Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  For a moment the man's face wavered the way Jell-O will if set down too hard. It firmed up quickly.

  "Right. And your first lesson was bashing visitors over the head with ashtrays."

  "No," Anna snapped. "I learned that at my previous job."

  "And what, pray tell, was that?"

  He seemed to be enjoying the conversation in a creepy sort of way. There was no tension in his shoulders, and his feet were planted with the confidence of a big man used to being in control.

  "The security here, your boys?"

  "Can't live on a beat patrolman's pay," he said affably. "Who is here with you?"

  "I'm alone," Anna said. "I paid Paula a couple hundred to let me in through the service door from the Bonne Chance."

  He thought about that. Anna could tell he liked the lie; it exonerated his security people of any failing. "Paula lent me the dress so I wouldn't upset the guests," she continued. "I'm from the Picayune. I'd hoped to get a story on the sex slave trade here in the Crescent City. I got lucky. This is Pulitzer Prize stuff. Would you mind giving me a quote for the piece? My photographer is downstairs, but we'll be sure and set something up with you before we go."

  The chief liked this even better. Anna could tell he loathed the local paper. The paper probably felt the same about him if he was as crooked and venal in his other dealings as he was in the area of vice. He would enjoy dealing with a reporter on his own turf.

  Just then the front of Anna's dress cackled and the words "Hey, Paula, what the fuck's going on?" came out from her bosom.

  It didn't take the chief long to react. "Fish it out," he demanded. "Two fingers, just like it was a gun and I might shoot you if it looked like you wanted to use it."

  Anna fished Paula's radio out of her bodice.

  The cop set the little girl at his feet. "Lay down," he told her. She did, her face on the floor, her tiny hands over her ears, the absurd period dress bunched up, her feet in their Mary Janes poking out from the petticoats. Never taking his eyes off Anna, he lifted one booted foot and, like a circus elephant, lowered the mighty hoof onto the back of the child's neck.

  "Now hand me the radio nicely," he said.

  Anna did.

  The chief thumbed the mike. "Gershwin, this is Ziegfeld. Come back."

  "Yeah, boss."

  "We got a spot of bother. Maybe a newspaper photographer down there. Look around, will you? Find Paula; looks like she let'em in. Call the Magician. Evacuate the clientele. Tell them everything's under control. You got all that?"

  Anna noticed he didn't bother to tell the other cop that he had a gun on one of the "newspaper people." She tried to look deserving of such an oversight, harmless and small and one who actually believed the pen was mightier than the sword. Just as she was thinking she was glad that Jordan had changed into costume to blend in, the chief asked, "What's your photographer wearing?"

  "I lied," Anna said. "I came here by myself. I'm not really with the Picayune. I work for Chase Bank out in Metarie, but I thought if I could get this story it would be my big break." Rounding her shoulders, she offered him a sheepish smile.

  He narrowed his eyes. He'd swallowed the newspaper bit as far as it went, but this was too much even for his big gut. Leaning forward, he ground his foot into the back of the little girl's head. She squealed; her twin echoed the cry.

  "He's wearing black Levi's, a black long-sleeved T-shirt, and black running shoes," Anna said quickly. "I don't know where he is. He could be anywhere in the house."

  "Has he got one of those goddamned iPod things that can send his pictures to the Internet as soon as he takes them?" the chief asked and pressed harder on the little neck beneath his foot. This time the child did not scream. Anna hoped her neck hadn't snapped under the pressure.

  Would it be better for her if her photographer could send the images instantly or better if he could not? She didn't have a lot of time to ponder the issue, but guessed the instant another intruder became priority one the chief would gun her down and go for the next target.

  "No," Anna said. "He's only got a small thirty-five millimeter. The phones don't take high enough quality photographs." She had no idea if that was true or not, but then, neither did the man with the gun and the hostage.

  Clicking the mike button again, the chief relayed Anna's description of the imaginary photographer to a "Gershwin" and a "Busby."

  "Find the photographer. I'm bringing down Miss Marple." Anna winced; her days of being called Nancy Drew were at an end. "Get Blackie here. We've got some disposal to take care of."

