SPIDER MOUNTAIN

by P. T. Deutermann

  Anything could be done, as it turned out. But all my plans for a leisurely exploration evaporated when I lifted first one knee and then the other onto my shoulders, leaned forward, and kissed her on the mouth. The next moment she was in the water with me, sans top and bottom, and telling me to go fast.

  Go fast? No problem. For once, we went up the mountain and didn’t bounce off. She clung to me like hot, wet silk, and this time it was the two of us taking care of business.

  We relaxed into the foaming, hissing water, holding each other close, soaking up the heat, both inside and out, for several lovely minutes. She had her head on my chest, and I got a close look at what was going to be a very interesting scar.

  Then we heard the unmistakable sounds of teenaged girls in the passageway between the motel and the pool enclosure. We moved apart. I helped put her suit together and then hiked my own trunks back up.

  “You’re supposed to say something,” I said.

  She thought for a moment and then said, “Thanks, I needed that.”

  “It was all that peek-a-booty that did it.”

  She giggled. “A hard man is good to find,” she said softly. “You seemed to get the message quick enough.”

  “Hard to miss,” I said, and she gave me a mock glare. “The message, that is.”

  Three preteens emerged onto the pool deck and immediately jumped in, followed by lots of brightly squealed oh-my-Gods. They happily ignored the two ancient adults huddled up in the hot tub.

  “Like, I mean, it’s time to, like, you know, go?” I said.

  “Like, totally,” she said.

  We hit a corner bistro for dinner, where we encountered Mose Walsh. He was decked out in his evening hunting kit and sitting at the bar looking suitably inscrutable. For once there were no women hanging around. We invited him to join us at a table. I ordered drinks.

  “So where’s all the action tonight, Chief?” I asked him.

  “It’s early,” he said, looking around just to make sure he hadn’t missed anyone. “You guys connected to the big shootout over at the sheriff’s cabin?”

  “Us?” Carrie and I said, almost simultaneously.

  Mose chuckled. “Yeah, you,” he said. “All of sudden we got feebs and state guys right here in River City and some pretty dramatic rumors flying. Too bad about Bill Hayes, though. He was a good guy.” He saw me frown and asked why. Carrie gave me a warning look.

  “Bill Hayes got himself entangled with some of the shit M. C. Mingo was into,” I said. “He kind of redeemed himself at the end, but there are some desperately loose ends still out there.”

  The waiter brought us our wine and Mose another scotch. “Not what I’m hearing,” he said. “What I heard was that it all was over. Bureau suits on the courthouse steps declaring that the incident was wrapped, strapped, and ready for transport. Robbins County has an interim sheriff, the Carolina SBI is shoveling shit as fast as they can, and we’re due for an interim election pretty soon.”

  Carrie gave me an I-told-you-so look, silently reminding me of her cynical prediction that the feds would cap it off and declare victory. I drank some wine, then told Mose what had happened out there at Hayes’s cabin and detailed our most recent séance with Grinny Creigh.

  “So you’re sayin’ that Nathan Creigh is out there in the backcountry somewhere, with six little girls? And the Bureau is aware of this?”

  “I can’t speak for what the Bureau knows and doesn’t know, but I sent them a background report, as did Carrie here, and the SBI sure as hell has been informed.”

  “Then why aren’t they acting on it?” he asked.

  “I give up,” I said. “Maybe they are, and we’re just out of the loop.”

  “So you guys are gonna do the reasonable thing and step aside, right?” He was looking at Carrie when he said that. There was more than just a glimmer of direct male interest in those dark eyes, and I actually felt a momentary pang of jealousy. With that face and his determination to score at least once a night, I’d wager he had himself quite a track record. Carrie shook her head.

  “No fucking way,” she declared quietly. “We are most definitely not letting go, not until I know those kids are safe—or dead. That’s why we’re going back to that cabin. In fact, I was just thinking: You must know that backcountry pretty well. Care to take on an unscheduled guide job?”

  Mose raised both hands in a gesture of surrender. “No, ma’am, I do not,” he said immediately. “You’re talking about getting on the trail of Nathan and possibly Grinny Creigh in the deep woods of Robbins County.”

  “That idea make you nervous, Mose?” I asked. I was going to rain on his parade, too.

  “Tracking them?” he said. “No. It’s what might happen when we caught up with them that worries me. To quote the lady at the table, no fucking way.”

  “Six little girls, Mose? In the hands of that monster?”

  He shook his head again. No way meant just that.

  “You really have lost your taste for it, haven’t you?” I said. Carrie patted her pockets and then produced a vibrating cell phone. She got up to go find a better signal.

