Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (23 page)

Leah dropped her paddle handle. The chair fell to the left. Heath was poured out onto the ground. Elizabeth was yelling, “Don’t drop Mom!” but Mom was already in a heap, torso over the downed paddle handle, legs twisted against the double wheel.

Sean stayed behind the women, the rifle lifted to his shoulder. The dude stood his ground, not even drawing the pistol from his belt.

The roar grew louder. A creature, black as a ninja, but big, and moving fast, burst from the trees.

THIRTY-FOUR

Charles got to his feet. Brushing the leaves off his shirt, he glared at Sean. The fool nearly shot him in the back with Jimmy’s peashooter. Dirt had spurted up less than a yard from his foot as the bullet plowed into the ground.

“God damn, Dude, that was close. Jimmy’s sights gotta be screwed. I’d’ve never! God damn,” the idiot babbled while Charles decided whether to kill him now or later. Later, he decided. He doubted Reg would rape the Hendricks girl. Charles certainly had no taste for that sort of thing.

“You were going to fuckin’ shoot me!” Reg screamed. “I come out of the woods, and you are fuckin’ shooting at me.”

Charles wasn’t a finicky man when it came to language. In his line of work, slaughtering the king’s English was de rigueur, but after a few days with Reg, he was coming to hate the word “fuck.”

Reg’s face was shiny with sweat. His eyes were too wide, the white of the sclera showing around the black irises. Charles breathed in slowly through his nose to quench a sigh. Reg was scared again, wolves or pixies or windigos, or maybe, like Charles, he believed demons roamed the earth and did not yet realize he was one of them.

“Quiet,” Charles said. The silence was not instantaneous. Control was definitely eroding. Not his fault. Amateurs and fools were beyond the control of sensible men. They needed to be manipulated with great care, and even then their response to anything outside their limited view of the world could render them unpredictable.

Rather than repeat himself and let this weakness show, Charles waited until they stopped gibbering.

“Reg?” he said as calmly as an executive VP at the Monday morning meeting.

“Shit, man, it was Jimmy. Coming for me. He had a knife. A big fuckin’ knife, and like this weird look in his eyes. I swear to God.” Words tumbled out.

“Jimmy,” Charles said, wondering what the point of this exercise in imagination was leading to. Reg was not lying; at least Charles didn’t think he was. His fear was sincere. Charles could smell it. The reek of fear was familiar to Charles. As was the reek of excrement. The Jimmy story could be an excuse for cowardice, or some phobia Reg didn’t want to admit to. Coprophobia, fear of excrement. Now that would make for an interesting story; a man so terrified by his own feces he hallucinated dead people.

“No shit, it was Jimmy!” Reg shouted. “Wolves or whatever didn’t get him, or if they got him, he ain’t dead. I tell you it was like Jimmy and not Jimmy. And that knife! Jesus, that fucker was a yard long.”

“Jimmy and not Jimmy,” Charles said, pretending to consider the ramifications. “Like a ghost.”

“Yeah, like a ghost, man,” Reg said. “But a ghost with a big fuckin’ knife, and its eyes were weird, man, weird.”

“Jimmy boy’s not dead?” Sean was asking Charles, not Reg, asking for permission to believe his erstwhile “friend” was not worm food.

“He’s dead,” Charles said. Experience told him the Jimmys of the world didn’t have the intelligence or creativity to pull off extravagant pranks. Jimmys were cogs; they didn’t run without the machinery of the gang around them. If Jimmy had been able to crawl, he would have crawled back to camp.

“No, man, I seen him. And that dog. He had the dog you busted up against the tree with him. It was like a wolf, man. All growling and showing its fangs and it had on, like, this green cape, like Superdog, you know…” Reg’s words trailed off.

“A dead dog in a superhero’s cape,” said Charles without inflection. The cretin had scared himself in the haunted forest. It annoyed Charles that Reg didn’t have enough respect for his intelligence to make up a decent story. “Did you get the firewood?” he asked mildly, as he let his eyes coast over the hostages.

The cripple was down, her daughter beside her. The Hendricks woman and her child stood behind them. A family of four posing for a classic portrait. They were in shock, injured, and confused. Charles had seen to that.

Something was off in their reactions to Reg’s tale.

It was that they were not reacting to Reg’s tale. It had all the ingredients of a good story: ghosts and animals, superhero capes and knives, and they were showing no facial expression whatever, not even the younger females.

