Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (6 page)

“Kill” was the word she used in her mind, not stop, disable, or detain but barbaric, irreversible, unforgivable killing. Time and life were the only true riches humans had. To waste either was a crime and a sin, if sin existed.

People had died before at her hands. Once she accidentally killed a woman in a fall. Occasionally Anna still fought up from dreams, flailing in an attempt to alter her trajectory so she would land anywhere but on the woman’s neck. Never had she slunk up on people as they slept and shot them through the back of the head in cold blood.

Still, she would slaughter these men if she got a chance. She would kill them all. This was not the time or place for knocking people out, tying them up, then hoping they stayed knocked out and tied up. There were too many of them, too few of her, and the stakes were too high. When it was done, she would have unclean hands. Paul would smell the blood on them. Like Lady Macbeth, she’d see the stains in her dreams.

Nightmares would be a small price to pay for Heath, E, Leah, and Katie.

And Wily. She wouldn’t forget Wily.

Anna shook off the morbid thoughts. As things were there wouldn’t be an opportunity to enact the imagined bloodbath. Something would come up. A better plan. Jimmy, the pint-sized spitter of tobacco juice, struck her as stupid. Mean and stupid, that was a volatile combination in a member of one’s own team. In the enemy it was an advantage. Though they passed guns around like college kids passing joints, Jimmy seemed to be the main keeper of the .22. If Anna could get the rifle, many options would become available.

The dude and Reg did not seem in the least stupid. The black guy was a fish out of his own murky waters, but he was alert—maybe even hyperalert—to his surroundings. Anna doubted either of them would make an opening she might slip through to save anybody in the near future.

The belly-twisting creep, Sean, was a cipher. He might be a Rhodes Scholar or have the reasoning ability of a chimpanzee. It was hard to get a read on him when she couldn’t bear to look at him. Like quicksilver in the palm of her hand, any thought regarding him beaded up and ran off of her brain.

When she’d worked in Mesa Verde, Anna had stopped at a tent because she thought she smelled dope smoke. As a rule, she didn’t care what campers used for recreation as long as it left no stain on the park, but she did insist on discretion. As it happened, the woman was burning sage, smudging her tent.

A self-proclaimed witch, she told Anna that smudging, plus a spell or two, warded off psychic attacks. Believing no more in witches than in angels, Anna had forgotten about it until the incident with a toxic sedan in Mississippi. What she had felt then was identical to the experience the campground witch described as a psychic attack. It was what she felt when she first saw the potbellied Sean. Just thinking his name brought back the willies.

“I ain’t carrying no cripple on my back.” Jimmy said this.

Anna knew their names and voices as well as she knew her sister’s or her husband’s. They’d only had to speak once and the section of the cerebral cortex responsible for storing vital survival information recorded them for all time, at least all of Anna’s time.

“We’re not taking the cripple,” the dude said. “Three adult females, two underage females. Where is the other female?”

Anna couldn’t tell of whom he asked the question, but it was Heath’s voice that answered. “Anna Pigeon was the fifth member of the party,” she said. “She backed out at the last minute. Family problems.”

Somebody snorted. Evidently even felons had family problems.

Stealthy as a shadow, but for the cracking of her knee joints, Anna rose to stand with her back to the tree. If a search was ordered, she would walk straight into the black of the forest. The muscles of her stomach clenched as she waited for the hue and cry of hunters. Wanting to see and hear, she’d come too close. Six paces. Why hadn’t she just gone and sat on the dude’s lap?

Jimmy sneered, “Lucky Pigeon shit,” and laughed as if his words were so witty they would eventually be attributed to Dorothy Parker.

That was it. They were moving on. The dude took Heath at her word. At least it appeared he had. He hadn’t seemed the trusting type, but Anna couldn’t think of any profit to be made from his pretending he believed her.

The lie had been impressively simple, and Heath had told it well. Often Anna forgot she and other women of a certain age were not seen—at least by men—as dangerous. Heath had everything going for her should she choose a life of crime and deceit: She was white, well dressed, female, middle-aged, and disabled. Few suspected this group of sinister or underhanded motives. If Anna ever decided to run contraband, all her mules would have at least three of those attributes.

“Name,” the dude said.

“Elizabeth Jarrod. The
cripple
is my mother.”

