Nightwalkers cr-4

by P. T. Deutermann

  I came up from the river side, going slow, approaching the house through the barn aisles, checking each building with the dogs and taking my time, conscious of that abandoned well. The shepherds jumped a rat in the hay barn, but I quickly brought them to heel. They were both interested in the spot where the woman had been shot down, which told me their noses were working. We ended up in the barn to the left of that one, where the ancient tractors were busy oxidizing. This shed had three windows in the back wall, so I climbed up onto one of the tractors and sat down on the bare steel seat frame. From there I could see the smokehouse, the springhouse, and the back courtyard and garden areas. The shepherds lay down on either side of the tractor. I'd brought along a small thermos of leftover breakfast coffee, and I sipped some of that while watching out the windows. It was horrible, as all leftover coffee is. I propped the shotgun up on the steering wheel and waited.

  After almost an hour of listening to mice scurrying around in the moldering haystack, I was getting pretty sleepy. I set my cell phone to vibrate a wake-up alarm in an hour and stuck it back in my pocket. I was just settling into the backrest of the tractor when both dogs got up suddenly and stared back out into the barnyard area behind us. I turned around slowly, shotgun in hand, and tried to make out what they were looking at. The buildings behind us were all gray in the moonlight, and I realized that some mist had crept up the hill from the river bottoms.

  There.

  Next to one of the smaller sheds, about a hundred feet away, I could just barely make out what looked like a large human figure, decked out in some kind of flowing black robes. It had a pale gray oval where its face should have been. It looked like one of those movie theater lobby cutouts, until it moved.

  The hair rose on the back of my neck. Kitty growled deep in her throat, and Frick put her head down as if about to charge it. I kept blinking my eyes, trying for more detail, when suddenly the figure levitated off the ground and flew right at me, the pale gray oval becoming a horror mask, and then I woke up, the cell phone humming against my right thigh.

  There were no death monsters, the shotgun was still wedged into the steering wheel, and both very special guard dogs were out like lights under the tractor. My neck was stiff, my mouth tasted of coffee grounds, and I felt like an idiot.

  This was pointless.

  I had started to slide down off the tractor when something really did catch my eye through one of the back windows. Something had moved out there. Then the moon slipped behind a cloud and it got really dark. I couldn't see anything through the windows anymore, but I was sure I'd seen movement over by the smokehouse. It looked like it had been coming toward the barn area.

  I continued to slide down off the tractor. Both shepherds got up and gathered around. I tiptoed to the open doors of the shed and went down on one knee. Then I motioned for both dogs to close in on either side, which they did.

  I put an arm around each one and cupped a hand over their muzzles. Frick knew what this meant, and Kitty was about to learn. I stayed motionless on the ground, watching and listening. The moon was still obscured, and my eyes hadn't yet adapted to full darkness. The only sound was that of the dogs' breathing through my fingertips. I would look at a spot and then look off to one side, trying to see the peripheral image. Then I felt Frick tense up, and I knew she'd seen it.

  I waited, and then Kitty saw it, too. I increased the tension on both dogs' muzzles. I didn't want any growling or barking. I tried again to see the thing that was out there, but the image just wouldn't come. The dogs' muzzles were slowly traversing to the right, and when I was pretty sure it had come past my building and was about to go between the next two sheds, I launched Frick, who went out like a bullet, then Kitty, hot on her tail. I reached back for the shotgun about the time they made the hit.

  There was a thump, a yell, and then a lot of shepherd intimidation barking. Then, mercifully, the moon came out. I walked out of the shed, checked to make sure he didn't have help, and then walked over to the large figure that was prostrate on the ground. The two shepherds were standing over him and giving him absolute hell as he covered his head with his arms. Then I saw the uniform.

  "Get 'em off me, please," Sheriff Walker said.

  I gave a command, and Frick jumped away and sat down. Kitty wasn't sure she shouldn't just go ahead and eat him, but then she reluctantly backed away and looked at me for further instructions.

