Spider mountain cr-2

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Parts? Human parts? From kids? A new low.”

  I nodded. It was getting dark, and I was suddenly tired. We could hear the drone of another helicopter going over the ridge. I knew I needed to beat feet if we had any chance at all of saving the rest of the kids.

  “There should be a fresh one in that glass hole or lava tube, whatever you want to call it,” I said. “Carrie’s up there leading the SBI through it. Assuming that they can retrieve a child’s body from that formation, and that Nathan is ready to come clean, they’ll finally have some physical evidence.”

  “A body in something like that might never be found,” he said. “You know-bodies sink initially and then gas up a couple days later. But if that tube goes way down, it may not be possible to get it back. From what you’re saying, that thing could be several hundred feet deep.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, and explained about the light coming in from the main lake. “But it will take time and some specialized equipment, which is why I cut loose from the goat-grab up there.”

  “What’s your plan?”

  “I’m headed for Grinny Creigh’s. There are five more kids still adrift, if Nathan was telling the truth.”

  “Why not wait for the cavalry?”

  “Same reason as last time-she hears Nathan’s in custody, she has to make those children disappear, and I’m betting they have other places where they can make that happen. Or she might run.”

  He shook his head. “She’ll never run. Never in a million years.”

  “Well, good, then I look forward to getting up with her,” I said.

  He thought about that for a moment. “Want some backup?” he said finally.

  “Where’s your crew?” I asked.

  “I’m solo on this,” he said. “We’re not supposed to know you anymore, so I can’t involve my guys. They brought me up here when I found out that Mose had taken you into the hills. I actually came up to talk you guys into leaving this mess alone, but… kids?”

  “We tried to tell people,” I said. “I’m not especially comforted by my government’s reluctance to jump into this with both feet. And from what Carrie found out, the federal response is being dictated more by turf boundaries than any sense of real urgency.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, kicking a clump of grass. “I talked to my boss. At length. But he’s a fucking wimp. Keeps saying: Where’s the drug-enforcement angle in this? If she’s kidnapping children, then call Charlotte. If she’s moving meth, go catch her at it.”

  It was my turn to think. Then I had an idea. “I was told there’s a hundred pounds of crystal meth in the escape tunnel behind the Creigh cabin.”

  He looked over at me with visible skepticism. “Told? By whom?”

  “Can’t say,” I said. “Have to protect my sources. But it’s a hundred pounds, all wrapped up for sale in the big city. Sounds like she’s moving meth to me.”

  “That’s laughably weak,” he said. “My boss would throw you out of his office for bullshit like that. For bullshit less than that. Nobody wraps meth.”

  “But your boss is a wimp,” I pointed out.

  “Why, yes, he is,” Baby said.

  “So: You want to go along? Explore this anonymous hot tip? Make it official?”

  “Duty calls,” he said.

  23

  It was close to eleven that night when we reached the north end of that ridge-line crack above the Creigh place. Our vehicles back on the mountain had apparently not been disturbed, so I’d left a note for Carrie saying I was going to Grinny’s to find the missing kids. I left out any mention of Greenberg’s participation. I was counting on their not going back to retrieve Mose’s vehicle until they’d settled the various scenes up on the mountain, because once they did, and found the note, they’d have people all over Grinny’s. I wanted to have our one shot before that happened. I thought Baby was right: She’d corner up and fight, not run.

  The night was cool and clear, and there was enough of a moon up to see pretty well. The shepherds were ready for some work, and so was I. We hunkered down in the Creigh-side end of the crack and scanned the cabin and buildings below. They were all dark, as usual, and there were no police vehicles there anymore, or none that we could see. That didn’t mean there wasn’t a deputy parked up under a tool shed down there, but the only police presence I could see was the occasional glimpse of a new tape line fluttering around the front of the main cabin. I also looked hard for sign of dogs-I think I was a lot more afraid of the Creigh dog pack than any lurking cops.

  We still had the same problems with respect to approaching the cabin down that open hillside, so my plan involved getting back into that escape tunnel, whose entrance was beneath the lone tree fifty feet away. I pointed it out to Greenberg, who was duly impressed with the Creighs’ tunneling ability. I’d brought a shotgun instead of my rifle, and we each had a handgun. I had mine in my utility vest, along with a flashlight, extra ammo, a knife, and some water. Baby had his Glock in a hip holster and a flashlight. I wanted to get back into the house via the escape passage, make sure Grinny and her prisoners weren’t actually just sitting there in the kitchen, and then explore some of those other passages we’d seen on our way out.

  With all that blubber onboard, I couldn’t feature Grinny Creigh making it through that narrow passage up to the main escape route, so I was pretty sure that she’d never left the Creigh compound. The house, maybe, but not the clutch of buildings. Nathan’s henchman had obliquely confirmed that when he told us Grinny had deliberately pointed us away from the cabin and out to the glass hole. Even a sheriff’s office forensic team hadn’t been able to find the escape tunnel, so I figured there had to be other hidey-holes buried back there behind that cabin. They’d had decades to dig and hide, and this couldn’t be the first time they’d had to go to the matresses in all that long history of smuggling and worse. Wherever she was holed up, it probably did not involve a lot of physical exertion to get there. On the other hand, I had to admit that she could just as easily have gotten into a vehicle right there at her front door and been driven off to Arkansas. But my instinct was that she was lurking in a hole somewhere, like the spider she was.

