High Country- Pigeon 12 (37 page)

For a long and frightful moment, she couldn't remember where the apron was. Just as she thought she had really and truly lost it, it came back to her. The night she and Scott went to Yosemite Lodge for drinks she'd been wearing it. Scott had noticed. She'd taken it off and thrown it in the backseat of his Mustang along with her day pack. She'd never retrieved it.

"I hid it," Anna said.

"Where?"

"You can't get to it without me." Reflexively, she threw her hand up to protect the side of her face. True to form, Trish struck. This time the barrel rapped across Anna's knuckles. Pain in the small bones of her hand was worse than the pain in her skull, but at least it didn't scramble her brain.

"You tell us," Trish said. "We'll worry about getting it."

"I tell you. You shoot me. What's in that for me?"

Trish whacked and prodded for several more minutes, but Anna held her ground. It wasn't hard. The moment they no longer needed her she was dead. A halfhearted beating was nothing compared to that.

She had no plan, no deep reason for leading them to the apron. She only knew that where she was-point B-was hopeless. The variables had to change before she could manufacture a chance to better her odds.

Tiny put a stop to Trish's redundant and stupefying brand of torture. "All right, Miss Smarty-pants, we'll play it your way one time."

The "Miss Smarty-pants" coming so close on the heels of being bludgeoned about the head struck Anna as terrifically funny. She was going to be killed by a Sunday-school teacher.

Hilarity and battering dizzying her, her mind spun through Tiny's next words.

"We'll go one place. One. You'll give us the apron or we shoot you where you stand."

The need to laugh evaporated. Anna didn't doubt for a moment that Tiny spoke the truth.

"Go toward Ahwahnee," she said and was relieved to feel the car begin to move. During the short drive no one spoke. Anna's mind turned on the coveted apron. She'd liked it because it was stiffer, had more body than the other one. Something must have been sewn into the back panels. Something light and supple, like the interfacing used in cloth belts and collars. Cash was the first thing that came to mind, the cash from the pilot's satchel she'd found among Trish's things. But unless the denominations of the bills were greater than any the U.S. Treasury printed, the apron couldn't hold enough to tempt a businesswoman such as Tiny Bigalo into risking kidnapping and murder to get it back.

Besides, Tiny and Trish didn't feel as if they were motivated by greed. Not at the moment anyway. They were scared. Fear boiled off of them in palpable waves that, when inhaled, left a bitter taste at the back of Anna's throat.

Therefore the lining of the apron must contain papers which, if not retrieved, threatened their lives.

These fragmented ideas banged around in her aching head as they drove through the sleeping valley, the moon casting a perfect light on frosted trees and the glittering shingles of the marvelous old buildings. Blind to the beauty, Anna remained in her own skull.

The pilot's satchel: maps, maybe cash, a change of underwear, a toothbrush. What else would be deemed necessary to the personal health and hygiene of a man flying a plane loaded with weed?

Names and addresses of contacts. The thought illuminated Anna's dark contemplations so suddenly she glimpsed the cartoon lightbulb above her. The apron contained the pilot's little black book with the names of the drug dealers he bought from and/or sold to. Trish must have taken it along with whatever else the satchel contained.

"You tried a bit of blackmail, did you?" Anna asked. "Thinking you could squeeze the big boys for some real money?"

"Trish is a fool," Tiny said. "Where to? Don't mess with me. I'm old and it's past my bedtime and I never liked you anyway."

They'd passed the village. Anna was taking them to the employee housing where Scott's Mustang would be parked. She'd not thought much further than that. No brilliant idea came to her now. "Turn left," she said. "I'll tell you when to stop."

Tiny did and they drove down the quiet lane behind the row of homes facing onto the meadow. Scott's Mustang was parked behind the house he shared with Jim Wither.

"Stop," Anna said as they drew level with it. "Park here."

"Where's the apron?" Trish demanded as if she'd expected to see it hanging on a tree marked with a big red X.

"I'm taking you to it," Anna said irritably and cringed, but the expected blow didn't come. "We get out," she said. Tiny turned off the ignition and Anna heard a satisfying thunk as the automatic locks popped open.

"Me first," Trish said.

For a woman so young Trish Spencer was well versed in controlling prisoners. Fortunately, Tiny didn't take well to orders from underlings. She took off her seat belt, opened the driver door and turned her back on Anna.

Quicker than she would have believed possible given the slings and arrows which had abused her body over an impossibly long day, Anna grabbed the dash with her right hand, the back of her seat with the left, pivoted on her butt, lifted her feet above the console and with all the strength of desperation planted both boots in the small of Tiny's back.

The little woman shot out, smashed into the half-opened car door and fell face-first onto the roadway. Anna released her seat belt and scrambled after her, hoping to win free of the car before Trish realized what was going on and made it around from the rear passenger door.

Anna's hands were on the door's kick-plate when whatever it was that hit her hit. A boot. A knee. Not the barrel of the handgun; Anna'd become intimate with the feel of its caress.

Had it been light the world would have grayed out. As it was dark, Anna merely lost her sense of up and down, time and place. The stunning was short-lived. When her knees and elbows banged into the frozen asphalt, "down" was firmly reestablished. A new ache tampered with her tender skull. Trish had a fistful of hair. Jerking Anna's head up, she rammed the silencer into her ear.

