They left the truck and crossed the roadside ditch, climbed one fence into an alfalfa field, and walked along another that stretched up to the woods at the top of the hill they were climbing. The woods would extend over the crest, down into the Orly’s Creek valley.
The day was hot, and they took it easy climbing the hill, breaking a light sweat that attracted mosquitoes when they crossed from the alfalfa field into the woods. The climb got steeper as they got deeper into the woods, and eventually they moved from one sapling to the next, hanging on to the brush to stay upright. Fifteen minutes after they left the truck, they reached the crest of the hill, which was punctuated with outcrops of soft yellow rock.
A game trail ran along the crest. Johnson shucked off his pack and said, “We should replace some fluids while we have the time. Stay quiet, see what we can hear.”
Virgil took a few sips of water, while Johnson popped open a beer, and they listened: and heard the woods, but nothing out of place. When Johnson had finished the beer, they walked to their right along the game trail until Johnson, who was watching the GPS, said, “We’re about there. We need to go off this way.…”
He led the way downslope, into the Orly’s Creek valley. A few dozen yards into the trees, they found themselves paralleling a shallow dry gully, and Virgil said, “This probably goes down to the break in the bluff.”
Johnson nodded, and they followed it down; a minute later the gully got deeper, and the way was blocked by a shoulder of the yellow rock. They moved into the gully, which got steeper, but took them through the lip of the bluffs. At that point, the slope became even steeper, and they paused to assess. The ground beneath their feet was a combination of damp black earth and crumbled bits of the yellow rock.
“It’s doable, if we use the rope,” Johnson said. “But we couldn’t get back up unless we left the rope here.”
“Don’t want to do that,” Virgil said. “If we had to get out some other way, they’d know where we’re getting in.”
They decided to take a chance — they’d use the rope, doubled around a tree trunk, then they’d pull it down, and find another way out of the valley. Doing that, after the decision, took only a couple of minutes, with Virgil leading the way down. They pulled the rope down after them, repacked it, and walked down the valley wall to the trail they’d seen in the ag service photos.
It turned out to be six feet wide, and well packed, marked with ATV tracks. A few incipient gullies across the trail, caused by water draining from above, had been filled with broken rock.
“Some good work here,” Johnson said. He looked up and down the track. “But why would they build it?”
“Cooking meth,” Virgil said. “But it’d have to be an industrial operation to build a road like this.”
Johnson was looking up at the overhanging trees. “You know what? Half the trees here are sugar and black maple. They could be cooking syrup.”
“Thought that was all up north.”
“No, they got sugar bushes all the way down into Iowa,” Johnson said. “The wood makes damn good flooring, I can tell you.”
“I know about flooring, now. Frankie salvages it from old farmhouses.”
“Yeah, that’s a fashion,” Johnson said. They were both looking up and down the trail.
Virgil asked, “Which way?”
“Right. I think.”
They moved off down the trail, listening and watching. Virgil asked, “What is it with these trees?” He pointed to a young maple that had been girdled with an ax or hatchet, but left standing.
“They’re killing the tree, but leaving it standing to dry out. Making firewood,” Johnson said. A hundred yards farther on they came to the built spot that Virgil had seen on the photos, and it turned out to be a woodlot, with a few face cords of stacked wood set off to one side.
“Could be the answer to the trail,” Johnson said. “Somebody’s harvesting firewood. You’d need an ATV to tow it out of here.”
“But this isn’t the end of it…”
Virgil led the way out of the woodlot. The trail had narrowed to a single-wide track, blocked by a pile of brush — the leftover ends of trees cut up for firewood. An ATV could get around it, but nothing wider. The trail eventually led to three metal sheds of the kind sold at lumberyards. They’d been painted with a green-on-black camouflage pattern, and all had tightly sealed doors, with padlocks. A half-dozen propane cylinders sat on the ground beside one of them.
“Smell it?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah.”
They could smell the acetone.
“Cooking meth,” Virgil said. “And not long ago.”
“They could use the same setup to cook syrup, the same setup I have,” Johnson said. “I wonder why that never occurred to me.”
“Because, despite your many enormous personal flaws, character weaknesses, and innate criminality, you’re too much of a gutless coward to cook meth,” Virgil said.
“I wondered about that,” Johnson said. “Thanks for the explanation.”
Virgil tested all the locks and found them solid. He took out his camera, made a few photos, and then saw, farther down the slope, a hump of raw dirt, like the fill from a double-long grave. When Virgil went to look, he found a dump: trashed containers that once contained the raw materials for methamphetamine. He took some more photos, then put the camera away and walked back up the slope to Johnson. “Can you get a GPS reading here?”
“Maybe,” Johnson said, looking up at the canopy of maple leaves. He had one a minute later, and saved it to the receiver’s memory.
“Let’s go upslope and see if we can find a way out,” Virgil said.
“What about the dogs?”
“This operation is more important than the dogs,” Virgil said. “They could be taking a ton of meth out of here. Johnson: this is sort of a big deal.”
“I’ll give you that,” Johnson said. “I still want the dogs.”
“We’ll be back,” Virgil promised. The trail had ended at the shed, and following the points on the GPS, Johnson led them to another of the openings in the bluff line. When they got there, the slope was still too steep, and they moved along to the last one, two hundred yards farther along the valley. This one was steep, but had saplings growing all the way up, and by using the trees to pull themselves along, they managed to climb to the crest.
Twenty minutes later, they were back at the truck.
“Now what?” Johnson asked. He cracked his second Bud as they did a U-turn and headed back toward the river.
“Got to think about that,” Virgil said. “To tell the truth, I don’t entirely trust your trusty sheriff.”
“You’re more perceptive than you look,” Johnson said. “Not to say that he’s an outright criminal. He may accept a little help now and then.”
“Okay. I’m thinking DEA. I’ve got a good connection there.”
“It’s your call,” Johnson said. “I’m just in it for the dogs.”
Virgil’s man with the DEA was named Harry Gomez, and he was now working out of Chicago. He’d directed the biggest shoot-out Virgil had ever seen, and one of the biggest he’d ever heard of.
Back at the cabin, Virgil called Gomez, who was a modest-sized big shot, and had to talk his way through a protective secretary. “Just tell him who’s calling,” Virgil said. “He’ll take it. I’ve saved his life on many occasions.”
She didn’t believe him, but Gomez took the call. “Hey, Virg. Please, please don’t tell me you found another meth lab.”
“I was calling to shoot the shit for a while,” Virgil said. “I’m not doing much, and I was wondering, what’s Harry Gomez doing? I mean, other than blowing some higher-up—”
“Really?” Gomez sounded almost hopeful.