  I’d asked Baby on the way over how in the world a bunch of drug-running hillbillies had managed to get into the horrible trade in pediatric organs. He surmised that they’d started by peddling kids to the truck-stop pimps throughout the South, then graduated into selling them into organized kiddy-porn and pedophile sex rings, the bulk of which operated in or around New Orleans.

  “All those semis,” he said. “You know, with the big living quarters behind the cab? Perfect way to transport thirteen-year-old girls and boys across the country. There’s a known market for blue-eyed blonds in Washington, no questions asked and big money. Probably only been a matter of time before someone with connections in the courier systems approached them about upping the ante.”

  “But harvesting organs? Hayes said he knew about them going to the hospital lab, but he thought it was for abortions. Carrie and I thought it was for sterilization.”

  “That’d be bad enough,” Baby said, “but you’re saying they took them over to that lab, put them to sleep, and then harvested. You gotta wonder who thought that one up.”

  “Three guesses.”

  “Yeah, well, you have to remember, they’ve been doing shit like this for generations up here. Probably didn’t seem like a big step to them.”

  “Which mystifies me even more,” I said. “If they’ve been doing evil shit for decades, how come they’ve never been taken down?”

  He thought about his answer. “I think it’s because nobody cared, as long as they were doing it to themselves. We only got into it because the meth coming down out of the hills was reaching flood stage. But it’s not like we’ve been putting serious assets against them-those are reserved for the urban cocaine and heroin traffickers. You know, the guys bringing it in by container-load through Miami or over the Mexican border on NAFTA semis. Basica
lly, DEA is just too damned busy to fool with what has been up to now a pretty low-viz and very remote problem.”

  I’d thought then that if this was considered a low-visibility problem, then the rest of the nation’s drug problem must be positively galactic in scale, but I kept my silence. If anyone appreciated that, it would be a street agent like Greenberg. Some day I’d ask him if his thoughts on the “war on drugs” were similar to mine. Right now it was time to get moving.

  “Pet the doggies?” I asked in a quiet voice, and both shepherds crowded around, circling my legs and rubbing hard in return for ear rubs and patting, even as I told them in my kindest voice that they were a pair of worthless, blockheaded, deer-chasing, flea-shedding hair-bags who couldn’t catch a sleeping cat it they tripped over one. They positively beamed.

  Getting them down into the escape tunnel was harder than I’d anticipated, and if surprise had been the objective, we probably blew it right there. The dogs slid and scrambled their way down that slanting plank and then barked at us when we didn’t join them fast enough. We found the lanterns Carrie and I had left, lit them, and put away the flashlights. Then we regrouped at the junction of the tunnel coming up from the cabin basement and the bricked-up wall. I described where the one tunnel came from, and Baby asked if we could defend ourselves if someone was down there in that hidden room with a twelve-gauge as we climbed down out of the ceiling. I had to admit that we’d probably get our asses shot off, literally.

  “How about this walled-up tunnel, then?” he asked, running his hands over the roughly mortared stones. He had to squeeze in between two of the three big ceiling support posts planted right in front of it. I had to hunch over, as the roof of the tunnel was only six feet, if that. The floor was hard-packed earth with a thin layer of dust. Everything was a dull yellow-orange in the kerosene lamplight. The air quickly began to stink of kerosene smoke.

  “It may have caved in or just simply be too dangerous to use,” I said. I slapped the stone with my hand and mostly hurt my hand-it was solidly embedded. The shepherds watched us in the lantern light with a bemused expression.

  Baby got out a pocketknife and began to test the edges of the stone wall. He could get the blade in about two inches all around except on the bottom. He leaned back against the center post and then grunted.

  “What?” I asked.

  “This post just moved,” he said, standing up and going around to the side away from the stone wall. Then he reached up and grabbed the top of the post and pulled, and damned if the post didn’t come down like a big lever arm while the stone wall lifted slowly out of the ground maybe two inches. We heard a dull snap under the door as if a ratchet had fallen into place. The post was now at a forty-five-degree angle, and it wouldn’t move anymore.

  “Okay, so it lifts and separates,” I said. “But does it open?”

  Baby pushed on the wall right in the middle, and nothing happened. I then stepped forward and pushed on the right-hand side, and the thing began to pivot, like a big stone flapper valve. There was obviously a pin of some kind dead center, so the wall ended up at about an eighty-degree angle to its original position. A warm flow of air came through the opening, smelling faintly of straw or hay.

  I pointed a flashlight down the passage beyond, which revealed a tunnel identical to the one we occupied. There were three posts on the other side just like the ones we had on this side. The difference was that there were many footprints in the dust on the floor, and this one went down at the same angle as the one coming from the cabin.

  “If anyone’s down there,” I said quietly, “that pressure release will let them know this door just opened.”

  “What’s that smell?” Baby asked, sniffing the air. “Barn? Hay? Straw?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe this connects to that barn where they chained me up that night.”