  I helped the sheriff up off the ground and pointedly did not look to see if he had embarrassed himself, although my nose told me he may have. He brushed the yard dirt off his uniform and then bent down to retrieve his service weapon, which he'd apparently been carrying in his hand when the two shepherds hit him from behind.

  "Goddamn, Lieutenant," he said, rubbing some sand out of his mouth. "Those sumbitches hit pretty hard. I heard 'em comin' at the last moment, but then I was down and having me a dirt sandwich."

  "Sorry about that, Sheriff. You said to vary my routine, so I decided to come over here and just see who or what showed up."

  "I should have told you I might come around," he said. He ran one hand over his head and then spit some more dirt out of his mouth.

  "I'd just about decided that I was being stupid," I said, "sitting out here in the damn dark, and then I saw you coming out of the smokehouse."

  He shook his head. "I came by the smokehouse, not out of it. Parked right out front, walked around the house like I owned it."

  That's funny, I thought. I hadn't heard a car coming up the drive. Of course, I might have been engaging the flying banshee right about then, too. I apologized again for knocking him down, and the shepherds closed in to make friends. He had the grace to pet both of them and tell them they were good dogs. They recognized their doughnut touch and wagged enthusiastically.

  I took him into the shed to show him where I'd been set up. We strolled around the working area of the barns, and I pointed out where my favorite abandoned well was lurking. Then we walked over to the springhouse, where I showed him the back wall that doubled as an escape door from the main house. He took it all on board without comment, and I wondered if I was telling him things he already knew. He was holding one elbow, which I'm sure was hurting after he'd been taken down by the dogs. The sheriff was a solidly built man, but he'd be hurting all over tomorrow morning.

  We stood by the springhouse, taking in the moonlit view down the wide lawns and out over the crop fields between the house and the river. The moon went back behind a cloud, and it became dark as the proverbial well digger's behind. The air was perfectly still. Then I heard a clunk in the distance.

  I looked sideways at the sheriff, and he had cocked his head to listen.

  "Recognize that?" I whispered.

  "Paddle on the side of a johnboat," he replied.

  Exactly what I'd thought. It's an unmistakable sound, and it had come from across the fields from the river bottoms. Maybe my ghost had just screwed up.

  "We wait or we go down there?"

  "How long would it take us to walk to that crack on that ridge over there?" he asked softly. "To get to the side with the rope on it?"

  "You don't think he's coming up here?"

  "Maybe," he said, "but if he comes here, finds nobody home, he'll go to his hidey-hole, if that's what it is. We wait by that rope, maybe we get him."

  What the hell, I thought. It might work. "Backup?" I asked.

  "Too much noise," he said. "Besides, we got four against one."

  I couldn't argue, and I wouldn't be Lone Rangering anymore, either.

  It took us almost thirty minutes. The sheriff's definition of walking was just a hair slower than my definition of a comfortable jog. I didn't want to deal with that slide of rocks and scree in the dark, so we turned left in the entrance to the pass itself and went up the backbone of the ridge instead. I knew our target might be going directly to the rope from the river side, which meant we might just collide on the ridge. The sheriff didn't seem to care, but I had Frick and Kitty cast out ahead as
scouts, which should give us a little warning if we were approaching a head-on. The clouds had disappeared, so we could see much better. That was a good news and bad news deal: so could he.

  I took the sheriff to the side from which I'd seen the rope the first time. It was still there, twenty, twenty-five feet across the shadowy defile. We worked our way back up the hill to the top of the notch and then back down the other side, being as quiet as possible now in case this had been his destination and not our playground over there on the big hill. The dogs found the rope and its anchor first. The sheriff pointed silently to the anchoring arrangement to make sure I recognized that it was professional climbing gear. Lots of stainless steel and complex knots. Then we backed out of the immediate area and into some trees uphill of the rope anchor. The sheriff said we should separate.

