I knelt down again to get closer to his face. “I’m here for Nathan Creigh,” I said. “Where is he?”
He started breathing in even shallower gasps, as if building up enough oxygen to speak again. “Camp’s yonder, by the hole. Nathan tole us to find the third man, after he shot t’other one. He’ll be a’waitin’ fer ye. You that lawman what kilt Rue Creigh?”
I said yes.
“Be damned, then. He said you’d be a’comin’. That Grinny would point the way. He’ll be a’waitin’. You a dead man walkin’.”
“Right now I think you’re a dead man talking,” I replied. I pulled his injured hand out from his armpit just to make damned sure he wasn’t holding a pocket gun. He groaned with pain when I moved his wrecked hand. Then I got up. His hat was lying in the grass. I retrieved that and his shotgun, then called in the dogs. I walked fifty yards toward the rock formation and then gave the dogs the hat as a scent target. No dummies, they promptly headed back to where I’d left the bearded man. I called them back in and sent them in the opposite direction. They cut a trail pretty quickly, and we started down the hill to find Nathan, hopefully before Nathan found us.
22
It turned out that the Creighs had set up a permanent camp just around the corner of the landward end of the big rock formation. All my efforts to be tactically discreet came to nothing when the dogs and I blundered out of the woods and there it was: two ancient, crude log cabins, a fire pit, cages for their dogs, the obligatory junk piles, a privy, and Carrie, sitting with her back to a small tree, a grimly determined look on her face and the end of a rope in her hand. She had her injured hand back under her armpit again. The rope had two turns wrapped around the tree. The rest of it led right to the base of the rock formation.
“Knew you’d show up sometime,” she said. “You have yourself a nice war up there?”
“Where’s Nathan?” I asked, shotgun ready. The dogs did their usual running around after greeting Carrie.
“Oh, he’s hanging around,” she said, indicating the other end of the rope. I walked over to where the rope disappeared into a stand of hawthorn. I pushed through the tangle and finally got to see the glass hole.
It was indeed an ancient lava tube: It looked like a long funnel, perhaps twenty, thirty feet across at the top and necking down to twelve feet across about a hundred feet down. The sides were polished basalt, and I could see why they called it the glass hole. At the bottom was a pool of dark blue water. At first, I thought the water was reflecting the sky, but then realized it couldn’t be-the tube went down at about a sixty-degree angle, so that water had to be connected to the main lake on the other side of the black tower. At the bottom of the rope, halfway down, was Nathan, hanging on with both hands and swinging gently from side to side.
“Okay,” I said. “How’d you manage this trick?”
“He got a little hands-on after he’d sent his boys out to find you,” she said wearily. “So I lay back and let him. Once he was distracted, I head-butted him, kneed him, whacked his limpy leg again, stuck an elbow in each eye, and then cold-cocked him with that tree branch over there by the fire.” She looked up at me. “Is Mose-?”
“Mose is gonna be okay, I think. He had his old police vest on under that coat.”
“Thank God,” she said. “I heard that round hit him and he went down like a tree. I saw all that blood while those ugly fucks were tying me up, and I just knew…”
“They were there already?”
“Apparently,” she said. “Nathan positioned them outside our camp, waited for his shot, and then they piled in and got me before I could get to a weapon.”
“That’s our Nathan,” I said, looking down at the hanging figure in the hole. “I managed to surprise his helpers. The bearded guy shot his buddy by mistake, and I took him and one dog out. The only problem we still have is that there are four of his dogs out there somewhere.”
“What do we do with Nathan?” she asked.
“Cut the rope,” I said. “Or not-let him hang down there until he dies. Except-”
“What?”
“First I want to talk to him. The bearded guy said they brought one of the kids up here, but the rest were still with Grinny.”
She became immediately alarmed. “I haven’t seen her,” she said, and then looked over at the hole.
