Cam - 04 - Nightwalkers

by P. T. Deutermann

  The house had burned and essentially collapsed into itself. The facade was intact, as were two of the four big columns, but the remains of the roof were down in the underground floor. One chimney had kept one side of the house from falling in, but the other one stood all alone, the fireplaces for two floors gaping like empty wisdom tooth sockets in a long red jaw. I circled the house as quietly as I could. There was no way anyone could hide in the remains of the structure, because there was a large pile of burned debris, dirt, and weeds within the walls.

  Out back were the familiar outbuildings of the era, a smokehouse, a summer kitchen, both of which were tumbling down, a large, covered well, and a carriage house with four stable doors. It was still intact. There were signs that amorous teenagers had been coming back in here for some time. I saw Frick stop, then retrace her steps around to the front of the house. Then she came back, obviously following a scent trail, and this time she went to the carriage house. She stopped again nearest the right-hand door, and Kitty joined her.

  I crept up to the front of the building. Up close it didn't look quite so substantial. The lintels were sagging, and three of the stable doors had been nailed to their frames a long time ago. Each door also had a separate chain and padlock stretched across it. The locks were antiques, and I suspected they were frozen with rust, but I wasn't ready to show a flashlight yet. I could hear cars coming and going down the two-lane out front, but I could no longer see their lights because of the high grass and all those oak trees out front.

  I walked around the carriage house to see what was out back. There was still some afterglow on the western horizon, and the moon was rising across the river, which was a good half mile behind and below the burned-out house. The back of the carriage house had windows, but they were so covered in dust and vines that I couldn't see into the building. Frick went back around to the front and hovered around that right-hand-most door.

  I examined the lock and chain and made a discovery: The hasp on the lock had been lifted out of its case and was resting right on top of the flat metal. More important, I could smell the familiar odor of WD-40. As quietly as I could, I twisted the hasp out of the way and took it off the two parts of chain, which I slipped down onto the dirt. I checked the hinges and found more WD-40, so I put my fingers into the crack and pulled gently. The door opened outward without a sound. I pulled it just far enough so that the shepherds could fit and then vectored Frick through the opening. I kept Kitty with me.

  Frick was back in thirty seconds and didn't seem alarmed by anything, so I went in and pulled the door shut. Then I opened it again and grabbed that padlock before pulling the door shut again. I'd had enough of being trapped in confined places.

  The carriage house was empty inside except for what I'd hoped to find there: an old pickup truck parked in the right-hand bay, its nose pointed toward the door. It was a full-sized Ford F-150, and the back had a low-rise camper shell in the bed. The sliding windows in the camper section were open and covered with fine screen against insects. I checked the plate. It was a Wilmington license with a current sticker. I wrote down the plate numbers. There was a pile of trash in the corner indicating someone had been camping out back here, and I was pretty sure I knew who it was: my dedicated stalker, who was probably across the river right now, laying out the next ambush.

  Well now, I thought. Two can play that game.

  I extracted one of the concussion grenades and went to work on that truck. As I set the booby trap, I wondered how he was getting across the river now that we had his boat. For that matter, with the current in the Dan as strong as it was, I wondered how he ever managed to get a flat-bottomed johnboat across the river without ending up two miles downstream of Glory's End.

  When I was finished in the carriage house, I withdrew with the dogs and reset the fake lock and chains. It was much darker now, but I could discern a faint trail through the grass leading down to the river, so I decided to go down there and see what we'd find. Interestingly, the trail didn't go straight down to the water but angled to the right across a big, gently sloping field. Once we got down into the bottoms, I could see that it pointed at the old railroad abutment that faced the one across the way on Glory's End.

  At the bottom of the stone pier-wall I found the answer to how he'd been getting across the river: There was a wire leading down into the water. The current was strong enough even here inshore that the wire, which resembled a metal clothesline, was leaving a small wake in the water. When I lifted it, I discovered that it was bowing downstream and probably lying quite close to the bottom. To get across, all he'd have to do was clip the boat onto that wire, pull hand over hand to the other side, and not lose any ground.

  I used the flashlight on red beam to see if there were fresh prints near where the wire was anchored to a tree with a bolted pad eye but couldn't find any. I knew that the water level in the Dan rose and fell capriciously as a function of upstream hydro dams and passing thunderstorms. There could be plenty of footprint evidence six inches underwater right in front of me. I wanted to undo that wire rig but didn't have any tools. The wire strengthened my conviction that I'd found the bad guy's hidey-hole. Finally.

  The smart thing to do now would be to let the sheriff know what I'd found here, so he could liaise with the Virginia authorities and whoever owned this property to see if they could surprise him here. First, though, I wanted him to find my own little surprise, so I decided to simply back out and go back to the cottage. Let him prowl the grounds at Glory's End tonight if he felt like it, while I got a good night's sleep. Tomorrow I'd run that plate through Sheriff Walker's office, and maybe we could finally find out who this guy was and why he was determined to kill me.

  Wilmington. Was there a connection there?

  My guys and I had disrupted a sabotage effort at a nuclear power plant down near Wilmington, but there hadn't been any wives involved. Who could be in Wilmington who thought that I'd done something to his wife?

