Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (4 page)

Despite what cowboy authors had written regarding the stealth of the average American Indian, it was not possible to travel through dry leaves without making a sound. This Anna knew from experience. When she was seven and her sister, Molly, twelve, they had spent many a fall afternoon trying to perfect a method to do it. This was during what they later came to refer to as their Arapaho Autumn.

Water traverse would be quieter. The scrawny fingernail moon afforded little assistance beneath the overhanging riverbank. Like a blind woman, Anna felt her way with paddle and toes, hoping she wouldn’t fall into a hole and dunk herself, or walk into an old strainer and skewer herself on a stick. Looming, unseen, the riverbank weighed on the right side of her brain. Water flowing over her knees was black as squid ink and had a viscous oily quality. Stars receded until they were mere pinpricks of ice in the sky.

Perceptions not provable in a lab informed Anna that the pure nastiness of humanity was polluting the Fox River. Pure nasty humanity was the problem she had with Paul’s God of love. Too many people were involved. Had love of one’s neighbor referred only to those with fur or feathers, she might have become a believer.

Fifteen yards from the campsite, she waded out of the water. A ribbon of sand and gravel lined the riverbed. Like dry leaves, gravel was almost impossible to walk on without making a racket. Stepping with great care, she reached the rising bank where soil crumbled down from above and a short scruff of grasses grew. Grass was more forgiving of human trespass.

A man’s voice rumbled downriver, chasing the crying of a woman or girl. No barking or growling. Where was Wily? As he aged, his joints had grown stiff, but his hearing was still keen.

Leaning on the paddle in the dark of the bank’s shadow, Anna closed her eyes and pictured the camp. Atop the low bluff was a triangular clearing, the longest leg facing east over the river. The north, west, and southwest were thick with deciduous trees, mostly maples and oaks. The forest floor would be deep in leaves, the ferns crisp with autumn. Nearest the river, beside the cut leading to the Fox, was a large stand of white pine.

Pine needles had been one of the few success stories for the Indian scouts of the Arapaho Autumn, a success Anna had duplicated many times in the years since. Even white women could move across pine needles with a minimum of noise. Piney woods had it all over hardwood forests when it came to surveillance or surprise attack.

Since the vagaries of fire and flashlight beams would catch white flesh and red hair more surely and startlingly than the steady burn of electricity, Anna skinned out of her dark blue jacket. Underneath she wore a long-sleeved black T-shirt and a red tank top. She wriggled her arms free of the T, then pulled it up until the black cotton hid her hair and most of her face, leaving the neck hole as her window on the world. Ersatz burnoose complete, she slipped the jacket back over her tank top. There was little she could do with her hands. The Fox’s was a sandy riverbed, stingy with its mud.

As camouflaged as she could manage on short notice, she silenced her thoughts, as she always did when she wished herself invisible. Tracking everything from grizzly bears to skunks, she’d become convinced animals could sense a clamorous mind. People, not so much; still, she waited for inner quiet before walking quickly over the parched grass toward where the glow of the campfire touched the river.

Water soaked from her trouser legs and squished beneath her bare feet, seemingly as loud as whales mating or ten thousand jellyfish going under a steamroller. Five nerve-stripping yards, and she was beneath the bluff where Leah’s oversized canoe, a product in testing, was beached. She nearly barked her shins on the gunwale. With only a new moon, little light came from the open sky above the Fox. Beneath the trees ruled a darkness rivaling that three miles underground in Lechuguilla Cavern.

A social trail, cut by human and animal traffic, had eroded into a miniature ravine that led from the water to the top of the bluff. On a canvas of exposed roots and rocks, firelight painted a stairway that might have been done on one of Dalí’s bad days.

On hands and feet, Anna made her way up the gully far enough that her eyes were level with the top of the bank. Nose at root level, her senses were washed in the wholesome scents of soil and hay as she peered through the coarse grass covering the bluff.

Four men were visible; the nearest was a head taller than his companions. Orange and green half-dome tents, dwarfed by his height, gave the impression he stood in a magic mushroom patch. He wore the red-and-black checked wool coat favored by hunters, but the clothes fairly creaked with newness, a costume acquired for this event. Short black hair was combed back from a sharp side part. A predatory nose hunched over a luxuriant mustache that reflected the red of the flames where it curved over the corners of his mouth. In his left hand was a Colt. Anna couldn’t determine the caliber but trusted it had sufficient stopping power.

