Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

  “Shine the light on her,” Rick ordered.

  Anna cringed as the beam struck her eyes, then swept down her body.

  “God damn,” Rick said, and Anna was scared.

  “Bad?” Anna tried to keep the fear from her voice and failed.

  “I found it.” Dot came into the circle of light, the butt of Marty’s gun pinched between her thumb and forefinger.

  Rick jerked down on the flexi-cuffs. Marty cried out and crumpled to the ground. “Move and I’ll break your other arm,” he warned. This time he believed him. Rick was causing Schlessinger unnecessary pain. Police brutality. Anna was all for it.

  Rick took the gun from Dot and ejected the magazine into his hand. “Glock. Two rounds left. And one in the chamber. Safety is off. Just point and shoot. Anna, can you handle it?”

  “For now.”

  Rick handed her the Glock and said to the VIPs, “If Anna passes out or whatever, you take it and keep the suspect covered till I get back. If he does anything you don’t like, just shoot him. Can you do that?”

  “Yes indeed,” Mona said, with a clarity that satisfied him.

  “I’ll get the paramedics out here. I won’t be long. You hang on, Anna.” Taking the flashlight, he set off back toward Stafford at a run.

  By the light of the moon, Anna could see Dot and Mona staring at her with concern. Schlessinger had neither moved nor spoken since Rick sat him down. Most of Anna’s body hurt. Her face felt like hamburger. Her left leg ached from groin to knee. Her head swam and nausea, brought on by blows to her belly or the blood she’d swallowed, threatened to boil up out of her throat.

  Anna was scared.

  “Can I hold Flicka while we wait?” she asked.

  CHAPTER Twenty-seven

  THE KEY TO finding was looking in the right places; an absurd truth that negated the value of the search. Frederick was feeling let down. Success had rendered him of no further use to Molly Pigeon and he dreaded the call he must make telling her the good news, yet looked forward to it with the feverish optimism of a young lady in a Jane Austen novel.

  He’d been home in Chicago for several days. The clutter of his apartment, once a comfortable refuge, felt claustrophobic. The chirpy attention of Danny and Taters, his two budgies, merely reminded him of how pathetic his social life had become. Anna had called twice and he’d let the machine answer. Before they spoke again, he needed to talk with Molly. Tonight was the night.

  Chicago was in the clutches of August, his window-mounted air conditioner unequal to the task of making the house livable. Clad in underpants and a T-shirt, he sat in the living room feeling he should dress for the phone call and condemning himself as an idiot for the thought. Idiocy won out. He slipped a worn pair of khakis over his Fruit-of-the-Looms and sat down again facing the telephone.

  Putting off knowing the inevitable for a few more minutes, he picked up the folder from the coffee table. Molly had given him hers at their last meeting and he smiled at the skull and crossbones, the dripping dagger. He’d saved it like a memento; he drank Scotch neat to feel close to her. In short, he clung to all the trite signs and symbols of romance. “Can’t help myself,” he said to Danny. The little bird hopped to the phone receiver and looked up at him expectantly. “I’ve never had the time to devise any symbols for myself.”

  The folder contained notes from the work he’d pursued on Molly’s case. He’d used government time and equipment but didn’t feel a shred of guilt. In the past twenty-five years he’d donated more hours of his life to the federal government than he’d ever tallied up.

  His instinct on the plane had been right; Molly’s was a sin of omission. He’d traced the three people who’d pressed her hardest to represent them or theirs in the wake of the Lester Mack defense. Second time out he hit pay dirt. One of the supplicants was a woman, a well-educated divorcée, with one son. At eighteen, that son had been arrested for the rape and torture of a sixteen-year-old high school girl who later died of injuries inflicted. Dr. Pigeon had refused to testify on the boy’s behalf. He’d been sentenced to life, had served three years, then died in a knife fight in the prison cafeteria. Six days later Lester Mack was released, alive, well, and walking the streets a free man.

  To the bereaved mother, this chain of events was cause and effect; proof Molly Pigeon could have freed her child and had chosen, instead, to be instrumental in his murder.