Anna winced. E was too smart not to know what sort of men she was dealing with. Given her history, one would have thought she would have realized that cruelty and indifference had been man’s natural state since he was an oyster cracker floating in a bowl of primordial soup. Perhaps the resilience of youth had allowed a mustard seed of faith in her fellow human beings to resprout.

“Want me to kill the cripple and the kid?” This was the mellow bass of Reg, the guy who wouldn’t shoot Wily. He sounded perfectly happy to shoot Heath and Elizabeth. That should scorch the earth beneath Elizabeth’s mustard seed.

A man laughed, three short barks, each starting on a high note and stopping an octave lower. Anna had no idea who it was. She had not heard much in the way of laughter. The voice that followed it was that of Sean.

“You won’t shoot a crippled dog, but you’re okay with shooting a crippled woman. Don’t they have therapists in Chicago?”

“It’s different.” Reg sounded defensive, almost sulky. “Dogs don’t talk. Dogs don’t be thinkin’ of ways to get back at you. No sense killin’ a dog.”

“To keep it from suffering,” the dude said, not as if he believed it, but as if he read it off of a strip of paper from a fortune cookie.

“Yeah, right,” said Reg. “Tell that to the dog.”

“I’ll shoot that goddam dog.” That was Sean. “I hate dogs. Dogs get rabies and shit. Goddam fleabags. I’ll cut its throat if you don’t want to waste a bullet.”

“Reg, dispose of Miss Jarrod and the cripple,” the dude said. “Sean will dispatch the dog.” He sounded like a patient kindergarten teacher dividing up chores.

Hoarfrost grew down Anna’s spine. She turned and peeked through the matrix of dead pine branches and needles. Sean’s hands were occupied touching Katie. No doubt he would have called it “frisking” the thirteen-year-old. A Paul Bunyan–sized hunting knife hung in a nylon sheath on his belt. Taking the place, no doubt, of a drastically foreshortened and shriveled penis. That would be the knife he planned to use to slit Wily’s throat.

“I’ll do the crip and the kid,” Jimmy volunteered excitedly. Anna heard the metallic swallowing sound of the pump action on the .22, followed by a faint thud and Jimmy’s “Shit.” There had already been a live round in the chamber. He’d just ejected into the grass.

“Reg,” the dude said with a faint hint of weariness in the north wind of his voice.

The next bullet would not be frittered away. Stepping back from the tree, Anna drew a deep breath. If she charged into the midst of the men, she might be able to knock Jimmy down, maybe even wrest the rifle from him, but she would die.

Then Heath and Elizabeth would die.

The only hope was to distract and divide. If she could draw a couple of the thugs into the trees, get them to chase her, she might be able to split them up, let the darkness confuse them. Anna was at home in the dark. The darkness had always been her friend. Maybe an opening just big enough to let one of their lives out would present itself. Maybe a chance for Leah, Katie, or Elizabeth to run.

As she drew breath to shout, a whining cadence cut through the momentary quiet, as sour and cleansing as the juice of a lemon.

“God, you are so lame. Heath’s got ten times as much money as Leah.”

Katie. It was Katie Hendricks. The only child of wealthy parents, she would have known of the danger of being kidnapped from an early age. She would realize why men would take only her and her mother and “dispatch” Heath and Elizabeth.

“You’re so stupid you’re going to flush millions and millions of dollars down the toilet and it serves you right.” Katie’s spoiled-girl whine segued into spoiled-girl spite.

Anna cocked her head, inadvertently mimicking Wily’s characteristic pose. She hadn’t thought Katie would put herself out to save others. Maybe Katie really thought Heath was rich; maybe she wanted Heath and Elizabeth for company in her sufferings. Or maybe Anna had underestimated her.

“Is that true?” asked Jimmy, eyes wide and excited under the brim of the absurd cap.

For an interminable second no one spoke. Anna feared the dude was simply deciding whether to shoot the smart-mouthed kid along with E and Heath or make them dig their own graves first. She quit breathing.

Jimmy’s nasal tones sawed away the silence. “Dude, that money would be all ours. We’d have to cut the pilot in to keep him from blabbing. That’d make it a five-way split, but millions? Nobody’d ever have to know we even had it.”

“It’d make this shit worth it,” Reg grumbled.

“You’re being paid,” the dude said.

“Paid, yeah. Money, but not, like,
real
money,” Reg argued. “If she’s not shittin’ you about the crip having dough, that could be real money.”

