P Deutermann - Spider mountain

After ten minutes, I hoisted my weary ass off the ground and began a highspeed hobble down the road. Getting off my feet for a few minutes may have been a mistake; my left ankle was bigger than it had been and very definitely not happy. I consoled myself by thinking about how Nathan felt right now.

Then I heard something coming fast through the woods behind me, and it wasn’t of the two-legged variety. I swung the shotgun around and took a shooting stance, and then relaxed when Frick and Frack burst out of the trees. I chastised them for waiting to reappear until I’d escaped from the clutches of the Creighs. They went into heavy licking and panting mode anyway. As usual I felt a whole lot safer with my two furry friends alongside. They’d detect anything else coming through the woods long before I would.

In fact, they heard the vehicle coming up the dirt road before I did. My fatigued brain had been on the lookout for headlights, but this vehicle wasn’t showing any. All three of us scuttled off the road and into the underbrush. I put the dogs on a down and hunched behind a briar bush until I finally saw Rue Creigh’s pickup truck grinding up the road in second gear. There appeared to be two people in the truck’s front seat. I couldn’t make out their features but assumed one was Rue and the other-Carrie?

Yes, by God, it was Carrie, and she looked a lot like a prisoner. When the truck was not quite even with my hiding place, I stepped out of the bushes to the side of the road and pointed the shotgun at Rue’s face. She stopped almost immediately, her brake lights painting the woods behind her with a red glow. Her window was open.

“Police officer,” I shouted, out of habit, I guess. “Shut it down, step out, and let me see your hands!”

Rue surprised me, and she might have succeeded had not Carrie yelled a warning. Rue produced a shiny handgun seemingly out of nowhere and pointed it right at me, obviously preparing to shoot right through her own windshield. I pulled both triggers on the ten-gauge, and Rue’s face and head disappeared in a bloody explosion of skin, bone, brains, and windshield glass. I felt something snap by my own head as the big shotgun bucked in my hands, and realized she’d actually gotten off a shot a millisecond before I sent her to see her Maker.

I slowly lowered the shotgun and saw Carrie piling out of the pickup truck, her face ashen and the left side of her blouse and jeans stained with gore. Her wrists were cuffed in duct tape and she was barefoot. Bits of windshield glass glittered on her clothes.

“Sorry about that,” I told her, trying not to look at the practically headless torso canted over to one side in the driver’s seat. “Cop training. See the gun, pull the trigger. Answer questions later.”

“Jesus Christ!” Carrie gasped. “What a mess!” She was trying not to stare at the truck’s bloody interior. My ears were ringing again, and the woods seemed to have gone very quiet after the double blast of the shotgun. I wondered if they’d heard that up at Grinny’s cabin.

“I was hoping to spring you and take the truck,” I said. “Now I think I’d rather walk.”

“Got that right,” Carrie said, a hand over her mouth. “Talk about wet work. Goddamnl”

“Was she the ‘oh, shit’ I heard you say before we got cut off?”

Carrie nodded. “I turned around and there she was, gun in hand. I hadn’t locked the screen or the front door, and I was fresh out of shepherds. She had a roll of duct tape on her wrist like a bracelet and a look of pure, evil pleasure on her face.”

Now she had no face at all. First Nathan and now Rue. Grinny Creigh and what was left of her clan would declare war over this. “We have to get out of this county,” I said. I told her what I’d done to Nathan and how I thought he and his boys had been able to find me.

“Laurie May?” Carrie said. “No way.”

“Either blood’s thicker than water, or they may simply have scared it out of her. Or hurt her, for that matter. Nathan may have used those two dogs to make her talk, not find me.” I took out my penknife and hacked away at the duct tape. Carrie’s clothes smelled of the blood and bits splattered all over the inside of the truck.

“Where’re your shoes?” I asked.

She nodded in the truck’s direction. “In there, in the backseat,” she said. It was obvious she wasn’t going anywhere near the truck, and she was licking her lips as if she were fighting down nausea.

I felt about the same way, but she had to have shoes, and I also wanted that gun. I had to hold my nose and my gorge while I retrieved Carrie’s shoes and socks from the floor of the back seat and also Rue’s handgun, a stainless steel. 357 Magnum. Big gun for a woman to handle, but she’d still managed to get one off and damned hear hit me with it. She hadn’t hesitated one second, either, even while staring at eternity down the barrels of a ten-gauge. I saw her cell phone lying on the seat, but she’d bled all over it, and I wasn’t about to touch it. There were two unopened and unsullied bottles of water on the floor in the back, and I did take those. The smell in the truck was horrible, and suddenly I just had to back out of there.

I called the shepherds while Carrie got her shoes on, and then we got going down the dirt road. I figured it’d be daylight in three hours or so, and we needed to put as much distance as possible between us and the Creighs while we could.

“You okay?” Carrie asked me after five minutes.

“I’ll live,” I said. “I’ve shot one other perp during my career, and I’ve witnessed a few more.”

“Is it always that bad?” she asked.

“There’s always a lot more blood than you’d expect,” I replied, not really wanting to talk about this just now. I knew it had been purely a self-defense shoot, but I still had this cold pit in my stomach. It wasn’t like on the television, where there was a medium bang and a foreboding stain. One moment I’d been looking at and talking to a living human being and, in her own blowsy fashion, an attractive young woman. The next second there was nothing but a pumping stump where her head had been.

She got one off, I kept telling myself. Close enough for you to hear it go by, too. The question was-had she been thinking self-defense, too? Or had she just been that hard-boiled? Someone else in my shoes, without police training and reflexes, might still have hesitated when she produced that gun. That. 357 would have had about the same effect on my face.

“Don’t torture yourself,” Carrie said, as if reading my thoughts. “She told me Grinny had sent her into Marionburg to get close to you and then put a knife in your ribs-her words-but the shepherd alerted and you turned her down. Said you hurt her womanly pride. That most men most definitely did not turn her down.”

“Her mother’s daughter,” I said, calling the dogs in closer now that we were getting nearer to the paved road. “How far is it to the Carrigan County line?”

“Eight, nine miles on the river road,” she said. “What’s the matter with your foot?”

I told her about getting out of the shackle in the barn. As we reached the pavement, I looked at my watch. Three thirty.

“Right is southeast, toward Marionburg. The road follows the river. I was going to suggest we start jogging, make better time, but if your foot’s injured-”

“It’s not like we have much of a choice,” I said grimly. “Let’s boogie.”

We made pretty good time, but only because we were going downhill for most of it. We walked the few upgrades we encountered and stopped often to listen for vehicles. My foot made it clear that it was going to get even with me. At times I wished it would just go ahead and fall off. My main concern was that once Rue’s body was found, they’d definitely get those dogs out. We’d left a clear track down that dirt road, and the pavement wouldn’t disguise the scent very much. I thought about crossing the river to interrupt the scent trail, but the stream was getting wider as it flowed downhill, and I was afraid we’d lose too much time. We badly needed to get out of Robbins County.