  Frederick hadn’t been able to interview the woman himself. NYPD detectives had done the honors. Given an audience of apparently sympathetic men in suits, she had confessed to the notes and messages. What she would be charged with remained to be seen. Nice upper-middle-class lady under the strain of grief—odds were she’d be given a slap on the wrist and Molly would be left looking over her shoulder for a while.

  Not altogether satisfying in Frederick’s opinion but par for the course. Bureaucrats made lousy heroes. There were too many Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules to allow for riding in on white horses and rescuing damsels in distress. Not to mention the civil suits the average superhero would leave himself open to.

  He put down the file, lured Danny off the phone, and lifted the receiver. Molly answered just as he was about to hang up, not willing to face her answering machine. It was good to hear her voice. He let himself relax enough to lean back in the chair as he told her of the dead convict and his mother’s confession. Molly listened without interruption, and when he finished, she waited a moment, letting the information soak in.

  “Well,” she said finally, “speaking as a citizen, I can’t say I’m overwhelmed with relief. Professionally, I expect this will be the end of it. The first crush of grief is past. She frightened me, she got some attention. She knows I know she knows, so to speak, and should my body turn up in an alley, the police will know where to start asking questions.”

  “That’s about it,” Frederick said; then because he wanted to comfort, he added: “I don’t think you’ll hear from her again.”

  “No,” Molly agreed.

  Silence crept between them.

  “Have you heard from Anna?” Frederick asked.

  More silence, then: “I’ve been out most evenings.”

  “Neither have I.” He wondered if he was telling the same lie as Molly. “You know I have feelings for you,” he said awkwardly.

  “I know.”

  No help there. He waited with growing discomfort. “And you?” he asked when he couldn’t take it anymore.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Molly said flatly. He knew it was true. Molly was Anna’s sister. He’d expected nothing less. Still, he’d hoped, been intoxicated by the fantasy.

  “Will you tell her?”

  “Tell her what?” Molly was being intentionally obtuse. He waited and she relented. “No. And neither will you. Ever.”

  Frederick stirred his Scotch with his finger. The ice cubes had melted in record time. Like my love life, he thought with a dose of self-pity. It was time to hang up, but as he knew there’d never be another call, he procrastinated.

  “Somebody should tell her something before she moves to Chicago,” he said, because he was angry and to keep Molly with him a little longer.

  A short bark of laughter struck across the phone line. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Anna will never leave the wilderness.”

  CHAPTER Twenty-eight

  RICK HAD GONE, and with him the noise and surrealistic horror of the fistfight. Marty lay like a broken puppet where he’d left him, neither speaking nor responding when spoken to. His arm must have been hurting but stubbornness or the anesthetic qualities of cocaine kept him from alluding to it.

  Clasped in the loving arms of Dot, Flicka had been returned to the circle, and Anna found comfort in stroking the soft hide. Mona, her head seeping blood where Schlessinger’s gun barrel had struck, was slightly dazed but insisted she was uninjured in any serious sense.

  The dust settled and their minds began working again. Dot took the Glock and stood guard over the prisoner whil
e Mona helped Anna peel off her mud-encrusted trousers. There was no blood and no wound, only an area of discolored flesh halfway between knee and crotch.

  “Wonderwoman,” Mona said, and Anna laughed shakily. Schlessinger’s bullet had struck some solid object—wood or stone—and a piece of nature’s own shrapnel hit Anna in the leg with the force of a fast-pitched hardball. The belief that she was shot had been nearly as debilitating as the blow.

  Tears prickled behind her eyes and she snorted to frighten them away. “I’d’ve felt pretty doggone silly if I’d died of this,” she said as she zipped her pants. The power of the mind was an awesome thing. She was reminded of a woman who died from a king snake’s bite. She was so sure it was a rattler, and so afraid, she’d gone into shock and died before she reached the hospital.

  After a few tries, Anna found she could walk. The pain was bad enough that she guessed there might be a hairline fracture of the femur, but nothing that wouldn’t heal itself in time.

