“Can we make it to the lake before they catch up?” Greenberg asked. He seemed to be doing just fine physically, without any signs of being out of breath. Of course, he wasn’t carrying as much gear as I was. That had to be it.
“If the men keep the dogs with them, on tracking leads, then we can beat them. If they turn them loose, I don’t know. We get over this spine, it’s all downhill from there.”
“That’s good,” Greenberg said.
Actually it wasn’t. The slope was much steeper going down, and my thighs were burning within a few minutes of starting down that hillside. The footing on Rockslide Mountain was loose shale, rocks, and tufted grass, and I felt as if I were falling forward more than running down the hill. Greenberg started to slow down, as I had thought he might. It was always much harder to go down than up. The dogs weren’t doing too much better. Frack lost his balance and tumbled for ten yards before getting back up, and then he did it again. Behind us the noise of the dog pack seemed louder, but I kept telling myself it was just the acoustics caused by the rock walls above us. The bad news was that it didn’t sound like the dead pig had slowed anyone down.
We finally reached the bottom, which was a jumble of large boulders in front of a tangled pile of winter-killed pine trees. The line of debris stretched hundreds of feet in both directions along the base of the mountain. Greenberg collapsed in front of a big rock.
“Fuck it,” he gasped. “You were right—my legs are done. We’ve got a pretty good field of fire here. Those dogs show up, let’s waste ’em.”
I glanced down at Greenberg’s .45; lovely weapon though it was, the pursuing dogs would have to be at our throats for pistols to do any good, especially shooting uphill. I dropped my gear and picked a suitable rock for rifle work. The shepherds flopped down in the woods beyond the debris field, panting heavily. The sounds of baying hounds echoed clearly now from within the trees up above our position. I shook my canteen, but it was empty. Somehow the top had come off in the big scramble down the slope. I yelled a command at the shepherds to put them into a long down.
The afternoon shadows were deepening fast down here, but there was plenty of light for the Leupold scope. I attached the rifle’s arm sling, contracted my body into a sitting position behind the rock, and pointed the rifle up in the direction of all the noise. I began to scan the edge of the trees from which we had escaped. I had enough ammo to thin out the pack leaders and hopefully convince the followers to stop and talk things over.
“There they are,” Greenberg said. “Swing right.”
I traversed the rifle and saw the first three dogs clearing the edge of the forest and coming down the hill in our direction. I lined up on the biggest one and squeezed off a single shot at about two hundred yards. At first I thought I’d missed, but then the dog tumbled down the hillside in a hail of dust and gravel and lay still. The rest kept coming, and there were more appearing at the edge of the woods. I set up on one running in another pod of three and dropped that one, too. The dog nearest to that one looked over its shoulder but never broke stride. Greenberg was crouching over his rock, watching.
“Get under cover,” I said to Greenberg while stuffing more rounds into the magazine. “The handlers will have rifles.”
Greenberg dropped and then crawled on his stomach to the rock behind which I was hiding. He began sweeping the ridge with his binoculars, looking for the men behind the dogs. I fired again and swore when I saw dirt fly. I dropped a third one, a through-and-through lengthwise, and this one died hard, screaming as it rolled down the hill. That stopped the ones behind it, and I took the opportunity to shoot one more before the pack finally scattered. But the lead wave, now down to three truly ugly dogs, was inside of a hundred yards away and coming strong.
Greenberg was sitting alongside me now. He had his .45 out, waiting calmly. I dropped one of the final three, which somersaulted into a twitching heap. The other two were at forty yards, still coming fast, teeth clearly visible, ropes of drool flying.
“I’ve got one round left,” I said.
“I’ve got the world’s supply,” Greenberg said, brandishing a spare magazine. “You keep the ones up the hill honest.”
