Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Barr, Nevada

  TEN

  There would be hell to pay when the thugs discovered that not only was Heath not a multimillionaire, she still had forty-three thousand in medical debts. Given that there was already hell to pay, she was grateful for the reprieve, grateful she and her daughter weren’t going to be shot down like dogs. Try as she might, she couldn’t think of a way to get Wily included in the reprieve, but at least at the moment, Sean was too occupied with Katie to cut Wily’s throat. She dared hope, somehow, this save would be permanent for E, that she’d live to grow up and have a whole new set of issues from this second violent trauma in her world.

  Heath doubted her reprieve would keep her alive more than a day longer than her dog. She and Wily could keep each other company on the ferry ride across the River Styx. Had these men the dedication and stamina to work as hard as it would be to carry a one-hundred-fifteen-pound woman, half of her dead weight, through the wilds of northeastern Minnesota, they would have made their pile in honest jobs by now. The instant she became a burden, it would occur to one of the louts that Elizabeth would probably bring as good a price as they’d get for the both of them anyway.

  From the dude’s abbreviated phone conversation, it sounded as if he intended to take them cross-country for six miles. Before this trip, Heath had never been to Minnesota. She had no idea what the cross-country hiking was like. In the mountains around Boulder, Colorado, in the older pine forests, there were places where she would rate hiking off trail from doable to joyful. Here, what she’d seen as they glided past in the canoe was a different matter.

  The forest was mixed evergreen and deciduous: red fir, aspen, red and white pine, white fir, maple, balsam and oak, aspen, tamarack, and alder thickets that truly earned the title “thicket.” Beneath the forest’s canopy bracken fern, tansy, aster, wild roses, sumac, and more grasses than an amateur naturalist could identify tangled together.

  It would be difficult to navigate on foot. Impossible in a wheelchair.

  Lacking wheels, Heath’s most efficient mode of travel was backward, on her butt, using her arms in place of her legs. Palms to the ground, she could lift the weight of her body and move her buttocks back a few inches. Being strong and practiced, Heath’s personal best was ninety feet, and that was over smooth surfaces. More than that and she began to burn out her shoulder muscles. Six miles cross-country might as well have been six thousand.

  Elizabeth would exhaust herself trying to help. Worse, she would endanger herself by annoying the thugs. When the time came to shoot Heath, Elizabeth could not be trusted not to throw herself in the line of fire and take the bullet for her. Her daughter had a selfless streak that time and inexperienced mothering hadn’t been able to eradicate.

  The only escape Heath could envision depended on getting Elizabeth out of camp while there was still enough darkness to cloak her. Anna would find her. They would take Anna’s canoe downriver and get help. On her own, Anna would never leave. With Elizabeth’s well-being to consider, she’d have to.

  Help had better come fast, to save even Leah and Katie. Kidnapping was often simply murder postponed.

  The bearded thug staggered up from the canoe with a loaded cooler. The thugs attacked the food like ravening beasts, ripping into plastic containers of potato salad, bread, cornflakes, and milk cartons. Tops were popped off canned chili and stew. Jimmy didn’t bother with a spoon, the dirt on his fingers apparently providing added zest. As they were pillaged, paper plates, plastic wrap, bottles, tins, cups, and napkins were tossed aside or into the fire.

  Anna would be appalled.

  The dude ate sparingly and without sitting down.

  Sean dragged Katie down by his side. Kneeling, her face hidden behind the screen of blond hair, her hands tied together on her knees, she sat immobile while she was treated to a monologue about the quality of the food. Leah did not look at Sean or her daughter. Sitting, knees up under her chin, bound arms around them, she looked like a side of beef trussed for slaughter. Her face expressionless, she stared at Heath’s wheelchair. Remembering Katie’s crack about being loved only if she had titanium parts, Heath wondered what kind of relationship Leah had with her daughter. What inspired a thirteen-year-old girl to call her mother by her first name?

  “Save the sleeping bags,” the dude ordered when he’d finished. “Salvage food for tomorrow. Burn the rest.”

