Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  Except for the chief, the pedophiles were leaving, scuttling down the stairs to their limos, no doubt, to prey on other children at other times. They stepped over and around her and Dougie, indifferent to the fact that she lived or that he did not. She watched them pass, but with the costuming, the confusion, getting shot and whatnot, Anna doubted she would be able to identify any one of them in a court of law.

  Beyond the chief, on the patio in the courtyard, two men in black suits were trying to herd the children streaming from the building into a group. There was no sign of the whorehouse staff or of Clare. Anna hoped she had managed to escape and wasn't lying dead somewhere. The hope was feeble; Clare would not leave without her children.

  Anna supposed she could creep upstairs and hide. Maybe the chief wouldn't notice the dead had walked, wouldn't look for her, wouldn't drag her out and kill her. It was a slim chance but better than nothing. Had they not been taking the children away to torture at their later convienience, she would have done just that.

  Seven steps to the bottom of the stairs.

  By the time she'd reached the last one, she'd have a plan, she promised herself.

  Gathering her skirts up in her free hand, she began to pull herself to her feet, using the banister. Each movement felt as if it tore the hole in her side wider and deeper. Because Dougie had been cad enough to bleed all over her, she had no idea how much blood she was losing, whether the wound was grave or just a scratch. Pain was no indicator. Often the worst wounds damaged the nerves and hurt less than non-life-threatening wounds.

  "Barrett!" the chief barked. The shorter man in black turned. Anna froze. Indoors, uncertain light, panicked men and children: If he wasn't looking for her he might not see her.

  "Yeah?"

  "We got any gas?"

  "A five-gallon can in the garage. Why?

  "We're going to burn this place down. There's been too much radio traffic. Some nosy parker's bound to have been scanning."

  "Where's Paula?"

  "I don't know and I don't care. Get the gas."

  "Gas is easy to detect, boss."

  "You got a better idea?"

  Barrett turned and trotted in the direction Downs had led the children.

  With Barrett out of line of sight, Anna got to a standing position, congratulating herself on the decision not to hide. Burning was way down on her list of favorite ways to go. The Chance would burn as well, and she wished she could warn them. With sunrise only a few minutes away, surely most of the revelers would have gone home. The two dominatrices must have to take the kids to soccer practice or something.

  Dropping her skirts and holding on to the banister, she took her first step. Six more to the Plan. Toddling barefoot into three handguns was a plan of sorts. Five steps to a Better Plan.

  Damn. Somehow she'd slid down the railing till her butt was on the tread. Putting her head between her knees, she tried to bring her drifting consciousness back into focus. Perhaps the bulk of the blood on her dress wasn't Dougie's. Maybe it wasn't a corn snake. Maybe she'd been bitten by a rattler. The knife was still in her hand, but she wasn't sure what she'd intended to do with it.

  Soon the chief would turn around or Barrett or Downs or whoever else was still on-site would come back. Either they'd see her and kill her or they'd burn her up sight unseen. Paul would never know what had become of her.

  One day he had talked to his wife on the phone. She'd told him she was fine and having a nice rest with her girlfriend in New Orleans. Then she was never seen or heard from again.

  Jesus, Anna thought. How can people survive not knowing, looking in every face on the street, craning to hear voices in the dark, thinking against all reason that maybe, maybe this time, it will be the lost love. Suddenly, over all the horror she'd seen and all the horror yet to come, washed a wave of grief so dark it eclipsed them. She realized what she had done to Paul, how she had lied to him by omission, and how she had lied to herself in pretending that she did it to shield him. She had wanted to feel in control, meaningful; she'd wanted distraction and a sense of importance. Well, she had gotten all that in spades. The cost was yet to be totaled up.

  "Barrett," the chief yelled as the other officer trotted back lugging a heavy red gas can. "Start on the third floor. Go light. Save a couple gallons for the second and ground floors."

  Anna could hear Barrett's boots loud on the tiles that fronted the house proper. The arsonist was heading for the stairs.