I helped her tie off the rope, and then we both went back over to the edge of the glass hole. There was shrubbery growing right up to the lip, and woods creatures had probably been dying in that thing for centuries. Those shining sides looked entirely alien among the bushes and rocks at the top. There was absolutely no way anything could climb back out of that deadly funnel, especially if the climber was wet. It reminded me of one of those pitcher plants that trap insects. The light reflecting in from the tube’s other end in the main lake made the hole look almost infinite in depth.
I had thought that Nathan was holding his end of the rope, but when I looked closely, I could see that she had tied a noose around his two wrists. He was literally hanging from the rope by his hands, which looked larger than they would normally be. I shouted down the hole and heard my voice reverberating off those glasslike sides. Nathan raised his head but could not open his swollen eyes. Carrie had apparently grown tired of being abducted by Creighs; he looked positively battered.
“Hey, Nathan, can you swim?” I said.
I thought he muttered something, but he was too far down for me to hear it. “Let’s pull him up some,” I said, and so we did. We got him to within ten feet of the lip, but the sides were so smooth he might as well still have been a hundred feet down. He was, in fact, positively battered.
“Where’s the child, Nathan?” I asked.
He cracked one eye and glared up at us. The rope had pulled him into an elongated bow shape, and he was probably having trouble breathing. Broke my heart. He’d dropped Mose without a qualm with a long-range rifle shot and then taken Carrie back to his camp so that he could throw her into this alien geographical feature, where she would absolutely never be found. After he had gratified himself. The fact that they had a semi-permanent camp up here meant they’d done all this before.
“Where’s the little girl, Nathan?” I asked again. I kicked the rope, which had the effect of squeezing his purple hands.
He grunted with the pain. “Ain’t no girl,” he said, finally.
“Your bearded buddy said you brought one up here-he’s dead, by the way, along with his pal who had the big dog on the leash-so where is she? You throw her down this hole?”
“Y’all go to hell,” he said, closing the puffy eye.
“Cam, look,” Carrie said. She was pointing down into the lava-glass funnel. Way down there, in the water and at the edge of the lava walls, a tiny white object had appeared. It looked like a piece of paper, but it wasn’t. I suddenly had a very bad feeling.
“What’s that down there, Nathan? Down there in the water?”
Nathan tried to look down but couldn’t. His arms had to be just about screaming by now, but I had zero sympathy.
“Get on the very end of that rope,” I told Carrie. “Belay it around that tree right there, and then I’m going to drop this bastard.”
Carrie did exactly as I asked. I took up the tension on the rope, she wrapped the very end of it around the tree, and then I let go. Nathan slid down the side of the tube like a luge rider, yelling all the way. He hit the water below with a clumsy splash and disappeared until the rope snapped taut, and then he burst back up to the surface. Without hands, he couldn’t swim, so he went right back down again. I let him do this three times and then hauled in on the rope until his arms and head remained above water. I gave him a minute to breathe and then told him to go get the white thing that was floating about ten feet from him. He looked small and helpless all the way down there, which I thought was just about perfect.
He refused to move, so I tied off the rope to keep his head above water and then went and got my rifle.
“Cam,�
�� Carrie began, but I waved her off.
“I want him talking, but he needs some encouragement,” I said. I knelt down at the lip of the lava tube and put a round three inches from his face. The sound effects were interesting, as was the knifelike slash of the bullet into the water right next to his face. I fired two more rounds, each one a little closer, and he finally yelled, “All right.”
I gave him some slack with the rope, and he crabbed sideways with his body and then reached down to pick up the white thing. It became obvious that his hands weren’t working anymore as he kept dropping it. I yelled down for him to grab it with his teeth, and, when he did, we both pulled on that rope with all we had. Nathan wasn’t a little guy, but the hole wasn’t vertical, either. Being wet, he slid up that glassine surface with very little friction. When his face got to the top, framed by his two straining arms, I stared at the white thing he held in his teeth.
