Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (8 page)

“Throw the bag on the fire,” the dude said abruptly.

Heath had found, if not an Achilles’ heel, at least a small breach in the stone in which the dude had encased himself. Weakness terrified him. Four men, four women, four sleeping bags. The women were destined to sleep on the cold ground. Since that was infinitely superior to having to share bag space with the bastards, Heath chose not to mind.

Reg’s head popped up in the wash that accessed the river. It was dark and he was dark and his hoodie was black. When the roaring fire caught his eyes Heath felt a jab of terror as old as mankind, a horror of the monsters of the night.

“What about the canoe and all the shit they got in it?” Reg asked. “Burn that, too?”

“We’ll sink it in the morning. Not near shore. Chop a hole in it and drag it out till we’re sure it goes down.”

Reg’s orange-and-black eyes vanished. Heath’s scalp began to crawl down from where it had climbed to the top of her head.

“I need some things,” Leah said softly. “To make it easier to move Heath.”

Leah had not abdicated; she had been studying the chair, thinking of how it might be altered so Heath wouldn’t be left behind with a bullet in her head. She’d been planning a way to take her with them. Relief flooded Heath. She had not wanted to die, not wanted to sacrifice herself for the greater good.

For what seemed a long time the dude said nothing. His face betrayed no emotion. The hand with the pistol was as relaxed as ever. His stillness did not feel like calm. It felt like the counted seconds between when lightning strikes and thunder cracks.

“Leah can do it,” Katie said, still attached to the creep by cable ties. “Leah loves mechanical things. She wishes I was a robot.”

“That’s not true,” Leah said, but she didn’t take her eyes off the chair.

“Reg,” the dude said.

Reg’s wicked-looking eyes glowed back from the darkness below the riverbank.

“Cut Mrs. Hendricks loose,” the dude said. “She needs tools so you can roll your new investment overland. See to it she gets nothing else.” The tip of his pistol moved an inch toward the Fox. From him it seemed like a sweeping gesture.

Like one in a dream, Leah walked around the fire to the shallow ravine leading to the water. Katie watched her mother walk out of the light. Despair made her face seem that of a spirit no longer tethered to the earth, a balloon come loose and liable to float up into the branches had she not been tied to the thug’s belt.

“Katie’s only a little girl,” Heath said mildly. “Her hands are tied. She can’t hurt anybody. Would it be okay if she sat over here by me?”

The dude rotated his eyes to settle them just above Heath’s head. She made an effort to keep both fear and pleading off of her face. Sean was the sort that would feast on a victim’s fear. The dude seemed beyond even that twisted recognition of their humanity.

“No,” he said.

The destruction of the camp continued. Heath had hopes the invaders would build the fire so high that the Forest Service would send someone to investigate.

Minutes passed. Fire burned. Through the leaping, devouring light, Heath could see that E, hands bound like Katie’s, had dropped to her knees. Her head was bent forward, in a pose unsettlingly like that assumed by a woman about to be beheaded.

Heath rubbed her face, trying to pry loose the terror. She needed to clear her mind, look for weaknesses, opportunities, think like a heroine. The effort was in vain. Fear clouded her vision. Uncertainty made every considered act a potential path to destruction.

She realized she was praying; then she realized she was praying not to God but to Anna. Horror of theistic retribution froze the unvoiced words. Sorry, God. Sorry, Anna. She sent the thoughts up into the night with the sparks from the all-devouring fire.

Leah returned, trailed by Reg carrying a red toolbox. He set it on the bank between the camp and the river. Heath knew the box. Leah always carried it. She was as faithful to the battered metal box as Heath’s aunt the pediatrician was to her black leather medical bag. Like a doctor’s bag, the toolbox opened in the center and folded out into two cascading trays, each with several compartments. The larger tools were in the bottom.

“Open it,” the dude ordered. Reg opened the box and sorted through it.

Jimmy peeked over the black man’s shoulder into the toolkit. “Dude, bitch has a saw in there!”

Reg picked it out of the box. In his hand it looked Barbie-sized. “Stay back,” he said. “She’s liable to give you a manicure.”

Sean snickered. Jimmy sulked. The dude showed nothing. Heath wondered if his lack of affect went clear to the bone, if he was without imagination or humanity.

“I’ll need two paddles from the canoe, the LED lantern, and someone to hold it,” Leah murmured, her eyes on Heath’s wheelchair as if nothing else mattered.

