Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (17 page)

“Where’s Jimmy?” the dude asked suddenly. Though Jimmy had gone at dusk, and it was now full dark, he was just now realizing the little man was missing. So was Heath. Even Sean and Reg seemed not to have noticed that he’d never returned from gathering firewood.

“Taking a piss,” Sean said indifferently.

“Long piss,” the dude said.

Reg flashed a look of alarm as he rose to his feet, the Walther coming out of his pouch like a faithful joey.

“Jimmy!” Sean shouted halfheartedly. “Hey! Jimmy boy!”

Into the listening silence came the howling of a wolf. The sound knifed into the camp cold as an arctic wind. Heath saw the men freeze as it touched them. Another howl followed. Heath knew that howl, or thought she did. Wily. The forest stopped breathing. Then, from far away, came an eerie answering wail that built from a single voice to a chorus.

Heath yearned to howl with them: Anna and Wily and real wolves. Given twenty-four hours with the dude and his gang, even the real wolves seemed like guardian angels. Neither Katie nor Elizabeth woke.

“Wolves. Jesus fuck,” Reg said. Holding his pistol in both hands, arms locked at the elbows, he turned a slow circle, trying to see into the darkness beyond the fire. “Jimmy ain’t comin’ back.” He shoved the barrel of the pistol into his waistband and began snatching down dead branches and throwing them on the fire.

“Find him,” the dude said. Sean started putting on his shoes with a slowness that would have done a recalcitrant four-year-old proud.

“Find him your own self,” Reg retorted. “I’m not leavin’ the fire for that little freak. It’s dark, Dude, in case you haven’t noticed. Even if he wasn’t dog meat, we’d never find him.”

The dude took a burning brand from the fire and walked several steps into the dark beneath the surrounding trees.

“Ain’t like them torches in Hollywood movies, is it?” Reg sneered, as the branch flamed out, embers dropping to the ground.

“Reg’s right,” Sean said tentatively. “We aren’t going to find Jimmy. If he isn’t dead, he’ll come back. If he is dead…”

The dude threw the smoldering wood back onto the fire. Tilting his head back, he stared skyward as if already awaiting the plane.

“Hey, Jimmy!” Sean shouted again.

“Shut the fuck up,” Reg snapped and sat down with his back to the fire, the Walther on his knee.

The shouting awakened Katie and Elizabeth.

“It’s okay,” Heath said. “Nothing bad has happened. At least not to us.”

“It’s okay,” Leah echoed, her comment aimed between her daughter and Heath’s.

Katie blinked with confusion, then lay down again.

Jimmy did not return.

“I’ll take first watch,” the dude said after a while. Sean laid down next to the fire, tucked his hands between his thighs, and slept. Reg did not.

Through the distortion of the heat, Heath watched his head repeatedly droop as he nodded off, then jerk upright, the gun bobbing to attention and making a short arc covering the darkness. Every few minutes he threw more wood onto the fire.

Heath enjoyed the heat, ignored her hunger, and willed her worthless legs not to hop about like demented frogs and disturb Elizabeth. For once, they did as she begged and were still. It took an even greater act of will to keep herself from stroking E’s hair, or otherwise pestering her. The love of a child turned out to be a much fiercer thing than Heath had expected when she’d adopted the girl. She would have felt guilty about not loving Wily as much, except, she suspected, Wily felt much the same as she did about Elizabeth.

Leah, her black-framed glasses halfway down her nose, gazed at the fire with unfocused eyes. The flames lent color to her cheeks. Whether it was real or a trick of the light, Heath was relieved. Leah’s paleness worried her at the best of times. This last twenty-four hours she’d looked like a ghost.

“Tired?” Heath asked, too worn out herself to care that the question was idiotic.

“Not bad” was the surprising reply. “There’s two of us and only one of you,” she reminded Heath. “Three, if you count Katie.”

“I count Katie,” Heath said, in case the child was only feigning sleep.

“Things have been … So much has … I should have done more,” Leah said, sounding lost and angry.

“More than just save my life a few times a day?” Heath asked.

“How did the chair work from the inside?” Leah asked, showing her first true animation of the evening. Heath would have thought that would be the last question on her mind after fighting with the contraption all day.

For a while they talked design and function. The normalcy was a balm. Leah’s murmuring voice was soothing. Heath felt herself relaxing to an extent. Just as she was thinking how nice it would be if only had something to eat, Leah whispered, “I picked some mushrooms.”

