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

could come a time when a watcher chooses whether to kill or rob or rape. If the choice is not to, one walks on never knowing that a devil had set crosshairs on one’s life.
    Reg didn’t take his eyes off Wily, but he must have sensed a bit of what Heath was reading into the dude’s pregnant stillness. “I mean, like, you know, people might hear the gunshots and shit,” Reg excused his inaction.
    “It’s hunting season,” said the avid troll keeping a rifle bead on Heath. “Nobody’ll think nothin’ about guns going off.”
    “No shit?” Reg asked. “Bubba’s going to be blasting at everything that moves?”
    Reg wasn’t from the urban enclaves in Minnesota, Heath guessed. More like Chicago, New Orleans, or Houston. Other than the inner-city cant, he didn’t have an accent. It was possible he’d been bounced around the circuit: Los Angeles, Chicago, Jackson, New Orleans, Los Angeles as trouble and fed-up relatives moved him on. In their own way, people who had grown up on that path had voices as homogeneous as the Twin Cities’ newscasters.
    “Better put on something red,” Jimmy said. “You’re looking a lot like Bambi.”
    “Shut up.” It was the flat voice of the dude.
    Reg shut up, postadolescent attitude shut down. Jimmy didn’t say another word.
    “The dog,” said the dude. “One of you shoot it, club it, or stomp on its head if you want to. Just kill it.”

 
    EIGHT
     
    Reg, the black man with the Walther, walked away. The one they called the dude stood basilisk-like, staring at the fallen dog. His eyes shifted from Wily’s body. Anna let her breath out slowly.
    After her initial reconnaissance, she had gone a ways upriver, climbed the Fox’s bank, then made her way back over the whispering pine needles. Behind a red pine, thick and spiky branches making a rood screen she could peek through, she spied on the camp. Wily’s resurrection, and subsequent death sentence, had taken place no more than six paces from the tree she had chosen.
    Wily was coming around. She watched his eyeballs moving beneath the brown fur. First one eye opened, then the other. For a short space of time, they had the fogged look of a dreamer. Nostrils quivered, scent informed, and his eyes not only cleared but fixed on her tree. His tail thumped the ground, and his ears pricked.
    Wily had a lousy poker face. There was no point in moving. Anywhere she was near enough to observe, he would be able to smell her. Maybe he’d have some kind of animal instinct not to betray her presence. Then again, he was named for a trickster.
    Hoping out of sight would be out of mind for her canine friend, Anna quit spying, turned her back to the tree’s trunk, then sat down, careful to keep all of her parts out of view. Leaning her head back against the rough bark, she tried to formulate a plan. With the men awake and watching, there was little she could do. If three slept while one kept watch, she might be able to kill the lookout, get a firearm, then kill the rest.
    “Kill” was the word she used in her mind, not stop, disable, or detain but barbaric, irreversible, unforgivable killing. Time and life were the only true riches humans had. To waste either was a crime and a sin, if sin existed.
    People had died before at her hands. Once she accidentally killed a woman in a fall. Occasionally Anna still fought up from dreams, flailing in an attempt to alter her trajectory so she would land anywhere but on the woman’s neck. Never had she slunk up on people as they slept and shot them through the back of the head in cold blood.
    Still, she would slaughter these men if she got a chance. She would kill them all. This was not the time or place for knocking people out, tying them up, then hoping they stayed knocked out and tied up. There were too many of them, too few of her, and the stakes were too high. When it was done, she would have unclean hands. Paul would smell the blood on them. Like Lady Macbeth, she’d see the stains in her