SPIDER MOUNTAIN

by P. T. Deutermann

  Now she had no face at all. First Nathan and now Rue. Grinny Creigh and what was left of her clan would declare war over this. “We have to get out of this county,” I said. I told her what I’d done to Nathan and how I thought he and his boys had been able to find me.

  “Laurie May?” Carrie said. “No way.”

  “Either blood’s thicker than water, or they may simply have scared it out of her. Or hurt her, for that matter. Nathan may have used those two dogs to make her talk, not find me.” I took out my penknife and hacked away at the duct tape. Carrie’s clothes smelled of the blood and bits splattered all over the inside of the truck.

  “Where’re your shoes?” I asked.

  She nodded in the truck’s direction. “In there, in the backseat,” she said. It was obvious she wasn’t going anywhere near the truck, and she was licking her lips as if she were fighting down nausea.

  I felt about the same way, but she had to have shoes, and I also wanted that gun. I had to hold my nose and my gorge while I retrieved Carrie’s shoes and socks from the floor of the back seat and also Rue’s handgun, a stainless steel .357 Magnum. Big gun for a woman to handle, but she’d still managed to get one off and damned hear hit me with it. She hadn’t hesitated one second, either, even while staring at eternity down the barrels of a ten-gauge. I saw her cell phone lying on the seat, but she’d bled all over it, and I wasn’t about to touch it. There were two unopened and unsullied bottles of water on the floor in the back, and I did take those. The smell in the truck was horrible, and suddenly I just had to back out of there.

  I called the shepherds while Carrie got her shoes on, and then we got going down the dirt road. I figured it’d be daylight in three hours or so, and we needed to put as much distance as possible between us and the Creighs while we could.

  “You okay?” Carrie asked me after five minutes.

  “I’ll live,” I said. “I’ve shot one other perp during my career, and I’ve witnessed a few more.”

  “Is it always that bad?” she asked.

  “There’s always a lot more blood than you’d expect,” I replied, not really wanting to talk about this just now. I knew it had been purely a self-defense shoot, but I still had this cold pit in my stomach. It wasn’t like on the television, where there was a medium bang and a foreboding stain. One moment I’d been looking at and talking to a living human being and, in her own blowsy fashion, an attractive young woman. The next second there was nothing but a pumping stump where her head had been.

  She got one off, I kept telling myself. Close enough for you to hear it go by, too. The question was—had she been thinking self-defense, too? Or had she just been that hard-boiled? Someone else in my shoes, without police training and reflexes, might still have hesitated when she produced that gun. That .357 would have had about the same effect on my face.

  “Don’t torture yourself,” Carrie said, as if reading my thoughts. “She told me Grinny had sent her into Marionburg to get close to you and then put a knife in your ribs—her words—but the shepherd alerted and you turned her down. Said you hurt her womanly pride. That most men most definitely did not turn her down.”

  “Her mother’s daughter,” I said, calling the dogs in closer now that we were getting nearer to the paved road. “How far is it to the Carrigan County line?”

  “Eight, nine miles on the river road,” she said. “What’s the matter with your foot?”

  I told her about getting out of the shackle in the barn. As we reached the pavement, I looked at my watch. Three thirty.

  “Right is southeast, toward Marionburg. The road follows the river. I was going to suggest we start jogging, make better time, but if your foot’s injured—”

  “It’s not like we have much of a choice,” I said grimly. “Let’s boogie.”

  We made pretty good time, but only because we were going downhill for most of it. We walked the few upgrades we encountered and stopped often to listen for vehicles. My foot made it clear that it was going to get even with me. At times I wished it would just go ahead and fall off. My main concern was that once Rue’s body was found, they’d definitely get those dogs out. We’d left a clear track down that dirt road, and the pavement wouldn’t disguise the scent very much. I thought about crossing the river to interrupt the scent trail, but the stream was getting wider as it flowed downhill, and I was afraid we’d lose too much time. We badly needed to get out of Robbins County.