It wasn’t just PTSD from his machinations. They were hiding something, Charles knew it as surely as he knew it didn’t matter what it was. Tomorrow he’d be shed of the lot of them, one way or another. His revenge to be savored, and his money invested in Michael’s future.

THIRTY-FIVE

A nurse was wiping Anna’s hand with a warm wet cloth, careful to clean between each two fingers. At least this was what her mind told her as it drifted back from the realms of the unconscious. Or perhaps the subconscious. Lying on her side, she had a nice view of the hand being cleaned. On the forest floor half a foot from the tip of her nose, it lay on its knuckles, the fingers half closed. Wily, his chin on his paws, was meticulously lapping the blood from it. He’d gotten all but a few patches between her fingers, and the stuff beneath her nails. Anna didn’t mind Wily licking her hand. The feel was comforting, and he might get a little protein from the exercise.

“Missed some,” she whispered and spread her fingers. Pain shot down from her shoulder to meet the tiny tensing of muscles. “God damn,” Anna said. “The bastard shot me, didn’t he?”

Wily went on with his cleansing.

“I don’t believe it. The bastard shot me.” Wily raised one eyebrow and studied her with his golden brown eyes.

The bastard might still be nearby.

Anna stopped talking and listened until she felt as if her ears were waving over her head on long stalks. No sound of a man creeping or charging through the shrubbery, no taunts, nothing.

Finished with her hand, Wily flopped onto his side and began washing his butt.

“He’s gone, isn’t he? He can’t have known he shot me. If he did, he would have come and finished me off,” Anna whispered. “Went to get backup? The dude and whatsisname? That would be stupid. For all he knows, we could be a mile away in any direction before they got back.”

Wily went on with his toilette.

“We scared him off?”

Wily paused to meet her eyes.

“You’re making that up. You and me? No kidding? I guess we’re scarier than I thought.” She was quiet for a while, watching Wily continuing his ablutions. “You know what, Wily? I’m scared to try to sit up, scared to look at where the bullet hit. I’m scared I’m going to die.”

Whuff, came the canine reply.

“You’re right,” Anna said. “We’re all going to die.” While Wily watched with a concerned eye, Anna sat up. “So far, so good. Help me off with the coat?” Wily chose not to, and as it turned out, Anna didn’t need assistance. The coat was so roomy it slid off her shoulders easily. Fabric driven into her upper arm by the force of the bullet was plucked from the wound. Screaming without opening her mouth, Anna sounded like a suffering puppy more than anything human. Blinking back tears, she waited until the pain subsided from hurricane to tropical storm force.

There was nothing much to see. Blood soaked the black knit of her long-sleeved T-shirt. Poking around with her finger, she found the hole in the shirt and a corresponding hole beneath, which she did not probe. Dragging the shirt off over her head was beyond her courage. Using the hunting knife, she cut away from the tear in the shirt, then ripped the sleeve off.

There was no blood on the back of the sleeve. No exit wound. Her mind was clearing. She’d been six feet from the bore of a Walther: The bullet should have torn her arm off. Hunks of shattered bone should be jutting out of a mass of mangled bleeding flesh. Reg’s bullet hadn’t even made it through the meat of her bicep. Either she’d been hit by a piece of lead ricocheting off a rock, or shrapnel had been driven into her arm, a splinter of wood, a shard of stone.

Having removed the cap with her teeth, Anna upended the canteen and poured the last of the water over the wound. Wily kindly assisted with the final mop-up. A ricocheted bullet; the hole was as neat and round as if it had been made by a drill, which, in a sense, it had. Blood was flowing steadily, but not spurting. Experimentally, Anna bent the wounded arm at the elbow. Her internal screaming was so loud she was deaf with it. Taking a deep breath, she tried it again. No crepitus. The bone didn’t seem to be broken.

“Good news, Wily, today is not a good day to die.” Wily didn’t so much as smile. Evidently, he had never seen
Little Big Man
either. “You’ve got to get out more,” she said seriously.

Further examination was pointless. Discovering that it was not broken had been pointless and painful. She’d only done it to reassure Wily.