“Big money,” added Jimmy.

Anna watched the big man. His face was as unreadable as the face of a granite cliff. There was no way to tell what he was thinking.

“The Hendricks child is lying,” the dude said.

“Am not,” Katie murmured, sounding so like her mother, for a second, Anna wasn’t sure which one had spoken.

“Elizabeth Jarrod,” the dude said. “Do you have millions?”

“No,” E said.

“Are we done?” the dude asked the other thugs.

“My great-aunt Gwen has the millions,” Elizabeth said.

“See, Dude, it ain’t no lie! Auntie will pay up, sure as hell,” Jimmy said.

The Dude slowly looked from Jimmy to Reg to Sean. Before, the air between the men had been charged with fear of the dude and fear of the wilderness. That had suddenly changed to an almost audible hiss of greed.

The minions, at least, believed Heath might be too valuable to murder.

If the dude destroyed this perceived windfall, he could risk losing hold of his merry band.

Anna dared not move. Since she didn’t have a line to God, she prayed to her husband, Paul, to lean on the Almighty.

The forest hushed as if listening: no owls, no night creatures, no insects chirring or stirring. Pressing her palms and her forehead against the rough bark of the tree, inhaling the faintly sweet odor of the sap in the cracks of the rough bark, Anna waited for the gunshots. “Suit yourselves,” the dude said finally.

Anna breathed.

“They are now your problem. If they delay us, they—and you—become my problem. I don’t like problems. Clear?”

“Clear,” said Reg with such audible relief, Anna guessed he feared the dude as much as she did.

“Clear,” said Jimmy happily, not clever enough to be afraid.

“We cut it five ways,” Sean said. “You two, me, the pilot, and the dude.” There was a short silence during which Anna imagined Jimmy counting on his fingers.

“Five ways,” Reg agreed.

“Yeah. Fair’s fair.” Jimmy sounded more childish than Katie.

Anna had dealt with intelligent criminals, average criminals, and criminals who bordered on idiocy. These four were a different breed. They hailed from a world of thuggery with which she had no experience, a place where men had devolved beyond bad and good into a creature so basic she would have said they were less like people than vicious animals.

Except that would have been a disservice to the animals—and, she suspected, to the dark intelligence of the dude.

NINE

Cluster fuck was the correct phrase, Charles thought. There was a reason he had sworn off working with fools and amateurs. They got people killed—the wrong people. He should have left this alone, but it had seemed a God-sent opportunity. One he’d been waiting for a long time. Even so, he should have walked away the moment they’d arrived at the burned-over camp and found the targets missing.

Greed, that’s what had undone him. It’s what got everyone in the end. Greed for money, life, sex, power. A suitable revenge. Not the glib and momentary bullet to the base of the skull, a feast, a harvest festival, a play with five acts. Greed had tempted him to buy Bernie’s statement that the targets were only a short walk downstream, a couple of hours at most. Bernie had either been lying or obliviously optimistic. Night had nearly overtaken them in the woods. No food, no flashlight, it could have been a miserable ten hours waiting for the sun.

Charles could only blame himself. If you knew you were taking the word of a fool as gospel, then who was the fool? Some plans were hatched, some unfurled, some led; this one would be bench-pressed, shoved up by force of will and muscle every inch of the way.

He surveyed his partners in crime: a dribbling idiot, a rapist, and an ex-gangbanger who wouldn’t shoot a goddam dog. That one had taken Charles off guard. African Americans weren’t supposed to like dogs. A racial memory of the baying hounds and the slave-masters chasing them through the swamps or something. Times had changed. Reg probably had a Pomeranian named Peaches waiting for him at home.

The dog didn’t matter one way or another. Its leg or maybe its back was broken. Whether they killed it tonight or a wandering bobcat killed it tomorrow was of no importance. The dog had been an object lesson. A man who will kill a dog will stoop to anything. That is a man to be feared with bowel-loosening intensity. That is a man with no soul. If the dog had died when it hit the tree, Charles would have been happier. Since it didn’t, when Reg refused to shoot the thing, he’d put a spotlight on himself as the weak link. Hostages were drawn to the stench of compassion like flies to horse dung. He’d seen it in the cripple’s face, the dawning of hope that one of her captors was nice, a good person who liked animals and children, a person who might help a poor little crippled woman.