I steadied the rifle back up to where the rest of the dog pack was milling around, not willing to run by the one gut-shot dog that was still screaming on the hillside. I sighted in on one especially big dog and dropped it with a hindquarters shot. It went down with enough drama to convince the rest of the pack to withdraw into the woods. I lifted my eye from the scope in time to see Greenberg sighting carefully from a two-handed grip right between the two oncoming dogs, whose growls were now audible. At the last minute, he fired, right and then left, shooting both dogs through-and-through. They tumbled into a single bleeding heap about ten feet in front of them, too badly hurt to scream.
I swung the scope back up the hill, looking for signs of humans in the tree line. There was a big boom next to my right ear as Greenberg dispatched one of the wounded dogs, which had begun to crawl toward us. When I looked back up the hill I thought I saw a face in the trees.
“Down!” I yelled, and we both ducked behind our rock just as a bullet blasted a spray of granite bits all over us. Three more rounds came down the hill, each one placed right where our two faces had been seconds before.
“Those the usual warning shots?” Greenberg asked with a grin, and I shook my head.
We executed a high-speed slither into the tangle of downed trees. When we came out the other side, I whistled up the dogs and we took off running again, keeping well into the woods, which by now were deep in shadow. We could no longer see the firebreak lane, but I knew in which direction the lake was and, by this juncture, all slopes headed down would end up in the water. There was no more shooting from up on the ridge. I was hoping that the dog pack had decided that we were definitely bad juju. We jogged for fifteen minutes and then took a breather. My thighs were hurting again, and I was glad for the momentary respite.
Until a huge dog came out of the woods from our right and lunged at my face. I ducked the snapping jaws by throwing myself backward hard enough to crack my head on the ground. The dog went over my head, landing in a heap, but then whirled around, jaws agape, only to be nailed by Frack, who seized it by the throat with a huge roar. The two dogs went down in a blurred tangle of feet, teeth, and flying hair. The attacking dog was bigger than Frack, but the shepherd had a death grip on its throat and it was already suffocating. Frick came by in a blur, went over a log, and attacked a second dog head-on, biting the attacker’s right front leg off at the elbow and sending the amputee screaming back up the hill with Frick in hot pursuit, the dog’s leg still in her mouth. Greenberg shot a third dog that had slid to a stop when Frick attacked, and then a fourth in midair as it launched itself over our position. I felt helpless without a close-in gun, but somehow I’d managed to get my knife out and was back-to-back with Greenberg.
The woods went silent except for the final sounds of the deadly struggle as Frack completed strangling the bigger dog. It was now down on it side, its eyes bulging and its rear legs kicking helplessly. Frick came bounding back to us, still carrying her bloody trophy. The air was filled with a sudden acrid smell of gunpowder and then dog manure as the big dog died.
Greenberg apparently saw something move out on the edge of his vision. He fired two snap-shot rounds in the general direction of the sound. There was a yelp in the woods, but I couldn’t tell if it was human or canine. We got down behind some logs and waited. I reminded myself not to make any more assumptions. After five minutes, Greenberg took a deep breath.
“Chapter two,” he said quietly, and we started running again, the shepherds bounding alongside, their hackles still up. Greenberg loaded his spare magazine and racked the SIG as we ran through the trees. I wanted to look back over my shoulder but had to pay attention to my feet, as the slope had steepened noticeably. Greenberg stumbled and went down in a heap of pine needles and furious language. Then we burst out into the open,
picked our way across a wide strip of rocks and gravel, pushed through a ten-foot-wide stand of stubby, stunted pines, and slid down a rocky bank to the edge of the lake. Once down on the water, I tried to decide which way to go. A rifle bullet kicked up a waterspout ten feet out in the lake, and we both dived back to the base of the bank as the boom from the rifle arrived. I whistled the dogs over from the water’s edge.
“Which way?” Greenberg said.
“If he’s up high, he can’t see us as long as we stay under this bank. Let’s go that way as far as that point, see if we can spot the island.”
