Endangered Species (27 page)

An Austrian had a ruined leg from a shotgun shell .

Schlessinger had a habit and an attitude and lied about hearing the

shot.  Mitch Hanson was a goldbrick and a double-dipper, roundly

disliked by Schlessinger.  According to Dijon, he had been inordinately

cheerful, pottering around the crash site cracking jokes before the

corpses were cold.  A blond and a brunette were featured on Slattery's

wall and three used tampons inhabited his freezer.

Separating the clues from the flotsam of human idiosyncrasy was a bitch.

How, if at all, Hanson, Schlessinger, and the shotgun wound fit into the

Beechcraft sabotage, Anna couldn't fathom.

She resurrected her dead pillow and settled into a new position .

Fragments of ideas continued to jump docilely over her mental fence:

baby alligators hooked on bologna sandwiches, plastic bags in the

outboards, volunteers with orphaned fawns, separated actuator rods,

chipmunk pigiets.  Still sleep eluded her.  Giving it up as a lost

cause, she threw back the sleeping bag and padded out through the

kitchen, snatching up a dish towel to protect her bare behind from the

splintered steps that led down from the apartment.

In her current role as incubator, Tabby kept the air conditioner on high

and Anna welcomed the moist warmth of the night.  With the heat came a

twinge behind her left ear.  She fill ered the diminishing lump.  She'd

forgotten to include that incident in her inventory of significant

happenings.  She wrote it off to brain damage and revised her mental

list.  An unknown assailant, hiding like a bogeyman in Hammond's bedroom

closet, had bashed her over the head with the butt of a twelve-gauge

shotgun.

List complete, Anna's mind became empty.  The exquisite balm of the

South wrapped around her.  Though she loved the high deserts, felt

renewed by the harsh vistas of the West, there was no denying the sultry

pleasures of Georgia.  Breathing deep and evenly, she closed her eyes to

better let the night soothe her.

Through the music of frogs came the shattering crunch of shod feet on

gravel.  Peace was canceled.  With the noise a sudden realization came

to Anna: she was naked, or in local vernacular, buck nekkid.  Night

crawlers seldom separated art from pornography.  All at once she felt

vulnerable; a wrinkling white-skinned woman on a peeling white-painted

step.

For the past quarter of an hour she'd sat without moving.  If she

continued as still, the odds were good she would remain undetected.

Slowing her breaths, aware now of the myriad sounds of a body sustaining

life, she froze.

Reacting to a seldom-used instinct, her bare skin was prickling .

Sensations were clear and sustained in their detail.  Rough wood pressed

into her buttocks with a mild ache, warning her not to sit too long, not

to compromise mobility.  The soles of her feet stuck damply to the step

below, her own sweat providing traction should it be needed.  A breath

of air touched her left cheek, teasing the fine guard hairs.

Undoubtedly there was a time in man's evolution when these things

combined to warn and prepare, to help survive.  Years indoors, feet on

concrete, had forced the intellect to try and compensate for the sensate

and Anna found the alarms of her body to be a distraction.  Fervently

she wished she'd dressed.  Even a T-shirt and panties would have helped.

The crunching stopped.  In the thick silence she became aware that the

song of the frogs had stopped as well.  A minute ticked by, cataloguing

the discomforts of a body in stasis.  Reveling in her captive state, a

mosquito whined bloodthirsty threats in her ear.

A frog peeped, then another.  They'd gotten over their panic .

Anna had not.  Without the crunch she couldn't locate the interloper.

Perched naked as a jaybird on the top step, it was possible that she'd

been seen and the prowler had fled in unseemly-and unflattering-haste.

The theory died as it was born: no racket of retreating steps .

Left behind was the disquieting knowledge that in the inky shadows on

the drive someone stood watching or waiting or both.

A shriek of metal ripped the darkness.  Anna's senses were stretched, a

web of nerves.  They caught the knife-edged noise in their silken

strands and Anna twitched as if she'd been struck.  The urge to leap up

and bolt indoors quivered through her.  She breathed shallowly, like a

woman having contractions, till the terror passed .

All this transpired in a Jack Robinson minute and she found herself

thinking of Einstein, wondering if there was an untapped internal

correlation to his theory of relativity.

With the passage of knee-jerk panic, the source of the noise became

clear.  It was the familiar rasp of the passenger door on the pumper

truck being forced open over a rusted wrinkle acquired in a past

encounter with another vehicle.  A soft thump followed; t he seat back

being pulled forward, hitting the steering wheel.

Anna stared until her eyes watered.  She'd parked the truck beneath a

venerable magnolia.  Light-reflecting waxy leaves kept the midnight

beneath safe from the moon and her prying eyes.

Faint rustlings and bumpings painted a picture on the black screen of

her vision.  Someone was rummaging through the truck, stirring the

rusted mess of tools behind the seat, rearranging water bottles and

insect repellent cans.

