She wasn’t sure whether to be happy about that or frightened of what they might find at the other end.
Another half an hour of walking made her very glad she’d worn the hiking boots, especially when the dog stopped and sat at the entrance to a narrow trail that marked the end of the road they were on. A chain was slung across it from two poles on either side, and a faded and battered sign read: Private. No trespassing. Faint tire impressions could be seen in the dirt track on the other side.
Georgia and Kari exchanged glances. “What do you think?” Kari asked.
The other woman peered over the rusted chain. “Looks like someone used a four-wheeler to get up and down from whatever is at the other end of this path. No way you could fit a car up there. Without any rain for the last few days, it is hard to tell how recent those tracks are. They could have been made by Bill Myers before he died, or someone could have come up here yesterday. Impossible to say.”
“Do we keep going?” Kari asked. Despite her trepidation, she didn’t want to give up, but she wasn’t sure how the former trooper would feel about technically breaking the law.
Georgia glanced down at Pepper, who was staring intently down the tight and shadowy confines of the trail, his focus unwavering. “Heck yeah,” she said. “I didn’t hike all this way to turn back now.”
They ducked under the chain and continued on, a little faster now as Pepper seemed to gain confidence the closer he got to his goal. Finally, after a few minutes of brisk walking, he marched up to a strong but slender tree with peeling white bark and sat down at its base, giving his mistress a quiet woof.
“Well, will you look at that,” Georgia said, squatting down to examine the base of the birch. She pushed back some tall grasses to reveal the remains of a tattered rope, one end tied around the tree and the other hanging loose, fraying where it had been chewed through.
Kari joined her. “This is it, isn’t it?” she said. “The place where poor Pepper was left tied up.” Her heart ached at the thought of the innocent animal, left out here on his own.
“I’d say so,” Georgia said. “Although I didn’t bring along the other piece of rope to compare to this one. It’s still in the Jeep.”
She walked around to the other side of the tree and let out an “Aha!” before resurfacing with two empty plastic bowls in her hands. One was red and looked as though it had been recycled from some kind of cut-down jug, and the other might have been a restaurant take-out container at some point in its life. “I’m guessing there was originally food and water in these, although there’s nothing in them now except a couple of bugs.”
“So Myers did plan to come back and get Pepper,” Kari said. “Or he probably wouldn’t have bothered to leave those.”
Georgia scowled. “That doesn’t make me feel any better about him. The no-good jerk stole my dog and left him tied up in the middle of the woods. If Myers wasn’t already dead, I swear I’d kill him.”
“I don’t blame you,” Kari said, petting Pepper. “But now what?” She glanced around at their surroundings. Nothing but trees and scrub brush and the intermittent sound of birds singing. Her heart sank. “I don’t see anything that would indicate any other dogs were ever here. Definitely nothing that looks like it would be a hiding place for that book. Are we at the end of the trail?”
Georgia pursed her lips, scratching at an insect bite that had somehow made it under the collar of her shirt. Finally, she shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “There had to be a reason why Myers left Pepper in this specific spot. Maybe there is something nearby that was of some kind of interest.”
“Like that marijuana field Carter said was supposedly up here?”
“Sure,” Georgia said. “Although to be honest, I never even heard rumors of such a thing.” She shrugged, wincing a bit as if her bad shoulder objected to the movement. “Mind you, there are plenty of people back up in these hills who grow a small patch for their own use. Back when I was on the force, we knew about most of them and just let it go. But someone with a substantial enough operation to interest Bill Myers? I don’t know about that.
“Still,” she said, perking up. “Myers had to be looking for something up here. Something that he thought only a retired police dog could find for him. And Pepper’s specialty was drug detection. So we might as well keep going, and see if he can lead us to whatever it is.”
Kari looked around, suddenly feeling her skin crawl as though she was being watched.
“You don’t think that whoever the pot field belongs to is up here, do you?” she said hesitantly. “I mean, if there is one.”