Reaching into the pocket screened by her daughter’s sleeping form, Leah drew out three delicious-looking lobster mushrooms and several deer mushrooms. “I’ve been keeping an eye out.” The lenses of her glasses flashed as she shot a surreptitious look toward Sean, who was nearest, then the dude, who, back to the fire, continued to search the scrap of sky tangled in the tree branches. The man had an uncanny ability to make Heath feel he was watching even when his back was turned.

Leah pinched a small white mushroom from the pocket of her shirt and set it on the ground near the other mushrooms but not touching any of them. “Amanita,” she whispered and looked meaningfully at the men. “Destroyer Angel.”

For a moment, Heath’s fatigued brain couldn’t make sense of the word. Then she remembered the previous night, a million years ago, Leah lecturing on which mushrooms were food and which were poison. The Destroyer Angel was exceedingly deadly. A smile plucked up the corners of Heath’s lips, and was answered by a grim smile from Leah. Getting the mushroom from Leah’s pocket into a thug’s gullet would probably prove impossible. For this minute, though, it was enough to know they had a lethal weapon. The mushroom was like a lottery ticket. Odds were a billion to one a person would win, but it bought a day’s worth of dreams.

The wind changed direction. Smoke blew into Heath’s eyes. When it cleared, she saw Sean was awake and staring at them. One toe stuck out of his worn socks like a great white grub. His leather jacket was unzipped. His belly pushed toward the flames, straining the fabric around his shirt buttons. In the apertures between the edges of the fabric, white flesh and dark stiff hairs showed. Letting her gaze pass over the place where he was, Heath tried to make it seem she had not met his eyes.

Sean, like the boogeyman, or certain insane people, might become more dangerous if one made eye contact.

She’d not been quick enough. Whatever the mental switch direct eye contact flipped, flipped in Sean’s brain. Laboriously, he rose to his stocking feet, then hobbled gingerly until he was between them and the fire, blocking light and heat metaphorically and literally. Grunting, he lowered himself to the ground. He arranged his feet by picking up his legs and moving them, much in the same way Heath did. She hoped infection had set in and the pain was unbearable.

A halo of orange fire surrounded his head, throwing his face into shadow. On his cheeks, wider than the back of his skull, gray bristles of a two-day-old beard shone like tiny satanic candles.

“You ladies look all comfy-like,” he said.

Heath had no idea what to say to that. Did he want to chat with his victims? Was he bored? Lonely? Did he think they would care? Or was his plan to evict them from the warmth of the nest they’d made and take it for his loathsome self?

“All curled up like a bunch of puppies, nice and warm,” he said and grinned. His teeth should have been crooked and stained with brown, like the bad guys’ in cowboy movies. Instead, they were white and straight. If they hadn’t been so tiny, it would have been a Pepsodent smile. Heath imagined how it would look after being smashed in with a steel-toed boot.

“What do you want?” she asked. She’d wanted to sound cold and imperious, the way Anna did when she suspected park visitors of killing her rattlesnakes or annoying her coyotes. What came out was the barest frightened whisper.

By the greater exposure of the undersized Hollywood molars, she guessed Sean liked it very much. Had her throat not been so dry, she might have spit in his face. What could he do to her? Kidnap her? Cripple her? Send her to bed without supper?

Elizabeth was what he could do to her.

Heath’s throat grew even dryer. No longer sure she could manage even a whisper, she forced herself to hold his gaze. He didn’t like that. Smile shrank, eyes slitted.

“How about I snuggle right in there between those two little bitches and get me warmed up? Puppies—bitches, get it? I’ll be the big dog.” He laughed.

Heath did not. She was not averse to his snuggling in, if all he intended was to sleep, because it was a sleep from which he would never wake. The moment he’d said it, the lovely image of her two hands pulling a bootlace tightly around his neck and holding it until he was dead shined like a magic lantern on the walls of her mind.

“Me and her and little blondie would just lie happy as spoons in a drawer,” he said.

Heath could not tell if he was taunting her and Leah or coaxing them. Undoubtedly the former. Sean didn’t seem the type who’d waste any time convincing a woman to give him what he wanted when he could take it by force. Whichever it was, his words were exciting him. Back in the day—when she’d had sex now and then—Heath had noted the twitching that penises often displayed before they committed to a full erection. The front of the thug’s trousers appeared to have a small nervous animal within shyly testing the walls of its prison.

