Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (5 page)

A sensible person would have hopped in the canoe and paddled for help, but Heath knew Anna hadn’t. She couldn’t, no more than Heath could shut off her fear for Elizabeth. Anna was out there. As long as the four jackasses of the apocalypse didn’t realize that, there was a chance.

Elizabeth wouldn’t give Anna away. Heath could count on her. Trauma had not destroyed E, it had made her wiser than her years. Leah might be the smartest human being on the planet, but Heath had no idea what the scientist would do when she and her daughter were the lab rats. If Heath, who’d once made her living leading difficult climbs, had very possibly pissed herself in terror, what must an otherworldly brainiac be suffering?

Leah didn’t share her inner self with the world, not even, apparently, with her sole offspring. Docile as a robot with the power switched off, she was watching the potbellied scumbag retie Katie’s wrists with plastic ties. Shock, Heath told herself. Leah was wasn’t used to not being in control.

After a day and a half with Katie, Heath guessed Katie would offer Jesus Christ up to the Romans if she thought it would get her an extra hour of TV a night. Katie would give up Anna in a heartbeat if she saw any profit in it. Then again, if there was nothing to be gained, Katie might keep the secret to her grave just to spite the riffraff who dared handle her so roughly.

Putting her lips so close to E’s ear she could smell the wood smoke in her hair, Heath whispered, “Elizabeth?” Beneath her cheek Elizabeth’s head nodded fractionally.

“Play dead.” Foolish as it might be, E flat to the ground, not moving, not looking in the direction of the men, made Heath less afraid for her. Rather like pulling the covers over your head so the monster in the closet won’t eat you, she mocked herself.

“Get up,” the dude said in a voice so conversational, so easy, it bored a hole in Heath’s mind that sucked the sane universe through into a place where water ran uphill and the sun set in the east.

“What do you guys want?” Heath demanded. “What in the hell do you want from us? Whatever it is, take it and go.” The thug, Sean, laughed an ugly grunting laugh.

The dude said nothing. He stepped closer, melding in with the dark canopy of leaves, as tall and unknowable as a giant redwood. Nostrils flared black. Cavernous eyes were deep behind cheekbones sharp as knives. Heath was seeing not the man but the skull under the flesh. Nothing shone behind the eye sockets, nothing. Windows to the soul opening onto a room inhabited by cobwebs and cockroaches. The dude would shoot her and Elizabeth where they lay rather than repeat himself.

He nudged Elizabeth’s shoulder with the toe of his boot.

Heath swatted his foot away. “Let me,” she said, glad to have a reason to turn her eyes from his face as she shook E’s shoulder gently. “E, wake up. Get up. Seriously rotten ice. Get up.”

Rotten ice was what caused the fall that crippled Heath. “Rotten ice” was the phrase they used when something was deadly serious. Not that E wouldn’t realize armed men appearing out of nowhere and killing the family dog was a serious situation; Heath said it to cancel out her previous order to play dead.

Elizabeth got to her hands and knees, then wavered to a standing position. Grace and agility gone, she moved like an old drunk. Weaving, she found her feet. Blood dripped from her nose to her upper lip. The bastard had hit her so hard it made her nose bleed. Furious, Heath wanted to fly at the dude and rip him to pieces. She hated being confined to the earth like a worm, gazing up at nostrils and armpits; hated being unable to kick the son of a bitch in the balls. Frustration turned to tears and poured down her face.

Crying like a fucking baby, she flagellated herself as her eyes flooded, blurring the looming man-beast. “I’m not crying because I’m afraid of you!” she yelled, though that was not entirely true. “I’m crying because I can’t have what I want. Your head on a spike.”

Reacting to her outburst not at all, he pocketed his pistol, then closed his oversized hand around Elizabeth’s upper arm, fingertips meeting on her bicep. His nails were clean and clipped. His cuticles were healthy and whole, not cracked like those of a man who worked with his hands.

“What are you doing out here?” Heath asked, trying to sound reasonable, civilized, a person other people didn’t kick or kill.

“Jimmy,” he said, ignoring the question as well as the questioner.

That, at least, Heath was accustomed to. People had a lot of reasons not to see a woman in a wheelchair, let alone one flopping about in the dirt. As she was trying to think of a way her invisibility might work for her, the small bearded man trotted over and pointed the rifle at her head.

