Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (16 page)

“That includes you,” she told Wily as he returned from his place of concealment. He lay down, put his chin on his paws, and puffed out a sigh. He hadn’t complained all day. His old bones had to be aching from being trussed up like a package for so long. “Feels good to be free, doesn’t it?” Anna asked and stroked his head.

Beneath the leaden sky, shadows began to coalesce in the hollows and thickets. Silently Anna rose to her feet. The knife was in her hand. Walking as softly as any creature on paws, she crept toward where the kidnappers and their victims milled and stomped and cursed. Rising as silently, Wily followed on three legs, his grizzled muzzle close to the ground as he read the news of his people. Anna did not stop him. He had as much right as she to hunt these woods.

The two of them settled in a swale twenty feet from the clearing where the party had stopped. The swale was shallow and wide. Old beetle-killed pines had fallen haphazardly over it. Undergrowth tangled along its lip. Lying belly-down to the slight rise, Anna raised her head over the edge of the depression enough to be able to see the thugs and her friends. Wily curled beside her, his chin on the back of her knees; in the failing light he trusted more to his nose than his eyes.

Heath, lying on her side, was still tied in the chair. Tanned even in winter from snowmobiling, her skin had faded to the color of an old chamois cloth, hard used and much laundered, a dirty tan that pinched to white around her nostrils. Her legs, tied to the footrests with sorry-looking remnants of tape, shivered as if they pulsed with electricity. In the cold colorless light, blood showed black on her palms and forearms. Balance poles either lost or abandoned, so that she’d been using her bare hands.

Elizabeth squatted nearby, elbows on knees, head hanging, face hidden behind a greasy curtain of hair. One of her shirtsleeves was shredded as if she’d been in a fight with a puma. Leah sat with legs folded and hands on her knees like the pale ghost of a yogi. Her head was up and her eyes open, but she did not appear to be looking at anything. Katie stood behind her, hands limp at her sides, face blank.

The four of them were drenched. River water had dried, but sweat had replaced it. Sean and Jimmy weren’t in much better shape than the captives. As the sun went down, so did the temperature, from a high of around seventy to closer to fifty. Forty before morning. Maybe freezing. They were all at risk of severe—even fatal—hypothermia.

Sean slumped to the ground. Groaning, he removed his shoes. Jimmy unslung the rifle from his back and flopped down. The dude stood still as a rock, studying the trees around him as they faded to gray in the evening light. Reg paced.

“What the fuck do we do now?” he growled.

The dude took his cell phone from the leather holster on his belt and stared at the face of it. Reg sprang toward him and snatched it from his hand. “Fucking Motorola,” he shouted and threw the phone into the woods.

Shoot him, Anna prayed. For an instant it looked as if she would get her wish. The dude turned his cod-eyed stare on Reg. To her disappointment he decided to let him live a while longer.

“We wait,” the dude said flatly. “We can’t be more than a mile or so from the airstrip. When we don’t show up, the pilot will come looking for us. The plane will lead us to where we need to be.”

“It’s going to be dark soon,” Jimmy said. “He ain’t gonna find us in the dark, Dude.”

“We wait until morning.”

Elizabeth had freed Heath from the rickshaw and helped her to sit up, a tree supporting her back. From the pocket of her coat, Heath took out a pack of cigarettes; she shook one out and put it between her lips. The mangled cigarette beckoned to her nose like a skeletal finger. Her hands trembled so badly, the lighter fell to her lap.

“We need a fire,” Elizabeth said. Then, louder, “We need a fire.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Reg said. “Fucking wolves.”

“No matches,” the dude said.

“Lighter,” Elizabeth replied. The girl was too tired to keep the scorn from her voice, and Anna was afraid for her. The dude either didn’t notice or chose not to show it.

“Reg, Jimmy, Sean. Get wood. We’ll build a fire. That’ll keep us until the plane comes.”

“Any food left?” Jimmy asked plaintively. The dude picked up the day pack, turned it upside down, and shook it.

“Not a chance,” he said. “Missing a meal won’t kill you. Cold will. Get the wood.”

“I can’t walk, Dude,” Sean whined.

“You know what happens to horses that can’t walk?” the dude asked.

Muttering something about animals and PETA, assholes and feet, Sean began pulling on his socks.

