“Where are you?” she asked. Her voice sounded a bit off.
I told her and then asked her the same question.
“At your fancy cabin,” she said. “My room at the main lodge was on the government’s nickel, which is no longer on offer.”
“Good, I’m glad someone’s using it. I wish I were there instead of out here in this damned cave.”
“You didn’t tell me you had all this scotch here,” she said. “I may have overindulged. Just a little.”
That accounted for her voice and slightly slurred words. “Good for you,” I said. “Having second thoughts about resigning, are we?”
“Yep,” she said. “Standing on lofty principle usually means the next step is down. The loftier, the farther down. I should have eaten something. I’ve already got a headache.”
“Regrets?”
“Well…,” she said, hesitating. “I’ve discovered that being in the SBI gave me most of my identity. Now…”
“Now you feel naked,” I said. “No badge, no creds, no gun, no authority. And guess how I know all this?”
“Yeah, I suppose you do. I’m desperate to pursue this thing with the Creighs, but I’m no longer a player.” I heard a hiccup. “May have fucked up.”
“Would they take you back?”
“You know? I’m not so sure. My boss didn’t try very hard to talk me out of it, now that I think about it. Of course, he was pissed over what we’d been doing here in the hills.”
“Drink lots of water,” I said. “Get some sleep. Everything looks better in the daylight.”
“I won’t,” she said. “Daylight means mirrors. What are you going to do?”
“Laurie May suggested I hide out in Grinny Creigh’s hollow because that’s the last place they’d go looking for me. But Nathan just showed up to get some dogs, so my plan may have to change, and soon. There’s no good cover where I am now.”
“I should be out there with you,” she said. “This is my beef.”
“Right now you’re more useful to me in Marionburg,” I said. Especially with a snoot full of scotch, I thought. “I may yet need extracting if these guys get lucky.”
“I suppose,” she said. There was a moment of silence, a noise I couldn’t identify, and then I heard her say “Oh, shit.” Then the connection was broken.
I immediately called back. The phone gave me a canned system message saying it was no longer on the air.
What the hell had just happened? Had the Creighs gone after Carrie? In Carrigan County? I shut the phone off and restowed it. I looked at the shepherds, who were lying there alert, awaiting orders. Something told me to get out of that cave and to go in motion. I told the dogs to stay down and stepped out of the cave to reconnoiter. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that Nathan and his dogs might be on my trail pretty soon, so I couldn’t stay up here on the ridge, and it wouldn’t be terribly bright to let them catch me in that crack in the rock.
Okay, we’d go down to Grinny’s. If Nathan and his dogs had tracked me toward the cabin, he’d think his dogs simply wanted to go back to the pen. I hoped.
I roused the shepherds and we set out down the ridge. There was no cover until I got within a hundred feet of the cabin, and then we slipped into a tree line. I went downhill along the tree line until we got abeam of the cabin itself. I put the shepherds on a long down and crept to the house side of the trees, some thirty feet from the porch. This was where Nathan’s black hats had been standing the night they brought me up to socialize with Grinny. The wind was slightly in my face, which hopefully would keep the dog pack behind the cabin from detecting us. Grinny’s reputed second sight might present a more dangerous problem. There was some light coming through the curtained windows, but it was yellow and diffused, probably lantern light. I couldn’t see anyone inside or on the grounds.
I was trying to figure out what to do next when I heard another vehicle coming up the pasture road below the cabin. It sounded like a modern SUV instead of one of the ancient pickup trucks these folks seemed to favor. Whoever it was knew where he was going and drove right up to the front of the cabin. I settled down in the pine thicket to watch as the vehicle, a dark-colored Chevrolet Tahoe, stopped and shut down.
For a long minute, nothing happened, and then the front door of the cabin opened and Grinny Creigh stepped out onto the front porch. A foreign-looking man got out of the SUV and greeted her in the lilting accent of Southwest Asia. He went halfway up the steps and stopped when she told him to wait there, and then she went back into the cabin.
I studied the man as he waited in the dim moonlight. He was perhaps five-seven or -eight and in his late thirties. He had a sharply outlined, close-cropped black beard that joined his mustache, and he had the prominent nose of Pakistan or perhaps India. He wore khaki trousers and a light windbreaker, under which I could see a cell phone and a pager clipped to his belt. He waited patiently on the front steps, looking around at the mountains and open fields around the cabin as if he’d seen it all before.
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 second 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 into the cabin. Then she turned back to the man, who had stepped 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 ones 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’em, 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, suspicions-confirmed 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 toward her, which she set down behind her against the door. Her huge bulk completely hid it from view.