Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (10 page)

Leah clicked the axle rod of the double wheel into the quick-release dock. Holding it up, she spun it experimentally. The unified wheels whirled around with a purring noise.

The creation resembled a unicycle, the seat on the top of the Tilt ’n’ Turner directly above the wheel. The short horizontal bar that gave the Tilt ’n’ Turner its L shape protruded near the middle of the wheel, providing a rest for Heath’s right foot.

Leah laid the thing down again, then bolted a C-shaped metal part, previously attached to one of the wheelchair’s front wheels, onto the left side’s protruding axle. The unicycle now had a footrest to either side of the wheel.

“Hand me the canoe paddles,” Leah said in her drifting way. Without a single gripe, Sean bent down and retrieved the paddles for her.

Anna got on her belly to reduce her silhouette, then slithered slowly closer to the edge of the camp where Elizabeth pretended to sleep. Once Anna got her in the sheltering black of the night woods, she would lead her to the river. When the Fox took her, E would be home free. Elizabeth was a good enough paddler to negotiate the flat water of the Fox. In a day and a half she’d reach a working phone. If the law of supply and demand held in this situation, the three remaining hostages would be of greater value. Maybe it would keep them alive longer.

*   *   *

Anna reached the
end of the pine-needle blanket. Seven feet of crackling, creaking, crunching autumn leaves separated her from where she could signal E. She rose to her feet. Never had she felt so tall and bright and obvious, like the Washington Monument at sunset. No one noticed. Carefully, she took the first step. Leaves and twigs went off like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Anna froze, waiting for the camp to erupt in an uproar.

Heath began squirming around as if Elizabeth had settled her in a nest of fire ants, making scuffling noises as her feet moved in spasms, grinding her knuckles into the ground and scooching her chair forward, grunting and grumbling. Noise for Anna. Anna raced the few steps to the edge of the clearing nearest Elizabeth, then dropped to her belly behind a big old rotten tree trunk covered with lichen and fungus.

As Leah applied the drill to the blade of the first paddle, Anna found a stick and tossed it at the top of Elizabeth’s head. Stick tossing from a prone position, and on the sly, was an awkward business. The third stick made contact. E lifted her bound hands to her hair and surreptitiously studied the trees at the edge of the clearing.

When they made eye contact, it startled Anna. Though it had been only a few hours since she had become the ghost in the darkness, the sense of alienation was far advanced. It occurred to her, had it not been for Paul and the National Park Service, she might have gone feral years ago.

Anna looked past E. The men were absorbed watching Leah bolting the blade of a paddle to the side of the cupped plastic seat, the long handle sticking out in front like the tongue of a wagon. This might not be the best time—the dude was awake—but Anna doubted it was going to get any better. She motioned for Elizabeth to come to her.

Elizabeth silently pulled her knees up to her chin and rolled herself onto them, positioning herself as if she prayed to Mecca. Anna was suffused with pride. Heath was the one who had saved Elizabeth in every way that mattered, but Anna had been there from the first night when she had come mostly naked and bleeding into Heath’s life. Elizabeth had been young then, and afraid of everything. In a mere few years, she had transformed into this beautiful, courageous young woman.

On elbows and knees Elizabeth began a slow crawl toward Anna.

Leah attached the second of the paddle blades to the side of the seat. Finished, she stood between the long handles, raised them, and pushed forward. The conveyance rolled like a wheelbarrow. Leah turned around, pulled, and it became a one-wheeled rickshaw. Heath applauded loud and long. Elizabeth inchwormed toward the log.

Katie woke. Anna saw her head come up, the white-gold hair a halo of orange against the light of the fire. She half turned. “Shh,” Anna hissed.

“Leah!” Katie called.

Every eye turned.

Expressionlessly, the dude raised his pistol, his arm ramrod straight, his hand steady.

“Run,” Anna whispered.

Elizabeth scrambled to her feet and bolted into the forest, leaping over Anna like a hurdler, crashing from sight in the lightless woods. Anna hoped E wouldn’t bash her brains out on a tree branch in her zeal.

The report of the Colt was followed by the lesser crack of the .22 rifle.

Jimmy woke and began yelling, “Dude! Dude! What’s happening, man?”

Another round slammed into the log near Anna’s face. Powder, comprised of bark, mildew, fungus, and lichen, blasted into her eyes and nose.

