Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (27 page)

“Katie,” Leah whispered, “does the dude look familiar at all to you?”

Katie stared hard at the man for a minute or more. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

“Why?” Heath asked. “Does he look familiar to you?” If Leah knew him, surely she would have mentioned it by now.

“I thought he did at first,” Leah said. “Then I thought not. Who could forget those eyes?”

“Carp eyes,” Elizabeth said.

“Shark eyes,” Katie said.

“Then last night he said something odd.”

Heath had known Leah long enough to realize that, without help, she wouldn’t go on. Often she didn’t finish sentences. Evidently finishing them in her head was sufficient communication. “What did he say?” Heath prompted.

“I told him Katie was a child, an innocent. He said, ‘Tell that to Gerald.’”

“Your husband?” Heath asked.

“I guess so. He sounded like he knew Gerald.”

“Maybe a business contact?” Heath asked.

“Why would daddy know a douche bag like him?” Katie asked.

“Katie,” Leah remonstrated.

“Douche bag,” Elizabeth confirmed.

“You’re outvoted, Leah,” Heath said.

“What business? Gerald has … issues, but violence isn’t one of them,” Leah said.

“Shut up,” Reg snapped at them. Then, as if it had been too long since he’d said it, “Fuck. Plane can’t find us in this shit, Dude.”

“Ground fog,” the dude said. “It’ll burn off.”

The sun climbed; the fog thinned, then was gone. Sunlight warmed Heath’s cheeks and hands.

No silver plane burred into the blue sky.

Reg stopped pacing. He sat with his feet planted wide apart, throwing a jackknife into the dirt and scowling. The dude removed his red-and-black checked hunter’s coat and spread it on the ground, colorful side up, to make a bigger signal for the plane. He kept looking from the coat to his wristwatch to the sky.

Another hour passed. No airplane.

Heath was out of the chair, her spine braced against the stump. She still believed the dude would shoot her should she cause delay, but the pain of holding herself upright and balanced made the bullet seem the lesser evil.

By the time the sun was halfway up the sky, and clouds were beginning to show ominously in the northeast, the dude was including Heath in his geometry of vision: coat, wristwatch, sky, Heath. The pattern reminded her of a cocaine addict she roomed with briefly in college. When the stuff was available, Sarah would obsess on something else, her hair, the mirror, her makeup. Eventually, and inevitably, the coke would be factored into the pattern. That’s when Heath knew Sarah had lost the battle; she would use.

Heath tried to ignore the lightning strikes of the dude’s eyes. She had the eerie feeling that his drug was death itself. His emotions would crescendo, hit a set point, and he would blow her to kingdom come just to take the edge off.

Reg stripped to the yellow hoodie, identical to the black one that customarily covered it. The dude nodded approval at the bright color. From then on, Reg was configured into the pattern. Five points: sky, watch, coat, Heath, Reg; an infernal pentagram drawn in the air. Tension quivered so palpably Heath expected it to become visible, to shiver and shimmer like July heat off the Smoke Creek Desert.

Reg ceased his constant grumbling. Bereft of the word “fuck” he did not speak. Periodically, he shot the dude hostile glances, but never when the dude was looking at him. Having nothing better to do, he glared at the women, daring them to speak.

Heath was scared to scratch, yawn, stretch, or breathe too deeply. Who knew what might bring disaster down upon their heads? This was a hideous game, and only the dude knew the rules. Breaking one carried a penalty of death or beating.

Though the plane meant nothing good for the captives, Heath found herself praying to hear the angry buzzing of the engine, anything to interrupt the high-pitched psychic whine running along the wires of her mind. Nitroglycerin ran through the dude’s veins. Living each minute knowing he might explode and destroy Elizabeth or Katie or Leah was so excruciating Heath was tempted to bring his wrath upon herself simply to end it.

Unfortunately, it was Katie who set him off.

“Leah—Momma—I think I know where I saw him!” she exclaimed suddenly. “The dude. Daddy has a picture of him.”

Slowly, a crocodile emerging from cold river mud, Reg raised his head. His eyes returned from whatever inner vista they’d been watching to rest on Katie.

“Dude,” he said in a low voice. The pewter-colored pistol lay atop the black hoodie he’d dropped on the ground. He picked it up as he rose to his feet.

