Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (21 page)

“Goddammit, hold up! I’m with you. Wood, fire, heat. I get it. Wait up!”

The baritone bellow snapped Anna back into the hollow beneath the boulders. The purr was Wily’s subvocal growling.

Less than ten yards from their shelter, Reg was trotting by.

The rain had stopped. Without its blur and distraction, Anna felt exposed, the dead Jimmy’s red checks blinking
HERE SHE IS.

She had to be more careful, stay alert, stay in her body. Because she had chosen to ignore hunger and fatigue did not mean they had chosen to ignore her. With cold temperatures added to the mixture, confusion awaited behind every drifting curtain of the mind. This was the time climbers fell, hikers lost their way, and campers cut their fingers off with the kindling hatchet.

“Hold up,” Reg yelled.

Obviously Sean or the dude had already passed by, and neither Anna nor Wily had noticed. They could have been shot like sitting ducks, fishes in a barrel.

Reg tromped into the woods out of sight. He and whoever he followed were backtracking. Anna doubted she would have missed it if the hostages had been herded by, and knew Wily wouldn’t have. Leah, Katie, Heath, and Elizabeth were still out on the burn, one thug with them as guard.

Wood. Fire. Heat. Those were Reg’s words.

The dude or Sean, followed by Reg, had come back into the forest to gather wood. So near the burn, small flash fires and inroads of flame had thinned the underbrush. They’d have a bit of a walk before they found anything resembling fuel.

Anna pressed her lips to Wily’s ear and whispered, “Did you notice any decent shelter back a ways?” A sense of the ridiculous echoed in the back of her mind. Then she caught Wily’s steady gaze. “Me neither. These rocks are it. Heath and E, they have to shelter here, or they could die. A cold front is blowing in, driving the rain southeast.” Saying the words startled her. Only in her flying dream had she seen the cold front.

Absorbing an eerie shiver, she rose to her feet. Not the fluid motion of her youth, or even the willpowered muscle of recent years. She had to use the rock walls to get from a crouch to her feet. Wily wavered to a standing position beside her. Neither made a mad dash to do anything constructive. “Reg and whoever have to come back this way,” she whispered. “If we point this out, think they’ll have sense enough to use it?”

Wily cocked his head and looked up at her. He doubted it.

“We can’t give ourselves away. No dropped dog collars or arrows made of sticks. It has to seem like their idea.”

For her own amusement, Anna occasionally practiced hiding in plain sight. Placing herself in clear view, but in such a way that the hiker’s eye would naturally be drawn away from her. Most people walked by without ever noticing her. Never had she practiced calling attention to herself—or an item—without using signals or signposts clearly human in origin.

While she pondered, Wily hobbled over where Reg had walked past. Sniffing, he circled. When his nose found the appropriate place, he urinated, scratched a few times with one front paw, then limped back to Anna.

“Smart guy,” she said.

THIRTY-ONE

“Do you girls like to play games?”

Leah would have rolled her eyes if they hadn’t been frozen in place by sheer terror. The man was a bad joke. If he hadn’t become a thug, he’d have found a place as a petty bureaucrat, enjoying the power to thwart, delay, and lose paperwork. A gun and a lack of parental supervision allowed Sean’s juvenile despotism to flourish to a point he could torment those he hated—everyone, Leah expected—a little bit more than he hated himself.

War let the Seans of the world step from behind their desks and counters, out of their kiosks, and into a place beyond their darkest dreams, where victims were abundant and consequences did not exist. In Hitler’s Germany, Sean would have been a low-ranking Nazi; at Abu Ghraib, a sneering guard; at Guantánamo, an avid torturer.

Along her left arm and thigh, Leah could feel the unfamiliar warmth of Katie’s body. The human being, the child this creature would defile. Her child. Leah seldom thought of her that way. Usually, if she thought of Katie at all, it was as Gerald’s child. Gerald’s genes were clearly stamped in her coloring and features, but that wasn’t why. Gerald wanted her. He had made sure Leah got pregnant right away after they married. Once he had the child, he quit work and became a stay-at-home dad.

To say Leah knew little about men would be an understatement. Raised by two mothers, whose circle of friends was largely comprised of lesbians, Leah had not known many men. Her mothers didn’t dislike men, there were simply not that many around. Growing up, Leah had been wrapped in love and support the way fine china is wrapped in bubble wrap for shipping, told she was pretty and smart and strong and good.

