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

by Barr, Nevada

  Since the dude had shot her mother, Elizabeth had either cried silently or, judging by the expressions that rotated across her face, blamed herself for being unable to carry Heath any farther, or plotted revenge on the dude.

  Or so Leah surmised. Reading other people’s emotions was another chore she was not accustomed to performing for herself. Not a chore, she corrected herself, an art form. Like drafting. Except not at all like drafting.

  After she’d rested she’d be better able to think.

  Katie plowed into the food with the pragmatism of her father. Gerald did have emotions. He loved his daughter. Leah thought he liked her well enough. Courting Leah, he’d said he loved her. Leah believed it then. He’d never crushed her heart, never announced he no longer loved her, never had loved her. The truth came slowly, delivered in endless thoughtful kindnesses. Acts of service that masqueraded as love. Not until Leah had seen the genuine adoration in his eyes when Katie was born had she known that what he gave her was an imitation of love.

  There had been sadness. Then there was work. Gerald took care of Katie. If he saw her now, hands bound with plastic ties, pouring canned peaches into her mouth between bites of a cinnamon roll—the individually wrapped kind they sell at the cash register in convenience stores—he would be running for wild-caught blueberries to counteract the toxins.

  Picking out a round of sliced wiener with filthy fingers and stuffing it into her mouth, Leah realized she and the girls were in a kind of feeding frenzy. Not only were their bodies in need of fuel, there was always the fear the food would be snatched away.

  “Hey! Hey, goddammit!” the pilot shouted over the distance between the camp and the plane. “Get me some help down here. You! Get away from that! Touch her and I swear to Christ I’ll cut your balls off and feed them to the pigs.”

  Leah and the girls stopped midswallow. As one, they stood, trying for a better view. The far end of the field was shrouded in darkness, the voice of the pilot small with distance, but shriller, more alarmed than before.

  “See what he wants,” the dude said to Reg. Reg was leaning against one wall of the ruin, using his jackknife to scrape the last smear of deviled ham from a small tin. Having already consumed enough to send a teenaged boy into shock, Leah assumed it was more for amusement than sustenance.

  “It’s too fuckin’ dark, man.” The nonchalance was strained. He didn’t raise his eyes from his ham project, didn’t want the dude to see he was scared to go.

  The dude picked up the flashlight and tossed it to him. Reg glanced up in time to catch it before it banged into his head.

  For several seconds the two men stared at one another. The dude’s carp eyes won. Reg clicked the light on. Black clothes were sucked into black night and he vanished quickly as he walked out of the camp toward the plane. What remained was swathes of unexpected green scythed from the ground by the flashlight.

  “Bring the flashlight, God damn it!” The pilot was screaming, high-pitched and angry.

  “Keep your fuckin’ pants on, man,” Reg said.

  “He’s after the goddam airplane!” the pilot shouted furiously.

  With herd instinct, Leah and the girls closed ranks and stood shoulder to shoulder watching the blank screen of darkness. “Anna trying to disable the plane,” Leah whispered almost inaudibly. Elizabeth nodded. Her eyes welled with tears. Anna had not saved her mother. That had to be hard. Elizabeth talked about Anna as if she were Superwoman, then Anna had let Heath die. What good was the death of thugs or the salvage of Katie’s innocence if she could do nothing to keep Heath alive?

  The black box theater blew into shocking life. Darkness shattered into the shape of a man on fire, a creature of fire, crying high and wild and waving its arms. A human torch staggering like a mummy, reaching for an end to pain or a victim for it. Leah placed a hand on either side of Katie’s face. She tried to turn her head so she wouldn’t see. Katie shook free. Leah didn’t try again. She could not tear her eyes away either.

  “Holy Mary Mother of God,” breathed the dude. Jimmy’s rifle in one hand, the Colt in the other, he walked to the edge of the firelight.

  Shots rang out. The pilot hadn’t had a gun, not one Leah could see. Reg was firing at someone or something. Anna. He had to be shooting at Anna. He was bellowing as he pulled the trigger.

