Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 13 - Hard Truth

by Hard Truth(lit)

  Lorraine looked her up and down, a trainer viewing a spavined sway-backed nag. "You're a wreck," she said not unkindly.

  Anna said nothing. She suspected she had that begging-dog look on her face, but there wasn't much she could do about it.

  "Come on then." Lorraine turned and walked swiftly toward the wait-ing helicopter, as if challenging Anna to prove she could keep up.

  thirty-six

  The flight was short, minutes only, and Anna was amazed such a great deal of human drama, the sort that warps, changes and ends human beings, could have unfolded in this relatively tiny space. An emotional epic altering forever the lives of so many should have required more acreage.

  On the brief hop she contemplated telling Lorraine about Rita's unauthorized wolf reintroduction program. In the end she didn't. The flight was too short, and the wolf pups would explain themselves far better than Anna could.

  The nonstop entertainment Buddy had provided since she'd met up with him at Loomis Lake had crowded Rita Pern from her mind. What with one thing and another, she'd scarcely given her a thought. Till now. Tears prickled in the corners of her eyes. Anna shoved them back with thumbs. Rita had been a good ranger, a first-rate paramedic. Had Anna been thirty years old and orphaned wolf pups appeared near a park over-run with dying elk, she, too, might have made an effort to restore the health of the food chain. True, Rita was a fairly heavy-duty Christian, but so was Pope John XXIII and Anna had always thought well of him.

  Sorrow at the loss of Perry's idiosyncratic flame of selfhood in an occa-sionally dark human landscape melded with fatigue and grim images of Buddy Ray and Candace Watson's empty eyes. Feeling a weight like unto that suffered by Giles Corey in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Anna slumped against the side of the aircraft and stared out the window, totally blind to some of the most beautiful landscape on earth.

  The helicopter set down on the shore of Loomis so gently that, until the pilot cut power and the sound of the rotors changed, Anna was unaware they'd landed. Snapping out of her self-induced trance, she real-ized, though she'd begged Lorraine to be allowed to come, she didn't want to be here. Didn't want to see another corpse. Didn't want to feed the wolf pups into the bureaucratic mill.

  Doors were opening. Lorraine, the pilot and Ryan, the delightfully baby-faced paramedic, were deplaning. Anna followed suit. For a moment they all looked at her as she got her bearings.

  "This way." She walked toward tree line in the direction the wolves' den was located. Rita had been killed between the lake and the stone pen.

  By night, shackled to a child, a gun at her back, she had thought the trek endless. By day, with armed rangers for company, Anna found herself only a few minutes' walk from where she had cuffed Rita to the tree, where she'd shot Candace, where Buddy Ray had shattered Rita's ankle with a bullet. There was no mistaking it. Brown-black and fly-covered blood soaked the needles.

  Rita's blood. But no Rita.

  "He moved the body," Ryan said.

  There'd been a shot, Anna had heard it, then Buddy had reappeared in record time and in a foul mood. "No. She moved the body. She knew he'd be back. Clever woman. Rita!" Anna shouted. She was half wild, like a tired kid strung out on cotton candy at a late-night amusement park, but she couldn't help herself. "Rita!" she screamed again.

  "Track," she ordered herself, ignoring her boss and her fellows. Track-ing was a bit of an overstatement; following the designated trail was closer to the truth. Dragging herself, Rita had plowed a two-foot-wide furrow through the deep forest litter. Anna could see where she had tried to sweep the needles back with her hands as she went, but the differences in color and surface contour from the surrounding duff were obvious. That would not have been true at night; in the dark her track would have been close to invisible. Anna leading, they walked into the trees ten or fifteen yards. Just beyond a tangle of fallen logs the track ended. Needles had been heaped. It was here Rita had covered herself and hidden till Buddy Ray left. Given the state of her ankle, she should still have been here.

  "Where is she?" Anna asked stupidly. Then yelled, "Rita!"

  "You did say her ankle was shattered?" Ryan asked respectfully, much too considerate a young man to imply Anna had been wrong or, God forbid, actually lying.

  "I said that." Anna moved off along the new drag trail, this one Rita had not bothered to try and cover. Every couple yards there was a wider spot where she'd stopped to rest-or passed out. The pain must have been bitter. The track changed slightly after the second of these stops, a smoother groove ran along the right side of the drag.

  "Smart," Anna said.

  "What?" This from Lorraine, her first word since they'd begun. The chief ranger had risen to the top of a highly competitive man's world, yet kept her intuition intact. When others worked she could psychically withdraw, giving them space.

  "Rita rigged a travois for her injured leg, a piece of bark is my guess, so it wouldn't be jarred so much as she pulled herself backward." Because to her it was obvious, Anna didn't mention that Rita was moving backward in a sitting position, her legs trailing.

  "Rita!" Lorraine, Anna and Ryan hollered in unison.

  A tiny "here" trickled weakly through the trees. Anna began to run. The sound had seemed directionless but she knew where Rita would be. She would be with her wolves.