Dragging Elizabeth with him, the dude moved to where Leah and Katie knelt. Reaching down with his free hand, he grabbed a handful of hair and lifted Katie effortlessly to her feet.

“Leah!” Katie cried.

“You didn’t have to do that,” snapped Elizabeth.

Leah scrambled up awkwardly, her hands bound.

“Leah!” Katie cried again.

“Do what they want,” Leah murmured, not even trying to move closer to the child.

Katie’s fine blond hair, usually tucked behind her ears, fell over her face in a veil. Without her hands she couldn’t push it aside. Acutely aware of how it felt when suddenly robbed of abilities one never considered crucial until they were taken away, Heath wanted to shout at Leah to sweep the hair out of her daughter’s eyes for her.

“I have money,” Leah said in just over a whisper. “I can pay you if you let us alone.”

The dude turned his skull back in Heath’s direction, his sleek mustache moving like a drugged ferret as he said, “Now you,” in the same tone a bored receptionist might say, “Have a seat.”

“Dude,” said the bearded man, the one with the rifle trained on Heath. Umber specks, spit out with the word, added to a brown freckling on the front of the new coat. He jerked his chin. The beard, grizzled with gray, dark brown streaks running from the corners of his mouth, poked out of the neck of his jacket, pointing at something beyond the fire.

Robo-butt ATV, her wheelchair.

“Bitch is a crip.” Jimmy sounded affronted, as if Heath had ceased using her legs for the sole purpose of making his life harder. He spit a stream of tobacco juice into the fire, where it snapped and sizzled. The last drop trickled into his beard, adding to the brown stain. “Be doin’ her a favor.” Sober concentration slowing his chewing, he made tiny circles in the air with the barrel of the rifle, making a game of where he would put the first bullet.

The dude’s cheekbones and chin lifted, the invisible eyes shifting in their shadowy sockets. “Are you crippled?” he asked.

Please pass the salt. Did you get all your classes? How’s the wife and kids? Are you crippled? I have a great big gun.

Heath shook her head, trying to rid herself of the unreality swarming around her ears and eyes like a plague of gnats.

“Whose chair is it?” he asked, mistaking her intent.

“No,” Heath managed. Her voice was as weak and breathy as if she’d run a mile rather than crawled two yards. The tears had been humiliating enough. She’d not yet found the courage to look and see if the crotch of her trousers was wet. Willing her voice steady in an attempt to retain some shred of dignity, she said, “The wheelchair is mine.”

Her voice was firm, clear, much better. As this self-scrutiny flickered through her thoughts quick as summer lightning, she realized how desperately she wanted to be brave for E, and for Anna, who she prayed was even now pulling a miracle out of thin air to save them.

“Are you crippled?” he asked again, using the exact same modality he’d used the first time, the way a Chatty Cathy doll would say, “I love you,” each time the ring in the back of its neck was pulled.

Nothing behind the eye sockets. Nothing behind the voice. No sympathy to play on. No guilt to trip. No heartstrings to pluck.

“I can’t walk,” Heath said, startled at what sounded like defiant pride in her voice. “I broke my back. My legs are paralyzed.”

“Hey, Dude,” Reg said, his voice deep and filled with life compared to the dude’s.

Unexpected, close, the sound shattered Heath’s brittle facade of courage like a stone shattering glass. She jerked and squawked. Elizabeth echoed her.

Ears full of the noise of her daughter’s heart breaking, Leah’s murmured offers, and the thoughts crackling in her head, Heath hadn’t heard the black man move from the other side of the camp.

Having circumnavigated the clearing, Reg was standing staring down at the crumpled form of Wily. The pewter-colored gun—the Walther, she remembered—was held loosely in his long-fingered right hand. He tapped the barrel absentmindedly against his thigh in waltz time—
one,
two, three,
one
—the way Heath’s aunt Gwen would tap her pen against her teeth when she was thinking. In her late seventies, Gwen predated computers. She’d grown up with a pen in her hand. Reg looked as if he’d grown up with a gun in his.

“Dude,” Reg said again, louder this time.

“What?” The dude had lost no composure when she and Elizabeth squeaked, lost none when Reg interrupted him, but Heath thought his virtually affectless voice was flatter than before. Could a man of hollows, holes, and empty places get angry? Heath thought not. He would only become more efficient. Unlike the rattlesnake, or the hissing cat, he would give no warning beforehand.

