Crazy Like a Fox (Lil & Boris #3) (Lil & Boris Mysteries) (2 page)

I held onto hope anyway. Somebody would miss me. They had to. Hopefully before I was supposed to be at work tomorrow morning to take the seven-to-three shift and lurk around town to catch traffic offenders on their way to work in Charlottesville or Lynchburg.

My hope didn’t last too long. We were bouncing over and through and into some nasty potholes. It knocked a lot out of me, including my breath. I had four people who might miss me. No more. Until I failed to come to work. Then Kim, my secretary-dispatcher, would worry. She’d call Aunt Marge, then Tom. Aunt Marge would send Roger over to my house. Roger would not find me. Meanwhile Tom would run out to the usual speed traps just to be sure I wasn’t there. Someone would call Maury Morse, our mayor, and then Harry Rucker. Someone might even call the state cops sooner or later. I wasn’t sure what kind of mess had been left but I was pretty sure I’d knocked a glass bowl onto the floor on the way out the door. It was an antique, too. Art deco. Aunt Marge didn’t like art deco as a rule, but I did, so she’d let me have the bowl from the treasure hoard she called an attic. I also had a Tiffany lampshade, a Picasso, a Van Gogh, a Degas, a carved screen brought from Hong Kong by a Turner on the world tour, and a few miscellaneous other pieces she’d been glad to hand over.

There’s a reason Sotheby’s has her number on speed-dial.

As long as Boris was okay, I told myself, it didn’t matter who missed me or when. As long as Boris was okay.

It’s funny how that didn’t help.

The car was slowing, climbing. I slid around in the trunk, getting a hell of a carpet burn on my bare feet and hands. Uphill. Then curving. And then steeply downhill, back up again. I knew what that meant. A hideaway tucked up in the mountains. We had a lot of mountains. Probably still the Blue Ridge, though I’ll be damned if I could explain how I knew that. Something in my blood and bone. I might be half Littlepage and half Eller, but I was all mountain girl born and bred.

I might just end up a mountain girl buried.

2.

T
he car rattled to a stop. I waited to hear the engine cut off, but it didn’t.

That didn’t bode well.

The trunk flew open. I had no warning, was blinded by sun and snow glare. We’d gotten a few inches two days ago, and it hadn’t warmed up enough yet for it to melt. When four hands hauled me roughly out of the trunk, the cold hit me so hard I shivered painfully with every breath. The air had a feel to it I recognized, a windy bite. Wherever I was, it was high.

I’d half-expected someone to put a hood over my head. Instead, as my eyes slowly adjusted, I saw that
they
wore hoods. And ski masks. And sunglasses.

I’d been kidnapped by wannabe Unabombers.

Beyond them, I saw gray tree trunks, blue sky, the white ridge of the next mountain. Then I was grabbed under one arm by the taller person, while the other one waved a shotgun eloquently toward a gap in the trees.

I do yoga barefoot. Walking in that snow froze my feet so deep they
burned
. I gave both my abductors a taste of the famous Littlepage glare that ought to have turned them to ice, but I kept walking like a good little prisoner and didn’t say a word.

Never argue with a shotgun at close range.

We moved downhill. I had no idea how my captors knew where to go, because I couldn’t see a single trail marker anywhere. No blazes, footprints, posts, not even a bit of colored tape. Which was useful information, if I survived. These guys knew the path very well.

Locals.

I twisted my head to study the mountains. I know the shape and swell of every mountain in our county, but none of these rang a bell. Before I could decide if that was good or bad, Shotgun used the barrel to re-direct my gaze forward. If it wasn’t for Tall, I’d have fallen face-first.

The path opened onto a wind-swept outcrop that fell sheer and frightening a good hundred feet straight down. For a second, I thought they’d throw me over, and my heart jumped into high gear so fast my stomach turned flips. I may have squeaked, like a mouse.

Tall pulled me left. I did my best to balk. He pulled harder, Shotgun pushed, and I was half-walking, half-sliding toward a stone face jutting right out of the mountain, walling off the outcrop on that side. There was nowhere to go from there but some cracked, broken boulders that in summer would be a great place for snakes. In winter, the fractured jumble looked like a great place to toss a sheriff off the cliff.

