P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“She was a bleeder,” he said, spitting out the bonnet. It stuck to the lava wall like a piece of wet toilet paper. “No good to us. Grinny said trash her, so that’s what I done.”

“So it’s true?” I said. “You make those poor goddamned women pay for their drugs in kids? And then you sell them as sex objects?”

He gave a long sigh, as if he knew it was all over and there was no more point in playing the role of tough guy. He looked up at us with that one working eye, and I’d have sworn he was laughing at us.

“Better,” he said.

Better? That’s what Mingo had said.

“What the hell does that mean, better?”

“We sell ’em for parts.”

I heard Carrie gasp, and then she was reaching for her knife to cut the rope. I grabbed her hand and yelled “No” at her. She fought me, reaching by me to cut that rope. She almost succeeded. The hell of it was I wanted her to cut that rope.

“He needs to die,” she snapped.

“Sure he does. But think about it: Think about the evidence that has to be down there in that water. They’ve been using this place for years.”

Nathan had closed his eyes again as the pain of being hung by his hands reasserted itself. Carrie glared down at him with a face like Medusa.

“Look,” I said. “The one thing we’ve never been able to get is physical evidence. Down there is the mother lode. They’ll convict this bastard, and then he’s going upstate, where they’ll lock him up for life as a child killer. Think of what the cons will do to him. Especially if his hands don’t work any more.”

“Some goddamned lawyer will get him off,” she muttered, but she had lowered the knife.

I sat back on my haunches and looked down at yet another minion of hell. “That so-called doctor will talk,” I said. “The doctor who took those kids into a lab at night and cut them up like stew meat. And we’ll make sure the story’s out there, so no bureaucrats can pull any more rugs over this mess. But first we have to find Grinny and the rest of them.”

“Prison’s not good enough,” she said.

“Yes, it will be,” I said. “If he gets life, they’ll have to box him up so the rest of the cons can’t get to him. He’ll live in an eight-by-six concrete room for the rest of his life. And if he gets the needle, he still gets to live in that box for a decade or so, only this time in the death house. Our killing him would be a mercy, and this bastard doesn’t deserve mercy of any kind.”

I stood up and pulled her back from the lip of the lava tube. “What are we going to do right now?” she said.

“We’re going to go back to our camp and check on Mose. Then we’ll fire that EPIRB. For this mess, we need a crowd.”

“And him?”

“Let him hang for a while.”

We lowered Nathan back down to midway in the tube and then tied him off.

A crowd was what we got. The first helicopter arrived right at the end of the two-hour response window, as advertised. He couldn’t land, but he did put down a rescue paramedic. While the bird flew around in lazy circles overhead, we explained what we had on the ground and that we needed Sam King and his SBI team here in a hurry, preferably before dark. Carrie did most of the talking. The medic checked Mose out and said he was stable and qualified for air transport. The helo came in and they did a rescue hoist. Mose was shocky from that big whack in the chest, but he managed a grin at Carrie, who held his hand until the hoist was ready.

Then the shepherds and I went back to the ambush site to mark the location of the two bodies there. Carrie stayed back at our camp. The paramedic had left her a radio, and she briefed the rescue pilots as they flew back to the nearest hospital on what to tell the cops. Then, while we waited for the SBI, we went back down to Nathan’s camp near the lava tube.

We debated bringing him out of the tube. Carrie really liked the idea of letting him just hang there, but his hands were now a dark purple, and I didn’t want him going off to some hospital to fight gangrene for a month. She, on the other hand, had this interesting theory of how his hands might just come off, and she wanted to watch. In the end we hauled him out of the glass hole and tied him to a tree. I left the shepherds to watch him, and then we trudged back up to our original camp to wait for the circus.

The enormity of it all swept over us while we waited for the helicopters to come back.

Better, Nathan had said. Just like that snake Mingo. They hadn’t been sterilizing these little girls at that path lab-they’d been harvesting organs. Very fresh pediatric organs. That’s what had been going overseas. Coolers filled with body parts. Couriered to an airport by one of Mingo’s deputies, probably.

Then it occurred to me that if this story got out, Grinny would absolutely be forced to kill the remaining children. Once the swarm began here, Carrie and I would be wrapped up in it for a few days at least. I made a decision not to let that happen. I told Carrie that I was going to go back down to the glass-hole site and check on Nathan and the dogs. I asked her to remain at the camp to greet King and his people and to see if she could find a landing site. The radio blasted into life, and while Carrie was dealing with the first wave of questions from King, the mutts and I slipped out of camp.

I went back down to the tube. Nathan was still tied to the tree, and it didn’t look like he’d made any efforts to get himself untied. He was exhausted from his excursions on the rope. His hands were still purple, he was having trouble breathing after being semi-crucified like that, and, more important, I think he’d given up. If there had been any more black hats up there, they’d probably melted away into the hills once all the shooting started. Even so, I wrapped a canvas bag around Nathan’s head so he couldn’t see, retrieved my rifle and the shepherds, and then quietly took the dogs around the crater lake the long way as a convoy of helicopters appeared up on the ridgeline.

I hated to just abandon Carrie to the arrival of the authorities, but she’d be the more helpful of the two of us, familiar as she was with SBI forensic and scene procedures. She knew as much as I did about what had happened there and would be more than able to describe Nathan’s revelations. I, on the other hand, had zero official standing and, therefore, none of the legal inhibitions that would constrain the SBI when they finally swung into motion against Grinny Creigh.

Besides, I really, really wanted to get that woman. Mingo and Nathan had been players in their grisly business, but the real monster in the cave had always been that supremely evil old woman. They’d get Nathan into a courtroom, but I knew Grinny would die before she ever let that happen to her. I didn’t think she’d run, either. For one, it would be physically difficult for a woman that fat to move fast. Two, these were her hills, her territory, her fiefdom. She would defend it to the end. That was fine by me. And by not telling Carrie what I was up to, I reasoned, all she could honestly say to the rest of the cops was that she didn’t know where the hell I was. In a sense, I was doing her a favor. Sounded good, anyway.

“C’mon, mutts,” I told the shepherds. “We have to get to that truck before it gets really dark.” And before Carrie finds out we’ve bugged out and comes down to fang our collective asses, I thought.

It took the same two hours going down as it did coming up. Going down was still harder on the leg bones than climbing. The shepherds ranged ahead most of the time except for when we had to traverse some thick scrubland, and then I called them in as protection against any lurking Creigh-dogs. Which is why they didn’t spot the man sitting on the front bumper of my Suburban smoking a cigarette as we walked up to the parked vehicles. I was unlimbering the rifle when I recognized Baby Greenberg. He flipped the butt out onto the ground and got up as we approached.