Read Online Burn- pigeon 16 by Nevada Barr - Free Book Online

might not know that. He might see it as a good place to break in.
    Stupid, Anna thought. Sammy would bark. The guy had just been informed a federal law enforcement officer had moved in next door. Jordan didn't strike Anna as stupid; massively unbalanced, yes, but smart.
    The characteristic whump of a hinged plastic lid falling closed on a garbage bin let Anna know it was she who drew the short straw in the cerebral sweepstakes. Jordan reappeared walking normally, no parcel under his arm. Anna had successfully surveilled a young man taking out the trash. She considered going back upstairs, calling Paul, taking a bath, but she didn't move.
    Jordan hadn't carried the parcel like it was garbage. One didn't cradle garbage in the crook of an arm as if it were a baby. Jordan didn't move like a man on a domestic errand either. Normal people don't creep like the fog on little cat's feet checking windows to be sure they're unobserved when they dump the wastebasket.
    Anna sighed, a sound so like the wind in the foliage she scarcely noticed she'd made it. "Go ahead," she whispered. "Get it over with." Her daypack with the Maglite she carried was upstairs by the folding chair. She retrieved the little flashlight, let herself out of the cottage, and followed Jordan's path with the same stealth he had exhibited.
    Treading lightly into the greater darkness of the vine-shrouded walk, it occurred to her that maybe Jordan had been sneaking for the same reason she was. Maybe he was not embarked on evil, but doing something foolish and didn't want to get caught.
    Maglite in her mouth, using both hands to raise the hinged lid so it would not bang against the house and rouse Geneva, Anna looked into the collected refuse. A cockroach trundled across a banana peel laid like a yellow brick road over a mound of coffee grounds. In other places Anna had lived, cockroaches had the decency to skitter and run from the light. In the Crescent City, they ambled.
    Newspapers, crumpled as if they were going to be used as packing material, were piled up against the far side of the bin. Wishing she'd had the foresight to get a pair of latex gloves out of her first aid kit, Anna gingerly pinched a corner of the paper and moved it over the cockroach's run.
    Under this hasty covering was the parcel Jordan had thrown away.
    The fabric had been torn in a rough square, from a bedsheet, Anna guessed, and one that was none too clean before its ultimate sacrifice to the ragbag. The corners of the cloth were tied up, making a bundle reminiscent of the sacks cartoon hobos carried on a stick over their shoulder.
    Gingerly she closed her hand over the knotted corners of the bundle and hefted it experimentally. Soft dead weight pulled the makeshift hammock into a rubbery curve. Rust-colored spots speckled the side and pooled into a stain where the bundle had rested on something other than the trash; the pooling was on the side of the fabric, not the bottom.
    Anna set it on the bricks between her feet. Wind, still warm and heavy with moisture, gusted from all directions, carrying leaves and litter on its feathered back. It was the kind of wind that made Anna's cats rampage around the house; that made her feel wild and dark. It snatched at the cloth, fluttering it with sudden life, and she jerked her hands back. Belief in things unseen was carried on the air in New Orleans, and Anna's hardheaded rejection of superstition momentarily abandoned her.
    "I'm going in," she whispered to the spirits on the breeze. "Cover me." Smiling to herself, she teased the knots from the corners and pulled them apart.
    It was a pigeon. Dead.
    For a cold moment she believed the message was for her, a pigeon for a Pigeon. The parcel hadn't been delivered to her, however; it had been put in the garbage in such a way that she might never find it. Using the fabric to roll the bird from side to side, Anna looked it over. Its head had been crushed and its right wing twisted as if someone had wrung it the