“Time, Carrie, time. You know what might be happening in there, now that she knows someone’s rumbled their operation.”
“I can just imagine the kinds of things Grinny Creigh will have in her house,” she said. “Can’t wait to go inside.”
I turned to look at her. “What’s the matter-that witchy-twitchy bullshit didn’t get to you, did it?”
She looked away. “No,” she said, most unconvincingly.
“Aw, for God’s sake, Carrie,” I said. “Focus! There might be a half dozen little girls in there, and they’ve absolutely got something to be scared of. Let’s not give her any time to think about this. We need to go back there, eliminate the dog problem, and get inside. No one else is going to do it.”
She didn’t reply.
“Okay, look,” I said. “Watch your cell phone. You get a signal, tell me to stop, call your boys, get ’em out here.”
It took us an hour to get over to the cave. We hadn’t spent too much time around the remains of Laurie May’s cabin, which was indeed all gone. Even in the moonlight, the pile of blackened rubble was a desolate sight among all the pretty flower beds and the fenced yard.
Carrie had been unable to reach the Big brothers. Our problem now was that the Creigh dogs didn’t show up when they should have. Carrie figured Grinny had retrieved them and put them back under the house. It was one thing for us to hole up in a cave and shoot them as they attacked. It would be another thing altogether if we were creeping Grinny’s cabin and they all appeared at once like the last time.
“We shouldn’t have left,” I said. “We could have dispatched that whole pack right there from the car.”
“And if those kids are there, Grinny would have been down in the basement cutting throats while we were eliminating attack dogs,” Carrie said.
The field leading down to the Creigh cabin was just as bare of cover as before. I’d brought the spotting scope and spent some time scanning the whole compound, but that wasn’t helping us get any closer. It was nearly midnight, and we needed to either back out and get some help or get down there and start some shit.
“Cam-look,” Carrie said, pointing down the hill. I looked. A child was walking out of that tree line that ran down alongside Grinny’s cabin. I swung the scope around. She was blond, almost white-haired, wearing a long dress that reached to her ankles. Her face was pinched and scared, and she was somewhere between eight and ten years old. And she was coming right up the hill toward us like a diminutive ghost.
16
My God,” Carrie said. “They are in there.”
“And can you tell me how she knows we’re up here in this fucking cave?” I asked.
Carrie had no answer for that and neither did I. If ever I wished for a working cell phone it was right then, which is when I remembered that the cave was a signal point. Nathan had captured my ass when I stepped out to improve the signal.
“Cell phone works here,” I said. “Call the Bigs.”
She looked at her phone, swore, and called the Bigs. I watched the little girl climb the hill, and then remembered to put away the guns and to make the shepherds lie down. She looked scared enough as it was. I heard Carrie talking to someone, so I stepped out, without the guns, to wait for the child to make it up the long hill. I hoped she wasn’t a stalking horse for some guy with a long gun down at the cabin, but she was coming purposefully, as only a frightened child could. I cursed M. C. Mingo, Hayes, Grinny, and all their works.
Carrie snapped the phone shut behind me. “Zoo city in Marionburg,” she said. “Sam’s there with an SBI squad, and there’s real goat-grab under way. Bigger John says he’s heard talk of the Bureau coming in. I told him to back out and meet us at Laurie May’s.”
“Look at her,” I said, and Carrie looked. The child knew precisely where we were. She was almost there, and we could hear her puffing with the exertion of climbing the hill.
“You go out there and talk to her. She’ll be scared of me.”
“Right,” Carrie said, and went partway down the hill to meet the child. I went back to the spotting scope to make sure there wasn’t some Creigh snake-in-the-grass setting up on Carrie. A moment later, the two of them came into the cave. The child recoiled when she saw the shepherds.
I told her it was all right and brought each dog over to lick her hands. She relaxed, but only a little, so I took the dogs to the cave entrance with me, where I went back to the scope and Carrie sat down to talk to the little girl.
“What’s your name, sweetie?” she asked.
