The door opened and Grinny Creigh reappeared, carrying a lantern this time and leading a young girl by the hand. The girl was between eight and ten years old and very thin, with flaxen hair and a pinched, frightened face. Grinny gripped the little girl’s wrist as if to make sure she wouldn’t bolt as she raised the lantern to fully illuminate the child. The man on the steps examined her carefully, asking her to turn around a couple of times, and then came up on the porch to lay his hands on her. Given what I was expecting, I was surprised to see that he wasn’t touching her in a sexual manner, but rather examining her, the way a doctor might. He looked into her eyes and mouth, asked her to cough even though he didn’t have a stethoscope, and felt her limbs as if to gauge how well-fed she was.
I experienced a sudden urge to shoot them both and rescue the little girl. But for all I knew, this was a county social services doctor or PA making a house call of some kind, even if it was pretty late. The child was thin and frightened, although she didn’t look to be ill. Grinny just stood there looking bored, but not letting go of that slim, bony wrist for one moment. I thought for just a moment that I glimpsed another small, pale face peeking through the curtains at what was going on out front, but then it was gone, like a ghost on the move.
The man thanked Grinny and said that everything was acceptable. Grinny turned the child around and sent her back into the cabin. Then she turned back to the man who had stepped back down to the walkway.
“If’n we had to, how many could you take in one go?” she asked.
The man thought about that for a moment. “No more than one per night,” he said, finally. “And that would be difficult. The airport security would notice.”
“Ain’t sayin’ we’ll have to, mind,” she said. “But there’s been some folks snoopin’ around, and it ain’t been the one’s we usually see ’round here, them drug cops, I’m talkin’ about.”
“Who are they, then?” he asked.
“We don’t know. M.C. had one of ’em, but he got away ’fore we could have a little talk with’m.”
“Is it about the children?” the man asked.
“Like I keep sayin’, we don’t know. But if we git cornered up, you could take all of’m, right?”
“The demand far exceeds the supply, always,” the man responded. “It’s the processing and transport that are tricky. For a sudden oversupply, the costs would be higher, of course.”
“Unh-hunh,” Grinny said in a sarcastic, suspicionsconfirmed tone of voice.
“Let me get something out of the car for you,” he said, and turned to go back to the SUV. Grinny stood there for a second, and then reached down behind that oversized rocking chair and pulled a shotgun towards her, which she set down behind her against the door. Her huge bulk completely hid it from view.
The man came back from the SUV with something small and black in his hand and for a second I wondered if he had a gun. Instead he handed it up to Grinny on the porch.
“This is a one-time pager,” he said. “Use it once and I will come at the regular hour. Then throw it away. Never use it again because they are able to track such devices now.” He pointed up into the sky. “From space, using satellites. Imagine. If you must move them all at once, activate the pager precisely at noon on whichever day you use it. Otherwise, activate it at some other time, it doesn’t matter when.”
“All right,” she said, keeping her right hand buried in her housecoat and close to that shotgun.
“I will be back in a few nights,” he said. “I will let your Mr. Mingo know when to meet me.”
She nodded curtly at him and went back into the house, shutting the big wooden door and locking it with some kind of metal bar which I could hear thump down into place. The man drove off in his SUV. He’d been just far enough away for me not to be able to get the license plate number.
I sat back on my haunches. Some kind of a transaction had just taken place. The little girl had been approved for sale, confirming our worst suspicions about Grinny Creigh. And there might be more of them, either in the cabin with her or somewhere else, based on her question about having to possibly move more than one in a hurry.
But move them where and to what end? He had said something about airports, so maybe the theories about children being sold out of the hills into global sex slave markets was accurate. I remembered Laurie May’s comment about what kind of ‘mommas’ would do such a thing? What kind indeed.
Two dogs started to bark back in the dog pen. I decided it was time to get out of there. I checked the cell phone, but there was no signal down here at the cabin. The dogs finally shut up after five minutes or so. We moved away from the cabin and went back up the hill, staying in the trees for as long as possible, the shepherds plastered to my side. It was slower going up than it had been coming down, and I was puffing once I made it to the cave. I slipped into the black hole and rested for about twenty minutes, trying to decide what to do next. I kept coming up with the same answer—immediate departure. Then deal with the problem of the children. I tried the cell again. There was a single signal bar showing in the little window, so I told the dogs to stay and stepped back out of the cave to see if I could do better.
My heart sank. I should have heeded my own advice. There was Nathan, standing with two other men in the dim moonlight. All of them had shotguns. A fourth man was wrestling the tracking leads on the two big dogs I’d seen Nathan throw into the back of the pickup truck. I thought about calling out the shepherds, but there were simply too many shotguns.
Nathan swung the barrel of his shotgun towards the distant cabin, and tipped his head in that direction. Clear enough.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE CAT DANCERS
Copyright © 2005 by P. T. Deutermann.
Excerpt from Spider Mountain copyright © 2006 by P. T. Deutermann.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
eISBN 9781429903615
First eBook Edition : April 2011
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2005046583
St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / December 2005
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / November 2006
The Cat Dancers Page 46