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

by Barr, Nevada

  The thug took the sandwich with a grunt.

  Just as if he had said “thank you,” Elizabeth said, “You’re welcome,” in the old small voice. He ignored her. She stayed where she was. After a moment she said, “Your poor feet. They must hurt awfully.”

  The abyss that had manifest did not vanish from Heath’s mind. It merely changed shape. E hadn’t regressed, not unless she had regressed all the way to Jane Austen’s day. Elizabeth would never say, “They must hurt awfully.”

  Relief that her daughter’s mind was sound momentarily canceled out the fear of what she was up to. Sean had shown a nasty appreciation of the slight, small, girlish Katie. Heath couldn’t forget the way he’d pressed his belly and, if it could be reached, she presumed his cock, against the child’s back as Leah was being bound, how he all but drooled on her sleeping body. Elizabeth had seen it, too. With the prevalence of information, even girls younger than E knew what a man like Sean’s preferences were.

  “Life’s a bitch,” Sean said.

  “And then you die.” Those words, in the scared-child voice, gave Heath the creeps. She could feel them like insect feet creeping down her spine and over her scalp. Her left leg shot out, the toe of her boot banging into a stone.

  Sean shuddered as well. Before Heath could consider that he might actually possess a soul, she saw what had caused his reaction. It wasn’t the little lost child act. It was Elizabeth’s toes. She was wiggling them the way a nervous little girl might, and they were tickling Sean’s thigh. Sean was liking it very much. E was pretending not to notice.

  Heath was trying not to have a heart attack.

  When she realized just what it was that Elizabeth was up to, she did have a heart attack. Or felt like she did, given the sudden painful crushing sensation in her chest. The girl’s quick eyes had noticed something Heath’s had missed. As Sean threw his sorry ass down, the great long pig-sticker he wore on his belt had been forced partway out of its sheath. The holding snap popped open, and two inches of blade extruded from the leather. While distracting Sean with sexually deviant fantasies, Elizabeth’s bare toes were working the knife from its sheath.

  There could be no happy ending to this. If E managed to get hold of the knife, she wouldn’t—or couldn’t—drive it into a man’s heart. Even if she pulled off that gruesome and magnificent stunt, she would be shot by one of the others.

  “Elizabeth!” Heath tried to call. What came out of her mouth was a papery whisper. Her daughter ignored her. “Elizabeth!” This time she found voice. “Come here. I need you.”

  “Leave her alone,” Sean growled. He grabbed E by the shoulders and pulled her across his chest. It was the opening E needed and Heath dreaded. Elizabeth pulled the knife free.

  “Break it up.” The dead and deadly voice of the dude put a stop to everything. Even time, or so it seemed. Sean let loose of Elizabeth. Elizabeth, in her scramble away from the thug, managed to push the knife behind the tree on which he leaned, half burying it in the duff.

  Heath could have cried with relief. Elizabeth wasn’t arming herself, she was arming Anna.

  Elizabeth crawled back to Heath, and Heath hugged her hard. Into her ear she whispered furiously, “Stupid, stupid risk. A lot of bullets were fired. Anna might not be coming.”

  “She’s coming,” E whispered so fiercely Heath felt the heat on her eardrum. “Nothing stops Anna.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Wily in her arms, Anna glided to the edge of the clearing. Stopping, she searched the area. A mess. Nothing remained: no tents, no camp chair or wheelchair, no porta-potty, sleeping bags, or clothes. The fire pit was smoldering with items never meant to be destroyed by burning. Leah’s state-of-the-art canoe was gone. In an hour or two, when the smoke cleared, river traffic floating by wouldn’t know that just above their heads four lives had been violently uprooted.

  Come evening, if canoeists chose to camp here, there would be evidence of an upheaval, illegal dumping or burning, but not enough to send them back on the river at night to report it.

  The scorched white metal of the first-aid kit lay at the edge the fire. It had been kicked into the burn area but hadn’t caught. Anna set Wily carefully on the ground, then fished the box out with a stick and left it to cool. The bones of Heath’s camp chair were charred, but possibly usable. A metal World War II army canteen, the green canvas burned away, the aluminum charred, was settled bent and soft-looking in the coals. That, too, she fished out with her stick. A can of Dennison’s chili had exploded, spewing beans on the ground. The can was cool to the touch. Anna scraped out the last half inch of beans and licked them off her fingers. Nothing else appeared salvageable.

