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

clear her mind, look for weaknesses, opportunities, think like a heroine. The effort was in vain. Fear clouded her vision. Uncertainty made every considered act a potential path to destruction.
    She realized she was praying; then she realized she was praying not to God but to Anna. Horror of theistic retribution froze the unvoiced words. Sorry, God. Sorry, Anna. She sent the thoughts up into the night with the sparks from the all-devouring fire.
    Leah returned, trailed by Reg carrying a red toolbox. He set it on the bank between the camp and the river. Heath knew the box. Leah always carried it. She was as faithful to the battered metal box as Heath’s aunt the pediatrician was to her black leather medical bag. Like a doctor’s bag, the toolbox opened in the center and folded out into two cascading trays, each with several compartments. The larger tools were in the bottom.
    “Open it,” the dude ordered. Reg opened the box and sorted through it.
    Jimmy peeked over the black man’s shoulder into the toolkit. “Dude, bitch has a saw in there!”
    Reg picked it out of the box. In his hand it looked Barbie-sized. “Stay back,” he said. “She’s liable to give you a manicure.”
    Sean snickered. Jimmy sulked. The dude showed nothing. Heath wondered if his lack of affect went clear to the bone, if he was without imagination or humanity.
    “I’ll need two paddles from the canoe, the LED lantern, and someone to hold it,” Leah murmured, her eyes on Heath’s wheelchair as if nothing else mattered.
    “Jimmy, get the lamp,” the dude said. Jimmy sprang to the small pile of items yet to be burned, salvaged, or stowed and picked up the lantern.
    “Where do you want it, Dude?” Had he been a dog with a tennis ball he couldn’t have been more pleased with himself. He all but wagged his tail to be of service.
    Thinking of tails, Heath dared a glance to where Wily lay. She’d been careful not to look, not to remind the thugs he existed and was still awaiting execution. Wily’s head was down and he wasn’t moving, but the bright brown eyes that met hers assured her he was still alive.
    “Get the lamp going and set it beside Mrs. Hendricks,” the dude ordered.
    The chore proved too much for Jimmy.
    Leah turned the lamp on.
    Leah on the bank, Heath by the fire, Katie tied to Beer Gut, Elizabeth on the other side of camp. Heath wondered if isolating them, not allowing them to comfort one another, was coincidence or a control mechanism. Her observation of the dude suggested he instinctually divided and conquered. A natural Machiavelli.
    “Elizabeth, could you bring me my cigarettes?” Heath asked her daughter.
    Without looking to the dude for permission, E rose gracefully despite the bound hands and the knock on the head. Circling around the fire, she surreptitiously petted Katie’s hair as she passed Sean. Heath doubted that at the age of fifteen she would have had the sense to comfort another girl in shared misery.
    The cigarettes were beside Heath’s abandoned camp chair. Elizabeth retrieved both cigarettes and chair, then came and sat next to her mother.
    The dude watched but did not stop her. The isolation had been coincidental, not inborn cunning. Heath felt better with E close, and better knowing the dude was not as all-seeing and all-knowing as his sphinxy face would lead one to believe. She moved her poor old butt up onto the kind seat cushion and smiled at her daughter.
    Reg fished the Walther from his trousers. He’d stowed the gun in his waistband in order to carry the toolbox. As inner-city fashion decreed, he wore his pants low and baggy. The gun had been swallowed and come to rest in the nether regions of his drawers.
    Leah sat down in the wheelchair and stared into the fire. Heath had seen her go into creative trances a couple of times before. Under the guns of evil men, it seemed unlikely, unless work was where she hid when she was frightened. That would account for Katie being given over to nannies