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

by Barr, Nevada

  She did not find Wily; Wily found her. He had dragged himself nearly to the camp, and his family. The thumping of his tail on pine needles announced his presence. Anna felt for him. The familiar touch of his fur, and the lack of any warm wet places on his hide, reassured her he’d not been hit by a stray bullet. Cross-legged, she gathered him onto her lap. Wily found her eyes and began licking. “Gross,” she whispered, but she didn’t stop him. His tongue was soft and wet and felt good cleaning what had to be a double handful of cockleburs from beneath her eyelids.

  Jimmy was yelling about having shot a wolf. The wolves—the real wolves—were miles away. Much as she’d love to see a wolf, a half-blind woman and lame dog might look sort of tempting. Regardless of the logic, she wasn’t afraid. Part of her believed wolves, mountain lions, bears—all the creatures of the wilds—would give her a bye. Too much Disney as a girl, she suspected, the creatures of the forest nestling in Snow White’s skirts.

  “You hit shit, dickwad,” Sean said.

  “Let’s go,” Anna whispered in Wily’s ear. Tail feathers brushed over her forearm where it curled around his hindquarters. Eyes still stinging and tearing, Anna worked her way to her feet in stages. With no light to tell up from down, she was afraid she might fall. Enough strange noises and eventually even these thugs would get suspicious a creature other than a windigo or a wolf skulked in these woods. Once sure of her footing, she bent down and lifted up Wily. Wily wasn’t a big dog; still, he weighed close to thirty-five pounds. That was the upper limit Anna allowed herself in a backpack if she was going any distance.

  Clutching the compliant dog, she made her way slowly away from the river deeper into the trees. Every few steps she looked back to see if the glow of the campfire could still be seen. It was the only way she could judge whether she and Wily would be out of sight of the thugs when the sun rose.

  When the orange glow was entirely swallowed, and Wily’s weight had grown onerous, Anna stumbled into the umpteenth dead-and-down tree and declared it home for the night. Sitting on it, she swung her legs over, then slid to the ground. Wily’s weight resting on her thighs, her back against the log, they shared body heat. Fatigue and shock helped Morpheus drag her fast and deep into sleep.

  * * *

  Approaching footsteps woke her. Gray diffuse light proclaimed coming sunrise. Their cloak of invisibility was gone for another twelve hours. A growl, more vibration than sound, came from beneath her hand. Wily neither let the growl grow, nor did he bark. Anna should have been surprised, but she wasn’t. By the glare of an LED light, she had seen inside him, and he inside her. They were comrades in arms. Words no longer mattered.

  The steps closed in on the log she and the dog sheltered behind. After hours immobile, on the cold ground, with thirty-five pounds of dog flesh on her legs, Anna doubted she would have a chance leaping to her feet and running. Even if the thug didn’t shoot her in the back, he’d catch her almost immediately.

  Playing bunny rabbit, she closed her eyes and hugged Wily. Bracken snapped. Asters, touched by frost, creaked as the man came closer. He wasn’t hollering to his pals. He wasn’t trying to move quietly. Ergo, he didn’t know Anna was there, didn’t know the bunny was frozen just beyond the log, its furry little brain convinced if it remained still enough the hawk would not see it.

  The footsteps halted. Anna hadn’t the courage to open her eyes. Whoever it was was standing right on the other side of the log. The top of her head would be visible. Red-with-gray hair, a mess from her nightly adventures—the crown of her head might pass for a spray of lichen or frost-burned weeds. Thinking weedy thoughts, she waited for the cry of denunciation that would end her freedom and Wily’s life.

  What came was the gentle sound of splashing, an intermittent stream of water striking an uneven surface. A thug was pissing on her tree. Explosive giggles threatened to boil up her throat, hysteria trying to burst forth. With an effort she kept breathing slowly and made not a sound. To calm herself, she imagined that the urination was intermittent because the bastard had prostate cancer. Advanced prostate cancer.

  Eventually her listening was rewarded by the zip of a zipper and the noise of footsteps retreating through the snap, crackle, and pop of the frost-rimed undergrowth. Cold as she was, much as she, too, felt the need to empty her bladder, she dared not move until there was sufficient racket from the kidnappers and the others to cover the racket of getting herself and the dog up off the ground and into the day.

