Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (3 page)

Whoever it was had not come from downstream. Anna would have heard them snap-crackle-and popping through the downed leaves and twigs.

Hunters? Possible. It might be deer season. Outside of the parks, Anna was unsure of the rules and regulations. As far as she was concerned, hunting season was when rangers hunted poachers.

A chance encounter? A lone and twisted individual happening on helpless-looking women while pursuing a moose? Opportunistic cruelty of the kind portrayed in the movie
Deliverance
?

“Squeal like a pig” sliced out of Anna’s memory.

Thieves? Thieves would be nice. Thieves liked to take things and slip peacefully away. Property crimes were common in parks and forests. Cars were clouted and pockets picked, but seldom this far from civilization. Hikers carried little of value, but for their gear, and gear wasn’t easily converted to cash.

There was little hope for a nice honest robbery. Unfortunately other forms of lowlifes—denizens of horror films and fever dreams—often chose to be paid in the currency of screams, investing fear into the depleted accounts of their sorry, miserable, stinking lives.

Anna turned the canoe’s nose upstream and began paddling hard against the current.

FOUR

In a public campground, a KOA—any place where people gathered—the approach of human footsteps would not have been frightening. Alone, in the backwoods at nightfall, there was no reason for pedestrian traffic. No good reason.

A man, dressed like a lumberjack in a red-and-black plaid coat and black jeans tucked into new boots, materialized out of the charcoal gray of evening beneath the trees. A gun that looked the size of a small cannon, the hole in the barrel as wide and deep as a well, was held close by his thigh. Admittedly, Heath’s eye level was less than three feet off the ground; still, he was huge. He had to be close to six-six. Beneath the layers of flannel and wool, his body was thick. Like the blade of a shovel, his jaw was wide at the top and came to a spade point below a small mouth. Dark hair formed a widow’s peak on a low, broad forehead. In some lights the face would appear ruggedly handsome. In others, dimorphic and hideous, the top half that of a he-man, the bottom that of a woman.

“Good evening,” Heath said, hanging on to the vain hope these were hunters and this an unexpected social call. “What can we do for you?”

“Hendricks, Leah,” the man said in a flat cool voice, his eyes flickering over Heath and dismissing her.

“I’m Leah Hendricks,” Leah whispered. Her face, always pale, was gray where blood had fled the skin, and orange where the glow of the fire hit her cheekbones and the ridge of her nose. The effect was disturbing, feverish.

“Hendricks, Katie,” said the man.

“What is this? Is Gerald okay?” Leah asked. Gerald was her husband.

“Hendricks, Katie,” the man repeated.

“Is something the matter with Daddy?” Katie asked. “Are you a cop?”

His eyes, just holes in his face from where Heath sat, sparked as they moved in Katie’s direction. “Yes,” he said. “Katie Hendricks?”

“Here,” Katie said and raised her hand as if she were in school.

“Aunt Gwen?” Heath asked in the barest scrape of time, when she could believe that the police had sent forest rangers with bad news.

“This is it,” the man said in a louder tone.

“About fucking time,” came another male voice. Seconds later a smaller, bearded man, dressed almost identically, stepped into the ring of firelight. He carried a rifle.

“You’re not the police, are you?” Heath asked. Two more men emerged from the dark fringe of trees, one with a handgun. Overkill, Heath thought and wished she hadn’t. The men spread out, making four points of a box around Heath and the others.

“Are you lost?” Heath inquired politely, trying to force the situation to normalcy. “About all we can offer you is a cup of coffee.”

“You and you.” The tall black-haired man, the leader most likely, indicated Katie and Leah with the barrel of the pistol. Katie’s eyes grew so big she looked more like a lemur than a human child. “There. Sit.” He pointed at the feet of a black man who, in a black hoodie and black sweats, formed a shadow against the trees.

“Sean’s got the ties, Dude,” the black man said. Sean was the fourth man, the last to enter the clearing. He looked like an extra from the road show of
Grease
who hadn’t aged well. He saw Heath staring at him and smiled with small, crooked, very white teeth.

Terror stampeded over Heath. It was happening, the worst-case scenario; she was crippled and helpless and monsters had come for the children and she couldn’t do one damn thing to stop them. Not one goddamn thing. Visions of Elizabeth bleeding, clothing ripped, men in the midst of gang rape burned through Heath’s mind too fast for the eye to see, but not for the soul to feel.

