“Count on it, Grinny,” I said. “And pack your bags. You’re going away.”
“No,” she said, “You the ones going away.” She carefully set the shotgun down on its butt against the wall, reached sideways, and pulled on a chain that was attached to something in the floor of the front porch. We heard what sounded like a trapdoor dropping, and a moment later every damned one of her dogs was piling through the latticework under the porch, unlimbering a yard of slavering canine ivory each, and coming our way.
We both scrambled into the Suburban with maybe one second to spare before they were all over the vehicle. I zapped my window up and started the engine, while behind me I heard Carrie’s gun go off as three snarling dog heads appeared in the left rear window trying to get in. One dog lost its head while the other two went screaming, earless, for cover. Grinny had disappeared and her front door was closed.
I backed up in a hurry through a sea of snapping, snarling, growling beasts. My shepherds were very wisely keeping their heads down in the way-back. I illuminated the front of the cabin with my brights again, but there was no sign of anyone else getting ready to take action. Carrie had rolled up her window and was reloading the shotgun.
Nathan had taken the children somewhere. I was sure of it. Grinny didn’t care if the feds did come; they wouldn’t find anything. I was also sure she didn’t keep meth or any other drugs here, so her cabin would reveal nothing. I’d been bluffing about feds coming, anyway. Most of the action would be in the two sheriffs’ offices, in both counties, for some time. I backed the car up some more and then turned to head back down the field. All that bravery and we’d flat-ass struck out. Bounced off, once again.
“Now what?” Carrie asked. She was getting good at asking that. And then it occurred to me that Grinny might have been simply lying. They were all in there, kids and Nathan, down in the basement or in that cave or whatever it was behind the cabin. Short of going back and shooting every last dog, there was no way we could to force our way in there. The dog pack continued to surround the vehicle, making more noise than ever, as we drove off. They were everywhere, snapping at the tires, trying to jump up on the hood and the back door.
“They could be in there,” I said. “I’m not taking Grinny’s word for fuck-all. Let’s lose these dogs and then come back.”
“Lose these dogs?” she said. Two of them had locked their jaws on the bumpers as we rolled down that field.
“Well, hell, at least thin ’em out,” I said. I kept the Suburban rolling down the field in first gear and half-lowered my window. I shot the first mouthful of teeth that jumped at the window and then the next one after that. They backed away then, but still followed us down the field, raising absolute hell and lunging at the vehicle from every direction. Carrie lowered her window and blasted two more with the shotgun as we finally made it into the tree line. The dogs quit at the edge of the field. We rolled up our windows, and I turned on the vents to clear the gunsmoke.
“Let’s go over to Laurie May’s,” I said, putting the vehicle onto the dirt road leading down to the big creek. “We’ll come back through that crack in the ridge.”
“And do what?” she said. From the sound of her voice, the dog pack had unnerved her. To be honest, it had unnerved me, too. That had been very close.
“There’s that cave on this side of the ridge, right down from the crack. We get to that, make noise, and attract the dogs. Then we kill every one of them. We’ve got two shotguns and my rifle. Then we walk down there and get close to that cabin.”
“The stealthy approach, hunh?” she said.
“They know we’re back. If the feds do show up, all the better. If not, I still want those kids. She knows we know, so maybe she won’t kill them all out of hand.”
“Or she already has,” Carrie said. “Or Nathan’s gone and taken them up to some hole in the mountains where he’ll bury them alive.”
“Gone where?”
“Shit, take your pick. To any one of the hundreds of hideouts, caves, old mines, sinkholes, you name it, up there in that ten thousand acres of blank space on the map the state calls game lands.”
“First things first,” I said. “Let’s go do what no one else has ever been able to do.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Get inside that cabin.”
“Why not wait for backup?” she said. “Get the Bigs here, at least.”
“Time, Carrie, time. You know what might be happening in there, now that she knows someone’s rumbled their operation.”
