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

didn’t like to look at disability wouldn’t want to hear about it either. Heath didn’t care what he thought about her, just so long as he stopped thinking about the number five.
    Feigning enthusiasm for the subject, Heath started saying whatever came into her head. “The way my spine fractured made it so the weight that my rib cage used to support now rests on my bladder. A lot of us have catheters, up the urinary tract—or the rectum, you know, fecal matter and all that shit. Well, I guess, technically shit is fecal matter, but anyway—”
    “Throw the bag on the fire,” the dude said abruptly.
    Heath had found, if not an Achilles’ heel, at least a small breach in the stone in which the dude had encased himself. Weakness terrified him. Four men, four women, four sleeping bags. The women were destined to sleep on the cold ground. Since that was infinitely superior to having to share bag space with the bastards, Heath chose not to mind.
    Reg’s head popped up in the wash that accessed the river. It was dark and he was dark and his hoodie was black. When the roaring fire caught his eyes Heath felt a jab of terror as old as mankind, a horror of the monsters of the night.
    “What about the canoe and all the shit they got in it?” Reg asked. “Burn that, too?”
    “We’ll sink it in the morning. Not near shore. Chop a hole in it and drag it out till we’re sure it goes down.”
    Reg’s orange-and-black eyes vanished. Heath’s scalp began to crawl down from where it had climbed to the top of her head.
    “I need some things,” Leah said softly. “To make it easier to move Heath.”
    Leah had not abdicated; she had been studying the chair, thinking of how it might be altered so Heath wouldn’t be left behind with a bullet in her head. She’d been planning a way to take her with them. Relief flooded Heath. She had not wanted to die, not wanted to sacrifice herself for the greater good.
    For what seemed a long time the dude said nothing. His face betrayed no emotion. The hand with the pistol was as relaxed as ever. His stillness did not feel like calm. It felt like the counted seconds between when lightning strikes and thunder cracks.
    “Leah can do it,” Katie said, still attached to the creep by cable ties. “Leah loves mechanical things. She wishes I was a robot.”
    “That’s not true,” Leah said, but she didn’t take her eyes off the chair.
    “Reg,” the dude said.
    Reg’s wicked-looking eyes glowed back from the darkness below the riverbank.
    “Cut Mrs. Hendricks loose,” the dude said. “She needs tools so you can roll your new investment overland. See to it she gets nothing else.” The tip of his pistol moved an inch toward the Fox. From him it seemed like a sweeping gesture.
    Like one in a dream, Leah walked around the fire to the shallow ravine leading to the water. Katie watched her mother walk out of the light. Despair made her face seem that of a spirit no longer tethered to the earth, a balloon come loose and liable to float up into the branches had she not been tied to the thug’s belt.
    “Katie’s only a little girl,” Heath said mildly. “Her hands are tied. She can’t hurt anybody. Would it be okay if she sat over here by me?”
    The dude rotated his eyes to settle them just above Heath’s head. She made an effort to keep both fear and pleading off of her face. Sean was the sort that would feast on a victim’s fear. The dude seemed beyond even that twisted recognition of their humanity.
    “No,” he said.
    The destruction of the camp continued. Heath had hopes the invaders would build the fire so high that the Forest Service would send someone to investigate.
    Minutes passed. Fire burned. Through the leaping, devouring light, Heath could see that E, hands bound like Katie’s, had dropped to her knees. Her head was bent forward, in a pose unsettlingly like that assumed by a woman about to be beheaded.
    Heath rubbed her face, trying to pry loose the terror. She needed to