The tongue-lashing went on for almost a minute, and then Grinny did a strange thing. She stepped forward and, hooking her forearms under the child’s armpits, pulled her up into an ample embrace.
“I guess they made up,” Greenberg said.
But I wasn’t so sure. “Can that kid breathe?” I asked quietly.
Greenberg watched and then swore. It became obvious to both of us that Grinny’s embrace was anything but motherly love. We could barely see the girl now as Grinny hugged her to that huge, soft belly, but we could see her hands and feet struggling to escape those meaty arms. Grinny bent further forward and then really gripped the little girl’s body. Nathan and M. C. Mingo watched from a few feet away, Nathan with what appeared to be clinical interest, while M. C. seemed to be studying the ground until it was over. Grinny finally straightened up and threw out her arms in a dramatic gesture, and the girl’s limp body dropped in a heap of skinny arms and legs at her feet. Grinny nudged the body a couple of times with her foot, causing the girl’s head to loll like that of a broken doll. Then she turned to go back into the cabin. I thought I saw her glance up at the rocks, but the binocs were not strong enough to really see where she was looking.
Nathan helped the sheriff roll the child over, and then Mingo cuffed her hands behind her back. Together they loaded her into the patrol car’s backseat. They talked for a minute, and then the sheriff got in the car and drove back down the hill. Now he seemed to be in a hurry.
“Mother fuck!” Greenberg whispered. “She just kill that kid?”
“I thought so until Mingo cuffed her,” I said, swallowing hard. “Now I think she just smothered her until she passed out.”
“Damn. I wish I had a picture of that.”
“The kid would have been invisible,” I said. “But, man! What are these people doing?”
“Well, now we know all we need to know about M. C. Mingo,” Greenberg said.
“We have to report this.”
“Wanna go now?”
“We should wait till dark,” I said. I couldn’t get Grinny’s final glance upward out of my mind. Something wasn’t quite right here. Then it came to me.
“You know, maybe we should get out now,” I said.
Greenberg looked over at me and raised his eyebrows.
“She damn near smothered that kid,” I said. “Right out there in the open. Where anybody could see her do it, including any watchers up here on the ridge. Why would she do that in full view?”
“Because she never did see us?”
“Or because she’s already sent for reinforcements.”
“How?”
“Who knows?” I said. “Cell phone? Landline telephone that we don’t know about? Ham radio? Homing pigeon?”
Greenberg took another look through the telescope. “Homing dog, maybe?” he said softly. “You’re the dog man-is that possible?”
“Hell, yes,” I said, and we started breaking down our gear. Five minutes later we crawled on our bellies out from between the big rocks and up to where my dogs had been stationed. I was hoping that the pines in front of us would conceal our movements, aided by the fact that the eastern slopes of Book Mountain would be moving into sun shadow as the afternoon progressed. We made no sound as we moved through a deep bed of pine needles until I gave a low whistle to summon the shepherds from their hides above the big boulders. They came at a run, and I gave them some water. Then we headed back across the eastern face of Book Mountain, trying to keep trees and other vegetation between us and anyone watching from down at the cabin.
It took us a half hour to reach the first firebreak lane, where we stopped to catch our breath. I drank some water and gave the rest to the shepherds, who were panting pretty hard. We were going to have to cross the open firebreak to keep going down and across the mountain, and even though it was overgrown with chest-high weeds, we would be clearly visible from the heights above. The woods on the other side were denser than what we’d been toiling through, and those shadows were inviting.
“Any better way across this?” Greenberg asked, as I gauged the hundred-foot-wide clearing and felt the forested ridges towering above us.
I shook my head. “We can stay in the woods, but that’s the way we need to go to get back down to the lake. Cross this and then move parallel to it. We can wait for dark, but they might use dogs to find us. I’d rather be out on the lake after dark than still up here.”
Greenberg sighed. “So,” he said. “We just run for it?”