  About an hour before sunrise, we came upon a whitewater rafting outfitter’s place situated between the road and the stream. There was a log lodge building, which advertised tickets and supplies, and a dirt parking lot with chains across the entrance and exit. We stopped to catch our breath and then looked at each other. A raft ride would be a whole lot easier than jogging down the road. And it would eliminate our spoor.

  We snuck around to the back of the place and found canoes hanging upside down on racks and a row of inflatable rafts stacked on their sides, big ones, medium ones, and even two-man jobs, all attached to a large oak tree by a cable with a padlock. The wire and lock were mostly there for show, because the wire ran through individual rope handles on the rafts. I cut out one of the medium, eight-man rafts, and we pushed it down to the ramp. There were paddles strapped inside as well as life vests. We unstrapped two paddles, put on some damp life vests, loaded the shepherds, and pushed out into the stream.

  “Ever done this before?” I asked.

  “Once,” she said. “In Colorado. Much bigger raft, with professional guides. I was just along for the ride. Never felt so helpless in my life.”

  “Those are big rivers. This stream shouldn’t be too bad. I think we can mostly drift with the current.”

  “So is there a reason that place called itself a whitewater rafting outfit?” she asked pointedly.

  “Probably in the spring when this thing is up and running,” I replied, with more confidence than I actually felt. I’d been out a couple of times but would have to admit I knew next to nothing about navigating real rapids. Fortunately, it was late summer and there shouldn’t be enough water in the stream to build any real rapids ahead. If there were, we could always get out and resume our cross-country marathon.

  “Do you think this will slow up the pursuit any?” she asked, again mirroring my own thoughts. I was dragging my left foot, sock and all, in the cold water. It felt wonderful. Getting the boot off had not been wonderful. I’d cut away the laces and then let the weight of the water pull it off.

  “If they use dogs, they’ll know we hit the river with a raft. Then they’ll have to search both sides to find us, and the dogs won’t be of much use.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  My mind was foggy, and my foot was getting a good start on becoming a block of ice. I realized that getting into the raft was mostly going to be a comfortable break in an otherwise precarious escape plan. Once M. C. Mingo got a look into Rue’s truck, every cop in the entire country and all the black hats would be on our trail. And getting into Carrigan County wasn’t necessarily going to solve our problems. Mingo could fax over some crime-scene photos to Sheriff Hayes’s office and we might get rounded up and handed right back over to our nemesis. I ducked her question.

  “What else did Rue reveal on the way to Grinny’s cabin?” I asked. “She say what they planned to do with you?”

  “Mingo knows I’m not with the SBI anymore,” she said.

  “Which meant he was worried enough to check.”

  “Yes, I suppose. I tried to bluff her, tell her there’d be consequences when I got back.”

  “And?”

  “And she said something along the lines of ‘Honey, it ain’t like you comin’ back.’”

  “Well, there you are,” I said. “Now she’s dead instead of you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said wearily. “It was still pretty awful.”

  “Worse because it was a woman getting shot?”

  I had to think about that for a moment. �
�Yes, I think so. That’s probably not PC, and I know she was a snake, but…”

  She moved closer to me in the back of the raft. Under other circumstances it would have been a very pleasant ride through the soft night. The stream was about sixty feet wide, and the raft was just sailing along peacefully. We were both in the back, and the shepherds were at our feet. The raft would bump into the occasional rock or one of the banks, spin lazily, and rejoin the current. We’d stowed the two sweeps, and I’d shoved the shotgun into two nylon safety harness loops on the side. Large trees overhung the banks, and the dim moonlight peered in and out of the leaves. We’d seen no vehicles on the road above, and after ten minutes or so I think we both fell asleep.

  Which is how the waterfall surprised us. I awoke to feel the back end of the raft coming up and the front tipping down dangerously. By the time I got my wits about me we were over the edge and dropping like the proverbial stone. I grabbed a safety loop with one hand and Carrie with the other about the same moment that we hit the water below with a surprisingly painful thump. Both shepherds slid forward to the bow of the raft and were catapulted back to the middle when the raft folded up into an inflatable sandwich for an instant. I think the only reason we all hadn’t gone into the water was that we had been grouped back at the stern of the raft.