Reg walked purposefully away from the others, snapping off dry twigs and snatching up pieces of downed wood as he went. Sean limped around poking dispiritedly into the brush. The dude remained where he was, his eyes on the captives, not as if he expected them to try to escape, but as if they were specimens of an animal whose continued existence he had not yet decided was worth his further effort.

Jimmy left his rifle where he’d dumped it and wandered off into the trees between Anna and the river.

“Hunting season has officially opened,” she whispered to the dog. Wily thumped his tail against the ground.

Clutching the knife hilt, she rose to her feet. Matching her steps to those of Jimmy—who made more noise than a herd of stampeding elk—she followed. Shadows had gone. Trees and bushes showed black in a colorless world barely illuminated by cold gray sky. Anna angled away from the camp on a trajectory that would intersect Jimmy’s racket. Within minutes she saw him.

Bent over a fallen log, he was trying to tug off a rotting limb. His back was to her as he worked it back and forth. Knife in hand, she stepped from behind the screen of trees she’d kept between them and walked quickly toward where he huffed and struggled.

“Damn,” he gasped and plunked his butt down on the log, wiping his forehead on the sleeve of his coat.

Cloaked only by dusk, Anna was directly in his line of sight. The breath in her throat stopped. Her heart thudded. The rush of her breathing roared like a chain saw in her ears. A childish desire to close her eyes, and thus render herself more invisible, was strong. The need to keep watching was stronger.

Jimmy sighed, turning his head to the left and right, his beard wagging over his chest. He was not expecting a human shape; his mind was on consumable fuels, and he was tired. Dark clothing and the black hood sufficed. His eyes passed over the shadow Anna had become and lit on a tangle of downed dry pine branches several yards farther into the woods.

Motionless, she waited as he gathered sticks and twigs. When his arms were nearly full she began a slow creep toward him, timing her movements to his tugs and yanks. Her breath sighed out. Thought ceased. Movement became as fluid and natural as that of a snake through familiar grasses. Her heart resumed a steady beat. Her ears stopped roaring. Nothing but the ribs in his back over his heart and the stalking existed. The knife was not in her hand but of her hand.

When she was scarcely more than a yard away, Jimmy’s pile of sticks began to slide. Trying to save his harvest, he spun to the left. Before he could face her, Anna sprang, the knife held over her head in the pose Anthony Perkins made famous in
Psycho.
Putting what strength she had behind it, she brought it down on the right side of Jimmy’s back, hoping to plunge through to his heart.

The knife was big, but it wasn’t sharp. The weapon was cheap, probably worn more for effect than use. The blade cut through the heavy blanketing of the coat and sliced into the thug’s skinny back. Already slightly bent over, Jimmy toppled forward, dragging the knife with him. The hilt twisted in Anna’s hand as the blade scraped along his scapula, then jammed in a rib. As he fell, Jimmy turned to see his attacker. The hilt was wrenched from Anna’s fingers as he fell onto his back.

Flinging her body on top of his, she drove him into the ground. He was squirming like a snake under a boot. “Die, goddammit,” Anna whispered.

He opened his mouth to shout. Anna drove her elbow between his jaws and jammed down hard. Fists pounded at her face; fingers clawed at her hands. Beneath her, his body bucked like that of a man in the throes of passion. She rode him and cursed him in a steady whisper, and the knife worked its way farther into his body.

His teeth ground ineffectually at the sleeve of her jacket. She rammed her elbow deeper until she heard him choking. The thrashing became more feeble. Finally it stilled. Anna lay atop him, a demon lover. She was gasping for breath. Sweat dripped from her face into the dead man’s beard.

Until the last of the light had drained from the day, and she could no longer see the outline of his face, she did not move. When she finally rose from her kill, his teeth ripped the elbow of her jacket as pulled it free of his mouth. The fabric was wet with spittle and redolent of tobacco juice.

She could not see the body. She couldn’t even see her own feet. She looked in the direction of the group. A fire blazed. Sean was shouting Jimmy’s name. Idly she wondered how long that had been going on. Time had folded in on itself and gone as black as the night.

Then her head was back, mouth open. Howling poured from her throat as primeval as that of the first wolf. A second howl joined hers, Wily. Then, from a distance, the answering howls of a pack.

When she’d done, her face was wet. Whether it was from sweat or tears, she didn’t know.

In this strange, new, ancient, familiar world there seemed to be no difference between the two.

