Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (9 page)

“That was never proven,” Heath returned.

Anna had noticed Reg was on edge the moment she laid eyes on him. The others weren’t comfortable in the wilderness, but the man from the mean streets was downright scared. The grouse thrumming spooked him. Elizabeth’s talk of wolves spooked him. Reg probably didn’t get out of town much; the very intensity of the darkness and the depth of the night sky would spook him.

Reg struck Anna as a man who was used to being the scariest thing in the room, a king in his own country—however small that fiefdom might be. He didn’t take the dude’s orders with the lickspittle gratitude of the other two. A flunky for the dude, operating out of his area of expertise: He would have had to be desperate to take this job, in deep with loan sharks, drug dealers, or the local gang boss.

Whatever shark nipped at Reg’s heels, it must have inspired him to snatch at the idea of Heath and Elizabeth being worth millions. Greed was like hope on steroids, ready to see the object of desire where it did not exist.

“You gonna work or what?”

Reg’s demand snapped Anna out of a half-doze she’d slipped into without realizing it.

Leah didn’t reply.

“She is working,” Heath said.

Half an hour crept by. Anna fought to stay alert. If an opportunity presented itself to free any of the hostages, it would come while the dude was sleeping.

“What the fuck?” Reg. No one replied.

Heath slid down in her camp chair, letting her head rest against the back.

Sean, no longer pacing, stood on the bluff over the river where the entirety of the camp was under his eyes. Reg, pistol hanging like a living appendage from the end of his arm, moved to stand beside Sean.

“This is fucked, man,” Reg said. “Three of us could’ve sacked out. Don’t need two to watch this shit.”

“Dude said two,” Sean replied.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

Another silence followed.

Reg stepped over behind the wheelchair and pressed the bore of the Walther PPK to Leah’s left temple. “Fuckin’ do something!”

TWELVE

Leah had never been good with people. People were predictable, but they weren’t consistent. That was anxiety-making, as if gravity quit working one day in a thousand. Never knowing when that day would come, life would be one long terror of suddenly being spun off into space. Education didn’t help. What was true about a person Monday might no longer be true on Thursday. Committing to a relationship was complicated when the person one committed to might be transfigured into another person.

SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE

That should be tattooed on the foreheads of newborns.

Leah could not even vouch for the fact the language people spoke did not change from moment to moment. Many times as a child she’d ventured out onto the playground where the other children were bunched together and heard them chattering like magpies. Not metaphorically; to her they literally sounded like magpies.

Separating out one thread and following it to a sense of meaning took concentration.

She surmised the magpies had trouble understanding her as well. Murmuring had become habitual because, other than when she talked design or development, no one listened to what she had to say.

Mathematics, physics, chemistry: Numbers didn’t change without warning. Didn’t judge and condemn. One never had to hide from numbers. In math two plus two always equaled four. In English literature two plus two could equal two above ground, one in a tomb, and one swallowing poison. Philosophy, sociology—the studies of why people felt as they did and did as they did—were even worse.

The magpies knew why jokes were funny, why Juliet drank the poison. Not Leah. They wore bright colors and waved their hands, emotions flashed across their faces, teeth showed, cheeks puffed up, hair was tossed over shoulders. There was nothing wrong with her eyesight, but she’d worn glasses since she was eight. The clear lenses helped hold the world at a distance, imposed a kind of visual silence.

To survive, she’d learned ways of shutting that world out.

As a child she’d lived in terror of her inadequacies coming to light until she’d found her home in the design studio. For the past years she’d practically lived at her lab, working with physical matter and intellectual challenges, working out the bugs in selvane and experimenting with its possibilities.

Leah was a genetic unknown. Her mothers moved and worked in the human race with zeal and ease. They took Leah hiking and camping and mushrooming. She’d loved them too much to tell them she didn’t like the vagaries of nature, only the being away from people. They told her she was just shy, that she was more than adequate, she was loved.

Leah wasn’t related to either of her mothers. As a teenager, she’d speculated that her DNA had come from another solar system. She’d taken to astronomy, looking for home. That had led to science fairs and scholarships, then to designing for the disabled.

