Boar Island (30 page)

No flying.

Not a dream.

Again she looked toward the ruins. The stairwell was disgorging its recent meal, bipedal shapes bulging forth to be delineated by the faint light of the stars. The creatures who’d put a wasp in her dream, a drug in her veins.

Anna raised her gun hand. “No further,” she said. “Move and I soowt.” She’d meant to say “shoot.” The bonk on the head, or the chemical they’d injected, turned her lips to rubber. The figures halted, murmured, then came toward her.

Anna pulled the trigger. Nothing. Her hand was empty, the gun ever so far away on the ground by her foot.

The figures separated, moving slowly in her direction. Ninjas, black clothes and hoods and faces, with four white hands, fake as plastic mannequins’ hands, floating along beside them. They were wearing surgical gloves.

Coming to butcher the kill, Anna thought as she tipped into nothingness.

THIRTY-TWO

Denise couldn’t take her eyes off the fallen woman. In the starlight, Anna Pigeon was faintly luminescent, as if she’d been swimming in phosphorescent plankton. The boots, incongruously dark, made it appear as if her legs had been lopped off just below the knee, leaving white stumps. Anna’s hair, always in a single fat braid, was spread out around her in a dark fan shot with silver, a protective cape that reached to her waist.

Denise didn’t know what she had expected to happen when they’d set out on this venture, but this wasn’t it. Despite the fact that three of her bullets were in him, Kurt Duffy had roared and fought. That made it self-defense in a way. Killing should be a positive or negative choice, not made in hot blood, necessarily—cold blood was fine—but with a real sense of commitment. One
committed
murder; murder didn’t just happen. The gun didn’t just go off; the victim didn’t just run into the knife seven times.

Since she wasn’t murdering Anna Pigeon, just removing an obstacle for a while, she’d pictured it happening in a prosaic, workaday kind of way. Or peacefully, like taking out the garbage on a Sunday afternoon. The unconscious body would lie in its own snug little bed, drifting quietly into deeper and deeper sleep. Then Denise and Paulette would wrap her tidily in one of her blankets and haul her to the runabout.

Not this blood-and-snot-filled gun-toting drama.

Also, in her mental picture, Anna Pigeon would wear a pair of pajamas, for Christ’s sake, or a T-shirt and panties. What kind of lunatic leaps up and gives chase wearing nothing but a pair of cordovan NPS boots, even if she is drugged?

Naked was bad in an unsettling way. Naked was vulnerable and very female. Naked gave a body a gender and an age. “She should wear fucking pajamas,” Denise hissed. “Rangers get called out at night.”

Paulette said nothing.

The shushing sibilance of the sea washed between Denise and her sister. Usually the sounds of the ocean soothed Denise. These rasped. The clacking of rocks as they were rolled by the receding waves clattered like a plague of demented cicadas.

Anna Pigeon’s hand twitched. Passed out on major drugs, the woman seemed to still be reaching for her gun.

“Oh God,” Paulette whispered. “What do we do now?”

Trained to the call of “Gun!” Denise ran forward quickly and kicked the SIG out of the reach of the weak and groping hand. At a safe distance from the moribund ranger, she retrieved the weapon and shoved it into the waistband of her pants at the small of her back. Unlike Paulette, Denise had opted for black Levi’s instead of sweatpants. The denim waistband held the gun firmly.

“We get her to the boat,” Denise said.

“Shouldn’t we get her some clothes first?” Paulette asked plaintively.

The toe of Denise’s sneaker twitched out and struck the downed woman in the shoulder.

“Don’t kick her!” Paulette exclaimed.

Like that was worse than drugging and snatching her.

Denise made no reply. She hadn’t meant to kick her. Her foot had jerked out of its own accord. Nerves.

“We can lend her some of our clothes,” Denise said. “She won’t need much. She won’t be there for long. Help me pick her up.”

Paulette didn’t move. She was looking past the naked ranger toward the housing area. “Maybe we should go back to her room. She’s going to need some things. Maybe she takes medication … and toothpaste … that kind of thing,” Paulette said.

Denise thought about that for an instant—not the meds or the toiletries, a blanket to cover her up. Anna had made it fifty or sixty yards from her apartment. There was nothing but open road and parking lot between where she lay and her bed. A sculptor up late smoking dope, or doing whatever sculptors did in the dead of night, might see them. “Too risky,” she decided. “I’ll take her arms, you take her legs. Put a hand under each knee; it’ll be easier that way.”