Not a duck or grouse hunter’s weapon.

He held the gun firmly but comfortably, as if he were shaking the hand of an old friend. The barrel was pointed at the back of Heath’s head. These were not hunters of deer or elk or moose. These were men who stalked alleys, bars, and city parks.

Elizabeth was prostrate, her cheek pressed to the ground, her girlish mouth twisted into a moue. A trace of black was smeared between her nose and upper lip. In the shadows there was no way to tell if it was blood or dirt. A slight rise and fall of her chest let Anna know she was alive, either unconscious or playing possum. Heath was draped over her in a protective curve of motherhood.

Not hunters, not woodsmen: These guys wouldn’t have come by river. They were motorboat types, not canoeists. A back road, maybe, an old logging or mining road. Yet they hadn’t driven. As still as the night was, Anna would have heard an engine. Their clothes were speckled with leaves and twigs where they’d pushed through vegetation. They’d traveled by foot and for quite a long way.

Beyond the big man covering E and Heath with the Colt was a man no more than five foot eight and clad in a red-and-black coat identical to the big man’s and augmented by a matching plaid cap with earflaps. Had it not been so creepy, this mini-me would have been comical. A dirty-brown beard hid most of his face. In his hands was an old pump-action .22, the kind of rifle any self-respecting Mississippian would call a squirrel gun. He held the .22 out from his body and too far forward, more like a divining rod than a rifle. Saturday night specials, straight razors, and pool cues were likely his weapons of choice.

The muzzle of the .22 was pointed at a place on the ground behind the tents. Leah and Katie, Anna guessed. Good news. Dead people didn’t need to be held at gunpoint.

The remaining thugs had not tried to change their spots with Eddie Bauer’s best. They were dressed like miscreants snatched off any city street. One was slender, black, and around thirty. He wore blue Converse high-tops and black drawstring pants. For warmth he’d layered two hoodies, one over the other, black over yellow. Both hoods were up; his hands were stuffed into the pouch pocket on his stomach. Without daylight, Anna could tell little else about him: whether he was light- or dark-skinned, handsome or ugly, or even if he had hair. If he was armed, whatever he carried fit into the pocket of a sweatshirt.

The last of the quartet was an excessively white middle-aged man. A beer belly the size of a seven-month-old fetus pushed his jacket out. Astraddle a red-veined nose sat glasses with rectangular lenses in brown plastic frames. The temples sank into the man’s flesh. The lenses were so thick his face appeared squeezed in, his eyes the size of watermelon pips. Newer, lighter, thinner lenses had been available since the eighties. The too-white guy either liked the look or hadn’t bothered to update his prescription in thirty years. His jacket was black leather with zippered pockets. On his feet were half boots with elastic inserts on the side, the kind fashionable in the seventies.

He stood several feet from the bearded man with the rifle, also staring at the place where Anna assumed Leah and Katie sat. He had no gun, but an oversized hunting knife hung from his belt in a leather sheath.

Sudden and awful dread rushed into Anna. Poison, cold and acidic, burned her brain. Sweat broke out on her palms. Light-headed, she clung to a root for fear she would stumble back into the gully. Twice before had she gone sick with a fear she didn’t understand. Neither time had there been any real threat in sight. The first was in Mississippi. She’d pulled over a beat-up Ford sedan for going twenty miles per hour in a fifty-mile-per-hour zone. The driver was a young female, pathologically obese, her short brown hair like a bathing cap painted on a white billiard ball. Her eyes, beady and black, were buried in folds of flesh. The passenger was as dried up as a mummy, old and wrinkled and tiny. Neither wore a seat belt. Neither said a word.

When Anna had leaned down to speak to the driver, something so evil gusted out the driver’s window that she rocked back on her heels, her insides quaking. She’d given them a warning, then scuttled back to the sanctity of her patrol car, certain there were the dismembered bodies of infants in the trunk, and just as certain she wasn’t going to try to find out if that was true.

The second time was at Isle Royale in Lake Superior when she was checking fishing creels. She’d boarded a fishing boat tied to the dock on one of the islands in Washington Harbor. Three men were in the boat, three creels, and a sense of something so palpably wrong, Anna leapt back on the dock without counting their catch.

