What if we had it wrong? What if this guy had not gone into the alleged ridge tunnels but had instead run for it? It was a simple matter of his turning downhill at the bottom of the chasm and then heading back to the river and his boat. If he'd tumbled to the potential ambush up top, he wouldn't deliberately go into a tunnel from which there might be only one way out.
You're pushing it, my tired sensible brain told me. The lizard half, however, wanted to get this guy.
I turned around, called the mutts, and headed back. I wanted to tell the sheriff what I was doing, but the first deputies had already arrived at the top of the gorge, so I drifted to the right along the top of the ridge and retraced my steps of the afternoon, aiming for the river bottoms at the north end of the ridge. I could see more blue lights coming into the main driveway of Glory's End. The sheriff must have indeed summoned a crowd.
The backbone of the ridge began to tilt down, but it was still pretty clear sailing along all that smooth rock. If I was correct, my ghost was headed in the same direction, only he'd be working his way down in the creek bottoms to my left. That would be slow going compared to this relatively paved road up here, so I kept to the east side and moved as fast as I could, shotgun at port arms, shepherds out in front. When the ridge tipped down at a fifteen-degree slope, I had to slow way down. The moonlight was getting dimmer now, but there was a cool breeze rising from the river, dispersing the mist. I could smell pine trees the closer I got to the water, along with the first hints of mud. I slowed to a careful creep through all the flood debris along the banks and brought the shepherds closer in.
The question now was, where was his boat? It had sounded like he'd been messing with it from somewhere upriver, but the directionality of sounds carrying across the country night could not be trusted. I turned upriver, aiming for the point where that creek that ran the western side of the ridge finally joined the Dan. I was hoping for a clean crossing, but instead I found myself stepping through increasingly gooey muck. I hoped this wasn't the quicksand people talked about. The shepherds were now following me instead of me following them. Their pointy little feet were going deeper than my size sixteens. I had to stop.
There was an enormous tree root ball lying parallel to the riverbank. I hoisted myself up on that and then dragged both dogs up onto it with me. The ambient light down here in the bottomlands was minimal. I could both hear and feel the river flowing by, and I could see pretty well across the water. Something substantial plopped into the water from the root ball. A snake?
Now what, as Tony would have asked. Was this a wild goose chase? The guy could also have gone inland instead of back to his boat. All he would have to do was wait by the road for all the cavalry to go rushing by, and then scamper through the crop fields to the two-lane and beat feet for-where? It kept coming back to that: Where was my stalker holing up?
At that moment there was some frantic thrashing in the darkness upstream from our tree trunk, and then two deer came bounding awkwardly out of the darkness, headed downstream. Frick held. Kitty, unfortunately, did not. She bounded off the tree trunk and went after the deer before I could grab her. Worse, she barked. The next thing I heard was the wasp noise of bullets in the air punctuated by repeated bangs from a gun somewhere in front of me. I went flat against the tree trunk, swung the shotgun out, looked for and caught a dim red flash in the trees ahead, and fired three times at a point just above the flash. I thought I heard a muffled cry, and then I definitely heard a loud splash.
I slid down off the tree trunk, followed by Frick, who'd been startled by the shotgun blast and was pressing hard against my leg. I shoved some more rounds into the shotgun and began to scan the surface of the river. If I'd hit him and he'd gone into the main river channel and not the creek, he'd be coming by almost immediately. Every time I looked directly at the water, all I could see was the bloom of the shotgun blasts. If I looked sideways, I could just make out the surface. Kitty and the deer were long gone, which was a separate problem because a deer can run an inexperienced dog to death.
There. Something.
No. My eyes were playing tricks.
I looked away, then back. Something. Metal. Shiny metal.
A boat. Thirty feet away, at most.
I lifted the shotgun and fired into the boat. It was close enough that I could hear the loads shredding metal sides. When my vision recovered, the boat had disappeared. Then I saw blue strobe lights approaching as two cruisers arrived at the brickworks behind me in search of the firefight they'd heard from up on the ridge.
I'd been tired when the previous evening had begun, and now, at 2:00 A.M., I was well and truly whupped. I'd tromped over to the brickworks to meet the deputies, who came out with guns drawn until they saw Frick. They'd given me a ride back to the cut through the ridge, where we'd met the sheriff coming down off the hill.
Turned out they'd sent three roped climbers down the side of the gorge opposite where our ghost had dropped into the gloom. At the bottom was a tiny creek running through a space no more than one man wide. Uphill was a crack in the rock from which water was weeping, and downhill the gorge widened until the brook joined the larger creek on the western slope. No cave, no tunnels, no secret entrances. Flashlights had revealed fresh footprints leading down the hill, not into the mountain. A careful search of the top area near the rope anchor had produced two motion detectors, each with tiny transmitters. The rope had indeed been bait.
While I debriefed the sheriff and his people on what I'd been doing down by the river, Kitty came bounding out of the woods with white deer tail hairs stuck to her muzzle. She seemed to be no worse for wear, and I was too tired to reprimand her for her egregious breach of discipline. The deputies took us back to the stone cottage. When I went inside I found out why there'd been a delay between when we'd heard the oar clank on the boat and when my stalker had shown up on the hill. There was another of those white-face pictures pinned to the couch, only this one had a note. Frack was watching me with his one good eye when I picked up the piece of paper. He'd been left in the cottage when I went out, which meant he'd let the guy in. That should mean something, I told myself, but my brain was too dulled by fatigue to bring it up.
The note said simply, It's been fun.
Fine with me, I thought. Then I went to bed. As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered if tonight's gunfight had changed my stalker's schedule.
The following morning I took my utility vehicle over to Glory's End to meet the sheriff. Once it was daylight, he had sent a full forensics team up into the crack in the ridge from where it opened on the lower creek. They confirmed that there were no hidden entrances or other signs of tunnels or ventilation shafts. Rock sides, sand bottom, a spring-fed brook leading down, and, of course, my stalker's roping gear. They took one footprint cast out of the creek sand that didn't seem to match with the SWAT guys' footgear, the stalker's climbing equipment, and the two motion detectors back to the lab for a workup.
"You think you hit him?" the sheriff asked again.
"I fired three shells, heard what sounded like a grunt, and then a big splash," I said.
"So he could have just been real surprised and made a noise when he jumped into the water?"
"That's possible, and what I saw of the boat as it went by was a peripheral image. I know I hit the boat."
"So that should still be out there," he said.
"That'll depend on the current, but yeah, if it was inshore, it should still be there."
He raised some deputies on the radio, and we went down in his car to take a look. I left the shepherds up at the main house, not wanting any more deer chases. One of the deputies found the boat a hundred yards downstream from where I thought I'd been last night. He'd climbed a tree and looked down into the water, where he spotted the glint of metal. It took all four of us to grapnel the thing onto the riverbank. We confirmed that I had definitely hit it with the shotgun. There were seven holes along its starboard side and six more on the other where the shot had gone all the way through. There were no traces of blood or anything else in the boat, nor was there a boat license with my stalker's name and address, either. I felt relieved that we'd found some physical evidence from the night before to back up my story of a gunfight down here, but there was no way to tell if he'd been in the boat or had just lost it to the current.