The girl put a grubby fist in her mouth for a moment before answering. Her eyes were pale blue and just the slightest bit out of focus. “Honey Dee,” she said. “I’m Honey Dee.”
“Well, Honey Dee, what are you doing out on this big old hill so late at night?”
The girl closed her eyes for a moment, as if she were recalling a rehearsed message. She was wearing a long white shift and had a frilly little bonnet on her head embroidered with crude yellow bees. She continued to nibble on a knuckle; then she got the message out.
“Grinny says y’all have to leave us alone, or we all goin’ in the glass hole.”
I stopped breathing for a moment when I heard that. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Carrie stiffen.
“Who else is down there with Grinny?” Carrie asked.
The little girl had to think about that. Then she began to count on her fingers and name names. She named five more names.
“So there’s six of you in the house?” Carrie asked.
That provoked some more heavy-duty brow wrinkling. Somehow I didn’t think Honey Dee was operating with a full deck, not with that partially vacant expression I’d glimpsed earlier. Vacant? Or partially blind? I couldn’t tell. Then she counted laboriously on her fingers to six this time and nodded.
“What is the glass hole, Honey Dee?” Carrie asked gently.
Honey Dee shrugged. She didn’t know.
“But it’s a bad place?”
She nodded vigorously. Bad place.
“Do you know where it is?”
More head shaking.
“Is it downstairs, under the house?”
Another shrug. Fist back in her mouth, and then a yawn.
“Keep her here or send her back?” I asked quietly, still sweeping the area with the scope. I was looking for dogs.
Carrie sighed. “I think we have to send her back. We keep her…”
“Yeah.” Then I saw movement on the front porch of the house. It was too dark to see what it was, but the shape was big enough for it to have been Grinny. I told Carrie, and the child perked up. Interestingly, she seemed more eager than fearful.
Carrie took the child’s hand and walked back out into the open. She pointed down the hill and told her to go to Grinny. Honey Dee giggled and then positively ran down the hill and into the trees. I focused the scope on the dark porch and saw movement again, a bare glow of yellow lantern light, and then just shadow.
“Think she’ll let those dogs out again?” Carrie asked.
“Actually, I don’t,” I said. “She knows we could take them all down from inside this cave. No, I think the dogs will come out if and when we get a lot closer to that house. Then we’d be the ones in trouble.”
“How did she know?” Carrie asked. “And what in the hell is a glass hole?”
“Not sure I want to know,” I said.
“There was a signal a few minutes ago,” she said. “I say we call Sam King and tell them there are six hostages in there and Grinny’s threatening to kill them. Maybe that will finally stir up the feds. Big enough posse, that dog pack’s no threat.”
I couldn’t think of anything else to do, and we didn’t have much of a chance of getting into that cabin, not if she let that dog pack loose again. “Try it,” I said.
She stepped back out into the night air, opened the phone, looked at it for a second, held her arm out, and then began to move it around, searching for the ever-elusive signal. The dog came out o
f the dark at about a hundred miles an hour and went right for her extended hand. She yelped as massive jaws snapped down, and then she jumped back into the cave, tumbling over my shepherds as they lunged for the cave entrance. But the beast was gone into the night. And so was her phone. I recalled the shepherds before they got sucked into some kind of canine ambush.
“He get you?” I asked, backing slightly into the cave with the shotgun ready.
“Didn’t break the skin, but not for lack of trying. God damn! Hand really hurts.”
I searched the dark hillside for a glimpse of the cell phone. The dog had gone for a nice juicy hand, not the phone, so I hoped it would be where we could retrieve it. Depending, of course, on how many more of those bastards were waiting out there. Assumptions again, biting me in the ass and Carrie in the hand.
“Can you cover me?” I asked. Carrie was holding a penlight on her hand, which was already swelling.
“For the moment I can,” she said. “I think.”