  Waiting for a lights-and-sirens rescue with hot-and-cold-running paramedics anxious to get in on a bona fide gunshot wound was too loathsome to contemplate. Having prodded the resolutely mute biologist to his feet, Anna leaned on Dot and they began a slow limping trek the two miles back to Stafford House.

  To help pass the time and take their minds off their injuries, Dot and Mona filled in some of the blanks left in Anna’s picture of events. Schlessinger, believing Dot and Mona to be dead women, had indulged in boasting of his own cleverness.

  Anna had been right about the microscope and the assistants. Both had been billed to the loggerhead account and the money taken by Schlessinger, but it went deeper than that. The ten-year turtle study was funded by a $112,000 grant to be paid in two installments, half on commencement and half two years into the study. Schlessinger had embezzled and spent the first half very quickly. In September he was to receive the second half. Hammond figured out the scam and wanted fifty percent as his price for silence. Marty hit upon a less expensive guarantee.

  Schlessinger had been given carte blanche more or less, and had been the only one to take an interest in the loggerhead project files until Chief Ranger Hull decided to have them updated and put on the new computer system. Evidence of the embezzlement was there to a trained eye. Suddenly it became imperative that Schlessinger locate and destroy the old files.

  And, Dot added, the old file clerks as well.

  While they talked, Marty shambled along ahead of them, his eyes on the ground, picking his path with great care, looking for the smoothest trail, one that wouldn’t jar his broken bones.

  Anna asked him how he’d known to sabotage the actuator rod and whether he’d lied about hearing the shotgun blast that took the Austrian’s leg, but he wasn’t talking.

  “Oh, so now the cat’s got your tongue,” Mona said unkindly. No one begrudged her this minute breach of manners. “I seem to recall hearing that Old Number One died in a wreck. Want to bet it crashed for the same reason Slattery’s crashed?”

  A plane wreck; the answer had been in front of them all along. Anna remembered being told Marty’s wife had been killed in a crash. Everyone on the island knew that. Like Anna, they’d probably assumed it was a car crash, America’s favorite way to die. Perhaps Schlessinger knew how to ruin the actuator rod because he’d done it before.

  Less than a mile from the cottage Rick came back to them. This time he was armed with a red jump kit of first-aid supplies, extra flashlights, and Lynette Wagner. A helicopter with emergency medical personnel was on its way from the mainland and would be landing at the Stafford meadow. Already the faint chuff-chuff of the blades could be heard in the distance.

  Rick’s admiration for Anna’s fortitude turned to ribbing as soon as she admitted that she had not, in fact, taken a bullet.

  “I’m shot! It’s bad,” he mimicked in a falsetto.

  “It looks like it’s going to leave a real nasty bruise,” Mona said in Anna’s defense.

  “Oh, no! Not a bruise!” Rick squealed.

  Anna groaned inwardly. She was never going to live this one down. Her only hope was to dye her hair, change her name, and leave town.

  Lynette was, as Anna had come to expect, sympathetic and helpful. She was even reasonably sober considering the quantity of wine she and Tabby had consumed. Anna found Rick’s teasing easier to bear up under than Lynette’s kindness. It was part of an unwritten code. Bravery was possible when one’s companions made light of one’s predicament. Sympathy could unman the most stalwart.

  Paramedics descended on them in a flurry of efficiency just as they reached Stafford’s grounds. They did a decent job of hiding their disappointment at Anna’s relative good health, settling for one broken arm (Schlessinger’s), a possible concussion (Mona’s), and assorted cuts and contusions.

  As the last of the on-scene ministrations were being finished up, the sheriff from St. Marys docked at Stafford pier. Marty would be transported to the hospital, placed under guard, and removed to the jail once the doctors released him. Mona was also going to the hospital to get her head wound checked.

  Anna dug in her heels and refused transport, even to the extent of signing the obnoxious form she’d shoved under countless park visitors’ noses; a form swearing they’d been told what idiots they were and absolving the medical personnel of any liability should they get what they deserved for refusing treatment.

  As they carried a compliant—almost to the point of being catatonic—Marty Schlessinger toward the waiting helicopter, Rick looked longingly after them. “This is really your collar, Anna. You want to go?”

  “I’m already in enough trouble,” she said. “Do you want it?”