“I can just imagine the kinds of things Grinny Creigh will have in her house,” she said. “Can’t wait to go inside.”
I turned to look at her. “What’s the matter—that witchy-twitchy bullshit didn’t get to you, did it?”
She looked away. “No,” she said, most unconvincingly.
“Aw, for God’s sake, Carrie,” I said. “Focus! There might be a half dozen little girls in there, and they’ve absolutely got something to be scared of. Let’s not give her any time to think about this. We need to go back there, eliminate the dog problem, and get inside. No one else is going to do it.”
She didn’t reply.
“Okay, look,” I said. “Watch your cell phone. You get a signal, tell me to stop, call your boys, get ’em out here.”
It took us an hour to get over to the cave. We hadn’t spent too much time around the remains of Laurie May’s cabin, which was indeed all gone. Even in the moonlight, the pile of blackened rubble was a desolate sight among all the pretty flower beds and the fenced yard.
Carrie had been unable to reach the Big brothers. Our problem now was that the Creigh dogs didn’t show up when they should have. Carrie figured Grinny had retrieved them and put them back under the house. It was one thing for us to hole up in a cave and shoot them as they attacked. It would be another thing altogether if we were creeping Grinny’s cabin and they all appeared at once like the last time.
“We shouldn’t have left,” I said. “We could have dispatched that whole pack right there from the car.”
“And if those kids are there, Grinny would have been down in the basement cutting throats while we were eliminating attack dogs,” Carrie said.
The field leading down to the Creigh cabin was just as bare of cover as before. I’d brought the spotting scope and spent some time scanning the whole compound, but that wasn’t helping us get any closer. It was nearly midnight, and we needed to either back out and get some help or get down there and start some shit.
“Cam—look,” Carrie said, pointing down the hill. I looked. A child was walking out of that tree line that ran down alongside Grinny’s cabin. I swung the scope around. She was blond, almost white-haired, wearing a long dress that reached to her ankles. Her face was pinched and scared, and she was somewhere between eight and ten years old. And she was coming right up the hill toward us like a diminutive ghost.
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My God,” Carrie said. “They are in there.”
“And can you tell me how she knows we’re up here in this fucking cave?” I asked.
Carrie had no answer for that and neither did I. If ever I wished for a working cell phone it was right then, which is when I remembered that the cave was a signal point. Nathan had captured my ass when I stepped out to improve the signal.
“Cell phone works here,” I said. “Call the Bigs.”
She looked at her phone, swore, and called the Bigs. I watched the little girl climb the hill, and then remembered to put away the guns and to make the shepherds lie down. She looked scared enough as it was. I heard Carrie talking to someone, so I stepped out, without the guns, to wait for the child to make it up the long hill. I hoped she wasn’t a stalking horse for some guy with a long gun down at the cabin, but she was coming purposefully, as only a frightened child could. I cursed M. C. Mingo, Hayes, Grinny, and all their works.
Carrie snapped the phone shut behind me. “Zoo city in Marionburg,” she said. “Sam’s there with an SBI squad, and
there’s real goat-grab under way. Bigger John says he’s heard talk of the Bureau coming in. I told him to back out and meet us at Laurie May’s.”
“Look at her,” I said, and Carrie looked. The child knew precisely where we were. She was almost there, and we could hear her puffing with the exertion of climbing the hill.
“You go out there and talk to her. She’ll be scared of me.”
“Right,” Carrie said, and went partway down the hill to meet the child. I went back to the spotting scope to make sure there wasn’t some Creigh snake-in-the-grass setting up on Carrie. A moment later, the two of them came into the cave. The child recoiled when she saw the shepherds.
I told her it was all right and brought each dog over to lick her hands. She relaxed, but only a little, so I took the dogs to the cave entrance with me, where I went back to the scope and Carrie sat down to talk to the little girl.
“What’s your name, sweetie?” she asked.