  Sean licked his fingers in a parody of seduction. When he’d done, he stood and unbuckled his belt. Nausea threatened to make Heath’s supper come up as he took Katie’s pale bird-boned hands in his paw and drew them toward his crotch.

  “Hey!” Heath shouted. She’d not meant to, didn’t want to draw attention to herself and, therefore, Elizabeth. It just happened. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “See-cure-itty,” Sean drawled, showing teeth the size of BBs. He drew his belt between Katie’s arms and rebuckled it, attaching her to his waist. “You want to get free, all you gotta do is open my pants,” he said.

  “As if,” Katie snapped. Sean laughed. Leah did nothing.

  The fabric of the first two tents went up in a colorful column of chemical flame. Poles shrank and grew distorted, like bones aging on fast-forward. Small, startling explosions rocked the air as tubes and bottles of whatever the women felt they couldn’t live without exploded.

  “Five sleeping bags, Dude,” said Jimmy as he crawled, ferretlike, from the last tent.

  The dude, standing with the pistol loose at his side, eyes raking the campground and the woods with the professional dispassion of a Secret Service bodyguard, turned his stare on Leah.

  Leah said nothing. Her eyes, unfocused, remained fixed on the wheelchair. On climbs, Heath had seen that vague look in the eyes of climbers who panicked and mentally opted out of the adventure. Abdicating, it was called. When people abdicated responsibility for themselves, they became the responsibility of the rest of the party. A burden that could not be trusted.

  “Five bags,” the dude repeated.

  “My back,” Heath said. The dude didn’t like looking at her; she’d figured that out. Now he stared at the point in the middle of her forehead where the third eye is rumored to reside as if weighing her veracity against some internal measure, the way the ancient Egyptians were said to have their hearts weighed against a feather when they died.

  People who didn’t like to look at disability wouldn’t want to hear about it either. Heath didn’t care what he thought about her, just so long as he stopped thinking about the number five.

  Feigning enthusiasm for the subject, Heath started saying whatever came into her head. “The way my spine fractured made it so the weight that my rib cage used to support now rests on my bladder. A lot of us have catheters, up the urinary tract—or the rectum, you know, fecal matter and all that shit. Well, I guess, technically shit is fecal matter, but anyway—”

  “Throw the bag on the fire,” the dude said abruptly.

  Heath had found, if not an Achilles’ heel, at least a small breach in the stone in which the dude had encased himself. Weakness terrified him. Four men, four women, four sleeping bags. The women were destined to sleep on the cold ground. Since that was infinitely superior to having to share bag space with the bastards, Heath chose not to mind.

  Reg’s head popped up in the wash that accessed the river. It was dark and he was dark and his hoodie was black. When the roaring fire caught his eyes Heath felt a jab of terror as old as mankind, a horror of the monsters of the night.

  “What about the canoe and all the shit they got in it?” Reg asked. “Burn that, too?”

  “We’ll sink it in the morning. Not near shore. Chop a hole in it and drag it out till we’re sure it goes down.”

  Reg’s orange-and-black eyes vanished. Heath’s scalp began to crawl down from where it had climbed to the top of her head.

  “I need some things,” Leah said softly. “To make it easier to move Heath.”

  Leah had not abdicated; she had been studying the chair, thinking of how
it might be altered so Heath wouldn’t be left behind with a bullet in her head. She’d been planning a way to take her with them. Relief flooded Heath. She had not wanted to die, not wanted to sacrifice herself for the greater good.

  For what seemed a long time the dude said nothing. His face betrayed no emotion. The hand with the pistol was as relaxed as ever. His stillness did not feel like calm. It felt like the counted seconds between when lightning strikes and thunder cracks.

  “Leah can do it,” Katie said, still attached to the creep by cable ties. “Leah loves mechanical things. She wishes I was a robot.”

  “That’s not true,” Leah said, but she didn’t take her eyes off the chair.

  “Reg,” the dude said.

  Reg’s wicked-looking eyes glowed back from the darkness below the riverbank.

  “Cut Mrs. Hendricks loose,” the dude said. “She needs tools so you can roll your new investment overland. See to it she gets nothing else.” The tip of his pistol moved an inch toward the Fox. From him it seemed like a sweeping gesture.

