SPIDER MOUNTAIN

by P. T. Deutermann

  Except the furry face that finally broke through the bushes was Frack, who was very happy to see me. Frick came through right behind him and took advantage of the fact that I was on the ground to do some serious licking. The problem was that they were making a lot of noise, and if Jacky was near, that shotgun was training around on us. I grabbed a stick and threw it high in the general direction of where I figured the handler was lying, and they took off to retrieve it. They went crashing through the bushes, so I took that opportunity to squirm thirty feet farther to the right under cover of all their noise.

  By now I had the rock formation at my back, which meant that Jacky and his erstwhile buddy ought to be between me and my original trail. The dogs were still thrashing around out there, and then they started barking. I winced and waited for the shotgun, but nothing happened. They continued to bark, and they weren’t moving. I decided it was time to close in.

  Jacky was propped up against the base of a tree with his back to me. He was trying to bring the shotgun to bear on the shepherds with just his left arm, and he wasn’t doing too well. I could see a pair of boots sticking out of a clump of hawthorn bushes some ten feet in front of him. The shepherds were very aware of the shotgun and kept darting in and out of the line of fire, continuing to bark at Jacky. I was able to creep right up behind under cover of all that dog racket and grab the shotgun out of his hand before he could pull the trigger. He yelled in pain when I did that, and then pressed his left hand over his right arm, as if trying to hug himself. His left hand was covered in blood.

  My snap-shot had managed to hit him in the right hand. It wasn’t anything like the old western movies. That .308 round had essentially exploded his right hand, to the point where there were jagged bits of bone protruding everywhere his palm used to be. He was distinctly gray around the gills, and there was a baby lake of blood under his legs where he’d been hunched over, holding his right hand under his left armpit. His mouth was open and he was taking short, gasping breaths through all that beard. Keeping an eye on Jacky, I checked out the dog handler, but he was either unconscious or dead. Jacky had managed to put a blast of some large-caliber shot into the man’s chest, and he was probably gone.

  I turned back to Jacky, shut down the barking shepherds, and squatted down a few feet away from him, keeping the .25 pointed in his general direction. His whole face was gray now, and his lips were trembling as he slid deeper into shock. I was amazed that he could have fired the shotgun, given the recoil of a ten-gauge. I broke open the action and found two new shells, so he’d also been able to reload after shooting his own man down. He was glaring at me through a haze of pain. I was very aware that Nathan was out there somewhere, possibly with more of his black hats. They had to have heard all the gunfire.

  “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.

  “Where’s the child, Nathan?” I asked.

  He cracked one eye and glared up at us. The rope had pulled him into an elongated bow shape, and he was probably having trouble breathing. Broke my heart. He’d dropped Mose without a qualm with a long-range rifle shot and then taken Carrie back to his camp so that he could throw her into this alien geographical feature, where she would absolutely never be found. After he had gratified himself. The fact that they had a semi-permanent camp up here meant they’d done all this before.

  “Where’s the little girl, Nathan?” I asked again. I kicked the rope, which had the effect of squeezing his purple hands.

  He grunted with the pain. “Ain’t no girl,” he said, finally.

  “Your bearded buddy said you brought one up here—he’s dead, by the way, along with his pal who had the big dog on the leash—so where is she? You throw her down this hole?”

  “Y’all go to hell,” he said, closing the puffy eye.

  “Cam, look,” Carrie said. She was pointing down into the lava-glass funnel. Way down there, in the water and at the edge of the lava walls, a tiny white object had appeared. It looked like a piece of paper, but it wasn’t. I suddenly had a very bad feeling.

  “What’s that down there, Nathan? Down there in the water?”

  Nathan tried to look down but couldn’t. His arms had to be just about screaming by now, but I had zero sympathy.

  “Get on the very end of that rope,” I told Carrie. “Belay it around that tree right there, and then I’m going to drop this bastard.”

  Carrie did exactly as I asked. I took up the tension on the rope, she wrapped the very end of it around the tree, and then I let go. Nathan slid down the side of the tube like a luge rider, yelling all the way. He hit the water below with a clumsy splash and disappeared until the rope snapped taut, and then he burst back up to the surface. Without hands, he couldn’t swim, so he went right back down again. I let him do this three times and then hauled in on the rope until his arms and head remained above water. I gave him a minute to breathe and then told him to go get the white thing that was floating about ten feet from him. He looked small and helpless all the way down there, which I thought was just about perfect.

  He refused to move, so I tied off the rope to keep his head above water and then went and got my rifle.

  “Cam,” Carrie began, but I waved her off.

