Cam - 04 - Nightwalkers (29 page)

I went back to the cottage, fed the starving mutts, and got my field gear. Then I drove the utility vehicle over to the barn and told Cubby
that I needed to see Ms. Valeria again but it wasn't urgent. He thought the vehicle was a great idea but advised me not to drive it up to the big house where Ms. Hester would see it.

"You don't think she's already seen it from one of those windows up there?" I asked.

He grinned. "Ms. Valeria? Yeah, she's seen it, and you in it. Ms. Valeria, she sees everything. But Ms. Hester? She's takin' a nap right about now. Thing is, she's got a hate-on for those four-wheelers, and that's what's she's gonna think this is. Might shoot at it, even."

When I drove back over to Glory's End, I got a surprise. Carol Pollard was waiting for me. She'd changed out of her town clothes into jeans, boots, and a long-sleeved shirt-blouse. She was carrying a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum side gun in a holster. I asked her about her client.

"They forgot the appointment," she said. "Clients are a lot like contractors sometimes."

"And?"

"And I thought about you going out there on your own," she said. "I'm not a cop anymore, but I have had the training, if you'd like a hand."

"Absolutely," I said, eyeing the hand cannon and wondering if she could use it. "Backup is always welcome. Hopefully we won't need artillery."

"If we do, though, there's no acceptable substitute--is there?"

Carol and I rode in my trusty new chariot back out to the cut through the eastern ridge and then left up the hill to the spot where we'd acquired the newly disgraced Dobermans. The shepherds rode along in the back compartment as a concession to the fact that I'd just fed them. I was glad to have Carol along, but what really made me feel more confident was the fact that the other guy's dogs were no longer in the game. He'd made a mistake doing that. The first of many, I hoped.

Carol asked me about the so-called coal mine, and I told her what
Walker had told me. She'd never heard that story, or that any coal had ever been found in Rockwell County.

"They didn't find any here, either," I said. "Sounded to me like someone came along and scammed the owners in a get-rich-quick scheme."

We stopped at the same place we'd stopped when the dogs alerted. I looked back at them to see if they were interested in anything up in that tree line. Frick burped. Good deal.

I pocketed the keys. Carol and I got out and started up the hill. I'd brought a walking stick, so I made better progress than Carol, who was being careful not to turn an ankle in all the loose rock.

Loose rock?

I looked down and saw that we were climbing up what had to be a tailings pile, hidden under a carpet of weeds and small trees. I sent the dogs ahead, but they couldn't make quick progress, either, due to the sharp footing. Carol swore behind me, and I turned around to see her hunched over, both palms on the ground and her legs out behind her. She couldn't straighten up without falling, so I went back down and rescued her.

"What is it with all these rocks?" she said. Her hands were bruised.

I told her what I thought it was, and we both looked up into a line of scrub pines that seemed to mark the top of the rockslide. The shepherds disappeared into the trees.

"Great place for a shooting gallery," she said softly, staring into those trees.

"Let's split up," I said. "Separate by about twenty, thirty yards. Divide the targets."

"Right," she said. I gave her my walking stick and then went left across the rocks. I had heavy-duty field boots on, which gave my ankles a whole lot more support than her L.L.Bean day hikers gave her. She went right, far enough to force two shots, but stayed near enough that we could still see each other. I was counting on the shepherds to give us some warning if there were bad guys up there.

In the event, there weren't. We climbed through the pines and found both mutts waiting for us in front of what had been the entrance to a smallish tunnel or natural cave in the side of the ridge. There had been two massive vertical beams for the side of the entrance, and one even bigger, tree-trunk-sized beam for the lintel. All three beams were smashed into a collapsed mass of shattered wood and rocks. The tunnel had either caved in or had been dynamited down. Either way, there was no access here, and the entire pile of rocks and crushed timber was studded with dozens of small cedars.

We poked around the entrance area just to make sure that someone hadn't staged a cave-in, but it seemed real enough. The dogs weren't picking up any interesting scents, which was comforting. I did wonder why the Dobermans had come from this direction and mentioned this to Carol.

"How about air vents?" she said.

Good question
, I thought. Even if this hadn't been a real coal mine, they might have cut some air vent shafts farther up the ridge. The problem now was that the ridge went almost vertical at the face of the tunnel entrance, rising up maybe two hundred more feet to the top. There was a surprising number of trees growing off this face, slender, spindly specimens in survival mode, trapping water by putting roots down into cracks and crevices along the face.

"I'm trying to figure out how the tunnel would have gone," I said. "Straight in here, but then where?"

"If they kept going straight, they'd come out the other side of the ridge," Carol said. "If they turned it, they could go along the drift of the ridge for almost a half mile."

"I would think it would go down, not horizontally, if they were looking for coal. They wouldn't find coal in the top reaches of a ridge."

"They're finding it that way in West Virginia today," she pointed out. "They're strip-mining by taking off the tops of mountains."

She was right. Now that I thought about it, the sheriff had said
they'd taken the tunnel sideways down the ridge for six or seven hundred feet.

"We need to get up top," I said. "Look for any air vents, or even another entrance on the back side of the ridge."

"I thought your interest in this was a safety issue," she said, eyeing that near vertical face. "This looks pretty much closed up right here."

"My interest is in seeing if this tunnel, assuming it hasn't collapsed, too, is a base of operations for the guy who's after me. I don't want to go underground. I just want to rule it out."

"That's good," she said. "I don't like heights, and I hate going underground. You have no idea how hard it was for me to go into that escape tunnel."

I looked at her to see if she was serious about all that. She was.

