by Barr, Nevada
Anna couldn’t tell of whom he asked the question, but it was Heath’s voice that answered. “Anna Pigeon was the fifth member of the party,” she said. “She backed out at the last minute. Family problems.”
Somebody snorted. Evidently even felons had family problems.
Stealthy as a shadow, but for the cracking of her knee joints, Anna rose to stand with her back to the tree. If a search was ordered, she would walk straight into the black of the forest. The muscles of her stomach clenched as she waited for the hue and cry of hunters. Wanting to see and hear, she’d come too close. Six paces. Why hadn’t she just gone and sat on the dude’s lap?
Jimmy sneered, “Lucky Pigeon shit,” and laughed as if his words were so witty they would eventually be attributed to Dorothy Parker.
That was it. They were moving on. The dude took Heath at her word. At least it appeared he had. He hadn’t seemed the trusting type, but Anna couldn’t think of any profit to be made from his pretending he believed her.
The lie had been impressively simple, and Heath had told it well. Often Anna forgot she and other women of a certain age were not seen—at least by men—as dangerous. Heath had everything going for her should she choose a life of crime and deceit: She was white, well dressed, female, middle-aged, and disabled. Few suspected this group of sinister or underhanded motives. If Anna ever decided to run contraband, all her mules would have at least three of those attributes.
“Name,” the dude said.
“Elizabeth Jarrod. The cripple is my mother.”
Anna winced. E was too smart not to know what sort of men she was dealing with. Given her history, one would have thought she would have realized that cruelty and indifference had been man’s natural state since he was an oyster cracker floating in a bowl of primordial soup. Perhaps the resilience of youth had allowed a mustard seed of faith in her fellow human beings to resprout.
“Want me to kill the cripple and the kid?” This was the mellow bass of Reg, the guy who wouldn’t shoot Wily. He sounded perfectly happy to shoot Heath and Elizabeth. That should scorch the earth beneath Elizabeth’s mustard seed.
A man laughed, three short barks, each starting on a high note and stopping an octave lower. Anna had no idea who it was. She had not heard much in the way of laughter. The voice that followed it was that of Sean.
“You won’t shoot a crippled dog, but you’re okay with shooting a crippled woman. Don’t they have therapists in Chicago?”
“It’s different.” Reg sounded defensive, almost sulky. “Dogs don’t talk. Dogs don’t be thinkin’ of ways to get back at you. No sense killin’ a dog.”
“To keep it from suffering,” the dude said, not as if he believed it, but as if he read it off of a strip of paper from a fortune cookie.
“Yeah, right,” said Reg. “Tell that to the dog.”
“I’ll shoot that goddam dog.” That was Sean. “I hate dogs. Dogs get rabies and shit. Goddam fleabags. I’ll cut its throat if you don’t want to waste a bullet.”
“Reg, dispose of Miss Jarrod and the cripple,” the dude said. “Sean will dispatch the dog.” He sounded like a patient kindergarten teacher dividing up chores.
Hoarfrost grew down Anna’s spine. She turned and peeked through the matrix of dead pine branches and needles. Sean’s hands were occupied touching Katie. No doubt he would have called it “frisking” the thirteen-year-old. A Paul Bunyan–sized hunting knife hung in a nylon sheath on his belt. Taking the place, no doubt, of a drastically foreshortened and shriveled penis. That would be the knife he planned to use to slit Wily’s throat.
“I’ll do the crip and the kid,” Jimmy volunteered excitedly. Anna heard the metallic swallowing sound of the pump action on the .22, followed by a faint thud and Jimmy’s “Shit.” There had already been a live round in the chamber. He’d just ejected into the grass.
“Reg,” the dude said with a faint hint of weariness in the north wind of his voice.
The next bullet would not be frittered away. Stepping back from the tree, Anna drew a deep breath. If she charged into the midst of the men, she might be able to knock Jimmy down, maybe even wrest the rifle from him, but she would die.
Then Heath and Elizabeth would die.
