Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (12 page)

Leah, and especially Katie and Elizabeth, were another matter. Elizabeth was at the age where she locked the bathroom door to blow-dry her hair. Katie was probably even shyer about her personal needs. To imagine the likes of Sean and Jimmy watching the girls relieving themselves made Heath’s stomach tie itself in knots.

The idea of the dude watching didn’t sicken her as much. The dude cared so little for so much, she doubted he noticed life around him as anything other than convenient for the dude or not convenient for the dude. Reg didn’t quite exhibit that level of sociopathic behavior, but he struck Heath as a businessman. Watching girls peeing or humiliating women wasn’t his business. His business was getting money.

Sean and Jimmy were avidly trying to peek around the two standing guard so that they might see the miracle of elimination. Modern-day sin-eaters who did it not to cleanse the souls of others but because they were greedy for the taste of degradation, humiliation, and fear. Like
Dracula
’s Renfield, they gobbled down innocent lives, growing fat on the leavings of those more evil than themselves.

Reg and the dude would kill. Sean and Jimmy would do much worse. On sunnier days, Heath would have said there was nothing worse. Dead was dead. Life was hope. Yet Sean and Jimmy were black holes into which hope drained away. Heath had come to grips with the level of helplessness imposed upon her by her physical disabilities. This was a new brand of helplessness, and the depth of the glimpsed abyss made her palms sweat.

Anna was out there, possibly wounded, if any of Reg or Jimmy’s wild shots found her. Wily was wounded or dead. Heath wanted to communicate with them so desperately it manifest as an aching hunger of the heart, but she didn’t dare leave a note or scratch a message into the dirt. If the thugs found it, it would tip them off to the fact that there was another woman, one on the loose. Heath was even afraid to look at the woods more than absolutely necessary for fear it would give Anna away.

If Anna could follow, she would. Heath comforted herself with that thought. Once Heath had heard a man say Anna could track a duck across a pond a week after it had flown. For Anna it would be child’s play to trail eight people, four of them idiots, and one in a wheeled cart.

“Show’s over,” Sean said with a leer as he lowered himself into Heath’s camp chair. She glared at him. Puckering up, he made kissing noises. The thick distorting lenses of his glasses, complemented by the fish lips, would have been comical if he’d not been so vile.

Fear cooled to hatred and formed a cold iron-hard rod down Heath’s spine as she watched the evil fish-faced thing remove its pointed-toed ankle boots and peel off its socks. Blisters the size of quarters bloomed on its heels.

Forcing a look of mild interest, Heath said, “I’m an EMT. If your buddies haven’t sunk the canoe yet, there’s a first-aid kit in it. I can patch up your feet.” Inside her head, her voice echoed faraway and hollow. Sean lost vibrancy, as if viewed through dirty glass.

His hard round belly held like a basketball between his chest and knees as he cradled his foot, he stared at her suspiciously. “Why would you do that?” he asked.

Pushing with the heels of her hands, Heath straightened her upper body. She wasn’t an EMT. Once she’d been a first responder. As a guide she’d been religious about the refresher courses. Since the accident she hadn’t bothered. “Habit,” she said. “Maybe hope that if I take a thorn out of your paw, you won’t eat me.”

Sean snorted. “What the hell,” he said and rose to limp to the edge of the embankment. “Reg! Hang on a second. There a first-aid kit in that thing?”

As soon as Sean turned his back, Heath looked to Elizabeth. Moving stiffly, back and legs aching and sore from the beating, she was gathering up the toilet paper, then putting it in a plastic bag the way Anna had taught her.

“E,” Heath mouthed. “Wily’s briefcase.” In her penchant for naming things, Elizabeth called the dog-poop bags “Wily’s briefcases,” because they were carried when he did his business.

Without question, and with the sureness of a person who followed bizarre orders under deadly circumstances as often as James Bond, Elizabeth dropped the bag containing the used toilet paper, then shunted it over to Heath with the side of her foot.

Though none of her DNA had been used in the project, Heath congratulated herself on having such a smart, quick child.

Someone, presumably Reg, tossed a white metal box to Sean, who fumbled but managed not to drop it. He returned to Heath’s chair, shoved it with his foot until it touched her thigh, then flopped down hard in it. Opening the latches, then the lid, he removed the three-inch scissors and tucked them in his coat pocket. Thrusting the box and his feet toward Heath, he said, “Try anything hinky and I’ll snap your neck like a dry stick.”

