Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 13 - Hard Truth

by Hard Truth(lit)

  Trees began to separate from the black of a wall into individual trunks and branches silhouetted against the reflective water of Loomis Lake. Candace walked straight to the water's edge and might have kept going had Anna not told her to stop. The girl stopped. She didn't turn or ask questions. Buddy had taught her to do as she was told. Exactly as she was told. Anna had always thought she preferred obedient children. Watching Candace, she realized a bit of sass is an indicator of life and well-being in the adolescent spirit.

  "Throw your radio in the lake." Buddy was bored, testy, like a jaded child. Anna could think of little more frightening than a crabby psycho-path made to stay up past his bedtime.

  She threw the radio in the lake.

  "Cuff her."

  Buddy indicated Candace. Anna took the cuffs from her belt and gently turned the girl from the lake.

  "I've got to put the handcuffs on you. It won't hurt."

  Candace held her hands out obediently and Anna loosely fastened the cuffs around them.

  "Cuff key,"Buddy said.

  Anna took the handcuff key from her watch pocket.

  "Toss it to me." She did, watching the small silver key flash like a min-now through the starlight. It fell several feet short of where Buddy stood. "Now your spare."

  "You've picked up quite a bit about this rangering business, haven't you?" Anna remarked dryly.

  'Anybody can do it," he said. "You think you're something. You're nothing. All of you. Just nothing. Running around like a bunch of puffed-up pigeons pecking here, pecking there, scratching in the dirt, finding nothing. My things were there all the time. Right at Fern Lake Cabin. Right under the nothing noses of the nothing rangers. Toss it," he fin-ished.

  Again Anna threw a key. Again it fell into the wiry grass at his feet.

  "Now your cuffs. There on your belt. Put your arm through her arms and cuff your wrists."

  Anna did as she was told, manacling herself to the child in a parody of a square-dance promenade pose.

  Buddy picked up the keys, then said, "Make your widdle selfs comfy. I'll be back in two shakes of a lamb's tail."

  The change from bored monotone to baby talk jarred Anna dispropor-tionately till she realized what it augured. Buddy Ray Bleeker was happy. He was happy because he was about to do something he really enjoyed.

  That couldn't be good.

  Putting the flashlight under his chin in the tradition of children play-ing at hobgoblins, he fixed a horrific caricature of a stare on Anna. Never before had she seen the light trick work so well. The bland oval of his face became a vicious triangle of white, his short unremarkable nose grew, the nares cavernous. The eyes were what turned Halloween into hell. The whites fairly glowed and the brown of the irises was black as pitch. Flat black. The light seemed to have no power to illuminate the windows or this soul. Perhaps because there was none.

  "Don't you move, Annie Fannie. Don't you move one little inch," he said, then loped back in the direction of Rita's tree. Anna's ploy had failed. Buddy was going to kill the young ranger and there was nothing she could do about it. Yelling "But wait! You promised!" at his retreating back probably wasn't going to turn the tide.

  Rita's death could justifiably be laid at Anna's door, but she didn't think about that. Self-recrimination had long since been set aside in the interest of survival. Either she'd have the rest of her life to atone, or she d be joining Rita before the night was out.

  Buddy moved quickly, easily, a creature of the night. In a heartbeat his light was cut up, then consumed by tree line. If he was going to Rita, moving fast, he'd be at least seven minutes up and about that returning For her own sake and that of the girl, Anna hoped he'd take his time over his murderous treat, give them an extra few minutes. Since this was out of her control and merely a practical thought, she felt no disloyalty to Rita thinking it.

  Leaving her and Candace unattended was the act of a madman. What else? Anna thought.

  A trap.

  So? It wasn't like she could make the situation any worse.

  "Come on, Candace. We've got to hide," she whispered.

  "He said not to move. Not one little inch," Candace said, as if she spoke not of an order, or in favor of obedience, but was stating an irre-futable law of physics. When Buddy said she couldn't move an inch she became incapable of moving that inch.

  Anna considered dragging her but the going would be too slow, too noisy. Buddy might postpone his deadly recreation to come back early. "It was a game," she said. "He told me I couldn't move. He didn't say you couldn't. He wants you to move. That's why he only said it to me."

  By dint of great necessity Anna managed to keep the desperation and fury-not at Candace but at her tormentor-out of her voice. The child was probably inured to violence. That, or any more, could break anything left of her as yet unbroken.

  Games, Candace understood. In the past weeks there must have been many games where a wrong choice meant punishment and a right one a bit of food or simply the reward of not being hurt for that moment.

  "He wants me to move?" The fear and confusion in the question raked at Anna's heart.

  "That's what I think."

  "Move where?"

  "I'll show you."

  "You can't move."

  "Let the son-of-a-bitch try and stop me," Anna said with more heat than she'd intended.

  "He will." Another law of physics: Buddy always won.

  Anna walked two steps, her manacled wrists tugging at Candace's. Candace took two steps toward her. The spell was broken. Anna let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.

  "We better be quick or we'll lose the game." Whether Candace responded because of the clever psychological maneuvering or because she no longer had a will of her own didn't matter. Just doing something was raising Anna's hopes.

