She thought for a moment. “I think I remember someone like that-Indian face? He was older than me, but the kids called him Big Chief. Something like that.”
“That’d be him. Huge nose.”
She suppressed a quick grin. “If it’s the guy I’m thinking about, it wasn’t about his nose.”
“Wonderful,” I said with a sigh. “Now you have two reasons to check him out.”
I spent the day with Grandma Creigh and learned a good bit of useful information. A rocky spine separated her hollow from the other Creigh cabin, and there were two trails leading over that ridge, one high, one low. The people who lived in this hollow did not consort with the gang in the next one over to the north, with the possible exception of the one unfriendly couple we’d encountered down by the river road. They were considered officially no-count by the decent folks in the holler, in Laurie May’s opinion, and thus they were unknown quantities. Someone had alerted Mingo and his troops as to where we’d camped that night, and I thought they were good candidates.
Grinny Creigh had a fearsome reputation in this part of the county, with the rumored powers and abilities typically ascribed to mountain witches and demons. I told Laurie May I’d experienced that second-sight ability when Grinny had somehow known we were watching from the ridge. She didn’t think that was particularly unusual.
“Her mama had it, too. Grinny’s big and fat. Her mama was thin and had her this long white witchy hair even as a chile. Green eyes. Sharp little teeth. Teachers was scared of her.”
“And how about Nathan?”
There were apparently three constants about Nathan: He never spoke to anyone except Grinny, he was never without his bag of knives, and he obeyed Grinny Creigh with frightening dedication. As a boy, he had gone to the county elementary school for one whole day, during which the other kids had taunted him unmercifully about his freakish looks. One brat in particular, Billy Lee Ranson, had led the torment. At the end of the school day Nathan was seen walking down the dirt road in the direction of Book Mountain with a protesting Billy Lee in tow, literally. Neither of them had ever come back to school. Billy Lee’s older brother had gone up on Book Mountain to see about Billy, and he hadn’t come back, either. The sheriff at the time was not especially interested in bothering the clan up on Book Mountain, so the school authorities had decided to cut their losses and get on with the school year. The sheriff was known to be a sensible man, and the Ranson brothers were deemed to be no great loss.
At midday we saw a patrol car go past Laurie May’s and up the dirt road toward the neighbors at the top of the hollow. I put the shepherds into the little cabin. Laurie May gave me some bread and tea, and I went to the cabin to hole up. I was able to hear the cruiser come into her cabin yard about a half hour later, and then drive away.
“Said they was lookin’ fer a dangerous escaped prisoner,” Laurie May reported. “Said he burned down the old jail and they’s a’feared he kilt two deputies. I sent’m on his way. Ain’t seen nothin’, ain’t heered nothin’.”
I told her what had really happened, and that the two deputies should be alive and well over in Sheriff Hayes’s office by now.
“I know them boys,” she said. “They growed up ‘round here, then went off to the army or somewheres. Came back, though. And I know that old jail. One’a my boys got locked up fer brawlin’ in the town. I had to bring him his vittles, on account of because they didn’t have no money to feed no prisoners.”
“As best we could tell, it was Mingo’s boys who set the fire, so he and I have a score to settle.”
She wagged a finger at me. “Don’t go talkin’ about scores to be settled,” she said. “That be serious business in these parts.”
“So’s burning a prisoner to death because he might know too much,” I said.
I took a long nap that afternoon. The four-poster smelled faintly of pine needles, but it was very comfortable. Both shepherds had eyes on getting up on the bed, but I told them they’d die trying. More terrified yawns. Frack went over to that other rag rug and lay down. Moments later he snorted, got back up, and went to a corner of the room. Blood on and in the floor, I thought.
At four I took the dogs out. Laurie May was feeding her goats, and reported that there’d been one more cop car come by the place looking for that dangerous escaped prisoner. I took the DEA cell phone and went up the hillside to see if I could hit that transponder and get in touch with Carrie. I slanted my way toward the rocky spine between the hollows so as to avoid any eyes uphill from Laurie May’s along the dirt road. I didn’t need anyone seeing a stranger in the woods and calling Mingo’s people.
As it turned out, I had to get right up on the ridgeline before I saw any bars in the cell phone signal indicator. I didn’t like being right out in the open, silhouetted on a ridge, so I stepped down into a circle of man-high boulders. It being a DEA phone, the directory was locked, so I just kept hitting the call button and finally raised Baby Greenberg.
Carrie had made it out to Carrigan County without serious incident. She’d driven right through Rocky Falls without anyone so much as looking at the Suburban. Just outside of town there’d been two sheriff’s office cruisers parked along the road. She’d pulled over and talked to the deputies, asking them who they were looking for. They told her, giving her the clear impression that they believed the cover story Mingo had put out about my escaping and taking out the Big brothers. They asked her if she was in the county on official SBI business, and she told them that she was going to a meeting with some IRS officials concerning irregularities in the Robbins County pay and benefits system. Then she left.
“That word was probably all over the deputy force within an hour,” Baby said with a laugh. “Anyway, the Big brothers made it in to Sheriff Hayes’s office, where they gave statements about the fire. Carrie wrote up a report to be sent to SBI in Raleigh, in SBI-ese, and Hayes said he’d send it out under his signature.”
“Well, hell,” I said. “That ought to do it, right? Two of Mingo’s own people testifying that Mingo orchestrated this whole deal?”
“Um.”
“What do you mean, um?” The shepherds appeared to be watching something in the trees, so I moved down the ridge to make sure I couldn’t be seen from the fields below.
“Well, Carrie’s still entirely focused on this supposed child-trafficking business, but now that she’s resigned from the SBI, she’s been cut off on any current intel. And my bosses keep reminding me we’re supposed to be rolling up a meth smuggling and production operation. The fire in the jailhouse and a crooked sheriff don’t interest them very much.”
“It should-he’s the top cover for your meth crowd out here.”
“And your evidence for that would be…?”
“Hell’s bells, can’t you guys go to a grand jury with what you’ve got? I can testify, the Big brothers can testify, you can testify-how much more do we need to get something going here?”
“My bosses’ say-so, for one thing,” Greenberg said. “And, like I said, they’ve lost interest. In fact, we’re being pulled off to work a possible drug homicide over in Andrews. My line boss, Jack Harrie? He says this thing in Rocky Falls is a genu-wine hairball, Carrie Santangelo’s on a personal crusade, and we’re outta there.”
I didn’t know what to say. Without backup like a DEA squad, there wouldn’t be much I could contribute.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” Baby said. “I’m going to forget to retrieve the transponder, so you’ll have some comms until the battery dies. Carrie’s been shut out, like I said, so she has to figure out what she’s going to do. I told her that her first mission is to get your ass out of Robbins County.”
“They are watching,” I said. And so were the shepherds. They were still staring into the tree line above me on the transverse ridge. What had they seen? I changed position again.