  “So-we go?”

  “These guys go,” I said, and sent the shepherds down the passageway. If there was going to be an ambush, they’d sense it. They might not survive it, but we would. We picked up our lanterns and went after the dogs, Baby first and me in trail and still hunched over to keep from banging my head. I kept looking back, half-expecting that stone door to swing quietly shut like it always did in the movies, but it just sat there. Baby saw me looking and suggested we wedge it open. We went back through and wrestled with that post lever until we broke it off at the ground, which should keep anyone from closing it behind us.

  The tunnel went straight for maybe two hundred feet and then hooked hard right, where it ended in a wooden door. The dogs were milling around in front of the door, but they weren’t excited. We could hear air whistling past the cracks around the door, and the barnyard smell was stronger here. There was a normal latch on the door, and black iron hinges on the other side. This thing had been here for a while.

  “The lady or the tiger?” Baby said, drawing his Glock.

  I pulled the shepherds back to me and took a position that would let me cover the opening as the door swung back. Baby put a lantern down just out of the arc the door would take when opening, lifted the latch as quietly as he could, flattened himself against the wall, and pulled the door open quickly.

  Over the barrels of the shotgun I saw ten anxious eyes staring at us from a dark room. We’d found the kids.

  Now: Where was the spider?

  24

  The door had opened into one of the shed barns, but not the one in which I’d been penned up. There was a double door at one end, hay piled up to the roof on one side, and a wall of farm implements on the other. There was fresh straw on the floor and a malodorous bucket in one corner. A second bucket with fresh water and a tin cup hung on one wall by the doors.

  Baby stepped into the room first, and the children recoiled when they saw the gun in his hand. I followed him into the room and told them it was okay, we weren’t going to hurt them. The lantern revealed a ragtag collection of blankets on the floor. The children were all little girls, maybe eight to ten years old, dressed in plain, floor-length frocks, which were universally too large for them. They were pale, thin, and frightened. Two were sucking thumbs, a third had badly crossed eyes, and the other two had skin infections on their jaundiced faces. They all looked scared of the shepherds.

  Baby put away his Glock and knelt down on one knee to talk to the kids, while I went to the doors and tried to open them. There was a good-sized crack between the doors, and I could see a heavy keeper bar across them. I got out my boot knife, slid it through the crack, and lifted. It came up and then fell off the blade when I got it past the brackets. I pushed the doors ajar a few inches and looked out. In the time we’d been walking the tunnels, the night had turned misty and colder. I could see the main cabin way off to my right; the barn where the dogs had been kept was right next door. The moon was barely visible, but it provided a diffused light in the mist.

  “What’ve we got?” Baby asked.

  “Fog’s coming in,” I said. “Nothing moving out there for the moment. Better move that lantern, though.” I didn’t want to be silhouetted. And we still hadn’t found Grinny Creigh.

  “These kids are starving,” Baby said. “And scared.”

  “Wards of Grinny Creigh,” I said. “They ought to be scared.”

  He shook his head in dismay. “Barely human, some of them,” he mused.

  “Problem is, how do we get them out of here?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking sideways out the partially opened barn doors. “We try to make a run for it, and she’s out there in the weeds with some of those dogs?”

  “What if we could go back through the tunnels,” I said. “That would reduce our exposure to a fifty-foot run across open ground. Once we got into the rock passage, we could defend ourselves, and then get to the vehicle.”

  As if in answer to my what-if, we both heard something, a noise in the tunnel from which we’d just come. One of the kids was staring at the open door, and then she started to cry. I sprinted for the door as I recognized the
sound of running feet-far too many running feet. The shepherds recognized it, too, and leaped for the doorway at about the same time I got the thing slammed shut. Ten seconds later there were multiple thuds against the door and dark growls of frustration. So much for getting out through the tunnels, I thought. And Grinny had joined us on the web. Her web.

  Baby had brought the keeper bar into the barn and then secured the barn doors using the brackets on our side. There was a lot of snuffling and growling going on in the tunnel and just that simple door latch keeping the door closed. I jammed a pitchfork up against the panels of the door.

  “What time is it?” Baby asked.

  I looked at my watch. It was twelve thirty in the morning.

  “They’ll find that note when they go looking for you,” he said. “Then they’ll come here. All we have to do now is wait.”

  “She’s here,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” he replied. “She’s here.”

  I peered through the crack between the barn doors. There was a cold draft coming into the barn, and the mist had deepened outside. I could see out into the building complex, but not very far out into the yards beyond.

  “Well, we sure as hell can’t go out there,” I said. “There’ll be dogs and probably some black hats with rifles waiting. Don’t suppose your cell works, does it?”

  He shook his head. I’d checked mine; same deal-no signal. Some of the dogs on the other side of the tunnel door must have heard us talking, because they began to jump against the door. The pitchfork held, but just barely. The kids were watching the door with terrified expressions. They apparently were all too familiar with Grinny’s dog pack.

  “Hay bales,” Baby said, and we started stacking bales against the door. We got twenty of them set up, which had the effect of reducing the scary noises and also putting a thousand pounds of weight in front of that door. I went back to the front door to keep watch.