Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (15 page)

“Up, up,” Leah was shouting. The upstream side of the chair bucked up and down as E worked to raise the paddle handle and bring the apparatus to level.

Though the shout had been meant for Elizabeth, Katie responded. She lifted instead of holding her handle down. The center of gravity shifted, the double wheel caught the water like a tiller, and the chair spun.

“I can’t hold her!” was the last thing Heath heard before she went under.

She’d gotten a breath and closed her mouth. Her eyes were open. Nothing but brown showed. With fingers that felt as responsive as if they were made of clay, she scratched at the tape across her chest.

Remembering her horror at being taped into the wheeled death trap, futile fury lent her an erg of power. She had said nothing. Leah and Elizabeth—even Katie in her way—worked so hard for her, she couldn’t bear to criticize or make special requests. Because Aunt Gwen had drummed good manners into her, she was going to die a horrible gurgling death.

The lower part of the chair struck a submerged rock. Heath began cartwheeling downstream. Hands, scrabbling pitifully at the wet tape, forgot their business and tried swimming. Her head was snapped back by the spin. Her mind flashed on the county fair, back when it was small potatoes, a showcase for the local cake bakers and curtain makers, 4H calves and sheep, boys and girls sleeping in the stall with a loved prize animal, vying for a blue ribbon, then slaughter. Tilt-a-Whirl. That was the ride. Heath had chipped her front tooth on the safety bar before barfing cotton candy all over the wide-wale corduroy trousers of the boy of her dreams.

Light slashed her eyes as the chair rolled her faceup. The colors of autumn smeared in with the gray of the sky and the tears of the river. She’d just had time to suck in another lungful of air before she was under again.

Abruptly, the spinning stopped. Heath was saved. Then she wasn’t. The bottom of the river was in front of her face. Craning her neck as far as it would go, she could see the lighter shade of the surface. Not helping hands but the handles of the chair had arrested her tumble downriver. One or both had jammed in the soft mud of the bottom and the side bank. She was caught in a strainer designed by a genius engineer, and would drown as neatly as a rat in a rain barrel.

Pressure built in her lungs until they felt full to bursting, not empty. Soon she would no longer be able to hold it in. She would gasp it out. Silty water would rush in and fill her lungs.

A sharp bony finger raked across her cheek, tearing into her ear and tangling in her hair; a branch, maybe attached to an anchor—a tree or a larger branch. In the way of drowning men grasping at straws, Heath grabbed it with both hands and pulled. Not far above was light. She willed her face toward it, strained with arms and shoulders worn to threads by the morning’s trek.

The river dragged at her legs. The current toyed with the paddle handles, digging them deeper, then lifting them up. Where her body began to sense pain, low on her spine, seared above the numb, but not forgotten, sensations of the dead weight below. It would be worth breaking herself in two if she could get her nose above the surface for even an instant, a breath.

With the last of her strength, Heath jerked her chin toward the light and managed a sip of air, enough to prolong this hell for half a minute more. Her fingers opened without her permission. The branch, no bigger around than her thumb, scraped through, cutting her palms. The knowledge that Elizabeth would take her death hard spurred Heath to one more desperate snatch at the branch. Her fingers closed again around the black tendril, but she hadn’t the strength to hoist her shoulders up the three inches it would take to get her lips to the surface. She watched her hands opening as if they belonged to someone else, watched them float out from her body on arms that could not move without the aid of the current. The force in her lungs, the desperate hunger for air, couldn’t be denied any longer.

Through the murky waters a pale ghost drew near, a star shape, as amorphous as a jellyfish. The flashing of her life before her eyes had been a disappointment. If this was the light one was supposed to go toward, death was going to be a drag, she thought as she blacked out.

TWENTY-THREE

Hallelujah, Charles thought as the cripple went under. Maybe his luck was changing. Michael, if you have any leverage with your landlord, get him to drown her. One less malformed abortion taking up space that could be utilized by whole men. Though Charles had to admit this cripple was a fighter. She’d fought longer and harder and with less complaint than any man he’d worked with. If she’d been whole, she would have been a force to be contended with. If she’d been whole, he would have had to shoot her the minute he’d walked into camp.

