Read Online Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) by Nevada Barr - Free Book Online

blue veins visible on her temples. He knew her dirty little secret. As dirty little secrets went, hers was fairly pathetic; still, he enjoyed knowing it. Leah Hendricks hated camping, backpacking, and all the other outdoor sports she designed for.
    That she was a fraud didn’t impress him one way or another. She was cattle on the hoof, money to purchase Michael’s passage out of hell, a repast of dishes best served cold. The more quickly he got his goons fed and through the night, the more quickly he could get this business finished.
    He pointed his pistol at Mrs. Hendricks. A little scut work would do the multimillionaire’s soul good.
    “You. Help Sean with the food.” He had no qualms about using Sean’s name. The damage was already done. The fools had been bandying names about. If Hendricks was as smart as she was supposed to be, she’d realize that was tantamount to announcing they didn’t expect witnesses to survive. Victims who didn’t expect to survive took more chances than those who thought good behavior would win them a gold star and a few more mundane years of their mundane lives.
    If she read the unstated bad news, she didn’t show it. Mutely, she nodded. Charles couldn’t tell if she was scared speechless or if she wasn’t the talkative type. He hoped both were true.

 
    TEN
     
    There would be hell to pay when the thugs discovered that not only was Heath not a multimillionaire, she still had forty-three thousand in medical debts. Given that there was already hell to pay, she was grateful for the reprieve, grateful she and her daughter weren’t going to be shot down like dogs. Try as she might, she couldn’t think of a way to get Wily included in the reprieve, but at least at the moment, Sean was too occupied with Katie to cut Wily’s throat. She dared hope, somehow, this save would be permanent for E, that she’d live to grow up and have a whole new set of issues from this second violent trauma in her world.
    Heath doubted her reprieve would keep her alive more than a day longer than her dog. She and Wily could keep each other company on the ferry ride across the River Styx. Had these men the dedication and stamina to work as hard as it would be to carry a one-hundred-fifteen-pound woman, half of her dead weight, through the wilds of northeastern Minnesota, they would have made their pile in honest jobs by now. The instant she became a burden, it would occur to one of the louts that Elizabeth would probably bring as good a price as they’d get for the both of them anyway.
    From the dude’s abbreviated phone conversation, it sounded as if he intended to take them cross-country for six miles. Before this trip, Heath had never been to Minnesota. She had no idea what the cross-country hiking was like. In the mountains around Boulder, Colorado, in the older pine forests, there were places where she would rate hiking off trail from doable to joyful. Here, what she’d seen as they glided past in the canoe was a different matter.
    The forest was mixed evergreen and deciduous: red fir, aspen, red and white pine, white fir, maple, balsam and oak, aspen, tamarack, and alder thickets that truly earned the title “thicket.” Beneath the forest’s canopy bracken fern, tansy, aster, wild roses, sumac, and more grasses than an amateur naturalist could identify tangled together.
    It would be difficult to navigate on foot. Impossible in a wheelchair.
    Lacking wheels, Heath’s most efficient mode of travel was backward, on her butt, using her arms in place of her legs. Palms to the ground, she could lift the weight of her body and move her buttocks back a few inches. Being strong and practiced, Heath’s personal best was ninety feet, and that was over smooth surfaces. More than that and she began to burn out her shoulder muscles. Six miles cross-country might as well have been six thousand.
    Elizabeth would exhaust herself trying to help. Worse, she would endanger herself by annoying the thugs. When the