Hard Truth

by Nevada Barr

  “All right!” she yelled. “All right. Stop her.”

  “Stop,” Buddy nearly whispered into the bleeding silence, enjoying his power, showing off. “Now you drop the rope.”

  Anna let go of the line connected to his hobble.

  “Give a girl the cuff key and the gun.”

  “Why? You took the magazine. I can’t use it to bluff you.”

  “Because you didn’t look like you were bluffing. Hand it over or she kills you all.” He said each word distinctly, as if he spoke to an idiot.

  “You’re going to kill us all anyway,” Anna said.

  “Not all. Just you. And not right away. I wish the pleasure of your company till we leave the park. You’ll be sacrificing yourself to save the lives of three innocent children. Well, two damaged children and one budding psychopath, but the idea’s the same. And who knows what clever escapes you’ll come up with given that much time, that many more minutes of life? I can practically smell you salivating from here.”

  Anna hesitated. If she’d been by herself she would have tried taking Buddy down, using him as a shield as he was so fond of doing with others. Or she’d have run into the trees. A weak and shaken girl, even as close as she was, wasn’t much of a marksman. Anna might get shot but probably not killed.

  But she wasn’t alone and, in a crunch, Anna suspected Beth and Alexis would follow Buddy’s orders rather than hers. She wasn’t the one who would kill them for disobeying. So much for sparing the rod.

  Buddy’s eyes slid to where Candace hid with a pistol and nearly forty rounds of ammunition. He’d give the order. He had nothing to win by bluffing and time was running out. He would be as aware as she that two gunshots this close to a campground in a national park would not go unremarked. Now that most tents housed two or three cell phones, the shots would be reported the moment a signal could be found.

  “Fine,” Anna said, and unsnapped the keeper on her holster.

  “No. The short girl will get it. And the key.”

  For a moment Anna empathized with the docility of the girls. For a moment it seemed right, wise even. This man, this creature, could not be beaten. The fates themselves had decreed his darkness unstoppable, that he be placed on earth to try men’s souls, to force one to make increasingly hideous and futile choices till the only choice left was death.

  Beth took Anna’s gun, fished the tiny handcuff key from her pocket and walked them to Buddy. As she reached him Candace stepped from behind the sign. She had moved from one side to the other. Before, she’d been behind Anna; now, she was in front of her at Buddy’s elbow. He ordered Beth to give Candace Anna’s gun. For a moment Anna dared hope the frail girl wouldn’t have the strength to hold them both, but she found it somehow. While Beth unlocked Buddy’s handcuffs, Candace held the barrel to the temple of the girl she’d grown up playing dolls with, held it just as Buddy had held it to her temple at Loomis Lake.

  Anna grieved for the seconds while Candace was moving from one end of the sign to the other, moments Anna could have put her one bullet to good use, but the girl’s sneakers made no sound on the asphalt. Anna had never known she’d moved till she reappeared by Buddy.

  Every cloud, Anna thought as she realized that she was now between Alexis and both pistols. There was one choice for life left.

  “Alexis,” she said softly. “Run into the trees now. Now.” Anna didn’t choose to call attention to herself by turning and she didn’t hear any movement. “Run or die,” she hissed.

  Alexis ran. Cuffs still dangling from one wrist, Buddy snatched a pistol from Candace, grabbed a handful of Beth’s hair and jerked her to her knees, the barrel rammed into the soft cheek.

  His mask—masks—were disintegrating. It was becoming possible to read his face as desperation ate away layer upon layer of deception. Anna watched his narrowing options flicker through his mind as his eyes flickered from Beth to Anna to the woods where Alexis had disappeared.

  Time was short. Campers would soon be wandering to the trailhead or returning to their cars. More shots fired would raise the level of alarm, hasten the process. He dropped the idea of trying to coerce Alexis out of hiding.

  “Car keys?” he snarled at Anna.

  “Top of the left front tire.”

  “Get the car,” he ordered Candace. “The patrol car.” There weren’t many visitors and Anna’s NPS patrol vehicle was easy enough to spot. Candace, the gun with its single chambered round dangling at her side like a forgotten toy, moved toward the car with a robot’s measured pace.