Half running, half swimming, the cripple’s daughter was forging after the rolling machine that held her mother. Not a second’s hesitation, the dude noticed. The apple showed nearly as much courage as the tree.

Across the water, atop the steep bank, the idiot Jimmy raised his toy rifle to his shoulder. A squirrel rifle. Jimmy boy had probably kept food on the table with his peashooter until he infected his whole damn family with mad squirrel’s disease. Shooting the daughter while the cripple drowned would have been a neat solution to a number of Charles’s problems, but Leah Hendricks was between Jimmy and the daughter, and Jimmy was a lousy shot.

Anger always simmered in the caldron of Charles’s chest. Negative emotions—pity, sadness, guilt, lust, envy—were instantly transmuted into anger. Anger was stimulation and fuel. Showing anger was weakness. This ill-begotten, ill-fated circus of the damned he found himself ringleading had spawned a surplus of anger, fuel for weeks to come.

Drawing a sip of the heady brew, he raised the Colt and fired off four shots in quick succession. Explosions of dirt blossomed in a line four inches below Jimmy’s boots. The bank crumbled, the .22 fired. Arms pinwheeling, rifle flung aside, the bearded man tumbled into the stream.

Charles allowed himself a small interior smile.

The cripple’s daughter had reached the inverted chair. Plunging her arms under the water, she shouted, “Help me! I’ve got her.”

The Hendricks woman, who, like the riffraff on the other bank, had been gaping at the spectacle, hesitated, then started toward the daughter. Charles considered stopping her with a well-placed warning shot, but he’d become interested in seeing how the drama unfolded.

Together, Hendricks and the daughter got hold of the chair and lifted until the cripple’s head was above the surface of the river. Lifeless as old seaweed, the cripple hung from the duct tape. Drowned.

“Hold fast, Leah,” the daughter shouted, then let go of the chair. Grabbing her mother’s face, a hand on either side of her head, she bent and clamped her lips over those of the cripple.

A healthy body putting lips to a broken piece of meat turned Charles’s stomach.

The girl’s head snapped back. She spit, then a clearly audible “Eeeww” came upstream on the slight breeze.

Charles felt his gorge rise. The cripple, back among the living, had vomited in the daughter’s mouth.

“Reg, Jimmy, get that contraption up here,” he yelled. Enough time had been lost. “Sean, get the Hendricks girl across.”

Holding his ridiculous boots in one hand and Katie Hendricks’s arm in the other, Sean gingerly tiptoed across. Several times it looked as if the current would do with his belly what it had done with the wheel on the cripple’s chair, but he made it without a dunking.

Charles’s luck had run dry.

Wet clothing, no food—when darkness came they would all be in a sorry state unless he could get them to their destination. GPS systems didn’t work off cell towers. They triangulated off satellites. The make of phone he carried required the transmission of a cell tower in order to keep streaming. A civilized nation shouldn’t have any dead zones. Bernie was just the fool to find one.

With no GPS, he reasoned he’d have to keep going north by northwest, the direction they’d been headed when the cell phone went dead. It couldn’t be far. A few miles at most.

The Hendricks woman and the cripple’s daughter scrambled up the bank. Gasping, they fell to the grass. Reg and Jimmy wrestled the chair with the cripple in it up the incline. All three were coated with thick terra-cotta-colored mud. Along with its burden, they dumped the contraption on its side, then sat down, breathing hard.

The cripple had spilled half out of the seat, supporting her torso with one shaking arm. Water streamed from her hair and snot from her nose. Charles stepped over to her.

“Why don’t you die?” he asked with genuine curiosity.

The cripple stared up at him with sharp hazel eyes.

“You first,” she said.

TWENTY-FOUR

Carrying Wily in her arms like a baby, Anna walked the short distance from the bluff to where the others had crossed the river. A bread bag, squares of paper from presliced cheese, and a plastic envelope that had once held “heart healthy bologna” were scattered around. An insane need to pick up the litter consumed her.

Priorities, she told herself. She was following kidnappers, carrying a dog, intent on rescuing friends from psychopaths. Time was of the essence.

The compulsion was too great. Having put Wily down on a nice pad of pine needles, she picked the trash up and shoved it into her pockets.

