“Like the makings of a deal, Special Agent. By the way, my name’s Cam.”
Greenberg nodded and got up. “Name’s Ruthe,” he said, looking me right in the eye.
“Ruth.”
“That’s right. But with an e on the end.”
“And if I say anything at all, I’m going to get hurt.”
“Yup.”
“Lemme guess-you go in low and fast.”
“Drop to one knee, left hook into their nuts, and then I stand up as their face comes forward and down. Trick is to remember to keep your teeth together.”
“Ruth.”
“Yup.”
“Nickname?”
“Can’t you guess?”
I thought for a second. “Baby?”
“There you go.”
I nodded, trying not to grin. I thought we were going to get along. “So, Special Agent Ruthe Greenberg, glad to meet you.”
“Look,” Greenberg said. “One thing I’ve learned up here is that the outlaws are networked better than fucking IBM. Dollars to doughnuts somebody who cares already knows you’re on their web.”
“We hear you,” I said.
Greenberg glanced toward the front room and rubbed his beard. “I hear you,” he said. “But one of my guys stopped on the road to nosh a greaseburger two weeks ago? Little roadside pull-off, you know, park benches, trees, burbling fucking brook? He’s sitting there, scarfing fries, and this. 65-caliber Civil War minie ball comes down the mountain and blows up his Happy Meal bag.”
“One of those ‘we could have if we’d wanted to’ love notes?”
“Right. Bullet first, then the boom. Three-, four-hundred-yard shot.”
“Long guns are the scariest,” I said.
“Okay, then, just so you know,” Greenberg said. “They like to reach out and touch someone once in a while. Call me.”
“Call you what, exactly?” I asked.
Greenberg grinned, cocked and fired a finger gun at me, and left. After he’d gone, I wondered if that had been too easy. Most of the information flow had come from me, not Greenberg. On the other hand, the meth problem nationwide was big and getting bigger, so it made sense for the DEA to be out here along the Georgia-North Carolina-Tennessee wilderness nexus. I made a mental note to see if any of my friends in the North Carolina SBI knew “Baby” Greenberg. Either way, the chances were good that the DEA guys would try to use me to their best advantage. Fair enough, I thought. I was perfectly capable of using them right back.
The setting sun had made the porch uncomfortably warm, so I decided to go down to the creek bank, find a rock, and put my feet in the water. As I was sitting on my rock, enjoying the sunset and my scotch, I saw a figure coming down the creek who appeared to be walking on the water. I checked to see how much scotch I’d had and then realized he was wading in the water. I couldn’t make out his features because he was up-sun and there was one hell of a glare in that pristine mountain air. He was wearing hip waders and carrying what looked like a mesh laundry bag and a stick. I realized he was fishing for trash in the creek and, based on the lump of debris in the bag, succeeding.
When he got about ten feet away, I finally said howdy. He turned to see where I was, and I just had to stare. He had the face that you see on the back of a buffalo nickel, and I mean identical-the stereotypical American Indian face, complete with sculpted nose, thick lips, pointed cheekbones, and pretty much the same expression. It was such a resemblance that he was probably not surprised by my reaction.
“Scary, isn’t it?” he said with a small smile, resting on his pickup stick for a moment. I had to laugh. He was heavy in the chest and shoulders and had to be at least six-foot-something in height. He had jet black hair pulled back in a short ponytail and was wearing a buckskin shirt above the rubber waders. I had half-expected a grunt or even a Hollywood “How,” but his accent was not even remotely western Carolina. The shepherds appeared just then from the underbrush and looked him over.
“Nice dogs,” he said. “You staying here at the lodge?”
I said yes and asked him what he was doing out there in the creek.
“My contribution to the environment,” he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot. That water had to be very cold. “All this natural beauty, people come out here, gawk at it, ooh and aah, then throw their shit in the creek.” He glanced at the drink in my hand.
“Scotch,” I said. “Join me?”