  "We want to take him in, or just take him?" I whispered before we took up our positions.

  "I'm here to apprehend a suspect," he said, "but if it turns into a gunfight, I'm gonna be standing when it's all over. What you got in that shotgun?"

  "Heavy game load."

  "Can you hit him from here with that. 45 if you have to?"

  "Yup."

  "Me, too," he said. "I'll go down the other side, set up directly across from the rope. He shows up, I'll light him up with my Maglite here. Then I'll do a standard yell-down. He just stands there, take him down with the dogs. He pulls, oh, well. Okay?"

  "Works for me."

  I kept the shepherds with me while the sheriff went down the hill about fifty feet and faded into the shadows of the tree line lining the cut in the hillside. Tactically, we were set up correctly: If any shit started, our guy would have two separate shooters to deal with, one he knew about, one he hopefully didn't. We might have to wait a while if he was headed first to Glory's End or the stone cottage. Of course, it could have been a poacher we'd heard down on the river, some guy running his trotlines after dark. I didn't think so, though, and neither did the sheriff.

  I settled into the weeds and put my back up against a tree trunk. I'd put Frick on a sight line between me and the rope anchor, about halfway down. I kept Kitty with me. Even though it was a pretty fair ambush setup, it was comforting to have that big warm furry thing right at my side. Besides, I knew that Frick would give warning with her ears, while Kitty, still new to hunting games, might bark.

  An hour passed, an hour during which I changed position against the tree trunk, sat back, sat forward, knelt on one knee, stood up, and did everything else I could to stay awake and alert. Kitty was curled in a ball, but with her head pointed down the hillside and her eyes on Frick, whom I could no longer even see. The moon traversed the sky and began sinking toward the western ridge of the property beyond the big house. At some point, I told myself, I'm going to fall asleep . I think my body knew that we had made a lot of assumptions about where the man who'd gone thump in the night might be going. He might even have been getting back into his boat, having been up in the barnyard listening to us.

  Then Kitty was rising to a standing position, her ears forward and her body starting to tense up. I put a hand on her neck just to let her know I was watching.

  Something moved down the hillside. A figure, man or woman I couldn't tell, but definitely human. I got ready to fire the dogs at him. For an instant, the figure stood at the edge of the rock face. Then it knelt down. I heard a loud click of metal on metal, and the next moment, it was gone.

  Where in the hell was the sheriff?! Why hadn't he lit the guy up and made his noise? Had my stalker taken him out first?

  I couldn't see Frick, but Kitty was relaxing, which probably meant that Frick didn't know what to do. Neither did I. The sheriff solved it for me a minute later, coming down the hillside from behind me, making just enough noise that both the dogs and I could hear him approaching. He raised a hand as he walked up.

  "I know," he said softly. "I changed the plan. I thought about what you'd said, about backup. He could have done the same damn thing the moment I lit him up-dropped down that rope where neither one of us could get a shot at him. This way, we know where he is. Now I'm going to get me some backup."

  Get me some backup. Not "us." I realized that what had really happened here was that the sheriff's professional standards had reasserted themselves. It might sound good to say take the perp out, but in reality, the law was different. Also, it wasn't like I could argue. As far as he was concerned, this was probably the guy who'd shot the Craney woman in the barn. He had every right to tell me what I could and couldn't do as long as he was pursing a murder suspect in his exclusive jurisdiction. Still, I wouldn't have minded putting a few rounds down the hillside. It might have caused the guy to drop into that gorge without the benefit of his rope. Frick rejoined us, looking annoyed that she hadn't gotten to bite anybody.

  "Right," I said. "It's your patch."

  "You're thinking like a sheriff's office lieutenant again," he said approvingly. "When in doubt, bring a crowd."

  "Absolutely," I said. "I'll wait here with you until your guys show up, but after that, you don't need me here anymore, do you?"

  He hesitated for just a second. "No," he said. "We'll get set up and then send some SWAT people down that gorge to see what they find."

