Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) by Barr Nevada

Author:Barr, Nevada [Barr, Nevada]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTY

Greens and browns gave way to sodden gray and black. At the edge of the living forest, Anna and Wily stopped. There was little to tell between the wet ash and the darkling storm clouds.

“Damn,” Anna muttered. “Must have been a hell of a fire. No cover left for such as we.” For a moment she stood, Wily at her side, staring through gray rain at the gray landscape. “We could circumnavigate the black and intercept the others on the far side,” she suggested.

Wily said nothing.

“You’re right,” she decided after a minute. “Chances of finding them again are slim to none.”

Wily made a sound between a yawn and a cough. Anna suspected he was laughing at her. “I can’t sniff people out as well as you can,” she said defensively. “We wait till dark, you think?”

Wily rolled his eyes.

If the dude kept going, the hostages could arrive at the airstrip in a matter of hours.

Then what? Killing Jimmy had been a stroke of luck. All day Anna had waited, but neither Reg nor Sean so much as fell behind to take a leak.

Sean’s feet were being flayed alive by his boots. If he’d straggle behind, she might be able to pick him off. Doing it in the light of day would be harder than taking out Jimmy had been, and killing Jimmy was more difficult than Anna had thought it would be. He was small, not terribly bright, she had a knife, his back was turned, she had the element of surprise. If she’d been writing a plan it might have read: (1) sneak up; (2) plunge knife into back; (3) never, ever tell Paul.

Like the king in chess, the human heart was well guarded, and, too, the little bastard had not wanted to die. Taking lives wasn’t as easy as it looked in the movies.

Sean was bigger and smarter by a few IQ points. Evil hung around him like a cloud of gnats. Evil things were harder to dispatch than stupid things. Slitting his throat was an option. No coat or bones to get in the way. Sean’s cheap knife should have enough of an edge for that if she sawed a little. She’d have to be directly behind him.

“Wily, would you act as bait and lure Sean over with the old injured puppy routine so I can cut his throat?”

Wily licked her fingertips. He’d do it in a heartbeat.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky again,” Anna said.

When she thought about it, it was surprising how many successful murders there were in the United States. Murder was a lot of work. Guns helped. Guns with gigantic ammo clips helped a lot. It also helped if the shooter thought of himself not as human but as a weapon of mass destruction, dealing death anonymously.

“We haven’t heard the plane in a while,” she said. “It can’t fly in this stuff. I doubt the dude knows he led everybody in a circle yesterday, but he has to know he was lost. I figure him for the kind with too powerful a survival instinct to make the same mistake twice.

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