Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (25 page)

Mumbling prayers and incantations to the god Priapus, Sean was too absorbed to notice the scraping of her descent. Anna slid her hand into her pocket for the knife. Poetic justice, that Sean should be slain by his own phallic symbol. The knife was gone, dislodged from the pocket when the coat had crumpled up. The knife was the small thunk she’d heard. She dared not spend the time it would take to find it or use the headlamp.

“No. Please,” Katie begged.

“You goddamned pigs! Don’t let him. Fight, Katie!” Screams and cries and curses from Reg pounded the air.

Dropping to her knees, Anna ran her hand over the ground. The side of it banged against a rock. It was sharp-edged, a piece the size of an
Oxford English Dictionary,
broken from the boulders by repeated frosts. Anna pried it loose, grabbed it in both hands, then raised it over her head as if it weighed no more than a cat.

She stepped around the bulge in the rock. The bullet in her arm sent a wave of fire through her shoulder; her left arm weakened. The rock began to tilt.

Sean had his trousers undone and his cock in his hand. “Holy shit!” he said.

Before her arm could give out, Anna and the rock hurtled forward. Bones crunched and breath gusted from him as the rock smashed in his face. He fell backward. Anna, carried by the momentum of the rock, fell with him, on him. She rolled to one side, came to her knees, and grabbed for the rock covering his face with her good arm to again smash it down on his skull. The left arm wasn’t responding. The right hadn’t the strength to lift it.

Shaking, she rose to her feet. Blood dripped from her fingertips. The bandage over the bullet wound had come off. She gathered her balance, then stomped on the rock covering the thug’s face as hard as she could. Another crunch and the sound of something wet squashing.

Probably overkill, she thought. Then, prudently, stomped on it again for good measure.

Katie stirred. Anna whirled, throwing herself down on the child before she could move or scream.

Above them, as if the moon itself cried, Wily began to howl like a wolf. Anna fought down the need to join him. Hand clamped tightly over Katie’s mouth, body pressed on the terrified trembling form, Anna dredged her brain trying to find the language she had once shared with her fellow humans.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Eyes closed, brows together, lips drawn back, Leah keened without uttering a sound. The side of her face raged red with swelling flesh. Heath could see muscles and tendons working in her throat as she swallowed fury and helplessness. Elizabeth, bleeding from her lip and the mouse beneath her eye, sat slightly apart from Heath and Leah, scared she would be next, Heath guessed, and not knowing what to do when grown-ups cried. Heath saw this through a haze of pain. The burst flesh on her cheek had lost in competition with the blistered flesh on the back of her arm where the dude had laid a burning brand.

From around the side of the boulders came grunts and thumps that conjured up images that set hatred frothing red in Heath’s eyes. Those same images would be in Leah’s mind—but they would be of her daughter. Heath would not have been surprised if Leah wept tears of blood.

The dude, whom Heath hated more than the other thugs—even the rapist whose porcine comments they were being forced to listen to—could have stopped it. The dude’s crime was the greater evil. Mr. White, Heath’s sixth-grade teacher, once told the class that hatred wasn’t the worst emotion; the worst emotion was indifference. She’d not understood what Mr. White meant until this night.

A loud final-sounding “Ooomph!” puffed from the darkness beyond the stone.

The dude lay by the fire, his back to the boulders. If he was awake, he ignored the noise. Reg, standing ramrod stiff, back to the fire, winced. His shoulders relaxed. Heath wondered if he, too, thought it might be over, and was glad of it. Reg, who would have killed her as casually as he would swat a fly, who refused to kill an injured dog, was terrified of wolves and disgusted by the rape of a child. Vile as he was, he was human. Somewhere, somehow, someday, there could be redemption for Reg.

Not so the dude.

After the orgasmic “Oomph” came the single howl of a wolf. It seemed to descend from the skies. The windigo, the cannibalistic spirit of the north woods that flew on the storm, was loose this night. At that moment, Heath’s faith in misery and death made the demon as real as those who guarded what was coming to feel like her tomb.

The howl passed overhead and died away. The woods went silent, but for the crackling of the fire. Sean did not reappear.

“It’s over,” Heath breathed in Leah’s ear. Leah did not cease her voiceless screaming. Like Heath, she probably thought Katie was dead.

Seconds crawled by. Heath’s head, already pounding, felt ready to fly apart with the intensity of her listening.