  Anna's mind snapped back to the business of survival. She couldn't make it down unseen, nor had she a chance of getting to the top unseen. Unseen and unshot were synonymous.

  No more perverts were passing by. They were clearing from the lobby as well, funneling through the garden. Bumping back up the single stair she'd traversed, she lay down in a pose as close as she could manage to the one the chief had last seen, arranging her skirts so they covered but did not entangle her legs. The knife she opened and held in her right hand, the skirt covering it. Weak and in a hurry, she found Dougie too heavy for her to shift more than a few inches. Grabbing a handful of hair, she dragged his head up and let it drop on her chest and neck, partly obscuring her face.

  Boots hit carpet. Barrett was coming fast. Grunting under the weight of the gas can, he ran up the stairs. Anna resisted the temptation to hold her breath. Then he was over her, his boot mashing the little finger of her left hand, the other kicking her calf as he passed.

  Lying as one dead, she listened for him to reach the second flight of stairs. There he would turn and would no longer be able to see her. Where the chief had gone, she had no idea; the garage, she hoped. If she could get to the greenery in the courtyard, they might not be able to find her before they had to abandon the place. They wouldn't dare be here when the fire department showed up, not dressed--or half dressed--as they were. In the green, she might even be able to survive the fire.

  In that instant she heard the chief's soft-soled shoes hushing across the marble of the foyer between the piano and the stairs. The bastard was coming back. To get his shoes? Check on Barrett? Put on street clothes? Fire that insurance bullet into her skull? Closing her eyes, she became as dead as she possibly could with a heart that was hammering a hundred beats a minute.

  The slippered footfalls became muffled. He'd started up the stairs moving fast. Fast was good. His mind was on the floors above, not the carnage on the steps. As he reached Anna and Dougie, he slowed. She tightened her grip on the knife. She didn't think of death, of what it would feel like to have a shard of metal shatter her skull and take out the life when it slammed through her gray matter. She didn't picture Molly or Paul or Piedmont or Taco. The only image in her mind was that of the chief of police's bare heels.

  Her left arm lay along the tread, the hand open where it might easily be trod upon. She felt the brush of leather against her fingers. He was directly above her. Opening her eyes, she grabbed his ankle hard in her left hand and with her right slashed deep across his Achilles tendon.

  Screaming in pain and shock, he tried to raise his other foot from the step below, but the ruined tendon wouldn't take the weight. Grasping the banister rail, roaring in fury, he reached back for the gun in the waistband of his pants. Anna took hold of the seat and yanked. The butt of the Colt vanished into his trousers, landing in the roomy seat like an unsightly load.

  This would be funny in the telling, she thought absurdly.

  No good moves left to her, she began hacking at anything that moved. A blow to the side of her face stunned her. Rather than fighting it, she went with the force and rolled down the stairs. The crashing woke up the nerves in her injured side. Blood began to flow that she knew was hers alone. The tumble was only a few yards, but it seemed to pass slowly. She saw her right hand fly up and noticed she had lost the knife. She watched her bare feet flash by and wondered at the childishness of being without shoes. She saw snippets of ceiling, fronds, and flocked wallpaper.

  Then she rolled to a stop on the landing, where the ornate ne
wel post curved into the drawing room in gracious invitation. Other than the loss of the knife and the blood, she didn't think she was any worse for wear.

  Screaming curses and demands for his men, the chief was hanging on to the banister with one hand while trying to fish the gun out of his pants with the other. Again funny; again Anna had no urge to laugh. She turned tail and crawled down the last of the stairs on her belly like a reptile.

  FORTY-THREE

  The rats were deserting what Clare hoped was a rapidly sinking ship. She watched with cold eyes as sick men, with money and evil in equal proportions, streamed from the three-story mansion. Close in the ferns and the leaves of the subtropical garden, Clare held on to her daughter and wondered what had caused this exodus. Had the pigeon survived? Or had her death scared the whoremongers?