Leah was comfortable around disabled people. She envied them the fact that their disabilities didn’t excommunicate them from the human race. By studying them, helping them to regain lost abilities through science, she might discover what in her had suffered from a birth defect, gone undernourished, or been excised as worthless by some psychic surgeon.

These creatures who had smashed the night, hacking and snapping with words and guns, had driven her back into her mind. The big man, the dude, was hauntingly familiar, though Leah was pretty sure she’d never met him, but then she seldom truly looked at people. Those cold changeless eyes she would have remembered. Maybe. Maybe he just resembled a man from TV or the movies, a B-movie actor who made a living playing mobsters and Second Thug. Leah seldom watched either. She couldn’t be sure. Seeing him made her mind want to slam shut.

When the men took over the camp, every connection she’d forged with Heath and Elizabeth had been trampled asunder. Heath was a mother and Elizabeth was a daughter and they spoke as mother and daughter. Katie no longer even looked to her to be a mother. That was best. Leah could seldom think of anything to say to Katie.

In this crisis, part of her wanted to step up, be an adult, a parent, but she didn’t know what to do, what was expected, how to act. There were too many unknowns. The men who’d captured them did not behave according to any rules Leah had memorized. Any action she took could worsen the situation. Even making eye contact with Katie might spark the child to do or say something wrong, or provoke the men to do or say something harmful.

Enclosed in the prison of her skull, peering out through the portholes of bone, she watched the horror unfolding around her but had no way of breaking through.

Then it became clear they would murder Heath because she could not be transported with sufficient ease.

Leah could fix that. Maybe there was nothing else she was good for, but she could make Heath a chair they could move through the woods. That had always been the way. That was why Gerald had married her, why he had wanted her child. Shutting out all else, she put her mind where it could function, where the component parts didn’t change from moment to moment.

By the time the man, Reg, put the cold gun barrel to her temple, she knew what she needed to do.

Slowly, colorlessly, movement ingrained from years of wanting to go unnoticed, Leah rose from the wheelchair.

Reg and Sean reacted as if she’d exploded from a cannon. Both guns came up.

Leah waited to see if they would shoot her. Her mind could picture the strike of the firing pin, the explosion, the spin and velocity of a bullet, the sound waves coming slightly behind the slug, the lead penetrating her brow bone and spinning her brain into a froth. She should have been afraid, but death had never held any terrors for her. When the trigger was not pulled, she announced quietly, “I need six cable ties.”

Reg and Sean looked at her as if she had spoken an unfamiliar language. Leah was used to this. “The plastic strips you used to bind our hands,” she explained.

“The dude didn’t say anything about giving you shit,” Reg said. “Should we wake him up?” he asked Sean.

“No. Give her the ties. We’ve got a ton of them. She can’t do any harm with ties. Let the dude alone.”

“Right. Let sleeping dudes lie,” Reg grumbled as he fetched a plastic bag full of cable ties Sean had been carrying.

Leah took the ties and knelt beside the wheelchair.

“You’re welcome,” Reg sneered.

Regardless of how evil the deed and how small the favor, everybody believed they deserved gratitude. Leah didn’t understand this, she only knew it to be true.

“Thank you,” she said. The man huffed as he took his due.

Moving efficiently, she went to work. Pressing the buttons on the hubs of the quick-release wheels, she removed them from the snap-lock brackets that attached their axles to the wheelchair’s frame. The smooth click that accompanied the act satisfied her on a primal level. The Tilt ’n’ Turner slid out of its brackets as easily as a sword from a sheath, and Leah felt the universe of order reasserting itself. The chair’s seat was designed to be moved from venue to venue. Leah removed it, then set out her pieces on the grass as neatly as a meticulous child arranging the clothing of a paper doll. Pattern informed action. Neatness mattered in mathematics and physics. With the pieces in place, the whole was visible in her mind.

Using a wrench from the toolbox, she unbolted the axles’ quick-release brackets from either side of the frame. The chair was titanium, but the tubing was hollow to keep the chair lightweight. In minutes she had the first dock removed and had started on the second. The flow of the parts, each piece coupling and uncoupling precisely as she had designed them to do, moved through her hands and mind like music through a conductor’s baton.