  "Blackie quit," came back.

  "Get Dougie, then," the chief snapped. He tucked the radio into the side pocket of his pants, then crooked his finger at the free twin. Thumb stuck in her mouth, she stumbled over in her stiff skirts. Grabbing her wrist, he jerked her up as he had her sister, then removed his foot from the other child's neck. The girl on the floor didn't move, but Anna was fairly sure she could see her breathing.

  "Give me your cell phone," he ordered Anna.

  "I don't have one."

  The chief thought that was the biggest lie of all, right up there with "I don't watch television."

  "I mean, I have one," Anna said quickly. "But not on me. It was in my pants, and I left them in Paula's room when I changed."

  To this he just grunted. "You kids get out of here," he said to the group huddled around Anna. None of them moved. Whether they knew Anna had come to save them or were just paralyzed with fear was hard to tell. Anna could feel small hands clutching and plucking at her skirts.

  Disturbed by this show of noncompliance, the chief cocked the pistol with his thumb and pointed the barrel at a child, the white powder of her makeup streaked with mascara from crying, her elaborate wig askew. "Get out of here," he said.

  "For Christ's sake!" Anna exploded. Those would very possibly have been the last words she ever uttered had not a man come rushing up, taking the stairs two at a time.

  It was Dougie.

  He skidded into the crowd of frightened children like Kramer into Jerry's apartment on the old Seinfeld show. The gunman's attention flicked to the newcomer. If ever she was to act, this was the time. Once she and the children were taken downstairs there would be too many guns.

  Dougie wasn't a big man, not more than a few inches taller than Anna and no more than twenty pounds heavier. As he stopped amid the confusion, he turned toward the chief. Seeing the gun, he threw his hands in the air like a cowboy in an old Western.

  Scattering children, Anna slipped behind him, wrapped her arms around him, and slid her hands up his chest and around his neck, trapping him in a full nelson. Locking her fingers together on the base of his skull, she yelled at the children, "Run!"

  For a second they stood immobile, the girls in their miniature gowns, the boys in short pants or loincloths and turbans. Then a boy broke and ran. The others followed, pattering past Anna and Dougie and down the long carpeted stairs. Only the twins remained, one in the chief's arms and one on the floor, no longer prone but up now on her knees.

  Dougie began to squirm. Anna put pressure on his neck until he yelled with the pain and grew still.

  "Let the children go," she told the chief of police. "Or I snap your man's neck."

  "Are you my man, Dougie?" the chief asked, making no move to set the child down.

  "Yeah, boss," Dougie managed through his crimped throat.

  The chief lazily raised the gun and pulled the trigger.

  Dougie slammed back against Anna with the force of the bullet. The chief pulled the trigger a second time. Dougie went limp, and Anna felt a blow as if a fastball had been hurled into her as the bullet passed through the dead man and smashed into her side.

  Then she was falling backward, Dougie with her. There was the odd sight of the chief disappearing, then the ceiling unfurling, then the banister heaving up, then nothing.

  FORTY-ONE

  From a long ways away, she heard a cry.

  Feebly, Clare strugg
led through fogs of drifting layers, skittering shadows of movement and sensation until she came into her eyes. Below her, glasses broken and askew, tears streaming, was the face of Ichabod Crane. He looked at her with abject terror, and she didn't know why. Then she felt the brick in her hand, saw the blood on his bald head, and knew she was murdering him.

  "Mommy!"

  Clare dropped the brick and scrambled off of Ichabod, leaving him sniveling in the monkey grass. Dana, making herself as small as she could, her naked body curled into a ball and squished beneath the low bench, was crying for her mother.

  "I'm here, honey, it's Mommy," Clare crooned as she crawled across the bricks. "It's me, baby, I'm all dressed up for a play, but it's me. It's Mommy." She reached beneath the bench and laid a hand on her daughter's back. "Come on, honey. It's over. You're safe now, Mommy's here."

  Water was dripping from somewhere, splashing the brick, and Clare realized she was weeping.

  Dana took her hands away from her face and looked up.