  Two gunshots, close together, snapped her from her thoughts, and she ducked, wrapping herself over her daughter. The shots probably marked the end of the ranger. A law enforcement pigeon, but she hadn't found Vee, and now she'd gone and gotten herself killed before Dana was out of danger, Clare thought sourly. A faint pang of guilt left over from when she was civilized nudged her.

  If she and Dana survived, she'd put flowers on the woman's grave. If they didn't, no flowers for Anna Pigeon.

  When Clare again found the nerve to peek out of their tiny woods, little girls and boys in the hateful trappings of their slavery, some fully dressed, others with bits or pieces of the costumes still on, some dragging a ripped skirt or a wig fallen half off, were pouring out through the French doors. Most were not crying or running but moved with a stoicism that should never be seen on such baby faces.

  Clare didn't move. She searched for the one face she needed to see. If Vee was not here, then she'd been shipped overseas or secreted away in some man's basement. Or she had died. Clare prayed for the last.

  In a remarkably short time, the garden was free of perverted clientele. The only sound was the soft rustling of the children on the brick patio. This momentary hush was broken by the chief of police. In Edwardian trousers and bedroom slippers, he roared from the house, "Load up the jewels. And find that goddam photographer."

  The black suits began herding the children to the door where the perverts had swarmed out of the courtyard. The children, the jewels, diamonds beyond price, and they were being prodded ahead like cattle to be taken to another "fancy house" and another set of "clients."

  The one the chief called Barrett had run by carrying gasoline to burn the place down, with its evidence. There would be traces left, but, without Anna or the children or Clare, the arson investigators might not know what they were finding evidence of. They might think it was done to cover the theft of the presumed city property that was supposedly stored in this imaginary warehouse. The police would push that theory, for sure.

  Moving slowly so she wouldn't trip and cause Dana to cry out or the chief to decide the goddam photographer--it had to be her--was hiding in the bushes, she began folding herself through the wide fronds toward the door where the children had been taken. If it led to the outside, there was a possibility that in either confusion or darkness she could carry Dana to safety.

  A howl of rage and pain from the direction of the house stopped her. Had it not, she would have stepped out onto the brick and run right into the man rushing back from wherever the black maw of the door in the brick led to.

  Downs, the chief had called this man. Downs was compact and fast, probably in his early forties. His head was shaped like a bullet from working out his neck muscles and covered with close-cropped dark hair. As another roar of pain and rage came from the house, Downs faltered. He stopped several steps from where Clare stood in the shadows and, hands shaking, began fumbling for his pistol.

  Downs was only used to facing down frightened children, Clare thought. The chief's shriek was from a larger predator. Coolness coalesced around her like the still, cold air of a walk-in freezer. The smell of gardenias was gone. The sorrow of her lost baby girl was muted. The rush of blood in her ears was silenced. Lifting the brick from where it was cradled in the crook of the arm that held Dana, she stepped lightly into the chill and the silence behind Downs and brought it down hard on the back of his skull.

  With an "oomph" that sounded like the noise a bear might make, he fell to hands and knees. In one graceful movement Clare brought the brick down a second time. He didn't move again.

  Dana, the coat pulled up over her head, pushed her face deeper in the hollow of her mother's shoulder. Clare was glad her daughter hadn't witnessed the violence. Like good dry wine, revenge was an acquired taste, and one too bitter for the palate of a child.

  Dana clinging tightly to her neck, Clare leaned down and took the pistol the officer had managed to get out of his holster just as she struck him. It was a sleek semiautomatic. What make, Clare didn't know, but she recognized the feel from the gun she'd been given by props for the small part of an CIA agent she'd gotten in a movie shooting in Vancouver. That gun had been rendered harmless, but it had been a real weapon at one time in its life. So the character she played could handle it with confidence, Clare had taken lessons at a shooting range in Seattle.