  “Walk ahead,” Buddy told Anna. To convince her to do as she was told, he jammed the barrel of his 9 mm into Beth’s cheek so hard Anna heard the crepitus of broken teeth through the soft tissue. The girl made no sound. Her four weeks of “training” was coming back to her. Eight or ten steps into the parking lot, Anna was told to stop.

  The sound of the car starting let them know Candace had found the keys. The Crown Vic backed up awkwardly, then described an uncertain path across the tarmac to lurch to a standstill behind an oversized recreation vehicle and a VW bug twenty or thirty feet away.

  “Stay,” Buddy ordered Anna.

  Careful to keep Beth between himself and her, he went toward the car, turning so he would not lose sight of Anna. Beth’s head was held at the level of his waist, the gun hard in her cheek. Hair hid her face. Blood and saliva trailed down in shining lines on the black pavement.

  Candace had left the Crown Vic, walking around the rear of the car back toward her master. Soon Beth would be in the car’s cage, Candace or Anna with her. Buddy would drive them out of the park. Then he would kill them. The only reason they’d survived these last minutes was his reluctance to make more noise than he had to, leave telltale corpses that would inspire 911 calls to the rangers who would send out an all-points bulletin for an NPS vehicle.

  Anna wasn’t getting in that car. If she had to be a corpse she intended to be an inconvenient corpse.

  Buddy and his captive drew level with her. Keeping his eyes battened on hers, he began crabbing back toward the Crown Vic. When he was five or six feet past her, Anna raised her hands over her head, gently waggling her fingers. “If I might make a suggestion. . . ,” she said, taking a firm step forward.

  “Don’t,” Buddy retorted and jumped back quickly to maintain the distance between them. It was what Anna had been hoping for. When she’d come forward, she’d stepped on the tether trailing from the rope hobbling his ankles.

  Sudden stoppage unbalanced him and he fell. Startled, his grip loosened on Beth’s hair. Bent double, blinded, she half fell, half walked on.

  “Run, Beth,” Anna yelled as she snatched up the rope. Buddy was taking aim. At point-blank range he could scarcely miss. Anna jerked the rope hard and he fell onto his back, the gun still in his hands.

  “Go home, Candace. Go home,” he screamed as he rolled over, fighting for position.

  The command took Anna off guard and she glanced quickly to where the ruined child stood behind the Crown Vic. With no more emotion than she had shown when torturing Anna, Candace was calmly putting the barrel of the SIG Sauer with its single bullet into her mouth.

  thirty-four

  Till a noise, a car backfiring or the hard slamming of a door, woke her, Heath hadn’t known she’d been sleeping. Forehead against the window, she’d drifted seamlessly from consciousness to unconsciousness. Judging by the quality of the light, she’d not been out long. Fifteen minutes maybe. Sharon was not yet back. Not finding the girls in the bathrooms, she must have gone up the trail a little ways to the campsites.

  Wasting time. Heath turned as far as she could in the RV’s passenger seat. Patty, too, had succumbed to Morpheus’ charms. Curled up on her side like a kitten, she slept on the padded bench in the breakfast nook. The ignition keys Sharon had entrusted to her for safekeeping had dropped from her fingers to the carpet beneath the table.

  “Wiley,” Heath whispered. “The rangy dog stretched, front paws out, hindquarters high in w
hat could have been mistaken for obsequious homage if one did not know Wiley, then ambled over to put his chin on his mistress’ knee. Heath scratched behind his ears because she loved the way he loved it, then gave him his first command of the day.

  “Get keys,” she said and pointed to where Patty had dropped them. He looked at her as if he’d hoped for something a bit more challenging, then fetched the keys, holding them delicately with his front teeth.

  “Good boy.” Heath dropped them into a cup holder in the central console, one of approximately two hundred cup holders standard with this model, then pushed up to maneuver her nether half from the passenger side to the driver’s side. Her elbows buckled and she fell back into her seat, surprising a comic book “Oof!” out of her. She’d forgotten her marathon roll the previous night. Muscles in arms, shoulders and upper back had been worked to exhaustion. They didn’t ache much—she could look forward to that in eighteen hours or so—but they’d effectively been turned to jelly.