  Like one in a dream, Leah walked around the fire to the shallow ravine leading to the water. Katie watched her mother walk out of the light. Despair made her face seem that of a spirit no longer tethered to the earth, a balloon come loose and liable to float up into the branches had she not been tied to the thug’s belt.

  “Katie’s only a little girl,” Heath said mildly. “Her hands are tied. She can’t hurt anybody. Would it be okay if she sat over here by me?”

  The dude rotated his eyes to settle them just above Heath’s head. She made an effort to keep both fear and pleading off of her face. Sean was the sort that would feast on a victim’s fear. The dude seemed beyond even that twisted recognition of their humanity.

  “No,” he said.

  The destruction of the camp continued. Heath had hopes the invaders would build the fire so high that the Forest Service would send someone to investigate.

  Minutes passed. Fire burned. Through the leaping, devouring light, Heath could see that E, hands bound like Katie’s, had dropped to her knees. Her head was bent forward, in a pose unsettlingly like that assumed by a woman about to be beheaded.

  Heath rubbed her face, trying to pry loose the terror. She needed to clear her mind, look for weaknesses, opportunities, think like a heroine. The effort was in vain. Fear clouded her vision. Uncertainty made every considered act a potential path to destruction.

  She realized she was praying; then she realized she was praying not to God but to Anna. Horror of theistic retribution froze the unvoiced words. Sorry, God. Sorry, Anna. She sent the thoughts up into the night with the sparks from the all-devouring fire.

  Leah returned, trailed by Reg carrying a red toolbox. He set it on the bank between the camp and the river. Heath knew the box. Leah always carried it. She was as faithful to the battered metal box as Heath’s aunt the pediatrician was to her black leather medical bag. Like a doctor’s bag, the toolbox opened in the center and folded out into two cascading trays, each with several compartments. The larger tools were in the bottom.

  “Open it,” the dude ordered. Reg opened the box and sorted through it.

  Jimmy peeked over the black man’s shoulder into the toolkit. “Dude, bitch has a saw in there!”

  Reg picked it out of the box. In his hand it looked Barbie-sized. “Stay back,” he said. “She’s liable to give you a manicure.”

  Sean snickered. Jimmy sulked. The dude showed nothing. Heath wondered if his lack of affect went clear to the bone, if he was without imagination or humanity.

  “I’ll need two paddles from the canoe, the LED lantern, and someone to hold it,” Leah murmured, her eyes on Heath’s wheelchair as if nothing else mattered.

  “Jimmy, get the lamp,” the dude said. Jimmy sprang to the small pile of items yet to be burned, salvaged, or stowed and picked up the lantern.

  “Where do you want it, Dude?” Had he been a dog with a tennis ball he couldn’t have been more pleased with himself. He all but wagged his tail to be of service.

  Thinking of tails, Heath dared a glance to where Wily lay. She’d been careful not to look, not to remind the thugs he existed and was still awaiting execution. Wily’s head was down and he wasn’t moving, but the bright brown eyes that met hers assured her he was still alive.

  “Get the lamp going and set it beside Mrs. Hendricks,” the dude ordered.

  The chore proved too much for Jimmy.

  Leah turned the lamp on.

  Leah on the bank, Heath by the fire, Katie tied to Beer Gut, Elizabeth on the other side of camp. Heath wondered if isolating them, not allowing them to comfort one another, was coincidence or a control mechanism. Her observation of the dude suggested he instinctually divided and conquered. A natural Machiavelli.

  “Elizabeth, could you bring me my cigarettes?” Heath asked her daughter.

  Without looking to the dude for permission, E rose gracefully despite the bound hands and the knock on the head. Circling around the fire, she surreptitiously petted Katie’s hair as she passed Sean. Heath doubted that at the age of fifteen she would have had the sense to comfort another girl in shared misery.

  The cigarettes were beside Heath’s abandoned camp chair. Elizabeth retrieved both cigarettes and chair, then came and sat next to her mother.

  The dude watched but did not stop her. The isolation had been coincidental, not inborn cunning. Heath felt better with E close, and better knowing the dude was not as all-seeing and all-knowing as his sphinxy face would lead one to believe. She moved her poor old butt up onto the kind seat cushion and smiled at her daughter.