Georgia glanced at Pepper, who was alert but at ease. “I don’t think so,” she said. But she put her hand behind her back, under the jacket she wore, seemingly checking on something. “If we had company in these woods, we’d hear it. And Pepper would give me some kind of indication. But if you want to turn back, I’d understand.”
Kari thought about the other dogs whose whereabouts were still unknown, and the need to find out who really did kill the dog warden so they could prove Marge Farrow’s innocence and get their hands on Bill Myers’s notebook. “I’m in if you are,” she said, setting her jaw. “As long as you think Pepper is up to it.”
A tiny smile tugged at the corner of Georgia’s mouth. “Are you kidding? Once he’s on the track of something, I practically have to carry him away to get him to give it up.” She gave Pepper a treat and said, “Find, Pepper. Find.”
With that, they were off again.
* * *
* * *
This time Pepper proceeded more slowly, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. He’d wander in one direction, then in another, occasionally backtracking a few paces to sniff at the tracks in the lane or at something Kari couldn’t distinguish from the debris left from previous hikers. At some point they veered off the path and onto what might have been a deer track, or simply an accidental opening through the trees.
Once she started to question Georgia, but the woman just shook her head and insisted the dog knew what he was doing. So Kari followed along silently, trying to ignore the blister starting to form on the heel of one foot. This was more of a workout than her hiking boots usually got in a year.
Just as she was about to suggest they give up and come back another day, Pepper’s head went up and his whole body seemed to stiffen, like an arrow pointed at a target. Georgia straightened, holding her finger to her lips, and gestured for Kari to walk behind her as she parted some bushes to reveal a small, ancient-looking ramshackle hut.
The building was tiny. Probably no more than one room, with a sagging metal roof and a crooked chimney pipe sticking out of the top like a flag of surrender. There was a window on the side facing them with two cracked panes, but it was so covered with dirt and cobwebs, it looked as though it would be impossible to see through even if you were closer than they were.
The entire structure was so overgrown with vines and weeds to the point where it was barely possible to discern it from its surroundings. Kari wondered if this was accidental or on purpose.
The place looked completely deserted. There was no smoke coming from the chimney, although at this time of year, it wasn’t likely that anyone inside would need additional heat. In fact, the small wooden hut was probably stiflingly hot, even up here in the cooler forested area. She couldn’t imagine anyone living there.
“Do you suppose that is the famous still?” she asked Georgia. That would explain what it was doing out here in the middle of nowhere.
“Oh, I’d say almost certainly so,” Georgia said, her eyes gleaming. “That chimney is a dead giveaway. They used to boil the spirits and had to have a way to heat the still. There’s probably a fireplace or something.” She cocked her head to the side, looking puzzled. “But I don’t understand why Pepper led us here.”
“What do you mean?” Kari asked.
Georgia bit her lip, glancing from the dog to the cabin and back again. “Pepper is a drug dog. He wasn’t trained to sniff out booze, even the illegal kind. And I doubt anyone has made moonshine here in decades. No matter what the rumors say, Curtis Fry’s liquor is just cheap, not homemade. There’s no profit in it anymore.”
Kari glanced around. “Well, I am not an expert, but I sure as heck don’t see anything that looks like a field full of marijuana, do you?”
“I do not,” Georgia said. “All I see are weeds, trees, a really cute chipmunk, and a nasty-looking run-down hut.” She narrowed her eyes. “But I have never known Pepper to be wrong. I say we should take a closer look.”
“At the chipmunk?” Kari said hopefully. The rickety little cabin kind of gave her the creeps. It reminded her of something you might see in a horror movie. The kind of horror movie in which two innocent women and their heroic dog came to a horrible end.
“Very funny,” Georgia said, snapping her fingers at Pepper and starting to move forward cautiously. “You can stay here and wait for us if you want.”
