Burn

by Nevada Barr

  For a second they stood immobile, the girls in their miniature gowns, the boys in short pants or loincloths and turbans. Then a boy broke and ran. The others followed, pattering past Anna and Dougie and down the long carpeted stairs. Only the twins remained, one in the chief’s arms and one on the floor, no longer prone but up now on her knees.

  Dougie began to squirm. Anna put pressure on his neck until he yelled with the pain and grew still.

  “Let the children go,” she told the chief of police. “Or I snap your man’s neck.”

  “Are you my man, Dougie?” the chief asked, making no move to set the child down.

  “Yeah, boss,” Dougie managed through his crimped throat.

  The chief lazily raised the gun and pulled the trigger.

  Dougie slammed back against Anna with the force of the bullet. The chief pulled the trigger a second time. Dougie went limp, and Anna felt a blow as if a fastball had been hurled into her as the bullet passed through the dead man and smashed into her side.

  Then she was falling backward, Dougie with her. There was the odd sight of the chief disappearing, then the ceiling unfurling, then the banister heaving up, then nothing.

  FORTY-ONE

  From a long ways away, she heard a cry.

  Feebly, Clare struggled through fogs of drifting layers, skittering shadows of movement and sensation until she came into her eyes. Below her, glasses broken and askew, tears streaming, was the face of Ichabod Crane. He looked at her with abject terror, and she didn’t know why. Then she felt the brick in her hand, saw the blood on his bald head, and knew she was murdering him.

  “Mommy!”

  Clare dropped the brick and scrambled off of Ichabod, leaving him sniveling in the monkey grass. Dana, making herself as small as she could, her naked body curled into a ball and squished beneath the low bench, was crying for her mother.

  “I’m here, honey, it’s Mommy,” Clare crooned as she crawled across the bricks. “It’s me, baby, I’m all dressed up for a play, but it’s me. It’s Mommy.” She reached beneath the bench and laid a hand on her daughter’s back. “Come on, honey. It’s over. You’re safe now, Mommy’s here.”

  Water was dripping from somewhere, splashing the brick, and Clare realized she was weeping.

  Dana took her hands away from her face and looked up.

  “Mommy’s in costume,” Clare said. There was still no response. “Oh!” Clare had forgotten all but her daughter. “I’ve got on makeup, so I’ll look all beat up and bloody like that time when we did the scary play.”

  With sudden recognition, the little girl exploded from beneath the bench and wrapped her arms so tightly around Clare’s neck and her legs so tightly around her middle that Clare couldn’t breathe and wouldn’t have traded the embrace for all the oxygen in the world.

  “Do you know where your sister is?” Clare asked, forcing calm into her voice. “Do you know where Vee is?”

  Dana shook her head against her mother’s shoulder and cried harder.

  “Shh, shh,” Clare murmured. “It’s okay. We’ll find her. Don’t you worry. We’ll find Vee.” Dana’s crying seemed to lessen a little, and she burrowed her face into the hollow of Clare’s shoulder as if she would hide forever near her mother’s heart.

  Had there been the luxury of time, Clare might have sat just that way for hours. Instead, never loosing her hold on her child, she levered herself up from the bricks, using the edge of the bench.

  Ichabod had found the courage to sit up. The blow he’d taken to the head was bleeding copiously, and the sight of his own blood seemed to be terrifying him. A good bit of it had splashed on his hands, and he held them before his face, staring at them as if they belonged to someone else.

  A mother again, sane again, Clare reached for Anna’s cell phone to dial 911. The pocket was empty. She’d left it in the trousers she’d shucked off when she donned the costume. “Doggone it,” she whispered, careful as always not to swear around her children. To the pathetic bastard bleeding at her feet, she said, “Give me your cell phone or I will kill you.” She meant every word and knew that she and Jordan had integrated, become one.

  Ichabod fished his phone out and handed it to her. Clare flipped it open and punched in 911.

  Ichabod scuttled crablike to the edge of the clearing, got to his feet, and ran down the path on long shaking legs, hollering for help.