So did Carrie. She began to curse him in a low monotone, using words I hadn’t heard since the Marines. Then I saw what it was: that frilly little cap that Honey Dee had worn when she came up to the cave and brought us the message from Grinny, the one with the crude yellow bees embroidered on it. This evil motherfucker had thrown her down there to her death. And she hadn’t been the first, as I kept reminding myself.
Nathan heard our reaction and for the first time looked afraid. I had trouble framing the words. “What-have-you-done?” I said through clenched teeth.
“She was a bleeder,” he said, spitting out the bonnet. It stuck to the lava wall like a piece of wet toilet paper. “No good to us. Grinny said trash her, so that’s what I done.”
“So it’s true?” I said. “You make those poor goddamned women pay for their drugs in kids? And then you sell them as sex objects?”
He gave a long sigh, as if he knew it was all over and there was no more point in playing the role of tough guy. He looked up at us with that one working eye, and I’d have sworn he was laughing at us.
“Better,” he said.
Better? That’s what Mingo had said.
“What the hell does that mean, better?”
“We sell ’em for parts.”
I heard Carrie gasp, and then she was reaching for her knife to cut the rope. I grabbed her hand and yelled “No” at her. She fought me, reaching by me to cut that rope. She almost succeeded. The hell of it was I wanted her to cut that rope.
“He needs to die,” she snapped.
“Sure he does. But think about it: Think about the evidence that has to be down there in that water. They’ve been using this place for years.”
Nathan had closed his eyes again as the pain of being hung by his hands reasserted itself. Carrie glared down at him with a face like Medusa.
“Look,” I said. “The one thing we’ve never been able to get is physical evidence. Down there is the mother lode. They’ll convict this bastard, and then he’s going upstate, where they’ll lock him up for life as a child killer. Think of what the cons will do to him. Especially if his hands don’t work any more.”
“Some goddamned lawyer will get him off,” she muttered, but she had lowered the knife.
I sat back on my haunches and looked down at yet another minion of hell. “That so-called doctor will talk,” I said. “The doctor who took those kids into a lab at night and cut them up like stew meat. And we’ll make sure the story’s out there, so no bureaucrats can pull any more rugs over this mess. But first we have to find Grinny and the rest of them.”
“Prison’s not good enough,” she said.
“Yes, it will be,” I said. “If he gets life, they’ll have to box him up so the rest of the cons can’t get to him. He’ll live in an eight-by-six concrete room for the rest of his life. And if he gets the needle, he still gets to live in that box for a decade or so, only this time in the death house. Our killing him would be a mercy, and this bastard doesn’t deserve mercy of any kind.”
I stood up and pulled her back from the lip of the lava tube. “What are we going to do right now?” she said.
“We’re going to go back to our camp and check on Mose. Then we’ll fire that EPIRB. For this mess, we need a crowd.”
“And him?”
“Let him hang for a while.”
We lowered Nathan back down to midway in the tube and then tied him off.
A crowd was what we got. The first helicopter arrived right at the end of the two-hour response window, as advertised. He couldn’t land, but he did put down a rescue paramedic. While the bird flew around in lazy circles overhead, we explained what we had on the ground and that we needed Sam King and his SBI team here in a hurry, preferably before dark. Carrie did most of the talking. The medic checked Mose out and said he was stable and qualified for air transport. The helo came in and they did a rescue hoist. Mose was shocky from that big whack in the chest, but he managed a grin at Carrie, who held his hand until the hoist was ready.
Then the shepherds and I went back to the ambush site to mark the location of the two bodies there. Carrie stayed back at our camp. The paramedic had left her a radio, and she briefed the rescue pilots as they flew back to the nearest hospital on what to tell the cops. Then, while we waited for the SBI, we went back down to Nathan’s camp near the lava tube.
