P Deutermann - Spider mountain

I experienced a sudden urge to shoot them both and rescue the little girl. But for all I knew, this was a county social services doctor or PA making a house call of some kind, even if it was pretty late. The child was thin and frightened, although she didn’t look to be ill. Grinny just stood there looking bored, but not letting go of that slim, bony wrist for one moment. I thought for just a second that I glimpsed another small, pale face peeking through the curtains at what was going on out front, but then it was gone, like a ghost on the move.

The man thanked Grinny and said that everything was acceptable. Grinny turned the child around and sent her into the cabin. Then she turned back to the man, who had stepped down to the walkway.

“If’n we had to, how many could you take in one go?” she asked.

The man thought about that for a moment. “No more than one per night,” he said finally. “And that would be difficult. The airport security would notice.”

“Ain’t sayin’ we’ll have to, mind,” she said. “But there’s been some folks snoopin’ around, and it ain’t been the ones we usually see ‘round here, them drug cops, I’m talkin’ about.”

“Who are they, then?” he asked.

“We don’t know. M. C. had one of’em, but he got away ‘fore we could have a little talk with’m.”

“Is it about the children?” the man asked.

“Like I keep sayin’, we don’t know. But if we git cornered up, you could take all of’em, right?”

“The demand far exceeds the supply, always,” the man responded. “It’s the processing and transport that are tricky. For a sudden oversupply, the costs would be higher, of course.”

“Unh-hunh,” Grinny said in a sarcastic, suspicions-confirmed tone of voice.

“Let me get something out of the car for you,” he said, and turned to go back to the SUV. Grinny stood there for a second and then reached down behind that oversized rocking chair and pulled a shotgun toward her, which she set down behind her against the door. Her huge bulk completely hid it from view.

The man came back from the SUV with something small and black in his hand, and for a second I wondered if he had a gun. Instead he handed it up to Grinny on the porch.

“This is a one-time pager,” he said. “Use it once and I will come at the regular hour. Then throw it away. Never use it again because they are able to track such devices now.” He pointed up into the sky. “From space, using satellites. Imagine. If you must move them all at once, activate the pager precisely at noon on whichever day you use it. Otherwise, activate it at some other time, it doesn’t matter when.”

“All right,” she said, keeping her right hand buried in her housecoat and close to that shotgun.

“I will be back in a few nights,” he said. “I will let your Mr. Mingo know when to meet me.”

She nodded curtly at him and went back into the house, shutting the big wooden door and locking it with some kind of metal bar, which I could hear thump down into place. The man drove off in his SUV. He’d been just far enough away for me not to be able to get the license plate number.

I sat back on my haunches. Some kind of a transaction had just taken place. The little girl had been approved for sale, confirming our worst suspicions about Grinny Creigh. And there might be more of them, either in the cabin with her or somewhere else, based on her question about having to possibly move more than one in a hurry.

But move them where and to what end? He had said something about airports, so maybe the theories about children being sold out of the hills into global sex-slave markets was accurate. I remembered Laurie May’s question about what kind of mamas would do such a thing. What kind indeed.

Two dogs started to bark back in the dog pen. I decided it was time to get out of there. I checked the cell phone, but there was no signal down here at the cabin. The dogs finally shut up after five minutes or so. We moved away from the cabin and went back up the hill, staying in the trees for as long as possible, the shepherds plastered to my side. It was slower going up than it had been coming down, and I was puffing once I made it to the cave. I slipped into the black hole and rested for about twenty minutes, trying to decide what to do next. I kept coming up with the same answer-immediate departure. Then deal with the problem of the children. I tried the cell again. There was a single signal bar showing in the little window, so I told the dogs to stay and stepped back out of the cave to see if I could do better.

My heart sank. I should have heeded my own advice. There was Nathan, standing with two other men in the dim moonlight. All of them had shotguns. A fourth man was wrestling the tracking leads on the two big dogs I’d seen Nathan throw into the back of the pickup truck. I thought about calling out the shepherds, but there were simply too many shotguns.

Nathan swung the barrel of his shotgun toward the distant cabin and tipped his head in that direction. Clear enough.

They marched me down the hill to the cabin, Nathan leading, the other two gunmen behind me. They’d patted me down and relieved me of my field belt, the cell phone, and my weapon up at the cave. The man with the dogs was way ahead of us, being practically dragged back to the dog pen by those two big brutes. None of them had gone into the cave, which was a good thing because I don’t know what would have happened if they had. They’d have probably shot the shepherds and then fed them to the big dogs. If they’d seen me coming back up the hill from the cabin, they weren’t letting on.

Grinny wasn’t sitting in her chair on the front porch like the last time. They took me to one of the side barn buildings and locked me into what had been either a horse or cow stall, I couldn’t tell which. They chained a steel cuff to my right ankle and then barred the wooden stall door. The other end of the chain was made fast to a wooden beam that had to be twelve inches square. The floor was covered in dense straw that smelled of old manure. There were no windows and no lights. I could hear some kind of animals shuffling around in other stalls, but it was too dark to see what they were. The walls of the stall were about seven feet high, rough oak, and harder than any nail. The barn roof beams were a good fifteen feet above my head.

I sat down in a corner of the stall with my back to the plank walls, my leg extended to accommodate the chain. I could hear some of the dogs in the big pen, but no human sounds. The back of my neck was on a low burn.

I was in deep shit any way you looked at it. The shooter earlier had not been firing warning shots, which meant he’d been told to take care of business. I was now locked up in the enemy’s camp. The fact that there was a chain shackle permanently mounted in a stall meant that they’d held people here before. And there was a fair possibility that my only contact with the outside world had also been compromised. Greenberg’s crew had been pulled off to a project well south of the area, and no one in the SBI would be especially concerned that they weren’t hearing from Carrie.

I had to get out of there. I began with the shackle. Like most cops, I carried two knives, a big one on the field belt and a much smaller penknife sewn into a pouch in the back of my trousers’ waistband. I fished that out and went to work on the shackle’s lock. The shackle was actually a work shackle, the kind used on prisoners in a chain gang to keep them from running. It was not tight at all. The lock was an old-style, bar key series lock, but the steel was as strong as ever and my knife not strong enough to make the mechanism move. I took off my field boot and sock and tried to pull my foot through the shackle. I have smallish feet for a guy of my size, but the ankle was a mite too big. If I had some grease it might just work, but I was fresh out of grease guns. I sat back and rubbed my neck. Where there was a thick smear of greasy ointment.