Blind, forcing coughs to stay in her throat, Anna crawled down the length of the log. Her eyes burned as if she’d been pepper-sprayed, hurting too badly to even consider opening them. When she banged into the upraised tangle of roots, she burrowed in. Sticks jabbed at her hands and body. Being skewered was better than being shot. She pushed herself until she could go no farther, then rolled into a ball like a frightened sow bug, hiding feet, hands, and face in her dark clothing. Until she could see, she could do no better. With luck, the chase would go in the direction Elizabeth had run, and Anna would be an unnoticed black shadow, a rock half covered by the rotting roots of the fallen tree.

With luck.

FOURTEEN

Icy fingers closed around Charles’s heart and squeezed. He had let his guard down. Control had slipped away. The cripple was yelling, writhing around at his feet, banging on the arms of her chair with a wrench she’d managed to get. Jimmy was hopping up and down, brown spittle frothing at the corners of his mouth, yelling, “I think I got her, Dude. I think I killed the bitch.”

“You killed a log, Jimmy,” the dude said coldly. “Shut the cripple up.”

Jimmy jumped to where Heath Jarrod was doing her one-woman-circus act on the ground. Reversing the rifle in his filthy hands, he clubbed her on the side of the head with the butt. “Got her!” he crowed as she slumped over, as proud as if he’d downed a battalion of marines with a dull Boy Scout knife.

Charles snatched up the lantern. “See nobody else moves.” He walked into the woods where the girl had run, stopped, and listened for movement. She had gone to ground. Without light, she couldn’t have gotten far.

Holding the lantern high, so he wouldn’t blind himself, Charles moved into the trees. Forests bore no resemblance to parks. There were no long vistas beneath an even canopy. The pruned and ancient forests of southern France resembled cathedrals, arched ceilings reaching to heaven. Here coarse, half-dead vegetation clawed up from the earth. Wiry arms and bent fingers scratched down from above. The lantern ignited a never-ending spiderweb of twigs, needles, and branches spinning down to a floor of rubble from past lives and new bizarre life-forms.

The girl could be lying in a hollow twenty feet from him. One man, one lantern, he would not find her. Stumbling about in the mess would make him look the fool. Control would be further eroded. Charles was accustomed to working with a higher quality of muscle, men who could be controlled with reason, logic, fear, intimidation, promises: the sticks and the carrots.

Years before, Michael had warned Charles that Bernie was the sort who left steaming piles that other people stepped in. The oafs Bernie had unearthed from beneath one of his rocks were amateurs. One never knew what an amateur would do. One never knew what an idiot would do, or a lunatic. With the three stooges, all those bases had been covered. The moment he no longer needed them he would do his good deed for the decade and add them to the list of disposables.

He turned out the eyeball-searing glare of the lamp and walked back toward the firelight of the camp. Letting the girl go was an option. He doubted she and the cripple were worth much in the way of ransom. By the time she found civilization and sent a rescue party, he and his would be long gone. The difficulty lay in the next twenty-four hours. He needed the stooges to move the product. The stooges were motivated by the belief that the cripple and the girl were of value. Herding the two of them would give the fools something to focus on besides their bellies and their peckers.

Charles didn’t doubt that when the time came, Sean or Jimmy or Reg would kill the cripple for him. The decision theirs, his hands clean of their little drama. That would help foster what passed for loyalty with this sort of scum.

Stepping back into the firelight, he set the lantern down, then crossed to where the cripple sat, her head in her hands, still dazed from the impact of the rifle butt. He stood behind her low chair and steeled himself to touch her. The thought of it made his skin creep. A pool of sick formed in the bottom of his gut.

Grabbing a handful of hair, he jerked her up. The trousers looked half empty, like those of a scarecrow, as the legs followed, the heels of the shoes dragging along the ground.

Holding her by the hair, the fire blazing, he thought of the comic books he and Michael had read as kids, the natives holding up shrunken heads for the shock and titillation of eleven-year-old boys. Ah Michael, he thought, the things I do for you. I should leave you where you are. At least then we’d see each other again.

Not wanting his pistol to touch the cripple’s head, he kept the barrel a few inches out and pointed it at her ear.