“I’ll send the dogs across first to make sure no one’s over there in the woods,” I said. I summoned the shepherds, deactivated their bark collars, and sent them across the open space of the firebreak. Once into the woods they looked back at me and I gave them the hand signal for a down. They dropped obediently into the tall grass.
“Love that shit,” Greenberg muttered.
“I’m going to move right fifty yards and then do a little broken-field running. If there are shooters up behind us, I’ll try to make it hard. Once I’m out in the middle, you break out here and go straight across.”
“Divide the targets,” Greenberg said. “Good move.”
“Unless there’s a dozen of them,” I said. I grabbed my bag, my rifle, and the now-collapsed telescope and headed down the hill. When I got to what I judged to be fifty yards down the slope from where the shepherds had crossed, I slung the rifle, slipped into the pack, took a deep breath, and bolted out into the fire lane, jinking right and then left but really pumping it, trying to accelerate as I ran to make it as hard as possible for a long rifle to set up on me. I blasted through some scrub pines and into the welcome gloom of the pine forest on the other side and stopped. I bent over to catch my breath and listened for any gunfire. Moments later, Greenberg came pushing through the undergrowth, followed by the shepherds. I gave them a stern look; technically they should have remained in place.
“My fault,” Greenberg said. “Once I got across, I told them to come on, and they were only too willing.”
The shepherds sat down in front of me and tried not to look too guilty. “What do you think?” Greenberg asked. “We clear?”
“There aren’t any more open firebreaks to cross,” I said, scanning the slopes above and the tree line on the other side. The sun was farther down in the sky, so the shadows along the eastern slopes of Book Mountain were lengthening. “We’ve got four, maybe five more miles to go, across that next big slope. Then down five, six hundred feet in elevation to the lake. Then we’re in the clear.”
“I remember the up phase of that,” Greenberg said. “Down sounds better.”
I gathered my gear. “Actually,” I said, “down is harder. Be on the lookout for some good walking sticks.”
We headed southwest through the pines, keeping close enough to see the firebreak from time to time to make sure we remained on course. The dogs ranged ahead, crisscrossing our line of advance, ears up and noses down. We went as fast as we could without making too much noise, and I began to feel slightly more confident about our chances of getting back to the lake without a confrontation with the black hats. After that, things would get interesting, I thought. Especially when we reported what we’d seen that woman do to the child.
Then the shepherds froze in their tracks and stared into the woods ahead.
I made a sound and dropped to the ground immediately. Greenberg, fifteen feet to my left, followed my lead. We were on a downslope section of the hillside, still within the dense pine stands, and we had been approaching a narrow brook that had carved a rocky V down the face of the hill. On the other side were more trees, but these were a mixture of pines and thin hardwoods, which provided even denser cover. I hissed through my teeth, and the dogs turned around and came back to me. I snapped them into a long down and then carefully, slowly, unslung the rifle. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Greenberg inching over toward a large pine to get some cover between himself and whatever was on the other side of that creek. I had dropped next to a flat, moss-cover
ed rock, which gave me about a foot and a half of protection. For now, I thought, we were in decent defensive position, although when we crossed that brook, any shooters at the top of the V would be in even better position.
The slope facing us went back uphill at a fairly steep angle. I chambered a round, slipped the safety off, and then began to scan the forest on the other side through the Leupold VX-III scope, looking for anything out of place. Greenberg was doing the same thing with his binoculars, and he had his SIG. 45 out on a rock beside him. I realized that there could be someone approaching from behind us, but trusted the dogs to detect that problem. They’d hear footfalls and twigs breaking long before we humans would.
So what was over there? A deer? A bear? Or some of Grinny’s crew with an armful of shotguns? I lay on my side and began to methodically traverse the barrel of the rifle degree by degree, studying the scope picture for anything that didn’t look like a tree trunk or a boulder. The scope wasn’t as powerful as the telescope, but if I suddenly saw a man aiming a gun in our direction, I wanted to be able to shoot first.