  The light she'd welcomed when first they'd reached Loomis was now the enemy. She headed toward the trees at an angle to the path Buddy had taken. Without light they couldn't get far. Shackled to a frail and bat-tered child, Anna had no hope of staging any sort of assault. The best they could do was to go to ground and hope the night and luck would keep Buddy from finding them. They only needed to last the night. In the morning, Buddy knew rangers would be on their way up.

  Unless he canceled them.

  "Shit," Anna whispered as she stumbled on a root and she and Candace collided in an aborted do-si-do.

  In the trees it was beast-belly dark. Hands cuffed together, they couldn't even hold up their arms to protect their faces from low branches. Above nine thousand feet there was little in the way of undergrowth to hide small human animals from a predator. Running might not have been such a great idea, but since it was the only idea, Anna had no regrets.

  Blind, they would not find the ideal hiding place. Had a cave been a yard ahead it would have availed them nothing in its cloak of invisibility. Shoulders banging into trees, toes catching on stones, Anna pressed on. gaining as much distance as she could. Every minute or so she stopped, listening for the sound that would signal Buddy's imminent return to the shore of the lake.

  When the sound did come, it hurt more than she'd expected. A shot rang out and she flinched as if the bullet struck her own flesh. Another, and weakness washed over her as though her own life blood was pouring out along with Rita's.

  "Get over it," she whispered, but it was a moment before her body remembered it was alive and would again obey her commands.

  "He'll be coming back now," Anna said softly. "We've got to hide."

  "Yes. That woman has gone home. That's good."

  Anna brought up her hands and found the girl's face. Because she needed to make contact she ran her fingertips over the gaunt cheeks and small girlish nose. Candace didn't jump at the unexpected familiarity, didn't move away or protest. Her hands, manacled together through the circle of Anna's arms, slid down, the cuff chain heavy against the inner side of Anna's elbow joint. Like a rag doll, Candace let herself be done to, handled. Buddy had killed the child then left
her in an emaciated little body to wander the earth, a mockery of the life that was to have been.

  Feeling through the dark, Anna located a good-sized pine and pulled the girl down to her knees at its base. "Put your feet out," she ordered and proceeded to arrange the child till the two of them were sitting hip to hip, legs straight out in the way of dolls on a bedroom floor. "Stay still." This last wasn't necessary. Candace stayed where she was put until such time as she was ordered to move. Bending and scraping awkwardly, first on one side of their legs then the other, Anna scooped enough needles over them that, though not completely covered, their extremities were at least cam-ouflaged.

  "Lie down and see if you can't kind of wriggle down into that heap of needles beside you. I'll do the same and we'll be hidden."

  Candace did as she was told but with so little energy Anna doubted much in the way of torso coverage had been attained. Within a few minutes they lay quietly side by side, arms mechanically linked, breath-ing in the dust from the pine needles and staring up into the boughs of their tree.

  "Now wasn't that fun?" Anna said because fear and absurdity goaded her into it. She didn't expect a response. She was shackled to a ghost. But for the occasional rattle of chains, the child specter scarcely seemed to be there at all.

  Silence joined the darkness, making it more peaceful. Through the imperfect cover of the pine's branches Anna could see two stars. The minute pinpricks of white were comforting, reassuring her she'd not gone blind, that the Buddies had not yet managed to snuff all the light from the world.

  The quiet continued to deepen, unrelieved by the slightest rustle of movement from the girl pressed to her side. Night's usual music was absent, the small creatures, sensing a great ravening beast in their midst, had silenced themselves.

  Listening with nothing to hear wears hard on ears and nerves. Anna's head began to ache. The sound of Buddy's return to Loomis came almost as a relief. Their flight into the woods, though an arduous trek, had only put forty or fifty yards between them and the water. They were close enough that the crunch of his feet on the rocky shore carried clearly in the breathless chill of the air. Given that Buddy had no way of knowing which direction they'd taken, it might suffice.

  It had to suffice.

  "Fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking girls." An angry muttered mantra. Anna was surprised. He'd wanted them to run, she was sure of it, wanted the game he knew he couldn't lose. And she'd thought the thrill of butcher-ing a crippled ranger would have lifted his spirits.

  "Quiet as a mouse," Anna breathed into Candace's ear.

  A thump. Rocks pelting to earth. A curse. Buddy had kicked at some-thing and banged his foot. "Game over," he yelled, then he whistled, the staccato bursts of sound rising in tone, the way one whistles for a dog. The sharp sounds cut through the thin air like knives, killing the quiet.

  With an abruptness that jarred Anna on a cellular level, Candace began barking wildly.

  twenty-eight

  Shh. Jesus. Fuck. Shh." Anna scrabbled in the dark trying to drag her hands up to where she would get them over Candace's mouth. Cuffed together as they were, she couldn't get a grip on the child's head, her face, to cut off the maniacal barking.

  "Arf, arfl Arf!" Candace's high-pitched parody of Orphan Annie's dog was bringing Buddy through the woods. His eerie chortle tittered into the chinks between the mechanical barking.

