P Deutermann - Spider mountain

Greenberg made a face. “Then we need to boogie,” he said. “He’s gonna have black hats and white hats scouring the county for his ‘escaped’ prisoner.”

“Can we make it to Carrigan County?” I asked.

Greenberg shook his head. “We could have, but probably not now. There’s only one road, right through town there.”

“Actually,” Carrie said. “There are others.”

We both looked at her in surprise. She shrugged.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this. Mingo had to know you guys were in town. How’s about you and your people take one vehicle and go down there, show up on the scene, and baffle them with some DEA bullshit. Carrie and I will take your other vehicle and head for the hills. We’ll figure out next steps once we get clear.”

Greenberg gave Carrie a questioning look. She nodded. “Good a plan as any,” she said. Then she turned to me. “Laurie May’s?”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” I said. “They’ll expect me to run for Carrigan County, not toward the other side of Spider Mountain.”

“Mingo’s moving,” Greenberg announced.

“Is that cell phone transponder still set up?” I asked.

Greenberg said no, but that he would put it back on the air first thing in the morning.

“Got any maps?” I asked the DEA agent.

“Don’t need any,” Carrie said. “I know these hills. I grew up in this county. Let’s go.”

I whistled up the shepherds, and we swapped gear and vehicles with the other DEA agents. Then Carrie got in on the driver’s side. I settled the dogs in the back compartment and jumped into the front passenger seat.

“Ever see the movie Thunder Road?” Carrie asked, as she cranked the Suburban around and pointed it up the mountain road. I took one look at the grim expression on her face and cinched up my seat belt. For a supposed city girl from Raleigh, this lady was full of surprises tonight.

The Suburban was a federal seizure and forfeiture vehicle taken from a drug dealer. Even though it was the smaller of the two versions, it had a big V-8, four-wheel drive, tinted windows, and a beefed-up suspension system. Carrie drove it like a bootlegger, and all the questions I wanted to ask about her little bombshell back there definitely had to wait as she took paved road, dirt road, curves, straightaways, and hills at the same breakneck speed. The shepherds, who normally rode sitting up, were not visible in the way-back.

I had no idea of where we were until she skidded through a right turn down by what looked like the same creek where Mingo had staged the logging-truck accident. Suddenly we saw a police cruiser coming fast the other way, a few S -bends ahead of us, its light bar flashing blue strobe light through the trees.

“Duck down,” Carrie ordered, flipping on her brights, and I bent over in the seat. I felt the Suburban twist left, accelerate, and then swerve hard right, its horn blaring angrily. Then I heard the sounds of a crash behind us as Carrie decelerated hard going into the next curve.

“Okay,” she said above the noise of protesting tires.

“He get a look at us?” I asked as I straightened back up.

“He was busy,” she replied. “Now he’s wet. Hopefully, so’s his radio.”

We drove to the road leading up to Laurie May’s cabin, turned into it, and then hid the vehicle behind an old shed barn out of sight of the dirt road. We watched a few more police cruisers go by down on the hard-top road, but no one came nosing around. We watched for half an hour longer, but traffic seemed to have evaporated. I let the dogs out for a quick runaround and to make sure no one was nearby. I put them on a long down near the vehicle and got back in. Frick started barking at some woods creature, and I told her to shut up or I’d cut her ears off. She was visibly terrified for a good five seconds. Carrie asked if they always yawned like that when I yelled at them. I told her it was a fear response.

“Okay, Special Agent,” I said. “Explain, please.”

“Baby asked me if I had a personal stake in all this,” she said. “He said you’d asked.”

“Yup.”

“First I should tell you that I’ve resigned from the SBI.”

“Whoa,” I said. “What happened?”

“The operations director fanged my immediate boss pretty hard, with direct orders for me to back off,” she said. “She was not happy with the fact that I failed to ID myself as SBI when Mingo made his move. Said that we needed to regroup on the Robbins County problem, get a federal task force going, get the big Bureau back into it.”

“And you disagreed?”

“Hell, yes. I mean, we’ve done all that before. But she’s a bureaucrat first and a law officer second. A task force means meetings in Washington, overnights at cushy hotels, and a new bullet on her resume. Regarding the real problem, turns out all she really wants to do is kick the can.”

“The real problem?”

“The one you’re supposed to guess.”

“Unh-hunh. And you’re retirement eligible, or did you just up and quit?”

“Took an early out,” she said. “Just like you, as I recall.”

I didn’t remind her that I had taken early retirement with a multimillion-dollar trust fund in the wings. Her bailing out of a good state job was a lot more significant a move than my leaving the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office.

“So what’s the personal beef here?” I asked. The sky outside was starting to lighten in a false dawn. The shepherds were curled into tight little balls. Sometimes they were useless as guards, unless a bad guy happened to step on their tails.

She took a deep breath and then told me the story. Santangelo had been her married name, which she’d kept after her husband, a state parole officer, had gotten himself involved with an eighteen-year-old waitress down in Charlotte. He’d called it a case of the seven-year itch but admitted that he was desperately in love. She’d called it grounds for divorce, and now he lived in a double-wide on half pay with his Waffle House queen.

Her maiden name had been Harper, and she had actually been born and raised in the town of Rocky Falls, right here in wild and wonderful Robbins County. She and her mother had left when she turned sixteen, not long after her father and younger sister had been killed in a road accident. Her mother had gone back to the Charlotte area, where she had family. Carrie had finished high school, gone on to college, and from there into the SBI. She’d begun as an intern during her senior year, which evolved into a full-time job offer when she graduated. She’d been in the professional standards division right from the start.

“This goes back to the so-called accident,” she said. “My father was a state game warden. He managed the game lands that surround the Smokies National Park on the Carolina side. At the time, the accident was described as ‘cause unknown.’ After I’d been at the SBI for a while I made some inquiries through the North Carolina DMV. Turned out it had been recorded as a hit-and-run accident, involving a large truck.”

“Like a logging truck?”

“Just like that,” she said, looking over at me. Her eyes were shining with steely resolve. “Big enough to knock Dad’s pickup truck backwards into a ravine from the inside lane. His truck went into a river. And, and this is the interesting part, they recovered his body, but not that of my sister.”

“Any evidence that she had survived the crash?”

Carrie blew out a long breath. “My father’s family came originally from the Carolina coast. Their ancestors were Portuguese fishermen for the most part. Harper was a name change way back when, we think. Very independent-minded people. Dad, for instance, refused to wear a seat belt. Just wouldn’t do it. Rainey, that was my sister’s name, always wore her seat belt. Dad probably died in the initial impact, based on what I saw in the DMV accident reconstruction report. But Rainey should have survived-there was virtually no damage on her side, even after going into that ravine. Her door was found open, and her school book bag was gone.”