Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (26 page)

“She is,” Leah murmured. “Her panties aren’t even torn. She says Jimmy killed Sean, then fell on her, and tried to make her go into the woods with him. When she began screaming, he got off of her, and she ran.

“She said Jimmy whispered in her ear,” Leah said.

“What did he whisper?” Heath asked.

“‘It’s me, don’t be afraid,’” Leah said.

“Anna,” Heath said.

“Anna.” Elizabeth said it and smiled.

THIRTY-NINE

Katie had run from her. Anna had been powerless to stop her. The flow of energy that had lifted her from her and Wily’s nest, and propelled her down the side of the rocks, was gone as well.

Moving more like an earthworm than a vertebrate, Anna inched up the broken stone steps to the top of the boulders. Wily lay curled, nose to tail, around the sapling. His eyes were alert. When he saw Anna, his tail whisked quietly over the stone a time or two in welcome.

The dude’s shouting at Katie rose with the smoke. Anna and Wily listened to the awful ripping scream as he tore her from her mother.

“Jimmydidit.”

Katie’s voice was distorted and broken. The dude was shaking her.

“I tried, Wily. I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I tried to tell her it was me, to not be afraid, not to cry out, to come with me. She was so scared.”

Wily licked at the fingers recoated with blood. Old and helpless and frightened, Anna stared into the night unsure what she was. Cold and damp had weaseled into her bones, rusting the joints. Tears threatened. She wanted to die with her friends in the warmth of their company and the fire.

“My arm gave out,” she told the dog. “Opened up again. I was lying on Katie like a rapist, like Sean, and she couldn’t hear me. I’d forgotten I had on Jimmy’s hat and coat. Like Reg, that’s all she saw. He’s going to kill them, Wily, all of them.”

Wily stopped lapping and looked up at her with an ancient liquid gaze.

“Right,” Anna said. “We’ll think about it tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. After all … Never seen
Gone With the Wind
? I don’t believe that.” Too tired to do else, she curled down around Wily, folding him inside the coat next to her, her hands warmed by his fur.

Paul spooned her that same way. Never had anything made her feel so safe and valued as snuggling into the embrace of Paul Davidson. The thought of her husband broke a dam in her brain. All that was loving and desirable about the human race rushed through the breach.

Without warning, the flow changed. She heard Jimmy’s breath hard in her ear as she rammed the knife home again and again, felt his warm blood soaking through her shirt at the small of her back as she carried him to the river. Specks of Sean’s teeth or brain matter were cold where they’d splattered on her cheeks. Bodily fluids not her own rendered her hands sticky. Wily’s fur clung to her palms. Her body began shaking from within. Fingers shook. Moccasined toes dug at the thin layer of soil.

Torrents of weakness drowned her. With them came a thousand thousand gossamer threads connecting her to that which was not animal but apart, the thing called humanity: Christmas carols, kisses, high school rings, private jokes, good food, laughter, bad puns, guitar riffs, clean sheets, Paul’s smile, s’mores, holding hands with her sister, winks across the room, mowing grass, feeding her dog Taco, taking out the trash, rereading
Desert Solitaire,
buying red silk underwear, being disappointed and amazed, lonely and in love.

Bright paper packages.

Whiskers on kittens.

It was not God who created Man, but Mankind that held itself together when God would drag it piecemeal back into the natural world of tides, seasons, and dancing to the movement of glaciers and the shifting of continental plates.

Declaring one’s humanity complicated life, made transactions more difficult. Cats ate small helpless tweety birds, and cats were okay with that. Coyotes slaughtered adorable lambkins. Deer razed old men’s tomato gardens to the ground. There was no remorse; they did not second-guess themselves, or waste time parsing motives. A bear did not wonder if she was a good bear or a bad bear, if she was fair or just or kind. A bear ate, slept, mated, defended her young, lived and died without self-recrimination. Only people did that. The past was never over; the present was lost in planning for a future that promised nothing but proof of mortality.

The disturbance from below dwindled. The dude had given up trying to shake information out of Katie.

Anna’s disintegration into humanity continued. This was a bad time for it. There were things that needed to be done, people who needed to be killed.