The only hope was to distract and divide. If she could draw a couple of the thugs into the trees, get them to chase her, she might be able to split them up, let the darkness confuse them. Anna was at home in the dark. The darkness had always been her friend. Maybe an opening just big enough to let one of their lives out would present itself. Maybe a chance for Leah, Katie, or Elizabeth to run.
As she drew breath to shout, a whining cadence cut through the momentary quiet, as sour and cleansing as the juice of a lemon.
“God, you are so lame. Heath’s got ten times as much money as Leah.”
Katie. It was Katie Hendricks. The only child of wealthy parents, she would have known of the danger of being kidnapped from an early age. She would realize why men would take only her and her mother and “dispatch” Heath and Elizabeth.
“You’re so stupid you’re going to flush millions and millions of dollars down the toilet and it serves you right.” Katie’s spoiled-girl whine segued into spoiled-girl spite.
Anna cocked her head, inadvertently mimicking Wily’s characteristic pose. She hadn’t thought Katie would put herself out to save others. Maybe Katie really thought Heath was rich; maybe she wanted Heath and Elizabeth for company in her sufferings. Or maybe Anna had underestimated her.
“Is that true?” asked Jimmy, eyes wide and excited under the brim of the absurd cap.
For an interminable second no one spoke. Anna feared the dude was simply deciding whether to shoot the smart-mouthed kid along with E and Heath or make them dig their own graves first. She quit breathing.
Jimmy’s nasal tones sawed away the silence. “Dude, that money would be all ours. We’d have to cut the pilot in to keep him from blabbing. That’d make it a five-way split, but millions? Nobody’d ever have to know we even had it.”
“It’d make this shit worth it,” Reg grumbled.
“You’re being paid,” the dude said.
“Paid, yeah. Money, but not, like, real money,” Reg argued. “If she’s not shittin’ you about the crip having dough, that could be real money.”
“Big money,” added Jimmy.
Anna watched the big man. His face was as unreadable as the face of a granite cliff. There was no way to tell what he was thinking.
“The Hendricks child is lying,” the dude said.
“Am not,” Katie murmured, sounding so like her mother, for a second, Anna wasn’t sure which one had spoken.
“Elizabeth Jarrod,” the dude said. “Do you have millions?”
“No,” E said.
“Are we done?” the dude asked the other thugs.
“My great-aunt Gwen has the millions,” Elizabeth said.
“See, Dude, it ain’t no lie! Auntie will pay up, sure as hell,” Jimmy said.
The Dude slowly looked from Jimmy to Reg to Sean. Before, the air between the men had been charged with fear of the dude and fear of the wilderness. That had suddenly changed to an almost audible hiss of greed.
The minions, at least, believed Heath might be too valuable to murder.
If the dude destroyed this perceived windfall, he could risk losing hold of his merry band.
Anna dared not move. Since she didn’t have a line to God, she prayed to her husband, Paul, to lean on the Almighty.
The forest hushed as if listening: no owls, no night creatures, no insects chirring or stirring. Pressing her palms and her forehead against the rough bark of the tree, inhaling the faintly sweet odor of the sap in the cracks of the rough bark, Anna waited for the gunshots. “Suit yourselves,” the dude said finally.
Anna breathed.
“They are now your problem. If they delay us, they—and you—become my problem. I don’t like problems. Clear?”
“Clear,” said Reg with such audible relief, Anna guessed he feare
d the dude as much as she did.
“Clear,” said Jimmy happily, not clever enough to be afraid.
“We cut it five ways,” Sean said. “You two, me, the pilot, and the dude.” There was a short silence during which Anna imagined Jimmy counting on his fingers.
“Five ways,” Reg agreed.
“Yeah. Fair’s fair.” Jimmy sounded more childish than Katie.
Anna had dealt with intelligent criminals, average criminals, and criminals who bordered on idiocy. These four were a different breed. They hailed from a world of thuggery with which she had no experience, a place where men had devolved beyond bad and good into a creature so basic she would have said they were less like people than vicious animals.
Except that would have been a disservice to the animals—and, she suspected, to the dark intelligence of the dude.