“Stay close, stay close,” she whispered, reaching out to clutch Elizabeth’s leg. Heath had to hold herself together. If nothing else, she could witness, she could memorize the faces. Sean, that was one name. She could listen for more so they could be tracked down. Heath’s eyes tried to catch detail, find meaningful marks, but flickering light and pounding pulse and the enormity of the size of horror of the men of the guns cracked her vision into a kaleidoscope of images.

A story Anna once told flashed in her mind. A man in a bunny suit, shooting blanks from a revolver in one hand and waving a carrot in the other, charged into a Crime Scene Investigation class. He hopped around the room and out the door. When the students’ eyewitness accounts were read aloud, they did not agree on whether the shooter was black or white, male or female, if it was a rabbit or a kangaroo, or how many shots were fired. The only thing on which they agreed was that the intruder had guns in both hands.

The point: Eyewitnesses were unreliable.

There would be no eyewitnesses left after these men had done whatever they’d come to do. That reality struck Heath with the force of a two-by-four across the back of the head.

“Run!” she hissed at Elizabeth and surged to her feet to put her body between the guns and her daughter’s flight path. She flopped from the camp chair like a landed trout. Her mind had forgotten her legs no longer worked.

The gang leader, the tall man, straightened his arm, the pistol extending from his huge hand like a black finger pointing at Elizabeth’s midsection.

“Nobody move,” he said in a tone as hard as cast iron. Elizabeth, Heath, the rustle of the leaves overhead seemed to freeze. Time took a breath. The black guy froze. The bearded man with the rifle was still as stone. Everything but the fire stopped moving. A silence, closer to deafness than quiet, swallowed the camp. Heath was afraid she was going to start laughing or crying or screaming.

Over the water slow applause mocked the scene. The clapping grew louder, faster. A disapproving tongue clicking crept into the clatter.

The black man jumped. “What the fuck was that?” he demanded as the noise faded.

“Keep your pants dry, Reg,” the bearded man said. “Probably just an old rat or a squirrel messing around.”

“I never heard no rat sound like that,” Reg said.

“It’s a grouse,” Elizabeth told them. “They drum this time of year.”

Heath scowled at her.
Seen and not heard
echoed in her head. Invisible and gone would be better.

Reg looked at Elizabeth as if he were trying to figure out who she was calling a grouse, him or the creature that made the eerie sound.

“Finish securing the Hendrickses. Get this one, too,” the leader said, his gun still aimed at Elizabeth. “Soon as it’s light, we go. Reg, cover them with the Walther. Sean, secure them.”

The black man, Reg, had the “Walther,” a pewter-colored handgun. It was a kind of gun that shot more than six bullets. That was the extent of Heath’s expertise with firearms. Reg held it like a man who knew how to use it.

Sean pulled an unopened package of plastic cable ties from the pocket of his jacket.

Beneath Heath’s hand, Wily was trembling. Or maybe she was trembling; she couldn’t tell where she ended and the dog began, where reality ended and nightmare began.

Ties in hand, Sean said, “Put your pretty little wrists together so nice Uncle Sean can make sure you don’t get into trouble.”

Leah held out her hands, wrists together.

Wily began to bark wildly.

“Shut the dog up,” the big man said to Heath. “You, with the others.” He laid a heavy hand on E’s shoulder. Elizabeth stumbled, then fell to her hands and knees.

Leash trailing like the tail of a comet, Wily shot from under Heath’s fingers as if he’d been born in the Alaskan wilderness and just laid eyes on his first reindeer calf. Growl became roar, and his slink a lunge, as he went for the throat of the man who’d dared lay hands on a member of his pack.

Wily’s heart was that of a young wolf; his bones were those of an old dog. The man swatted him down as if he were a mosquito, then kicked him hard in the side. Wily’s limp form flew through the air. With a crack of bone that snapped Heath’s heart in two, he slammed into the bole of a tree.

FIVE

Wily’s body slid down the trunk and pooled around the bottom as lifeless as a dropped towel.

“You miserable son of a bitch,” Heath said, unable to comprehend such meaningless evil. From the corner of her eye, she saw Elizabeth rising to her feet on a tide of fury.

“Stop!” Heath cried. “No! No!”

Like an avenging angel, Elizabeth flew at the man. Pistol in hand, the man’s enormous red-and-black-clad arm rose.

