Bad Moon On The Rise (30 page)

“
Big scary bear?” I
repeated, thinking of my stint alone in the woods the night before.
Oh my god. I could have been killed while stuffing my face with
stolen sausage gravy. How low was that?

“
I’m being sarcastic,”
Ramsey explained. “Some asswipe killed what looks like my niece’s
teddy bear. It weighs all of fifteen pounds. What the fuck is the
matter with people? Now he’s going to stand around the water cooler
for the next three weeks talking about how his life was hanging by
a thread and he was inches from being eviscerated, when he… wait,
the asswipe is done and now the three assholes are stepping up for
their turn at the scales.”

“
Ever think about going
into television announcing?” I asked.

“
Now that’s a damn bear to
bag.” Ramsey was watching the whole thing like he was tuned into
his favorite television show, absently chewing his honey bun,
without noticing it was actually a petroleum byproduct, and sipping
at his coffee. “Wonder which one of those assholes actually tagged
it.”

“
My guess is the meanest
looking one,” I said.

“
Mean?” Ramsey snorted
with contempt. “Those guys are posers. Sure, they probably did a
few tours in Iraq, they’re probably hot shit sharp shooters or
paratroopers or ex-special ops or some shit like that. But could
they spend one night on a mountain like this without crumbling? I
think not.”

I perked up at that. “I spent a night
on the mountain,” I proclaimed proudly.

His contempt practically oozed over
me. “One night? Girl, I spent three months living off the land not
fifty miles from here.”

“
Did you see Eric Rudolph
while you were on the run?” I asked him.

“
He’s an asshole, too.”
Ramsey abruptly turned on his truck and revved the engine. “Hold
on. They’re pulling out.”

Any fear I’d had that Ramsey might
change his mind about helping me evaporated. Ramsey had decided the
guys were, well, assholes, and he was going to help me bring them
down. God bless testosterone.

Following their truck was like being
trapped on an endless water slide that twisted and turned without
mercy. The road wound around and around the mountain and Ramsey was
driving like he was on methamphetamine. It was hell experiencing it
all six inches from the cab floor, where the gas fumes wafted in my
face. I finally sat up and cracked the window so I could
breathe.

“
You’re taking a chance on
being seen,” he pointed out.

“
If I don’t sit up and get
some fresh air, I’m going to puke in your lap. You drive like a
maniac.”

“
Just trying to keep up.”
He braked abruptly and the truck fishtailed, spinning within inches
of a sheer drop-off. I gasped and clawed my way back to
Ramsey.

“
Down girl,” he said,
swatting me away. “I’ve got to concentrate.”

“
Oh my god, I am so not
coming on to you.”

“
Hold on,” he mumbled as
he took a turn too fast. The tires slipped on the gravel of the
shoulder and the entire truck shuddered before Ramsey wrestled it
back onto the road.

Words failed me. So I prayed. It had
been a long time since I’d asked God for help. Well, asked and
meant it. I meant it then, though, as I prayed with all my heart
that we would survive the chase down the mountain. I lost years of
my life on that one.

“
Do we have to stay so
close?” 

“
Yes,” Ramsey said
abruptly. “If they turn, we’re sunk. We could never find them and
then—whoa. Where’d they go?” He looked in the rearview mirror.
“Like I said.”

“
They turned off the
road?” I asked.

“
Right behind us. Hang on
and we’ll figure this out.”

We reached a deserted scenic overlook.
The tourists were still lingering over their coffee. “You’re sure
they turned off?” I asked.

“
I’m sure,” he said. “But
we can’t just follow them in by truck. So get ready to follow them
in on foot.”

“
We’re hiking in after
them? Last night wasn’t enough walking?”

Ramsey stared at me without
comment.

“
What?”

“
Tell me what you want to
get out of this. You call the shots.”

“
I want to know where the
hell this secret society of guards lives, and if they killed Tonya
Blackburn and took her son. Mostly, I want to know if they have the
boy.”

“
Okay, then,” Ramsey said.
“Follow me and keep the noise down or you might get shot in the
ass. The woods are thick with amateur bear hunters and they are the
biggest bunch of peckerwoods I’ve ever seen in one place, ‘cept for
that Hootie and the Blowfish concert in my back forty that one
time. That was not worth the rental, let me tell you
that.”

“
I got news for you. It’s
the same damn bunch of pecker-woods. They just got older and fatter
and bought guns.”

He ignored me and grabbed a rifle from
under a tarp in the back of his truck.

“
Where’s mine?” I
complained.

He laughed. “I’m not giving a firearm
to a convict.”

“
I hate you,” I said as I
tucked my stolen shirt into my jeans and tried not to think about
my underwear, which had already gone through the equivalent of the
Battan Death March and was now being asked to carry me further. It
occurred to me that maybe it was the bears themselves I ought to be
worrying about, specifically the male ones.

“
Did you bring me a change
of clothes?” I asked Ramsey hopefully.

He laughed again. “My jeans have gone
through a lot,” he said. “But fitting your ass into them is just
not going to happen.”

“
Fine. But if I start to
stink, just remember, I might attract bears.”

“
Bring ’em on,” Ramsey
declared. “And remember this: you are with the master. Watch and
learn from the master. As of now, you are invisible.”

He meant it, too. He got back in the
truck and surveyed the area. He found a spot a few yards down the
road with just enough room to pull the truck into along the edge of
a narrow wooded buffer. Within minutes, he’d snapped an armload of
branches free and had arranged them in front of the truck to create
a blind. You’d have to be standing within a few feet to ever notice
it.

“
The blue of the truck
looks like the sky behind it,” I said. “That’s
ingenious.”