  Losing their trail, or keeping up with the thugs, was not a concern. Regardless of no food and a gimpy dog, the day she could not follow a pack of city boys through the woods would be the day she’d find an ice floe upon which to sit and wait for a polar bear with her name on it.

  EIGHTEEN

  Katie, Elizabeth, and Leah lay on one sleeping bag, another spread over them. Jimmy was on watch. The dude had retired to the woods for his morning ablutions. Heath sat in her camp chair. She had not slept.

  By the grace of God, Elizabeth was not badly injured. Her back and right thigh were bruised, and her stomach was sore to the touch. Her face was an advertisement for obedience: the right eye swollen shut, the lid shiny and veined as a peeled grape. Lips were clown-sized, the lower split and seamed with black blood.

  Her teeth were all accounted for; the vision in her left eye was unimpaired, no blurriness, and she had no signs of mental confusion. She had slept without signs of nightmare.

  The dude had not hit any vital organs. Not for a moment did Heath doubt he knew how to beat a person to death with his fists. She was convinced he had pulled his punches. Not because he harbored any vestiges of goodness, but because he needed Elizabeth mobile.

  The damages Heath had not yet been able to measure were those to Elizabeth’s spirit, her sense of self. As a child she had had that systematically taken from her by a psychopath who’d abducted and imprisoned her and two other girls for several weeks.

  With the help of an excellent therapist, and an internal strength Heath could only marvel at in a child so young, Elizabeth had not only recovered but built a new self that was strong and brave. The “brave” she had proven last night. What the dude’s beating had left of the “strong” remained to be seen.

  E’s spirit was not the only one in imminent danger. After the aborted escape attempt, Leah would not speak a single word. Nor would she meet Heath’s eyes, or anyone else’s, for that matter. This went beyond her normal self-absorption. Heath wondered if she was ashamed that her wealth had attracted the thugs to the party.

  As she thought of the scientist, Leah’s eyes opened. From habit, Heath whispered, “Good morning.”

  “Why didn’t you send Katie with your daughter?” Leah whispered back with a malice that took Heath off guard. “They never would have shot me.”

  So that was why Leah had turned to ice. Heath bit back the urge to snarl, “Without you, none of this would be happening.” Instead, she said, “I couldn’t reach Katie.”

  “Elizabeth could have woken her.”

  The horrible truth was, Heath had never given Katie a thought. Elizabeth had taken up all of her mental energy. “Did Katie rat E out?” she snapped before she could stop herself. “She saw what Elizabeth was doing.”

  Leah reached for her glasses and put them on. “She didn’t see,” she said flatly.

  Heath was not sure of that.

  “I know she didn’t,” Heath lied. As Benjamin Franklin had said, if they didn’t hang together, they would all hang separately. “I should have tried to get them both out of camp. We have to stick together if we’re going to make it.”

  Before Leah could take the white flag—or burn it—the dude returned to camp.

  “We leave in twenty minutes,” he said. “Do what you need to do.”

  Breakfast was whatever cold canned food had escaped the conflagration of the previous night. Sean, Reg, and Jimmy fished the food from the cans with their fingers and stuffed it into their mouths. None of the captives were offered food. There
wasn’t enough for eight when four of them were swine.

  Elizabeth managed to snag a can of peaches. She offered it unopened to Leah. Heath was so proud of her she felt tears prickle in the corners of her eyes.

  Their trek along the river the previous day hadn’t taught the thugs they needed to carry water. When they thirsted, they drank from the Fox. They would have headed cross-country with nothing but hostages and what was in their bellies, had Heath not found the courage to speak up before the water bottles were destroyed along with everything else.

  Personally, she would have loved to see them perish of dehydration, but the minute they got thirsty, they would suck down the water she, the girls, and Leah carried. Heath consolidated their water into two of the bottles, then gave the remaining two to the dude, who sent Jimmy and Sean to fill them. The water filter had gone into the fire.

  Heath could, and did, hope the unfiltered river water would give them many nasty parasites. Sadly, there was no hope it would cause them to die miserable deaths.

