SPIDER MOUNTAIN

by P. T. Deutermann

  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.

  “So, sport, who won the war up there?” he asked. The dogs greeted him warily—they didn’t like surprises or cigarettes.

  “How’d you find us?” I asked.

  He grinned, knelt down, and pulled the tracking transmitter from under the front wheel well. “Would you believe, federal voodoo?” he said. “For your own safety, you understand.” He put the thing back on the frame and stood up, dusting off his hands. “And where’s the rest of’us’?”

  I put my stuff in the back and then sat down on the back bumper to tell him what had happened up there, and what we’d learned from Nathan about their child-trafficking business. I’d expected complete shock, but this only seemed to fulfill his worst expectations for the mountain criminal crowd.

  “Parts? Human parts? From kids? A new low.”

  I nodded. It was getting dark, and I was suddenly tired. We could hear the drone of another helicopter going over the ridge. I knew I needed to beat feet if we had any chance at all of saving the rest of the kids.

  “There should be a fresh one in that glass hole or lava tube, whatever you want to call it,” I said. “Carrie’s up there leading the SBI through it. Assuming that they can retrieve a child’s body from that formation, and that Nathan is ready to come clean, they’ll finally have some physical evidence.”

  “A body in something like that might never be found,” he said. “You know—bodies sink initially and then gas up a couple days later. But if that tube goes way down, it may not be possible to get it back. From what you’re saying, that thing could be several hundred feet deep.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, and explained about the light coming in from the main lake. “But it will take time and some specialized equipment, which is why I cut loose from the goat-grab up there.”

  “What’s your plan?”

  “I’m headed for Grinny Creigh’s. There are five more kids still adrift, if Nathan was telling the truth.”

  “Why not wait for the cavalry?”

  “Same reason as last time—she hears Nathan’s in custody, she has to make those children disappear, and I’m betting they have other places where they can make that happen. Or she might run.”

  He shook his head. “She’ll never run. Never in a million years.”

  “Well, good, then I look forward to getting up with her,” I said.

  He thought about that for a moment. “Want some backup?” he said finally.

  “Where’s your crew?” I asked.

  “I’m solo on this,” he said. “We’re not supposed to know you anymore, so I can’t involve my guys. They brought me up here when I found out that Mose had taken you into the hills. I actually came up to talk you guys into leaving this mess alone, but… kids?”

  “We tried to tell people,” I said. “I’m not especially comforted by my government’s reluctance to jump into this with both feet. And from what Carrie found out, the federal response is being dictated more by turf boundaries than any sense of real urgency.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, kicking a clump of grass. “I talked to my boss. At length. But he’s a fucking wimp. Keeps saying: Where’s the drug-enforcement angle in this? If she’s kidnapping children, then call Charlotte. If she’s moving meth, go catch her at it.”

  It was my turn to think. Then I had an idea. “I was told there’s a hundred pounds of crystal meth in the escape tunnel behind the Creigh cabin.”

  He looked over at me with visible skepticism. “Told? By whom?”

  “Can’t say,” I said. “Have to protect my sources. But it’s a hundred pounds, all wrapped up for sale in the big city. Sounds like she’s moving meth to me.”

  “That’s laughably weak,” he said. “My boss would throw you out of his office for bullshit like that. For bullshit less than that. Nobody wraps meth.”

  “But your boss is a wimp,” I pointed out.

  “Why, yes, he is,” Baby said.

  “So: You want to go along? Explore this anonymous hot tip? Make it official?”

  “Duty calls,” he said.

  23

  It was close to eleve
n that night when we reached the north end of that ridge-line crack above the Creigh place. Our vehicles back on the mountain had apparently not been disturbed, so I’d left a note for Carrie saying I was going to Grinny’s to find the missing kids. I left out any mention of Greenberg’s participation. I was counting on their not going back to retrieve Mose’s vehicle until they’d settled the various scenes up on the mountain, because once they did, and found the note, they’d have people all over Grinny’s. I wanted to have our one shot before that happened. I thought Baby was right: She’d corner up and fight, not run.

