P Deutermann - Spider mountain

He looked like he was getting ready to push back from the table. I reached out and held his wrist. “Six little girls,” I said. “Sold by their so-called mothers to a pig-eyed Gorgon on Spider Mountain, who packs them into Marionburg at night, gets them spayed, and then ships them into a life of slavery in some fucking Arab’s tent? Six little girls? Who are now happily ensconced in something called the glass hole?”

His eyes widened when I said the words “glass hole,” but then he looked pointedly at his wrist, which I realized I was gripping pretty hard. I let go and sat back. He wouldn’t look at me now.

“Unlimited supply,” he recited. “Endless. A fucking red tide of evil bastards. And I never made even a dent in it, and neither can you. The difference is, I already know it.”

Carrie was coming back to the table, so I gave up. “Okay, Mose. Sorry I pushed. Go get lucky.”

He got up, gave me a quick, sad grin, shot me with his thumb and forefinger, and went back to the bar. Carrie sat down.

“What was that all about?” she asked.

“I was hoping to shame him into helping us find Nathan up there,” I said.. “Because, otherwise, I think we’re dead in the water.”

She shook her head. “We’re only dead in the water if we quit,” she said. She took a deep breath. “First,” she said, “I need a nice big rare steak. Then we’re going back out there to the Creigh place and we’re going to take another look.”

“Tonight?” I said.

“Yes, tonight. In about two hours, to be exact.”

“We can’t do that, Carrie-they’ve got that place secured. They’ll run our asses right out of there.”

She patted the pocket with the cell phone. “Not according to Bigger John,” she said.

Deputy or Special Agent John-I wasn’t sure which-greeted us when we drove up to the Creigh cabin. He’d been reading a book in his cruiser. Bobby Lee Baggett would have had his ass for that. Anyone could have snuck up on him in the dark. It wasn’t until we’d gotten out of the Suburban and walked up to the cruiser that we saw the second cruiser, with Big Luke inside, shotgun and all, artfully concealed in some trees. Luke waved.

The cabin itself was not decorated with miles of crime-scene tape as I would have expected. Perhaps this was because no one had detected any crime there, unless you wanted to count the shotgun booby trap.

“Where’s everybody gone to?” I asked John. The moon was up, so there was ambient light in the front yard, but the cabin was dark. I left my shepherds in the Suburban.

“Bureau showed up this morning,” he said. “Made Sam King’s day, long about nine. Been downhill since then.”

I could just imagine. The place seemed eerily quiet without the dog pack. I kept glancing over to the cabin’s front porch, expecting to see the two of them sitting there in their rockers, shotguns at hand. “And none of them is worried about six little girls?” I asked.

He shook his head. “There was nothing in the cabin, ‘cept that little business with the door gun. No evidence of children. No drugs, no money, no nothin’.”

“And no Grinny and no Nathan,” Carrie said.

John nodded, patiently.

“We’d like to go inside and look around,” Carrie said. “If there was no evidence of criminal activity, and I don’t see any scene tape, then I don’t think we’ll be disturbing anything of value here.”

“What’re y’all looking for?” he asked her.

“Anything that might tell us where they went. And how they went.”

“I’ll have to come with y’all,” he said.

“Great,” I said. “And I mean that.”

He stared down at his oversized feet. “Something ain’t right,” he said, speaking to Carrie. “No offense intended, but the bosses seem to be skatin’ on this one.”

Carrie went up to him and hugged him. He absolutely did not know what to do. Then we went up to the front porch and picked up some lanterns. John lit them for us and we went inside.

“I’d like to see that hidden room,” I said.

John took us downstairs to the basement. It was earthen-walled and -floored, with a dressed stone rim that formed the cabin’s foundation. The dirt was hard packed and had been there a while. There was a stack of shelves that had been pulled to one side, behind which was the opened hidden door. The left edges of the door were badly damaged.

The shotgun trap had been confiscated, so we went in, holding our lanterns high. The room was perhaps twenty feet by ten, and there was nothing inside but a single wooden chair and more dirt walls and floor. The ceiling was formed by the floor joists and floors of the cabin above.

“Okay,” I said. “The shotgun was wired to that chair, and a trigger mechanism was made to the inside door handle.”

“Yessir,” John said.

“So how was that done from outside this room?” I asked.

This question provoked the expected silence. Carrie walked to the back wall of the room and began to thump the wall with her good hand, testing for a hollow area. Then we heard a car horn out front.

When we got back outside, Luke was standing in front of the cabin with a young woman who was so thin you could almost see right through her. Luke was holding a lantern so we could get a look at her. She had a bony, pale face, a strangely receding hairline for a young woman, and pale blue eyes. She was wearing a white, often-patched dress that barely made it to her knees, and her legs looked like white sticks with red bumps on them. She had blond hair so white that it made her look young and old at the same time. I’d seen hair like that recently. The girl wouldn’t look at any of us. She stood there, twisting one grubby fist with the other.

“Whatcha got there?” John asked his brother.

“Says she’s a’lookin’ for her child, name of Honey Dee?” Luke replied. “Came walkin’ out of the woods. Lieutenant’s dogs told me she was comin’.”

I nudged Carrie and she took over. She took the lantern from Luke and went over to the obviously frightened woman and began to talk to her. She told her that we’d seen her child earlier, and that she’d seemed to be all right.

“Where she at, then?” she asked, looking at each of us for an answer. Her teeth were dark brown, and her cheeks twitched when she spoke.

“We don’t know,” Carrie said. “That’s why the sheriffs are here.”

She put a hand over her mouth and began to tremble. I looked over at the Bigs and indicated with my head that we should leave Carrie to it. We backed off and listened from a distance. Carrie coaxed the story out of her with gentle questions, while the poor thing cried silently through closed eyes.

Baby Greenberg had been right about what was going on up here. She’d traded her child to Grinny to pay for her boyfriend’s meth habit. It was obvious to me that she had one of her own, but Carrie finessed that problem. Grinny had finally cut them off, kept the child, and turned them out of the network. The boyfriend was, of course, long gone, and the young woman was now at her wits’ end, starving, and crushed by guilt for what she’d done. When all we could tell her was that little Honey Dee was probably with Grinny Creigh, she folded into herself, squatted down next to the lantern, and began to beat her breast.

“Oh, God,” she sobbed. “Oh, God Almighty. I’m a’lookin’ at the fires of hell.”

I figured that for once in her miserable life she was absolutely right, but held my tongue. Carrie asked Luke to put her in one of the cruisers, and then we took the lantern and went back inside.

We stood in the middle of what we suspected had been the kids’ bunkroom. The lantern threw flickering shadows on the earthen walls and floor. The damaged door hung by a single hinge, and the basement beyond was dark as a tomb. The place was cold.