“Where’s the woman?” I asked.
He just looked at me, his eyes squinting with hate. There was fresh blood trickling down between his fingers as he continued to hold his shattered hand against his body.
I repeated my question. He made no reply. I unlimbered the. 308, opened the bolt to make sure there was still a round in there, and then cycled it closed. I stood up and pointed the rifle at his face. As I pulled the trigger, I twitched the barrel a tiny bit high so that the heavy slug smacked into the tree instead. Even so, he felt the wallop and cried out despite his defiant expression. I jacked in another round and this time lowered the barrel to point at his belly. I asked him again: “Where’s the woman?”
“Go ‘head, do it,” he gasped. “Won’t do you no good, anyhow. She gone.”
“Gone where?” I asked. I lowered the muzzle so that it pointed at his genitals. He watched it as one would watch a snake between his legs.
“In the hole, by now,” he said. “She ain’t a’comin’ out, neither.”
“Did you bastards kill her?” I asked.
An evil sneer crossed his face. “Naw,” he said. “Hole does that. Takes a while. Go look, you want to. You’ll see.”
“Where is it, this hole?”
“Yonder,” he said, pointing with his enormous, frizzy beard toward the rock formation. He coughed, and for the first time I saw blood in his mouth and at the end of his nostrils. It was only then that I saw the hole in his shirtfront and realized I’d hit him twice with the same round. He was a big guy, but he was also mortally wounded, and I think he knew it.
“What’d you do with those children? Are they in the hole, too?”
He got a blank look on his face, then understood. He shook his head. “Wasn’t but one young’un up here,” he said. “Grinny got the rest.”
He closed his eyes and his breathing became more labored, as if the effort to speak had winded him. I lowered the rifle barrel. The shepherds were nosing around the motionless dog handler but keeping their distance. I thought I heard a sound over in the direction of the rock formation, but the dogs weren’t reacting. Still, I knew I had very little time left.
I knelt down again to get closer to his face. “I’m here for Nathan Creigh,” I said. “Where is he?”
He started breathing in even shallower gasps, as if building up enough oxygen to speak again. “Camp’s yonder, by the hole. Nathan tole us to find the third man, after he shot t’other one. He’ll be a’waitin’ fer ye. You that lawman what kilt Rue Creigh?”
I said yes.
“Be damned, then. He said you’d be a’comin’. That Grinny would point the way. He’ll be a’waitin’. You a dead man walkin’.”
“Right now I think you’re a dead man talking,” I replied. I pulled his injured hand out from his armpit just to make damned sure he wasn’t holding a pocket gun. He groaned with pain when I moved his wrecked hand. Then I got up. His hat was lying in the grass. I retrieved that and his shotgun, then called in the dogs. I walked fifty yards toward the rock formation and then gave the dogs the hat as a scent target. No dummies, they promptly headed back to where I’d left the bearded man. I called them back in and sent them in the opposite direction. They cut a trail pretty quickly, and we started down the hill to find Nathan, hopefully before Nathan found us.
22
It turned out that the Creighs had set up a permanent camp just around the corner of the landward end of the big rock formation. All my efforts to be tactically discreet came to nothing when the dogs and I blundered out of the woods and there it was: two ancient, crude log cabins, a fire pit, cages for their dogs, the obligatory junk piles, a privy, and Carrie, sitting with her back to a small tree, a grimly determined look on her face and the end of a rope in her hand. She had her injured hand back under her armpit again. The rope had two turns wrapped around the tree. The rest of it led right to the base of the rock formation.
“Knew you’d show up sometime,” she said. “You have yourself a nice war up there?”
“Where’s Nathan?” I asked, shotgun ready. The dogs did their usual running around after greeting Carrie.
“Oh, he’s hanging around,” she said, indicating the other end of the rope. I walked over to where the rope disappeared into a stand of hawthorn. I pushed through the tangle and finally got to see the glass hole.
It was indeed an ancient lava tube: It looked like a long funnel, perhaps twenty, thirty feet across at the top and necking down to twelve feet across about a hundred feet down. The sides were polished basalt, and I could see why they called it the glass hole. At the bottom was a pool of dark blue water. At first, I thought the water was reflecting the sky, but then realized it couldn’t be-the tube went down at about a sixty-degree angle, so that water had to be connected to the main lake on the other side of the black tower. At the bottom of the rope, halfway down, was Nathan, hanging on with both hands and swinging gently from side to side.
“Okay,” I said. “How’d you manage this trick?”
“He got a little hands-on after he’d sent his boys out to find you,” she said wearily. “So I lay back and let him. Once he was distracted, I head-butted him, kneed him, whacked his limpy leg again, stuck an elbow in each eye, and then cold-cocked him with that tree branch over there by the fire.” She looked up at me. “Is Mose-?”
“Mose is gonna be okay, I think. He had his old police vest on under that coat.”
“Thank God,” she said. “I heard that round hit him and he went down like a tree. I saw all that blood while those ugly fucks were tying me up, and I just knew…”
“They were there already?”
“Apparently,” she said. “Nathan positioned them outside our camp, waited for his shot, and then they piled in and got me before I could get to a weapon.”
“That’s our Nathan,” I said, looking down at the hanging figure in the hole. “I managed to surprise his helpers. The bearded guy shot his buddy by mistake, and I took him and one dog out. The only problem we still have is that there are four of his dogs out there somewhere.”
“What do we do with Nathan?” she asked.
“Cut the rope,” I said. “Or not-let him hang down there until he dies. Except-”
“What?”
“First I want to talk to him. The bearded guy said they brought one of the kids up here, but the rest were still with Grinny.”
She became immediately alarmed. “I haven’t seen her,” she said, and then looked over at the hole.
I helped her tie off the rope, and then we both went back over to the edge of the glass hole. There was shrubbery growing right up to the lip, and woods creatures had probably been dying in that thing for centuries. Those shining sides looked entirely alien among the bushes and rocks at the top. There was absolutely no way anything could climb back out of that deadly funnel, especially if the climber was wet. It reminded me of one of those pitcher plants that trap insects. The light reflecting in from the tube’s other end in the main lake made the hole look almost infinite in depth.
I had thought that Nathan was holding his end of the rope, but when I looked closely, I could see that she had tied a noose around his two wrists. He was literally hanging from the rope by his hands, which looked larger than they would normally be. I shouted down the hole and heard my voice reverberating off those glasslike sides. Nathan raised his head but could not open his swollen eyes. Carrie had apparently grown tired of being abducted by Creighs; he looked positively battered.
“Hey, Nathan, can you swim?” I said.
I thought he muttered something, but he was too far down for me to hear it. “Let’s pull him up some,” I said, and so we did. We got him to within ten feet of the lip, but the sides were so smooth he might as well still have been a hundred feet down. He was, in fact, positively battered.