“Dog’s not dead, man,” Reg said, squatting and reaching toward Wily.

Wily’s growl was more beautiful than a choir of angels. Heath started to cry again. She pushed the palms of her hands hard on the ground in the hope that the bites of small stones would distract her from another embarrassing outburst.

“Wily!” Elizabeth cried.

“Don’t,” the dude said before she could run to the dog.

Elizabeth didn’t.

Good girl, Heath thought. E had always been a quick learner.

“Maybe you just knocked it out. One back leg’s kinda weird, but it’s not dead. You’re not dead, are ya, boy?” Reg said.

Again Wily growled. The sound was stronger this time, and it made Heath absurdly happy in an absurdly terrifying world.

“Shoot it,” the dude said flatly.

“No!” Elizabeth screamed at the man with the pewter gun. In the same breath, Heath screamed, “No!” at her daughter, trying to abort any impulsive action that could get her killed.

“Man, I ain’t shootin’ no dog,” Reg said.

Reg, the black man, born with a silver gun in his mouth, the man Heath had dismissed with the half-formed tag “urban gangbanger,” didn’t want to kill an old dog. A rush of gratitude strong enough to be mistaken for love washed over her. Stockholm syndrome went from theoretical historical to practical possible.

So the bastard didn’t jump at the chance to shoot a dog, she told herself. That was not enough on which to base a long-term relationship.

The dude grunted, but not like a pig. It was more like the sound Heath imagined when characters in Dickens’s books said, “Harrumph.”

A moment passed; the silence stretched thin. Heath imagined that the man called “the dude” was deliberating whether he would kill Reg for insubordination or let him live. The drama of it kept her eyes on the big man’s face. In the life of everyone there could come a time when a watcher chooses whether to kill or rob or rape. If the choice is not to, one walks on never knowing that a devil had set crosshairs on one’s life.

Reg didn’t take his eyes off Wily, but he must have sensed a bit of what Heath was reading into the dude’s pregnant stillness. “I mean, like, you know, people might hear the gunshots and shit,” Reg excused his inaction.

“It’s hunting season,” said the avid troll keeping a rifle bead on Heath. “Nobody’ll think nothin’ about guns going off.”

“No shit?” Reg asked. “Bubba’s going to be blasting at everything that moves?”

Reg wasn’t from the urban enclaves in Minnesota, Heath guessed. More like Chicago, New Orleans, or Houston. Other than the inner-city cant, he didn’t have an accent. It was possible he’d been bounced around the circuit: Los Angeles, Chicago, Jackson, New Orleans, Los Angeles as trouble and fed-up relatives moved him on. In their own way, people who had grown up on that path had voices as homogeneous as the Twin Cities’ newscasters.

“Better put on something red,” Jimmy said. “You’re looking a lot like Bambi.”

“Shut up.” It was the flat voice of the dude.

Reg shut up, postadolescent attitude shut down. Jimmy didn’t say another word.

“The dog,” said the dude. “One of you shoot it, club it, or stomp on its head if you want to. Just kill it.”

EIGHT

Reg, the black man with the Walther, walked away. The one they called the dude stood basilisk-like, staring at the fallen dog. His eyes shifted from Wily’s body. Anna let her breath out slowly.

After her initial reconnaissance, she had gone a ways upriver, climbed the Fox’s bank, then made her way back over the whispering pine needles. Behind a red pine, thick and spiky branches making a rood screen she could peek through, she spied on the camp. Wily’s resurrection, and subsequent death sentence, had taken place no more than six paces from the tree she had chosen.

Wily was coming around. She watched his eyeballs moving beneath the brown fur. First one eye opened, then the other. For a short space of time, they had the fogged look of a dreamer. Nostrils quivered, scent informed, and his eyes not only cleared but fixed on her tree. His tail thumped the ground, and his ears pricked.

Wily had a lousy poker face. There was no point in moving. Anywhere she was near enough to observe, he would be able to smell her. Maybe he’d have some kind of animal instinct not to betray her presence. Then again, he was named for a trickster.

Hoping out of sight would be out of mind for her canine friend, Anna quit spying, turned her back to the tree’s trunk, then sat down, careful to keep all of her parts out of view. Leaning her head back against the rough bark, she tried to formulate a plan. With the men awake and watching, there was little she could do. If three slept while one kept watch, she might be able to kill the lookout, get a firearm, then kill the rest.