  The emergency operator answered. Clare began pouring out her story. It sounded unreal, like the story of a prankster or psychopath. She took a breath to mentally reframe what she’d seen and heard this night.

  Into the silence the operator said warily, “Where are you?”

  Clare started to snap, “I told you that!” but remembered she hadn’t shared the address. She didn’t know it. “It’s behind the sex club on the north edge of the Quarter, the Bonne Chance.”

  For a beat or two the operator said nothing, then, “There’s nothing behind that club but city warehouses filled with old pumping station machinery, obsolete computers, broken crime cameras, things like that. It’s called the Bone Yard.”

  City warehouse, chief of police. Possibly others from the upper echelons of Louisiana politics were involved. Clare changed tack. “My name is Clare Sullivan,” she announced. “I’m wanted for four murders in Seattle, Washington. I’m ready to give myself up.”

  “Are you still . . . behind the Bonne Chance?” the operator asked.

  “Yes,” Clare said firmly.

  “In the warehouse?”

  “Yes,” Clare said again.

  “If you’ll go out to the street, I’ll have an officer come by to arrest you if you’d like,” the dispatcher said with only a hint of sarcasm.

  “I can’t,” Clare said. “I can’t get out of the warehouse.”

  There was a distinct sigh from the other end. “Stay on the line, please.” A list of helpful hints of what to do in case of emergency began playing over the phone.

  Clamping the slippery device between ear and shoulder, Clare lowered Dana to the bench. The child wouldn’t let go of her neck but, with coaxing, was willing to set her feet on the stone seat. Having wriggled out of the Edwardian jacket, Clare wrapped it around her daughter’s naked body and gathered her up again. The night wasn’t cold, but she couldn’t bear the thought of Dana feeling any man’s eyes on her.

  Through the foliage came the sound of raised voices. Ichabod had reported her. Holding Dana tightly, Clare pushed into the dense elephant ears and Australian ferns between the brick paths. They would not hide her long, but it was the best she could do. Not quite the best; stepping back into the clearing, she picked up the bloody brick she’d used in her aborted attempt to bash a pervert’s brains out and slipped it into the folds of the coat wrapped around Dana.

  Radios crackled, and the men hushed. The operator had called out the police, and the police were receiving the call on their radios, in the garden, in the fancy house. Edging through the dense greenery, Clare moved the half-dozen yards to where the paths left the patio. Three guys in black suits were standing close to the piano, listening to their radios.

  After the dispatcher made her report, another voice came over the air. “Amy, this is the chief. That’s a crank call. Officers Barrett and Downs are with the caller now. We’ll get back to you.”

  “Night of the full moon,” the dispatcher said.

  “Always brings’em out,” replied the chief.

  Without waiting for the operator to come back on the line, Clare closed the cell phone. The way out through the house and sex club was locked. Vee was either dead or shipped overseas or in this house somewhere. Anna was probably dead or dying. The rats were abandoning ship, stripping off period costume jackets, vests, hats, spats, and ascots as they rushed a door in the garden wall that led to a garage or other screened exit.

  Carrying Dana, Clare would be stopped if she tried to blend in with the men making their escape. If she walked back into the house, bloodied and filthy and carrying a child, the three
off-duty policemen would stop her in a heartbeat.

  Hugging her daughter tightly, she sank down into the ferns.

  FORTY-TWO

  Anna opened her eyes. She was looking at a black shag carpet. No, she was under a greasy shag carpet. Shit. She was staring at the back of Dougie’s head. Carefully, lest her spine be snapped, she rolled her head to the side. The two of them lay on the stairs, her head smashed awkwardly into the angle between stair and wall. Her right arm was trapped beneath her and her left flung out as if she’d tried to break her fall. Dougie lay partially over her chest, his head resting on her cheek.

  Oddly calm, she wondered if he was dead. Not that she cared, but if he wasn’t, maybe he’d get the hell off her lungs so she could breathe. Dougie had been shot.

  Anna had been shot by the same bullet—or bullets. She only remembered feeling one hit. What should a gunshot person do on awakening?