Genetics would tell. Leah’s birth mother must have been a mess. Leah believed none of what her mothers told her, except that she was smart, and then only in academia. When her mothers died in a small commuter jet crash, their community of friends closed around Leah in a protective wall. Money was raised and she was sent to Bryn Mawr. Leah was sixteen. At twenty-two she was heralded as the wunderkind of chemistry and engineering.

Then Gerald and Katie. In a fit of cosmic irony, Gerald turned out to be gay. The one man in the world who would marry her for her mind, because he knew how to spin her thoughts into pure gold. Katie was his insurance policy: community property and child custody. The only thing Leah hated Gerald for was believing he needed that.

“You’re not a pawn, Katie,” she whispered. “I won’t let you be used in his games.”

“Speak up, God damn it!” Sean said. “You talk, I wanna hear what’s said. You got that?”

“I won’t let you use my daughter in your games,” Leah said. Her voice was so loud it startled her.

THIRTY-TWO

Finished, Anna studied it sourly. It looked like a ranger had scratched a bunch of lines in the dirt with a stick. She hoped the dude’s city senses would not pick up on country deceits. Why would he? The belief that Anna and Wily didn’t exist was their greatest—only—advantage. Most people didn’t bother to protect themselves against that which did not exist.

As an added incentive, she dropped the stick so it fell pointing toward the rocks. Wily sniffed it. “Does it look like a big fat arrow on a yellow sign?”

Since Wily didn’t piss on it, Anna decided it would pass.

“I’m following them,” Anna whispered. She pointed toward the boulders. Behind them several trees, not dead yet but with roots exposed, had blown in a heap and lay piled like pick-up-sticks in the child’s game. “You should be able to find a dry spot. You can stay here and rest if you need to.”

Wily shot her a dirty look.

“Sorry,” she said. Anna put a span of trees between herself and the trajectory Reg had been on. Running as quietly as a rabbit across the rain-damp duff, she kept on a parallel course. It was an hour or two until dark. The light was diffuse and low with tails of fog clinging to the ground as the air cooled more quickly than the earth. The forest had become a place of mists and pools without light. Unformed shadows painted trees; damp and lichen drew faces on the stones. From the dying leaves, raindrops fell in slow motion, hitting the soggy forest floor with the splat of baby frogs hitting pond water.

Anna’s effortless run was short-lived. The trees grew more thickly. Her breath shortened. Beneath the coat she began to sweat. Reg hadn’t much of a lead, and he was hunting and gathering. Knowing she was close, she slipped into stalking mode. Wily caught up with her just as she heard the crack of breaking branches and men’s voices. Reg and the dude; they were together.

Anna didn’t try to get close enough to see them. Too much light remained in the sky, and, fierce as they were, she and Wily couldn’t take down two armed men.

Jimmy’s coat protecting Anna’s rump from the wet ground, her lap protecting Wily, they made themselves comfortable in a stand of oaks ringed with wild-rose bushes and bracken. Hunkered down to prey, the two waited with the patience of wild animals. Putting her hands under the nylon rain cape she’d made Wily, she let his fur warm her fingers. Head back against the bole of the tree, she listened to the progress of the men gathering firewood. Ears and nose being of superior quality, Wily closed his eyes and rested his chin on Anna’s forearm.

*   *   *

Reg was performing
a remarkable feat; he was whining in a baritone, and with bravado. The timbre put Anna in mind of a tractor engine with a loose fan belt.

“I don’t know why we gotta wait for the fuckin’ plane. We gotta be practically on top of the landing strip. I mean it’s like a big old camp or shit, right? We could’ve got there by just keeping on.”

Wily cocked an eyebrow at Anna. She mouthed, “Right.”

The dude said nothing.

“Are we supposed to build a fire out there in the ashes and shit? The pilot could see it, right? If he can see it, he can land, right? If it’s cloudy we could hear him, we could follow the fuckin’ sound, for Christ’s sake. When’s the asshole coming back?”

“When he comes,” the dude answered. Irritation was loud and clear in his tone. Reg kept on. Scared, Anna guessed, angry, resentful: one of those emotions that make people chatter. Scared, she bet, mostly scared, of the dude and the alien environment.

