P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“Gotta go back in,” he said. “You okay here for a little while?”

“I think so,” I said. “I’ve got my buddies in the cabin. And Nathan Creigh’s ten-gauge.”

“How’d you get ahold of that?” he asked. I told him, leaving out the part about Rue Creigh.

“Hope you whaled on him real good,” he said. “ ‘Cause that old boy won’t rest till he gets it back. And you with it.”

“I’ll be happy to face him again if he’s really interested,” I said.

“Not his style,” he said. “Think big-caliber ball, Reb rifle.”

After he left I walked across the parking lot and up to the main lodge. I’d left the shepherds in the cabin, along with the ten-gauge. I might get away with carrying a handgun into the hotel, but a shotgun would definitely make the waitstaff nervous. For that matter, the remaining shells were now thoroughly soaked and probably useless.

The lodge had a nicely appointed cocktail lounge. I limped in and ordered a single malt and a hamburger, in that order, and tried not to think about long guns. It was ten thirty, and I was disappointed at not being able to go along on the ride to recover Carrie Harper Santangelo. Special Agent King was right, of course, but I was also ashamed of having just left her there. The hamburger came; if the bartender thought it was strange to be washing down this culinary extravaganza with twelve-dollar scotch, he certainly didn’t say so.

The lounge was full and humming. They had a fusion blues trio in one corner, a small dance floor that allowed for as close a dance as you might want, and the usual collection of mildly desperate men and women looking for love or at least some company. Including one Moses Walsh, who was ensconced at a corner table with a woman in her late forties trying hard to look thirty-nine. He was dressed in a long-sleeved white shirt and clean, faded jeans and had some kind of Indian decoration in his hair and at his throat. With that face, he had the part covered in spades.

The woman got up to visit the powder room, so I grabbed my scotch and sauntered over.

“Big Chief on the road to glory?” I asked.

I got a sonorous western movie grunt and a squinty-eyed sideways look. “Big Chief on short final,” he said. “He hopes.”

“I think I would need some more scotch for that one,” I said, watching her walk away from us. “Not sure that would be a good wake-up.”

“Ain’t never gone to bed with no ugly woman,” he quoted. “But I have woke up with some. Where’d you hear about Big Chief? I haven’t heard that since high school.”

I told him and he smiled. “Didn’t know her,” he said. “She pretty?”

“Very,” I said. “And a senior internal affairs inspector in the SBI.”

“Oh,” he said.

I laughed. We talked for a few minutes, and then the woman came out of the bathroom, headed back toward the table. She stopped to talk to another woman of a similar stripe.

“You gonna introduce me? See if she has a friend?”

“Paleface blow Big Chief’s cover, he’s gonna die.”

“No worries,” I said. “And what kind of Indian are you supposed to be tonight?”

“Chippewa.”

“I don’t believe they were ever in these parts,” I said.

“No, but everyone’s cherokee’d out up here, so Chippewa it is.”

I got up, trying not to laugh out loud, and walked away, nodding at the returning lounge queen. Fifty trying for forty was more like it, but Mose was obviously a practitioner of the Go Ugly Early rule. He was also probably getting lucky a whole lot more than I was these days.

I went back to the bar and signaled for a refill. I was enjoying said refill when Sam King slid onto the adjoining bar stool.

“Those shepherds of yours aren’t always friendly, are they,” he said.

“Depends on what their orders are,” I said. “They’re German shepherds. Partial to clear orders. You guys all set up?”

“Better than that,” he said, signaling the bartender for a whiskey. “We got her back. A motorist found her standing in the middle of the highway on the Carrigan County side of the county line. She was dazed and wearing duct tape across her eyes. Guy called 911 and then brought her into the sheriff’s office. They took her to the county hospital, and they’re holding her overnight for observation.”

“How bad?”

“Big, ugly gash across the top of her head. Gonna be some stitches there. Possible concussion. Gonna have a sideways white streak in her hair for life, probably. Otherwise, unharmed. Filthy dirty, really damp around the edges, a lot of blood on her clothes, but it looks like she dodged a big one.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Just like that.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Just like that. No signs of Brother Lucas, either, which is a shame. We were looking forward to getting up with him.”

“With luck he might even have resisted.”

King nodded and sipped his whiskey.

“This cannot have happened without you-know-who being in the mix,” I said. I was keeping my voice low as the bar was starting to fill up. “And I heard another story tonight, from one of the deputies who used to work over there.”

“Another Robbins County story,” he said. “Terrific.”

“It supports Carrie’s theory that Grinny Creigh is doing some damn thing that involves children.”

“Would a judge act on it?”

“Probably not.”

He looked at his watch. “Then I don’t want to hear it. We came here to get her back. She’s back.”

“You didn’t get her back. They gave her back.”

“Whatever,” he said. “She doesn’t work for us anymore, and she’s back. That’s what we came out here to do. Forgive me, but I’m a linear sort of guy, kinda like those shepherds of yours.”

“So now what-you guys just gonna back out?”

“Wouldn’t you, if you were still a lieutenant in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office? Or did you people run around expending scarce resources on colorful rumors?”

King took my frustrated silence for assent.

“Look,” he said. “We’re the SBI. You know we never get too far out ahead of the line departments. We come in when there’s a solid case to be built, and then only when we’re asked in and we have assets to offer that a local sheriff’s office doesn’t.”

“And you never run your own ops?” I asked.

He studied his whiskey.

“How much smoke do you need before you go looking for a fire?” I asked. “You know you have a problem with Mingo, and that’s something the SBI does do on its own. DEA knows they have a problem with the Creigh clan and Mingo. You said that even the Bureau had something for you when you broke off to come look for Carrie. I’ve been shot at, jailed, kidnapped, and rescued by two of Mingo’s own deputies, who then jumped ship and are working for Hayes now. Your own ex-agent was kidnapped and got away only because her kidnapper stumbled onto me on a dark road, threw down on me, and got her head blown off. Then Carrie gets shot and kidnapped again? And then mysteriously released? What the fuck does it take, Special Agent?”

My voice had been rising, and some people were looking at us.

“Outside,” he said, throwing some money on the bar. We walked through the main lobby in silence and out into the parking lot. His official car was parked out front, with my very good friend Storm Trooper Gelber in the driver’s seat. I got the familiar glare when he saw me. The man was nothing if not consistent.

“Here’s some advice, Mister Richter,” King said. “This is western Carolina. Eastern Carolina is mostly horizontal, densely populated with lawyers, and urban-minded. Western Carolina is mostly vertical, sparsely populated altogether, and bloody-minded, especially when it comes to strangers poking around in the woods. Now, here comes the advice: Go home.”