TWENTY-FIVE

Heath’s insides felt fragile, as endangered as a china teacup in an avalanche. There was no part of her that didn’t hurt, but for her legs, and they complained with quivers, kicks, and that unsettling feeling that was almost pain. Rick Shaw, prison, tormenter, and, very nearly, executioner, was lying on its side like a child’s hastily discarded bicycle. Hours had passed since her near-drowning, yet Heath felt the pull of the cold river on her mind, a siren song urging her to give up, accept the inevitability that these men were going to take her life.

There was a restful seduction in the idea of letting go, sliding into dark waters. Without Elizabeth, she might have given in. A child kept a woman anchored to life. A mother might not go down fighting for herself, but for her child …

The fire helped Heath pretend she was whole and brave and good. Light in the darkness, the theme for so many books and songs, was a potent healer of damaged souls. Heath drew the heat in through her pores. Metaphorically, she dragged herself upright, shoulders squared, rifle at ready, eyes clear, nose to the grindstone, ear to the ground, and all the other nonsense people used to buoy themselves up.

“Think of somebody worse off than you.” She heard her aunt’s voice in her mind. “Then help them. It always works for me.”

Worse off than an aching, starving, thirsty para lost in the wilderness with four of the creepiest individuals ever to crawl out from under a rock?

Heath’s eyes sought Leah where she and Katie sat cross-legged close to the fire. They neither touched nor talked. Katie had her thumb in her mouth. Heath hoped she was gnawing on it rather than sucking it, reverting to infantilism.

Leah was worse off than she; Heath had the joy of Elizabeth.

Elizabeth, hands held out to the fire, knelt between the Hendrickses. Exhaustion had quenched the rebel flame in her eyes. The lure of victimhood was working its wiles on the others as it was on Heath.

“Up,” she commanded to the girls and Leah. “Up and to work. It’s going to be colder than a well digger’s hind pockets tonight. We need a bed of boughs between our butts and the freezing ground, and a back to catch the heat. Can we borrow your knife?” she asked Sean.

Sean was propped against the trunk of an aspen. Denuded of leaves, in the firelight, the branches reached for the sky like skeletal arms. Sean had not moved since he’d lit the fire with Heath’s lighter. Freed from his shoes, his mangled feet poked toward the flames.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said without opening his eyes. Heath winked at E and was rewarded with a slight dimpling, the precursor to a smile.

Sean believed he’d lost his knife crossing the river.

“Right,” Heath said, pushing her luck to stimulate herself and her friends. “Never mind. We’ll make do.” Quickly, before Sean could decide to get to his sore feet and come kill her, Heath addressed the women. “Just get what you can.”

“One of you steps out of the light, one of you is shot,” the dude said.

“Buddy system,” Elizabeth said, some of the punkiness back. “A new twist.”

The dude didn’t respond.

Leah and Elizabeth gleaned enough pine branches to pile up a hint of shelter at their backs, and enough leaves to make a soft bed. Without a word, Katie took the snuggest place in the middle. Leah slumped on the far edge, watching her daughter from the corners of her eyes. A good sign, Heath thought. At least there was acknowledgment of existence.

Building their nest had not lifted the film of despair from any faces.

“Hot drinks,” Heath said. “The wilderness panacea.” The others looked at her as if she’d gone mad. “Rocks, get me rocks small enough to put through the mouth of a water bottle.” Under the eyes of the gunmen and the urgings of Heath, Leah and E shook off their lethargy and rose to do her bidding.

“Katie?”

Katie glanced up, still chewing on her thumb, and looked at her mother through the hair fallen around her face. “Come help me find small stones?” Leah’s tone was new to Heath. It was no longer quite so vague and dreamy. There was a note of pleading in it.

Katie shook her head and returned her attention to her autocannibalism.

Putting rocks in the fire, fishing them out, cleaning them as best they could, and dropping them into the bottle finally allowed them the illusion of control. Looking far more alive than they had, they curled up together in their relatively soft, warm nest and passed marginally hot water from one to the other.

When the last of the warm water was gone, Katie and Elizabeth curled up between Leah and Heath. Elizabeth pillowed her head in Heath’s lap. Extra weight and lack of movement were going to wreak havoc on the flesh of Heath’s backside, but she didn’t care. Tonight she couldn’t drum up a lot of sympathy for a part of her anatomy that had gone AWOL. It wasn’t often a mother got to cradle her teenaged child.