Reg paced from one side of the fire to the other. His eyes were wide and scared. The wolf—or wolves, or windigo—was near. Yet he never looked in the direction Sean had taken Katie.

Despite the great big gun, Reg was a coward, afraid of unseen predators. Heath despised him. He hadn’t the courage of the two girls he let his buddies savage.

Just when she thought she would shriek like a banshee from sheer nerves, and Leah’s heart would explode through her rib cage, Katie’s screaming cut into the tight-stretched stillness.

“Get off me! Momma! Get off me!” and then hysterical wordless wailing.

“Katie!” Leah cried out. Scrambling, her feet striking Heath’s already damaged legs, Leah reached the mouth of their cramped cavern only to be kicked back inside by Reg.

The dude rose from his place by the fire, fluid and deadly.

Airy, scratchy, a sound nearly identical to the scuff of leaves, yet with the rhythmic beat of iron wheels on railroad tracks, sang through night branches. Katie? Singing to herself? Sean doing something unimaginable? Heath couldn’t even be sure the sound was human. Ancient horrors rose in her throat and made the skin on her scalp shrink.

Katie half stumbled, half fell into the light, whispering to herself, each step awkward. Her trousers were pulled up but unzipped and sagging.

Wordlessly, Leah held out her arms. Wrists tied together, she resembled a beggar asking for alms. Staggering frighteningly close to the fire, Katie tottered, then fell into her mother’s lap. “Itwasjimmyitwasjimmyitwasjimmy.”

That was what the child was chanting. If blood could, in fact, run cold, Heath’s did. Ice pervaded the part of her that was sensate, and a memory of winter took the bones of her legs.

Reg stepped into the entrance to the shelter. Leah dragged Katie with her as she retreated to the farthest limit of the crack, again smashing Heath’s legs in the process. No matter, Heath thought. A small price to pay. Elizabeth moved so she was between the Hendrickses, and the thug in the doorway. Heath grabbed her arm, trying to force her back. Better Reg take Katie again, better anything than he take Elizabeth.

“Take me,” Heath croaked from a dry throat. “I’m still … whole.”

Reg shoved his face inside their space. In the shadows, his black skin was the same as the black of the narrowing stone chimney above: noseless, eyeless, faceless, the lightless vacuum that artists used to depict the visage of the grim reaper.

“What’s that kid sayin’?” he hissed.

Leah looped her arms over Katie’s head and forced her daughter’s face against her chest in a bear hug.

“Nothing,” Heath said.

Reg pulled the silvery gun from his pouch. In his large black hand it appeared to float in midair, catching reflections of firelight from the rock. Like magic the muzzle moved itself to Elizabeth’s temple.

“What’s the kid saying?” Reg asked again.

“It was Jimmy,” Heath answered so quickly it humiliated her. There was no reason he shouldn’t know what Katie said, but in an insane universe one couldn’t tell a hand grenade from a lime.

Reg bolted upright, struck his head against the rocks, swore, then backed out of the crack. Circling the fire, his back to the flames, he scanned the woods through the gun’s sight. When he reached the side of the boulders where Sean had vanished with Katie, he stopped.

“Sean, what the fuck? Sean, man, get your ass out here.”

There was no response. Reg peered into the dark beside the boulders but didn’t step away from the comfort of the fire. Instead, he set his back against the rock and froze, holding the gun across his chest the way police on television do when waiting for a perp to pop out of a doorway.

The dude surveyed the camp area, took in the space between the boulders, the fire, Reg standing guard.

“Sean didn’t come back,” Reg said.

“Maybe he’s sleeping it off.”

“The kid said it was Jimmy.” Reg’s voice was calm and neutral. Trying to keep the dude from going after him again for seeing ghosts, Heath guessed.

“The kid said Jimmy raped her?” The dude laughed. “Maybe we’ll have a virgin birth in nine months. A ghost did it. Haven’t heard that one in a while.”

“She keeps saying ‘Jimmy did it’ over and over, and Sean ain’t back. It’s too cold for him to be sleeping it off out there,” Reg insisted.

“Sean!” the dude shouted.

No answer.

“Go get him,” the dude ordered.

“No. I ain’t going to,” Reg said. The gun on his chest jumped an inch or two. Heath hoped there’d be a shoot-out. The dude stared him down.

“Jesus Christ,” the dude said, as he walked to where Reg stood frozen to the rock. “Sean!”