The quick-release brackets, in their metal housings, were added to the pattern of parts.

The wheelchair’s cushion, customized with variable contouring and foam layers used by NASA, was part of the equipment she was testing. Using the Tilt ’n’ Turner tray as a template, she marked the seat cover with a pointed scribe. Cutting into it caused a moment’s ripple in her working dance, but it had to be done if the seat was to be mounted to the tray of the T ’n’ T. Using a small cordless drill, she bored holes through the six-thousand-dollar prototype seat and cushion.

The whine of the drill bit brought the dude up from his sleeping bag gun in hand with the suddenness of a ghoul disturbed from a grave. The gun was not pointed at her, so Leah didn’t stop working. By the rude glare of the Coleman lantern, she saw Heath’s right leg begin to spasm. Leah looked away. That was how her mind felt when she tried to be the mother Katie needed.

“It’s just a drill, Dude,” Sean said quickly. “One of those battery jobs.”

“You said she could have the toolbox,” Reg added. “The drill was in it when you looked.” His voice was gruff.

The dude joined his cohorts watching her work. She felt them looming. With the ease of long practice, she shut them out and affixed the plastic seat to the top of the long square aluminum arm of the Tilt ’n’ Turner.

THIRTEEN

The filthy beasts were caught up in Leah’s project, all but Jimmy, who slept the sleep of the innocent. Heath and Elizabeth had been talking quietly. Anna hadn’t caught on until she’d noticed E was taking forever to straighten and settle Heath’s legs, her back, her chair, her cigarettes. They were using the close physical activity to speak unheard.

Elizabeth raised her head from her work and quickly scanned the dark curtain of trees. Anna waved. In the dark, her wave went unseen; still, E and the others knew she was out here. Heath said something. E moved to the pile of items that the thugs had saved from the conflagration. It was near the edge of the camp opposite the river. First she looked at the backs of the men watching Leah and her magic tricks. Then she studied the forest again.

From the pile, she pulled the last of the saved sleeping bags, then laid it on the ground between Katie and the woods, as close to the darkness as she could. Heath nodded. Elizabeth lay down. Heath searched the trees and nodded again.

Gently Anna lifted Wily from her lap, slid off the log, then settled him in the duff nearby. By the peculiar glow of Leah’s LED lantern, Anna could see his eyes. Huge black pupils surrounded by a halo of gold, flecked with brown. Holding a finger to her lips, she made the universal sign for silence.

Wily tilted his chin up, his lids lowering slightly over his eyes. Anna was jolted with the completeness of the knowledge and connection she read there. Unsure whether she’d witnessed an arcane moment of interspecies unity or was going mad, she turned and crept toward the light of the camp.

Her moose-hide moccasins would have provided little protection over rough ground. Through the soft soles, she could feel the sharpness of sticks fallen from the pines. The mocs were, however, ideal for walking softly through the forest. One of the reasons, she supposed, various American Indian tribes had adopted them.

No one in camp was moving or speaking. The fire had settled to a murmur. With no cover noise, Anna was forced to move slowly. Since she had only a vague idea of what she might do when she got close to the people, the delay didn’t concern her. Fifteen feet out, and still well screened, she stopped behind the kindly bulk of a tree trunk and watched.

Leah had used the cable ties to fasten the wheels together so they formed one wider wheel. Their short axle rods poked out several inches to either side. Now she was drilling holes in the long arm of the Tilt ’n’ Turner opposite the end to which she had affixed the seat. That done, she bolted one of the quick-release docks designed for the axles to the T ’n’ T bar.

Anna hated the fact that a mind such as Leah’s could be shut down by the likes of Jimmy, Sean, Reg, and the fucking dude.

Suddenly she wished he had a name, wished it almost as much as she wished him dead. The need to call him something other than “the dude” was so strong it stopped her breath for a second. Names mattered. Bob, Harvey, even Jason, anything would be less frightening—and less infuriatingly banal—than “the dude.”