“Need some gas?”
I managed not to jump. I hadn’t heard the man come up behind me.
“Hell of a storm up top,” he said, pointing his chin up the valley. He was thin with longish gray hair and a Gabby Hayes beard.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I need gas all right. How about coffee?”
“It’ll be done, time you get your gas,” he said, turning to go back inside. “I’ll turn the pump on.”
After I filled the bike, I walked past a minnow tank under an open shed. Aerators bubbled and hissed, and the shed smelled like a sardine can. The little store was homey, with a long wooden table and handmade benches around it. The old man talked as he turned on the lights in coolers and display cases. His blue-gray flannel shirt was thin enough to see through on the elbows. I poured myself a cup of coffee.
“You must’ve got up early this morning,” he said. “Fishin’s gonna be off with all that rain up high.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m actually just here to scout out a hunting spot for deer season this fall.” I stood looking at a map on the wall. It was made of pages out of an atlas taped together, and it showed the surrounding valley with spots marked along the creeks in red felt-tip. “What do you fish for around here?”
“Smallmouth bass. Good fishing most of the time.”
He kept talking while I looked at the map. I was trying to get my bearings, retracing my route from last night. “Who owns this up in here?” I asked, pointing a finger.
“Oh God,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t want to go in there. Them dang bikers hole up in there. I could tell right away you wasn’t one of them. They’re worthless as hell. Want some bacon?” He was peeling off strips into a big frying pan on an old gas stove.
“Sure, bacon’s good,” I replied. “So they wouldn’t want to lease me some hunting ground?”
“God no! You don’t even ask them boys. I had to run ’em off with old Bessie here. Pumped gas and didn’t pay.” He reached behind the counter and patted a double-barreled shotgun with all the bluing worn off. “Rock salt on the left, double-ought buck on the right. Gave it all to ’em.”
“What about this place?” I pointed to the adjoining property on the map.
“Well now, that would be a good place to hunt,” he said. The bacon hissed and popped as he flipped it over with a fork. “But you can’t get up there. There ain’t no road.”
“What about that?” I pointed to what looked like a trail up a creek that ran on the north side of the place.
He squinted at the map. “You can go up the creek with a four-wheeler, but you can’t get past the bluffs. Steep as hell.”
“Where could I rent a four-wheeler?”
“Nowheres I know of. You want some eggs?”
“Over easy,” I said. The old man looked like a hillbilly, and I’m sure he was, but he wasn’t a fool. He was answering my questions just enough to keep me asking more. “How do you get around to all these fishing spots?” I asked.
He gave a little laugh as he broke eggs and dropped them into the hot grease. “A sure-footed old mule named Abner.”
Abner was a jewel. He plodded on through the brushy, slick trails that I guess he knew were there; I surely couldn’t see them. I had left the Harley, of course, after assuring the old man that it was worth at least the value of the mule. I was avoiding thinking about how I was going to get Delbert out, if I happened to find him, but I would think of something. The saddle was an ancient, high-backed thing. The old fellow had bragged on it. “My pap brought it all the way from Kansas City back in the twenties; that’s a genuine Shipley.” The mule was big for a riding mule; he was a sorrel going to gray around the muzzle. The rain had finally come down to meet me, and the cheap poncho that I had purchased at the store was leaking badly where it had snagged on tree branches. When I got to the steep part of the trail, I let Abner do his own navigating. He went up slopes that looked impossible. All I could do was hold on; he was like a cat climbing a tree.
The rain stopped as we topped a ridge, and the sun peeked through the clouds. I smelled wood smoke. I looked through the army-surplus binoculars the old fellow had loaned me and checked out the head of the valley before me. The smoke was rising from a cabin not more than a quarter-mile away. It was still early morning, and men were already moving about. This was not going to be easy.
I dismounted and pulled off the poncho, tying it to the saddle. My back was wet, and I shivered as I tied off the mule. I’m not a bounty hunter; in fact, most of my work involves a computer and digging through courthouse files for my lawyer buddies. But ten thousand dollars is a lot of money, and a one-man private-investigating business is not all that lucrative. The offers that I had received from the big agencies, with their health-insurance coverage and paid vacation time, were looking awfully good as my clammy wet jeans clung to my legs.
As I approached the buildings, I was aware of a chemical smell besides the wood smoke. The old man at the station had told me that “Pappy” Buckman had been dead for years, and that his infamous still hadn’t been used for decades. I ducked behind some cedars as a man came out of one of the cabins carrying two five-gallon buckets and dumped them into the clearing. The grass and brush were already dead from previous dumping. The air held a tang of acid and sulfur, the telltale signs of a meth lab.
There were two guys moving in and out of what looked like an old smokehouse. One wore bibbed overalls with no shirt, his long hair tied in a ponytail. The other had a buzz cut and wore some kind of rubber apron. They both wore rubber gauntlets and busied themselves scrubbing glassware and buckets with water dipped from a small, stone-lined spring. The spring was probably the original reason the still was placed here. I made my way to the back side of a lean-to shed where I could still see the cabin. The grass, as well as the underbrush, was dead all down the hillside as chemicals leached out of a pile of containers for drain cleaner and muriatic acid. Some of the stuff was partially burned; I wouldn’t have wanted to be downwind of that fire.
“Hey!” The voice was so close that I reached behind my belt for the old Colt pistol I had brought with me. “Where can a guy take a dump around here?”
I had ducked back into the shed when I heard another one of them answer. “Yonder next to the shed. Take a roll of paper with you, but don’t leave it in the privy; the rats’ll shred it.” I sank deeper into the darkness behind an old high-wheeled grain wagon that had probably hauled corn for the mash. A door slammed, ringing hollow in the low pressure of the cloud cover. The weathered boards of the shed had shrunk over the years and allowed me to watch the approaching man through the cracks.
He was even uglier than his mugshots. Delbert Fish’s hair was matted and long. His once-white undershirt was gray and stained with what could have been last night’s supper... or blood spatter. The outhouse stood at a crooked angle just above the slope of the hill. I was tempted to shove it over the edge.
A dark green Honda four-wheeler was parked in front of the cabin, and I could see a path back across the clearing. I was hoping for a pickup or Jeep, something I could throw a disabled Fish into and hightail it out of the area. The trail was only wide enough for the four-wheeler. If I could get Fish down the hill quietly, I could work us back around to where Abner was tied and go out that way. There was no way they could follow the mule on a four-wheeler.
“You tie them dogs up?” It was Fish yelling from inside the outhouse. The hair on the back of my neck prickled. I hadn’t thought about a dog.
“Rosie’s tied up,” came the reply. I heard a chain dragging somewhere on the other side of the cabin as the dog heard her name.