Crunch Time

fingered hag,’ that kind of thing. I was scared.”

I paused. “But why are you at your house now?”

She didn’t say anything for a minute. Had she heard about Marla’s puppy being sick? I wondered. At length she said, “I came home to get some clothes this morning. Along with all the other messages on my machine, there was an anonymous one giving me a number to phone if I wanted the location of the puppy mill. I called and got directions. The tipster said I shouldn’t go right away, that I should wait until around ten. So I’m going out there as soon as I’m dressed. And no one is going to talk me out of it! The tipster also told me the puppy mill owner had a gun. The police don’t care and won’t protect me or the dogs. So I’m taking my own firearm.”

“Hermie,” I said desperately, “please don’t—”

“If you wish to join me, be at the Aspen Meadow Lake parking lot in fifteen minutes.”

“Hermie, this is not safe for you. This is a very bad—” But she had hung up.

I was less than five minutes from the lake. I called Tom, left a message on his voice mail saying I was meeting Hermie at the lake, that someone had told her the location of the secret mill on the grounds of a legitimate breeding enterprise. I asked him to please, please come, because Hermie was bringing a gun, which I’d already told her was a terrible idea. I sighed and hung up.

What should I do? I wondered. I pulled the van out of the parking space and raced up Main Street.

I was almost to the lake when I heard the vroom-vroom sound that had so upset Yolanda and Ferdinanda. I braked hard. Luckily, no one was behind me. On my right, on the snowy sidewalk, Harriet, the lovely, tall woman who had been Kris Nielsen’s date at Rorry’s party, had just opened the passenger- side door to a white Maserati. Kris’s Maserati. I squinted. She wore jeans, a black turtleneck, and a leather jacket.

Where was she going? The Maserati pulled out in front of me, which gave me a chance to look hard on my right. The only thing directly on my right was the two-story building that had held Mountain Rents. A red and white FOR LEASE sign hung in the upstairs window. Below, on the main floor, was Frank’s Fix-It.

Maybe she was going in to drop something off? I shook my head as the Maserati moved up Main Street. You could leave a broken article with the potheads at Frank’s Fix-It and it would be there for years, gathering dust and spiders as it deteriorated, and when you came back to claim it, they’d say they hadn’t been able to repair it, after all.

I shook my head as the Mas made it through on a green light, while I got stopped by a red.

A few moments later, the van was chugging toward the lake. At the ramp that led to Upper Cottonwood Creek Road, I turned left, so I could get to the parking lot in time to meet Hermie Mikulski. Hermie Mikulski drove a large beige van that was like mine, only newer. When she pulled into the parking lot, I jumped out of my vehicle and waved to her.

Her window powered down and I hurried over. Hermie’s pale, wide face was heavily made up, but the foundation and powder did not conceal the dark circles under her eyes. Her short gray hair, curled in complex whorls, had not been brushed. She wore a purple silk dress, a string of large pearls with matching earrings that pulled down her large lobes, and a purple boiled wool coat embroidered with green crewelwork. She looked like she was going to a meeting of my mother’s New Jersey bridge club.

The remaining fingers of Hermie’s left hand gripped the steering wheel. On the passenger seat lay a gleaming .22. This was not something you’d see at a bridge club meeting.

“Hermie,” I said, my voice full of concern, “I just think it is a very, very bad idea for you to go out to this place, much less take a weapon. I’ve called the sheriff’s department and asked my husband to meet us—”

“I don’t have time to wait for him. He’ll have to get a warrant and by then the breeder may have cleared out his mill kennels and hidden the evidence. Those puppies could die.”

“But if you’d just talk to him first—”

“Look, Goldy,” she said brusquely, “you don’t have to come with me. I invited you and I can disinvite you.”

Damn it. When Tom was in a meeting or en route to a scene, he rarely checked his voice mail. “Where are you going, anyway?”

Her powdered face broke into a wide smile. “Out by the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. My tipster told me how to get in the back way. You see, this man, the breeder, claims to have a legitimate operation. I’ve seen it. It’s a spanking-new red-painted barn that you can view from the dirt road that leads to his house. That’s what Animal Control sees when they come out. But according to the tipster, the mill operator has several sheds where he actually breeds puppies in the most deplorable conditions. Oh, that son of a bitch! I’m sure Ernest found the sheds, and then he was killed. But now my tipster has marked the precise way to get there!” She patted binoculars and a digital camera on the seat beside her. “I’m going to get the evidence I need.”

“May I know where we’re going, please?” I asked. She shook her head vigorously and exhaled with impatience. “Hermie, please wait for the sheriff’s department.”

“No, no, no.”

“Please, please, please don’t take a gun out there. If this person is armed and expecting trouble—”

“I know this person is armed, Goldy.” She wrinkled her brow. “That is why I’m taking my own weapon. And I know how to shoot, too; I took lessons. Nobody is going to deprive me of any more digits!” She glanced at a pearl-crusted watch. “Ten o’clock. Now, if you’re coming, follow me. Otherwise, go home and make soup.”

Damn it to hell, I thought as I jogged back to the van. Don’t people understand how dangerous firearms are? If One-Handed Hermie got into a gun battle with the puppy mill owner, I had no doubt who would win, and it wasn’t Hermie Mikulski.

She drove fast, so fast her van slung itself from one side of the two-lane road to the other. Occasionally she crossed the yellow divider line. I prayed that a state patrolman would stop her, give her a ticket for speeding, and then notice the gun. He would take her down to jail, and that would be that.

No such luck. Once we were several miles outside of town, I tried again to reach Tom on my cell. But fate wasn’t smiling on me then, either. We were out of range.

I cursed silently when Hermie’s van zoomed past the sign indicating the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve was five miles ahead. The road turned from pavement to mud mixed with gravel. Hermie’s tires sloshed through puddles and spewed up curtains of sludge and stones. To avoid having my windshield thoroughly spattered, I allowed my van to trail farther behind Hermie’s, and cursed her again.

Our vehicles began to climb. The snow on either side of the road was deeper. Here and there, patches of sun-bleached grass dotted brilliantly whitened meadows that led up to hills thick with pine. Vistas of the ice-capped peaks of the Continental Divide appeared as the road rounded one hill, then another.

My inner ear echoed with Tom’s words: I still don’t want you going out to the preserve. And Miss G., can’t I just ask you not to do something, and you don’t do it? And I’d said yes.

Yet here I was, trying to follow crazy-ass Hermie Mikulski as she raced her van out to some godforsaken rendezvous with an armed puppy mill owner, in a place with no cell phone reception.

Hermie passed the left-hand turnoff that I was almost positive had been the one Charlene Newgate had taken when she’d been driving ahead of me, the last time I’d been out there. I still suspected Charlene of lying about providing any recent employees to Drew Parker, DDS. But, why would she do that? Money? Maybe. But given the way she’d pulled her fur around her and the proud note in her voice when she’d talked about her “boyfriend,” I suspected another motive: love.

About a mile beyond Charlene’s road, Hermie suddenly slowed and turned left. There had been no sign. A deeply rutted dirt road was lined on either side by thick woods. Occasional mailboxes indicated driveways that veered up out of sight. I didn’t see a single house. This was not a place where builders had ventured to build minimansions; those owners wouldn’t have been able to abide the difficulties of such a horrible dirt road. I surmised that we were in an area where there were a lot of summer cabins, not unlike the one Sabine Rushmore and I had gone through, although that one had had a fireplace and, presumably, some alternative kind of heat for the winter months. Once the first snows hit, the summer owners usually boarded up their places and headed south.

The road itself became narrower, barely wider than a lane. Pine branches brushed the sides of the van. Only