Paulette tiptoed gingerly around the crumpled form on the paving stones. Leaning down, she lifted one of the booted feet and pulled the leg. With the leverage, the senseless woman rolled to lie upon her back, hair veiling her breasts. Half of her face was covered in a black mask. Denise stared until she realized that it was not a mask; it was blood.

“She’s bleeding!” Paulette exclaimed. “Why is she bleeding?”

To Denise, it sounded as if her sister blamed her, suggested she’d kicked Anna Pigeon in the face. Her toe had only just tapped the woman’s shoulder. “She must have cut her head when she fell,” Denise said curtly. “Get her legs.” Moving briskly to give herself more courage and authority than she felt, Denise grabbed a limp wrist in each hand and lifted the upper body.

The used syringe fell from Anna’s lax fingers. Denise dropped the hands. Flesh thudded against the ground.

“Careful,” Paulette whispered. “We don’t want to hurt her.”

Denise grunted. Stepping on the needle, she pried the plastic up until the needle snapped off. She put the syringe in the front pocket of her jacket. Both she and Paulette had worn surgical gloves when they filled it; still, forensics would be able to tell what drugs were used, maybe match them to the rufies missing from the park’s evidence locker. If anybody even thought to check there. The syringe itself might be a special kind Mount Desert used exclusively. One never knew what mattered and what didn’t until it was too late.

The bit of evidence secured, Denise grabbed Anna’s wrists again and whispered, “Grab her legs.”

Paulette grabbed the top of the boots and pulled Anna’s naked legs up and apart. A whimper escaped her as she slowly lowered them again, boot heels carefully together. “I can’t!” she wailed softly. “It’s like rape. Please, let’s get her some clothes. Or put her back in her bed and leave. She won’t remember us. You said she won’t remember anything.”

Denise wanted to lash out at Paulette, but a part of her felt as her sister did. Not about putting Ranger Pigeon back and pretending it never happened, but about one woman prying apart another woman’s legs and stepping between them when that woman was naked. It was icky. The worst kind of icky, the kind that stuck to the inside of your skull for years.

“Right,” she said to herself; then, to her sister, “But we can’t go back. We’re way beyond that. We can’t leave her. Let’s do this. Come take an arm. We’ll drag her so her feet stay together and we’re not … you know, looking at her that way. We don’t have to drag her far. Jumping out of bed and chasing us, she did half our work for us. Another couple hundred yards and we’re good to go. All the hard part over.”

Paulette came up beside Denise but made no move to help. Denise shoved one of Pigeon’s arms into her hands.

“Ranger Pigeon was nice to me the morning Kurt was found,” Paulette said, looking into the bloody mask of a face.

Denise heard faint accusation in her sister’s tone and bit back a harsh response. Paulette was her gentler self; she had to respect the Paulette half of her personality even when it was a huge pain in the butt. “Everything is going to be fine,” she said calmly. “We’ve come so far. We do this and we’re almost free. Think of our house in the pines somewhere warm. Think of being a family and never being cold or alone again.”

Paulette took in a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right.”

Denise exhaled in relief. “Here we go,” she whispered.

Both of them pulling moved the body at a snail’s pace. Anna Pigeon couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds, a hundred and fifteen at most, yet she apparently had made a deal with gravity; the earth seemed to hold her fast. Agonizing minutes passed as they dragged her from the granite apron in front of the Education Center onto the road to Schoodic Point, where the boat was stashed.

“Shit,” Denise muttered as one of Anna’s boots came off. Half a yard more and her heel was red with blood. Or, in the moonlight, black with blood. Denise was imagining the red color.

“We have to stop,” Paulette said. “We’re scratching her bottom and her legs all up.”

“We’re making a ton of noise,” Denise said. Dumb and Dumber move a body, she thought. Murder wasn’t glamorous; she knew that from killing Kurt. Neither was kidnapping, but it shouldn’t be stupid. This was stupid, like a bad movie.

For an awful moment, Denise flew free of her body. From twenty feet up in the air she looked down at herself and her sister dragging the drugged ranger. They were ludicrous, absurd. Minuscule black ants, intent on abduction, hauling along a naked human. Insane. The picture whirled, and Denise crashed back into her own skull.

Not absurd, necessary.