This paunchy, absurdly dressed man emanated the same ordure; the stink of heroin in the veins of a child whore, slit nostrils, cats run over for fun.

As the physical terror swelled, and Anna felt she must shed her skin like a snake, E’s eyes suddenly popped open the way Lucy’s always did in Dracula movies. A laugh, or maybe a scream, was startled to life in Anna’s throat. It took an effort of will to keep it from escaping.

Elizabeth was staring beyond the firelight where the pines crowded close on the northern side of the bluff. Anna followed her gaze. At the base of a venerable old white pine lay a shadow, gray-brown and wadded up, the way a man’s coat might fall if he tossed it at a hook and missed. It was Wily. He hadn’t been barking his fool head off because he was dead. There had been no reports from a gun. He must have been clubbed or kicked to death, his faithful body struck by a booted foot, or slammed into the unrelenting bark of the tree. Fury burned the overweening terror from Anna’s mind. Her eyes ached with tears that turned to steam before they reached the ducts.

Two teenaged girls, a slightly mad scientist, a paraplegic, and an old dog: Anybody who would prey on such as these would stomp kittens and dry-swallow ducklings.

Elizabeth had long suffered nightmares, scars from her brush with a psychopath. Anna doubted she could survive a second brutal encounter. Katie was a poor little rich girl who had probably never faced any adversary more daunting than a recalcitrant nanny. Leah had a high-voltage brain, the kind that easily short-circuited. If anything happened to E or Wily, Heath would probably dive back into the ocean of self-pity and bourbon where Anna had first found her.

If Anna went for help, it would be thirty-six hours minimum before it arrived. Thirty-six hours would be too late.

Monsters weren’t known for deferring gratification.

With luck, and the good wood of a canoe paddle, a lone gunman could be taken down by five women. There would be a cost, but it could be done. Richard Speck, the rapist and murderer of eight student nurses, had taught women a hard lesson; better one or two die in a hero’s rush than all die slowly and horribly.

Four gunmen was a different story. Still Anna would stay, would watch. She would wait for an opening, a chance, then she would take it. Too many years rescuing lost hikers, mourning friends, and seeking justice for the dead had passed for her not to know she was, and always would be, her sister’s keeper.

SEVEN

Heath’s guts felt as if they had been dumped in a blender set on “puree.” She was so scared she thought she might have wet herself. Not that she could feel it. Pissed her pants. There went her foolish pride, the petty superiority she allowed herself when contemplating those whose backs had been busted a few vertebrae higher than hers. At least I can control my bladder, she’d think. At least I don’t piss myself.

Pride cometh jeering at the most inopportune moments. Still, she hoped she hadn’t wet her pants, that she wasn’t panicking. She’d been a climber, for Christ’s sake. It was not a sport for cowards. At least not physical cowards; there had been a time she’d been afraid of life, afraid to live without two good legs, but that was years ago, before she’d fallen in love with the little girl who was to become her daughter.

Now it was E who was turning her craven. Overcoming fear for one’s self was a piece of cake compared to overcoming fear for one’s child.

Pushing up on one elbow, she took most of her weight off of E’s back while managing to stay between her and the gun. Not that her scrawny body would do much good. Though she’d never owned a gun, never shot one, and never wanted to, Heath had lived in Colorado all her life. She couldn’t help but absorb a modicum of ambient knowledge. Fired at close range, a bullet could go through one person and kill whoever was behind. Still, as insubstantial as she was, she was better than nothing. She might get lucky and if the dude—Lord! To be shot by a man called “the dude”; she’d die of shame before she had time to bleed to death—if the dude pulled the trigger, maybe her bones, a zipper, or a button would deflect the bullet and save E.

Until Anna could rescue them.

That was the thought she wouldn’t articulate to herself. That was a hell of a burden to put on one small, unarmed girlfriend. Heath couldn’t help but hope: Anna was smart; she was resourceful, with a couple of miracles and a lot of luck … Anyway, Heath was careful not to raise her eyes to the woods, listen too intently for the soft fall of moccasins on leaves, or otherwise telegraph Anna’s presence. She prayed that Leah, Elizabeth, and Katie would have the good sense to do the same.