In movies or TV shows, someone in that situation miraculously breaks free, or snap-kicks the bad guys to their deaths, or is rescued at the last possible second. In real life, you shake so hard you can’t even wet your pants. You get a few nanoseconds of wondering if it’d be better to die by shotgun, fright, or a big fall. You’d sob and beg, if you weren’t duct-taped across the mouth, and to hell with dignity.

I was trying to scream when Tall suddenly veered into a tiny gap between the boulders and that stone “wall” sticking out of the mountain.

The optical illusion evaporated. There, through an otherwise invisible space between what was actually the “wall” and a very big boulder, I could see perfectly gentle mountainside.

Not far away, near the base of the cliff, stood a log cabin. Log shack, more accurately. Complete with dead brambles and winter-browned creepers, a caved-in metal roof that looked too rotten to bear the weight of fog, and a stretch of disintegrating rail fence right out of a PBS show on frontier history.

It was too bad to be true. Too perfectly bad. And not bad enough, I noticed as we got closer. Sunlight glinted off window glass behind seemingly haphazardly nailed-on boards. No dead plants were near or on the door, which fit snugly in its frame instead of hanging loose or warped. The heavy chain across the door looked rusty, but the padlock gleamed. I’m no trail-master, but I could see there were no animal tracks, not even a single squirrel print, anywhere by the place. But the clincher for me was the black soot marks on the underside of the tree branches overhanging the old fieldstone chimney. That tree was maybe fifty-sixty years old. The shack at a guess was twice that, and had probably been uninhabited since the tree was a tiny sapling.

Uninhabited on a daily basis, that is.

I took a deep, sharp, lung-hurting breath. Crap. Moonshiners.

Some people run their stills at home for a little profit on the side. Others find a hole in the wall dump like this. Most choose a place more convenient to a road, but a quick covert look told me there were logging roads cutting through these forests. You could see them, and the previous year or two of brush and waste, without the masking foliage of spring and summer.

I know every moonshiner in our county. As long as they keep their product pure, and don’t sell it where I can see it or to kids, I turn a blind eye. The main crop for several decades in our county has been poverty. You don’t hang some old grandma out to dry over a few gallons of corn liquor that sell for ten-twenty bucks a pop and help her buy groceries. The big runners, the ones selling for twice those prices to big city markets, I leave to the feds. So what would a moonshiner with a covert set-up like this want with me?

When we got in the door, I knew I was right about the moonshine operation. Once you smell corn mash, you never forget it. You can’t. It’s etched into your sinuses the way the taste of moonshine gets etched into the backs of your eyeballs. Believe me, that’s not something you
can
forget, even if you try.

The one-room shack was snug. That busted-in roof? Not a problem when you’ve got another roof under it, hung low enough that you couldn’t raise your hand without smacking the underside of it. Fireplace? Blocked in tight. Windows? Easy to open from the inside if you wanted some fresh air, provided you pushed aside the blackout curtains. No electricity, but battery-operated camp lanterns had been stuck in the corners.

Shotgun kept his eye and his weapon on me while Tall pulled up a big metal ring in the floor. Trapdoor to a cellar‌—‌color me unsurprised‌—‌and a whole lotta scared running in my veins.

Tall went down first, with a lantern. Chivalrous of him. Then I more or less controlled my fall down the stairs, so steep they might as well have been a ladder. Shotgun came last, with another lantern.

The cellar had been hewn right out of the mountain, and it was easily twice the size of the shack above it. The far wall, like the floor, was native fieldstone. There were even two tiny windows peeping out into the valley, though at that hour, the sun came directly in. Late afternoon, nearing sunset, I realized with a shock. I’d been gone for hours.

There was nothing down there in the way of comfort. It was all copper tubing, huge kettles, gallon jars, and what looked like space for small tanks of propane to fuel the two big cookers‌—‌jury-rigged, I saw‌—‌and a stream running through the cellar. It came right out of the mountain, trickled down a sort of built-in trough, and out the far wall. On a hot summer day, this was probably a great place to be, even with the two big cookers going. In winter, it was cold. Not killing cold. At least, not right away.