Carrying Sean’s coat and her wounded arm, she led the way back to the creek they’d forded on their way to kill Reg. For the second time in two days, she used the rubber syringe, filling it with creek water and squirting it into the hole. The pain was such that, had she not been sitting down, she would have fallen. Since she wasn’t going to get it anywhere near sterile with creek water, she saved herself the agony of a second baptism. Instead, she poured the contents of the little peroxide bottle into the hole, and bit back a cry as it burned down to the bone. Peroxide wasn’t a particularly good antiseptic, but it was all she had. Maybe the frothing would bring out more of whatever pulverized crud had traveled in on the bullet.

She put a couple of sterile pads over the wound, then bandaged it tightly with gauze. The chunk of lead was in the back of her bicep. The lump was palpable beneath the skin. Because it was alien, part of her wanted to slash the flesh with the thug’s knife and force it out of her body. The saner part of her knew the risk of infection was greater than the damage caused by leaving the slug where it was. If they survived, a nice, antiseptic doctor with a clean scalpel could do it for her. If not, what did it matter?

The canteen refilled, she washed down four of the aspirins, put Jimmy’s coat back on, and put her hand in the pocket in lieu of a sling. “That does, it buddy,” she said to Wily. “That’s my whole repertoire. We may as well get back to work.”

Wily sighed as he got up on three legs, his lime green cape still in place, and led the way back around the stand of firs. They peeked out to where Reg had been relieving himself. The space was devoid of life, the trees silent sentinels, the fog encasing everything in shrouds of gray. Sticks and twigs lay where the thug had dropped them.

“Holy smoke,” Anna breathed. “We did; we scared him off. What a weenie! He had a gun. You think he shot up all his bullets?” In the center of the clearing where Reg had squatted was a smeared pile of excrement. Bowels tended to let go in extreme fear situations, readying the body for fight or flight.

Wily sniffed the dung.

“Anything I should know?” Anna asked.

There wasn’t.

“This”—Anna indicated the pile with the tip of her moccasin—“indicates serious terror. Not that you and I aren’t scary as hell—for a small middle-aged woman and an old house dog. Sorry, a spade is a spade, as they say.

“I do have this big damn knife. Still…” Anna’s voice trailed off. “Something sure as hell scared him off.” Twisting around, she looked at the deepening gloom in the woods behind them, half expecting to see a ring of wolves. Not so much as a squirrel flipped its tail.

“Were there wolves?” she asked Wily. He didn’t seem to think so. Though they were his brothers, they would kill and eat him if they got a chance. Had there been wolves, Wily would smell them; his hackles would be raised.

“No wolves, then. What do you say we move on?” Anna asked. “Hey, we’ve got them on the run.”

Wily had stood his ground growling as bullets fell around him like hail. He deserved a ride from the woman who’d dived under the nearest tree. It hurt Anna that she couldn’t lift him and carry him in her arms. Not that he’d ever say anything. Still, it hurt nearly as much as the bullet in her arm did. She wasn’t to suffer that guilt long. All of her attention was required to remain upright and moving forward. Shock; she knew the symptoms. One was that it was hard to think clearly. She couldn’t remember the others, and she couldn’t tell if night was falling or if she was going blind. For a time, she simply plodded after the irregular patter of Wily’s paws.

When he stopped, she stopped. When he didn’t start again, she sat down. She drank some water. She put her head between her knees. Wily sat beside her in silent sympathy. At length, her mind settled, her blood pressure rose, and she could tell nighttime from blindness.

Wily had brought her back to a place near the leaning stones. They were thirty or forty yards to one side, Tangled roots of trees, killed by fire and downed by wind, screened them.

In a miracle worth investigation by the Vatican, the dude had picked up on Anna and Wily’s hints. He had brought his hostages to the sheltering boulders. Leah, Heath, and the girls huddled together inside where it was dry. Reg, stiff as a Buckingham Palace guard, stood nearby, the pistol in his hand, eyes raking from left to right with the regularity of windshield wipers. Sean, limping ostentatiously, was laying a fire at the mouth of the shelter. The dude had belatedly noticed the scrim of deadfall nearby. He was dragging branches to where Sean worked.

Not one single person spoke.

“It’s going to freeze tonight,” Anna whispered. She’d seen ice in the cold front she’d dreamed. She would not share that with Wily. She was in no mood to be made fun of. “We could burrow under leaves, but then we couldn’t keep watch.” Not to mention they were an arm and a leg shy of full burrowing potential. Should they fall asleep without a fire, or some kind of external heat source, Anna suspected one of them at least would wake up dead.