“Don’t shoot!” Heath screamed.

He didn’t shoot. He clubbed Elizabeth to the ground with the same easy violence he’d shown when dealing with Wily. The base of her skull struck the duff first, and she went as limp as the dog.

“God damn you, you son of a bitch, you goddam son of a bitch,” Heath yelled. Worthless legs tangling, she scrambled to her daughter’s body. Damaged nerves were sending so many mixed signals Heath couldn’t feel a pulse in E’s neck. She pressed her ear to Elizabeth’s back. Rapid and strong, a heartbeat.

“Damn lucky for you, she’s alive.” Heath spit the words at the big man. A flicker of something crossed his face. Maybe amusement. Heath wanted to strike him down so badly she hissed like a snake.

“Whoa! Got us a she cat,” said the bearded man.

“Hey, at least the dog shut up,” said Sean. “Turn around,” he ordered Katie.

“Don’t you dare touch me, scumbag!” she snapped, jerking an arm the size of a toothpick from his thick-fingered hand. “My father will kill you. Do you know who my mother is?”

“I know exactly who she is, sweet cheeks. And I know just what you rich little twats are good for.” He leered cartoonishly. On him it looked natural.

“Do as he says.” Leah’s voice was a cold thread of sound.

Katie glared at her mother, tears glittering like rubies on her cheeks. “Not so tight,” she cried as the plastic was pulled taut on her wrists.

“Not so tight, Sean,” the big man said.

“Dude, you can’t loosen these things. I gotta cut ’em off and do new ones.”

“Then cut them off,” the dude said reasonably.

“Pain in the ass,” Sean muttered, but he did as he was told.

Scraping, a noise, paddles on the gunwale of a canoe, grated through the panic and despair boiling inside Heath’s skull.

Anna. She was returning to camp. In a minute she would beach the canoe and walk up the path to the bluff.

“You’ll never get away with this,” Heath yelled and flailed her arms, making as much noise as she could. “We’re expected back tomorrow morning. If we don’t show, the entire country will come after you, guns drawn!”

Sean stopped in the midst of cutting Katie’s bonds. The thugs looked at her as if she were behaving boorishly, as if they’d never attacked and kidnapped such a disgusting barbarian.

“Crazy,” Reg said, shaking his head sadly, the yellow hoodie beneath the black flashing in bright parentheses on either side of his dark face.

“Stay away from us! You hear me?” Heath shouted. “Stay the hell away!”

SIX

“Stay the hell away!”

Heath.

Anna quit paddling.

Adrenaline spiked her blood and she nearly dropped the paddle into the river. Skin prickled, hairs on the back of her neck stirred, nostrils flared. As her body absorbed the level of threat, her ears felt as if they grew venous and quivering like those of a bat.

Taking a deep breath, she held it, consciously slowing her heart rate. The bluff blocked her view of everything except the glow of the fire. Shadowed red and gold leaves on the underside of the canopy shuddered in the breeze, pallid echoes of the flames beneath.

Hugging the bank, she let the canoe drift back downstream. The night had been transformed from star-filled and gentle into dark and full of menace. A man’s voice. Heath screaming obscenities. One man? More than one. Males who were announced with screams and curses tended to travel in packs, like jackals.

The canoe had drifted far enough. With a deft twist of the paddle, she nosed into the bank downstream of a tree. Roots undercut, it had fallen into the river and lay with a crown of desiccated foliage bobbing in the stream.

Anna leapt over the bow onto dry land, then pulled the canoe far enough out of the water that the tug of the current wouldn’t lure it away. For insurance, she tethered it to the exposed roots. At present, the canoe was her most valuable asset. When she’d gone for a solo paddle, she hadn’t planned to be out for more than an hour. Consequently, she hadn’t brought anything with her, not so much as a water bottle. Her camp shoes, good moose-hide moccasins from Ely, Minnesota, were house shoes with soft leather soles. These and the clothes on her back were the sum total of her survival gear. She didn’t even have her Swiss Army knife. Having lost so many to TSA, when she flew, she left it home. In lieu of major ordnance, she lifted a paddle from the canoe. A paddle was as good as a baseball bat and boasted a longer reach.

Seated on the trunk of the downed oak, she removed socks and moccasins, stuffed the socks into the shoes, tied the moccasins together by their laces, then slung them around her neck. Using the paddle as a staff, she waded back into the river.