were offline, and no one in operations should know that the car was out of the lot. I didn’t know if that was good news or bad. I surreptitiously looked to see if the back doors had interior handles. They did not.

“So what’s going down, boys?” I asked, casually, reaching for a seat belt as John sped up the mountain road.

“Like I said, Mingo’s gone to git his Spider Mountain boys,” Luke replied. “I heard one’a the front office deputies sayin’ they was gonna be a insurance fire back in the old jail and that Mingo said not to pay it no mind till it dropped.”

“This guy know I was in there?”

“Don’t b’lieve so,” Luke said. “Everybody thought you was still back in the holding pen. Ain’t nobody been back that way since we took you out.”

“Lovely,” I said. “And if the old building burned down, nobody would care very much.”

“Yup.”

“You guys get a chance to talk to somebody about a federal task force?”

“Yup.”

That explained why I wasn’t cuffed in the car. I saw the dashboard clock; it was two fifteen. John took a couple of switchbacks fast enough to make the tires complain, and then we pulled over into a scenic overlook space. John nosed the car right up against the stone wall, switched off the lights, and got out. Luke opened the right back door and motioned for me to get out, too. Neither had his weapon out. I wondered if this was Robbins County’s version of the Tarpeian Rock, Rome’s original execution place.

From the overlook, we had a good view of the town down below. The main drag through town was clearly lighted, and we could see the river and the backs of the houses that perched on the hillside above the main street. The sheriff’s office parking lot was visible because of the sodium lights. John produced a thermos of coffee and some paper cups. He poured all three of us some coffee and then pitched the empty thermos back into the front seat. Luke lit up a cigarette and sat down on the stone wall that framed the overlook. Down below in the town we saw an SUV of some kind starting up the same road we had just climbed, several hundred feet below the overlook. A second one turned into the road a moment later. I finally began to relax when they produced coffee.