  “I want him talking, but he needs some encouragement,” I said. I knelt down at the lip of the lava tube and put a round three inches from his face. The sound effects were interesting, as was the knifelike slash of the bullet into the water right next to his face. I fired two more rounds, each one a little closer, and he finally yelled, “All right.”

  I gave him some slack with the rope, and he crabbed sideways with his body and then reached down to pick up the white thing. It became obvious that his hands weren’t working anymore as he kept dropping it. I yelled down for him to grab it with his teeth, and, when he did, we both pulled on that rope with all we had. Nathan wasn’t a little guy, but the hole wasn’t vertical, either. Being wet, he slid up that glassine surface with very little friction. When his face got to the top, framed by his two straining arms, I stared at the white thing he held in his teeth.

  So did Carrie. She began to curse him in a low monotone, using words I hadn’t heard since the Marines. Then I saw what it was: that frilly little cap that Honey Dee had worn when she came up to the cave and brought us the message from Grinny, the one with the crude yellow bees embroidered on it. This evil motherfucker had thrown her down there to her death. And she hadn’t been the first, as I kept reminding myself.

  Nathan heard our reaction and for the first time looked afraid. I had trouble framing the words. “What—have—you—done?” I said through clenched teeth.

  “She was a bleeder,” he said, spitting out the bonnet. It stuck to the lava wall like a piece of wet toilet paper. “No good to us. Grinny said trash her, so that’s what I done.”

  “So it’s true?” I said. “You make those poor goddamned women pay for their drugs in kids? And then you sell them as sex objects?”

  He gave a long sigh, as if he knew it was all over and there was no more point in playing the role of tough guy. He looked up at us with that one working eye, and I’d have sworn he was laughing at us.

  “Better,” he said.

  Better? That’s what Mingo had said.

  “What the hell does that mean, better?”

  “We sell ’em for parts.”

  I heard Carrie gasp, and then she was reaching for her knife to cut the rope. I grabbed her hand and yelled “No” at her. She fought me, reaching by me to cut that rope. She almost succeeded. The hell of it was I wanted her to cut that rope.

  “He needs to die,” she snapped.

  “Sure he does. But think about it: Think about the evidence that has to be down there in that water. They’ve been using this place for years.”

  Nathan had closed his eyes again as the pain of being hung by his hands reasserted itself. Carrie glared down at him with a face like Medusa.

  “Look,” I said. “The one thing we’ve never been able to get is physical evidence. Down there is the mother lode. They’ll convict this bastard, and then he’s going upstate, where they’ll lock him up for life as a child killer. Think of what the cons will do to him. Especially if his hands don’t work any more.”

  “Some g
oddamned lawyer will get him off,” she muttered, but she had lowered the knife.

  I sat back on my haunches and looked down at yet another minion of hell. “That so-called doctor will talk,” I said. “The doctor who took those kids into a lab at night and cut them up like stew meat. And we’ll make sure the story’s out there, so no bureaucrats can pull any more rugs over this mess. But first we have to find Grinny and the rest of them.”

  “Prison’s not good enough,” she said.

  “Yes, it will be,” I said. “If he gets life, they’ll have to box him up so the rest of the cons can’t get to him. He’ll live in an eight-by-six concrete room for the rest of his life. And if he gets the needle, he still gets to live in that box for a decade or so, only this time in the death house. Our killing him would be a mercy, and this bastard doesn’t deserve mercy of any kind.”

  I stood up and pulled her back from the lip of the lava tube. “What are we going to do right now?” she said.

  “We’re going to go back to our camp and check on Mose. Then we’ll fire that EPIRB. For this mess, we need a crowd.”

  “And him?”

  “Let him hang for a while.”

  We lowered Nathan back down to midway in the tube and then tied him off.

  A crowd was what we got. The first helicopter arrived right at the end of the two-hour response window, as advertised. He couldn’t land, but he did put down a rescue paramedic. While the bird flew around in lazy circles overhead, we explained what we had on the ground and that we needed Sam King and his SBI team here in a hurry, preferably before dark. Carrie did most of the talking. The medic checked Mose out and said he was stable and qualified for air transport. The helo came in and they did a rescue hoist. Mose was shocky from that big whack in the chest, but he managed a grin at Carrie, who held his hand until the hoist was ready.

  Then the shepherds and I went back to the ambush site to mark the location of the two bodies there. Carrie stayed back at our camp. The paramedic had left her a radio, and she briefed the rescue pilots as they flew back to the nearest hospital on what to tell the cops. Then, while we waited for the SBI, we went back down to Nathan’s camp near the lava tube.