"Don't shoot her," Tiny hissed. She'd come to all fours and crouched nearly nose to nose with Anna, two dogs ready to fight. "One sound out of you and I rip your fucking tongue out with my fingernails. Got that?"

Anna nodded. Tiny's fingernails, undoubtedly acrylic, were an inch long and painted the color of old blood. From the faint spill of moonlight through the trees, Anna could just see the woman's face: black and white, all eyes and years. Nosferatu. The right side of her face, from cheekbone to jaw, glittered in black stripes where the ice and pavement had scraped away the skin.

Deliberately, Tiny raised one long-nailed hand and raked hard down the side of Anna's face.

"We'll be the Bobbsey Twins," she whispered and Anna wondered if the headwaitress was entirely sane or if she'd delivered one too many turkey quesadillas.

Using the door for assistance, Tiny pulled herself to her feet. "Get her up," she ordered as she retrieved her coat from the backseat and put it on. Anna felt herself being lifted by the hair and was surprised at the younger woman's strength. Trish did it one-armed; the other arm, with the hand holding the gun, never wavered. The cold metal of the silencer's tip pressed and banged into the cartilage of Anna's ear till she could have screamed with the constant invasion of pain and noise.

"Where?" Tiny demanded.

The Mustang was less than ten feet away, the apron probably still behind the front seat where she'd tossed it nearly a week before. Nothing in that ten feet would save her, would even change the world enough so she could save herself. Once they had the apron they would kill her. If Scott had seen it, taken it inside, they'd shoot her because it wasn't there.

"Scott and Jim's," Anna managed. Her throat had gone dry. Talking was difficult. She'd not meant to endanger anyone else. It was against law enforcement ethics and against her personal code of conduct. For a brief flicker of thought she was ashamed at how effortlessly she would sell others out when her life hung in the balance.

"Go." Tiny twitched her head, first at Anna then at Trish. Anna led the way up the concrete walk to the cottage's door, not a back door as she'd have expected from the ginger-breaded porch and tended garden on the meadowside, but a second "front" door complete with doorbell and miniature wooden porch.

Light showed around the edges of the blinds on one of the windows flanking the entrance. Jim and Scott had yet to turn in for the night.

As she weaved up the narrow walk, the last blow to the head having awakened the cumulative effects of the others, Anna wasted brain time with justifications: Tiny wouldn't let Trish kill Jim or Scott-too much history between them, even some affection at one time. And Jim and Scott might not take Anna's part. There was a very real possibility she was trading two problems for four and one of those as strong as nine years working out in Soledad's weight room could make a man.

She hadn't sold out, she told herself. She was just playing for time, fighting for one more roll of the dice in hopes her luck would change. Her life expectancy in Tiny's car had been short, in the deserted campground even shorter. Maybe Wither's living room would present new possibilities. Maybe an armed law enforcement ranger would drop by for a post-midnight snack. Maybe the phone would ring and cause a moment's distraction.

Maybe Santa would come down the chimney two weeks early and bring Anna a nice stocking full of hand grenades.

The toe of her shoe hit a raised paving stone. The shock with its echo of pain in head and ankle woke her from the trance she'd fallen into.

"If she so much as breathes funny, kill her," Tiny ordered.

"Will do." Trish dug the barrel of the gun into the small of Anna's back.

"Stop that, for Chrissake," Anna snapped. What with one thing and another, fear for her life was turning into massive irritation. One more poke and bullets be damned, she was going to punch somebody. An old, old memory flared up; when Molly was in her twenties she'd had a little butterball cat named Sophie. Sophie was the sweetest of God's creatures till she was crossed, then she turned into psycho cat, a buzz saw of teeth and claws animated by the unleashed power of steam-driven hissing. Though she weighed only seven pounds she could leave grown women cowering. Anna knew how Sophie felt.

Brain turned back on and wit sharpened by anger, she set about damage control in the exposure of Scott and Jim, presumably innocent bystanders.

"Scott and Jim are idiots," she said derisively. "They don't know they've got the apron and wouldn't know to do anything but throw it in the washing machine if they did. A faggot and an ex-con; not exactly the cream of the intelligentsia." Anna hadn't much of a feel for what the relationship was between Tiny and Wither or Wooldrich, and none at all as to what Trish thought of the men. She was just spewing toxins in hope of making somebody sick enough to get stupid.

"They're sure going to be surprised to see you, Trish," she went on. "It's almost going to be worth the price of admission to this farce to see their faces. Everybody thinks you're dead, your body frozen into a corpsicle up on LowerMercedPassLake. Once word gets out you are alive and well, stalking around pointing guns at cooks, California will become way too hot for you."

Trish stopped. Anna heard the whisk of her sneakered feet on the icy walk cease.

"Tiny," Trish said.

"Stop," Tiny ordered.

Anna did and stayed very still, not wishing to trigger any fingers.

"I'd rather stay dead," Trish said. "What do we do? Shoot the three of them?"

"Now there's a bright idea," Anna answered before Tiny could. "Like the Manson Family. Jesus. There'd be an army of federal agents for a body count like that. Bet you didn't know that. Murder goes to the FBI unless the superintendent says otherwise. Hair, prints, DNA, fiber-the whole Thursday-night lineup. How careful have you been tonight?"

"Bullshit," Trish breathed, but she believed. Anna could tell by the lack of conviction in her obscenity.