We debated bringing him out of the tube. Carrie really liked the idea of letting him just hang there, but his hands were now a dark purple, and I didn’t want him going off to some hospital to fight gangrene for a month. She, on the other hand, had this interesting theory of how his hands might just come off, and she wanted to watch. In the end we hauled him out of the glass hole and tied him to a tree. I left the shepherds to watch him, and then we trudged back up to our original camp to wait for the circus.
The enormity of it all swept over us while we waited for the helicopters to come back.
Better, Nathan had said. Just like that snake Mingo. They hadn’t been sterilizing these little girls at that path lab-they’d been harvesting organs. Very fresh pediatric organs. That’s what had been going overseas. Coolers filled with body parts. Couriered to an airport by one of Mingo’s deputies, probably.
Then it occurred to me that if this story got out, Grinny would absolutely be forced to kill the remaining children. Once the swarm began here, Carrie and I would be wrapped up in it for a few days at least. I made a decision not to let that happen. I told Carrie that I was going to go back down to the glass-hole site and check on Nathan and the dogs. I asked her to remain at the camp to greet King and his people and to see if she could find a landing site. The radio blasted into life, and while Carrie was dealing with the first wave of questions from King, the mutts and I slipped out of camp.
I went back down to the tube. Nathan was still tied to the tree, and it didn’t look like he’d made any efforts to get himself untied. He was exhausted from his excursions on the rope. His hands were still purple, he was having trouble breathing after being semi-crucified like that, and, more important, I think he’d given up. If there had been any more black hats up there, they’d probably melted away into the hills once all the shooting started. Even so, I wrapped a canvas bag around Nathan’s head so he couldn’t see, retrieved my rifle and the shepherds, and then quietly took the dogs around the crater lake the long way as a convoy of helicopters appeared up on the ridgeline.
I hated to just abandon Carrie to the arrival of the authorities, but she’d be the more helpful of the two of us, familiar as she was with SBI forensic and scene procedures. She knew as much as I did about what had happened there and would be more than able to describe Nathan’s revelations. I, on the other hand, had zero official standing and, therefore, none of the legal inhibitions that would constrain the SBI when they finally swung into motion against Grinny Creigh.
Besides, I really, really wanted to get that woman. Mingo and Nathan had been players in their grisly business, but the real monster in the cave had always been that supremely evil old woman. They’d get Nathan into a courtroom, but I knew Grinny would die before she e
ver let that happen to her. I didn’t think she’d run, either. For one, it would be physically difficult for a woman that fat to move fast. Two, these were her hills, her territory, her fiefdom. She would defend it to the end. That was fine by me. And by not telling Carrie what I was up to, I reasoned, all she could honestly say to the rest of the cops was that she didn’t know where the hell I was. In a sense, I was doing her a favor. Sounded good, anyway.
“C’mon, mutts,” I told the shepherds. “We have to get to that truck before it gets really dark.” And before Carrie finds out we’ve bugged out and comes down to fang our collective asses, I thought.
It took the same two hours going down as it did coming up. Going down was still harder on the leg bones than climbing. The shepherds ranged ahead most of the time except for when we had to traverse some thick scrubland, and then I called them in as protection against any lurking Creigh-dogs. Which is why they didn’t spot the man sitting on the front bumper of my Suburban smoking a cigarette as we walked up to the parked vehicles. I was unlimbering the rifle when I recognized Baby Greenberg. He flipped the butt out onto the ground and got up as we approached.
“So, sport, who won the war up there?” he asked. The dogs greeted him warily-they didn’t like surprises or cigarettes.
“How’d you find us?” I asked.
He grinned, knelt down, and pulled the tracking transmitter from under the front wheel well. “Would you believe, federal voodoo?” he said. “For your own safety, you understand.” He put the thing back on the frame and stood up, dusting off his hands. “And where’s the rest of’us’?”
I put my stuff in the back and then sat down on the back bumper to tell him what had happened up there, and what we’d learned from Nathan about their child-trafficking business. I’d expected complete shock, but this only seemed to fulfill his worst expectations for the mountain criminal crowd.
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