  Leah could see nothing but the burning thing. Once human, eaten by fire, it staggered several steps, then turned, the fiery face seeming to look straight into the camp. Behind it fire shot up from the ground, forming a column underneath the airplane wing. Then the plane exploded, a star-blast of fire. The creature was blown to its knees. There were no more cries. In absolute silence, it toppled over. The flames were smothered, but for an eerie blue running across the downed form, painting the shape of a man. Behind him the plane had gone almost dark. The explosion stealing air from the flame.

  “Momma,” Katie said. Her eyes were beseeching. Leah had no idea what to say or do. She looked around for Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth was not there. She had used the moment of the dude’s distraction to get to the end of the truncated wall. On silent feet, she was slipping around the end to where she could escape into the night, then into the forest.

  Leah should have thought of this. She should have thought to send Katie. For half a breath, she hated Elizabeth for not taking Katie with her. It was an ignoble hate. There’d not been time. There wasn’t time now.

  A flicker of shadow gone wrong caught in the corner of the dude’s eye. Quick as a cobra strike, his head snapped around. “Stop!” he yelled. The pistol came up, straight and level and aimed at Elizabeth’s retreating back.

  Leah hurled the half-eaten can of beans she still held in her hands.

  The beans struck him in the chest, splattering under his chin and down the front of his coat. Sending out a shower of wood chips, his bullet smacked into a rotten board where Elizabeth had been standing a second before. Elizabeth was gone, hidden by the darkness. They could hear the sound of her footsteps as she ran into the safety of the woods.

  Face dead with rage, the dude turned the gun on Leah.

  Utter stillness descended. With it, unexpectedly, clarity. Total clarity of mind: Leah had not known her mind was fogged, but it had been for years and years. Intricate puzzles, schematics, and plans had filled it like cobwebs filling an abandoned house. Ideas and numbers ran along the strands of the web. She shepherded them, pruned them, deleted them, perfected them. Never was her mind still.

  Life had gone on largely unnoticed outside of the laboratory in her skull. Equations hooded her eyes; their mathematical music stuffed her ears. On this trip, in spite of the monsters stalking her and Katie and Heath, Leah had clogged her mind with remaking the wheelchair, with clever mechanical scenarios. When those had been ground into dust, she lapsed into a mental silence, a dead spider on a dead web full of dead flies.

  At this moment, with this gun pointed at her and Katie, her child, her daughter, Leah could see and hear and think with stunning lucidity. She felt as if she’d awakened from a long, complicated dream.

  “Sit down, Katie,” Leah told her daughter calmly. “Finish your dinner.” Stunned into instant obedience, Katie sat and, though she didn’t eat, picked up the sliced peaches and held the can between her hands.

  “There’s no point now,” Leah said to the dude. “Without the plane you can’t transport us. You’ll be caught. Killing us would serve no purpose.”

  “There’s a purpose,” he stated flatly.

  Before Leah could ask what, or the dude could shoot her, Reg came hurtling into the firelight, gasping and gesturing wildly with his silvery pistol. “Man, Dude, this shit isn’t right. There is some kind of bad goin’ on, like sewer-stink bad. Fuckin’ Jimmy and the fuckin’ dog and Sean and shit. This is bad, Dude. We gotta get the fuck out of here.”

  Foam, lit by the flames, showed in orange specks at the corners of his mouth. His hands flopped as if strings attached to them were being plucked by a tone-deaf harp
ist.

  “Who did you shoot?” the dude asked.

  “What the fuck? You listening to me? We got no plane, Dude. We got no fuckin’ plane! We got to get out of here. Do the hostages, and get the fuck out.”

  “There’ll be a plane,” the dude said. “Who did you shoot?”

  Reg’s face blanked with confusion. “What the fuck you talkin’ about, man? I ain’t shot shit. This is like insane, Dude.”

  “Did someone else fire those four shots?” This time there was concern in the dude’s tone.

  “Nobody shot shit, Dude, I’m telling you.”

  “You mean you didn’t hit anything?” the dude asked.

  “Like I said, man, I didn’t hit shit. That was crazy stuff. This thing all fire like in the comics.”

  “So you shot at the thing of fire?” the dude asked.

  “Shit, yes! What a fucking nightmare.” Walther in hand, Reg threw himself to the ground beside the boxes of provisions the pilot had brought. He pulled out a bottle of Jim Beam and unscrewed the cap. “Fuck you,” he said to the dude and took a long pull.