  The night was cool and clear, and there was enough of a moon up to see pretty well. The shepherds were ready for some work, and so was I. We hunkered down in the Creigh-side end of the crack and scanned the cabin and buildings below. They were all dark, as usual, and there were no police vehicles there anymore, or none that we could see. That didn’t mean there wasn’t a deputy parked up under a tool shed down there, but the only police presence I could see was the occasional glimpse of a new tape line fluttering around the front of the main cabin. I also looked hard for sign of dogs—I think I was a lot more afraid of the Creigh dog pack than any lurking cops.

  We still had the same problems with respect to approaching the cabin down that open hillside, so my plan involved getting back into that escape tunnel, whose entrance was beneath the lone tree fifty feet away. I pointed it out to Greenberg, who was duly impressed with the Creighs’ tunneling ability. I’d brought a shotgun instead of my rifle, and we each had a handgun. I had mine in my utility vest, along with a flashlight, extra ammo, a knife, and some water. Baby had his Glock in a hip holster and a flashlight. I wanted to get back into the house via the escape passage, make sure Grinny and her prisoners weren’t actually just sitting there in the kitchen, and then explore some of those other passages we’d seen on our way out.

  With all that blubber onboard, I couldn’t feature Grinny Creigh making it through that narrow passage up to the main escape route, so I was pretty sure that she’d never left the Creigh compound. The house, maybe, but not the clutch of buildings. Nathan’s henchman had obliquely confirmed that when he told us Grinny had deliberately pointed us away from the cabin and out to the glass hole. Even a sheriff’s office forensic team hadn’t been able to find the escape tunnel, so I figured there had to be other hidey-holes buried back there behind that cabin. They’d had decades to dig and hide, and this couldn’t be the first time they’d had to go to the matresses in all that long history of smuggling and worse. Wherever she was holed up, it probably did not involve a lot of physical exertion to get there. On the other hand, I had to admit that she could just as easily have gotten into a vehicle right there at her front door and been driven off to Arkansas. But my instinct was that she was lurking in a hole somewhere, like the spider she was.

  I’d asked Baby on the way over how in the world a bunch of drug-running hillbillies had managed to get into the horrible trade in pediatric organs. He surmised that they’d started by peddling kids to the truck-stop pimps throughout the South, then graduated into selling them into organized kiddy-porn and pedophile sex rings, the bulk of which operated in or around New Orleans.

  “All those semis,” he said. “You know, with the big living quarters behind the cab? Perfect way to transport thirteen-year-old girls and boys across the country. There’s a known market for blue-eyed blonds in Washington, no questions asked and big money. Probably only been a matter of time before someone with connections in the courier systems approached them about upping the ante.”

  “But harvesting organs? Hayes said he knew about them going to the hospital lab, but he thought it was for abortions. Carrie and I thought it was for sterilization.”

  “That’d be bad enough,” Baby said, “but you’re saying they took them over to that lab, put them to sleep, and then harvested. You gotta wonder who thought that one up.”

  “Three guesses.”

  “Yeah, well, you have to remember, they’ve been doing shit like this for generations up here. Probably didn’t seem like a big step to them.”

  “Which mystifies me even more,” I said. “If they’ve been doing evil shit for decades, how come they’ve never been taken down?”

  He thought about his answer. “I think it’s because nobody cared, as long as they were doing it to themselves. We only got into it because the meth coming down out of the hills was reaching flood stage. But it’s not like we’ve been putting serious assets against them—those are reserved for the urban cocaine and heroin traffickers. You know, the guys bringing it in by container-load through Miami or over the Mexican border on NAFTA semis. Basically, DEA is just too damned busy to fool with what has been up to now a pretty low-viz and very remote problem.”

  I’d thought then that if this was considered a low-visibility problem, then the rest of the nation’s drug problem must be positively galactic in scale, but I kept my silence. If anyone appreciated that, it would be a street agent like Greenberg. Some day I’d ask him if his thoughts on the “war on drugs” were similar to mine. Right now it was time to get moving.