  Carrie swore as the raft did a giddy three-sixty and we got a look at the falls, which fortunately were only about six feet high. But now we found out why they called themselves a whitewater rafting company. The river’s banks were closing in, and the current was beginning to really assert itself.

  “Reveille, reveille,” I said, reaching for one of the paddle sweeps. I hauled the dogs back to where we were, and Carrie pulled out a sweep.

  “What do we do?” she said, shouting because the water was getting noisy. The raft hit a big boulder and whipped around, sending us backward down the increasingly turbulent stream.

  “Not this,” I yelled, and began to sweep with the paddle to get us going bow first before we hit something again. Carrie copied what I was doing, and we fought each other for a minute before we realized what was happening.

  “Get up front,” I called. “Try to keep us from hitting anything dead-on.”

  She scrambled to the front of the boat as I finally got the damned thing across and then aligned properly in the current. The dogs were staying low and giving me reproachful looks. I wondered if shepherds got seasick.

  Ahead was a long, straight channel of high, slab-sided rocks and whitewater. This stretch must be really something in the spring, I thought, as we went over another low waterfall neither of us had seen in the darkness. Carrie gave a whoop and then disappeared in a blast of spray and bad language. If it had been daylight this might have even been fun. The good news was that we were making good distance in the suddenly strong current. The bad news was that we were effectively out of control, since neither of us knew what we were doing. And it was starting to get light, which meant that soon there would be eyes on the shore trying to find us.

  We were shoved sideways to one side of the main stream, and the boat hung up on something, which resulted in cold water pouring over one gunwale in alarming quantities. The dogs scrambled instinctively to the other side, and the weight shift dislodged the boat before either of us was ready. Once more we were rolling downstream backward. I didn’t know much, but I knew that was a prescription for disaster, and I yelled at Carrie to pull hard on her sweep. She called back that she was trying, and then the damned boat lunged sideways and settled into a whirlpool, spinning us sickeningly in three complete circles before spitting us out into the main channel again.

  And then it was over. The river catapulted us out of one final, narrow stone chute into a broad expanse of black water and went back to sleep. I didn’t know how long we’d been in the rapids, such as they were, but it had seemed forever. The river widened out again and entered a long, deep curve, once more embraced by large trees on either bank. We were both wet and, even in the late-summer dawn, cold. Frick and Frack were disgusted at our ineptitude and wouldn’t look at me.

  The shotgun was sloshing around in about three inches of water, so I shipped the oar and extracted the heavy gun. I ejected the two sodden cartridges, reloaded with semi-dry ones from my pockets, and put the gun across my knees. Carrie crawled toward the back of the raft, laying her oar down in the bottom, but the current had thrown us to the outside of the big bend, and the raft crunched to a halt in some gravel. Carrie grabbed her oar, got up on her knees, and tried to push us off the gravel bar. I shifted to the port side to unload the part that was aground, and she got up into a crouch to put her body weight into the push.

  Just as she succeeded in pushing us off, she grunted painfully and pitched headfirst out of the boat as the echo of a long gun came booming across the water. A second round slashed the air in front of my face, and then a third smashed a big waterspout at the bow of the raft as we swung back out into the current. I flung myself flat into the bottom of the raft and tried to see where the fire was coming from. Two more rounds came in, both raising waterspouts in the middle of the raft, which I realized was now filling with water and starting to sink. The shepherds were scrambling around in the rising water right beside me.

  Then I saw them: two vehicles parked nose out on a high bank on the road side of the river, about fifty yards ahead. One a civilian van, one a cop car. I caught a muzzle flash from between them as another round ripped all the way through the fabric of the raft. The raft’s forward motion had stopped. I couldn’t see what had happened to Carrie and desperately wanted to roll out of the raft, but didn’t dare expose myself. Then I realized I was still gripping the shotgun. I tipped the barrels to make sure there was no water inside and then fired both in the general direction of the vehicles. Even partially wet, both cartridges functioned as advertised, and the shooting stopped long enough for me to roll sideways out of the raft. The dogs jumped in with me, and we started swimming awkwardly toward the same bank the shooters were on. When my knees banged on some bottom rocks I realized I could make better time by scrambling through the shallows, which were now out of the line of fire from the vehicles.