  Stop the bleeding.

  Check airways.

  Treat for shock.

  Set up a saline IV.

  That was for when other people got shot, victims, she remembered. Nobody ever taught rangers what to do if they got shot. Don’t die, she thought and started to laugh. With x number of pounds of Dougie on her chest, it didn’t work out. As long as she stayed still, the wound didn’t hurt too badly. Was it too bad? Only a crease, she told herself, don’t be scared. Fear was deadly. There’d been a story going around the parks one year about a man who was bitten by a corn snake and died of shock because he believed he’d been bitten by a rattler. It might not have been true, but it was a good teaching point at campfire talks.

  “Corn snake,” Anna whispered and was pleased to find she could talk without making ominous gurgling sounds. Her lungs weren’t punctured. Before she made the commitment to moving from under the man she’d shared a bullet—or bullets—with, she listened past the sound of her own heartbeat in her ears and the breath in her throat.

  “Load up the jewels. We’re shutting this place down. And find that goddam photographer,” she heard the chief shouting.

  He was downstairs, where the children had run. Why hadn’t he shot her again for insurance when he passed her and Dougie on the stairs? Maybe with her head jammed against the wall and the copious amounts of blood—Dougie’s, she hoped—drenching her, she’d looked too dead to waste a bullet on.

  Without moving overmuch, she frisked the body that lay across hers. Last time she’d been this close to Dougie, he’d been carrying a knife, a long blade that folded into the haft. With luck, in the intervening days, he’d augmented his arsenal with a gun or two. Her quota of luck had evidently been used up when the chief decided not to finish her off; there was only the knife. Holding the open blade across Dougie’s throat in case he wasn’t dead enough, she pressed two fingers on his carotid. No pulse.

  The weapon hard in her fist, she wriggled from beneath the dead man. Pain roared up through her side, making her breath catch, and the wretched skirts tangled around her lower legs. What should have been a relatively simple operation was a slow misery.

  Panting and sweating and swearing nonstop under her breath, she got free of Dougie and could see down the stairs.

  Her escape maneuvers had gone unnoticed. The chief was just in sight, his back to her, standing by the baby grand, clad in period trousers and anachronistic leather bedroom slippers, shouting orders to Barrett and Downs—presumably his men in the courtyard. The .357 was shoved in the waistband of his trousers. Despite his considerable girth, the antiquated cut of the trousers left them roomy. They were meant to be held up by braces, not a belt. Most of the gun had slipped down his ass. Only the tip of the wooden grip remained visible.

  Except for the chief, the pedophiles were leaving, scuttling down the stairs to their limos, no doubt, to prey on other children at other times. They stepped over and around her and Dougie, indifferent to the fact that she lived or that he did not. She watched them pass, but with the costuming, the confusion, getting shot and whatnot, Anna doubted she would be able to identify any one of them in a court of law.

  Beyond the chief, on the patio in the courtyard, two men in black suits were trying to herd the children streaming from the building into a group. There was no sign of the whorehouse staff or of Clare. Anna hoped she had managed to escape and wasn’t lying dead somewhere. The hope was feeble; Clare would not leave without her children.

  Anna supposed she could creep upstairs and hide. Maybe the chief wouldn’t notice the dead had walked, wouldn’t look for her, wouldn’t drag her out and kill her. It was a slim chance but better than nothing. Had they not been taking the children away to torture at their later convienience, she would have done just that.

  Seven steps to the bottom of the stairs.

  By the time she’d reached the last one, she’d have a plan, she promised herself.

  Gathering her skirts up in her free hand, she began to pull herself to her feet, using the banister. Each movement felt as if it tore the hole in her side wider and deeper. Because Dougie had been cad enough to bleed all over her, she had no idea how much blood she was losing, whether the wound was grave or just a scratch. Pain was no indicator. Often the worst wounds damaged the nerves and hurt less than non-life-threatening wounds.

  “Barrett!” the chief barked. The shorter man in black turned. Anna froze. Indoors, uncertain light, panicked men and children: If he wasn’t looking for her he might not see her.