"Okay," I said. "I don't want to go all the way around to the other side of this ridge and make another long climb. It'll take too long. Let's do this: You take the shepherds and go back down to the vehicle. Take it back to the dirt road that goes along the bottom of the ridge and head toward the river."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to climb hand over hand, using those trees, get to the top, and then walk the top of the ridge down toward the river. I'll keep you in sight, and you should be able to see me. I'll come down off the ridge when I get near the river. That should put you near the quarry."

"I don't know, Cam," she said, looking up at the ridge again. "If something goes wrong, I can't help you from down there."

"I guess you could always call the cops," I said and gave her the keys.

The plan fell apart as soon as the shepherds realized I wasn't in the utility cart. I'd begun my climb only to be interrupted by Kitty barking down at the base of the cliff, while Frick ran back and forth around the collapsed entrance, trying to find a way up. I could see Carol in the distance, standing by the vehicle, her hands up in an I-tried gesture.
There was nothing I could do about the shepherds, and I now had my hands full, literally, with staying on the cliff. The smaller trees were shaky as handholds because they were rooted in their imagination for the most part. I pulled a couple out and then had to slide back down until I could grab a more substantial tree trunk. Each slide produced a baby avalanche of gravel and loose rocks. I also found myself puffing more than a little and vowed to get back to daily runs and a lot more exercise, just as soon as I got off this damned cliff.

A half hour later I reached the top of the ridge. I could no longer see the dogs down below, and I hoped they'd gotten tired of being rained on by my clumsy climbing efforts. The view was pretty spectacular from the top. I could see the big house in the distance to the west, and I could clearly see Carol and the vehicle rolling down toward the river and the quarry area to the east. As I watched, two dusty shepherds came out of the woods along the road and caught up with the cart. Carol stopped, invited them to climb into the back, and then looked up toward the ridge. I waved, and she waved back. Okay, back on track.

The very top of the ridge was solid rock, which looked like granite to me. The scrubby trees began on the nearby slopes, but the backbone of the ridge was like a paved road, maybe twenty feet wide. I was looking for signs of ventilation shafts, but wondered, now that I beheld all this granite, if they'd really run any shafts down to that tunnel. Sheriff Walker had said the tunnel began in a cave, and that almost didn't compute: Caves were usually found in limestone, not granite. Maybe the whole thing was BS, with the efforts of the alleged coal miners confined to blowing up a perfectly good cave. Either way, the ridge didn't seem to be a very promising place for a hidey-hole.

A blur of motion to my left had me whirling and reaching for my SIG when two deer came bounding past me in those exaggerated leaps they make. They'd come out of a clump of hardwoods down to the left and about thirty yards ahead of me. I put the SIG back and veered off the clear rock path and went down into that grove of trees,
where I found a spring. The water looked cool and inviting, but I was mindful of giardia and other parasites, so I washed the sweat off my face but did not drink. There were three game trails leading away from the spring, which was the source of a pretty brook that went splashing down the hillside. A hawk launched out from the side of the ridge below me, screaming indignantly at something.

Then I froze. I'd been above the deer, and yet they'd come in my direction. The hawk had blasted out of the trees farther down the same side of the ridge. Maybe I wasn't the cause of all this spooked wildlife. I was keenly aware that I could no longer see Carol, or she me, now that I was off the top of the ridgeline.

I listened but heard only a mild breeze sloughing through the trees and the musical noise of the brook dropping down into a baby waterfall, which seemed to echo.

Echo?

I started grabbing small trees again as I let myself down the western hillside, following the course of the outfall from the spring. After about forty feet of going tree to tree, I came to a real cliff, a sheer wall of solid rock. Then I realized it wasn't a cliff at all but a crack in the ridge. It was perpendicular to the ridgeline and about twenty feet across where I was standing, narrowing down to almost nothing about a hundred feet down. It was as if the part of the ridge that sloped down to the river had broken off the main stem of the hill, like a ship whose bow gets too heavy for its keel. There were decent-sized trees on both rims, which is why I'd never noticed this formation from down in the crop fields below. Even more important, directly opposite from where I stood, there was a rope, anchored to the edge of the crack, dangling down into the shadows below.

Gotcha.

We held a council of war at the local pizza joint over beers and some surprisingly good pie. Tony was back from Charlotte, and Pardee back
from downtown. I'd invited Carol Pollard to come along. She wanted to help, had local knowledge that we needed, and wasn't afraid to go out in the woods. The fact that she carried a .357 was a plus.

Tony had mixed results to report from the world of Charlotte Dobermans. There was an active breed club in the city, but no one remembered anyone asking to acquire two working Dobermans. There was one breeder who said he'd supplied four Dobes to an individual who'd claimed he was an estate manager out in the Asheville area about a year ago. Tony didn't think that sounded like my guy. None of the club's breeders had ever heard of the biker gang's dog supplier, but they did acknowledge that there could be other breeders out there who did their own thing and didn't come to the AKC shows, weren't members of the Charlotte DPC,
etc.
Otherwise, he'd drawn a blank.

Pardee had managed to acquire the components he needed to put up a video surveillance system at Glory's End, including both the house and the grounds. He had designed the system so it could be monitored from within the big house or from the stone cottage. I asked him to send a list to Sheriff Walker of all the high-tech widgets we'd come up against since my stalker started his thing, so that he could get the SBI going on providing a possible profile.

Then we talked about the mysterious rope. Tony immediately suggested we saw three-quarters of the way through it. Next time the guy started down, he'd get a courtesy drop test. I wanted to climb down it and see what was at the bottom. Pardee said that the bottom of that chasm would make a perfect place for my stalker to finish the game. That rope, he suggested, might have been put there for me to find.

He had a point: My ghost had been ahead of us all the way up to this moment, and there was no reason to think we had the initiative now. Then Carol had a question.