I handed her Hayes’s shotgun and told her to stay in the cave entrance. I stepped out with my own gun ready, Frick and Frack alongside. I remembered to check the hillside above the cave, but I didn’t see anything. That damned dog hadn’t made a sound, so maybe there was just one of them out there in the darkness. It had come in fast, low, and hungry, and I knew I was taking a big chance stepping away from the relative safety of the little cave. But we had to have that phone, as mine was in the Suburban. If we couldn’t find it, we’d have to back out and return to Marionburg.
I kept the shepherds close by my side and searched the ground in the general direction that the dog had run, while trying to watch as much of the hillside as I could. I pulled the hammers back on the shotgun and walked in a series of small, continuous circles, looking down and then out into the darkness. The shepherds would be my first line of defense, but I didn’t need them getting torn up right now, either.
There was a small breeze nudging cooler air across the slope, but not enough to stir the grass or make any noise. The only sound came from my boots as I crunched through some of the loose gravel. Carrie was down on one knee at the cave entrance, her shotgun resting on her thigh, while she held her injured hand under an armpit. I knew about dog bites-they hurt. A big dog could exert hundreds of pounds of pressure with its jaws. It was like having your hand run over by a car with studded tires.
I finally stopped to take a careful look all around. The phone was one of those small silver numbers. It should have been visible out there, assuming the dog had dropped it when he realized he couldn’t eat it. Or maybe he did eat it; he’d looked mean enough to eat a car. And where the hell had that fucker gone? The nearest cover was either back in the crack through the ridge or down in that tree line near the house. The four hundred yards in between was just a wide open space.
I decided to make my way up toward the defile through the ridge. It was a hundred feet or so above me and maybe seventy yards away. I could make it out as a darker shadow against the gray rock face of the ridge. I kept circling as I went-I couldn’t turn my back on any sector with that thing out there, but the closer I got to the crack, the more I wondered if that dog wasn’t in there, waiting. So I sent my shepherds ahead, aiming them at the opening.
Big mistake.
The moment they got fifty feet away from me, I saw out of the corner of my eye something coming at me from the downhill side. I vaguely heard Carrie call out and just had time to whirl around and raise the barrels of the shotgun as the dog leaped at me. I ended up stuffing both barrels down its throat, and then the gun was wrenched out of my hands before I could fire, sending me tumbling backward into the grass. The dog landed five feet away and tried desperately to disgorge the shotgun with its paws and by shaking its massive head. Then Frack pounced and seized it by the throat, followed by Frick, who grabbed the dog by its muzzle and started pulling, which had the effect of dislodging the shotgun. It tried to get up but it was too late, as Frack clamped down on its windpipe until the thing shuddered and then lay still.
I got myself up, grabbed the shotgun, hit the inert beast on the head as hard as I could with the gun butt, and then walked back in the direction from which it had sprung. The shepherds followed, excited but visibly pleased with themselves. I told them they’d been a little slow off the mark.
I finally found the phone, which had been crunched almost in two. It was obviously inoperable. I thought about Carrie’s hand being in there and decided she didn’t need to see how badly the phone had been mauled. I waved her over, and we headed for the exit out of this unhappy valley. We walked through the sliver of a canyon, Carrie facing forward, me facing Grinny’s, in case there were more of them around. When we got down to the ruins of Laurie May’s cabin, I was grateful to see that the Suburban was still there.
I checked my cell phone, but there was still no service, so we decided to wait there for the Bigs. Leaving the headlights off, I moved the vehicle to a better concealment position alongside some trees. Carrie was still holding on to her injured mitt, so I found some aspirins in my glove compartment and gave them to her. I told her I’d take the first watch, but she said no, her hand hurt bad enough that she’d never be able to sleep. I put the dogs out fifty feet away from the car in different directions, lowered all the windows, set up the guns, and then reclined my seat. Carrie kept her seat upright.
“I can’t think of any way to get into that cabin,” I said. “Not with all those damned dogs out there. We’d get some of them, but then they’d get us.”