  Changing tactics, she used the dashboard and the high seat-back and swung rather than lifted herself from one seat to the other.

  Patty never stirred. At nine she still retained the sleeping skills of the innocents.

  Heath hated to abandon Sharon, but there was no help for it. An emotionally damaged young woman, a child and a paraplegic weren’t anybody’s dream team when it came to rescuing damsels in distress. Heath wanted as many armed law enforcement types as could be raised.

  She readjusted the side mirror. A reflection from behind the RV appeared like the fairy-tale granting of a wish. In the glass an NPS patrol vehicle moved at a snail’s pace across the lot.

  In another instant she would have begun honking and hollering to catch the driver’s attention, but the sun broke between the trees and spotlighted the front seat of the Crown Vic. It was being driven by a child, a kid whose head barely topped the steering wheel. Reality shifted. For an instant Heath didn’t know if she’d awakened and taken the driver’s seat or still slept in the passenger seat and was dreaming.

  “Shit,” she whispered. This crude reaction of lips, tongue and bad manners reassured her she was awake. More to the point, she was now alert. Adrenaline had cleared the tunnel vision of ignition keys and fanny transfers.

  Turning the mirror she saw three people: Anna Pigeon, the limpet and another park ranger. Anna Pigeon looked like she’d been through the wringer. Alexis was nowhere to be seen, nor was Sharon. The limpet was safe in the male ranger’s embrace but bent nearly double as if she suffered from a stomach ailment. Stance, spacing, expressions: something was terribly wrong. The male ranger backed away from Anna Pigeon and Heath saw the gun he held to the limpet’s head and his fist in her hair.

  The dark-haired child climbed from behind the wheel of the Crown Vic and walked around the rear of the car. She, too, carried a gun. In her hand it looked oversized, macho, like Clint Eastwood’s weapon in a Dirty Harry movie. The girl didn’t point it at anyone but held it cradled in her arms as if it were a baby.

  Anna Pigeon was standing stock-still. Arms, legs, face, uniform were filthy, caked with mud, muck and dirt. Her hands hung limply at her sides. She was the only one who appeared unarmed.

  As Heath watched, the ranger holding Beth sidled past Anna. Anna raised her hands in surrender, said something then stepped forward.

  With a rapidity that was hard to follow, the scene began to unravel. The male ranger sat down abruptly on the pavement. Pigeon snatched something off the ground and began jerking and shouting like a lunatic. Beth broke free and began to run. The ranger who’d fallen to the asphalt was struggling to sit up, to take aim. Each time, Pigeon jerked him like a fish on a line. Three bullets were fired. Heath heard glass breaking but had no idea what had been hit.

  Suddenly Anna Pigeon screamed, “No, no!”

  Heath looked to where the dark-haired girl stood, watched her put the barrel of the gun into her mouth.

  Then Pigeon was running toward the suicidal child. As her boots left the ground in a flying tackle Heath saw the ranger on the ground roll over, plant his elbows on the tarmac, and take aim at Anna Pigeon or the fleeing form of Beth.

  “Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch,” she let out on one long breath. The intensity of her anger could find no adequate words to express itself. Fury boiled up from within her with the terrifying and unstoppable force of magma erupting from the center of the earth.

  She turned the ignition key, dropped the RV into reverse and squeezed the gas lever to the steering wheel.

  thirty-five

  There was no time. Candace was beyond the reach of anything but force. She was “going home,” taking the one ticket out of Hades that Buddy had allowed her to keep, to believe in. In her usually expressionless face was the first thread of what might have been joy Anna had ever seen there.

  “No! No!” she screamed, more in hopes of distracting Candace than convincing her, and threw herself at the underweight girl in a flying tackle.

  As she smashed into Candace, a gunshot rang out. The two of them struck the ground with such force Anna’s brain was knocked loose in her skull. One of them cried out. A good sign. Somebody was still alive. Anna was base enough to be glad it was her. Candace was in her arms. The gun fired again. An engine roared to life. Anna looked up to see a wall of metal and rubber descending fast.