The dude squinted over his shoulder. “What?” he demanded, then rotated his body until it aligned beneath his face. Head and body seemed to move independently of each other. Heath’s crawling sense that he was not human flared. Had her legs been functional, she might have run away, abandoning her child and risking a bullet in the back.

“Kid’s seen a picture of you,” Reg said.

The dude walked slowly toward them, a power contained, wild horses being held in check. When he reached them, he bent over to close his fist in the front of Katie’s shirt. Without apparent effort, he lifted her until he was looking up into her face. “Your father has my photograph?”

“Put her down,” Leah begged, scrambling to her feet. Elizabeth was rising as well. Heath couldn’t reach her to drag her back down.

“We were talking about a TV star who looked like you is all,” Katie squeaked. “He, he—”

“He was on
The Young and the Restless,
” Heath said. Given all the hours she’d spent in a hospital bed she knew the classic soaps.

Never taking his eyes off Katie’s face, he quietly asked, “Is that right?”

“Yes,” Katie gasped. His free arm shot out like a piston, his fist punching Leah in the stomach. Her slender body folded over, then crumpled to the ground

“Are you sure?” the dude asked in the same even tone.

An eager tension plucked at the corners of his eyes like a smile so long unused it had atrophied.

“The plane! The plane!” Reg was shouting and pointing.

Heath was of the generation that could not hear those words without picturing Hervé Villechaize on the beach of
Fantasy Island.
Hysterical laughter clawed its way up her throat. Putting both hands around her neck, she squeezed to keep her esophagus from bursting. Katie was going to die, and the plane was coming to lead them into perdition, and it took every ounce of strength she had to keep from laughing until her rib cage cracked.

Instantly indifferent to Katie, the dude dropped her. Unhurt, she got to her feet and ran to where Leah was uncurling from the gut punch. Reg tore off his yellow hoodie. Waving it frantically, he shouted, “Down here! Here! Down here!” The dude stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the oncoming aircraft as if waiting to be strafed.

The metal of the plane flashed, the wings rocked; it descended until Heath thought the wheels would touch the tops of the trees. In a roar and a storm of disturbed ashes it flew over. Heath could count the rivets on its undercarriage. Two white objects, each the size of a fat bed pillow, emerged from the plane’s left-side door to plummet to earth.

FORTY-ONE

Anna and Wily lay low until the thugs and hostages were gone from the sheltering stones. After helping Wily to descend, Anna found the knife. When she dropped it into the coat pocket, it clanked. The cell phone; she’d forgotten she had it. Two bars of power showed. There was still no signal.

Wily limping at her side, she trailed the thugs across the burn. Had Reg’s familiar “Fuck!” not alerted her, she would have shown herself. Just over a low rise, jagged with the charred remains of trees, the dude had stopped to await the plane.

Within earshot but out of sight, Anna skinned out of Jimmy’s coat. Spread like a blanket, checkered side down, it kept her and Wily off of the cold ground. She didn’t bother to wrap her black T-shirt around her hair and face. Ash from the burn, coupled with soot from the thugs’ fire, grimed her until she was probably much the same color as the remains of the forest.

Sharing tepid water and filtered sunshine, she and Wily listened and waited. The sun climbed, warming the air. Wily slept. Anna dozed and nodded until screams snapped her out of a fantasy of corn chowder with fresh buttered bread.

A gunshot arm made belly-crawling an exercise in self torture. On three legs, like Wily, Anna crabbed uphill until she could see over the berm of earth they were hiding behind.

The dude held Katie up high in one hand. Leah was on the ground in the fetal position. Wily smelled a stink inside the dude that made his nose wrinkle. A whine burned in his throat. Anna believed she could smell it, too, a mix of burning electrical wires and acetone.

Before Anna could piece together what was happening, an angry buzzing of enraged hornets shook the sky. A shadow struck like a fist across her eyes. Wily barked unheard as the airplane flew over low and slow. Two parcels tumbled out the pilot’s-side door.

Reg ran after them. Grabbing one up, he tore it wide open.

“Food, man. Food!” he shouted with the innocent delight of a child.

In pure agony, Anna and Wily watched as Reg and the dude devoured deli sandwiches and guzzled from little boxes with straws. There would be food left over. The pilot had brought enough for four men. Only two still lived.

Anna winked at Wily.