  They found her lying near the granite to the right of the makeshift gate. Both feet were elevated on a sloping stone to ward off shock and reduce the bleeding in her injured ankle. In her rattled and shattered trek from where she'd been shot, she'd even had the presence of mind to bring her daypack. It served as a pillow and source of water. Despite pain and horrifying circumstances, she'd found sufficient strength to save her own life. Still she was a ghastly shade of taupe, that peculiarly unattractive color tanned skin takes on when the blood beneath it retreats.

  Why she'd felt the need to put herself through what had to be a brutal form of torture, moving from her first hiding place uphill to the den, was a question for the psychiatrists, not Anna. Maybe if Rita thought she was going to die, she wanted to be with friends.

  Rita waved weakly, smiled. Anna fell to her knees and started to cry. It was crushingly embarrassing, yet she was relieved she had the strength of mind not to give into another uncharacteristic urge and gather the younger woman in her arms murmuring, "Oh my poor dear."

  Rubbing her face with the flat of her hands, Anna managed to smear the outburst of emotion around a little. "Whew boy!" she breathed. "Tireder than I thought. How are you doing?"

  In this short chunk of time Anna had been gently nudged to one side. Ryan and the chief ranger, orange pack open between them, were begin-ning emergency care, getting an IV in to rehydrate Rita, cutting away sock and boot to assess and stabilize the ankle.

  Anna allowed herself one sop to whatever maternal demon had chosen to possess her and held Rita's hand. Rita acted as if kindness and com-passion were normal human interactions and squeezed Anna's fingers gratefully.

  Not wanting to look at people during this bizarre interlude, Anna let her gaze wander: signs of scuffling, duff torn, moved. A lot of it and in a different direction from that of hiding place number one. For reasons she was not privy to, her backcountry ranger had been dragging her battered body hither and yon a good bit in the last twelve hours.

  The pilot arrived with the stretcher and Anna let go of Rita's hand. The time had come. "Do you want to show the chief what's in this west-ern Stonehenge of yours or do I do it?" Anna asked.

  "You do it." The pilot and Ryan started to lift the stretcher. "Wait," Rita said. "Just one minute."

  Anna figured if pictures were worth a thousand words, the item itself should be worth even more than that. "There's something you need to see," she told Lorraine, and held open the stick-and-twine gate into the den. Lorraine wasn't crazy about going first into this unknown, but pride or trust in Anna moved her gracefully between the boulders.

  'Ah!" A cry of delight. This was good. It wouldn't earn the wolves
a place in Rocky, that was out of park hands, but it would ensure they were well placed. 'A wolf pup," Lorraine exclaimed.

  "A wolf pup?"

  Rita nodded.

  Why one? Then it came to Anna. Had she told anyone about the wolves, it could be argued she was mistaken about how many. It would not be possible to argue they'd never been there at all. Too much wolfy activity had taken place to clean up in a single crippled night.

  Anna looked to the wide-ranging tracks in the duff. What had it cost in pain and blood for Rita to move the other three to a new secure hiding place? No wonder her skin was the color of old parchment and lines of agony radiated out from her eyes and hacked downward from the corners of her mouth.

  "Yeah," Anna raised her voice to be heard by the chief ranger. "Rita smuggled it in hopes of normalizing the elk situation."

  Lorraine emerged through the gate and closed it behind her. "One wolf wouldn't do much good. Still, I'm kind of sorry we found it. Let's go," she said to the stretcher bearers. "I'll send resource management up with a kennel for the pup." To Rita she said, "My agreeing with you in principle won't do you one damn bit of good."

  Anna hoped that wasn't true. She personally was going to lobby her little heart out to keep Rita on the payroll. It was that or she hiked up here every other day for the next couple of months to feed the little buggers.

  Thanks, Rita mouthed when no one was looking.

  Anna returned a stare so blank even the most socially challenged could not mistake it. This would never be mentioned again.

  "You'll come out next trip," Lorraine told Anna. "Your seat's been removed to make room for the stretcher."

  In half a minute more than the time it took to tell it, the rear seat had been excised, the stretcher locked into place and the doors were slam-ming shut. Anna watched until the helicopter was gone from sight. A moment later the echo of its engine and blades faded as well. The carnage was being air-lifted from the park. It came to Anna that one of the many-things she loved about her job was its immediacy. Law enforcement seldom had to deal with the aftermath of crime. That was for survivors, psychiatrists, social workers, prison guards, lawyers. For the officer it was me or them. When it was over only one remained on the field.

  Me, Anna thought, and standing in the quiet, the sun on her face, she realized the world was new again. Or ancient once more. Loomis Lake, the fragrant pines, the edged breezes, none were touched with cruelty, pain, sickness. People-humanity-were blessedly short-lived, blessedly unimportant, truly nonevents floundering about in paradise.

  She sat down on the marooned aircraft seat, tilted her face to catch the sun and opened her eyes the barest of slits that she might watch the silver dance on the wind-ruffled surface of the lake.

  The End