The Cat Dancers (45 page)

Authors: P.T. Deutermann

BOOK: The Cat Dancers

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“Okay, mutts,” I announced quietly. “We’re officially here.”

I shucked my bedroll and the field belt and then moved back to the entrance to see what kind of view I had. It wasn’t terrific. Because of the way the cave entrance made that initial turn, I couldn’t see much of the Creigh place without going back outside. Fine for the nighttime, but dangerous during the day. I went outside and sat down with my back
against the rock again. The cave would be okay for holing up, but I needed a watching point that would conceal me and the dogs while giving me a clear view.

There was another problem. Nathan had come back to the cabin to get some dogs. If they were trackers,
and
if he went to Laurie May’s, they might track me up to and through the crack. After the shooting earlier, somebody knew I was in the area, and probably where I’d come from. In which case, I didn’t want to be holed up in any dead-end cave. They could just stick their shotguns into the entrance and leave the resulting gore to compost.

The cell phone slipped out of my pocket. I picked it up, switched on, and checked for a signal. This time there were two whole bars. I fished around for Carrie’s number and called her. She answered on the third ring, and I moved back into the cave’s entrance.

“Where are you?” she asked. Her voice sounded a bit off.

I told her, and then asked her the same question.

“At your fancy cabin,” she said. “My room at the main lodge was on the government’s nickel, which is no longer on offer.”

“Good, I’m glad someone’s using it. I wish I were there instead of out here in this damned cave.”

“You didn’t tell me you had all this Scotch here,” she said. “I may have overindulged. Just a little.”

That accounted for her voice and slightly slurred words. “Good for you,” I said. “Having second thoughts about resigning, are we?”

“Yep,” she said. “Standing on lofty principle usually means the next step is down. The more lofty, the farther down. I should have eaten something. I’ve already got a headache.”

“Regrets?”

“Well …” she said, hesitating. “I’ve discovered that being in the SBI gave me most of my identity. Now …”

“Now you feel naked,” I said. “No badge, no creds, no gun, no authority. And guess how I know all this?”

“Yeah, I suppose you do. I’m desperate to pursue this
thing with the Creighs, but I’m no longer a player.” I heard a hiccup. “May have fucked up.”

“Would they take you back?”

“You know? I’m not so sure. My boss didn’t try very hard to talk me out of it, now that I think about it. Of course, he was pissed over what we’d been doing here in the hills.”

“Drink lots of water,” I said. “Get some sleep. Everything looks better in the daylight.”

“I won’t,” she said. “Daylight means mirrors. What are you going to do?”

“Laurie May suggested I hide out in Grinny Creigh’s hollow because that’s the last place they’d go looking for me. But Nathan just showed up to get some dogs, so my plan may have to change, and soon. There’s no good cover where I am now.”

“I should be out there with you,” she said. “This is my beef.”

“Right now you’re more useful to me in Marionburg,” I said. Especially with a snoot-ful of Scotch, I thought. “I may yet need extracting if these guys get lucky.”

“I suppose,” she said. There was a moment of silence, a noise I couldn’t identify, and I heard her say
Oh, shit
. Then the connection was broken.

I immediately called back. The phone gave me a canned system message saying it was no longer on the air.

What the hell had just happened? Had the Creighs gone after Carrie? In Carrigan County? I shut the phone off and restowed it. I looked at the shepherds, who were lying there alert, awaiting orders. Something told me to get out of that cave and to go into motion. I told the dogs to stay down and stepped out of the cave to reconnoiter. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that Nathan and his dogs might be on my trail pretty soon, so I couldn’t stay up here on the ridge, and it wouldn’t be terribly bright to let them catch me in that crack in the rock.

Okay, let’s go down to Grinny’s—if Nathan and his dogs had tracked me towards the cabin, he’d think his dogs simply wanted to go back to the pen. I hoped.

I roused the shepherds, and we set out down the ridge. There was no cover until I got within a hundred feet of the cabin itself, and then we slipped into a tree line near the cabin. I went downhill along the tree line until we got abeam of the cabin itself. I put the shepherds on a long down and crept to the house-side of the trees, some thirty feet from the porch. This had been where Nathan’s black hats had been standing the night they brought me up to socialize with Grinny. The wind was slightly in my face, which hopefully would keep the dog pack behind the cabin from detecting us. Grinny’s reputed second sight might present a more dangerous problem. There was some light coming through the curtained windows, but it was yellow and diffused, probably lantern light. I couldn’t see anyone inside or on the grounds. I was trying to figure out what to do next when I heard another vehicle coming up the pasture road below the cabin. It sounded like a modern SUV instead of one of the ancient pickup trucks these folks seemed to favor. Whoever it was knew where he was going and drove right up to the front of the cabin. I settled down in the pine thicket to watch as the vehicle, a dark-colored Chevrolet Tahoe, stopped and shut down.

For a long minute, nothing happened, and then the front door of the cabin opened and Grinny Creigh stepped out onto the front porch. A foreign-looking man got out of the SUV and greeted her in the lilting accent of Southwest Asia. He went halfway up the steps and stopped when she told him to wait there, and then she went back into the cabin.