Tall left the cellar. I shifted from one foot to another, trying to restore full circulation. It wasn’t working. Shotgun stood at the base of the ladder, watching me like he could see right through my fleece jacket. I turned my back on him and studied the cellar. Maybe twenty-four by twenty feet. In the center, more or less, was a big square-ish fireplace, probably once used for cooking up mash, now home to a wood-burning stove. By the smell of smoke, warm ash, I got the feeling it had been used fairly recently, maybe that morning. When they were preparing for my arrival.

Although there were logs in the bin, Shotgun made no move to stoke up the fire. I kept examining the cellar.

I’d bet the cabin had been built atop the spring when it ran along the bottom of a narrow natural crevice in the rock. I could see where massive old logs had been laid over the part that didn’t lie under the shack, and been reinforced later by both wooden and metal beams. I could even see old tool marks on the stone walls. This place had probably been built to house a still all along. From the shadows of twigs against the two tiny windows, I realized that the growth of the forest masked the place. People could have walked right over top of the whole thing for decades and not known it. Even locals would have a hard time finding it if they weren’t in on the secret.

Another bad omen for me.

Tall returned, with an armful of old, faded comforters. He set them down near the back wall, where the spring entered the stone-laid trough. He led me to them, and turned me to face the wall. When I heard the click of the handcuffs unlocking, I jerked my hands wide and tried to mule-kick him and elbow him at the same time. The best I could do was stagger hard and knock him a little off-balance. He aimed a smack at my head but I ducked it, catching the blow on my shoulder.

I’ve swatted flies harder than that.

Then I felt the shotgun in my back.

Shotgun pressed me down on the comforters, which smelled stale but clean. Tall fastened the handcuff to my right wrist and a length of light dog chain that he looped around a wooden beam more-or-less bolted into the stone floor. That puzzled me. A human can break a dog chain if they’ve got the right motivation, and I certainly did.

Tall went back up the ladder. Shotgun went up after him. The trapdoor slammed into place. I got both hands around that dog chain and threw my weight against it as hard as I could. It didn’t break. I backed up, took the duct tape off my face, inhaled deep, and tried again. That time, the chain broke, the handcuff leaving a sore red scrape on my wrist.

By the time I got up the ladder to push at the trapdoor, I could hear their footsteps, and a sound of dragging. I shoved at the trapdoor with all my strength, and got it up maybe half an inch before weight smacked it back down. I tried to think what had been up in the shack. An old table, maybe? Or an old bed? There’d been some shapes, but I’d had my eyes on Shotgun.

I went back down the ladder. I wanted to run to a window and scream, but I couldn’t even see another house, and chances were I’d be wasting my breath. I shivered, and went to the comforters. There were two. I chose the thinner one and wrapped it around myself from the armpits down. It helped a little. Then I shuffled to the wood stove. I opened the door. The ashes were still warm, all right. But not hot. I stirred them a little with a metal stick, a short length of re-bar, in fact, that had been doing duty as a fire poker by the looks of it. I blew gently. A few bits of something flared up bright, then died away. I shut the door and went hunting.

There were plastic barrels under the two tiny windows, and I pried up the lids. I pulled out sacks, the kind cornmeal comes in when you buy it by the twenty-five-pound bag, still with some fine corn dust in them. I took those, and peeled the labels off three cans of soup I found in a tin box nailed to the wall as as cupboard. My fingers hurt and shook while I shredded the labels, and picked apart the sacks. I pried splinters out of the ladder with the re-bar, and made a little pile of kindling in the warm bed of ashes. I blew and blew, and prayed, and hoped, and finally, one little bit of smoldering caught along the edge of a label. It curled up quick and black. The next moment, a small flame licked up the pile, and the splinters caught.

I fed the fire the smallest log and waited for what felt like years for it to catch well enough for me to risk a second log. I was shaking from head to toe by then. With the door open, the woodstove put out enough heat that I finally felt warm by the time the sun went down and the dark closed in.

***^***

I let myself put one log in the fire only when the previous log was down to hot coals. I managed to make the fire last the night, but come cold sunrise, I had two logs left, and nothing else to burn but the ladder. I used the length of re-bar to start chipping splinters out of the trapdoor. The damn thing was made out of thick planks, aged, tight-grained. I might as well have tried to bite my way through teak for all the good I got from it.