  I searched back upstream in the morning twilight for any signs of Carrie but couldn’t see anything, and I knew it wouldn’t take those guys long to figure out where I’d gone to ground. I crawled up the low, stony bank with the dogs, fumbling for more shells while staying low enough not to make a good target. I didn’t like the idea of firing on police officers one bit, but had to assume that these were Mingo’s people and that they had orders not to bring back any prisoners.

  We crashed into some low bushes and reeds near the top of the bank. I downed the shepherds and reloaded the shotgun. My clothes were soaked, and the hulls of the shells were definitely wet. I could only pray that they would fire if I needed them. The raft had disappeared out in the river, either sunk or floating just beneath the surface. I had one boot on, one boot gone, and no longer cared if my foot hurt.

  Carrie had been hit and was probably bleeding in the shallows back upstream. I had to decide: try to get back to her or deal with these guys first. Easy decision: I had to neutralize this threat before I’d be able to help Carrie. I decided to do the unexpected and started crawling toward the two vehicles. It was tough going through all the riverbank debris. I couldn’t see the shooters, and there’d been no more rifle fire since the ten-gauge had spoken, but I knew that it was highly unlikely I’d done any real damage from that range. The shepherds came with me, staying right by my legs and crouching low.

  When I’d gone about thirty feet the bushes started to thin out, and I lay down behind a hollowed-out sand embankment for a minute to see if I could hear the shooters. Then I realized they were just on the other side of the same snag-mound. I thought I heard one of the vehicles start up.

  “Lucas got the woman,” a voice said. “Got her good.”

  “What the hell do we do now?” a second, younger voice asked nervously. “I don’t hol
d with shootin’ no women, and besides, ‘at bastard’s got him a Greener.”

  “We wait,” the first cop said. “Mingo’ll be comin’ on with the rest of Grinny’s boys. Then we’ll do a find-’em line and roust his ass out. He ain’t goin’ far, and she ain’t goin’ nowheres.”

  “Mingo gonna take ’em in?”

  “Shee-it,” the first one spat. “Mingo’s gonna take care of business. You seen what they done to Rue?”

  “I heard,” the younger one said.

  I could hear him adjusting his position. The embankment was at least five feet high. I was beneath it; they had to be crouching just on the other side. I settled down even deeper into the sand. These guys were deputies. Lucas, whoever he was, must be one of Mingo’s “unofficial” deputies. I was tempted to just stand up and blow them away. Tempted, hell—they’d shot Carrie without compunction or warning.

  But then I hesitated. I was assuming the shotgun’s shells would work, and they’d been awfully wet going into the barrels. And where the hell was Lucas? Had that been him going to fetch Mingo? Or was he circling behind my landing spot?

  I eased the heavy shotgun around from underneath me and pointed it upward. Still I hesitated. They were cops with their blood up. As far as they were concerned, they were chasing two stone-cold killers, and God only knew what Mingo had told them. It was Lucas who’d shot Carrie, not these two. At this range, any part of a ten-gauge blast would be fatal. But I needed to do something, especially if I was mistaken about Lucas leaving.

  I took a deep breath, gathered myself into a one-legged crouch, duckwalked up the embankment until I saw the top of a deputy’s hat, stood up, let go both barrels into the space right between them, and then set the shepherds on them.

  They both went down in a tangle of yells and snarling German shepherds. I let the dogs do their thing for a few seconds while I reloaded, and then I called them off. The two deputies were in Robbins County uniforms, and they were utterly terrified. The dogs had scared the living shit out of them without taking very much meat, and now their worst nightmare was standing over them with a ten-gauge in their bleeding faces.