NINE
Cluster fuck was the correct phrase, Charles thought. There was a reason he had sworn off working with fools and amateurs. They got people killed—the wrong people. He should have left this alone, but it had seemed a God-sent opportunity. One he’d been waiting for a long time. Even so, he should have walked away the moment they’d arrived at the burned-over camp and found the targets missing.
Greed, that’s what had undone him. It’s what got everyone in the end. Greed for money, life, sex, power. A suitable revenge. Not the glib and momentary bullet to the base of the skull, a feast, a harvest festival, a play with five acts. Greed had tempted him to buy Bernie’s statement that the targets were only a short walk downstream, a couple of hours at most. Bernie had either been lying or obliviously optimistic. Night had nearly overtaken them in the woods. No food, no flashlight, it could have been a miserable ten hours waiting for the sun.
Charles could only blame himself. If you knew you were taking the word of a fool as gospel, then who was the fool? Some plans were hatched, some unfurled, some led; this one would be bench-pressed, shoved up by force of will and muscle every inch of the way.
He surveyed his partners in crime: a dribbling idiot, a rapist, and an ex-gangbanger who wouldn’t shoot a goddam dog. That one had taken Charles off guard. African Americans weren’t supposed to like dogs. A racial memory of the baying hounds and the slave-masters chasing them through the swamps or something. Times had changed. Reg probably had a Pomeranian named Peaches waiting for him at home.
The dog didn’t matter one way or another. Its leg or maybe its back was broken. Whether they killed it tonight or a wandering bobcat killed it tomorrow was of no importance. The dog had been an object lesson. A man who will kill a dog will stoop to anything. That is a man to be feared with bowel-loosening intensity. That is a man with no soul. If the dog had died when it hit the tree, Charles would have been happier. Since it didn’t, when Reg refused to shoot the thing, he’d put a spotlight on himself as the weak link. Hostages were drawn to the stench of compassion like flies to horse dung. He’d seen it in the cripple’s face, the dawning of hope that one of her captors was nice, a good person who liked animals and children, a person who might help a poor little crippled woman.
Charles could have shot Reg. That would have underscored the point that he was to be feared and obeyed without question, but he wasn’t sure he could afford to lose him yet. The targets had to be transported to the airplane. Bernie’s master plan had not been brilliant: acquire the targets, dispatch the peripheral individuals, and move the targets from camp to vehicle to airstrip via trails and logging roads. Every change in venue was a risk for one side and an opportunity for the other. Change of venue meant exposure and possibility. Bernie had factored more changes into this job than Charles would have accepted.
If he hadn’t been blinded by greed.
Spilt milk, blood under the bridge, this was the hand he’d been dealt.
According to the GPS, they’d bushwhacked four miles along the river from the burned-out camp to the targets’ actual location. Venues were now changed.
They could canoe back upriver. The canoe looked big, but he guessed more than four would be dangerous. That meant two men remained behind and two accompanied the targets. Charles had never been in a canoe and doubted dumb, dumber, or dumbest had either. That meant forcing the females to paddle at gunpoint. Not only was the river too public at this time of year, but Mrs. Hendricks or Miss Hendricks might think to roll or swamp the boat, and then, all bets would be off.
Hiking the targets back to the original pickup location was another option. That would mean another four miles bashing through the bushes with the targets, then three miles on foot along rough roads with the targets from the original pickup to the vehicle, and another stretch in the vehicle. A lot of exposure, many chances to be seen, to be interfered with, to be betrayed. Bernie’s little gang had come close to mutiny fighting their way through the shrubbery on the walk down the river.
Sighing inwardly, Charles surveyed his temporary duty station. Because he had ordered it, the dog had to die. The cripple and the older child would be disposed of before they left this place. Bernie, God rot his soul, hadn’t mentioned one of the disposables was crippled. Charles abhorred broken things, broken people. He’d had to abandon the park he’d eaten lunch in every sunny day he was in town for over ten years because someone got the bright idea of bringing retarded children to play there at noon every day. Observing the mentally retarded made him physically ill, nauseated.
People who weren’t whole needed to be taken out of the equation.
