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

by Barr, Nevada

  “Me and her and little blondie would just lie happy as spoons in a drawer,” he said.

  Heath could not tell if he was taunting her and Leah or coaxing them. Undoubtedly the former. Sean didn’t seem the type who’d waste any time convincing a woman to give him what he wanted when he could take it by force. Whichever it was, his words were exciting him. Back in the day—when she’d had sex now and then—Heath had noted the twitching that penises often displayed before they committed to a full erection. The front of the thug’s trousers appeared to have a small nervous animal within shyly testing the walls of its prison.

  “Let me take a look at your feet,” Heath said in hope of distracting him. Her mouth was so dry she’d half expected a puff of dust to come out.

  “They’re bad,” Sean complained and obediently pulled off his socks. The stirring of foot and fabric released the vile odor of stinking feet. Even when she’d used them daily, and without mercy, Heath’s feet never stank. Elizabeth’s gym shoes didn’t smell. Two days in the woods weren’t sufficient for this reek, not even given she’d doctored them with feces.

  He thrust them toward her. Her legs jumped like those of a gigged frog. Her knee banged Elizabeth’s head. The girl came awake with a startled scream.

  In the mind of Sean, this was another extremely humorous event. His guffaws woke Katie. The girls would have woken soon anyway, if only from the excruciatingly creepy vibes the man gave off. His evil was such it would penetrate the unconscious mind.

  Leaning forward as best she could, Heath studied his feet with pretended concern.

  “They hurt like sonsabitches,” Sean said plaintively. Heath hazarded a glance at his face. The thug, the kidnapper, expected them—or at least her—to pity him, to feel bad that his feet were raw and torn. Expected it. She could tell. His face was as readable as that of a kindergartner showing Mom a skinned knee.

  “I bet they do,” she managed.

  He waited.

  Heath had no idea what for.

  “Can you bandage ’em up again or something?” he asked, irritation replacing childishness.

  “No bandages. Nobody brought the first-aid kit.” It surprised Heath to have to say it. Could they be so unfortunate as to have been taken by insane kidnappers? Or was that redundant?

  “Somebody sure as hell should’ve,” Sean snarled, turning suddenly hostile. He threw back his head, the firelight catching the backs of his ears and turning them red. “Jimmeeeeeee!” he screamed so loudly the four of them flinched. When his head rocked back on his neck, eyes in their direction, Heath could tell game time was over.

  He pointed a finger at Katie’s drawn white face. “You!” he said. Before he could order Katie to do whatever he intended, Leah opened her fist and took a bite out of a lobster mushroom the size of half a sandwich.

  Sean’s appetite changed gears. “You’ve got food,” he whispered accusingly. His eyes flicked from side to side as he took in the whereabouts of his compatriots. Sharing was clearly not one of Sean’s talents. “Give it to me.”

  Still chewing, Leah held it out, the crisp white semicircle of the bite she’d taken clear and cartoonlike against the rusty red of the mushroom. Sean grabbed it off her palm and, lowering it to where it was less likely to attract the attention of Reg or the dude, examined it, turning it over in his dirty hands. “What is it?”

  “It’s a lobster mushroom,” Leah murmured softly. “I found several edible varieties of mushrooms today.” Reaching behind Katie, Leah scooped the mushrooms up, then held them out toward Sean. “The white ones are deer mushrooms. The red-colored are lobster.”

  Of the little white ones only two were deer mushrooms; the other was the Amanita. He’s a pig, Heath thought. He’ll eat them all. She reached out, plucked up a deer mushroom, popped it into her mouth, then began to chew. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t tell if the mushroom really tasted like moldy cardboard or if it was only her. Uncooked mushrooms made one a little queasy, but Heath was already way beyond a little queasy.

  “Hey!” Sean snapped, grabbing for the remaining mushrooms. Hope slowed time. Heath watched his blunt fingers swim through the firelight toward the Amanita. There was time to notice the broken nails, the black wiry hair on the backs of his fingers, the dirt in the creases of his knuckles, time to see Sean eat the Amanita, sicken, and die.