  Back at the cottage, I parked my Suburban out behind the Laurel Grove barns. If he'd already taken a look at the cottage, I wanted him to think I was still out for the night. Then I set the two operational dogs up to watch outside, leaving Frack to sleep in the living room. I called Tony's cell and left him a message describing what I'd found and what I'd left behind. Then I got myself a Scotch and sat down to study those aerials some more on the dining room table. I chided myself for not having looked over there before this.

  Round about ten, Frack lifted his head and whoofed quietly. I doused the reading light and went to a window. The moon had been waning, so there wasn't very much light outside, but there was enough to see the major walking his horse off the dam and up toward the house and barns. His head was down almost as if he were asleep, and the horse was just plodding along. Both outside shepherds were out in the yard, sitting down but watching him go by. Once he'd passed, I turned the light back on and resumed my study of the aerials. Cubby had said they didn't want him going out at night, and the barn had been locked. He sure seemed to do it often enough, though, and why was he walking?

  After looking through all the pictures for good ambush places, I realized that there were too many good sites. I decided that I'd move over to the big house on Glory's End and make him come to me. Time I had, and now that his base of operations had been busted, he'd have to do something. He'd also probably realize that I'd seen the license plate, which meant there was going to be an identification made. The local cops wanted him for a homicide, and that would make his capture a priority. He could either run tonight, and go back to Wilmington, or try to finish it in the next twenty-four hours. Having put so much effort into his campaign, I was expecting him to take one last hard shot. On the other hand, if he set off that concussion grenade tonight when he got back, he'd be in no mood for any hunting for several hours.

  Tomorrow we would probably finish this matter, one way or the other.

  I refreshed the Scotch and called Carol. She answered but sounded sleepy.

&nbs
p; "Hey," I said.

  "Back at you," she said. "Where are you?"

  "In the cottage, surrounded by incompetent mutts."

  "What's up?"

  "He's probably out in the woods, beating the bushes for his target, but his target has decided to get a good night's sleep and deal with his evil ass manana."

  "What if he doesn't want to wait?"

  "My shepherds will eat him."

  "Why don't you come here," she said. "In a manner of speaking."

  I grinned. "Don't want to expose you to danger."

  "Bring the shepherds."

  "They make too much noise."

  "I'll drown them out."

  "That's not fair."

  The next morning I called the Ops desk at the sheriff's office and gave them the plate number. I asked them to have Sheriff Walker call me as soon as he could. Then I went to retrieve my Suburban. I looked into the shop area for Cubby, but he wasn't there. I saw Patience hanging some sheets out to dry behind the big house and went up there. She said Cubby was still down with his ear infection and would probably be out for the rest of the week. As I walked back to the cottage, I wondered about Patience. She'd been unusually voluble, as if my inquiries were making her uncomfortable. I'd had earaches when I was a kid; they gave you some stuff and it usually went away in twenty-four hours. Now that I'd asked twice about Cubby, Patience was suddenly nervous.

  I parked the Suburban and went into the cottage to check my cell phone. No messages yet. I let Frack run around in the front yard for a bit and had another coffee. Tony called, and I filled him in. Then I asked him to entertain a theory. When I was done he said he and Pardee would be out later this morning. I called the sheriff's office and asked if the boss was available yet. They told me the office was all spun up over a robbery-homicide out on the major east-west road through the county, where a couple of teenagers shot and killed a shop owner for the forty-two dollars in the register.

  I asked for the sheriff's voice mail. The deputy said I was talking to it. I told him that my stalker had been holing up in the ruined house directly across the Dan River from Glory's End, and that his detectives had the guy's plate number for a possible ID. I gave the deputy my cell number as the callback. Then I piled the shepherds into the Suburban, and we went into town.

  A couple of stops later, I was parked at the intersection of Mill Street and Main. Down the block, just beyond a row of small houses, was a large concrete warehouse. It had an old-fashioned water tower and a brick smokestack and was surrounded by truck parking lots and a chain-link fence. There was a rusting sign that read springmaid on a billboard above the factory. Behind the houses was a generous creek, which had probably supplied water and power to the mill way back when. The textile industry in this part of the world had long gone the way of most manufacturing in this country, that is to say to rice country, and the buildings had that abandoned look about them.

  The town phone book had listed two sets of Johnsons on Mill Street, which was in what the locals openly referred to as the black part of town. Not knowing Cubby's real name, I couldn't determine which house was his, so I'd decided to just park across from the entrance into Mill Street and see what showed up. I saw some faces watching me after a while and figured that a white guy with dogs sitting in a Suburban was fairly shouting "cop" to the neighborhood, but no one came out and openly challenged me. The sheriff finally called while I was waiting.

  "You found his spider hole?"

  "I think so," I said and then described what I'd uncovered the night before.

  "So if we go over there with some of the Virginia guys, we need to watch for that grenade?"

  "I'm hoping he took care of that all by himself last night," I said. "Although I didn't hear any boom."

  "We'll have to get a warrant and then get with the Virginia Highway Patrol to execute it. The plate was no help."

  "Stolen?"