Box in her lap, Heath opened the hinged lid between herself and her patient so he couldn’t see her slip Wily’s briefcase in with the first-aid supplies. Balancing on her bottom while working on Sean’s feet was a trick rather like riding sidesaddle on a palsied horse, but she managed.

After donning latex gloves, she carefully broke open the blisters, then, taking the used toilet paper from the ziplock bag, made a show of thoroughly cleaning the open wounds. When she’d done as much damage as she dared, she bandaged his heels. She’d doctored enough feet in her time that she had the knack of bandaging blisters so the bandages would stay on for a day’s rough hiking. Sean’s would not. They would peel off in an hour, two at most.

During this peevish rebellion, Heath watched herself from above and to her left, an out-of-body experience. Since the accident, she occasionally abandoned her corporeal self. Smearing urine and feces in open wounds was scarcely more efficacious a revenge than spitting in the soup was for a disgruntled waiter, yet she instinctively knew that many slaves before her had done the same.

Until one could overthrow the master, one would undermine him.

NINETEEN

Leah wished she could take back her snipe about Heath not saving Katie, wished she could take back not only the words but the silence that preceded them. While Heath had connived to free her daughter from danger, Leah had dismantled and remantled a thing of metal and rubber. A grown woman playing at Transformers while the world went to hell around her.

Ostensibly she had done it to help Heath, to save her life. In reality she’d done it because she hadn’t the wits to do anything important. She knew she could make a new design, craft it for the job described. Despite the sufferings of Gerald’s child, the battering of Heath’s, she couldn’t but think that in its utility, it was beautiful.

Rick Shaw, as Elizabeth had named it, was a creation to be proud of. The frame was strong, the seat balanced close over the double wheel, the paddle handles mounted where the center of gravity would be once Heath was seated.

Heath had tried to save her child’s life.

Leah had turned a thing into another thing.

The night before, until Katie had called her name and the shooting started, working with the wheelchair had made Leah happy. Standing between the handles of the machine she had built, she’d forgotten she had a daughter, forgotten she was a hostage. She was showing off her work, and she was happy. There must be holes in her soul. If her mothers had lived, perhaps they’d have found a way to knit them up.

Admiring Rick Shaw, Leah murmured, “Katie, you are going to have to help.”

For a moment, Leah thought Katie would refuse. A familiar mutinous look marred her perfect face. Leah and Gerald’s DNA had designed this child; she had built this human being, a creature perfect in form and function. Why couldn’t she take pride in her daughter?

Katie was so like her father, blond and ethereal on the outside, grasping and manipulative on the inside. Leah had been twenty-one when she met Gerald. Just out of grad school and knowing nothing of men. Gerald had a partnership in a business in Montreal designing and selling outdoor equipment. He believed in her, bought out his partner, and used the money to build her a lab in which to work.

Within three months of the wedding, Katie had been conceived. That was the last time she and Gerald had sex, or nearly the last. Gerald had his own life. Leah designed; he sold. That he did other things had ceased to interest her years ago.

Had Katie purposely called the attention of the thugs to Elizabeth’s escape? Had Gerald done something? Had she done—or not done—something that twisted Katie’s mind?

“It’s not too bad,” Elizabeth said to Katie. “Not heavy exactly.”

Katie moved to take her place, each girl on a paddle handle like dray horses readying to pull a wagon.

“Thank you,” Leah said. “You’re a good girl,” she added, because that was what Heath would have done.

“Just part of the machinery,” Katie said in a voice like treacle.

“Ready?” Leah asked.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Heath said with a smile.

Heath believed Katie had nearly gotten Elizabeth shot, yet she smiled. Leah had never been able to tell if smiles were real, what they tried to communicate.

“Hold Rick Shaw steady,” she said to the girls. She helped Heath get into the seat. Once she was settled, Leah took a roll of duct tape from her toolbox, then taped Heath to the chair at waist and chest.

For the minutes this took, Leah lost herself again in the rhythm of building, testing what she had built, seeing its use taking shape. Taping done, she put Heath’s feet on the makeshift foot rails and attached them firmly.