  “That ‘thing of fire’ was our pilot,” the dude said.

  “Yeah? Well, fuck him. I did him a fucking favor.” Reg drank again. Leah waited for the dude to shoot him. The dude always disappointed.

  “The cripple’s child is out there,” the dude said. “Got away during the festivities. You see her, shoot her. Either one of these two moves, shoot them. You got that, Reg?”

  “I got it,” Reg said. He took another long drink.

  “Cap it,” the dude said softly.

  Reg screwed the cap back on the bottle and set it carefully in the cardboard box as if afraid it would tip over and spill its precious contents.

  “Where is the flashlight?” the dude asked.

  “How the fuck should I know?” Reg mumbled.

  He must have dropped it when he’d fired at the burning man, then run like a deer back toward the fire. At least Leah hoped it was a man, hoped the burning figure was not Anna. Surely, if the pilot wasn’t dead, he would have called out. Of course, Anna could have killed the pilot somehow, then accidentally lit herself on fire trying to sabotage the airplane.

  “Right,” the dude said. “How the fuck would you know anything?”

  Tucking the .22 Winchester under his arm, the dude stepped toward Reg. Reg flinched like a dog expecting a slap. Reaching past him, the dude lifted up the pilot’s jacket. It was vintage World War II, horsehide, with cracked and fading patches. To wear a jacket like that in a tiny airplane put Leah in mind of a lab tech she’d worked with who wore full motorcycle leathers when he rode his 49 cc scooter to work.

  From one of the inside pockets, the dude fished out an iPhone. Having pushed a number of digits with his thumb, he waited a few seconds, then said, “Send another plane, Mr. Big. Later. Just do it, Bernie.” He pushed the disconnect, slid the phone into the pocket of his coat, then retrieved the rifle from under his arm. The Colt had never left his right hand.

  Again with rifle in one hand and pistol in the other, like a figure on a poster from an old cowboy movie, the dude turned his back on the lot of them and faced into the night.

  Leah had lost the appetite she’d thought so insatiable a few minutes before. Katie had as well. “Reg, can we move back and lean against that wall?” Leah asked, indicating the wall Elizabeth had slipped around the end of.

  “I don’t give a shit. You get up on your hind legs, though, and I blow you away,” Reg snapped.

  “Thank you,” Leah said. That she was genuinely grateful annoyed her, but she was. “Come on, Katie-did.” It was the pet name she’d called her daughter when she was only one or two years old. She hadn’t thought of it in a long time. Katie remembered; her face lit up. Through the dirt and misery, she smiled as sweetly as she had when she was little.

  Careful to crawl and stay low, Leah and Katie moved the few feet to the wall. Leah leaned back and stretched her legs. To her surprise, Katie backed up to her. Tentatively, Leah slipped her bound wrists over her child’s head, let her arms drop around the narrow shoulders, and hugged Katie to her chest.

  Katie snuggled in. Leah was in awe of how much comfort her daughter was to her.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The neighbor’s dog was barking. Anna found it amazing that dogs never got hoarse. They could bark for hours, days on end, and never wear down their vocal cords. This dog had been barking forever. Not a vicious come-near-and-I’ll-bite bark, this was a welcome-home-I’m-so-happy-I-could-die bark. Anna could not remember a time when this dog had not been barking.

  Giving in to the inevitable, she opened her eyes. She had no idea where she was. Whether her dog Taco was barking, or where her bedroom window was. Frightened, she tried to picture her house. Various permutations of park housing, much of it similar, stirred together in her mind without jelling.

  She’d dreamed her husband was dead.

  Zach was dead. It wasn’t a dream.

  A whiff of something acrid startled her nose. Smelling salts?

  Zach had died over twenty years before.

  Paul Davidson, she was married to Paul Davidson. Paul was not dead.

  Intense relief flooded her mind. She was lying on the ground somewhere in Minnesota, staring at a distant spark of light, a campfire, and Paul was not dead. The near distance quivered and shuddered as if there were a rift in the time-space continuum. Whatever that was.