“Jimmy, get the lamp,” the dude said. Jimmy sprang to the small pile of items yet to be burned, salvaged, or stowed and picked up the lantern.

“Where do you want it, Dude?” Had he been a dog with a tennis ball he couldn’t have been more pleased with himself. He all but wagged his tail to be of service.

Thinking of tails, Heath dared a glance to where Wily lay. She’d been careful not to look, not to remind the thugs he existed and was still awaiting execution. Wily’s head was down and he wasn’t moving, but the bright brown eyes that met hers assured her he was still alive.

“Get the lamp going and set it beside Mrs. Hendricks,” the dude ordered.

The chore proved too much for Jimmy.

Leah turned the lamp on.

Leah on the bank, Heath by the fire, Katie tied to Beer Gut, Elizabeth on the other side of camp. Heath wondered if isolating them, not allowing them to comfort one another, was coincidence or a control mechanism. Her observation of the dude suggested he instinctually divided and conquered. A natural Machiavelli.

“Elizabeth, could you bring me my cigarettes?” Heath asked her daughter.

Without looking to the dude for permission, E rose gracefully despite the bound hands and the knock on the head. Circling around the fire, she surreptitiously petted Katie’s hair as she passed Sean. Heath doubted that at the age of fifteen she would have had the sense to comfort another girl in shared misery.

The cigarettes were beside Heath’s abandoned camp chair. Elizabeth retrieved both cigarettes and chair, then came and sat next to her mother.

The dude watched but did not stop her. The isolation had been coincidental, not inborn cunning. Heath felt better with E close, and better knowing the dude was not as all-seeing and all-knowing as his sphinxy face would lead one to believe. She moved her poor old butt up onto the kind seat cushion and smiled at her daughter.

Reg fished the Walther from his trousers. He’d stowed the gun in his waistband in order to carry the toolbox. As inner-city fashion decreed, he wore his pants low and baggy. The gun had been swallowed and come to rest in the nether regions of his drawers.

Leah sat down in the wheelchair and stared into the fire. Heath had seen her go into creative trances a couple of times before. Under the guns of evil men, it seemed unlikely, unless work was where she hid when she was frightened. That would account for Katie being given over to nannies while Leah spent her life in a lab. Working with living creatures was far more angst-ridden than working with metal and plastic.

The fire died to a stinking smoldering heap of melted nylon and blackened tin, the occasional gout of flame darting up as proof of life. Heath wondered if Anna’s red metal fuel bottle, the one in which she traditionally carried a nice Cabernet, had been found and tossed on the fire. She really could have used a drink. For a moment, she fantasized about getting the men drunk, then sidling up to them in good old succubus style and slitting their throats with Sean’s great big knife.

Leah continued to sit motionless in the wheelchair, the toolbox at her feet, her eyes on the dwindling fire. Heath began to lose hope that she was absorbed in the problem at hand and worry that she had gone catatonic. Either way, she envied Leah her absorption. The only respite she herself had from worrying was the endless fussy complaints of her legs. Every minute or so she had to shift her weight to keep the pressure from cutting off the blood flow in any one part of her butt more than another. Fatigue and tension were causing more spasms than usual, her feet kicking out. It was a cruelty she’d not been warned of, that legs, deaf to her commands, would, of themselves, flip about with such vigor.

Through the distortion of the heat, she could see Katie. The altruistic Sean had finally let her go. He’d even given her one of the remaining sleeping bags. She lay on her side, her hands beneath her cheek, her eyes closed. Heath hoped she slept.

“Try to get some sleep,” Heath murmured to Elizabeth. “I have a feeling you’ll need it.”

“Why don’t you lie down and let me keep watch?” E returned.

Until then, Heath hadn’t realized that that was what she was doing. She was keeping the watch. She could not overhaul a wheelchair; she could not keep Sean’s eyes from Katie, or the dude’s fist from Elizabeth, or a bullet or knife from Wily. Witnessing was the only act she could do, so she would witness.

Sunrise was five hours away.

Heath tried to enter into Leah’s world, or the world she imagined the engineer had retreated to, a place of sprockets, cogs, and fighting friction. Leah had created the wheelchair for rugged sports. The seat was a single unit, a molded cup of hard plastic that could be snapped off the lightweight titanium frame and used with other devices. The twenty-inch quick-release wheels were wider than those customarily used in civilized settings and had a deeper tread.

