P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“The Big brothers are sworn officers. They can bring him in,” she said. “Besides, I have a feeling he’s not calling to make any kind of a deal. I think he wants to get right with God over what he and Mingo’ve been doing.”

“I don’t know, Carrie,” I said. “I know you think that about Hayes. On the other hand, it could be a nasty setup, with Hayes on the porch and Mingo and his crew waiting in the weeds.”

“Why?” she asked. “You’re the one he thinks saw him at the hospital. You didn’t say anything about me being there, did you?”

“No, I didn’t, but he knows you were there being treated, and we’ve been operating together. If he thinks I’ve blown town, you’re the loose end at hand, so to speak.”

“I’ll chance it,” she said. “We’re not going to bust Mingo and his operation on our own, and so far the heavies, as Baby calls them, aren’t doing squat. If Hayes wants to repent, maybe he can get us in. I still have this terrible feeling there’s a clutch of children being held somewhere for one final ‘harvest.’”

On that happy note, we stopped yapping and made our preparations. I followed Carrie into town in a loose tail. She met up with John and his brother at the sheriff’s office, and she followed their cruiser out of town. I had the dogs, my Remington rifle, Nathan’s ten-gauge and a whole box of extra-dry shells, the spotting scope, and enough rifle ammo for a fair-sized firefight. I felt better that both the Big brothers were coming along. Carrie called me on my cell phone as we left town.

“We’re proceeding to the Hayes home place,” she said. “It’s about ten miles out of town in the direction of the Robbins County line. Apparently there’s the original house, a modern cabin, and an abandoned mine on the property.”

“Have you talked directly to Sheriff Hayes?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “John called him and told him we were starting up.”

“And they know I’m in the picture?”

“The brothers do, Hayes does not. Luke and John were cool with that. They said they’re not expecting trouble.”

“That’s when trouble usually rears its ugly head,” I said, and hung up. She’d been an SBI bureaucrat for most of her career. I, on the other hand, had been a street cop and an operational major crimes detective for most of mine. She was expecting a civilized meeting. I was expecting an ambush. I would really have liked to be able to do a prebrief with the Bigs, but they were in a separate vehicle, so off we went.

On the way up I got a call from Mose Walsh. He wanted to know if I’d heard about the sheriff going walkabout. I said yes.

“I was sitting next to some off-duty deputies last night for supper,” he said. “One of’em said this supposedly had something to do with M. C. Mingo and Grinny Creigh.”

“That’s not news,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “But if people are talking like that, it’s gonna get back to Robbins County. And if this is about selling kids, whoever’s holding the product may just panic.”

“Good point,” I said. “Things are in motion, so, please, keep listening.”

I followed them up into the actual mountains, and finally they turned off onto a well-maintained dirt road. I lingered on the main road for about five minutes, assuming there was only the one road going up. I assumed wrong, as usual. A quarter mile into the woods the dirt road diverged into two branches, one going right and up, the other going left and down. I quickly tried to call Carrie. No signal. I got out and played Indian, trying to see where the fresh tire tracks were. I failed Indian. The shepherds were no help-they had no scent to focus on. I stood there, listening for the sounds of vehicles, but heard only a few crows laughing at my Indian act. I remembered why I used to like shooting crows.

It was a dirt road, I kept telling myself. There had to be tracks. The shepherds were pretending to look for something, but I knew they were mostly just confused. I walked up the hill on the right-hand track, assuming the home place would be on high ground. The surface of the road was actually hardpan, with lots of shattered flat rocks and even some shale. It was showing zero tire tracks, and I was getting antsier by the minute.

I walked back down to the dividing point, listened again to make sure no one else was coming up the road from the two-lane, and then tried going down. Fifty feet in I found a wet spot where a tiny creek was soaking through the dirt road. I finally passed Indian-tire tracks at last. I went back to the Suburban and called in the mutts, and we headed down, going slow with all the windows open. After another half mile it looked like the trees were thinning out ahead. I didn’t like being below whatever it was I was going to be watching, but this branch of the road had gone ninety degrees away from the upper branch, so it was going to be low ground or no ground. I parked the Suburban, hiding it as best I could behind some bushy pines. I rousted out the shepherds, the rifle, and the scope and headed into the woods on the left-hand side of the dirt lane. About three hundred yards in I stepped over a small creek and could finally begin to see the Hayes home place through the trees.

I discovered that I was approaching from below a long earthen dam, behind which there was a three-acre pond, formed in the valley cut out by a creek. At the other end of the pond there was a very pretty log cabin, which looked to have been one of those modern kit jobs, as opposed to an original rustic. There was a detached frame garage, behind which I could see Carrie’s vehicle, the brothers’ cruiser, and presumably Sheriff Hayes’s vehicle parked on one side of the cabin. To the left and slightly above the cabin was a graying, narrow, three-story house made of rough-hewn timbers. It was pretty obviously long since abandoned, with a slumping roof, gaping window frames, and a front porch that was down on the ground. There were several old outbuildings surrounding the house in similar states of ivy-draped decomposition.

Above and beyond the house, cabin, and pond, the land rose steeply on either side of the creek that supplied the pond, and I could see a mound of tailings halfway up the hill to the left, along with some rusting machinery stands and a few disintegrating mine carts. I was too low to see the actual mine entrance, but it had to be up there by those tailings. The mine was probably three hundred feet higher than the cabin and the house. There were no pastures or any other signs of farming, and the enveloping mountain forest was slowly but surely reclaiming the entire place.

I moved to the left along the grass face of the dam until I had a better view of the vehicles and the slopes to my right, where presumably that other road came out. We were miles from the Creigh place over in the next county, but not very far from the county line, as best I could tell. The Hayes place was on an eastern slope, and the late-afternoon shadows were beginning to creep down the higher ridges as the sun began to set. Unfortunately, there was absolutely no cover where I was crouching, and the slanting sunlight was full in my eyes. I had to move.

I signaled the dogs, and we went back down the dam face to the outflow creek and then down the long gulley below the dam until I could no longer see the cabin or the falling-down house. Then we cut directly south, into the woods. My objective was to circle the whole place until I came out up at the level of the abandoned mine. From there, I should be in the shadow of the setting sun and able to see the cabin, all the vehicles, and anyone coming down through the opposite woods.

It took me almost a half hour to get in position, as the woods on the south side of the property were thick with wait-a-minute vines and stands of hawthorn. I didn’t make any decent progress until I crossed a narrow track that presumably led up to the old mine. There were railroad ties and a badly rusted cog rail on one side of the track, so I followed that up until I reached a small plateau cut back into the face of the hill. The mine entrance was a rectangular black hole, framed in large timbers and cut into the side of the hill, with rusting narrow-gauge tracks coming out toward the tailings dump. The hill rose above the mine entrance two hundred feet or so.