  Then it clicked into place. The fight, the burning man, the explosion. The pilot had knocked her clear of the Cessna before the fire reached the gas tank. That she still lived attested to the fact that there couldn’t have been much gasoline left in the rubber bladder in the wing. The shudder of air was heat rising from the wreckage.

  Other than alive, she didn’t know how she fared. Without moving, she started to take inventory, then gave it up. There was no part of her body that did not hurt. Starting slowly, with her fingers, she attempted movement. Her left arm was uppermost. Moving those fingers caused her bicep to remind her, before she’d been blown up, she’d been shot. Her right arm was underneath her. Feet worked. Knees bent. Hip joints rotated. Head moved up and down and side to side.

  Gathering her shredded courage, Anna managed a sitting position. Her face hurt. Burned, she guessed, but not badly. Her eyelashes were singed. The stench of burning hair—smelling salts—had helped bring her around. Her feet were bare. She’d been knocked out of her moccasins. Where her socks had gone was a mystery.

  The dog quit barking.

  Wily quit barking. Of course it was Wily. Anna had left him with Heath minutes ago. Hours ago. She hadn’t the slightest idea how long she had been out. There was no sign of dawn. The sliver of a moon was still about where it had been when she’d come to disable the plane. Maybe half an hour, forty-five minutes.

  Why hadn’t the thugs found her? Reg was afraid of the dark, but he had a flashlight. The dude didn’t act like he was afraid of anything. The sight of the burning man might have changed that.

  Burned alive.

  Anna felt acid rise from her stomach. Leaning to the side, she vomited it out. Had the man not slammed into her, she would have been the thing of fire. I didn’t kill him, she told herself. Jimmy, Sean—I killed them. I did not burn the pilot to death. I never lit a human being on fire.

  In truth, she hadn’t. Truth didn’t matter in the long run. The burning pilot was seared on her soul. She wanted to pour this out to Paul, wanted to see the endless kindness in his hazel eyes, the redemption in his smile. She wanted him so badly she hurt inside as much as she did outside, her lungs and heart swollen and aching.

  She was rocking.

  That was a bad sign. Rocking back and forth. Like a depressed person. Like a very depressed person. A seriously mentally ill individual. She stopped herself immediately.

  “Anna.” Her name was breathed on a cold wind from the north. A windigo was whispering, calling her to dinner. “Anna.” It was walking up behind her on its burned stumps o
f feet. Heath couldn’t walk. “Anna.”

  Scissoring her legs and pushing with her good arm, Anna fought to rise. Hands closed on her upper arms, crushing the bullet under the flesh.

  Anna fainted.

  When she came to, a face without a body floated over her, glowing almost blue. In an instant, it vanished.

  “I’msorryMomtoldmeyouwereshotIforgot.” Anna heard that. Her mind took it in, poked it a few times. “I’m sorry. Mom told me you were shot. I forgot.” Mom. Forgot Anna had been shot in the arm. Anna had left her headlamp with Heath. The face was E’s. Must be she was still dreaming. Heath could not have rescued Elizabeth. Heath could barely hold her head up. Yet Elizabeth had the headlamp.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “I got away.”

  The pride in the girl’s voice went a long way toward making Anna glad she’d regained consciousness. Elizabeth had escaped the thugs; she’d found her mother. “Good girl,” Anna said. “Very good girl.”

  Elizabeth took hold of Anna’s uninjured arm and helped her to her feet. “Are you okay?” the girl asked, keeping her voice a bare whisper.

  “I assume you mean relatively speaking,” Anna replied. “Your hands are still tied together.”

  “This plastic is made of kryptonite or something. I hope you have the knife,” Elizabeth said.

  Anna swayed, and E held her steady. Seeing would have helped. She could have kept herself parallel with the trees and perpendicular to the ground. In total darkness, her inner ears out of whack from the blast, she was having trouble keeping her balance. “I did have the knife,” she said when the invisible world quit spinning. “Maybe I still do. Look around, but watch the light. I don’t think your mom and I have much running left in us tonight.”

  Elizabeth turned the light on, carefully shading it with her cupped hands, and, on her knees, followed the tiny spotlight she aimed. Light helped. Anna felt better seeing E’s face in the reflected glow, the warm red of her fingers, the shadow of the bones beneath the flesh. Life.