Carved in Bone - Jefferson Bass [30]
And with that, he was gone.
He didn’t come back in one minute, or two, or even three. To pass the time, I pulled a notepad out of my pocket and began drafting a job recommendation a former student had asked me to write. At last the door swung open. “I was about to send out a search party,” I said, my eyes still on my notes. “You must have had a couple quarts of tea with your lunch, Deputy.” But it was not the deputy who leaned down and peered at me through the open door. It was a bear of a man, dressed in a camouflage jumpsuit, the tree-bark pattern worn by deer hunters, complete with a camouflage cap.
“Dr. Brockton, I’m real sorry about this, but we got a little change of plans. My name’s Waylon. Now, I ain’t gonna hurt you. How about sliding over behind the wheel and pulling back onto the road? You’re gonna head toward town a piece, then make a turn where I tell you.”
“Where’s Deputy Williams?”
“Leon? He’s all right, don’t you worry none about him. He’s just kindly…tied up at the moment, you might say.” The big man flashed either a grin or a grimace at me.
I sat. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”
“Somebody needs to talk to you. In private. Prob’ly won’t take a half a hour, then we’ll get you back to town so you can go on about your business with the sheriff.”
I studied Waylon. He outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds, and I was guessing there was a pistol tucked somewhere in that camo suit. Maybe a skinning knife, too. “What if I say no?”
He sighed. “Look, Doc, ain’t no reason we got to have trouble between us. I told you, I ain’t gonna hurt you, but I will hogtie you if I have to. Besides, you’ll want to talk to this fellow I’m taking you to. I bet he can help you figure out who you pulled out of that cave the other day.”
News travels fast in a small town. I cranked the engine and shifted into gear. “You tell me where to go.”
He grinned, flashing a smile of scattered teeth, pitted with cavities and flecked with chewing tobacco. “Now you’re talking. Once you cross that next bridge, take your first right. It’s gravel.” We wound along for maybe a mile; during that time, I considered half a dozen escape plans and rejected them all—not because I was hopelessly outmatched, though plainly I was. I rejected them because this homespun mountain man had shrewdly punched the one button—short of threatening my family—that was guaranteed to ensure my complete cooperation: he dangled before me the prospect of a forensic revelation.
We thunked onto a new concrete bridge—obviously a replacement for some predecessor that had washed away in one of the floods that frequently scoured the mountain valleys—and off the other side. “Best slow down a bit—it’ll sneak up on you. Right yonder—you see it?”
I did, barely: two mammoth hemlock trees arched over the right-hand side of the highway, and running between them, as if they were some great gateway, a gravel road turned off and disappeared into the forest.
The road was deceptive: unobtrusive, but smooth and well-maintained, free of the ruts and mud holes that plague most gravel roads in the mountains. The Great Smoky Mountains are classed as a temperate rain forest, with up to eighty inches of precipitation a year, so it’s a rare mountain road that doesn’t have a few wallows and washed-out spots. This one was firm, dry, and well-drained by ditches and culverts everywhere that drainage might be a problem. There were no weeds in its center, either, a sign of frequent traffic or regular grading.
“This is a good road. The county keep it up like this?” I tried to sound offhand.
He swiveled his bearlike head at me. Perhaps I hadn’t managed to sound quite as casual as I’d hoped. “Naw,” he said. “This here’s what you might call a private drive.” After a moment, I heard a low, rumbling growl that seemed to shake the entire vehicle. I glanced over to see him chuckling. “Private drive,” he mumbled again, and chuckled some more at his wit. Then he flashed me a delighted, speckled smile. Lord God, what have I got myself into, I thought, shaking my head. Then I felt myself