No way. The person who stayed behind in the movies always got killed first. “I’ll stick with you and Pepper,” Kari said. “If it’s all the same to you.”
Georgia gave her a sympathetic grin, as if she had been reading Kari’s mind. “No problem,” she said. “But I don’t want to hear any of that girly screaming.”
“Not unless there is a guy in a hockey mask,” Kari promised. “Or a snake. If there’s a snake, all bets are off.”
“I’m not worried about snakes,” Georgia said in a grim tone. “Except the kind with two legs who are up to something sneaky in deserted huts in the middle of the woods.”
Twenty-One
Kari expected the door to creak loudly when they pushed it open, but instead, it was surprisingly quiet.
“Oiled,” Georgia said in a thoughtful tone, reaching out one finger to touch a hinge, and then rubbing her finger on her pants. “And relatively recently, by my guess. Someone is still using this place.”
“But for what?” Kari asked.
“Only one way to find out,” Georgia said, and walked inside. Pepper gave one sharp bark and sat down right inside the front door, as if to say, Well, I did my part of the job. The rest is up to you.
“Do you smell ammonia?” Kari said. The entire inside of the small building stank, despite the fact that the two windows they hadn’t been able to see from the other side were propped open with sticks and shielded only by ratty-looking screens.
Georgia looked around and whistled. “Holy crap. It’s a meth lab.”
“What?” Kari took an involuntary step back. “Don’t they explode?”
“They can,” Georgia said in a grim tone. “Although not on their own. As long as it isn’t in active use right this minute, we ought to be fine. But don’t touch anything. There can be toxic residue on everything in here. Not to mention that it is a crime scene. We need to get back down the hill and call the sheriff.”
“I don’t think so,” said a gruff voice behind them. The two women swung around to face the door and Pepper growled low in his throat. But he didn’t move from Georgia’s side. Kari guessed that the smell from the meth lab was so strong, he hadn’t been able to scent the approach of their visitor. And none of them had heard a thing.
“Come on out of there,” Curtis Fry said. He looked even more disreputable than ever. His bald head was covered by a battered baseball cap advertising a type of beer that hadn’t been produced in ten years, and at least three days’ worth of stubble crept over his chin and cheeks. Only the scowl was the same as usual.
“You just couldn’t keep your nose out of my business, could you?” he said to Kari, waving a shotgun in their general direction. “Come out, I say. I don’t want to accidentally blow up my cabin when I shoot the two of you.”
Georgia’s hand twitched in the direction of her jacket again, but she didn’t do anything but give Kari a meaningful glance. “Heel,” she said to Pepper, and the three of them walked out to stand in the open space in front of the hut. “Now what?” she asked Fry. “Are you really going to shoot us? Because I’m pretty sure that if we both disappear at the same time, people are going to come looking for us.”
“We told our friends we were coming up here,” Kari added. “So the cops will know where to look.”
“Not without that dog, they won’t,” Fry said, gesturing at Pepper with the end of the shotgun. “He’s the reason that dratted Bill Myers found this place too.” He snarled at the German shepherd, who snarled back, silently lifting the edge of one lip. “I thought Myers got rid of him after that, or I would have done it myself.”
Now Kari wanted to snarl. Or bite the man, although she expected he would taste pretty bad. “You killed Myers,” she said. “Not Marge Farrow. It was you.”
Fry narrowed his eyes at them, then shrugged. “No point in denying it, since now I’m going to have to kill you too. That idiot showed up at my bar one night, and told me he’d been trying to find some imaginary pot field up here and discovered my little factory instead. He thought he was so clever. Told me he’d be happy to keep his mouth shut for twenty percent of the profits. Like I was going to do all the hard work, risk blowing myself up, and just hand him over a wad of money for doin’ nothing.”
“You couldn’t afford to have him blackmailing you,” Georgia said. “Eventually he would have gotten even greedier, and asked for more.”