  There was an unspoken question there, as in, Don't you want to know what we find? The truth was, I was really tired. I knew that it would take a few hours for them to get set up properly and get more people in position along the ridge to watch for a second way out. They'd be polite, but I also knew I'd just be in the way.

  I let him do his thing on the radio with his operations center while I walked back down to that rope anchor. The gorge was at least a hundred feet down, maybe more, and very narrow, perhaps only man-wide at the bottom. The sheriff might have had a shot, but the moment he slipped onto that rope, I would not have been able to get a bead on him. The shotgun might have worked, but I didn't really have cause to shoot the climber without knowing who he was.

  We'd been speaking as quietly as we could, so I didn't think our ghost would have been aware of us down there, unless he'd put some more electronics in place up here on the rim. So what had he done: clipped on his descenders, kicked off the rock rim, and gone down in one smooth descent, applying some brakes only as he neared the bottom. Then stepped off the rope and into-what? An old ventilation shaft? A breakthrough collapse in the cave walls? I knelt down at the edge of the crack in the hillside, experiencing a mild wave of vertigo as I looked down into the deep darkness below.

  Once I saw the blue lights flickering out on the two-lane, I told the sheriff I was going to take my dogs and go back to the stone cottage. He nodded, but he was preoccupied with getting his people in position. I climbed up the ridge to the granite road to watch for a few minutes and then headed down toward the farm road. Then I stopped.

  What if we had it wrong? What if this guy had not gone into the alleged ridge tunnels but had instead run for it? It was a simple matter of his turning downhill at the bottom of the chasm and then heading back to the river and his boat. If he'd tumbled to the potential ambush up top, he wouldn't deliberately go into a tunnel from which there might be only one way out.

  You're pushing it, my tired sensible brain told me. The lizard half, however, wanted to get this guy.

  I turned around, called the mutts, and headed back. I wanted to tell the sheriff what I was doing, but the first deputies had already arrived at the top of the gorge, so I drifted to the right along the top of the ridge and retraced my steps of the afternoon, aiming for the river bottoms at the north end of the ridge. I could see more blue lights coming into the main driveway of Glory's End. The sheriff must have indeed summoned a crowd.

  The backbone of the ridge began to tilt down, but it was still pretty clear sailing along all that smooth rock. If I was correct, my ghost was headed in the same direction, only he'd be working his way down in the creek bottoms to my left. That would be slow going compared to this relatively paved road up here, so I kept to the
east side and moved as fast as I could, shotgun at port arms, shepherds out in front. When the ridge tipped down at a fifteen-degree slope, I had to slow way down. The moonlight was getting dimmer now, but there was a cool breeze rising from the river, dispersing the mist. I could smell pine trees the closer I got to the water, along with the first hints of mud. I slowed to a careful creep through all the flood debris along the banks and brought the shepherds closer in.

  The question now was, where was his boat? It had sounded like he'd been messing with it from somewhere upriver, but the directionality of sounds carrying across the country night could not be trusted. I turned upriver, aiming for the point where that creek that ran the western side of the ridge finally joined the Dan. I was hoping for a clean crossing, but instead I found myself stepping through increasingly gooey muck. I hoped this wasn't the quicksand people talked about. The shepherds were now following me instead of me following them. Their pointy little feet were going deeper than my size sixteens. I had to stop.

  There was an enormous tree root ball lying parallel to the riverbank. I hoisted myself up on that and then dragged both dogs up onto it with me. The ambient light down here in the bottomlands was minimal. I could both hear and feel the river flowing by, and I could see pretty well across the water. Something substantial plopped into the water from the root ball. A snake?

  Now what, as Tony would have asked. Was this a wild goose chase? The guy could also have gone inland instead of back to his boat. All he would have to do was wait by the road for all the cavalry to go rushing by, and then scamper through the crop fields to the two-lane and beat feet for-where? It kept coming back to that: Where was my stalker holing up?