“Let me take a look at your feet,” Heath said in hope of distracting him. Her mouth was so dry she’d half expected a puff of dust to come out.

“They’re bad,” Sean complained and obediently pulled off his socks. The stirring of foot and fabric released the vile odor of stinking feet. Even when she’d used them daily, and without mercy, Heath’s feet never stank. Elizabeth’s gym shoes didn’t smell. Two days in the woods weren’t sufficient for this reek, not even given she’d doctored them with feces.

He thrust them toward her. Her legs jumped like those of a gigged frog. Her knee banged Elizabeth’s head. The girl came awake with a startled scream.

In the mind of Sean, this was another extremely humorous event. His guffaws woke Katie. The girls would have woken soon anyway, if only from the excruciatingly creepy vibes the man gave off. His evil was such it would penetrate the unconscious mind.

Leaning forward as best she could, Heath studied his feet with pretended concern.

“They hurt like sonsabitches,” Sean said plaintively. Heath hazarded a glance at his face. The thug, the kidnapper, expected them—or at least her—to pity him, to feel bad that his feet were raw and torn. Expected it. She could tell. His face was as readable as that of a kindergartner showing Mom a skinned knee.

“I bet they do,” she managed.

He waited.

Heath had no idea what for.

“Can you bandage ’em up again or something?” he asked, irritation replacing childishness.

“No bandages. Nobody brought the first-aid kit.” It surprised Heath to have to say it. Could they be so unfortunate as to have been taken by insane kidnappers? Or was that redundant?

“Somebody sure as hell should’ve,” Sean snarled, turning suddenly hostile. He threw back his head, the firelight catching the backs of his ears and turning them red. “Jimmeeeeeee!” he screamed so loudly the four of them flinched. When his head rocked back on his neck, eyes in their direction, Heath could tell game time was over.

He pointed a finger at Katie’s drawn white face. “You!” he said. Before he could order Katie to do whatever he intended, Leah opened her fist and took a bite out of a lobster mushroom the size of half a sandwich.

Sean’s appetite changed gears. “You’ve got food,” he whispered accusingly. His eyes flicked from side to side as he took in the whereabouts of his compatriots. Sharing was clearly not one of Sean’s talents. “Give it to me.”

Still chewing, Leah held it out, the crisp white semicircle of the bite she’d taken clear and cartoonlike against the rusty red of the mushroom. Sean grabbed it off her palm and, lowering it to where it was less likely to attract the attention of Reg or the dude, examined it, turning it over in his dirty hands. “What is it?”

“It’s a lobster mushroom,” Leah murmured softly. “I found several edible varieties of mushrooms today.” Reaching behind Katie, Leah scooped the mushrooms up, then held them out toward Sean. “The white ones are deer mushrooms. The red-colored are lobster.”

Of the little white ones only two were deer mushrooms; the other was the Amanita. He’s a pig, Heath thought. He’ll eat them all. She reached out, plucked up a deer mushroom, popped it into her mouth, then began to chew. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t tell if the mushroom really tasted like moldy cardboard or if it was only her. Uncooked mushrooms made one a little queasy, but Heath was already way beyond a little queasy.

“Hey!” Sean snapped, grabbing for the remaining mushrooms. Hope slowed time. Heath watched his blunt fingers swim through the firelight toward the Amanita. There was time to notice the broken nails, the black wiry hair on the backs of his fingers, the dirt in the creases of his knuckles, time to see Sean eat the Amanita, sicken, and die.

“Were you born stupid?” the dude asked Sean. “Or do you have to work at it?”

Startled by his sudden appearance, Sean yelped.

Reg was on his feet yelling, “What the fuck? What’s happening?”

“Never eat a mushroom that doesn’t come in a can,” the dude said evenly.

Reg saw the mushrooms. “Were you gonna eat that wild shit, man? Even a fucking retard knows not to eat shit you find on the ground.”

The dude, the very image of a god of destruction, stared down at the three of them. Then only at Leah. His fist shot into the midst of them, fast as a boxer’s left jab. It emerged with a handful of Katie’s hair, and Katie with it, shocked into the limpness of a rag doll.

“Don’t play games with me, Mrs. Hendricks,” the dude said. “Sean,” he called without looking away from Leah. “Something to keep the chill off.” He held the child out with the ease of one man handing a used coat to another.