I studied the man as he waited in the dim moonlight. He was perhaps five foot seven or eight and in his late thirties. He had a sharply outlined, close-cropped black beard which joined his moustache, and he had the prominent nose features of Pakistan or perhaps India. He wore khaki trousers and a light windbreaker, under which I could see a cell phone and a pager clipped to his belt. He waited patiently on the front steps, looking around at the mountains and open fields around the cabin as if he’d seen it all before.

The door opened and Grinny Creigh reappeared, carrying
a lantern this time and leading a young girl by the hand. The girl was between eight and ten years old and very thin, with flaxen hair and a pinched, frightened face. Grinny gripped the little girl’s wrist as if to make sure she wouldn’t bolt as she raised the lantern to fully illuminate the child. The man on the steps examined her carefully, asking her to turn around a couple of times, and then came up on the porch to lay his hands on her. Given what I was expecting, I was surprised to see that he wasn’t touching her in a sexual manner, but rather examining her, the way a doctor might. He looked into her eyes and mouth, asked her to cough even though he didn’t have a stethoscope, and felt her limbs as if to gauge how well-fed she was.

I experienced a sudden urge to shoot them both and rescue the little girl. But for all I knew, this was a county social services doctor or PA making a house call of some kind, even if it was pretty late. The child was thin and frightened, although she didn’t look to be ill. Grinny just stood there looking bored, but not letting go of that slim, bony wrist for one moment. I thought for just a moment that I glimpsed another small, pale face peeking through the curtains at what was going on out front, but then it was gone, like a ghost on the move.

The man thanked Grinny and said that everything was acceptable. Grinny turned the child around and sent her back into the cabin. Then she turned back to the man who had stepped back down to the walkway.

“If’n we had to, how many could you take in one go?” she asked.

The man thought about that for a moment. “No more than one per night,” he said, finally. “And that would be difficult. The airport security would notice.”

“Ain’t sayin’ we’ll have to, mind,” she said. “But there’s been some folks snoopin’ around, and it ain’t been the one’s we usually see ’round here, them drug cops, I’m talkin’ about.”

“Who are they, then?” he asked.

“We don’t know. M.C. had one of ’em, but he got away ’fore we could have a little talk with’m.”

“Is it about the children?” the man asked.

“Like I keep sayin’, we don’t know. But if we git cornered up, you could take all of’m, right?”

“The demand far exceeds the supply, always,” the man responded. “It’s the processing and transport that are tricky. For a sudden oversupply, the costs would be higher, of course.”

“Unh-hunh,” Grinny said in a sarcastic, suspicionsconfirmed tone of voice.

“Let me get something out of the car for you,” he said, and turned to go back to the SUV. Grinny stood there for a second, and then reached down behind that oversized rocking chair and pulled a shotgun towards her, which she set down behind her against the door. Her huge bulk completely hid it from view.

The man came back from the SUV with something small and black in his hand and for a second I wondered if he had a gun. Instead he handed it up to Grinny on the porch.

“This is a one-time pager,” he said. “Use it once and I will come at the regular hour. Then throw it away. Never use it again because they are able to track such devices now.” He pointed up into the sky. “From space, using satellites. Imagine. If you must move them all at once, activate the pager precisely at noon on whichever day you use it. Otherwise, activate it at some other time, it doesn’t matter when.”

“All right,” she said, keeping her right hand buried in her housecoat and close to that shotgun.

“I will be back in a few nights,” he said. “I will let your Mr. Mingo know when to meet me.”

She nodded curtly at him and went back into the house, shutting the big wooden door and locking it with some kind of metal bar which I could hear thump down into place. The man drove off in his SUV. He’d been just far enough away for me not to be able to get the license plate number.

I sat back on my haunches. Some kind of a transaction had just taken place. The little girl had been approved for sale, confirming our worst suspicions about Grinny Creigh. And there might be more of them, either in the cabin with her or somewhere else, based on her question about having to possibly move more than one in a hurry.

But move them where and to what end? He had said something about airports, so maybe the theories about children being sold out of the hills into global sex slave markets was accurate. I remembered Laurie May’s comment about what kind of ‘mommas’ would do such a thing? What kind indeed.

Two dogs started to bark back in the dog pen. I decided it was time to get out of there. I checked the cell phone, but there was no signal down here at the cabin. The dogs finally shut up after five minutes or so. We moved away from the cabin and went back up the hill, staying in the trees for as long as possible, the shepherds plastered to my side. It was slower going up than it had been coming down, and I was puffing once I made it to the cave. I slipped into the black hole and rested for about twenty minutes, trying to decide what to do next. I kept coming up with the same answer—immediate departure. Then deal with the problem of the children. I tried the cell again. There was a single signal bar showing in the little window, so I told the dogs to stay and stepped back out of the cave to see if I could do better.

My heart sank. I should have heeded my own advice. There was Nathan, standing with two other men in the dim moonlight. All of them had shotguns. A fourth man was wrestling the tracking leads on the two big dogs I’d seen Nathan throw into the back of the pickup truck. I thought about calling out the shepherds, but there were simply too many shotguns.

Nathan swung the barrel of his shotgun towards the distant cabin, and tipped his head in that direction. Clear enough.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE CAT DANCERS

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St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

eISBN 9781429903615

First eBook Edition : April 2011

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2005046583

St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / December 2005

St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / November 2006