  "Mommy's in costume," Clare said. There was still no response. "Oh!" Clare had forgotten all but her daughter. "I've got on makeup, so I'll look all beat up and bloody like that time when we did the scary play."

  With sudden recognition, the little girl exploded from beneath the bench and wrapped her arms so tightly around Clare's neck and her legs so tightly around her middle that Clare couldn't breathe and wouldn't have traded the embrace for all the oxygen in the world.

  "Do you know where your sister is?" Clare asked, forcing calm into her voice. "Do you know where Vee is?"

  Dana shook her head against her mother's shoulder and cried harder.

  "Shh, shh," Clare murmured. "It's okay. We'll find her. Don't you worry. We'll find Vee." Dana's crying seemed to lessen a little, and she burrowed her face into the hollow of Clare's shoulder as if she would hide forever near her mother's heart.

  Had there been the luxury of time, Clare might have sat just that way for hours. Instead, never loosing her hold on her child, she levered herself up from the bricks, using the edge of the bench.

  Ichabod had found the courage to sit up. The blow he'd taken to the head was bleeding copiously, and the sight of his own blood seemed to be terrifying him. A good bit of it had splashed on his hands, and he held them before his face, staring at them as if they belonged to someone else.

  A mother again, sane again, Clare reached for Anna's cell phone to dial 911. The pocket was empty. She'd left it in the trousers she'd shucked off when she donned the costume. "Doggone it," she whispered, careful as always not to swear around her children. To the pathetic bastard bleeding at her feet, she said, "Give me your cell phone or I will kill you." She meant every word and knew that she and Jordan had integrated, become one.

  Ichabod fished his phone out and handed it to her. Clare flipped it open and punched in 911.

  Ichabod scuttled crablike to the edge of the clearing, got to his feet, and ran down the path on long shaking legs, hollering for help.

  The emergency operator answered. Clare began pouring out her story. It sounded unreal, like the story of a prankster or psychopath. She took a breath to mentally reframe what she'd seen and heard this night.

  Into the silence the operator said warily, "Where are you?"

  Clare started to snap, "I told you that!" but remembered she hadn't shared the address. She didn't know it. "It's behind the sex club on the north edge of the Quarter, the Bonne Chance."

  For a beat or two the operator said nothing, then, "There's nothing behind that club but city warehouses filled with old pumping station machinery, obsolete computers, broken crime cameras, things like that. It's called the Bone Yard."

  City warehouse, chief of police. Possibly others from the upper echelons of Louisiana politics were involved. Clare changed tack. "My name is Clare Sullivan," she announced. "I'm wanted for four murders in Seattle, Washington. I'm ready to give myself up."

  "Are you still . . . behind the Bonne Chance?" the operator asked.

  "Yes," Clare said firmly.

  "In the warehouse?"

  "Yes," Clare said again.

  "If you'll go out to the street, I'll have an officer come by to arrest you if you'd like," the dispatcher said with only a hint of sarcasm.

  "I can't," Clare said. "I can't get out of the warehouse."

  There was a distinct sigh from the other end. "Stay on the line, please." A list of helpful hints of what to do in case of emergency began playing over the phone.

  Clamping the slippery device between ear and shoulder, Clare lowered Dana to the bench. The child wouldn't let go of her neck but, with coaxing, was willing to set her feet on the stone seat. Having wriggled out of the Edwardian jacket, Clare wrapped it around her daughter's naked body and gathered her up again. The night wasn't cold, but she couldn't bear the thought of Dana feeling any man's eyes on her.

  Through the foliage came the sound of raised voices. Ichabod had reported her. Holding Dana tightly, Clare pushed into the dense elephant ears and Australian ferns between the brick paths. They would not hide her long, but it was the best she could do. Not quite the best; stepping back into the clearing, she picked up the bloody brick she'd used in her aborted attempt to bash a pervert's brains out and slipped it into the folds of the coat wrapped around Dana.

  Radios crackled, and the men hushed. The operator had called out the police, and the police were receiving the call on their radios, in the garden, in the fancy house. Edging through the dense greenery, Clare moved the half-dozen yards to where the paths left the patio. Three guys in black suits were standing close to the piano, listening to their radios.