  A thump and the immense vehicle jarred to a stop. Beneath the double wheel on the right side was Buddy. The RV had not run completely over him and the wheels pinned him to the ground.

  Amazingly, terrifyingly, he was still alive. Slowly, he turned his head and looked at Anna. His eyes—sclera, iris, everything but the pupil—were red, blood forced into them. Blood leaked from his nose and mouth, from his ears.

  The SIG Sauer was still in his right hand. Bit by bit he began forcing it around, toward Anna and the girl she held.

  Candace wriggled and Anna saw she was dragging the pistol with its single bullet from beneath them. Whether she meant to kill herself, Anna or Buddy, Anna didn’t choose to find out.

  “Here, honey, let me,” she said. She took the semiautomatic from Candace’s nerveless fingers, stretched her arm along the pavement and squeezed the trigger, sending a bit of lead into Buddy Ray Stephen’s brain. A neat small hole appeared between and just above his brows, the place the third and all-seeing eye was said to dwell. Then the strangest thing happened.

  Anna had seen people die before, not a lot but more than most women her age, more than she would have chosen to. She’d seen them die in peace, by violence, and, a time or two, at her own hand. Cats, dogs and, once, a wild deer had died in her arms. She had seen life go out of the eyes, the quick become the dead, the windows of the soul close.

  Nothing happened in Buddy’s eyes. Nothing. They looked precisely the same dead as they had alive. It unnerved her so completely, had she had the ammunition, she would have shot him a few more times. To be sure. To make him blink. To be safe. To end him.

  With a physical jerk of her head she broke the gaze his eyes had trapped her into and looked to Candace. She had to be miserably uncomfortable. One arm was trapped beneath her chest, her cheek was mashed into the asphalt; Anna lay across her back, but she didn’t squirm or complain. She, too, was staring at the blood-red and black of Buddy’s eye.

  The fragile threat of joy that had softened her face as she put the gun barrel in her mouth was gone, replaced by what looked like envy. Candace stared at the bloody, broken corpse of her captor, her torturer, her rapist, and felt envy.

  Buddy had gotten to go home.

  The world was full of high places, sharp objects, fast cars. Candace was going to be exceedingly difficult to keep alive. Buddy hadn’t ended. Buddy was still going to kill her.

  “Beth! Beth!”

  It was Heath Jarrod shouting. Anna was pulled back from that place where death was the greatest good. She pushed to her feet. “Don’t look at him,” she ordered, but Candace could not look away.

  Anna grabbed her upper arm in
the same hard pincer grip her maternal grandmother had used to propel her and Molly from place to place, the kind of grip that left no bruise but poked painfully into the hollow between muscle and bone. “Let’s go. Up.”

  Candace peeled herself from the asphalt, her eyes on Buddy’s till elevation caused the rear bumper to block him from sight. When the last of him, the final staring ruby eye, slipped beneath the hulk of RV, Candace was freed from the trance. Her head wobbled like that of a foolish dashboard doll and she turned, finally, to look at Anna.

  She’d been freed of the trance, not of the spell. No gratitude and little recognition were reflected in her face. Only a sense of waiting.

  “So wait here,” Anna said, answering her own thoughts. Taking a deep breath as if for a forty-foot free-dive, she squatted down. For the briefest of moments she did not look under the vehicle. She was afraid Buddy would be gone. Or not gone. Afraid he’d reach out like a nightmare beast beneath the bed and drag her under by her ankles. “Damn you,” she whispered, and lunged beneath the chassis, snatched the loaded SIG Sauer from where it had fallen from his hand, and backed out quickly.

  Buddy was the only dead person she’d ever met that Anna didn’t trust.

  Candace waited.

  All this had taken less than half a minute, the time between Heath’s last “Beth!” and now her demand: “Find Beth.” Along with this shout came the low drone of hydraulics and the scrabble and leap of Wiley jumping off the lowering chairlift.

  “Hey,” Anna said.

  “Hey,” Heath replied. “Beth?”

  Anna turned and pointed. Beth had been running past Candace as she put the gun in her mouth. With a startlingly focused part of her eye-to-brain circuitry, as Anna had knocked Candace to the ground she’d noted Beth ducking behind a hunter green Chevy minivan.