This cripple, with her too-thin legs that fell to one side, with shoes on her feet as if she could walk, made his skin crawl. The legs moved jerkily of their own volition it seemed, small erratic motions like those of an insect. The wheelchair filled his nostrils with the stink of old people, sitting in their urine, drooling on their hospital gowns, hair dry as straw, eyes vacant.
Charles would choose to burn in hell rather than sit in a wheelchair. He had chosen to burn in hell. Occasionally, he still went to confession to unload a few sins, but there were things God could not forgive.
Dragging his gaze off the trappings of hospitals and nursing homes, he considered what the cripple had told him: The fifth female had opted out of the trip. One canoe, four females, four tents. There was nowhere else to be but this camp or the river. Why wasn’t he surprised that Bernie hadn’t known of this development either?
“Finish securing the hostages, then find something to eat,” Charles told the men. Food would go a long way toward heading off any thoughts of mutiny Bernie’s little side trip might have fostered. As Michael used to say, the world looked better from the bottom of a plate.
Walking to the edge of the bluff overlooking the Fox River, Charles took the cell phone from its holster on his belt beneath the heavy blanket fabric of the new coat. He punched in the speed-dial number for Bernie. Briefly he outlined the choices for moving the product. “Any ideas?” he asked when he’d finished. Bernie floundered around awhile, Charles listening to him talking to himself as he pawed through what sounded like a pile of nails.
“Okay,” he said when he finally came back on. “Have you got a GPS on your phone?”
“Yes.”
“I Google Mapped it. You have four miles back along the river, three to the car, then five by road to the strip and a last mile or two on foot. The road is there, but might be impassable in a car.”
This was information Charles had just given to Bernie.
“Yes,” Charles said again and amused himself with the thought of killing Bernie for nothing when this thing was over, a little lagniappe for putting up with such a pain in the ass.
“It’s only six total if you go cross-country from where you are to the airstrip. That’d save you time. There’s no huge mountains or rivers as far as I can see.”
Charles considered the idea. It was shorter. The going couldn’t be much rougher than it had been along the water. Six miles. Half a day. The crippled female wouldn’t make it; that was a plus. The greed that had the goons believing she was of monetary value
would wane quickly enough if they had to carry her on their backs. Let them choose when to dispose of her. That would leave him out of the negotiation and keep resentment from stiffening their spines.
“Have the plane there by noon.” Charles punched the OFF button before he had to listen to Bernie get whatever last word he planned on getting.
He turned his attention to their primary target.
Leah Hendricks, Boulder, Colorado. BS, MS, PhD, thirty-five, five feet nine inches, one hundred eighteen pounds. Net worth unknown, estimated between three and seventeen-point-five million. Hair light brown, dyed black. Eyes gray. Skin white. Mrs. Hendricks. Charles had seen her picture many times. Photos didn’t show how thin she was, wide-hipped but narrow.
When she turned sideways and stuck out her tongue, she’d look like a zipper. Michael’s childhood joke would have made him smile had those muscles not atrophied from lack of use. For a supposed outdoorswoman, she was pale to the point of anemia, blue veins visible on her temples. He knew her dirty little secret. As dirty little secrets went, hers was fairly pathetic; still, he enjoyed knowing it. Leah Hendricks hated camping, backpacking, and all the other outdoor sports she designed for.
That she was a fraud didn’t impress him one way or another. She was cattle on the hoof, money to purchase Michael’s passage out of hell, a repast of dishes best served cold. The more quickly he got his goons fed and through the night, the more quickly he could get this business finished.
He pointed his pistol at Mrs. Hendricks. A little scut work would do the multimillionaire’s soul good.
“You. Help Sean with the food.” He had no qualms about using Sean’s name. The damage was already done. The fools had been bandying names about. If Hendricks was as smart as she was supposed to be, she’d realize that was tantamount to announcing they didn’t expect witnesses to survive. Victims who didn’t expect to survive took more chances than those who thought good behavior would win them a gold star and a few more mundane years of their mundane lives.
If she read the unstated bad news, she didn’t show it. Mutely, she nodded. Charles couldn’t tell if she was scared speechless or if she wasn’t the talkative type. He hoped both were true.