The first puffs of the late afternoon breeze were stirring leaves across the way, and the pines were making that sweet whistling sound above us as their tops bent to welcome the cooler air coming down from the higher slopes. While my left eye studied the scope picture, my right eye saw that both shepherds were still interested in something across the way. Their ears were erect and not moving. I kept looking, tree by tree, across one line of elevation, and then back, slightly higher. There were no bird sounds other than what sounded like a large woodpecker working on something across the way. I kept searching the tree line, studying the shadows and the bushes, the reticles of the scope seeming to drill into the greenery. I was looking for a face, a hat, the glint of steel, eyes.
Eyes?
I steadied the scope and centered on a gleaming reddish eye looking back at me. My finger came off the trigger guard and settled on the trigger. I cleared my throat quietly, and Greenberg looked over at me. Seeing the rifle steadied, Greenberg swung his binoculars around, trying to locate the target. For an instant I lost it, and then the bushes moved slightly and I saw it again-a single red eye, surrounded by what looked like a black Brillo pad. The woods were silent except for the clatter of the woodpecker. I pulled the butt of the rifle in tight.
“Animal,” I whispered.
“What kind?” Greenberg asked. The shepherds were still down, but they sensed our excitement and were leaning forward.
“Can’t-” I began, and then I fired, almost involuntarily, as a four-hundred-pound black boar exploded out of the bushes in front of us and charged down the hillside in our general direction, grunting and growling and coming down like a four-legged avalanche, knocking down bushes and small trees and coming faster than I had ever seen any pig move. The shepherds launched forward, barking furiously.
“Tree!” I yelled to Greenberg, as I slung my rifle and leaped into the lower branches of the nearest pine tree. Greenberg did the same, and we both scrambled as high as we could get, dislodging a hail of dead branches, pine needles, and a few thousand startled insects as we pushed our heads up through the dense foliage. The furious pig blasted right past the shepherds and headlong into the tree Greenberg had climbed, shaking it from roots to tip and almost dislodging the scrambling DEA agent.
I swung around my own sticky trunk, unlimbered the rifle, and tried to get a shot, but by now the shepherds were circling the beast, barking and snapping, while the pig got down on its haunches and circled with them, tearing up great gouts of dirt and pine needles with its hooves while making a continuous roaring sound. I finally got a shot and fired down into the pig’s back, but the monster merely grunted once and kept circling. It lunged at Frick, who barely escaped being disemboweled by a whipping tusk, but the move allowed Frack to get a jaw-full of the pig’s right hind leg. The dog backed hard, pulling the squealing pig right off its feet. As it tried to bend around to get at the shepherd, Frick closed her jaws over the pig’s snout and began to pull back in the other direction. The pig thrashed hard enough to flail the two shepherds like furry rags, but the moment gave me a second shot. This time I aimed for the back of its head and the pig collapsed instantly. The two shepherds continued to pull and snarl until they finally heard me calling them off. The pig’s stubby legs twitched uncontrollably for about a minute and then it expired with a long, wet gasp that sprayed a flat cone of bright red blood onto the pine needles.
I swallowed hard and looked over at Greenberg, who was staring down at the black, hairy body below. His face was white as we watched the two shepherds sniffing around the body.
“What the fuck is that thing?” he asked.
“Wild pig,” I said. “I should have recognized the warning she was giving-remember the woodpecker sounds?”
Greenberg nodded, not taking his eyes off the pig, as if to make very sure that the thing was really dead.
“She was snapping her jaws at us, warning us to go away. There’s probably a litter up there.”
“Litter same as smaller?”
I laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. The yellow tusks sticking out of the pig’s mouth were at least twelve inches long. Okay, two. But the dogs had been lucky.
Dogs?
We both heard it at the same time-a long, melodious baying sound from the ridge behind and above us. Then another dog joined in. The pack was coming to the sound of our gunfire.
“Rock and roll,” I said, and slid down the pine tree in a shower of sticky bark and outraged pine beetles.
