Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (31 page)

Using Jimmy’s knife, Anna hacked and tore the lining out of the coat and fashioned a pressure bandage around Heath’s thigh. One-armed, she piled up duff and leaves to make a soft bed, raised and warmer than bare ground, then wrapped Heath in the coat. Jimmy’s coat only covered her halfway down to her knees. Her poor pale legs cold and bare, she resembled a red-and-black all-day sucker on a white stick.

“Lie down next to her,” Anna told Wily. “Share your heat.”

Wily shot her an aggrieved look that suggested he was going to do that anyway, then lay down alongside his mistress.

Anna was building up more leaves to elevate and protect Heath’s legs when eerie high-pitched notes tickled through the trees, seeking out her ears and their whereabouts.

“Whistling,” Anna realized. Her father whistled like that when he was deep in thought, building houses in his mind or laying fence line. “Whistling through his teeth,” she said. She laid the headlamp near Heath.

“Wait here,” she whispered to Wily, then silently slipped out of the trees. Despite having the cold tuneless whistle to guide her, it took a moment to locate the source. It manifest as the burning end of a cigarette floating through the air fifty feet or so from the airplane.

“Anything?” came a yell, weak with distance, but clear in the crisp air of the autumn night.

“Must have left a butt unstomped,” was the shouted response.

The thugs had finally spotted the tiny fire behind the plane’s wheels. Fortunately, the pilot attributed it to not putting out his cigarette properly.

The circle of orange vanished. He’d turned his back.

“When I holler, you hold the flashlight for me,” he shouted. “I’m going to taxi her up near the fire. She’s getting lonesome out here.” The burning cigarette end reappeared, followed by the crunching shuffling of a man walking without sufficient light.

Behind the red ember, Anna was beginning to make out the shape of the smoker. He was less than twenty feet from the plane. Once the machine was parked near the thugs’ camp, there would be no jimmying open of doors and cutting wires. Come daylight, the plane would lift off with Elizabeth, Leah, and Katie.

Anna slipped Sean’s overgrown knife from the belt of her trousers. Clutching it in her fist, she sprinted toward the oncoming figure. Running on pure instinct and adrenaline, no thoughts sullied her mind or slowed her reflexes.

She was on him before he realized she existed. Knife tucked firmly against her side beneath her arm, blade pointed behind her, she curled up like a sow bug and rolled into the man’s legs. Hard boot leather ripped into her ear. Her injured shoulder shrieked through her bones that she was going to die. Eyesight dimmed.

With a startled “Huh?” the pilot flew ass over teakettle. The thud when he hit the ground was loud enough to be encouraging. Back on her feet, Anna staggered for the airplane, her balance out of whack, her vision doubled. The edge of the wing and the pointed tip of one wheel cover were limned in silver, rendered visible by light ten million years old. It occurred to her she probably should have killed the pilot, but in her condition it wouldn’t have been a sure thing.

“Hey! Hey, goddammit! Get me some help down here. You! Get away from that! Touch her and I swear to Christ I’ll cut your balls off and feed them to the pigs.”

Anna was so close she could have reached out and touched the propeller when he caught her. A huge hand closed on her upper arm. Ruined flesh crushed the bullet into her ulna. Agony drove her to her knees. She willed nerveless fingers not to drop the knife. A boot slammed into her ribs, knocking her to her side. Using the force of the kick and the fall, she rolled beneath the airplane’s engine, into the triangle between the nose and side wheels. Disoriented, she tried to crawl from under the plane, sticking her head out at the precise place where the pilot was standing.

A boot ricocheted off her temple. Swinging her head the way a bull does when deciding whom to gore first, she fixed on the barely flickering light from Heath’s fire—no bigger than a baseball, and the flames so few she could count them—and wormed toward it.

The flames were less than a foot from her nose when she squirmed from beneath the plane. Using the wheel and the side of the fuselage, she clawed her way to her feet. The knife was still held tightly in her hand. Bracing her right forearm against the pilot’s window, she stepped up the fourteen inches to the top of the aluminum wheel cover. In order to retain her balance, she reached for the strut with her left hand.

The arm was finished. It moved only a few inches. Her fingers would not flex. Had she been able to reach the strut, she couldn’t grip it. She needed two good hands, one to anchor herself and one to wield the knife.