  “Is this a trick question?” Rick was so eager, she was tempted to torture him for a moment. Fatigue rather than a good heart stopped her.

  “Be my guest.”

  Happy as a hound on a hunt, he loped off after the paramedics.

  The sheriff took statements and drank instant coffee till Anna thought either her head or his bladder would burst under the strain. Four hours on the wrong side of midnight he finally left. Dot, Anna, and Lynette sat around the kitchen table in the cottage staring blankly at one another. Tabby snored daintily from amid the ruin of files on the sofa.

  “Hey, some girls’ night out, huh?” Lynette said after a while. “On top of everything else, my period started.”

  Anna tried to smile but it hurt.

  “Don’t let any of these southern boys find out,” Dot warned her. “They’ll steal your used tampons for deer bait. Ugh.”

  The packages of meat in Slattery’s freezer; the frozen tampons. Anna thought she’d laughed, but all that came out was a strangled croak.

  “You should have gone to the hospital,” Dot scolded. “You’re in worse shape than you think. You’d better stay here tonight.”

  “No,” Anna said. “Thanks.” Thoughts were hard to string together; movement struck her as wildly improbable. Yet, more than anything, she longed to be by herself, responsible for nothing and no one. “You’ll stay with Tabby?” she asked Lynette when she managed to piece together what she needed and how to get it.

  “Aren’t you going back to Plum Orchard?”

  “I want to go home.” Dot and Lynette looked at her with alarm and Anna realized she was sounding a little off-the-wall. “Back to the fire dorm, I mean. My own room.”

  “I don’t think you should be alone,” Dot said.

  Anna sat in mulish silence. A minute’s war of wills, then Lynette sighed. “If that’s what you want, I’ll drive you over.”

  “I’ll take the truck,” Anna said. The need to be alone had mushroomed until she craved it as intensely as Marty Schlessinger must have craved cocaine. In her present mood she could easily understand killing for it. Solitude was a drug harder to come by in the modern world than most.

  She tried to stand but couldn’t do it without help. Her injured leg throbbed, the large muscle outraged at recent abuse. She ran her fingers lightly over i
t. The flesh was raised half to three quarters of an inch in an area twice the size of her palm. Frightening visions of blood clots and internal hemorrhaging made her wish for an instant that she’d gone to St. Marys. But only for an instant. In hospitals everybody messes with you. “I can walk,” she growled. But she couldn’t.

  At a loss, Dot and Lynette just watched her clinging to the edge of the table. Finally Dot put her fists on her hips and puffed out her exasperation. “Anna, you’re acting like a dog with a sore paw. We try and help you and you bite us.” Her eyes bored into Anna’s and, shamed back into third grade, Anna mumbled an apology.

  “Much better. Mona’s got an old cane from when she broke her foot. I’ll get you that. Lynette will take you to the dorm. One of the boys can get your truck tomorrow. That’s all there is to it. Are you going to be a pill?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  As ordered, Lynette took her back to the dorm. Over protests, she drew Anna a bath, settled her in it, then used Guy’s key to unlock the fire cache and brought her a clean pair of pants, a shirt, and a sleeping bag. “You can return them tomorrow,” she said. “Who’ll know?”

  After the interpretive ranger left, Anna meant to shampoo her hair, wash her battered face, and take stock of the damage. She fell asleep in the tub before she could begin.

  A TROUBLED DREAM was shattered by the bathroom door banging open. Anna’s heart responded with a bang of its own and she started to get out of the bath. The water had grown cold. Her skin was puckered and white. She looked as if she were dead and wished it were true.

  A shout of “Rick!” followed the crash and a shocked, “Who the fuck—My God, it’s you,” and a hasty retreat. Safe with the door between them, Dijon talked to her through the wood. “What are you doing here, Anna?” he demanded. “What happened to your face? Have you been having fun without me?”

  NEARLY A WEEK had passed and Anna had gratefully settled back into the dull routine of presuppression. Her leg still hurt her but she kept it covered and never complained. She even kept her limping to a minimum except when she was around Rick. Then she let it show, hoping to keep her credit good.