Forsaking any semblance of caution, we grabbed our gear and took off down the slope to the brook. Greenberg slapped his side and turned around to go back and retrieve the gun he’d left in the grass. I waited anxiously on the other side, trying to wipe pine pitch off my hands. I reloaded the rifle, and then we were off again, trotting right along the edge of the firebreak to make better time. From the sounds of it, there were even more dogs behind us now and they were onto a solid scent. The shepherds were ranging out ahead again, occasionally looking behind to see where that dog pack was.
“That dead pig will slow them up for a few minutes,” I said, trying not to puff. We were climbing again, and the branch-littered ground made for rough going.
“Can we make it to the lake before they catch up?” Greenberg asked. He seemed to be doing just fine physically, without any signs of being out of breath. Of course, he wasn’t carrying as much gear as I was. That had to be it.
“If the men keep the dogs with them, on tracking leads, then we can beat them. If they turn them loose, I don’t know. We get over this spine, it’s all downhill from there.”
“That’s good,” Greenberg said.
Actually it wasn’t. The slope was much steeper going down, and my thighs were burning within a few minutes of starting down that hillside. The footing on Rockslide Mountain was loose shale, rocks, and tufted grass, and I felt as if I were falling forward more than running down the hill. Greenberg started to slow down, as I had thought he might. It was always much harder to go down than up. The dogs weren’t doing too much better. Frack lost his balance and tumbled for ten yards before getting back up, and then he did it again. Behind us the noise of the dog pack seemed louder, but I kept telling myself it was just the acoustics caused by the rock walls above us. The bad news was that it didn’t sound like the dead pig had slowed anyone down.
We finally reached the bottom, which was a jumble of large boulders in front of a tangled pile of winter-killed pine trees. The line of debris stretched hundreds of feet in both directions along the base of the mountain. Greenberg collapsed in front of a big rock.
“Fuck it,” he gasped. “You were right-my legs are done. We’ve got a pretty good field of fire here. Those dogs show up, let’s waste ’em.”
I glanced down at Greenberg’s. 45; lovely weapon though it was, the pursuing dogs would have to be at our throats for pistols to do any good, especially shooting uphill. I dropped my gear and picked a su
itable rock for rifle work. The shepherds flopped down in the woods beyond the debris field, panting heavily. The sounds of baying hounds echoed clearly now from within the trees up above our position. I shook my canteen, but it was empty. Somehow the top had come off in the big scramble down the slope. I yelled a command at the shepherds to put them into a long down.
The afternoon shadows were deepening fast down here, but there was plenty of light for the Leupold scope. I attached the rifle’s arm sling, contracted my body into a sitting position behind the rock, and pointed the rifle up in the direction of all the noise. I began to scan the edge of the trees from which we had escaped. I had enough ammo to thin out the pack leaders and hopefully convince the followers to stop and talk things over.
“There they are,” Greenberg said. “Swing right.”
I traversed the rifle and saw the first three dogs clearing the edge of the forest and coming down the hill in our direction. I lined up on the biggest one and squeezed off a single shot at about two hundred yards. At first I thought I’d missed, but then the dog tumbled down the hillside in a hail of dust and gravel and lay still. The rest kept coming, and there were more appearing at the edge of the woods. I set up on one running in another pod of three and dropped that one, too. The dog nearest to that one looked over its shoulder but never broke stride. Greenberg was crouching over his rock, watching.
“Get under cover,” I said to Greenberg while stuffing more rounds into the magazine. “The handlers will have rifles.”
Greenberg dropped and then crawled on his stomach to the rock behind which I was hiding. He began sweeping the ridge with his binoculars, looking for the men behind the dogs. I fired again and swore when I saw dirt fly. I dropped a third one, a through-and-through lengthwise, and this one died hard, screaming as it rolled down the hill. That stopped the ones behind it, and I took the opportunity to shoot one more before the pack finally scattered. But the lead wave, now down to three truly ugly dogs, was inside of a hundred yards away and coming strong.
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