  He gave me a neutral look. “I absolutely have,” he said. “I lost my taste for it when I finally realized that there’s an unlimited supply of evil assholes out there. Unlimited. Unending. A storm surge of them. And for some unknown reason, they’re being allowed to breed. Their spawn comes out worse than they were. I gave that shit up over ten years ago. Working homicide was like standing at the outflow of a city waste treatment plant and putting your fist in the pipe—about the time you got used to the idea that your hand was eternally covered in shit, the tank would overflow on your head.”

  “So that’s it?” I asked. I couldn’t really justify goading him, but I was. Maybe it was the image of six little girls in chains in some damned cave. Or the way he had been appraising Carrie. Or the way she’d seemed to not mind all that much.

  “So now you’re down to sitting in bars, chasing loose women, and taking the occasional walk in the pretty woods?”

  He sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He really did look like those pictures of Sitting Bull when he did that.

  “Down to?” he said. Then he smiled. “You can’t provoke me, Loo. I have fully clarified my life. I work an honest and productive job during the day. Then I go out at night, have some scotch, and chase those terrible loose women, as you called them. The chase is always fun; catching them is usually fun but always comforting. Having a cup of coffee with a new and totally relaxed woman in the morning is pleasant. Knowing that she’s gonna go home in an hour is a daily relief. I’ve never married, because I don’t think I’ll live long enough to need the care of a good woman when I start to drool. So, yes, it’s one day at a time, and for the most part, every one of them is both wonderful and ten times better than my best day on the Job.”

  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.

  19

  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.

  “Back to your question,” Carrie said. “I thumped the walls all around and didn’t hear anything that sounded like false wall. The floor is obviously hard-packed dirt.”

  “Which leaves the ceiling,” I said, looking up at the floor joists and planks above our heads. Not, I noticed, very far above our heads. I wondered aloud if this room was lower than the basement. “Let’s go find some water,” I said.

  We retrieved a large pitcher of water from the hand pump in the kitchen and went back downstairs. I stood at about four feet back from the entrance to the bunkroom and poured the water onto the floor. As I’d hoped, it immediately streamed across the floor and down into the bunkroom, where it puddled against the far wall.

  “The ceiling it is,” Carrie said. It took us fifteen minutes to figure it out, and it was pretty ingenious. Pulling down in the middle of one floor joist at the left end of the bunkroom opened a trapdoor in the ceiling. The trapdoor had boards nailed across it to serve as step risers, and at the top was a narrow black rectangle. We went back upstairs to tell John what we’d found and got ourselves a second lantern.

  I went first, discovering that I had to crawl on my hands and knees once I got into the tunnel. It, too, had been cut out of hard-packed earth, and it seemed to drift slightly upward in a gentle left curve. The air was reasonably fresh, which made me think that it led to the outsid
e.

  After crawling for about a hundred feet I was finally able to stand up, albeit in a crouch. Carrie was right behind me. Ahead was a rough-cut wooden door, around whose seams I could feel air moving.

  “Remember that nasty secret surprise the guys found when they opened the bunkroom door,” Carrie said quietly. I nodded and examined the door. It was locked on our side by a large bolt-and-hasp arrangement. I tried the bolt and it moved freely.

  “Let’s get flat and then open it,” I said, and that’s what we did. There was no resistance when the door swung open on well-oiled hinges. Beyond there was an alcove of sorts, from which another tunnel led off to the left at about a ninety-degree angle to the one we’d been in. We stood up and stuck the lanterns into the alcove. The tunnel going left was wider than the original tunnel, and its ceiling had been reinforced with wooden beams and sheet metal. On the right-hand side of the alcove was a stone wall. Whoever had built the wall had been no mason, but it extended from floor to ceiling and felt solid. What cracks there were around the edges were dust-filled and looked undisturbed. As if to make the point, there were three solid beams standing in front of the door at regular intervals, one on each side and one in the middle.

  “That may one of the abandoned mine tunnels,” I said. The air was coming in strong from our left. “If they used this to bug out, then the outside is thataway.”

  “Outside would be good,” Carrie said. Apparently she did not care much for tunnels. For that matter, neither did I.

  “Left it is,” I said, and we soon found ourselves walking up a moderate incline for about three hundred feet until we encountered another hard left turn and some crude wooden steps nailed to a plank going up to a small hole at the top. There was a fine trickle of water seeping down the side of the steps. When we pushed our way through the hole we found ourselves standing under that lone pine tree at the entrance to the Creigh-side crack in the backbone ridge. We left the lanterns down in the tunnel and climbed out.