We hunched over and went west along the lakeshore, making sure we couldn’t be seen by the long-range shooter up on the ridge. We’d gone fifty yards when a goddamned dog started barking at us from up on top of the bank. Greenberg stepped out and fired once. He missed, but the dog jumped back when the ground next to him blew up. Another bullet smacked a waterspout into the air offshore, indicating that the shooter, taking his cue from the dog, now knew where we were and, more important, in which direction we were running.
“Fucking dogs,” Greenberg said, prompting disapproving looks from the shepherds. We were still a hundred yards from the point, and, to make matters more dangerous, our friendly bank dissolved into a narrow, rocky beach at the point itself, creating a no-cover zone.
“We’re going to have to wait until it’s dark,” I said. “We can’t cross that open area with riflemen up there.”
The dog returned, barking furiously at us from the edge of the bank. Then a second one joined in. They weren’t making any effort to come down to the shore, but they were making it absolutely clear to anyone watching from the ridge where their quarry was holed up. I judged we had another hour at least before it would be dark enough to try to cross that open ground, and then we’d still have to deal with an unknown number of dogs. A third hound joined in the noisy chorus up above, and yet another heavy round punched a hole in the lake, followed this time by the distinctive boom of a black-powder rifle. A second round hit the top of the bank, blowing a spray of rocks and dirt out into the water and scaring the dogs, but only for a moment.
As long as we stayed down below the rim of the bank, we were safe from gunfire. But we couldn’t get away, and, as more dogs joined the ones up on the bank, it was only a matter of time before the pack mentality took over and our pursuers would spill over the bank and come to dinner.
“How many rounds you got left?” I asked.
“Not enough for all that,” Greenberg said, pointing with his head at the rim of the bank.
Another heavy bullet hit the top of the bank. The shooter was either trying to keep us pinned down until others could get down to the lake, or he was just showing off, I thought. A puff of wind blew in from the lake toward the shore, which gave me an idea.
“Got your lighter?”
Greenberg patted his pocket, nodded, and fished it out.
I took it and began looking around for a small, dried-out bush. I found one and ripped it up out of the sandy ground. The barking and snarling from up above was getting more enthusiastic. Greenberg took careful aim and dropped one of the dogs. Its body came tumbling down the slope, which seemed to just make the survivors hungrier. The two shepherds lay with flattened ears next to the water, for the first time looking worried.
“You gonna start a fucking forest fire?” Greenberg asked.
“A little one,” I said. “Remember that gravel strip? That should act as a firebreak. Hopefully the fire will drive the dogs and the humans off the bank.”
“But what if it gets loose?”
“We’ll blame it on God,” I said, setting the lighter to the dried branches. “There’s precedent: It’s a burning bush.”
Greenberg rolled his eyes as I climbed up the bank and then whipped the smoldering bush around my head until it burst into bright flames. The dogs suddenly shut up. I threw the flaring bush up into the line of dry pines at the top. At first, the pack went nuts, but when the wind from the lake gusted and began to blow a flame-front down the lakeside strip of vegetation, the dogs decided enough was enough. I peered over the top just long enough to be sure and saw a satisfying brush fire with lots of useful smoke roaring down the beach line.
I signaled Greenberg. Time to go. When we got to the edge of the clearing, the fire behind us was audible, pushed along the lake margins by a suddenly interested onshore breeze. So far, the gravel strip was doing its job, but I didn’t know how far that strip extended. Greenberg was right: I might have just started a major forest fire. But that beat being eaten by a pack of dogs.
“We gonna run for it?” Greenberg asked as we crouched under the last of the cover.
“Any better ideas?”
Greenberg took a deep breath and then nodded. We took off across the open stretch of beach, the shepherds running with us. Amazingly, Frick still had her trophy leg. There was no gunfire as we splashed through the shallows at the point of the rocky spine and then around it, where we were again sheltered by a high bank. The point with the island at the end was right ahead, and there appeared to be cover all the way as we were now on the back side of the ridge. The sun was finally setting, glowing yellow through the big cloud of smoke behind us and making it doubly difficult for anyone up on that ridge to get a good shot. The glow of the fire silhouetted the lower spine of the ridge as we moved out onto the island itself. I kept telling myself that the fire was diminishing, but that may have been wishful thinking. Now all we had to do was figure out how to raise those two canoes and get the flock out of there.