“Come out of there,” the pilot shouted. “I’m going to break you in so many pieces you’ll have to be vacuumed up. Help! Get me some help down here!”

Boot leather thudded on aluminum as the pilot kicked and poked under the nose of the plane, trying to locate the intruder.

“What you got?” Reg.

“Get me some light,” the pilot yelled. “Bring the flashlight, God damn it!”

“Keep your fuckin’ pants on, man.” Reg’s voice was closer. He was coming to see what the fracas was about; Reg with a Walther PPK.

Once light hit her, a bullet would hit her, or a man would hit her. Anyway she looked at it, she had about three seconds to live.

Anna put the blade of the knife between her teeth. Leaning against the cabin for support, she grabbed her wounded arm with her good hand and lifted the miserable screaming thing upward until her wrist reached the V between the top of the strut and the wing. With a scream, she jammed her wrist until the bones were wedged tight between the metal of the strut and the underside of the wing.

The arm stabilized her.

Pain had gone beyond pain into a blanketing wave, the precursor of unconsciousness. Before she could succumb, she clutched the hilt of the knife in her right hand, then stabbed upward with every ounce of strength she could muster.

The plane’s aluminum skin was thin. Dull as it was, Sean’s knife pierced it.

“Thankyoubabyjesus,” Anna murmured.

Liquid trickled down her arm. The dangerous, sweet smell of gas burned in her nose. The drip was slow; by the time the fumes reached the fire and ignited, she would have pried her wrist from its trap and be halfway back to the woods.

A flashlight beam cut a slash of silver from the trailing edge of the wing, then a dusty swath across her belly.

“He’s after the goddam airplane!” the pilot shouted.

Screaming down the pain like a wounded panther, Anna wrenched the handle of the knife, twisting the blade. Gasoline gushed out, pouring down her arm and shoulders.

Roaring wordlessly, the pilot slammed into her. Her wrist tore free from the strut. Her feet were knocked from their perch. Airborne, her body flew a dozen feet before it smashed to the ground.

A whoosh of air and blinding light illuminated the underside of the wing and the fuselage. Waving his arms and shrieking the way Anna had seen a hundred stuntmen do in a hundred movies, the pilot emerged from the glare, a man of fire, hands, head, arms made of flames.

A column of fire sprouted from beneath the burning man’s feet and rose to envelop the wing. The gas tank exploded; shrapnel comprised of seared flesh, fire, and aluminum washed over Anna on a tidal wave of superheated air.

FORTY-SIX

They were encamped in what Leah believed was an old equipment shed. Three and a half walls were still standing. The corners were piled with rubble that undoubtedly housed all manner of vermin. A fire blazed where a fourth wall had faced out on the long clearing. Compared with their previous bivouacs, it was warm, almost cozy.

Expecting, perhaps, to have to spend a day or two weathered in at the camp with what he believed was four thugs and four hostages, the pilot had stocked the larder well. For two thugs and three hostages, even after the men had had their fill, there was an absolute cornucopia. Leah thought she was too tired to eat, that she didn’t have the energy to lift food to her mouth, let alone chew it. The smell of cold pork and beans changed her mind.

Lunch’s sandwiches, the only food they’d had in thirty-six hours, should have gone into shrunken stomachs and kept them full all day. Instead, it reminded their stomachs how wonderful food was. Leah’s had started screaming for more within the hour.

Because Heath would have done it, Leah was careful to see that the girls got fed before she ate anything. It wasn’t that she was a bad person, she knew that. Well, perhaps she was a bad person. No one knew what her progenitors’ genetics had been. Clearly, since they’d abandoned her the day she was born, they didn’t have strong parenting instincts. Leah was not accustomed to having the responsibility for feeding others. She was barely accustomed to feeding herself. Food was something a lab tech sometimes left on the workbench, and if she remembered, sometimes she ate it.

With Heath dead none of them believed they should be so callous as to be hungry. Especially Elizabeth, Leah could tell. Young, resilient, she couldn’t help herself and so she ate, but shame kept her eyes downcast.

Since the dude had shot her mother, Elizabeth had either cried silently or, judging by the expressions that rotated across her face, blamed herself for being unable to carry Heath any farther, or plotted revenge on the dude.