Okay, absurd, but necessary, Denise admitted to herself. They had to do this to get what was owed them. She was sorry about Anna Pigeon, but Anna would have sided with the Peter Barneses and the Kurt Duffys and stripped Denise and her twin of everything. Again. Thrown them out to rot with the garbage. Again.

On second thought, she wasn’t that sorry about Anna Pigeon. She should have kept her nosy little pigeon beak out of things that were none of her business, kept her beady little birdy eyes off of other people’s things.

“Let’s get her up,” Denise said as she dragged the ranger’s limp arm around her neck, hoisting her half of the inert form. “Like this, like we’re walking a drunk. Then we won’t be scratching her. It’ll be okay. Put her arm around your neck.” After more fumbling clown antics, they had the unconscious woman between them and were moving forward. Denise cursed herself. Anybody with half a brain would have worked all this bullshit out before doing the deed. The pigeon was to blame. If she hadn’t nosed around they wouldn’t be in such a rush, moving too fast to think things through properly.

With Anna draped around their necks, they traveled at a fairly good pace. Pigeon’s toes dragged, but there was nothing Denise could do about that.

Within minutes they had trundled their catch over the rough cobble-sized stones of the point to the wash where they’d hidden the runabout. Unseen. Unheard. Like they’d never been to Schoodic. Like none of it had ever happened.

“We’re good, we’re good,” Denise gasped, breathing in gusts as much from fear as exercise. Together they lowered the body, laying it out on the stones. “Catch your breath,” Denise told her sister. “Almost done.” Leaving Paulette standing over their captive, Denise went to turn the runabout right side up. The boat and outboard motor were heavy, but, unlike handling dead humans, Denise was accustomed to handling the runabout. She pried it up onto her knees, then flipped it easily over onto its keel.

Looking back over the gunwales, she expected to see Paulette getting the pigeon ready to drag over the side and into the boat. Instead, Paulette was sitting on the ground, in the rocks, her palms held to her cheeks and her feet in front of her like a little kid.

“We can’t do it,” Paulette said, eyes fixed on the prone naked ranger. “The shed won’t be a good prison. She’ll get out. Everybody will be swarming the island looking for her. Kidnapping is a serious crime. We could get the death sentence.”

Like murder wasn’t a serious crime—but then, Paulette hadn’t murdered anybody. Denise had.

“How can we can we keep her quiet, even for a day or two?” Paulette wailed, her voice rising too high, too loud. “Hikers and tourists go in the woods, they could hear. Handcuffed, how can she get to the toilet? Feed herself? If we do it, she’ll see us. Or hear us. We should have thought this through. Keeping her drugged all that time could hurt her. She could OD or dehydrate or something. I won’t.”

Paulette sounded mulish. More than that. She sounded firm.

What a miserable time for my sister to develop a spine, Denise thought. What a miserable time to get a conscience. Rage of the kind she thought she only held for Peter and his ilk rose up in her gorge hot as lava.

Paulette was staring up at her beseechingly, the ruined blond hair wisping out from beneath the black ball cap. Though they had been born only minutes, maybe seconds, apart, Denise realized Paulette was much younger than she was. Denise had to take care of her. You didn’t rage at a child. Especially not if that child was you when you were little, back before they ruined you. Besides, Paulette was right. A nutcase who would run after you naked with a gun wasn’t a person who would be easy to keep as a pet for an hour, let alone a couple of days.

Swallowing the molten anger, Denise walked around to where her sister sat beside Anna Pigeon. Crouching, she lifted one of Pigeon’s arms, then laid two fingers over the pulse point at her wrist. For thirty seconds she concentrated. Having laid the hand back on the stones, she shifted, put her first and second finger on the ranger’s trachea, and let them slide down into the hollow where the jugular vein was closest to the skin. Again she concentrated on feeling for a pulse.

It was there, thready and faint.

Making an executive decision, Denise removed her hand.

“Too late, Paulette,” she said. “She’s dead. You killed her.”

“Oh God,” Paulette murmured, and began to rock back and forth.

Denise sat next to her and put her arms around her. “Shh, shh,” she whispered. “It’s all good. This is how it was meant to be. I killed Kurt; you injected the pigeon and it killed her. That’s how it had to be. We did nothing that wasn’t supposed to happen. Things are just happening to help us now instead of hurt us. I’m going to take care of everything. No need to worry. Shh.” She laid her cheek against her sister’s. Paulette was calming at her touch. Denise savored the sensation of being of use, of value, to another human being.