The girl put a grubby fist in her mouth for a moment before answering. Her eyes were pale blue and just the slightest bit out of focus. “Honey Dee,” she said. “I’m Honey Dee.”
“Well, Honey Dee, what are you doing out on this big old hill so late at night?”
The girl closed her eyes for a moment, as if she were recalling a rehearsed message. She was wearing a long white shift and had a frilly little bonnet on her head embroidered with crude yellow bees. She continued to nibble on a knuckle; then she got the message out.
“Grinny says y’all have to leave us alone, or we all goin’ in the glass hole.”
I stopped breathing for a moment when I heard that. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Carrie stiffen.
“Who else is down there with Grinny?” Carrie asked.
The little girl had to think about that. Then she began to count on her fingers and name names. She named five more names.
“So there’s six of you in the house?” Carrie asked.
That provoked some more heavy-duty brow wrinkling. Somehow I didn’t think Honey Dee was operating with a full deck, not with that partially vacant expression I’d glimpsed earlier. Vacant? Or partially blind? I couldn’t tell. Then she counted laboriously on her fingers to six this time and nodded.
“What is the glass hole, Honey Dee?” Carrie asked gently.
Honey Dee shrugged. She didn’t know.
“But it’s a bad place?”
She nodded vigorously. Bad place.
“Do you know where it is?”
More head shaking.
“Is it downstairs, under the house?”
Another shrug. Fist back in her mouth, and then a yawn.
“Keep her here or send her back?” I asked quietly, still sweeping the area with the scope. I was looking for dogs.
Carrie sighed. “I think we have to send her back. We keep her …”
“Yeah.” Then I saw movement on the front porch of the house. It was too dark to see what it was, but the shape was big enough for it to have been Grinny. I told Carrie, and the child perked up. Interestingly, she seemed more eager than fearful.
Carrie took the child’s hand and walked back out into the open. She pointed down the hill and told her to go to Grinny. Honey Dee giggled and then positively ran down the hill and into the trees. I focused the scope on the dark porch and saw movement again, a bare glow of yellow lantern light, and then just shadow.
“Think she’ll let those dogs out again?” Carrie asked.
“Actually, I don’t,” I said. “She knows we could take them all down from inside this cave. No, I think the dogs will come out if and when we get a lot closer to that house. Then we’d be the ones in trouble.”
“How did she know?” Carrie asked. “And what in the hell is a glass hole?”
“Not sure I want to know,” I said.
“There was a signal a few minutes ago,” she said. “I say we call Sam King and tell them there are six hostages in there and Grinny’s threatening to kill them. Maybe that will finally stir up the feds. Big enough posse, that dog pack’s no threat.”
I couldn’t think of anything else to do, and we didn’t have much of a chance of getting into that cabin, not if she let that dog pack loose again. “Try it,” I said.
She stepped back out into the night air, opened the phone, looked at it for a second, held her arm out, and then began to move it around, searching for the ever-elusive signal. The dog came out of the dark at about a hundred miles an hour and went right for her extended hand. She yelped as massive jaws snapped down, and then she jumped back into the cave, tumbling over my shepherds as they lunged for the cave entrance. But the beast was gone into the night. And so was her phone. I recalled the shepherds before they got sucked into some kind of canine ambush.
“He get you?” I asked, backing slightly into the cave with the shotgun ready.
“Didn’t break the skin, but not for lack of trying. God damn! Hand really hurts.”
I searched the dark hillside for a glimpse of the cell phone. The dog had gone for a nice juicy hand, not the phone, so I hoped it would be where we could retrieve it. Depending, of course, on how many more of those bastards were waiting out there. Assumptions again, biting me in the ass and Carrie in the hand.
“Can you cover me?” I asked. Carrie was holding a penlight on her hand, which was already swelling.
“For the moment I can,” she said. “I think.”