  “Were you born stupid?” the dude asked Sean. “Or do you have to work at it?”

  Startled by his sudden appearance, Sean yelped.

  Reg was on his feet yelling, “What the fuck? What’s happening?”

  “Never eat a mushroom that doesn’t come in a can,” the dude said evenly.

  Reg saw the mushrooms. “Were you gonna eat that wild shit, man? Even a fucking retard knows not to eat shit you find on the ground.”

  The dude, the very image of a god of destruction, stared down at the three of them. Then only at Leah. His fist shot into the midst of them, fast as a boxer’s left jab. It emerged with a handful of Katie’s hair, and Katie with it, shocked into the limpness of a rag doll.

  “Don’t play games with me, Mrs. Hendricks,” the dude said. “Sean,” he called without looking away from Leah. “Something to keep the chill off.” He held the child out with the ease of one man handing a used coat to another.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Anna stood in the impossible night of the forest, her eyes fixed on the one spark of light, the campfire. One way or another, the body of the man at her feet had to be gotten rid of. If the kidnappers saw that their pal had been knifed, they would know they were not alone. Once they were on guard, she wouldn’t be able to get near them.

  Too close to the camp to risk using her headlamp, she knelt and felt for the dead man. Her hand landed on his face. His nose was warm against her palm. There was a time she would have snatched her hand back. That time was eons past. Following the lines of his body, she ran her hands down neck, shoulders, and arms. When she’d located both his hands, she drew his arms up and together.

  Working blind, she tugged, trying to drag the corpse to the river the thugs had returned to in their witless perambulation. Dragging dead weight in soft duff was harder than she would have thought. Jimmy might have been dropped in hardening concrete for all the effect she was having.

  Squatting on her heels, she stared at the distant flicker of light. Dragging was a bad idea anyway. There’d be sign. Maybe the thugs would think the trail was left by the wolves carrying off their kill, but she couldn’t count on it. There was no way of knowing how thoroughly they’d search. They didn’t seem to give a damn one way or another, and might not bother. Again, she couldn’t count on it.

  She’d have to carry him. He couldn’t weigh more than one-forty. Using the fireman’s carry, she’d hauled bigger men when she had to. Fireman’s carry, sometimes called dead man’s carry; truth in advertising this night.

  Anna worked herself around until she was squatting between his arms, facing the top of his head. Having gathered her legs beneath her, she lifted his torso to hers and held him in a lover’s hug. His beard tickled down the collar of her coat like a nest of spiders, and she shuddered. Of all the gods’ creatures, the one she was never able to come to love was the spider.

  Pushing slowly, she rose to a standing position, drawing him up with her until they stood breast to breast, knee to knee, cheek to cheek.

  Her nose wrinkled at the smell of his tobacco-spittle-doused beard. Breath rasped in her throat. Inhaling slow and deep through her nostrils, she stilled it. Free of distraction, she heard breathing, quick and steady and close by. For a cold moment she was afraid she’d not killed the little man thoroughly enough, and she hadn’t the strength to murder him again.

  No, not murder.

  This was war.

  “Wily?” she whispered.

  A whuffing snort came from the dark on her left. He hadn’t abandoned her. Taking strength from the presence of the pack, Anna turned in the dead man’s limp embrace, bent over at the waist, and let his tor
so drop over her hip bones. Had he been a small woman or a child, she would have pulled his inert form over her shoulders. A one-hundred-forty-plus load needed to be supported by the bones of her pelvic girdle, the center of gravity directly above her hips and thighs.

  Having steadied the corpse, she turned her rear end to the light from the camp. Hoping none of the thugs were watching her particular patch of woods, she flipped her headlamp right side out, then clicked it on. After near-total darkness its brilliance shocked her. Laserlike, the beam sliced through clotted night, snatching trees out of winter sleep, firing lichen into color.

  A riot of noise erupted from the camp. This was the time.

  She took a step forward, then another, then another. To her ears, her passage resonated like a parade of bulldozers, but by the time the camp quieted down, she was too far away to worry. Even if they did hear the crackle of leaves, or her labored panting, they wouldn’t have light to investigate.