We made it back to my cabin at just after four in the morning. Greenberg had brought his stuff down to the lake in his personal pickup truck, which now had both boats strapped in the bed out in the lodge’s lower parking lot. I made some coffee, and we dropped into chairs out on the creekside porch.
“Well, that was fun,” I said. I wanted some scotch in my coffee, but my legs were too rubbery to get up. “So now what?”
“We witnessed a near murder, executed right in front of the Robbins County sheriff,” Greenberg said, lighting up a cigarette. “Can’t just let that sit.”
“We witnessed an apparent near murder,” I said. “While basically trespassing on private property and spying on private citizens, without a warrant or jurisdiction and, in my case, against the explicit orders of the local sheriff not to leave town. Then, let’s see, we shot somebody’s dogs, killed some wildlife, and started a forest fire in a national park. Can’t wait to go in and tell local law all that good news.”
“Or,” Greenberg said, “we set off to take a perfectly innocent hike in said national park. How were we to know we’d strayed out of the park and into Rob-bins County? We rested under some rocks while we tried to decide where we were. Saw some shit. Left. Got chased by guys with guns and a pack of mad dogs. Defended ourselves, from them and the damned wild pig. One of the bullets fired at us hit a rock and started a brush fire, not a forest fire, and we had to escape by boat. Don’t know who was doing all the shooting, or who that woman was who smothered that kid in front of the sheriff, but somebody should really look into that.”
I looked at him. “Who would believe that bullshit?”
Greenberg squinted at me through a blue cloud. “What are you saying? We’re just going to forget this all happened?”
“Hell, no. We just have to pick the right person to tell, that’s all.”
We both said the name at the same time: Carrie Santángelo of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.
I looked at my watch. “It’s Sunday. No, it’s Monday morning. Let’s get some sleep, call her later this morning. See what she makes of all this.”
He nodded, rubbing his thighs.
“Told you down was harder,” I said, trying manfully not to rub my own quivering thigh muscles. “You really okay going to state law with this?”
“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” he said.
Over in a corner Frick still had her leg. I�
�d tried to take it away, but she’d given me one of those “I caught this leg fair and square and I am not going to turn aloose of it, friend” shepherd looks. I decided to go get some scotch after all.
“I know it’s four in the morning,” I said. “I need a drink. How ‘bout you?”
“Thought you’d never ask,” he said. “Down was a bastard.”
6
In the event, Special Agent Carrie Santángelo did not make it up to Marionburg until late Monday afternoon. Greenberg went back to his motel over on the Tennessee side after returning Mose’s gear. I heard via the grapevine in town that there had been a brush fire over in the Crown Lake area, and that a Robbins County fire truck and bulldozer team had been needed to contain it. The cause of the blaze was unknown, but careless four-wheelers were suspected. I had checked in with the Carrigan County Sheriff’s Office before going to dinner to see if anything was scheduled for the next day, but they had had no word back from Robbins County on the supposed fight victim or any warrants. They’d told me to check in again later.
Carrie had returned my call first thing Monday morning and said she could be up there by one or two. She arrived at the lodge at five thirty instead, having been delayed by the usual Monday morning crises in Raleigh. I called Greenberg over, went out for beer, and ordered in pizza, and then we debriefed her on our exciting excursion to Robbins County.
“How much of this have you told your bosses in the DEA?” she asked Greenberg immediately. He said he hadn’t reported anything. Yet.
“And you?” she asked me. “Have you talked to Sheriff Hayes?”
I shook my head. The sheriff had been unavailable all day, and my status as a potential manslaughter suspect had apparently lost a lot of traction.
She popped the top off another beer and sat back in her chair. She was wearing a dark business pantsuit and looked older than when I had first met her, but still entirely streetable. Older is a relative term.
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