  She moved Wily to where he could reach the beans in the grass, then began walking around the fire in circles of ever-increasing diameter, letting her feet, as well as her eyes, search. Near the edge of the clearing, nearly hidden under an aster still flaunting a few blue flowers, she found a headlamp and band. One of the women—or girls—had thought to toss it into the bushes for her to find.

  Anna retrieved it with silent thanks. Nights in the woods were not the half-dusk of nights in towns, fields, or deserts. Unless the moon was full, nights in the woods were blackout, bat-blind dark. The moon was new. Come sundown, Anna would be glad of the headlamp.

  A few feet farther out she came across a piece of nylon fabric from a lime green sleeping bag—Katie’s, she thought—the edges melted, the shape irregular and about two feet by four in size. This she picked up to add to her trove.

  Salvage left under Wily’s protection, Anna cleaned what was left of the chili can in the river, drank, refilled it, then took it to Wily. She sat down beside him and, gathering the beans he couldn’t reach, said, “This is it, old buddy. A scorched first-aid kit is our greatest treasure. Drink up.” She held the can of water to his snout, and he lapped greedily.

  “The doctor is in.”

  Wily was a trooper. Anna palpated his right hind leg. The fine grating sound of crepitation, the noise broken bone ends made when they rubbed together, made her teeth itch. He whimpered the least of whimpers. “Sorry, guy,” she said. “It’s broken. I was hoping for a sprain. Lots of dogs I know do just fine on three legs with a sprain. A break hurts too much. Shock would kill you—or me.”

  Opening the first-aid kit took a while. Heat had deformed the metal, and the latches didn’t want to release. A fist-sized rock, firmly applied, finally sprang them. The lid was eight inches by nine. She bent it back and forth, forcing the hinges, until it broke free. A canister the size of her thumb rolled out. Aspirin. She unscrewed the cap, shook two into the palm of her hand, then swallowed them with the last of Wily’s water.

  It wasn’t her habit to drink out of toilet bowls or doggie dishes, but things had changed. The night before, Wily would have been killed by the thugs, had she not stolen him away. Had he not slept curled on her lap and chest all night, she might have suffered hypothermia. They were family now. Besides, given the situation, she didn’t think the worst threat to life and limb was going to turn out to be dog spit.

  She shook out a third aspirin and held it out to Wily. He took it neatly and made a great show of swallowing. The second she turned her head, he spit it out. “Saw that,” she said. She plucked the pill out of the dirt, dusted it off, then put it back into the tube.

  The box held rolls of cloth tape, gauze, bandages, a small bottle of peroxide, a two-ounce bottle of hand sanitizer, half a dozen alcohol wipes, and a rubber bulb syringe for the ear. Nearly every one of the many first-aid kits she’d used over the years had a bright blue ear syringe bulb. Never once had she used it. “Today’s the day,” she told Wily.

  Back at the river, Anna filled the syringe and squeezed water into both gritty eyes until all the brown and black shrapnel the bullet had blasted from the log was washed away.

  Wily was next. She talked him through it the way she had talked a hundred park visitors through her medical machinations in the backcountry. Wily listened better than most
and, she was willing to bet, understood more.

  “Your femur is broken, if dogs have femurs. The big bone just below the hip.” Gently, she folded his leg, then laid the smooth metal box lid over it. “I’m going to tie it with the gauze, Wily, stabilize the leg so it won’t move. It will hurt a lot less that way, I promise. Since we are not exactly on our way to the vet, I’m going to tape it as well. So when we get out of this, and your fur is being pulled out by the roots by some sausage-fingered vet tech, remember I did this for your own good.”

  Wily yawned. She was boring him.

  When she’d finished and helped him to stand on all fours, she said, “Give it a shot.” Wily walked several feet on three legs. “What a sport,” Anna commended him. “We’ll save the walking for when it counts.” The terrain would be too rough to traverse for an old dog with a broken bone, but she didn’t tell Wily that. He had his dignity.