Clamped to the side of the chair was one of Heath’s indispensible items. The manufacturer called it a Tilt ’n’ Turner. Elizabeth dubbed it “Jack,” as in jack-of-all-trades. It was a custom-designed mechanism that could support up to a hundred and forty pounds and could lock in any setting at any angle. Heath used it to support everything from her cell phone to a 1949 Harley engine she was rebuilding. The Harley engine transport had not been a success. Jack had not failed; the engine just weighed more than Heath and tipped over the chair.

“Two sleep, two watch. Two-and-a-half-hour shifts,” the dude announced. “Sean, Reg, you’re up first.”

The dude and Jimmy retired to lie on two of the sleeping bags. Reg squatted near enough to Leah that he could shoot her before she could run him over. Sean paced, rifle in hand, looking out as Reg looked in.

Each time Sean passed by where Katie lay, his eyeballs stayed on her inert form a little longer, eyeing her the way a rat would eye a piece of cheese in a trap, trying to get up the courage to go for it. Heath dragged Elizabeth’s bound hands onto her lap and held them tightly.

“I’ll be okay, Mom,” Elizabeth whispered. “I think I’m too old for him.”

Heath thought she might be right. Katie was thirteen, but she looked no more than eleven. Heath told herself it wasn’t bad to be happy a monster selected a child other than hers.

Sean’s passes grew slower. Finally he stopped and stared hungrily down at Katie’s small body. When he raised his head he caught Heath and Elizabeth watching him.

“I’m gonna kill that fuckin’ dog,” he said abruptly.

He must have seen the judgment in their eyes, Heath thought. Now he would murder Wily to punish them.

Rifle tucked under his arm, he stalked around the fire, took a ball-peen hammer from Leah’s tool box, and moved toward the tree where Wily had fallen.

Elizabeth closed her eyes and hid her face on Heath’s shoulder the way she used to when she was a little girl. Forcing herself to keep her eyes on the thug so she might witness Wily’s passing, Heath made solemn promises to kill Sean one day.

The thug stopped, stared at the ground, then into the woods, then at the ground again.

“Hey, Reg,” he said. “The dog’s disappeared.”

Reg’s features quaked slightly, as if he’d walked into a glass door. “Stuff doesn’t just disappear, man. Something takes it.”

“Wolves,” Elizabeth said.

ELEVEN

“Wolves,” E said.

Anna saw the wisp of a smile that blew across Heath’s face. Safe in the black bosom of the woods, on a slight rise no more than thirty paces from the camp, she smiled unseen back at her friend as she smoothed down the fur on Wily’s neck.

Dressed and hooded in dark colors, perched on a downed tree, her back against an upthrust limb, she knew herself to be as invisible as she felt. Wily, too, had all but disappeared. He was designed with protective coloration in mind, his uneven fur brown or gray or gold—the color seeming to shift subtly depending on the background.

“Wolves’d be scared of the fire,” Reg said uncertainly.

“The fire’s almost dead,” Heath noted.

“Shut the fuck up about wolves,” Reg snarled. Through a few intervening branches, Anna saw him stuff the gun into the pouch pocket of his hoodie. Hands free, he began tossing pieces of deadwood on the fire.

“Leave it,” Sean said. “Dog just crawled off to die. Dogs do that.”

“I wish people did,” Reg said sullenly.

“Maybe it was the windigo,” Heath said.

This was a story Anna had told around campfires on Isle Royale when she was a young ranger. She’d told it to Heath when she’d invited her to northern Minnesota, where the windigo lived.

“What the fuck’s a windigo?” Reg asked, sneaking glances at the woods.

“It’s a legend in these parts,” Heath replied.

“Not to the people who’ve actually seen it,” Elizabeth said in a low voice.

“Cut the crap,” Reg said.

“The Algonquin Indians believe that if a person ever resorts to cannibalism—like the Donner Party—the demon of the windigo takes them over. Afterward they crave human flesh. They hunt the woods of these parts at night,” Heath said.

“It’s not a demon, Mom. That’s stupid,” Elizabeth said. “It’s like an infection. The reason the stories happen is because the winters are so bad up here, people do eat people and get infected.”

“It’s just a myth,” Heath said to Reg.

“There was that guy in Duluth…,” Elizabeth said.