Heath and the others got what was meant for Sean and Jimmy. Anna and the dog watched them eat, delighting as their friends grew in strength bite by bite. Wily was sniffing: meats, cheeses, breads, and the smells of his people filling with food and hope.

“Look,” Anna whispered, pointing at Heath nudging a paper-covered parcel behind the tree stump she’d been homesteading. “Lunch.”

Still chewing, the dude fished a piece of yellow lined paper from one of the sacks, letting the plastic bag fall to the ground. Anna counted the separate pieces of litter the dickheads had strewn about the landscape. Wrappings, bags, napkins, juice boxes, straws, plastic utensils, packages of salt and mustard and mayonnaise.

Litterbugs.

Anna was glad she’d killed two of them.

“What’s the penalty for littering, Ranger Pigeon?”

“Death, you slovenly pig.”

“What is it you got?” Reg asked as he loped over to the dude to read over his shoulder.

“Note from the pilot,” the dude said.

The thugs pored over the paper for what seemed an awfully long time. “Reading probably isn’t one of their job skills,” Anna whispered. Wily gave her a shushing look.

Leah and Elizabeth were quickly helping Heath back into her chair. Katie was holding the handles steady.

“Clever girls,” Anna murmured to Wily.

The plane flew over again. This time the group followed in the direction indicated, the dude leading, Leah and E pulling the chair, Katie pushing, and Reg bringing up the rear. Beyond a jagged black crest of a hill, they disappeared from sight. The hell-born stench dissipated.

Anna and Wily waited another five minutes to make sure nobody came back to see if they’d turned the iron off and locked the back door, then came out of hiding and trotted to the white paper sack Heath had squirreled away.

Partially squashed from the unusual nature of its delivery was a ham-and-cheese sandwich on a kaiser roll. The ants had gotten to it. Anna brushed off the ones that weren’t mired in the mayonnaise, tore the sandwich in two pieces, and gave one to Wily. Both wolfed the food down without bothering to sit.

Also in the bag, and no worse from its fall from the heavens, was a box of apple juice. Using Sean’s knife, Anna cut the top off, drank her half, then set the box down and held it steady while Wily drank his share. Wordlessly they agreed it was one of the finest meals they had ever had.

“Pick up the litter?” Anna asked.

Wily kept his eyes in the direction his people had gone.

“Right,” Anna said. “Priorities.”

For an hour they followed the deep tracks of the group wending its way across the burn. Without the protection of trees and underbrush, rain had carved deep gullies in the soil and the wind had filled them with debris.

The end of the devastated area appeared like a benediction. Anna and Wily breathed deeply, cleaning their noses of ash with scents of moss, pine, and downed leaves.

This initial elation lasted until the underbrush closed in, forming nearly impenetrable thickets. Half-naked tree branches spiderwebbed the sky. The dry pink sandy soil of the Fox River basin was replaced with deep loam, spongy underfoot. Damp chilled the air. Moss grew on all compass points of the trees. Lichen poked antlered heads out of moist bark.

Traces of Heath’s, Leah’s and the girls’ suffering were everywhere: scraps of torn clothing on briars, moss scraped away when Heath’s chair struck a tree, heel gouges where the chair was lifted over downed vegetation. The forest was biting pieces of the captives off, tearing at them with sharp branches, coiling around their ankles and tripping them. Heath had excellent upper-body strength and an innate determination to overcome obstacles. Leah seemed fit enough. The girls were girls; though in decent physical condition, they were not athletes. Their muscles and bones were gentled with fading childhood and oncoming fertility. Soon one or two or all of them would lose their battle with the North Woods. Their strength would give out.

In the end the dude and Reg, like slave drivers of old, would herd only those fit to walk to market.

The sun had started down the back side of the day, and the air was growing cooler, when the trail Anna and Wily followed petered out at the edge of a swamp. Beaver, Anna guessed, and old. There was no telling how wide it was, or how deep the water and mud. Drowned trees, roots long rotted away, fell over the bog, trunks and branches intertwined. Isle Royale, where Anna worked early in her career, had a number of bogs such as this. They were fine places to trap a foot or break a leg.

At the edge of standing water, Anna refilled the canteen. Mosquito larvae would add protein, she told herself. That done, she backtracked a dozen paces and saw where the group had made a right turn, heading northeast along the edge of the wetlands. The note the dude and Reg had been studying must have told them to turn right when they hit marshy ground.