P Deutermann - Spider mountain

Bags said he could get his wife’s sister, who volunteered over in her local county hospital, to come over from Gatlinburg. I told him I’d take Carrie back into Marionburg and that we’d come back after dark.

“You think ’em Creighs gonna come over here tonight? Lookin’ for y’all?”

“They might,” I said. “Nathan knows we hid out here once, so he may well check it out.” I could see what he getting at: We might drive back into an ambush of some kind. “Let’s do this: You guys stay here until we can get back and work up a plan. If there’s any reason you think we should not approach, put a single lantern in a front window. If you think it’s all clear, put two lanterns, one in each front window.”

“Them Creigh boys show up here, we goin’ to get to it,” David said.

“How’s Nathan looking?” I asked.

“He’s limpin’ some, according to Ma. Still well enough to put the hurtin’ on a defenseless old woman, though, the piece’a shit.”

“They come, you guys thin ’em out then,” I said. “Make it easier for later on.

They both grinned at that prospect. I gathered up Carrie and we went out to the car.

“I still think this is an unnecessary risk,” she said, but I saw her wince when she put her head back on the headrest.

“I meant what I said in there,” I replied. “I need you operational, not delirious with a fever, which is about where you are now, yes?”

She nodded and winced again. “Even my hair hurts,” she admitted.

“Okay, then. Let’s wait at the motel until dark, then go into the ER and see what they say.”

At eleven I was sitting out in a corner of the parking lot behind the Carrigan County hospital. I’d taken Carrie into the emergency room. The triage desk nurse told her it would be an hour’s wait, at a minimum. That had been two hours ago. When Carrie had mentioned “gunshot wound,” the nurse immediately wanted to notify the sheriff’s office, but Carrie talked her out of it, saying that she’d already been treated here for this same injury and the incident was already in the system. I had decided to wait in the car. If there were bad guys looking for us, they’d be looking for the pair of us. Carrie was relatively safe inside the hospital, at least from any marauding Creighs. Staph. aureus was another matter.

I’d made a couple of phone calls back to Triboro. The first was to my office, where I left a message for Tony, telling him what I was up to. Then I put a call in to Bobby Lee Baggett’s office. I wanted to brief him on what we thought was going on up here, but he wasn’t available. His executive assistant promised that he’d return my call in the morning. I called my defense lawyer at home and brought him up to date on the growing list of charges against me in Robbins County. He once again advised me to get back to Triboro as soon as possible, as in, tonight would be good, and warned of lots more fees if I kept at this. It was good to know he kept his focus, but I acknowledged that it was good advice. The problem was that I was in much too deep to back out now. Or so I kept telling myself.

I had parked in the darkest corner of the hospital parking lot to wait. The Dumpster alley was behind me, and I had a terrific view of the back of the Laboratory Services building, which apparently also housed the Pathology fun house. The hospital was a single-story affair stepped in layers along a hill. It consisted of several wings, with a small parking lot up front for the docs and the meat wagons. For ordinary humans and patients there was a larger lot behind the complex, which sloped down the hill, getting narrower as it went. Carrie was supposed to call my cell phone when they were done with her. It was cool enough to open the windows and not be eaten by mosquitoes. Fall was definitely coming on. I was ready.

At some point I must have dozed off, because I was startled awake by the sound of an argument somewhere in the parking lot. The voices were male, urgent, and, strangely, familiar. It sounded like they were trying to keep their voices down. I couldn’t make out what it was about, but when I finally found the source of the racket I sat right up.

And then I slid right back down again. I was in one corner of the narrow part, in the last and lowest row. The argument was in the other corner, and the noise was coming from two police cars, parked nose to tail so that the drivers could talk. They’d parked under a light, so I could see that one of them was Sheriff Hayes. His verbal antagonist was no other than M. C. Mingo.

My blood went cold. Hayes and Mingo meeting in a dark parking lot? Good Lord, was Hayes a part of the criminal matrix in Robbins County? I really, really did not want to believe that. I saw brake lights flare at the back of Hayes’s cruiser, and then backup lights. I slid all the way down below the dash, hoping like hell he wouldn’t recognize my Suburban. Once I heard his cruiser leave the parking lot, I raised my head again in time to see Mingo’s car approaching the back doors of the Laboratory Services/Pathology wing. He stopped, put a phone up to his ear, and talked to someone. Two minutes later, outside landing lights came on and the back double doors opened. A middle-aged man who had a neatly sculpted beard and wore a white coat came out, pushing a gurney. I stared hard, trying to see if it was the same bearded guy I’d seen at Grinny Creigh’s, but the building floodlights were shining in my eyes. Mingo got out of his car and went around to the right rear door of his vehicle, which was out of my line of sight. The two men transferred a blanket-covered something to the gurney, and then they both rolled it back into the hospital. Whatever it was, they handled it gently, as opposed to the way they might have handled a body. A few minutes later, Mingo came out. I went down-periscope and waited for him to drive away. The floodlights near the door went out.

I waited a good five minutes to make sure that there weren’t any other cop cars in or near the lot and that Mingo hadn’t swung back through to check his trail, and then I drove over to the wing into which they’d gone. A smaller sign near the door read LAB/PATH SERVICES ENTRANCE. The doors had small windowpanes, but the hallway behind them was dark. I was tempted to get out and try the doors but decided against it. If they were unlocked, then what? Go inside and snoop around? I didn’t think that would work out. Then my cell phone chirped; Carrie was waiting at the front entrance.

“Was that fun?” I asked her when she got in. Her face was pinched and she sat down gingerly, being careful not to let her head touch the headrest this time.

“Loads,” she said. “They had to remove the stitches and debride it, and then they gave me a shot with some kind of elephant syringe. Now I have seven days of these.” She rattled a pill bottle at me.

“Good thing we came in, then,” I said cheerily. I wasn’t positive, but I thought “debride” meant scraping the wound. Not fun. I drove away from the entrance with all its bright lights and turned back down into the parking lot.

“What’s this ‘we’ shit, paleface?” she grumped, still shifting from side to side in the seat.

“Actually,” I said, and then I told her what I’d witnessed. She exclaimed in disappointment when I mentioned Hayes. Then she asked what had been on the gurney.

“I couldn’t see, other than a mound under a blanket,” I said, knowing what was coming next.

“Was it the right size to have been a child?”

“Yes.”

“Mingo with another unconscious or drugged kid in his car? What the fuck?!”

“I don’t know that it was a child, and they were being more careful than that time Baby and I saw him handle that other child.”

The rest of the lower lot was empty, so if Mingo or even Hayes did come back, we’d be pretty obvious. I parked the car next to a delivery truck that I hoped wouldn’t be moving until the next morning to give us a little cover.