Or so Leah surmised. Reading other people’s emotions was another chore she was not accustomed to performing for herself. Not a chore, she corrected herself, an art form. Like drafting. Except not at all like drafting.

After she’d rested she’d be better able to think.

Katie plowed into the food with the pragmatism of her father. Gerald did have emotions. He loved his daughter. Leah thought he liked her well enough. Courting Leah, he’d said he loved her. Leah believed it then. He’d never crushed her heart, never announced he no longer loved her, never had loved her. The truth came slowly, delivered in endless thoughtful kindnesses. Acts of service that masqueraded as love. Not until Leah had seen the genuine adoration in his eyes when Katie was born had she known that what he gave her was an imitation of love.

There had been sadness. Then there was work. Gerald took care of Katie. If he saw her now, hands bound with plastic ties, pouring canned peaches into her mouth between bites of a cinnamon roll—the individually wrapped kind they sell at the cash register in convenience stores—he would be running for wild-caught blueberries to counteract the toxins.

Picking out a round of sliced wiener with filthy fingers and stuffing it into her mouth, Leah realized she and the girls were in a kind of feeding frenzy. Not only were their bodies in need of fuel, there was always the fear the food would be snatched away.

“Hey! Hey, goddammit!” the pilot shouted over the distance between the camp and the plane. “Get me some help down here. You! Get away from that! Touch her and I swear to Christ I’ll cut your balls off and feed them to the pigs.”

Leah and the girls stopped midswallow. As one, they stood, trying for a better view. The far end of the field was shrouded in darkness, the voice of the pilot small with distance, but shriller, more alarmed than before.

“See what he wants,” the dude said to Reg. Reg was leaning against one wall of the ruin, using his jackknife to scrape the last smear of deviled ham from a small tin. Having already consumed enough to send a teenaged boy into shock, Leah assumed it was more for amusement than sustenance.

“It’s too fuckin’ dark, man.” The nonchalance was strained. He didn’t raise his eyes from his ham project, didn’t want the dude to see he was scared to go.

The dude picked up the flashlight and tossed it to him. Reg glanced up in time to catch it before it banged into his head.

For several seconds the two men stared at one another. The dude’s carp eyes won. Reg clicked the light on. Black clothes were sucked into black night and he vanished quickly as he walked out of the camp toward the plane. What remained was swathes of unexpected green scythed from the ground by the flashlight.

“Bring the flashlight, God damn it!” The pilot was screaming, high-pitched and angry.

“Keep your fuckin’ pants on, man,” Reg said.

“He’s after the goddam airplane!” the pilot shouted furiously.

With herd instinct, Leah and the girls closed ranks and stood shoulder to shoulder watching the blank screen of darkness. “Anna trying to disable the plane,” Leah whispered almost inaudibly. Elizabeth nodded. Her eyes welled with tears. Anna had not saved her mother. That had to be hard. Elizabeth talked about Anna as if she were Superwoman, then Anna had let Heath die. What good was the death of thugs or the salvage of Katie’s innocence if she could do nothing to keep Heath alive?

The black box theater blew into shocking life. Darkness shattered into the shape of a man on fire, a creature of fire, crying high and wild and waving its arms. A human torch staggering like a mummy, reaching for an end to pain or a victim for it. Leah placed a hand on either side of Katie’s face. She tried to turn her head so she wouldn’t see. Katie shook free. Leah didn’t try again. She could not tear her eyes away either.

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” breathed the dude. Jimmy’s rifle in one hand, the Colt in the other, he walked to the edge of the firelight.

Shots rang out. The pilot hadn’t had a gun, not one Leah could see. Reg was firing at someone or something. Anna. He had to be shooting at Anna. He was bellowing as he pulled the trigger.

Leah could see nothing but the burning thing. Once human, eaten by fire, it staggered several steps, then turned, the fiery face seeming to look straight into the camp. Behind it fire shot up from the ground, forming a column underneath the airplane wing. Then the plane exploded, a star-blast of fire. The creature was blown to its knees. There were no more cries. In absolute silence, it toppled over. The flames were smothered, but for an eerie blue running across the downed form, painting the shape of a man. Behind him the plane had gone almost dark. The explosion stealing air from the flame.