  At last the beam fractured on fast water, foam sudden and sinister in the lightless flood. Anna was soaked with sweat, her clothes sticking to her skin. If she didn’t do something soon she would get chilled—too cold for even the dedicated warmth of the family dog to save her.

  “Better than a lion skin,” she whispered to Wily as she peeled the dead man’s coat from his back. The blood was still wet. It didn’t bother her.

  In one pocket she found a box of .22 longs. If she could get her hands on the squirrel gun she’d be golden. The old pump-action Winchester was one of the most accurate weapons she’d ever had the pleasure of firing. In the other pocket she found the cap with earflaps. Having removed her headlamp, she put the hat on, then tied the flaps underneath her chin.

  “I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay,” she whispered to the dog. Apparently Wily had never seen much Monty Python. He didn’t even crack a smile.

  She laid the lamp in the grass so it pointed toward the body. “Turn it off if anyone comes,” she said, only half in jest. Wily sat awkwardly, whined, then fell over on his side, watching her as she went through the dead man’s trouser pockets. She found a ChapStick, which she fell on greedily, smearing her chapped lips without a thought to the surface the wax had last touched. The used handkerchief she left alone. In his right hip pocket was a wallet. According to the driver’s license, the dead man was one James R. Spinks, late of Detroit, Michigan. The wallet also contained twenty-three dollars in cash and a wad of receipts.

  “Look at these,” she said, fanning the scraps of paper out under Wily’s nose. “Maybe James R. thought he could write off his expenses. ‘Murder weapon, three dollars and seventy-two cents.’ Kidding,” she told the dog as she pocketed the wallet. Police loved receipts. They drew a neat map of where a person went, when he went there, and what he bought.

  Anna took James R.’s boots off and tossed them in the river. The socks she kept, pulling them on like mittens over her hands. Her nose had become doglike. Scent registered more acutely than the day before. Judgment was suspended. There were no bad smells or good smells, just useful smells.

  Having sat down next to Wily, she braced her feet against James R.’s shoulder and thigh, then shoved with her legs, rolling the body over the bank and into the water.

  “Damn,” she whispered after a minute. “Sorry, Wily.” She should have cut off a slab of meat for the dog’s supper. “Next time.” A hazy memory of a former self, no more than a wraith drifting behind her left shoulder, remembered a time this would have been an alarming thought, or something not thought of at all. Anna ignored it.

  A woman’s scream brought both Anna and Wily to their feet. Snatching up the lamp, she started to whisper, “Stay,” to the dog, then thought better of it. In their tiny pack there was no alpha. She and Wily were equals.

  Half shading the lamp, she began to run in the direction of the camp. Sufficient noise from the others covered her progress. By all the laws of physics, she should have stumbled and fallen repeatedly, but she could not put a foot wrong. Campfire light appeared through the trees. She clicked off her lamp and kept running. Within minutes she had gained the periphery of the clearing and was down on her belly behind a mare’s nest of fallen branches.

  A devilish play was being enacted center stage, backlit by the orange fire. The dude held Katie by her hair. This was the third time Anna had witnessed the dude lifting a woman by the hair. Was he loath to touch them? Had he discovered that this mode of elevation inspired the most helpless terror?

  Katie was on her feet, her little hands clutching his fist to alleviate the pull on the roots of her hair. Heath was cursing, her arms whipping around her, as she tried to get to the girl. Leah’s long-fingered pale hands were clamped say-no-evil-style over her mouth. Shocked into inactivity, Elizabeth’s lips formed the O of a fish gasping for breath. In her battered face, it was neither cute nor funny.

  Sean was hunched over, staring at the dangling Katie like a dog salivating over a pork chop.

  His great pig-sticker of a knife found its way into Anna’s hand, urging her to rush in and bury it between the dude’s shoulders.

  Then she would be shot.

  Katie would be given to Sean.

  Wily would die alone.

  Retreating several yards into the dark of the woods, Anna sucked in a lungful of air, then screamed, low and terrible, the guttural shriek tearing at her throat. She screamed the way she thought the late, unlamented Jimmy would have, had she given him the chance.

