Nevada Barr - Burn

BURN

A LSO BY N EVADA B ARR

FICTION

Anna Pigeon

Borderline

Winter Study

Hard Truth

High Country

Flashback

Hunting Season

Blood Lure

Deep South

Liberty Falling

Blind Descent

Endangered Species

Firestorm

Ill Wind (a.k.a. Mountain of Bones)

A Superior Death

Track of the Cat

Nevada Barr Collection

NOVEL

Bittersweet

13

NONFICTION

Seeking EnlightenmentHat by Hat

NEVADA BARR

Minotaur Books
New York

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

BURN . Copyright 2010 by Nevada Barr. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.>

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barr, Nevada.

Burn : an Anna Pigeon novel / Nevada Barr.1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-312-61456-0

1. Pigeon, Anna (Fictitious character)Fiction.

2. Women park rangersFiction. 3. New Orleans (La.)Fiction.

I. Title.

PS3552.A73184B87 2010

813'.54dc22

2010021411

First Edition: August 2010

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my dearest
Deb and Ed, whom I have loved
since we were all young and
magnificently foolish

Shit, Blackie, this ones dead, too. Whatre we gonna do? The speaker, scarcely more than a boythe lines cruelty would carve deep into his face not yet showing more than petulancelooked with disgust into an aluminum cargo box half the size of a semitrailer. His nose, high bridged and straight, the only feature of his face that suggested an ancestry not devoted to the baser things, wrinkled at the stink, a stink not from the bodies, or from the way they had died, but from the way they had lived for nineteen days.

A jewel?

Maybe moren one.

We get rid of em.

Drops of water on the younger mans thick black hair glittered in the harbor lights like a cheap sequined hairnet. As his head pushed into the shadow of the shipping box, Blackie, fifty last birthday and made of hard muscles and hard times, turned away. For a second it had looked as if the head vanished and left the body standing stooped over by itself.

Blackie didnt like magic. Didnt like things that vanished or shifted or werent what they seemed to be; things that couldnt be relied upon.

Dougie, get your goddam head out of the box, he snapped. Whatre you doing? Sniffingem? Jesus.

Unoffended, Dougie did as he was told. Whatre we going to do? he asked again, sounding plaintive.

Absurd burbling notes of Baa Baa Black Sheep swam through the moisture-laden air. Blackie tensed, his eyes seeking and sharp with the keenness of the hunteror the hunted. He wished the night were darker. Seattles interminable drizzle caught the light from the quay and the street above the docks, giving everything a shadowless glow, robbing the place of depth, reality.

Its your cell phone, Dougie said helpfully.

Fuck. Blackie fumbled the phone out of his jacket pocket and pawed it open, his blunt fingers clumsy as hooves on the tiny plastic cover. Yeah? Oh, hi, sweetie-pie. A vicious glare, at odds with the sugary voice, abraded the smirk from Dougies face. No, Laura, Daddy didnt forget. I thought you got to stay up laters all. Okay. Ready? Nighty night, sleep tight, and dont let the bed bugs bite. As he closed the phone, Dougie began his lament.

Whatre we gonna

It was cut off by another few bars of the childrens nursery song. Blackies daughter liked to program the ring on his cell phone.

He flipped it open again. Sweetie... he began, then trailed off. His flesh tightened over wide cheek and brow bones, drawing the rigid lines of a man in painor in thrall to someone who enjoyed the dark arts.

Yeah, he said. And Yeah. And Clear. Putting the phone back in his pocket, he jerked his chin toward the freight container. Throw em in the back of the van. We got another job.

Dougie padded happily into the reeking darkness of the metal coffin. He knew Blackies look, the freaky frozen look. The other job would be better. It was way more fun when they werent already dead.

Old Man River. What a crock, Anna thought as she sat on a bench on the levee, the April sun already powerful enough to warm the faux wood slats beneath her back and thighs. The Mississippi was so unquestionably female, the great mother, a blowsy, fecund, fertile juggernaut that nurtured and destroyed with the same sublime indifference.

Rivers were paltry things where Anna had grown up, fierce only when they flash-flooded. Compared to the Mississippi their occasional rampages seemed merely the peevish snits of adolescence.

Half blind from the hypnotic sparkle of sun on ruffled water, she squinted at her watch. Geneva was about to go to work. Grunting mildly because there was no one close enough to hear, Anna shoved herself up from the bench and started back toward the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park on North Peters, a block from Caf Du Monde and Jackson Square.

Young persons of the sort she seldom ran across in the parks had laid claim to a swath of the river walk. Six males, three females, four dogs, one puppy, and nine bicycles created a barrier that could either be detoured around or run as a gauntlet. Hostile glares from thirteen pairs of eyesthe puppy looked friendly enoughsuggested Anna choose the detour.

Sheer orneriness suggested she take the puppy up on his tail-wagging invitation and plow through the pack. The alpha male, tall with hair pulled into a tail of natural dreadlocks, the kind created by aggressively bad hygiene and not kinky hair or salon manipulations, and a beard Charlie Manson might have sported before prison barbers took over his personal grooming, could have been close to thirty. The youngest was the girl holding the puppy. Anna put her at no more than thirteen or fourteen.

Age was hard to guess. Male and female alike wore only blacks and browns. Not a speck of color alleviated the drab of their thrift store clothing. Decorations were a study in sartorial nihilism: slashes, iron pins, rag-over-rag T-shirts with swastikas inked on. Piercing and cutting and tattooing moved seamlessly from fabric to flesh. Nothing was symmetrical, soft, or suggestive of kindness. Dirt, soot, sweat, and various effluvia dulled cloth, hair, and skin. Something more immutable dulled the eyes.

If life were to be found in T. S. Eliots waste land, Anna believed it would be in the discovery of roving bands like this one; parentless, homeless, hopeless children, more like the child-soldiers of Rwandaor little girls pressed into sexual slavery in World War II Japanese prison campsthan children from middle- and upper-class American families who chose to reject the plenty for the ride.

GenevaAnna was staying in the apartment behind her house on Ursulines in the Quartercalled them gutter punks. They were purported to call themselves travelers because they jumped trains, living the nomadic life once followed by hobos.

Just how dangerous they were, Anna hadnt a clue, but it was clear they wanted to inspire fear in civilians. Even without the stink and the rags and the self-mutilation, that alone would have earned them a wide berth as far as she was concerned. These kids were not her brand of criminal. She wasnt well versed in their migration patterns, did not know their natural habitat, what they preyed upon or what preyed upon thembut people who valued fear and enjoyed pain were scary. Healthy animals, bunnies and foxes and cougars and grizzlies, ran from what frightened them and avoided pain at all costs. When they stopped behaving this way it was because they were sick, rabid.