“Gotta go,” Greenberg said. “I’ll try to get back into it after this homicide deal. We’ll put your stuff back in that sex pad.”
“Thanks for that, and tell the lodge I’m still ‘there.’ Tell Carrie she can use the cabin until I can extract, if she wants. She can leave my Suburban there, too. Do you have her cell number?”
“Carrie Santangelo in the bridal suite,” he said after giving me the number. “Now there’s an image.”
“With a gun,” I reminded him. “Maybe two. And claws.”
“There is that,” he said. “Look, again, I’m sorry about this. I feel like we’re abandoning you.”
“DEA doesn’t have a dog in this fight,” I said. “Go solve your homicide. If these people are taking kids, we’ll get ’em. And besides, I owe M. C. Mingo one fire.”
I shut off the phone. My side of the slope was darkening into evening shadow. The shepherds were still watching up the hill but didn’t seem as alerted as they had been. I sat down against one of the big rocks and took in the view. The stone was still warm. It seemed so peaceful up here. It was hard to imagine the gritty infrastructure of meth labs, midnight bootleggers, and especially the notion of impoverished women selling their children to the likes of Grinny Creigh. I leaned forward to stow the cell phone in my back pocket and probably saved my life.
The rock right behind my head exploded into a spray of razor-sharp granite shards, followed by the echo of a booming rifle up on the high ridge. The back of my neck felt like it was on fire as I rolled to one side and deeper into the rock pile. The shepherds came running, but I yelled them down as another round slashed down the hill, spanging off a rock and out into the hollow below. I made like a snake, wriggling between the bigger rocks, conscious of wetness on the back of my shirt. Another round came into the rock pile. This one ricocheted off about five rocks before passing over my head like a supersonic hornet. The shooter knew I was in there and was hoping for a lucky hit. I was looking for that fabled direct route to China through the center of the earth.
Finally it stopped. My neck still hurt like hell, but it was now dark enough on the hillside that the guy probably couldn’t see us anymore. The distant boom of the rifle was still echoing in my ears, and I remained down on the ground for another thirty minutes until it was almost fully dark. Then I crept toward the edge of the rock pile nearest Laurie May’s place. The dogs were whining above me, but I told them to stay down until I got clear of the rock pile. Five minutes later I was able to get into some trees and call them down. Crouching low, I trotted down the hill toward my not-so-secret-anymore cabin.
Somehow they’d found out where I was holed up. Laurie May must have said something or done something to alert one of the visiting cops. I didn’t believe she’d intentionally done anything, but, either way, I couldn’t hang out here anymore.
I waited at the edge of the woods that concealed her doomed daughter’s cabin and watched her house for several minutes to make sure there wasn’t a reception committee down there. I finally spotted the old lady through one of the windows in the lantern light and decided to go on down. Her front door was open and I called her name. She came to the door and asked if I had been doing all that shooting. Then she saw my collar and told me to come in right away.
That first round had embedded enough granite dust in the back of my neck to make a good piece of sandpaper, as I discovered when she patiently extracted every speck of it. I was gritting my teeth and wishing for my bottle of scotch by the time she was through. Then she smeared some foul-smelling ointment on the wounded skin that took a lot of the sting away. I was afraid to ask what was in it.
“How many was they?” she asked.
“I think just one, with a long rifle and a good scope. He had me pinned in a cluster of big rocks.” I turned around to look at her. “I can’t stay here anymore,” I told her. “They’ll figure it out if they haven’t already.”
“I ain’t afraid of them no-counts,” she said bravely, as she put away her tweezers and the cotton roll.
“You tell them when they come that I made you put me up. Tell them I had a great big gun and threatened to shoot your livestock. And we need to burn that bloody cotton-I don’t want them to know they hit me.”
She threw some sticks in the woodstove, shook the ash grate, pitched in the cotton waste, and then stirred the soup pot. “Where’s ‘at pretty woman?” she asked.
“Over in Marionburg,” I said. “She managed to get out of Robbins County, but I don’t think she can come back here while Mingo’s people are all stirred up. I’m going to hike out.” I explained some of what I’d learned in the phone call.
“I’ll heat ye some soup,” she said. She clanked the firebox door shut. “You know they gonna be out there in them woods. Prob’ly have ’em dogs with ’em, too.”
“I can’t let them take me again,” I said. “Especially now that my allies have been backed out.”
“Which way you gonna go?” she asked.
“I think the best route will be over the ridges toward Crown Lake. I think the roads will be too dangerous.”
She stirred the soup some more. I realized I was really hungry. The back of my neck had settled down to a warm burn, which I hoped was not an infection getting under way.
“If’n it was me,” Laurie May said slowly, “I believe I’d go t’other way. They gonna be lookin’ for ye to run for Marionburg town. If’n it was me, I’d go up and over that ridge yonder and hide right in Grinny Creigh’s backyard. Ain’t none’a them gonna expect you to do that.”
Including me, I thought, but she had a point. If that shooter had alerted the rest of Nathan’s crew and the sheriff, the woods would soon be alive with the sound of guns being cocked and slavering dogs sniffing out trails. They would in fact never even think to look at Grinny’s place. She saw me considering it and gave me a toothy grin.
“I’ll show ye a shortcut through that backbone ridge yonder,” she said. “Put you into Grinny’s place sideways, other side’a them dogs. They’s a little cave on the bottom side of her front field. Maybe you can hole up in there, watch and see where she’s hidin’ them poor young’uns.”
And that was the objective, wasn’t it, I reminded myself. Carrie had defanged herself when she resigned from the SBI. She had no legal authority to pursue Grinny Creigh. Neither did I, for that matter, but I was here and she wasn’t. If I could watch the Creigh place undiscovered for a few days, maybe I could actually put some flesh on the bones of Carrie’s theory about Grinny selling children. The transponder was still in place, for now, anyway, so, in theory, I could call out.
Evidence. We desperately needed evidence.
“Okay, I’ll do just that,” I said. “The cave big enough for me and the shepherds?”
She nodded and then told me to sit down and eat. I briefly wondered how she knew about a cave over on the other side of the ridge. On the other hand, she was old enough to know damn near everything about these hills.
An hour later we turned down the lanterns in her cabin, put them in the front windows, and then slipped quietly out the back door. I had my field belt, the spotting scope, a bedroll, water, and the SIG. 45. Laurie May had fixed up a bag of bread and a couple of hard-boiled eggs. The shepherds seemed to sense our need for stealth; they were sticking close and moving in silence. There was a weak moon rising above the mountains, so between her knowledge of the path and a borrowed walking stick, I managed to stay upright as we climbed through the rock rubble toward what she had called the backbone ridge. We seemed to be heading right into the side of it as the ground rose, and I wondered if we were going to have to go straight up and over. But then we walked into a dense stand of gnarled pines whose branches were low enough to require constant swatting. Laurie May was moving surprisingly fast for a woman of her age, which hopefully meant she knew right where she was going. After about seventy-five feet of pine needles and bugs going down my shirt, we broke out in front of a crack in the ridge.