“I have a gun pointed at your mother’s head. If you do not return to camp by the time I count to twenty, I shall kill her.” He hadn’t shouted; he’d used the voice he saved for when he needed to penetrate steel.

“One.”

FIFTEEN

Faint whispering trickled through the trees like smoke. Anna tried to open her eyes against the pain. “E?” she whispered.

“Here.”

Blinking furiously, Anna tried to follow the tiny trail of sound. In darkness and tears, she saw nothing.

“I have to go back,” came the breath of an answer.

“No,” Anna hissed because she dared not wail. “Come here,” she begged. If she could get hold of Elizabeth, she wouldn’t be going anywhere Anna didn’t want her to go.

“They will kill Mom. You don’t know him, the dude. He will.”

The thread of sound was thicker. Elizabeth was moving back toward where Anna hid, to the camp. “Yes. Yes, he will kill your mother. He will kill her. Then he will kill you,” Anna said. “They will kill you all. Stay with me and live. Heath wants you to live.”

“I’m over here,” Elizabeth said loudly. “I’m coming.”

Anna rubbed her eyes with both fists, squeezing out water and flecks of rotted wood, desperate to clear her sight.

“No!” Heath screamed. “Don’t you dare. Run, God damn you! Ru—” The voice was cut off with a thud.

Anna peeked between the roots. Through a watery veil she could see that all eyes were on Elizabeth as, straight-backed as any Englishman who ever faced a firing squad, she marched into the clearing. Through the prismatic lens of tears and rotten dust, Anna saw the dude holding Heath at arm’s length by her hair, knees inches from the ground. She showed no more life than a sack of laundry. He cast her aside with an indifference that offended Anna more than the cruelty.

A prop in the theater of the absurd, Leah still stood between the pulling shafts of her creation, as unmoving as a statue, eyes blanked by reflections on the lenses of her glasses.

Slowly, with dignity, Elizabeth walked around the fire toward the bluff.

Heath pushed herself to her elbows. Her face was a mask of pain. “Damn you, Elizabeth. Damn you.” The words were slurred. Forgetting all she’d learned about effective self-locomotion, Heath hurled herself forward, an outflung hand closing around the dude’s ankle.

“It was me, it was my fault,” Heath said, the words coming so fast they were hard to understand. “I will do anything. Kill me. Let me lick your boots. Wash your feet. All I have, all I will ever have, I beg you…”

Pleas tumbled from her tongue like the toads from the mouth of the cursed fairy-tale princess. Anna understood. Pride was not worth the life of a single human being. If she could have traded hers for Elizabeth’s life, she wouldn’t have hesitated either.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Elizabeth said. She stopped in front of the dude.

Fear poured out of the clearing. It boiled off of Heath, pulsed from Elizabeth, and bent Katie’s little rat shoulders. This blast of horror altered Anna’s view of the dude. Firelight played over the planes of his face. His eyes fell away into tar pits of unfathomable depths. Flat cheeks and broad brow shifted like continental plates, as he assumed the size and indestructibility of a hellacious mountain range.

The thugs, the women, the forest, even the sky receded. The dude was all that remained.

“Kneel,” the dude said in the voice of a dead god.

Elizabeth knelt.

Anna found herself praying that he would only force her to give him a blow job. A woman could survive a blow job. A woman could bite off the penis of the enforcer. There would be possibilities.

The dude’s hand shot out with remarkable speed and closed around Elizabeth’s throat.

The mountain that fear built began to heave, great shoulders hunching into dark hills against the underlit canopy as the dude closed the fingers of a hand as big and heavy as an anvil.

“No!” Heath screamed.

The anvil slammed into Elizabeth’s chest.

It struck Anna’s mind with equal force. She fell into the burst of roots.

“No!” she heard Heath scream again. She went on screaming as, with the unstoppable regularity of a pile driver, the fist pounded her daughter.

Anna counted seven blows before she heard Elizabeth fall to the ground.

SIXTEEN

Heath was no longer screaming on the outside. Inside, every nerve shrieked, an internal cacophony that scrambled thought. Her skull burned; her brain matter was made of double-edged razors. Had there been anything in her stomach, she would have vomited. Had there been anything in her bladder or bowels, she would have fouled herself. Her arms unable to hold her up, she lay across the curled form of her child weeping in dry-eyed silence.