“Absolutely,” he said, wading over to my side of the creek. He sat down on a rock and began to undo the elaborate wader rig. I went up to the cabin and got another glass and the bottle. The shepherds stayed with me up and back. He was sitting on a dry rock when I got back down to the bank. He was wearing what looked like two sets of red woolen long Johns and extra-thick socks, and the boots and waders were piled in a sodden heap beside him. He accepted the drink gratefully and knocked half of it back, following up with a satisfied sigh. Up close, I could see that he was probably in his late fifties, if not sixty. His face was permanently tanned, telling me he spent all of his time outdoors.
“Perfect,” he announced. “I needed that.”
“You live up here?”
“Retired,” he said. “Came from these parts about a hundred years ago. Robbins County, actually, right next door.”
“You don’t sound like western Carolina,” I said. The shepherds sat behind us; from their posture, it was plain they hadn’t made up their minds yet about this guy. It was hard not to stare at that face; it was just such a perfect resemblance to the Fraser sculpture.
“Got the hell out, like most folks who had the chance and half a brain,” he said. “How about you?”
I told him I was retired from the Manceford County sheriff’s office back in Triboro.
“Don’t look old enough,” he said, eyeing me as he finished the scotch. I offered him a refill, but he shook his head. “Thanks, gotta drive my Harley.”
“I thought a snoot-full was a prerequisite for righteous hog wrangling.”
“A snoot-full and a Harley is a summons for the undertaker,” he said.
“They come after you for reenactments up at that Cherokee Village?” I asked.
“All the time,” he said, chuckling. “I don’t, but I do go downtown sometimes and do my wise old Indian act when I’m looking to pick up women.” He grinned and suddenly looked ten years younger. Retirement was agreeing with him.
“What brings you up here?” he asked. “Vacation?”
“I do a little consulting work on the side for the courts back east,” I said. “A friend needed some help with something, asked me to come up.”
He nodded, but didn’t pursue it. “I do private guide work in the backcountry of the Smokies,” he said. “Name’s Mose, by the way. Mose Walsh.”
“Cam Richter,” I said. “Those guys behind us are Frick and Frack.”
He laughed out loud. “They must hate you for that.”
“No, it’s a sound thing. Easy name differentiation for commands.”
He looked over his shoulder at the shepherds, who looked back. “Keep ’em with you all the time?”
I nodded.
“Good deal,” he said. “Especially for a cop. I had a shepherd once. He got eaten by something in the woods. Bear, feral pig, I don’t know what, maybe even a big cat.”
I felt a tingle on the back of my neck. “Big cat? You mean like mountain lion?”
He shook his head. “Folks say they’re out there, but I’ve never seen any real sign of’em. Too bad, in a way. Some’a these tourists would be more respectful of the park if there was something out there could eat ’em.”
“People keep saying they’ve seen big cats,” I said.
“The park rangers are hard-over on that subject,” he said. “The big ones are long gone. No, if it was a cat got Kraut, it was probably a bobcat. Damned dog liked to corner woods critters. Something cornered him back, that’s all.”
I thought about telling him about my own experiences
with some all too real mountain lions out there, but decided not to. It was history best left alone. Then I remembered what Greenberg had said about Robbins County, and I asked Mose about that.
“Robbins County is a place unto itself,” he said. “Me, I keep to the park.”
“I ran into some DEA guys this afternoon,” I said. “They make Robbins County sound like, um-”
“Injun country?” he said with a mock suspicious look on his face. Then we both laughed. That was exactly what I’d been about to say.
“Most of that county is classified as state game lands,” he said. “Hunters go up there more than tourists; you just have to be circumspect about what you see sometimes.”
“How long you been guiding?”
“Going on ten years now. Made a nice change. You found your chapter two yet?”
“Not really,” I said. “Still figuring it out.”
“Well,” he said, getting up from his rock. “Thanks much for the firewater. You ever need some guide services, give me a holler. Moses Walsh, Esquire. I’m in the book.”
“Esquire-you a lawyer?”