Guessing where ground zero of the lunch had occurred, she again walked her concentric circles. This time she found nothing. Hopping along, grunting through the pain movement caused his broken bone, Wily followed the scent of Heath, E, or a bologna sandwich to a large stone beside a red pine. He whined.

“What’s the matter, guy?” she asked. He looked as sheepish as a dog can look. “Embarrassed because you can’t lift your leg? Got to squat like a bitch? I’ve got no sympathy. This is an equal opportunity forest.”

Wily squatted to pee.

It was then Anna saw it. In the duff behind the rock, mostly covered by needles, was an enormous blade, the cutting edge nine inches long and an inch and a half wide at the hilt. Another gift from her girlfriends. A thousand Christmases could come and go before Anna would receive anything that brought her so much joy.

“We are officially armed, Wily,” she exulted. “No more tooth-and-claw business for us. We’ve moved into the Iron Age. Modern warfare at its most personal.”

Wily thumped his tail and nosed her pocket where the plastic from the bologna packet had been stowed.

Farther downstream Anna found a place where the little river widened and grew shallower. Having stripped off clothes, socks, and shoes, she bundled them, along with Wily, in the jury-rigged carry sack. The water came only to her waist. The fording was accomplished with creatures and paraphernalia dry.

Dressed again, Wily on her back, she followed the stream upriver to where the thugs’ trail led away from the water. Over the next few hours her greatest difficulty proved to be not stepping on the heels of Sean, the trailing thug. Periodically she got close enough she could hear the rumble of dissatisfied men. Then she and Wily would have to sit and wait fifteen or twenty minutes before they dared progress.

Anna estimated the dude and his bunch had traveled three miles north-by-northwest during the first half of the day. Without a GPS, and the sun sequestered behind a white sky, they spent the afternoon doing what lost people do. They walked in a circle. It wasn’t a myth that people lost in the woods walked in circles. Why this was so, Anna didn’t know. Perhaps one leg was a millimeter longer than the other, or right-handed people favored that direction. Most dead hikers were found within half a mile, if not less, from the place they first got lost.

By the time the fading glow of the sun silvered a horizon scraped clean by naked branches, the kidnappers had completed their circuit. They were a couple of hundred yards from the river that had nearly killed Heath, and less than a quarter of a mile downstream.

Anna knew this because, despite Wily’s weight, the slowness of their progress had made her impatient. Like a mountain lion keeping track of prey, she ranged to each side and ahead of them.

Unlike the mountain lion, she didn’t consider eating them. Hunger had passed. In its place was an almost pleasant burn, as if she ran on high-octane fuel. Without the distraction of people, chatter, food, or other trappings of civilization, her senses became attuned to the north woods. The ground was not stony like that of the Rockies. Though shod only in moose leather, her feet were not sore. Anxiety, like hunger pangs, had become a normal sensation, one she did not have to rate as good or bad. Just as she didn’t rate the warmth or weight of the dog slung on her back as good or bad. Future and past slipped away. What remained was the narrow focus required to wait, like a cat outside a mouse hole, for days if need be. Waiting for the kill.

“You don’t know where in the fuck you are!” filtered through the trees. Reg.

A soft reply. The dude.

“It’s getting dark, and there’s wolves and shit, and I got no more interest in following you through the bushes!” Reg’s voice had gone up several octaves since the incident at the river. His nerves were shot.

Anna bet the dude hadn’t a clue that they had looped back around to where they had started. The light was going fast. Whether the dude liked it or not, they would have to stay where they were until morning.

Kneeling behind a fallen log, she wriggled out of the papoose bag. Her black T-shirt had been shed in the heat of the day and used to better secure Wily to her back. She unwrapped the dog from his green nylon and black cotton sacking. “If you’ve got to go, now’s the time,” she whispered.

While he hobbled over to a place of privacy so she wouldn’t see him squatting like a girl, Anna removed the chili tin, the battered canteen, the headlamp, and the knife from the ersatz pack.

As she had the previous night, she arranged the black shirt around her head, the neck hole open for her face. The strap for the headlamp went over the makeshift burnoose. She flipped the lens to her forehead so its reflective surface wouldn’t catch the light. The chili tin she filled with water for Wily, then drank deeply of what remained in the canteen. Anything that could clank or constrain her movements she would leave behind.