  Using a hot metal rod, once a tent pole, Anna melted slits in both ends of the elongated piece of nylon she had found. She settled Wily in the center of the fabric, sat down with her back to him, then pulled a hole over each arm, drawing it up until he was strapped to her back papoose-style. Wily laid his chin on her shoulder. A warm canine sigh woofed into her ear.

  “De nada,” she said.

  She filled the charred canteen with river water and dropped it and the half chili tin over her shoulder into Wily’s sack. The first-aid items she stored in various pockets. Then they walked into the autumn woods.

  Anna didn’t so much track the kidnappers as follow the highway they had bulldozed. Despite the fact that eight bodies had broken trail, snapping off twigs and trampling shrubs, the going was hard, yet in a couple of hours she was close enough to the kidnapping party that she could hear them—and they could hear her.

  From that point on, she and Wily dared move only when the kidnappers moved. Stopped, Anna realized she was hungry and thirsty. Having removed Wily from his sack, she shared a cup of river water with him. For the hunger there was nothing to be done. Since it wouldn’t prove fatal for a month or more, she banished it to the back of her mind.

  Thirty minutes later, she heard the noise of the kidnappers and her friends on the move. “Time to go,” she whispered to Wily. Misunderstanding her, intentionally or not, he resignedly got to his three feet and hobbled a few feet away to pee on a tuft of grass.

  “Good idea,” Anna commended him and followed suit.

  The noise of the kidnappers continued but grew louder. They were moving, but evidently not in a linear direction. Leaving the track they’d trampled into the duff, she climbed a gentle slope that ended in a bluff where the land dropped away precipitously, the soft sandy banks undercut by a small swift river thirty feet below.

  Leaving Wily resting on the nylon cloth, she crawled to the edge of the bluff. The dude was downstream on the far side of the small river. Leah was duct-taping Heath into the rickshaw.

  They should move Heath and the chair separately.

  The current was too swift.

  There was too much torque.

  Anna quashed the urge to rush down and help, or stand up and shout instructions.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The dude was on the opposite bank. From chest to boots he was soaking wet. The water had to be close to three feet deep in the middle of the channel. Strainers made from dead limbs and other detritus attested to the fact the river was at or near flood stage from rains farther north. Whether the dude finally got a signal or just decided to follow his nose, he had ordered them to cross the fierce little river.

  Taped into the chair, unable to move anything but her arms, Heath fought down her fear as Leah and Elizabeth began lowering her down the embankment, one on each of the paddle handles. Clawing at the crumbling bank, Heath supported as much of her own weight as she could. Dirt clods rained down on her face as she grabbed at anything that looked like it might hold. Her knees and feet loosed small avalanches of soil into the water below.

  Heath felt the wheel hit bottom, a stability of sorts. She watched the water rise over her trapped feet and her legs, brown foam creaming her knees, but felt neither the wet nor the cold.

  Elizabeth and Leah were kneeling on the bank, their arms stretched full length, the paddle ends in their fists. The wheel of the rickshaw was in the water, No longer able to reach the bank to help them, Heath looked up. The paddle handle was slipping from Leah’s sweating hands.

  “Katie!” she yelled. “Help your mom!” Katie, face a mask of distaste, skinny arms crossed over her chest, didn’t move.

  “Mom!” Elizabeth cried as the current twisted Rick Shaw, ripping the other handle from her hands. The paddle handles shot skyward. Heath and the chair plunged backward. Tea-colored water swirled over Heath’s shoulders. This she could feel.

  The cold shocked her, driving the breath from her lungs. The Fox River had been just as cold, but in the sun, in a fabulous canoe, with friends and family, Heath hadn’t noticed. Now the sun sulked behind sullen-looking clouds, a cold disk of white on a gray sky. Friends and family were dead or in danger, and the water was just damn cold.

  Up on the bank, Jimmy and Sean laughed uproariously. Heath hadn’t heard such roaring belly laughs since Aunt Gwen had taken her to the road show of Spamalot in Denver.

  “Mom!” Elizabeth was sliding. She stumbled into the water, throwing her body across the paddle handles, fighting the current with her weight to keep the chair level and upright. Leah jumped down after her.

