He stared out the window again. “I told you, I gave that world up when I came back here,” he said. “Bad for the soul.”
I didn’t say anything. Let him fill the void this time.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Against my better judgment, such as it is. How can I find you?”
“We’ll find you,” I said.
Carrie and I had lunch in Marionburg, went back to the motel to make sure we had everything we needed, and then launched for Robbins County. I’d half-expected to see a Carrigan County cop car follow us out of town, but they apparently had bigger fish to fry. We’d divided our stuff into things to leave behind and gear we’d need up there, and left the excess in the motel room. We took my Suburban. I had Nathan’s shotgun. Carrie’s nasty little mamba stick was back in SBI custody, so now she had a nine in a belt holster.
She’d asked me to check her head wound, and to tell the truth, I wasn’t pleased with what I saw. The sutures were red and a little puffy-looking, and she admitted that she had a headache that wouldn’t go away. I asked her if she’d like to go back to the hospital for a quick checkup and maybe an antibiotic shot or at least another Betadine paint job, but she was adamant about getting on with it. I’d told her what Mose had said about Bill Hayes, and she seemed relieved.
It was midafternoon when we crossed the county line. We passed the usual tourist traffic on the two-lane main road as people came back from rafting trips and other excursions into Robbins County. We saw one cop car parked for a late lunch or coffee at a roadside eatery, but no other law enforcement activity on the road. If Mingo was expecting us, he wasn’t being obvious about it. The thought had crossed my mind that Hayes or someone in his office might tip off Mingo and his people, but I discarded the notion. Hayes might be afraid of the hard men in Robbins County, but I didn’t think he was part of their operation. He was preoccupied with problems closer to home.
We got to Laurie May’s place without seeing any of the local residents, and we hoped none of them saw us. I wasn’t worried about the honest citizens, but we hadn’t seen any people out in their yards or along the road leading up to her cabin. We stopped in front and waited for someone to come to the door. I saw Carrie playing absently with the stitches on her scalp and wondered how bad that mess hurt.
When no one came to the door, we decided to drive the vehicle around to the back so that it could not be seen from the river road or the lane coming up into the hollow itself. Carrie got out and went to the cabin’s back door and knocked. Nothing happened, so she knocked again, at which point I saw a shadow move behind the door’s curtain. I was still in the car and began easing my right hand down to the shotgun. The door swung open, revealing a short but large and densely bearded man standing in the doorway pointing an equally large shotgun in our general direction.
I probably couldn’t do anything for Carrie just then, not with a shotgun two feet from her chest. Frack saw the man with the gun and began growling. I told him to be quiet.
The man was staring at Carrie, who had frozen in place. “Who’re you?” he asked in a low voice. “What’re you-all doing here?”
“I came to see Laurie May,” Carrie replied, still not moving. I admired her poise-the muzzle of that gun looked like the twin tubes of the Holland Tunnel. “She knows us. Is she all right?”
He took a step backward into the kitchen and summoned somebody inside with a jerk of his head. A moment later his twin appeared in the doorway, holding another shotgun by the receiver, its barrels pointed down at the floor. Then I knew who they were-Laurie May had said she had twin boys, coal miners. The one who’d come to the door was looking over at me, and I nodded pleasantly. The other one slipped back out of sight. He returned after a minute and said something to his brother, who lowered his shotgun. Carrie turned in my direction and told me to come in.
Laurie May was in her bedroom, and when I saw her I swore out loud. Two black eyes, bruises on her face, and her badly bruised broomstick of a right leg stuck out from under the covers and rested on a quilt.
I looked over at one of the twins. “Nathan Creigh?”
He nodded.
“They made me tell ’em,” Laurie May said, blinking back tears. “That be-damned Nathan, he come in here and beat on me with my own walkin’ stick.”
Carrie approached the bed and took the old lady’s hand. “We know, Laurie May,” she said. “We know. And we know you’re no betrayer.”
“I ain’t,” Laurie May said with surprising vehemence. “I ain’t no betrayer. He beat on me. He done cracked my shinbone. He pushed me down, God damn his eyes.”
I introduced myself and Carrie to the twins. They weren’t tall, but they sure as hell were wide. Coal miners. One of them introduced himself as Bags, the other as David. They’d apparently changed their last names to Jones some years back, because neither one of them could abide the Creighs. Bags seemed to be in charge, so I decided to tell him why we were there. The twins listened in silence. Carrie apologized to Laurie May for bringing misery to her house, but Laurie May was defiant.
“My boys here, they fixin’ to go over there and clean out that rat’s nest,” she declared.
“They certainly need that, and more,” I said. “But let me tell you-all why we’re here. Maybe we can join forces.”
Carrie indicated with a nod of her head that I ought to take this back to the kitchen. She stayed behind with the old woman while I went out to the kitchen with the twins. There was coffee brewing, so we sat down around the table to talk. I noticed that there were four more shotguns and a few rifles stacked against one wall, and boxes of ammunition on the kitchen counter. They’d been planning a small war, from the looks of it.
I walked them through the background of why Carrie and I were up here, what Laurie May had done to help us, and what we thought was going on over in the next cove. The brothers listened in stony silence. At first, I got the impression that they were just being polite, letting me tell my story, and then they were going to proceed with whatever it was they’d planned. When I brought up the business of abducting and selling children, they drew closer. They were flinty individuals, toughened in the dark danger of the mines. They had thick shoulders and chests, bony faces, black beards, and gnarled hands that would never be entirely white again. But this talk of selling children visibly disturbed them.
It turned out that their plan was to go through the crack in the middle of the night and then walk down to the Creigh compound and slaughter every living thing, men, women, dogs, pigs, and chickens. It sounded good and traditional, but when I pointed out to them that they’d probably be shot down by snipers before they got within a quarter mile of the Creigh cabin, they were taken aback.
“There’s no more just driving up to the front porch, rolling down the windows, and going to town with shotguns,” I said. “They’re alerted over there. They may have spies in Marionburg who know we’ve left town, and they might even be coming here tonight. I got away from Nathan’s little jail cell, beat him to his knees in the process, and then I had to blow his sister’s head off because she threw down on me. The Creighs are not sitting over there watching television.”
This news really sobered them up. Carrie joined us from Laurie May’s bedroom and asked if she’d been seen by a doctor. They said no, but a healer she trusted had come by, and she’d prescribed bed rest, an herbal remedy for the pain, and immediate revenge. I had to smile.
“What’s your notion on all this?” David asked. His brother looked on with squinty-eyed interest.
“If that woman is selling children to perverted sons of bitches,” I said, “then we first need to find the children, and then take care of her and all her people. Keep in mind, if it is true, there are some mothers out there who’ve done a terrible thing, turning over their children to the likes of Grinny Creigh.”