  Downs's gun felt good in her hand. She thumbed off the safety and dropped her hand to her side, the barrel pointed down the line of her leg to the ground. Torn between walking into the darkness where the children had been taken or going back toward the house, she remained motionless. Minutes before, she'd written the ranger off, but there was no doubt in her mind that Anna had been the cause of the chief's anguish. The icy calm did not abate. She turned toward the house, following the winding brick walk with sure and silent steps.

  As she crossed from the patio onto the marble of the entryway, she saw blood on the tiles. The tail of the governess's dress was peeking from beneath a bench between the potted palms in the crook of the curving banister; the bench Clare had shared with the girls and their dollies.

  Above, leaning over the banister, .357 pointed at the plush velvet cushion, the chief stood on one leg. His skin was pasty. Sweat beaded on his forehead and dripped from his jaw. The hand that held the gun was trembling, but at that distance he would have no trouble shooting through the bench and hitting Anna.

  Clare raised Downs's gun and fired two shots into the chief's center mass. Watching him crumple, his hands groping like blind things trying to find the holes where she'd let his life out, she felt nothing but a mild sense of relief at a dirty chore completed satisfactorily.

  Barrett, gas can in hand, appeared behind the fallen chief, shouting, "It's burning good--" When he saw Clare he snapped his mouth shut. Clare did not move or blink or breathe. Barrett dropped the gasoline can and pulled his gun. Clare shot him twice.

  "The last scene of Hamlet," she said softly. "Hamlet is dead, Ophelia is dead, the king is dead, the queen is dead, Laertes is dead--"

  "But everybody else lived happily ever after," came the ranger's voice. Clare switched her gaze to the pile of gray muslin boiling from beneath the bench.

  "Wendy Darling's bedtime story. Peter Pan," Clare said. "Mr. Nye said I learned to fly faster than Mary Martin."

  "Bully for you," Anna said. With growls and curses, she got herself right way around and out from under the bench. Using the nearest palm tree, she pulled herself to a standing position. "Jesus!" she said as she took in the carnage. "Holy smoke. Good job."

  "They've set fire to the place," Clare said.

  "So I heard," Anna replied. One hand was clamped tightly over her side. What color remained in her face was made by blood worn outside the skin, not inside.

  "You're hurt," Clare said.

  "Smart and pretty, too," Anna mocked her.

  A crash sounded from above. A choking gout of smoke gushed down the stairs, burning their eyes and lungs.

  "Let's get the hell out of here," Anna gasped. She stepped from the support of the little tree and would have fallen if Clare hadn't dropped the gun to steady her.

  "I'm good," Anna said.
She pulled her arm away, took two steps, and fell headlong onto the floor.

  Clare squatted down as Anna pushed herself to her elbows. "Anna, I'm saving your life again, but if you don't stop making it so hard you can just die." Taking Anna's arm, she stood, pulling the ranger with her. Clare tried to walk her toward the courtyard, but Anna stayed rooted in the burning house.

  "Listen," she said.

  Clare listened. Faintly, through the increasing cracks and hisses of the fire devouring the building from the roof down, Clare heard it: a tiny sweet howl.

  "Mackie," she whispered.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Anna sat on a bench holding Dana on her lap. Clare had gone back into the burning house to find Mackie. For a pathetic minute, Anna had tried to go with her but had trouble standing upright long enough to make her point. Dana shifted, and the pressure of childish knees against her side hurt. The comfort Anna derived from the feel of a live and wriggling child more than made up for it. As she rocked Dana gently, Anna's mind drifted like the smoke reaching out from the upstairs windows.

  This time, she hadn't killed anyone. That had to count in her favor. There was a small matter of crippling the police chief, but since Clare had subsequently shot him to death, Anna's damage was a mere footnote. The scariest thought was of the sticky bit about why she didn't report Clare Sullivan to the FBI as soon as she realized the woman was on their wanted list for murder and escaping across state lines.

  Telling them it was necessary to save the lives of children wouldn't hold water. It was tantamount to telling a judge the perjury was necessary because the legal system was not to be trusted. She could lie. Then again, lying to the FBI was never a good idea. The punishment for the lie was often more severe than the punishment for the crime would have been.