Dressed, Anna would have confronted the intruder and gotten at least an

ID.  Sans clothes she felt too vulnerable.  She was annoyed to note the

protective magic with which modern women imbued a layer of cotton.

Surely, unencumbered by flapping fabric, one could fight harder, run

faster, escape with more agility.  Not to mention the possibility of

distraction to one's opponent.  Still, she didn't move.

Heavy and low, the sound of ripping rose through the darkness .

Seats being slashed.  Nothing else in the aging vehicle was made of

fabric.

Metal squawked again, announcing the end of the assault on the truck's

interior.  Anna watched the sharp edges of the shadows to see if the

night visitor would expose himself.  A moment of silence reigned, the

crunch of gravel began, then faded in the direction opposite the

mansion.  After a moment it stopped and was replaced by the delicate

crushing of leaves.  Whoever it was had left the drive, keeping to the

shadows.  Within moments the faint sound of leaves underfoot was gone as

well.

l'o be on the safe side, Anna waited another long minute before easing

to her feet and stinking back indoors.

Armored in NoMex and armed with a flashlight, she emerged five minutes

later and clattered down the wooden stairs.  Attempts at stealth would

have been fruitless given her footwear, but Anna wasn't interested in

sneaking.  Knife-wielding night creepers were best scared far away

before any investigation was undertaken.

Following the selective eye of the flashlight, she traced the marauder's

progress through the cab of the truck.  The seat was again upright, the

glove compartment gutted, its eclectic innards strewn across the floor.

A motley collection of tools and litter had been raked from beneath the

bench seat.  Chaos being its usual state, the clutter behind the seat

looked much as it always did.

On the back of the seat on the driver's side, approximately where a

small woman's shoulder blades would rest, were two deep slashes, short

and vertical, the way old medical texts illustrated the proper cut for

sucking poison from a pit viper's bite.  The neat slits struck Anna as a

violent form of shorthand.

The content of the message was unclear but the blind malice made her

scalp crawl.  A twinge was frightened from the tender spot behind her

ear.  This was personal, though for the life of her Anna couldn't guess

why.

Anna climbed the stairs once more, dawn was Bdrowning the stars over the

Atlantic.  She showered, dressed again, and made coffee to create the

illusion she'd enjoyed a night's sleep.  A report would have to be filed

on the vandalism done to the truck's upholstery, but no one would care.

It wasn't as if the slashes lowered the relic's trade-in value.  By the

light of day she would do a more comprehensive inventory, but she was

sure nothing had been stolen.  There wasn't anything of value in the

truck to steal: no car phone, no radar detector, not even an AM radio.

There was an outside chance the vandalism was random.  Even paradisiacal

islands had their share of malcontents.  Or the attack could have been

politically motivated, aimed at fire policy, the National Park Service,

or even the United States government in general.  The aftershocks of

Waco, Texas, the Oklahoma bombing, and assorted lesser calamities were

being continually resuscitated by the hot breath of publicity-hungry

groups.  Mostly down-at-the-heel men "i with too many guns and too few

brains who'd taken it upon themselves to tarnish the memory of the

American militia by embracing the name and not the ideal.

Random vandalism appealed most strongly to Anna.  Mindless, without

purpose, it struck and was gone.  Like lightning, it often did strike

the same place twice, but one entertained the reassuring delusion that

it would not.  Organized political vandalism had its merits as well. The

caricatured macho of feral militias was a villain Anna loved to hate.

She'd been surprised a spate of movies and television shows hadn't

sprung up around the concept.  Hollywood had been in search of a

serviceable evil since the end of the Cold War.

Restoring order to the toolbox and the disemboweled glove compartment,

she turned these temptations over in her mind.  In the end she had to

abandon both.  Plum Orchard was too isolated for violence of the random

variety, particularly the sort that customarily fell to disgruntled

teens.  Political groups tended to leave a calling card-those that were

literate, Anna in all prejudice felt obliged to add.  That left her

where she'd begun, with the uncomfortable knowledge that it was

universal malice, malice toward fire crew in general or her in

particular.

Near the gravel drive a portable water tank of rubber held up by metal

piping was kept full.  The tap ran slowly but steadily, and over time,

would fill the man-made reservoir.  As part of her morning's chores,

Anna unrolled and spliced together two hundred feet of cloth hose and

ran the line from the tank by the spigot to one of the two tanks

situated on the open green area where helicopters could get access.

Evaporation sucked up nearly a fifth of a tank every twelve hours.

Topping them daily was one of the duties of the fire crews.

That done, she tested her patience and the muscles in her right shoulder

pull-starting a Mark IV portable pump.  When it was up and running,

smashing the tranquillity of the morning and hardening the hose with

moving water, she took shelter under an oak and mapped out a plan for

the day.

Dijon would be with her again.  He was up for pretty nearly anything

that broke the monotony and was not yet old enough to worry about