  With one on each handle, the chair came level, the wheel on the bottom.

  “That was exciting,” Heath said.

  “Katie, we need you,” Elizabeth called.

  “If I get wet, I’ll be cold,” Katie called back.

  “If you don’t help, wet isn’t all you’ll get,” Elizabeth snapped.

  “You have to cross anyway, Katie,” Heath called before either could utter words that couldn’t be unsaid. “You’ll be safer if you cross with us.” Katie was so small, the current would snatch her away if she tried it on her own.

  Mincingly, and with many squeals, Katie entered the stream and hesitantly took a paddle handle. Leah moved behind Heath and grabbed the double wheel.

  “On three, lift the handles. I’ll lift the wheel,” Leah murmured. Heath could barely hear her.

  Katie repeated her mother’s words as if she had to translate them from a language the others weren’t familiar with.

  “You’re going to tip backward, Heath,” Leah said. “Girls, be sure you keep her chin above the water. Okay? Then you walk backward. Slowly. One, two, three.”

  Though forewarned, Heath yelped with vertigo as the chair tilted backward and the cold water rushed over her chest and throat.

  “Easy, baby steps,” Leah murmured.

  Heath began to move backward, the water slopping over her shoulders. “Whoa,” she gasped as the stream sent icy fingers over her breasts and down her pants.

  “Are you okay?” Elizabeth asked.

  “You mean other than being disabled, dunked, and abducted?” Heath asked.

  “Yes. Other than that.”

  Elizabeth was so tired Heath could feel the trembling of her muscles through the paddle handles and the plastic of the seat, yet she found the strength to pretend her mother was amusing. What a girl.

  They’d made it to midstream when the left side of the chair, the upstream handle that E was holding, dipped precipitously. Heath felt her weight slew to that side and the chair lurch. The wheel between Leah’s hands began to turn from the vertical. They were losing it. The current was spinning the rickshaw, trying to flip it over.

  “Pull up! Pull up!” Heath yelled at Elizabeth.

  “I’m trying. Dammit!”

  Katie’s paddle handle lifted out of the water, her hands like small white starfish, glued to the shaft. Water foamed over Heath’s upstream shoulder. She had to twist her neck to keep her face above water.

  “Don’t let go, Katie!” Elizabeth cried.

  “P
ush down, Katie, get the paddle down!” Heath said. Water poured into her mouth, and her words were lost in a fit of coughing.

  “She’s drowning!” Katie screamed.

  Leaning as far upstream as she could with her body taped to the back of the seat, Heath reached over and grabbed at the bottom of the chair, bowing her back in an effort to use her weight to right the rickshaw.

  “Up, up,” Leah was shouting. The upstream side of the chair bucked up and down as E worked to raise the paddle handle and bring the apparatus to level.

  Though the shout had been meant for Elizabeth, Katie responded. She lifted instead of holding her handle down. The center of gravity shifted, the double wheel caught the water like a tiller, and the chair spun.

  “I can’t hold her!” was the last thing Heath heard before she went under.

  She’d gotten a breath and closed her mouth. Her eyes were open. Nothing but brown showed. With fingers that felt as responsive as if they were made of clay, she scratched at the tape across her chest.

  Remembering her horror at being taped into the wheeled death trap, futile fury lent her an erg of power. She had said nothing. Leah and Elizabeth—even Katie in her way—worked so hard for her, she couldn’t bear to criticize or make special requests. Because Aunt Gwen had drummed good manners into her, she was going to die a horrible gurgling death.

  The lower part of the chair struck a submerged rock. Heath began cartwheeling downstream. Hands, scrabbling pitifully at the wet tape, forgot their business and tried swimming. Her head was snapped back by the spin. Her mind flashed on the county fair, back when it was small potatoes, a showcase for the local cake bakers and curtain makers, 4H calves and sheep, boys and girls sleeping in the stall with a loved prize animal, vying for a blue ribbon, then slaughter. Tilt-a-Whirl. That was the ride. Heath had chipped her front tooth on the safety bar before barfing cotton candy all over the wide-wale corduroy trousers of the boy of her dreams.