Breathing deeply through shudders, she let herself drain into Wily, felt the bridge from dog to wolf, breathed in the scent of the damp earth and the smoke of the fire. The ache in her wounded arm let go of anger at the bullet, fear of infection, and became merely an ache. The hunger in her belly ceased to resent the men who’d burned its food, lost the specter of starvation, and settled again into simple hunger.

Wily was warm and the fire was warm and Anna was as the fire and the dog and the boulder, cured of the burden of what the poets and the preachers called soul.

Denned beneath the stripling maple, she and the dog again slept.

FORTY

“A fuckin’ wolf and wearing a cape like some fuckin’ superhero.”

Remembering the words, Heath smiled. She should have known. Wily was one of a kind. No one could make up a dog like Wily, especially not wearing a glowing green cape. Knowing Wily and Anna were alive and with them helped her retain a semblance of courage and optimism. It was the least she owed Leah and the girls, and, often, the most she had to offer.

Paranoid of wolf attack, Reg had the turned the fire into an inferno. Their shelter was warm enough that Heath shed her jacket and enjoyed the luxury of wadding it up for a pillow. Leah, Katie’s head on her shoulder, slept sitting up. Elizabeth lay with her feet on Heath’s thighs.

They were a sorry lot, the four of them. Aunt Gwen would have said they looked like something the cat dragged in. More precisely, they looked like something the cat played with for a day or so, then dragged in. Nothing disabling, Heath reassured herself. Nothing that wouldn’t heal. Her face would scar, but Elizabeth’s wouldn’t. That was all that mattered. Heath was not interested in men who sought external perfection.

While the others slept, she watched the wild antics of the firelight on the leaning sides of the boulders and reveled in being warm and, for the moment, safe enough. For a change, she wasn’t even thirsty. They had been able to fill their water bottles at a shallow creek they’d crossed before the weather stopped them for the night. Pain from the burn on her arm was unceasing, but there wasn’t a thing Heath could do about it, so she refused to admit it was there.

Reg threw a log as big around as his thigh onto the fire. Sparks exploded into stars on the stone above her. Heath didn’t look out. She did not want to make eye contact with the monsters who lurked beyond the portals of this chamber. Especially Reg. Reg was frightened. Frightened men were dangerous.

That it wasn’t a ghost that had terrified Reg, that it was Anna, affected Heath in a way she had not expected.

Anna was wearing Jimmy’s coat and hat; therefore Anna had killed Jimmy.

She didn’t just make him vanish into thin air. She killed him. In the dark, alone, Anna had killed a man. Once he was dead, she had taken his clothes.

Of course Heath knew thugs didn’t quietly go away because they were told to. They had to be convinced; had to be killed. Jimmy leaving camp alive and in good health, no corpse, no blood, coupled with the curdling screams receding into the distance, had allowed her to put the incident into the part of her mind where zombies, dragons, and ogres lived.

Knowing Anna had taken the man’s life laid such a weight of sadness on Heath’s chest she found it difficult to breathe. Her sorrow wasn’t wasted on Jimmy. The world was a better place without Jimmy. The demise of the bearded thug made the sea of society one drop cleaner than it had been while he lived. Heath’s burden was for Anna. Killing a man, his blood literally on one’s hands, had to have an effect on the killer. Lady Macbeth, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” post-traumatic stress disorder: people agreed, at least on the surface, that there was a terrible, psychic, soul-wrenching penalty to be paid when one took the life of another.

Would it change her to kill the dude or Reg? Two days ago she would have said absolutely it would. Now she didn’t think so, not for the worse, anyway. Accidentally killing a friend or a child, that would be crazy-making. Killing these vermin might be in the same vein as poisoning cockroaches. It was a smelly business, and not without risk, but once it was done, there was only relief and satisfaction. No one lit candles for the skittery little buggers, or piled minuscule teddy bears at the scene of the carnage. They weren’t given another thought until it came time to kill them all over again.

Killing Sean and the dude and Reg would be like that, Heath decided. Murder was idiosyncratic, each killing generating a unique affect, like one’s first few love affairs.

The weight of sorrow lifted. Though scratched and dented as they all were, Anna would still be Anna when this debacle was over. Heath prayed the rest of them would be around to welcome her back into the civilized world. Such as it was.