  "Yup. Little old lady down in Wilmington. Belongs on a '98 Caddy."

  "I knew it was too good to be true," I said. "I'm going to hole up at the house at Glory's End with my buddies for the next twenty-four. We'll see what happens when you make your roust."

  "Hopefully you won't hear us do it," he said. "Prepare to explain where that thing came from, by the way."

  "What thing is that, Sheriff?" I asked innocently. Then I saw Cubby Johnson.

  He was coming up Mill Street toward the main drag, and he didn't have an earache. The whole left side of his head was bandaged, and the bandaging hadn't been done by any doctor or hospital. He was walking with a slight limp, and he did not look all that healthy just now. No wonder Patience had been nervous.

  Well. Well. Well.

  I waited until he'd turned the corner and headed toward a group of stores three blocks up from the intersection. I got out of the Suburban and let the two shepherds out. They had their game faces on, and I had my SIG in a holster on my right hip. Three teenagers on a nearby porch had been building up the courage to come over and ask me what I was doing around there, but when they saw me start down the sidewalk with two big shepherds at my heels and a big black gun on my belt, they vanished, and I heard other doors closing along the street. I stayed on my side of the street, about a hundred feet behind Cubby, who was on the opposite sidewalk. After one block, I saw him slow down and then stop. There was no traffic, so I crossed the street and walked up to within ten feet of him. I told Kitty and Frick to watch him. They advanced to half the distance between us and sat down.

  "So now you know," he said, not turning around.

  "Now I know," I said. "A minute ago I was just guessing. You had a doctor look at that mess?"

  He shook his head, and I could see that the movement hurt him. "They'd ask too many questions," he said.

  "Where else are you hit?"

  He pointed to his left side with his right hand, where I saw a bulge of bandages under his T-shirt. I took my cell phone out to call the sheriff's office. A car filled with black people went by going the other way, all of them staring at this tableau of a large white man with two police dogs behind a black man sporting bandages. It occurred to me that we needed to take this little drama off the streets and out of the 'hood, and that now would be nice.

  "I can call the cops now, or you can come with me and tell me what the fuck is going on," I said.

  "Okay," he said.

  "Wait right here," I said. I left the shepherds and went back to the Suburban. I drove down to where he was standing and picked him and the dogs up. Then we drove out to Glory's End in silence. There didn't seem to be any fight in him, and his slumped posture told me that he probably had an infection going.

  "You taken any antibiotics?" I asked.

  "Patience had some old stuff," he said. "Ain't workin'."

  "I've got a Z-pack in my first aid kit," I said. "We'll get it when we get to the house."

  "Don't bother," he said. "I'm done anyway, all this gets out."

  "Maybe, maybe not," I said. "Depends on what you actually did."

  We pulled into the driveway of Glory's End. The gates were still open from my last visit. Need to start using those, I told myself, and to schedule that backhoe.

  We drove up to the house, and I put Cubby in one of the rocking chairs on the front porch while I went fishing in the Suburban for the first aid kit and some water. I punched out one of the three big pills and gave it to him, along with the water bottle. He took it immediately and then drank all the water.

  "Okay," I said, sitting down across from him. The shepherds were still on watch. "I assume you've been the helper bee?"

  "Didn't want to," he said. He still hadn't been able to look me in the eyes. "This goes way back."

  "I am all ears," I said, checking to make sure my cell phone was on and still had a signal. I put the SIG in my lap just in case he was faking his debilitation.

  Cubby, it turned out, had been telling the truth when he said he'd done a stint in the army. He just hadn't finished it. He had deserted from the army in 19
70, toward the end of the Vietnam War, when they had told him they were going to send him back for a second one-year tour as a Long Range Reconnaisance Patrol shooter. He'd had enough of spending weeks in the bush with two other guys, cut off from any friendly front lines, shooting itinerant Viet Cong and the occasional main force NVA officer from five hundred yards away.

  He'd come home to Rockwell County and disappeared into the town's black neighborhoods, which were at that time hugely disaffected as the racial tumult of the sixties in North Carolina still raged. He'd met Patience while hiding out from the army CID, who had come looking for him. She had begun working for the Lees at Laurel Grove, and she got him work there as the outside man. Neither of the Lee ladies had actually inquired about his draft status, but they accepted Patience's statement that he'd been drafted, done his time, and now was out and done with it. She had showed Ms. Hester Cubby's military ID card, and that had closed the matter.

  "Somehow, 'bout ten years later, Ms. Hester found out," he told me. "Wanted my ass off the place that day, but by then Patience was so much a part of the house that when she said she'd leave, too, Ms. Hester had to let it go. You from the South; you know how that goes."

  I did indeed. So-called domestic servants often became utterly indispensable in southern homes. "Hester told somebody, though didn't she."

  He said yes.

  "You rig that well as a trap?"

  He said yes again. That explained how he'd been there to rescue me. It also explained how he came to have a key to that slave collar--he'd made it.

  "So it was you, putting the paper faces on the windows?"

  He nodded. "He said he wanted to scare you out of the land deal, and that he'd kill you if he had to. I told him, I wasn't killin' no one. He said that didn't matter; he liked to kill people."