“Na-ah,” he said. “The ‘esquire’ keeps those pesky telemarketers away.” He grinned again, and I said good-bye. He gathered up his wet gear, the bag, and the stick and headed up the gravel walk toward the parking lot, looking faintly ridiculous in those baggy red long Johns. A couple of teenaged girls were on the pathway. They stared at him as he lumbered by them. He raised his right hand and gave them a very convincing Big Chief grunt as he passed them, and they broke into fits of giggles. A minute later I heard the unmistakable rumble of a Harley firing up in the parking lot. Sitting Bull on a Harley; that must make quite a sight.
At nine, I was finishing dinner in town when Mary Ellen Goode came into the bar and looked into the dining room. I waved her over. Despite those shadows under her eyes, she was still pretty enough to cause most of the men in the dining room to fumble what they were doing. She was wearing jeans and a shortsleeved blouse, and she was definitely thinner than the last time I’d seen her. Her face exuded that slightly haunted, lingering, longing look. But not for me, I suddenly realized. I started to get up, but she waved me down and slid into a chair.
“You’re bigger than I remembered,” she said. “Weights?”
I nodded. “After I left the sheriff’s office I was really feeling sorry for myself. Left under a professional cloud, my best buddy dead up in the mountains somewhere, and an unknown number of the bad guys still out there. The sheriff came by one evening and was unsympathetic. Next day one of the SWAT team supervisors showed up and hauled my sorry ass down to his gym. Introduced me to the notion of applied pain as therapy.”
“Did it help the arm?”
“Actually, it did. I was mostly doing the Napoleon bit after the incident, but now I can hold a glass when I pour my scotch. But you’re right-two years of free weights and you tend to bulk up. Had to buy all new clothes. How about you?”
She smiled. It did wonders for her face, but it wasn’t the dazzling, sunny smile I remembered from when I’d first met her. “I came back to work after a month’s leave. Told my boss everything. Big mistake. They wanted to transfer me out west, or to Washington headquarters. I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the Smokies.”
“So then they, what-put you in a cocoon?”
“Exactly. I was having trouble sleeping, so they sent me to a counselor. He fell in love, or at least lust, and I had to disentangle myself from that mess. If I wanted to go out to the backcountry they always sent someone along. That screwed up the duty rotation, had people standing extra duty. I thought about quitting, but what else would I do? I had no idea.”
“I know the feeling,” I said. “I was a cop. That’s a job that defines you in today’s society. Now I’m supposed to be some kind of private eye and I feel a little ridiculous most of the time. Plus, everyone knows I don’t have to work anymore.”
“So the big bucks came to pass, then?”
“Boy, did they ever. Even after taxes and grasping lawyers, it was a hell of a lot of money. You eaten?”
She shook her head. “I typically have a late lunch and leave it at that.”
I talked her into dessert and coffee, and we talked about the past two years. She had written me a letter after the dust settled that seemed to invite a relationship, but it hadn’t panned out. I’d been too busy reestablishing my identity to get away from Triboro, and she had become increasingly reclusive. I asked her why she really wanted me to look into the Janey Howard incident.
“It’s become a political football,” she said. “The incident involved two counties and the national park, and no one wants to own it. Meanwhile Janey is a whimpering wreck over in Murphy, and, of course, she’s provided zero useful information. Her parents finally got disgusted and told everyone to go away. She was my newbie, and I feel responsible.”
“What’d the investigation reveal?”
“Not much. We found her Jeep and tracked around the lake with dogs, but it had rained and they got nowhere.”
“What kind of dogs?”
“Labs, as I remember.”
I snorted; I despised Labs. Blockheaded, passive-aggressive lumps, every one.
“Anyway, she was found some miles away from the lake, so she may have been abducted, taken somewhere, and then assaulted.”
“And she’s said nothing?”
“One of the EMTs reported she said two words on the way to the hospital-‘hangman’ and ‘grinning.’”
I sighed. “Not much. Almost sounds like that tarot stuff.”
She touched my hand. “You can forget the whole thing if you’d like to,” she said. “At least three authorities did look and came up with zero. I’ve no right to impose on you this way.”