  Leah rescued a loaf of bread, lunch meat, and Katie’s day pack. The dude turned the pack inside out. Finding it empty, he let them use it to carry the food and water.

  For the morning’s ablutions, the cable ties binding the girls’ hands were cut. Such was their relief, it leaked over into the realms of gratitude. This was ameliorated by the fact that the dude did not let them retire to the privacy of the woods to relieve themselves. After some negotiation, he permitted Leah to dig a shallow hole and two to stand as a human screen while another used it. During her backcountry career, Heath had lost most of her delicacy in the area of toileting. If she had to go, she would declare any small shrub as sufficient screening and do what needed to be done. What modesty had survived the outdoor life was destroyed when her back was broken and she was, for a time, dependent on others for everything.

  Leah, and especially Katie and Elizabeth, were another matter. Elizabeth was at the age where she locked the bathroom door to blow-dry her hair. Katie was probably even shyer about her personal needs. To imagine the likes of Sean and Jimmy watching the girls relieving themselves made Heath’s stomach tie itself in knots.

  The idea of the dude watching didn’t sicken her as much. The dude cared so little for so much, she doubted he noticed life around him as anything other than convenient for the dude or not convenient for the dude. Reg didn’t quite exhibit that level of sociopathic behavior, but he struck Heath as a businessman. Watching girls peeing or humiliating women wasn’t his business. His business was getting money.

  Sean and Jimmy were avidly trying to peek around the two standing guard so that they might see the miracle of elimination. Modern-day sin-eaters who did it not to cleanse the souls of others but because they were greedy for the taste of degradation, humiliation, and fear. Like Dracula’s Renfield, they gobbled down innocent lives, growing fat on the leavings of those more evil than themselves.

  Reg and the dude would kill. Sean and Jimmy would do much worse. On sunnier days, Heath would have said there was nothing worse. Dead was dead. Life was hope. Yet Sean and Jimmy were black holes into which hope drained away. Heath had come to grips with the level of helplessness imposed upon her by her physical disabilities. This was a new brand of helplessness, and the depth of the glimpsed abyss made her palms sweat.

  Anna was out there, possibly wounded, if any of Reg or Jimmy’s wild shots found her. Wily was wounded or dead. Heath wanted to communicate with them so desperately it manifest as an aching hunger of the heart, but she didn’t dare leave a note or scratch a message into the dirt. If the thugs found it, it would tip them off to the fact that there was another woman, one on the loose. Heath was even afraid to look at the woods more than absolutely necessary for fear it would give Anna away.

  If Anna could follow, she would. Heath comforted herself with that thought. Once Heath had heard a man say Anna could track a duck across a pond a week after it had flown. For Anna it would be child’s play to trail eight people, four of them idiots, and one in a wheeled cart.

  “Show’s over,” Sean said with a leer as he lowered himself into Heath’s camp chair. She glared at him. Puckering up, he made kissing noises. The thick distorting lenses of his glasses, complemented by the fish lips, would have been comical if he’d not been so vile.

  Fear cooled to hatred and formed a cold iron-hard rod down Heath’s spine as she watched the evil fish-faced thing remove its pointed-toed ankle boots and peel off its socks. Blisters the size of quarters bloomed on its heels.

  Forcing a look of mild interest, Heath said, “I’m an EMT. If your buddies haven’t sunk the canoe yet, there’s a first-aid kit in it. I can patch up your feet.” Inside her head, her voice echoed faraway and hollow. Sean lost vibrancy, as if viewed through dirty glass.

  His hard round belly held like a basketball between his chest and knees as he cradled his foot, he stared at her suspiciously. “Why would you do that?” he asked.

  Pushing with the heels of her hands, Heath straightened her upper body. She wasn’t an EMT. Once she’d been a first responder. As a guide she’d been religious about the refresher courses. Since the accident she hadn’t bothered. “Habit,” she said. “Maybe hope that if I take a thorn out of your paw, you won’t eat me.”

  Sean snorted. “What the hell,” he said and rose to limp to the edge of the embankment. “Reg! Hang on a second. There a first-aid kit in that thing?”