She closed her eyes. One hand rested gently around Elizabeth’s ankle. She slept deep and hard. There were no dreams.

*   *   *

Sunrise was only
a suggestion far to the east when the dude woke them by banging on the boulder with a chunk of blackened wood.

“Up. We’re moving.”

Long hours of immobility had stiffened overworked, sore muscles. Stirring elicited groans even from Katie, who was the youngest, and usually as agile as a gymnast. This morning she was a gymnast with a chipped front tooth and a bottom lip as swollen and purple as a ripe plum. Elizabeth’s face had reached what Heath hoped was maximum nastiness. She was glad her daughter couldn’t see it. The eye was monstrous, purple-and-black, fat with blood. Her fine cheekbone was hidden under a blob of swollen flesh in varying hues from puce to celadon. Heath doubted her own face was any more appealing, though, as far as she could tell, her skin was more broken than bruised. The burn on her arm was hideous, four inches across, with the nylon of her jacket seared into the flesh. What was happening below her belt she didn’t want to think about. Pain that was not pain, but almost pain, ghosted along the old nerve pathways hinting at dire blockages, leaks, and ruptures.

No one spoke of Sean or checked his corpse—or whatever remained of it. The dude acted as if the man had never existed. Reg pointedly avoided the side of the boulders where he lay. Katie and Leah had no desire ever to see Sean again, and Heath forbade Elizabeth to look. “Face smashed in” had been a sufficiently evocative description. She wanted no visuals in Elizabeth’s mind to augment the audio.

Heath wanted to see Sean’s body, not for any ghoulish reason, she assured herself. Just to be absolutely sure he was absolutely dead. Her formative years had been during the post-
Jaws
era when no monster stayed dead until it had been dispatched at least twice. The thought of Sean, a mangled mess of smashed bone and skin fragments where a face should have been, leaping out at her before the credits rolled engendered within her a superstitious tremor.

Since there was no good way she could get to the corpse without involving Leah or one of the girls, she decided to take it on faith that Katie and the dude were not mistaken, and Sean was irrevocably dead.

A night’s rest, and the knowledge they weren’t alone, had revived them. Once they extricated themselves from between the kindly boulders and got the blood circulating, there was almost an air of giddiness. This lightening of mood was not missed by the dude. His face was tight with suspicion. As they relieved themselves, he did not turn his back or look away as he had before.

Ghosts who bashed out the brains of rapists wouldn’t be a satisfactory explanation for Sean’s demise for such as the dude. He seemed a practical man. Heath studied him, seeking a clue to his mental processes. Chthonic, Heath had learned that word in high school English. Until now, she’d never had cause to use it. Of the underworld, without humanity, hard, harsh: chthonic, the dude. A sidewalk was more expressive. On a good day, one might be able to carve one’s initials in his visage with a sharp stick. At present, even that niggardly sign of life was gone.

She and Elizabeth would have to be very careful today. Belligerence or delay would not be tolerated. With Sean no longer around to slow the pace, Heath was the weakest link. She daren’t falter. The dude would put a bullet through her brain without a second thought.

For a while it looked as if he were going to leave the girls and Leah in wrist bindings, rendering it virtually impossible for them to pull the chair. Heath was readying her mind to die with dignity when, with a shrug that could have meant anything, he cut the plastic. Raw welts oozed blood where the ties had bitten deep. Heath had to look away lest she cry.

Fog shrouded the forest. The sun rising over the treetops was a glowing dime-sized silver disk when the dude called a stop. They were deep into the burned area, the landscape cremated and scattered by the wind. Bare-toothed rocks and black amputated limbs attested to the fact there was no peace in death. E and Leah put Rick Shaw’s paddle handles on a waist-high rock so Heath could sit upright. She leaned her shoulder against a foreshortened tree trunk.

The perch was gratingly uncomfortable, but Heath was afraid if she unpacked herself, when the plane flew over the dude would shoot her rather than wait until she was remounted. Should they get home one day, she would greet Robo-butt—as E dubbed her wheelchair—as an old friend rather than an odious necessity.

Leah and the girls sat in the grit of old ashes. Reg and the dude paced. Around them was nothing but the grim residue of fire: blackened tree trunks, arms burned to stumps, pointing accusingly at the dull gray sky.