  "Shut up shut up shut up please God shut up," Anna muttered as she sat up, found Candace's shoulder and maneuvered her hands around the girl from behind. Candace pressed tightly to her chest, Anna brought her left arm up, closed it around the soft throat and, left wrist clamped in her right hand, the crook of her elbow just out from Candace's larynx, she squeezed.

  The sleeper hold. Professional wrestling had made it famous. Law enforcement had used it for a while, though in recent years it was consid-ered right up there with deadly force. The bones of the arm pressed into the carotid arteries on either side of the victim's neck, cutting off the flow of venous blood from the brain. Within seconds the victim was "asleep." Within a couple of minutes she was brain-damaged. Too long and she was dead.

  Anna kept the pressure on only till she felt the girl, rigid in her mad-dog manifestation, go limp, then she loosed her hold. The freakish bark-ing silenced, she could again think. The sudden onslaught of aural insanity had done more than threaten her life and assault her ears. It was as if each shrill 'Arf!" had dimension and neon glare as well as sound. Freed of it. Anna could feel the space around her expanding.

  Maybe fifty yards away, maybe a hundred and fifty-trees and adrena-line played tricks with the eye-was Buddy's light poking here and there like a Star Wars light saber but more deadly. The chortling had stopped.

  Soon Candace would come to. Anna pulled the girl's head back hard against her sternum and, as she felt the little body begin to move, she clamped her hand tightly over Candace's mouth, the other on her fore-head, holding her close.

  "Bad dog," Buddy called, his light stabbing between trees. Erratic, halting, he was coming toward them. "Bad dogs get punished," he called.

  Candace's eyes flew open. Anna could feel the delicate brush of lashes against her wrist.

  "You know what the alpha does to the bitch," Buddy called. He sounded apologetic, as if he was sorry in a way for what bad-dog-girl-child Candace was going to force him to do to her. He whistled again.

  Beneath her hand Anna could feel the girl's jaw working as she tried to bark for her master, sit up, beg. Hot drops fell on Anna's thumb. Tears far hotter than the 98.6 allowed for human beings.

  Crushing Candace to her, so tightly she could feel the cut of the girl's shoulder blades against her stomach and the bird-boned fragility of her ribcage and arms, Anna breathed reassurance into her captive's ear.

  "It's okay. Shh. Shh. We'll be all right. Stay with me. Hush. Hush. I'm here. You're safe. Shh. Shh."

  Candace began to relax. Anna could feel the rigor leaking away, the bundle of sticks she clung to becoming a girl. The bones of the jaw Anna held stopped trying to unloose. There was a chance now, just a chance.

  "Good girl," Anna whispered.

  Candace spasmed. Too late Anna realized she uttered magic words, black magic. Dog words. Fighting as if her life depended on it, as it had for so many weeks, Candace tried to bark. Muffled noises, reminiscent of the bark of seals, broke into the night. Candace kicked her heels into the duff. Her fisted hands pounded Anna's face and skull.

  "Good doggie," crowed from the dark. The single great star that sought them turned toward where they hid, wending and winking through the trees.

  Anna slid her arms into position, squeezed, choking the blood from Candace's brain. The pummeling fists fell away. Struggling and sound ceased. The girl melted against her.

  The light that was no light at all but a harbinger of a darkness so great the sane mind could not comprehend it, slowed, stopped. Knife-sharp feelers went out, ripping orange life from dead needles and green from boughs, then killing them with its passing.

  Whistling resumed: short, sharp, demanding.

  Anna hadn't loosed the vise her arm made around Candace's throat. Candace's brain was sleeping. Soon it would start to shut down. Then it would die. If she let up, the child would awake. There would be noise. They both would die. Was it so bad after all that Anna helped Candace from this place? Should the child wake, and Buddy find them, would her death be easier? Would he let her drift quietly to sleep and then to obliv-ion? Or would he fill her last moments with terrors as great or greater than she'd already experienced? If, by some miracle beyond Anna's ability to devise, Candace should live out the night, survive Buddy, would she truly be alive? Already he had killed her childhood, her sense of herself as a per-son. The scars he had carved on soul and psyche would be there forever.

  Wasn't it better that she slip peacefully away in the arms of someone who loved her?

  Anna did love her, she realized with a jolt. An incomprehensible alchemy born of proximity; shared humanity
and nearness to death con-nected them as surely as the steel cuffs entwining their arms. Anna loved the sweet warmth of Candace's body against hers. She loved the dusky smell of her unwashed hair and the memory of tears too hot to the touch. She loved that she had learned to bark rather than to die.

  Anna loved the girl with an intensity that took her breath away; she loved her enough to kill her. But not now. Not till she had to. Not till the next death, guaranteed, would be her own.

  Her arm fell away from the slender throat. Her cheek dropped to rest against Candace's.

  The girl swam to consciousness on a scream.

  Then Buddy was upon them.

  Abruptly Candace went silent, her body stony in the circle of Anna's arms, a rabbit frozen under the coyote's eye hoping beyond hope it would be passed over. This time.