I handed her Hayes’s shotgun and told her to stay in the cave entrance. I stepped out with my own gun ready, Frick and Frack alongside. I remembered to check the hillside above the cave, but I didn’t see anything. That damned dog hadn’t made a sound, so maybe there was just one of them out there in the darkness. It had come in fast, low, and hungry, and I knew I was taking a big chance stepping away from the relative safety of the little cave. But we had to have that phone, as mine was in the Suburban. If we couldn’t find it, we’d have to back out and return to Marionburg.
I kept the shepherds close by my side and searched the ground in the general direction that the dog had run, while trying to watch as much of the hillside as I could. I pulled the hammers back on the shotgun and walked in a series of small, continuous circles, looking down and then out into the darkness. The shepherds would be my first line of defense, but I didn’t need them getting torn up right now, either.
There was a small breeze nudging cooler air across the slope, but not enough to stir the grass or make any noise. The only sound came from my boots as I crunched through some of the loose gravel. Carrie was down on one knee at the cave entrance, her shotgun resting on her thigh, while she held her injured hand under an armpit. I knew about dog bites—they hurt. A big dog could exert hundreds of pounds of pressure with its jaws. It was like having your hand run over by a car with studded tires.
I finally stopped to take a careful look all around. The phone was one of those small silver numbers. It should have been visible out there, assuming the dog had dropped it when he realized he couldn’t eat it. Or maybe he did eat it; he’d looked mean enough to eat a car. And where the hell had that fucker gone? The nearest cover was either back in the crack through the ridge or down in that tree line near the house. The four hundred yards in between was just a wide open space.
I decided to make my way up toward the defile through the ridge. It was a hundred feet or so above me and maybe seventy yards away. I could make it out as a darker shadow against the gray rock face of the ridge. I kept circling as I went—I couldn’t turn my back on any sector with that thing out there, but the closer I got to the crack, the more I wondered if that dog wasn’t in there, waiting. So I sent my shepherds ahead, aiming them at the opening.
Big mistake.
The moment they got fifty feet away from me, I saw out of the corner of my eye something coming at me from the downhill side. I vaguely heard Carrie call out and just had time to whirl around and raise the barrels of the shotgun as the dog leaped at me. I ended up stuffing both barrels down its throat, and then the gun was wrenched out
of my hands before I could fire, sending me tumbling backward into the grass. The dog landed five feet away and tried desperately to disgorge the shotgun with its paws and by shaking its massive head. Then Frack pounced and seized it by the throat, followed by Frick, who grabbed the dog by its muzzle and started pulling, which had the effect of dislodging the shotgun. It tried to get up but it was too late, as Frack clamped down on its windpipe until the thing shuddered and then lay still.
I got myself up, grabbed the shotgun, hit the inert beast on the head as hard as I could with the gun butt, and then walked back in the direction from which it had sprung. The shepherds followed, excited but visibly pleased with themselves. I told them they’d been a little slow off the mark.
I finally found the phone, which had been crunched almost in two. It was obviously inoperable. I thought about Carrie’s hand being in there and decided she didn’t need to see how badly the phone had been mauled. I waved her over, and we headed for the exit out of this unhappy valley. We walked through the sliver of a canyon, Carrie facing forward, me facing Grinny’s, in case there were more of them around. When we got down to the ruins of Laurie May’s cabin, I was grateful to see that the Suburban was still there.
I checked my cell phone, but there was still no service, so we decided to wait there for the Bigs. Leaving the headlights off, I moved the vehicle to a better concealment position alongside some trees. Carrie was still holding on to her injured mitt, so I found some aspirins in my glove compartment and gave them to her. I told her I’d take the first watch, but she said no, her hand hurt bad enough that she’d never be able to sleep. I put the dogs out fifty feet away from the car in different directions, lowered all the windows, set up the guns, and then reclined my seat. Carrie kept her seat upright.
“I can’t think of any way to get into that cabin,” I said. “Not with all those damned dogs out there. We’d get some of them, but then they’d get us.”
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