  The actors in the firelight froze in a tableau. Retreating a few more yards on silent moccasined feet, Anna cried out again, higher this time, ending in a wail.

  “Jimmy!” Sean yelled. “Jimmy boy!”

  Moving as quickly as she dared, Anna circled the camp. Her first cries had been from the east, the side where the river ran. When she was approximately north by northeast, and a good thirty yards from the fire, she began to cry like a lost child, then stopped suddenly, as if cut off by a blow.

  Covered by shouting and racket from the kidnappers, she ran until she was due west of the fire. There she produced a wail that trailed off; the windigo carrying the screaming Jimmy into the frozen north to devour at leisure.

  “Jimmy! Stop fucking around! Get your ass back in camp,” Reg shouted.

  “God damn you, Jimmy!” Sean cried.

  Anna slipped back near the camp, then climbed into a white pine with the boughs thick enough to hide her should anyone look up. Katie was in a pile at the dude’s feet. Leah was yelling, not a scream or a cry, simply a sustained line of sound that went on and on in a hollow aaaaaaaahhhhh.

  Heath was crying the loudest. Perhaps in joy that Anna lived to be a thing that went shriek in the night, perhaps hoping the cries were from Jimmy as his nasty self was dragged away by evil spirits or strong-jawed predators.

  Reg was spinning like a top, four-letter words flying from his mouth like bullets from a machine gun. His face, framed by the black and yellow of the double layer of hooded sweatshirts, was more gray than walnut. His lips, thin and bloodless, stretched back over his teeth. The Walther was held in both hands.

  He began firing wildly into the dark. Sean threw himself flat on the ground and covered his head with his arms, as if meat and bone could stop a round from the Walther.

  Jimmy’s Winchester was propped against a tree where he’d left it. Anna had over a hundred .22 rounds in her pocket. Hopes were dashed. The dude picked up the rifle and, swinging it like a club, struck Reg across the shoulders.

  Reg fell forward, stiff as a length of timber, the Walther clutched so hard in his fist he didn’t let go even as he struck the ground.

  Reaching out from the cushion of leaves where the women had gathered, Leah grabbed Katie’s arm and pulled her back into the fold. Awkwardly, as if she’d never learned how to do it properly, she patted the girl’s hands, trying to comfort her.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sheer exhaustion had knocked out everyone but Reg. Jimmy vanishing, and the weird noises coming out of the night, had cured
Sean of his appetites for both mushrooms and underaged girls. The quiet was a blessing to Charles. If he’d had to listen to Sean screwing the Hendricks girl half the night, he would have gone mad. The cretin lay passed out on his side, jacket zipped, feet nearly in the embers, hands pinched between his knees. Charles would give the child to Sean, not because Sean deserved it but because Hendricks did.

  Reg was haggard, but his fire was burning nicely. He’d been feeding it most of the night to keep the wolves from eating him. That would be a sight worth seeing, Charles thought. Very Roman Coliseum, one hale and hearty urban criminal against a pack of wolves.

  The first hint of dawn had alerted Charles as to which way was east. Watching the light drizzle in, shadowless beneath an overcast sky, he thought about the eerie cries that had come out of the woods. Wolves, of course. Anyone with half an ear to the news knew wolves had returned to northern Minnesota. Loons, maybe. Mating or dying or being eaten by coyotes. Until the first night of this debacle, Charles had heard loon calls only on movie soundtracks. Cougars could sound like a woman screaming. That bit of information had been gleaned thirty years before at one zoo or another. Moose and elk bugled; PBS taught him that.

  Never before had he heard any of these sounds in situ, as it were. Coming face-to-face with the denizens of this brand of wilderness was out of his range of experience. It didn’t scare him. Wild animals were not fond of the companionship of humans. Should one break that rule, anything short of a grizzly bear could be taken down with a .357. Demons, demonic possession, put the fear of God into him, as Michael liked to say. The monks at the monastery where he and his brother had been dumped were modern Catholics and tended to roll their eyes at talk of exorcisms, but Charles had seen people possessed by demons. There were times in his life he believed he might have been possessed himself.