  Reg fished the Walther from his trousers. He’d stowed the gun in his waistband in order to carry the toolbox. As inner-city fashion decreed, he wore his pants low and baggy. The gun had been swallowed and come to rest in the nether regions of his drawers.

  Leah sat down in the wheelchair and stared into the fire. Heath had seen her go into creative trances a couple of times before. Under the guns of evil men, it seemed unlikely, unless work was where she hid when she was frightened. That would account for Katie being given over to nannies while Leah spent her life in a lab. Working with living creatures was far more angst-ridden than working with metal and plastic.

  The fire died to a stinking smoldering heap of melted nylon and blackened tin, the occasional gout of flame darting up as proof of life. Heath wondered if Anna’s red metal fuel bottle, the one in which she traditionally carried a nice Cabernet, had been found and tossed on the fire. She really could have used a drink. For a moment, she fantasized about getting the men drunk, then sidling up to them in good old succubus style and slitting their throats with Sean’s great big knife.

  Leah continued to sit motionless in the wheelchair, the toolbox at her feet, her eyes on the dwindling fire. Heath began to lose hope that she was absorbed in the problem at hand and worry that she had gone catatonic. Either way, she envied Leah her absorption. The only respite she herself had from worrying was the endless fussy complaints of her legs. Every minute or so she had to shift her weight to keep the pressure from cutting off the blood flow in any one part of her butt more than another. Fatigue and tension were causing more spasms than usual, her feet kicking out. It was a cruelty she’d not been warned of, that legs, deaf to her commands, would, of themselves, flip about with such vigor.

  Through the distortion of the heat, she could see Katie. The altruistic Sean had finally let her go. He’d even given her one of the remaining sleeping bags. She lay on her side, her hands beneath her cheek, her eyes closed. Heath hoped she slept.

  “Try to get some sleep,” Heath murmured to Elizabeth. “I have a feeling you’ll need it.”

  “Why don’t you lie down and let me keep watch?” E returned.

  Until then, Heath hadn’t realized that that was what she was doing. She was keeping the watch. She could not overhaul a wheelchair; she could not keep Sean’s eyes from Katie, or the dude’s fist from Elizabeth, or a bullet or knife from Wily. Witn
essing was the only act she could do, so she would witness.

  Sunrise was five hours away.

  Heath tried to enter into Leah’s world, or the world she imagined the engineer had retreated to, a place of sprockets, cogs, and fighting friction. Leah had created the wheelchair for rugged sports. The seat was a single unit, a molded cup of hard plastic that could be snapped off the lightweight titanium frame and used with other devices. The twenty-inch quick-release wheels were wider than those customarily used in civilized settings and had a deeper tread.

  Clamped to the side of the chair was one of Heath’s indispensible items. The manufacturer called it a Tilt ’n’ Turner. Elizabeth dubbed it “Jack,” as in jack-of-all-trades. It was a custom-designed mechanism that could support up to a hundred and forty pounds and could lock in any setting at any angle. Heath used it to support everything from her cell phone to a 1949 Harley engine she was rebuilding. The Harley engine transport had not been a success. Jack had not failed; the engine just weighed more than Heath and tipped over the chair.

  “Two sleep, two watch. Two-and-a-half-hour shifts,” the dude announced. “Sean, Reg, you’re up first.”

  The dude and Jimmy retired to lie on two of the sleeping bags. Reg squatted near enough to Leah that he could shoot her before she could run him over. Sean paced, rifle in hand, looking out as Reg looked in.

  Each time Sean passed by where Katie lay, his eyeballs stayed on her inert form a little longer, eyeing her the way a rat would eye a piece of cheese in a trap, trying to get up the courage to go for it. Heath dragged Elizabeth’s bound hands onto her lap and held them tightly.

  “I’ll be okay, Mom,” Elizabeth whispered. “I think I’m too old for him.”

  Heath thought she might be right. Katie was thirteen, but she looked no more than eleven. Heath told herself it wasn’t bad to be happy a monster selected a child other than hers.