He grabbed a branch from the small pile of remaining firewood and thrust one end into the fire. “The middle of nowhere is too damn dark. Can’t see two feet. You’d think somebody’d put up streetlights.” When the torch caught, he eased it from the coals. Walking carefully, lest it blow out, he went to the edge of the light. Then Heath couldn’t see him anymore, only Reg in his statue-of-a-gunman pose.

In less than a minute, the dude stalked back into the firelight. The burning brand was gone. Brushing by Reg, he knelt in the mouth of the women’s shelter. “Give me the child.” He held out his hand. Leah hugged Katie more tightly.

Leaning her upper body between E and the dude, Heath planted her knuckles on the ground so she wouldn’t fold up like a cheap jackknife. The dude slapped her back against the rock so hard she lost sense of what was happening. Before she could recover her wits, he’d filled his hand with the front of her coat, she was out of the shelter, facedown, her right shoe smoking and stinking of burned rubber where it rested on hot coals. Elizabeth was close behind her, moving of her own volition. She snatched Heath’s foot from the fire, then crouched beside her. Heath wanted to push herself up but hadn’t the strength. “Run,” she whispered to her daughter.

Elizabeth helped Heath roll onto her back, then worked her leg under her mother’s head as a pillow. Heath reached up to put a hand to either side of her daughter’s face, the burn on the back of her arm glistening wetly in the light. “Run into the dark,” she whispered desperately. “They are going to kill me anyway. Please. I have to know you’re safe.”

Elizabeth shook her head.

Heath could feel tears dripping from the corners of her eyes and running over her temples into her hair. “You’ll find a way out. As soon as we don’t show up where we were expected day after tomorrow, they’ll start searching. Go now! Run. It’s too dark for them to follow.”

Mulishly, Elizabeth shook her head. “You’d be bored without me,” she said.

With that, the moment was gone. The dude backed out of the space between the boulders, dragging Katie by one arm. Leah wasn’t screaming or fighting. That meant she was probably dead or unconscious.

“What do you mean ‘Jimmy did it’?” the dude yelled. This was the first time he’d raised his voice. Heath had thought him incapable of losing control. Now she hoped that was true.

Katie didn’t answer directly. She’d gone rag doll and hung limply from his hand mumbling, “Itwasjimmyitwasjimmyitwasjimmy,” like an idiot. The dude shook her the way a ratter will shake a rat to snap its back.

The little body was jumping, the head flopping on the slender neck. “Stop it!” Heath cried. “Stop it! You’re killing her, you dumb shit.” The dude dropped Katie to the ground. Regaining her skeletal structure, she re-formed into a whole child, then skittered back between the stones.

“Sean’s over there with his head bashed in,” the dude said, his eyes boring into Heath.

“Sean is dead?” Heath asked. This was too good to be true. “You aren’t kidding? Trying to cheer me up?”

“Sean’s face was smashed to jelly by a rock,” the dude said. A glint of something, perhaps gallows humor, livened his matte eyes for so brief a second, Heath might have imagined it.

“Wow.” Heath shook her head. “Katie couldn’t have done it. How could she? Her hands are tied. She can’t weigh eighty pounds. We were all here. All she’ll say is ‘It was Jimmy,’ so I’m guessing Jimmy did it. Don’t kill her. Please.”

It was a bitch having to beg from a supine position. Heath’s aching neck refused to hold her head up, and she found herself staring at the sky. A star stared back. “Look,” she said. “It’s clear. The plane will come back. One more day, and we’ll be money. One more day. Please.” She ran out of breath and out of words.

The dude got to his feet, spit into the fire, then went back to the far side and lay down.

Refusing Elizabeth’s help, Heath made it to the mouth of the stones and braced her back against one side. She was furious at her daughter for not running into the woods when she’d been told to. Heath was her mother. If she wanted to sacrifice her life for her child, no little teenaged twit should be allowed to challenge that.

Elizabeth went into the crevice. She settled with her back to the opening, and to her mother. Heath closed herself inside her mind and fumed until anger changed particle by particle into pride. Elizabeth was amazing. Heath prodded her gently. “Let me in.”

Obligingly, Elizabeth turned. “Are you okay, Mom?”

“Never better,” Heath said. “Is Katie okay?” Heath hated the feeble words, hated that Katie would never be okay again, or not the same okay as she was before Sean had hurt her.