  As soon as Sean turned his back, Heath looked to Elizabeth. Moving stiffly, back and legs aching and sore from the beating, she was gathering up the toilet paper, then putting it in a plastic bag the way Anna had taught her.

  “E,” Heath mouthed. “Wily’s briefcase.” In her penchant for naming things, Elizabeth called the dog-poop bags “Wily’s briefcases,” because they were carried when he did his business.

  Without question, and with the sureness of a person who followed bizarre orders under deadly circumstances as often as James Bond, Elizabeth dropped the bag containing the used toilet paper, then shunted it over to Heath with the side of her foot.

  Though none of her DNA had been used in the project, Heath congratulated herself on having such a smart, quick child.

  Someone, presumably Reg, tossed a white metal box to Sean, who fumbled but managed not to drop it. He returned to Heath’s chair, shoved it with his foot until it touched her thigh, then flopped down hard in it. Opening the latches, then the lid, he removed the three-inch scissors and tucked them in his coat pocket. Thrusting the box and his feet toward Heath, he said, “Try anything hinky and I’ll snap your neck like a dry stick.”

  Box in her lap, Heath opened the hinged lid between herself and her patient so he couldn’t see her slip Wily’s briefcase in with the first-aid supplies. Balancing on her bottom while working on Sean’s feet was a trick rather like riding sidesaddle on a palsied horse, but she managed.

  After donning latex gloves, she carefully broke open the blisters, then, taking the used toilet paper from the ziplock bag, made a show of thoroughly cleaning the open wounds. When she’d done as much damage as she dared, she bandaged his heels. She’d doctored enough feet in her time that she had the knack of bandaging blisters so the bandages would stay on for a day’s rough hiking. Sean’s would not. They would peel off in an hour, two at most.

  During this peevish rebellion, Heath watched herself from above and to her left, an out-of-body experience. Since the accident, she occasionally abandoned her corporeal self. Smearing urine and feces in open wounds was scarcely more efficacious a revenge than spitting in the soup was for a disgruntled waiter, yet she instinctively knew that many slaves before her had done the same.

  Until one could overthrow the master, one would undermine him.

  NINETEEN

  Leah wished she could take back her snipe about Heath not saving Katie, wished she could take back not only the words but the silence that preceded them. While Heath had connived to free her daughter from danger, Leah had dismantled and remantled a thing of metal and
rubber. A grown woman playing at Transformers while the world went to hell around her.

  Ostensibly she had done it to help Heath, to save her life. In reality she’d done it because she hadn’t the wits to do anything important. She knew she could make a new design, craft it for the job described. Despite the sufferings of Gerald’s child, the battering of Heath’s, she couldn’t but think that in its utility, it was beautiful.

  Rick Shaw, as Elizabeth had named it, was a creation to be proud of. The frame was strong, the seat balanced close over the double wheel, the paddle handles mounted where the center of gravity would be once Heath was seated.

  Heath had tried to save her child’s life.

  Leah had turned a thing into another thing.

  The night before, until Katie had called her name and the shooting started, working with the wheelchair had made Leah happy. Standing between the handles of the machine she had built, she’d forgotten she had a daughter, forgotten she was a hostage. She was showing off her work, and she was happy. There must be holes in her soul. If her mothers had lived, perhaps they’d have found a way to knit them up.

  Admiring Rick Shaw, Leah murmured, “Katie, you are going to have to help.”

  For a moment, Leah thought Katie would refuse. A familiar mutinous look marred her perfect face. Leah and Gerald’s DNA had designed this child; she had built this human being, a creature perfect in form and function. Why couldn’t she take pride in her daughter?

  Katie was so like her father, blond and ethereal on the outside, grasping and manipulative on the inside. Leah had been twenty-one when she met Gerald. Just out of grad school and knowing nothing of men. Gerald had a partnership in a business in Montreal designing and selling outdoor equipment. He believed in her, bought out his partner, and used the money to build her a lab in which to work.

  Within three months of the wedding, Katie had been conceived. That was the last time she and Gerald had sex, or nearly the last. Gerald had his own life. Leah designed; he sold. That he did other things had ceased to interest her years ago.