P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“What were you two arguing about?”

“Mingo had always said that these were kids who needed an abortion. Teenagers who’d been abused by their father or their uncles. Said he didn’t need no more incest monsters in Robbins County. There was never any talk of selling them. The abortions were illegal, ‘cause they were underage. But they were necessary. We’ve got mongoloids and worse up in those hills. He paid me to keep the county hospital’s involvement quiet.”

“What was the argument about?”

“You and the DEA guy told me you’d seen Grinny Creigh almost smother a kid. Then you said you’d overheard her talking about selling them. I was asking him what the hell was really going on in there.”

“And the answer was?”

“He laughed at me. Told me I was in it up to my neck anyway, so what’d it matter. Then he told me to get out of there before someone saw us talking.”

“Someone did,” I said. “And I’ve described it all in gory detail to the FBI down in Charlotte. You come up here to eat your gun?”

Carrie said my name again in an indignant tone. Hayes stared at me. His face was not a pretty sight just then.

“Well, get to it, you bastard,” I said. “If you need some help, I’m your man.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Carrie said. “There’s more to it, and we’re wasting time. Right now we have to stop Mingo from killing those kids at Grinny Creigh’s. She has six of them up there, goddammit.”

I continued to glare at Hayes for a moment, and then decided it was time for a deep breath. The look in his eyes made it clear that he was desperately ashamed. We went inside, leaving the two embarrassed deputies to keep watch outside. We sat down in the cabin’s living room. I asked Carrie what Mingo had had to say.

“We never found out,” she said. “He didn’t expect the rest of us to be here, so there was some hemming and hawing, then he got mad, started making threats, and then that barefoot man banged on the door. We heard him say there were cops with machine guns on the hill and Mingo had to pull his people out of here. That was the first we knew that his people were out there.”

“I think he came here to kill me,” Hayes said from the couch. He seemed to have shrunk in the past few minutes, and he looked a hundred years old. “Those other people were just for insurance.”

Before either of us could reply to that, I heard the shepherds start barking, and then Big Luke stuck his head through the front doorway. “Car comin’ in fast,” he reported.

We went to the front door and looked out. A police car was coming up the lower driveway, coming so fast that the driver could barely maintain control. It was a cruiser, and it looked a lot like the one Mingo had been driving.

“Inside,” I yelled. “Everybody inside!” Then I called in the dogs and grabbed up my scope.

We backed away from the doorway and the two deputies piled in, followed by the two shepherds. We slammed the door and took up position by the front windows, weapons ready. Hayes went to the fireplace, took down a large double-barreled shotgun from a gun rack, and began feeding it shells.

The cruiser blasted up past the edge of the dam and then headed straight for the cabin. We could only see one person inside the car, and, at the last moment, he swerved to the right and drove the vehicle up onto the lawn in front of the cabin, tearing huge ruts into the soft ground as he got it stopped.

It was definitely Mingo, and the expression on his red face was murderous. Before we had a chance to react, he reached to his right and produced a Bush-master M4. He stuck it out the window and opened fire on the cabin. We all spent the next few seconds getting flat while a hail of gunfire blew out all the windows and reduced the front door to splinters. I yelled at the deputies to get to the back of the cabin, and they made a high-speed crawl through all the racket and flying debris back into the kitchen area and out the door. The shepherds fled into the kitchen with them.

Carrie, like me, was down on the floor taking shelter behind the largest base logs while bullets blew hunks of chinking into white dust all over the room. I glanced behind me and saw Hayes, also on the floor, starting to inch toward the front wall with the shotgun cradled in his arms like an infantryman. An instant later, the shooting stopped, and I chanced a look through one of the bullet holes in the chinking. Mingo was reloading a new magazine, so I took the opportunity to poke the rifle into the hole and take a single snap-shot at the cruiser. I think I hit a nearby tree, but Mingo wasn’t impressed. He brought the Bushmaster back up and we all went back to imitating pancakes. The noise was incredible, and the chinking was filling the room with a choking cloud of white dust. Framed pictures were being blasted off the back walls, and even the dining room chandelier was blown off its ceiling hook. Whatever else happened, this place wouldn’t be waterproof for years.

By the time Mingo got through his second magazine, Hayes had reached one of the front windows. He didn’t hesitate but rose up into a sitting position and let go both barrels at the cop car outside. He rolled away from the window, got two more shells into the gun, and rolled to the remains of the front door, where he stuck the gun through the thoroughly splintered wood and fired two more loads in the general direction of the cruiser. Then he flattened himself behind a two-foot-thick base log just as Mingo opened up again.

I was beginning to wonder just how much damn ammo that crazy bastard had out there, but then realized he’d shifted his aim to that big stone fireplace, because now there were rounds ricocheting all over the interior and there was truly no place to hide. All we could do was to stay down and hope. Then I heard three booming gunshots from the side porch, and the hail of automatic weapons fire stopped suddenly. One of the Big brothers had apparently crawled around the porch and momentarily put Mingo’s head down.

The silence was a pleasant respite. Carrie’s face was dead white, with fear, I thought, until I realized it was chinking plaster. She had her nine in her right hand, but no way to shoot without exposing herself to that Bushmaster. Hayes, on the other hand, was crawling through the crunchy white dust on the floor toward the front door again. Then we heard Mingo yelling something from out front. I was still a little bit deaf from all the shooting, but he was using the loudspeaker from the cruiser.

“Hayes, you weak bastard, this is between you’n me. Tell them other assholes to stay down and get your yella ass out here.”

Hayes kept crawling toward the front door. He held two ready shells in the splayed fingers of his left hand, and for the first time I saw that his head was bleeding. The blood running down his white-dusted face made him look like he’d put on war paint.

Mingo kept yelling more taunts. I tried to figure out where exactly he was. My best guess was that he was down behind his cruiser. Hayes kept crawling.

“What’re you doing?” I asked him.

“You people get out the back,” he said quietly. “I’ll take care of this problem. Keep your eyes peeled-he never goes anywhere alone.”

“You can’t go up against a Bushmaster,” I said, but even as I said it, I knew he could and would. The look on his face said as much, and I realized then that what he had in mind was unofficially called suicide by cop. That worked for me, considering what he’d been party to. I signaled Carrie to start backing away from the front-wall logs toward the kitchen and the back door.

“If you’ve got another shotgun in here, I can cover you,” I offered.

He shook his head. “This is my problem. You go get those kids away from that witch.”