  “Pet the doggies?” I asked in a quiet voice, and both shepherds crowded around, circling my legs and rubbing hard in return for ear rubs and patting, even as I told them in my kindest voice that they were a pair of worthless, blockheaded, deer-chasing, flea-shedding hair-bags who couldn’t catch a sleeping cat it they tripped over one. They positively beamed.

  Getting them down into the escape tunnel was harder than I’d anticipated, and if surprise had been the objective, we probably blew it right there. The dogs slid and scrambled their way down that slanting plank and then barked at us when we didn’t join them fast enough. We found the lanterns Carrie and I had left, lit them, and put away the flashlights. Then we regrouped at the junction of the tunnel coming up from the cabin basement and the bricked-up wall. I described where the one tunnel came from, and Baby asked if we could defend ourselves if someone was down there in that hidden room with a twelve-gauge as we climbed down out of the ceiling. I had to admit that we’d probably get our asses shot off, literally.

  “How about this walled-up tunnel, then?” he asked, running his hands over the roughly mortared stones. He had to squeeze in between two of the three big ceiling support posts planted right in front of it. I had to hunch over, as the roof of the tunnel was only six feet, if that. The floor was hard-packed earth with a thin layer of dust. Everything was a dull yellow-orange in the kerosene lamplight. The air quickly began to stink of kerosene smoke.

  “It may have caved in or just simply be too dangerous to use,” I said. I slapped the stone with my hand and mostly hurt my hand—it was solidly embedded. The shepherds watched us in the lantern light with a bemused expression.

  Baby got out a pocketknife and began to test the edges of the stone wall. He could get the blade in about two inches all around except on the bottom. He leaned back against the center post and then grunted.

  “What?” I asked.

  “This post just moved,” he said, standing up and going around to the side away from the stone wall. Then he reached up and grabbed the top of the post and pulled, and damned if the post didn’t come down like a big lever arm while the stone wall lifted slowly out of the ground maybe two inches. We heard a dull snap under the door as if a ratchet had fallen into place. The post was now at a forty-five-degree angle, and it wouldn’t move anymore.

  “Okay, so it lifts and separates,” I said. “But does it open?”

  Baby pushed on the wall right in the middle, and nothing happened. I then stepped forward and pushed on the right-hand side, and the thing began to pivot, like a big stone flapper valve. There was obviously a pin of some kind dead center, so the wall ended up at about an eighty-degree angle to its original position. A warm flow of air came through the opening, smelling faintly of straw or hay.

  I pointed a flashlight down the passage beyond, which revealed a tunnel identical to the one we occupied. There were three posts on the oth
er side just like the ones we had on this side. The difference was that there were many footprints in the dust on the floor, and this one went down at the same angle as the one coming from the cabin.

  “If anyone’s down there,” I said quietly, “that pressure release will let them know this door just opened.”

  “What’s that smell?” Baby asked, sniffing the air. “Barn? Hay? Straw?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe this connects to that barn where they chained me up that night.”

  “So—we go?”

  “These guys go,” I said, and sent the shepherds down the passageway. If there was going to be an ambush, they’d sense it. They might not survive it, but we would. We picked up our lanterns and went after the dogs, Baby first and me in trail and still hunched over to keep from banging my head. I kept looking back, half-expecting that stone door to swing quietly shut like it always did in the movies, but it just sat there. Baby saw me looking and suggested we wedge it open. We went back through and wrestled with that post lever until we broke it off at the ground, which should keep anyone from closing it behind us.

  The tunnel went straight for maybe two hundred feet and then hooked hard right, where it ended in a wooden door. The dogs were milling around in front of the door, but they weren’t excited. We could hear air whistling past the cracks around the door, and the barnyard smell was stronger here. There was a normal latch on the door, and black iron hinges on the other side. This thing had been here for a while.

  “The lady or the tiger?” Baby said, drawing his Glock.

  I pulled the shepherds back to me and took a position that would let me cover the opening as the door swung back. Baby put a lantern down just out of the arc the door would take when opening, lifted the latch as quietly as he could, flattened himself against the wall, and pulled the door open quickly.