  “Yeah?”

  “We got any gas?”

  “A five-gallon can in the garage. Why?

  “We’re going to burn this place down. There’s been too much radio traffic. Some nosy parker’s bound to have been scanning.”

  “Where’s Paula?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. Get the gas.”

  “Gas is easy to detect, boss.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  Barrett turned and trotted in the direction Downs had led the children.

  With Barrett out of line of sight, Anna got to a standing position, congratulating herself on the decision not to hide. Burning was way down on her list of favorite ways to go. The Chance would burn as well, and she wished she could warn them. With sunrise only a few minutes away, surely most of the revelers would have gone home. The two dominatrices must have to take the kids to soccer practice or something.

  Dropping her skirts and holding on to the banister, she took her first step. Six more to the Plan. Toddling barefoot into three handguns was a plan of sorts. Five steps to a Better Plan.

  Damn. Somehow she’d slid down the railing till her butt was on the tread. Putting her head between her knees, she tried to bring her drifting consciousness back into focus. Perhaps the bulk of the blood on her dress wasn’t Dougie’s. Maybe it wasn’t a corn snake. Maybe she’d been bitten by a rattler. The knife was still in her hand, but she wasn’t sure what she’d intended to do with it.

  Soon the chief would turn around or Barrett or Downs or whoever else was still on-site would come back. Either they’d see her and kill her or they’d burn her up sight unseen. Paul would never know what had become of her.

  One day he had talked to his wife on the phone. She’d told him she was fine and having a nice rest with her girlfriend in New Orleans. Then she was never seen or heard from again.

  Jesus, Anna thought. How can people survive not knowing, looking in every face on the street, craning to hear voices in the dark, thinking against all reason that maybe, maybe this time, it will be the lost love. Suddenly, over all the horror she’d seen and all the horror yet to come, washed a wave of grief so dark it eclipsed them. She realized what she had done to Paul, how she had lied to him by omission, and how she had lied to herself in pretending that she did it to shield him. She had wanted to feel in control, meaningful; she’d wanted distraction and a sense of importance. Well, she had gotten all that in spades. The cost was yet to be totaled up.

  “Barrett,” the chief yelled as the other officer trotted back lugging a heavy red gas can. �
��Start on the third floor. Go light. Save a couple gallons for the second and ground floors.”

  Anna could hear Barrett’s boots loud on the tiles that fronted the house proper. The arsonist was heading for the stairs.

  Anna’s mind snapped back to the business of survival. She couldn’t make it down unseen, nor had she a chance of getting to the top unseen. Unseen and unshot were synonymous.

  No more perverts were passing by. They were clearing from the lobby as well, funneling through the garden. Bumping back up the single stair she’d traversed, she lay down in a pose as close as she could manage to the one the chief had last seen, arranging her skirts so they covered but did not entangle her legs. The knife she opened and held in her right hand, the skirt covering it. Weak and in a hurry, she found Dougie too heavy for her to shift more than a few inches. Grabbing a handful of hair, she dragged his head up and let it drop on her chest and neck, partly obscuring her face.

  Boots hit carpet. Barrett was coming fast. Grunting under the weight of the gas can, he ran up the stairs. Anna resisted the temptation to hold her breath. Then he was over her, his boot mashing the little finger of her left hand, the other kicking her calf as he passed.

  Lying as one dead, she listened for him to reach the second flight of stairs. There he would turn and would no longer be able to see her. Where the chief had gone, she had no idea; the garage, she hoped. If she could get to the greenery in the courtyard, they might not be able to find her before they had to abandon the place. They wouldn’t dare be here when the fire department showed up, not dressed—or half dressed—as they were. In the green, she might even be able to survive the fire.

  In that instant she heard the chief’s soft-soled shoes hushing across the marble of the foyer between the piano and the stairs. The bastard was coming back. To get his shoes? Check on Barrett? Put on street clothes? Fire that insurance bullet into her skull? Closing her eyes, she became as dead as she possibly could with a heart that was hammering a hundred beats a minute.