  After the dispatcher made her report, another voice came over the air. "Amy, this is the chief. That's a crank call. Officers Barrett and Downs are with the caller now. We'll get back to you."

  "Night of the full moon," the dispatcher said.

  "Always brings'em out," replied the chief.

  Without waiting for the operator to come back on the line, Clare closed the cell phone. The way out through the house and sex club was locked. Vee was either dead or shipped overseas or in this house somewhere. Anna was probably dead or dying. The rats were abandoning ship, stripping off period costume jackets, vests, hats, spats, and ascots as they rushed a door in the garden wall that led to a garage or other screened exit.

  Carrying Dana, Clare would be stopped if she tried to blend in with the men making their escape. If she walked back into the house, bloodied and filthy and carrying a child, the three off-duty policemen would stop her in a heartbeat.

  Hugging her daughter tightly, she sank down into the ferns.

  FORTY-TWO

  Anna opened her eyes. She was looking at a black shag carpet. No, she was under a greasy shag carpet. Shit. She was staring at the back of Dougie's head. Carefully, lest her spine be snapped, she rolled her head to the side. The two of them lay on the stairs, her head smashed awkwardly into the angle between stair and wall. Her right arm was trapped beneath her and her left flung out as if she'd tried to break her fall. Dougie lay partially over her chest, his head resting on her cheek.

  Oddly calm, she wondered if he was dead. Not that she cared, but if he wasn't, maybe he'd get the hell off her lungs so she could breathe. Dougie had been shot.

  Anna had been shot by the same bullet--or bullets. She only remembered feeling one hit. What should a gunshot person do on awakening?

  Stop the bleeding.

  Check airways.

  Treat for shock.

  Set up a saline IV.

  That was for when other people got shot, victims, she remembered. Nobody ever taught rangers what to do if they got shot. Don't die, she thought and started to laugh. With x number of pounds of Dougie on her chest, it didn't work out. As long as she stayed still, the wound didn't hurt too badly. Was it too bad? Only a crease, she told herself, don't be scared. Fear was deadly. There'd been a story going around the parks one year about a man who was bitten by a corn snake and died of shock because he
believed he'd been bitten by a rattler. It might not have been true, but it was a good teaching point at campfire talks.

  "Corn snake," Anna whispered and was pleased to find she could talk without making ominous gurgling sounds. Her lungs weren't punctured. Before she made the commitment to moving from under the man she'd shared a bullet--or bullets--with, she listened past the sound of her own heartbeat in her ears and the breath in her throat.

  "Load up the jewels. We're shutting this place down. And find that goddam photographer," she heard the chief shouting.

  He was downstairs, where the children had run. Why hadn't he shot her again for insurance when he passed her and Dougie on the stairs? Maybe with her head jammed against the wall and the copious amounts of blood--Dougie's, she hoped--drenching her, she'd looked too dead to waste a bullet on.

  Without moving overmuch, she frisked the body that lay across hers. Last time she'd been this close to Dougie, he'd been carrying a knife, a long blade that folded into the haft. With luck, in the intervening days, he'd augmented his arsenal with a gun or two. Her quota of luck had evidently been used up when the chief decided not to finish her off; there was only the knife. Holding the open blade across Dougie's throat in case he wasn't dead enough, she pressed two fingers on his carotid. No pulse.

  The weapon hard in her fist, she wriggled from beneath the dead man. Pain roared up through her side, making her breath catch, and the wretched skirts tangled around her lower legs. What should have been a relatively simple operation was a slow misery.

  Panting and sweating and swearing nonstop under her breath, she got free of Dougie and could see down the stairs.

  Her escape maneuvers had gone unnoticed. The chief was just in sight, his back to her, standing by the baby grand, clad in period trousers and anachronistic leather bedroom slippers, shouting orders to Barrett and Downs--presumably his men in the courtyard. The .357 was shoved in the waistband of his trousers. Despite his considerable girth, the antiquated cut of the trousers left them roomy. They were meant to be held up by braces, not a belt. Most of the gun had slipped down his ass. Only the tip of the wooden grip remained visible.