At that moment she looked over my shoulder and withdrew her hand. I turned to see the young ranger who had been so unfriendly earlier come in and give Mary Ellen a disapproving look as he went into the bar. “Oh-oh,” I said. “You’ve been spotted consorting with the devil.”
“They’re just being protective, Cam,” she said.
“Well, let’s face it, Mary Ellen-last time I came out to these parts two people died and you were taken hostage. I guess I can see their point.”
“That case was very different,” she said. “This was just a straightforward assault.”
Ain’t no such thing, I thought. Especially up here in the western Carolina mountains.
2
The next morning I called on the sheriff of Carrigan County, William Hayes, whom I’d met before. He’d been sheriff for a while and looked it. Sixty-something, gray hair, politician-cop face with paternalistic eyes. I explained over coffee why I’d come up to his neck of the woods, trying to cast my mission more in terms of doing Mary Ellen Goode a favor than of actually hoping to solve a case that, presumably, the sheriff and his people had already taken a good swing at. The sheriff was not fooled for a moment.
“Last time you came around, you cut quite a swath,” Hayes said. “Mountain lions, dead guys. You still got those two shepherds?”
“Out in the car as we speak,” I said. “Bobby Lee Baggett ever give you the whole story about all that?”
“Enough to know I didn’t want any of that Triboro shit up here,” the sheriff said.
“It was a lot bigger than Triboro,” I said. “Tell me: What do I need to know about Robbins County?”
“Two words-stay the hell out of there.”
“Two words?” I asked.
“ ‘Stay’ and ‘out’ are the operative ones. Sheriff M. C. Mingo is the law over there. He takes the notion of territory serious-like. You know their motto?”
“I’ve heard it,” I said.
“Well, in Robbins County, everything is M. C.’s business, if he says so.”
“Mary Ellen said they weren’t cooperative in the Howard investigation.”
The sheriff snorted. “Master of understatement, that woman,” he said. “M. C. flat decl
ared that it didn’t go down in Robbins County, ‘cause if it had, he’d have known about it and he would have shot the bastards responsible, most likely for resisting arrest.”
“Resistance is good,” I said. “But, bottom line, if it did happen in Robbins County, that answer cuts both ways.”
Hayes nodded. “Not much I can do about what goes on over there. Our cooperation is limited to notifying M. C.’s office that there might be a mutual problem. We get an official acknowledgment, and then, if M. C. sees fit, what usually happens is that some battered hillbilly appears out on the county line road just dying to jump into the back of one my cruisers and confess to any damn thing at all. You know about the Creighs?”
“The Indian tribe? Cree?”
“Nope, the Creighs.” He spelled the name. “They just pronounce it that way. They’re the clan in Robbins County. Run by an old woman lives up on the side of a mountain. It’s got one name on the maps, but everyone in Robbins County calls it Spider Mountain. Guess why?”
“Lovely,” I said.
The sheriff grunted. “I’ve never seen her. Not many folks have, apparently. There’s not too many ways you can make a living in Robbins County other than tourism, and the Creighs tend to scare off the flatlanders. So lots of the folks up there subsist on welfare and supplement their existence by running ‘shine, weed, meth, mushrooms, and any other damned thing they can grow, dig up, boil down, or sell in the dead of night. And this Grinny Creigh is supposedly at the center of that web.”
“Grinny?”
“As in the way a hungry witch grins at a fat little child who blunders into her cauldron room asking about lunch. Her real name’s Vivian.”
“So why don’t the state guys or the feds take her out?”
He sighed. I realized he looked a good deal older than the last time I’d seen him. Older and a bit preoccupied.
“It would take an army to root those people out,” he said. “The bad ones, I mean. Robbins County is all up and down, and mostly empty wilderness designated as state game lands. The Creighs and their like have been at this kind of stuff for over two hundred years. Block the roads, they run the rivers. Block the rivers, they’ll hump it out on mules. Some Bureau types went in there back when they were hunting Eric Rudolph. Had to be rescued from an abandoned gold mine shaft. Said they had no idea how they got down there.”
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