He flashed me a smile. “That’s how you
do it.” He stashed his car keys in the hollow of a tree. “In case
one of us doesn’t make it,” he explained. Then he hunched over and
darted into the underbrush and I swear to god he disappeared in
front of my eyes. I don’t know how the hell he did it. He became
the trees and the brush and the light and the leaves, barely
visible even from a yard away.

“
How do you do that?” I
asked.

“
Pick an animal,” he told
me. “Then become it. Keep up.”

Okay, I could do that. I became a
black bear, only they pretty much trundle, which wasn’t far from my
natural gait, and they were, after all, in season. Why not pick an
animal without a bulls-eye on its ass? I tried imagining myself as
a possum, but that led to a lot of scuffling over the leaves. I
finally imagined myself as a huge doe slipping gracefully through
the forest. That did the trick. Openings started to appear before
me and my eyes began to pick out the subtle pathways leading me
around the thick strands of laurel. Soon Ramsey and I were flowing
through the woods, him in the lead, always taking us slightly up
the mountain and always in the same direction. It was hard work,
though, he moved fast, and I soon started to sweat. Ramsey was
leaner and tougher than me and he was evidently imagining himself
as a cheetah with a rocket engine up its ass. But it was still a
hell of a lot more efficient than my frantic tramping of the night
before, so I kept my head down and my mouth shut as we picked our
way to a ridge a couple miles in from the road.  

“
What are we looking for?”
I asked.

“
That,” Ramsey said. He
pointed down. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could make out a
dirt road that had been neatly cut through the forest. “That’s the
road they took in. We’ll follow it from the ridge line.”

We made our way along the edge of the
ridge, clinging to trees when the red clay started to crumble
beneath our feet. “Aren’t we easy to spot from below?” I
asked.

“
We’re safe. I can spot
every vehicle coming from either direction for at least half a
mile,” Ramsey explained. “Just look for plumes of dust and listen
for the engines.”

I put my faith in him and followed
some more. The road below led deep into the forested interior of
the mountain, twisting and turning in parallel curves with the
ridge. I stopped to catch my breath and Ramsey lingered, his eyes
never leaving the dirt road below us.

“
Aren’t we in the national
forest?” I asked.

He shook his head. “It’s about four
miles that way.” He pointed west. “But whoever owns this land
bought it for the privacy. You’ve got the national forest curving
around to the south, west and north, and the highway forms a
natural barrier to the east. You’ve pretty much guaranteed no one
will ever build on your doorstep with this acreage. It must have
cost a lot. It’s the perfect place for a compound.”

“
You think that’s what
this is?”

“
When was the last time
you saw three men in perfect shape with identical haircuts and
tattoos hanging out together?” he asked.

“
In Fayetteville last
Saturday night.”

“
Well this isn’t
Fayetteville and there’s not a military base within three hundred
miles of here. What this is, my friend, is a genuine paramilitary,
gun-toting, U.S. government-hating, people’s militia
compound.”

I looked at his smug grin and realized
I’d been a fool. “You knew about this place all along,” I accused
him. “You knew where those men were headed.”

“
Not exactly. I had to
wait until they turned down the road to be sure. But, hell yeah, I
knew this place was here. A raccoon can’t fart in the Carolina
hills without me knowing about it.”

I shook my head in disgust. “You just
wanted me to think you were some kind of tracking
genius.”

“
I am some kind of
tracking genius,” he said. “Now, who do you think has the money to
buy a place like this? Because that I don’t know. Mountain land is
not cheap, and it’s especially not cheap when it’s next to a
national park.”

“
Maybe it’s been in the
family for generations,” I suggested. “Remember, these are mostly
men from Bartow County.” A thought hit me. “They grew up in these
hills. They could be above us right now. Maybe they’ve been
following us when all the time we thought we were following
them.”

Ramsey’s laugh was full of mountain
man disdain, which is to say it sounded like he was swallowing a
whistle. “A Bartow County man hasn’t got dick on a Buncombe County
man and never will,” Ramsey bragged. “Now come on, you’re slowing
down the pace and we’ve got a quarter mile to go.”

Ten minutes of hard trekking later, we
heard distant voices accompanied by a strange arrhythmic
thumping.  Ramsey gestured for me to follow him deeper into
the woods above. We followed a steep rock line and took shelter in
a stand of trees along its outer edge, where we had a clear view of
a full-sized basketball court carved out of the side of the
mountain. It was smooth concrete, regulation-painted and full of
men running and jostling for position.

Was I surprised to find a full-size,
perfectly paved basketball court in the middle of nowhere filled
with sweaty players? Not really. We were still in North Carolina,
after all.

“
No wonder they’re all in
such good shape,” I said. “They are burning some serious
calories.”

“
You see your boy down
there?” Ramsey asked. “There are a couple of youngun’s on the
court.” His eyes had narrowed and I had the uncomfortable feeling I
was perched next to a human hawk looking for a human
mouse.

“
You seriously think I
could recognize Trey Blackburn from this distance? We don’t even
know if these men took him. Maybe he ran away.” I thought of
Tonya’s bloated body stretched out in that cramped room of the
trailer. “Maybe he doesn’t even know about his mother
yet.”

“
You say’s he’s about
fifteen, tall, kind of tan looking?”

“
Yes. With curly black
hair and he’s supposed to be a really good basketball
player.”

“
Then they’ve got your
boy,” Ramsey said firmly. “Because that kid is running rings around
the others.” He pointed down below but all I could see was lots of
sweaty men, half of them shirtless, running up and down a court.
Not that I minded the view.

“
I’ll take your word for
it,” I mumbled, but my stomach had dropped at the news Trey was
near. Would I have to be the one to tell him his mother was dead if
he didn’t already know?

“
We’re not going to be
able to approach him right now,” Ramsey said, rather obviously, I
felt. “We’re going to have to make camp and wait for our
chance.”