“There’s like buildings at the landing place, isn’t there?” Reg asked. “Some kind of lumberyard or something? I hope they got food stashed there. I’d eat anything about now, shit on a shingle, that’s what my dad called it in the army. Beef on toast. How long you think it’ll take us, when the pilot does his thing?”

“As long as it takes,” the dude said.

Anna shuddered with cold to amuse Wily. The dude’s voice could chill beer on a hot afternoon. Reg was quiet for about thirty seconds. Like grazing cattle, the men were moving erratically, but surely, past where Anna and Wily lay hidden.

“Hey, Dude,” Reg said when he couldn’t stand the pastoral tranquility any longer. “That’s a small fuckin’ plane. I never been up in a little plane like that. Shit, it looks like a toy some glue-sniffing kid built in the basement. There’s no way it carries six. No way, man. I mean, he’s gotta take the cripple and the kid, too, now, right? He’s gotta take them. No way we can be driving around with a cripple and a kid in the car. You were like flying out, so, what? He going to take four women and you?”

“It depends,” the dude answered.

Anna promised Santa she would never again ask for anything for Christmas if only the dude would snap and put a bullet in Reg’s brain.

“Shit, man,” Reg said, and Anna crossed her fingers. “How much of this shit do we need? You think we got enough firewood?”

“For now,” the dude said in a metallic monotone, not unlike the sound the slide on a semiauto made.

One set of boot-falls crackled back in the direction of the burn.

Anna eased Wily off her lap. She stood, shifting her weight back and forth to get the blood circulating in her legs.

“Dude,” Reg called. He was staying where he was, and Anna wondered why. The last thing Reg wanted—and the first thing she wanted—was for him to be left alone in the big bad woods.

“What?” The dude was farther away than before, and still walking.

Anna began methodically clenching and unclenching her fists to loosen up her hands.

“I gotta take a dump,” Reg hollered miserably.

“Yeah?” The dude didn’t stop.

There was a long time with no words. Footsteps receded. Small forest sounds dripped in: water falling from branches, squirrels or small birds scratching in the leaves, the music of a trickling stream.

Through it, faint and cold, the dude’s voice came, needling. “You want me to watch?”

“You’re a sick bastard,” Reg shouted.

The dude’s humorless excuse for laughter percolated through the trees. Then even the sound of his feet on the forest floor was gone. Anna’s heart rate climbed until cold stiff muscles grew pliant and ready.

Catching one of the thugs, not only alone but with his pants down, would be the most wonderful of things. She’d skin her kill. His coat would make a dog bed for Wily. His Walther PPK could make her dreams come true.

Then she and Heath and Elizabeth and Leah and Katie and Wily would go home.

Thinking of the coat and gun made Anna’s mouth water. The concept of home was too insubstantial to have much allure.

Rocking forward onto her toes, she sniffed the air the way Wily was doing. Nothing but rain-damp earth registered. A part of her had expected her nose to have evolved to a higher degree of efficiency. Time and timelessness had merged. She’d been in the forest for millennia. Her claws should have grown sharper, her pelt thicker.

Placing her feet one in front of the other to minimize the impact of each step, she slipped deftly from the copse. Wily, encumbered by his makeshift splint, fell behind. In moments, shielded by the twin trunks of two aspens that had grown together, Anna could see the thug. Reg’s back was to her. Between them was a ravine, no more than six feet across and half that deep. In the bottom ran a narrow, shallow stream; the music she’d heard earlier. On the far side of the stream was a stand of firs, their lowest branches sweeping the ground.

Alone, in the woods, with wolves and night coming on, Reg had to be scared half out of his wits. Twice he started to follow the dude. Twice his bowels called him back. Under certain circumstances, men of all ages exhibit the same symptoms. Having to take a dump is one of them. Anna was willing to bet Reg’s lower cheeks were pinched as tightly as his face, as fear and need warred within him. He opened his mouth to cry out again for the dude, but something stopped him. Manly pride, no doubt.

Pride cometh before the fall, Anna thought as she slid down the soft bank. She didn’t bother to avoid the water. Her moccasins were already soaked. Two steps brought her to the other side. Dropping to her stomach, she raised her eyes above the rim of the miniature ravine.

Reg muttered his word of choice for all occasions, “Fuck!” He dropped the collection of twigs and bark he’d gathered. Throwing his arms up he shouted, “God damn it!”