“These are for balance,” she said, retrieving two straight pieces of tubing she had salvaged from the original chair’s frame. Duct tape was wound around one end of each to give Heath a better gripping surface.

Using them like ski poles, Heath balanced herself above the single wheel. “They sure as hell don’t teach this in therapy,” she said.

“Dude,” Reg said. “Weapons.”

The dude turned slowly, his eyes no more fathomable in the light of day than they had been in the dark of night. Leah couldn’t even tell what color they were: the color of a stormy sky, mud, a sandstorm, the oil slick on the garage floor? Leah felt a strange kinship for this cold, colorless man. He, too, lived in a world by himself. That he chose to destruct rather than to construct didn’t make them opposites.

“Balance poles,” Heath said and tossed him one. She didn’t throw it but tossed it with obvious gentleness. Heath was on borrowed time, living because Katie had said she was wealthy. Leah wondered if Katie had lied from kindness or habit, or if it mattered.

It wouldn’t take much for the thugs to choose to divest themselves of Heath. Though given the choice between dying and bushwhacking six miles in Rick Shaw, escorted by homicidal maniacs, Leah might have chosen the dying, Heath would never choose death. Heath knew watching her murdered would permanently damage Elizabeth’s psyche. Leah didn’t think the same would be true of Katie.

The dude neatly caught the pole in his right hand. He was ambidextrous. A weird sense of déjà vu washed through Leah. For a moment the dude held the pole, balancing it on his palm. It weighed next to nothing. “Keep it,” he said. No attempt was made to toss it so Heath might catch it. He just dropped it for them to retrieve as they wished.

Reg picked it up. “Dude, I tell you, this is a weapon.”

“If she starts knuckle-dragging after you with those things, you can shoot her. How’s that?” the dude said dismissively.

Leah saw the insult slap Reg’s cheeks and flash in his black eyes. Reg was not good at taking insults—or orders. Evidently the dude was so used to hurling both at people he’d grown inured to their reactions.

“Stabbing,” Reg said through stiff lips. He jabbed at the air with the untaped end of the bar to illustrate his meaning. Reg would know about stabbing with found weapons: pens, broken bottles, sharpened sticks.

Reg dropped the pole.

Ignoring him, the dude took his cell phone from the wallet on his belt, punched a button, and held it to his ear. The look was incongruous to the point of perceived anachronism.

Heath had banned cell phones on the trip. Heath’s first excuse was that there were many places along the Fox where there was no cell reception. Her second was that the girls wouldn’t be able to leave them alone. The real reason was that they offended her friend Anna.

“Yeah,” the dude said into the phone. “We’re headed out. Six-point-seven miles. Should be there in a few hours.”

Reg was shaking his head, grumbling. “Took us a fucking lifetime to get here, and we were following the fucking river.”

Gutter language was not a part of Leah’s life. Of course she had heard the word “fuck” before. She’d just never heard it used as a verb, a noun, and an adjective, often in a single sentence.

The dude didn’t put his phone back in its holster but held it in front of him, watching the GPS map on the screen.

“Let’s move,” he said.

Stepping between the poles, Leah took over for Katie. “You push,” she said to Elizabeth. Too late, she realized she had marginalized Katie, disincluded her. Had she always done that? Had Katie chosen to keep her distance? Had Gerald orchestrated their relationship? The arrangement had once seemed to suit everyone concerned.

Their little train began to crawl out of the clearing, the dude leading, Reg behind him, Leah pulling Heath, Elizabeth behind pushing. Katie was nearly treading on Elizabeth’s heels, keeping as far from Sean and Jimmy as she could.

The first fifty yards, where social trails had been stomped into the soft earth by summer campers relieving themselves or searching for firewood, were comparatively easy. The chair moved smoothly on its doubled wheel, and there was space enough to each side for Heath to use her poles to maintain balance so her weight didn’t shift and jerk on the pulling handles.

Then the short honeymoon ended. Underbrush, laced with a loose weave of fallen twigs and branches, made movement a muscle-wrenching struggle. Hard physical labor was another thing that was not part of Leah’s life. Had the dude not been slowed up by fighting through thick vegetation, she, Heath, and Elizabeth would have been unable to keep up. Rick Shaw would have been abandoned, and Heath gotten a bullet between the eyes.