“Exactly,” Fry agreed, reaching one hand up to adjust his cap without ever moving the shotgun off them. “There was no way I could let him walk around, knowing what he knew. Do you have any idea what an operation like this is worth? I can make more money here in one week than I can take in at the bar in a month.”
“So you followed him to the shelter?” Kari said. She hoped Georgia had a plan, because the other woman was remarkably calm. Kari just figured that the longer they kept him talking, the better chance they had of getting out of this, although she had no idea how they were going to do it.
“Stupid man never even heard me sneak up behind him,” Fry said. He gestured down at his feet, where he wore sneakers instead of hiking boots like the ones they wore. He gave a low laugh. “I can be pretty quiet when I want to be. My father taught me, like his father taught him. You didn’t hear me either, did ya? Not even that dog of yours.”
He went on. “Myers was so focused on digging under that fence, he didn’t know I was there until the noose was over his head. And then it was too late.” He flexed one biceps. “I’m pretty strong after all those years of lifting kegs.”
As he was showing off, Georgia gave Kari a quick nod, a tiny twitch in the direction of the ground by Fry’s feet.
Kari shrieked and pointed. “Eek! Is that a snake?”
Fry looked down and jumped back at the sight of the stick Kari was pointing to. And while his attention was distracted, Georgia pulled her service revolver out of the holster under her jacket, aimed it with both hands, and calmly shot Fry in the leg.
“Ayyyyyy!” he said, screaming a lot louder than Kari had done a second before, and fell to the dirt, the shotgun flying out of his hands to land a foot away.
“Hold,” Georgia said to Pepper, who promptly went over and sat on the downed bar owner’s chest, sharp canine teeth only a few inches from the man’s throat. “Good boy.”
“Nice job,” she said to Kari. “I was afraid you wouldn’t figure out what I was trying to tell you.”
Kari gave a shaky laugh. “Thanks,” she said. “I was hoping I was right when I thought you were hinting that I should pretend there was a snake.”
Fry groaned loudly, whether because of the bullet wound, the dog on his chest, or the mention of a snake, Kari couldn’t tell. To be honest, she found it difficult to work up much sympathy either way.
“I guess we should call for the cops,” she said. B
ut, of course, when she pulled out her phone, there was no signal. “Oh. Drat. We’re out of service, of course. Now what?”
Georgia walked over to Fry and peered at his leg. “Nice to see I haven’t lost my touch,” she said. “He’s probably not going to bleed to death, but we should get him down off this mountain anyway.” She crouched down. “How did you get up here, Fry? Did you drive?”
“Four-wheeler,” he grunted between clenched teeth. “It’s hidden behind those three tall pines over there.”
“Well, this should be interesting,” Georgia said. She looked up at Kari. “Can you go fetch that while I bandage up his leg?” She held one hand out for the backpack Kari still wore and pulled the first-aid kit out of it.
“What about the snake?” Fry asked, twisting his head from side to side as if looking for the one Kari had pointed at.
“What, you mean this?” Kari asked, picking up the stick and waving it in the air by his nose. She smiled. “I can’t believe you’ve lived here all this time and you don’t know that there are no venomous snakes in this area. Just harmless garter snakes. I joke about them a lot, but they’re actually quite useful, eating small rodents and such.” She looked down at him. “Never as useful as they were today, though.”
Curtis Fry groaned and thumped his head on the ground a couple of times. “I don’t believe it.”
Kari and Georgia just looked at each other and burst into gales of semihysterical laughter.
* * *
* * *
Getting Fry down the hill was tricky and took a lot longer than either Georgia or Kari would have liked. They didn’t ask Curtis for his opinion, but from his groaning and complaining it was clear he agreed. After much discussion, Georgia decided that the best approach was to tie Fry’s hands in front of him and perch him on the seat of the four-wheeler with each of the women walking along on either side. Kari held the man steady while Georgia gripped the throttle just tightly enough for the machine to move forward at a steady pace.
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