“One already did,” she said. “And that was actually a near miss. Those things could amputate a limb.”
“So can those guys right outside,” I said, “But right now, we’re stymied.”
“We’ve got help coming, hopefully with radios,” she said. “They can get word to the county cops in Marionburg that we have a confirmed hostage situation involving children. That should do it.”
“I’m thinking I should go back and keep watch on that cabin. See if she moves the kids, or if Nathan comes back. The brothers show up, signal me and I’ll come back here.”
“Signal you how?”
“Gunshot? That sound ought to carry over the ridge.”
“And what about those dogs?”
“I’ll stay in the canyon. I can hold off the whole pack from in there.”
“Unless they get behind you,” she said. “It might be Nathan who’s running the pack. Hell, he could be on this side by now. Get you on your way up to the canyon.”
I sighed. We were stuck. The situation was getting away from us with every passing moment. But she was right-what if Grinny had turned loose three or four more of those savages and they’d tracked us through the canyon? These Creighs were pretty damned good at deploying those animals, as Baby and I had discovered during our run down the mountain. I was used to surprising people with my two furry torpedoes. The Creighs had taken that notion to the next level. I heard a little sound next to me and looked over at Carrie, who was now fast asleep.
Well, so much for that plan, I thought. We tried. I made sure the shepherds were where I’d left them, one a tawny shadow in the grass to our left, and the other two amber eyes on the right. Then I poked my shotgun out the window and settled down to try to stay awake.
17
The Bigs showed up an hour later in a Carrigan County cruiser. They drove right past our position and didn’t stop until the shepherds ran up to their vehicle. My guys love cop cars. I saw that Carrie hadn’t heard them arrive, so I pulled the keys and slipped out of the Suburban. The Bigs got out and Luke, bless him, handed me a cup of takeout coffee.
“Y’all havin’ fun?” he asked.
“About as much as you,” I said. They were looking around for Carrie. I pointed to the Suburban and folded two hands to my cheek to tell them she was asleep. Then I told them what we’d learned.
“Mr. King’s gone into Rocky Falls with his people,” Luke said. “Old boy named Ken Llarper is acting Robbins County sheriff now
.”
“He a Creigh ally?”
Luke shook his head. “Older guy. Longtime cop. May even be kin to Ms. Santangelo over there. Took Mr. King into Mingo’s office and was tryin’ to explain how things worked in Robbins County.”
“That’ll take some doing,” I said. “In the meantime, we need to get those kids safe.” I told them what we’d run into in our latest unsuccessful attempt to breach the Creigh compound. Big John spat into the grass and suggested we go get us some antifreeze. I knew what he was talking about. Farmers who had a problem with feral dogs would often put bowls of antifreeze out in their fields and keep their livestock up for the night. Animals simply couldn’t resist lapping it up, and then died horribly. The problem was that you got everything, not just the target pest.
“We also don’t know where Nathan is,” I said. “He might be there, he might be up in the hills, he might be watching us right now. This is going to take a crowd.”
“Got one’a them at the sheriff’s office right now,” Luke pointed out.
“Your radios work out here?” I asked.
It took two more hours to get said crowd to the Creighs’, and gaining entry turned out to be a cakewalk. The bad news was that there was no one there. No Grinny, no kids, no Nathan, not even any of the dreaded dogs. As I had suspected, there were also no drugs or other evidence of any criminal enterprise. Carrie and I got to sit out on the front field side while a host of heavily armed deputies from both counties tossed the place. They found the dead dogs we’d shot, which helped to corroborate our stories, but that was about it. The cabin itself was unremarkable, with furnishings and supplies typical of the people who lived up there. If there ever had been children there, the cops could find no sign of them.
They’d brought an EMS truck along, and one of the medics treated Carrie’s hand and gave her a tetanus shot just to make her arm feel as good as her hand. We both gave formal statements to one of King’s people, but the stark fact remained that the Creighs, the important ones, anyway, had vanished. Along with their flowers. We were nowhere. Again.
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