Hard Truth- Pigeon 13 Read Online Free PDF

with her legs, had it also lost access to information, memory and experience as well as sensation?

The sound of a truck engine vibrated out from the trees, and a boxy white ambulance came into view at the far end of the parking lot.

"Your guy must've got his signal," Heath said.

"Finish her." Gwen put the limpet's dripping feet in Heath's lap and rose to go flag down the ambulance.

Heath's little bears were in bad shape but, of the obvious injuries those to their feet were the most series. It was a testimony to their courage and fortitude-or their desperation and terror-that they'd kept on keeping on, putting one bloody ragged little foot down in front of the other.

And it was a testament to their peculiar attachment to her that they'd leaped up and run to her when she'd wheeled into camp. By the bright yet unilluminating glare of the Coleman lanterns, Heath could still make out the bloody prints their passage left on the crushed gravel.

She cupped the battered heels, one in each of the palms of her hands, and looked into the hopeless darkness of the limpet's eyes. Wind gusted through the trees, making the night sigh around them.

"Hey, sweetie pie, where ya been?" she whispered.

The eyes might have glimmered. Something as tiny as a minnow at the bottom of a deep night-bound pool seemed to flicker. The limpet's lips parted in an exhaled breath.

"What have you got for me?" came an alto voice, firm, authoritative and loud as a sonic boom in the fragile whisper of contact Heath had managed to establish with the child.

A woman, mid-forties or early fifties-under the brim of her flat hat, collar-length hair waved more white than brown-walked into the light. She wore the green and gray of an NFS ranger and carried a gun that was probably standard size but on her slender hips looked huge and black and in-your-face.

Heath was teetering on disliking her for a number of reasons, starting with her untimely arrival and her doing so on two good legs, when the scales tipped suddenly from casual dislike to overt hostility.

Skipper and the limpet began screaming as they'd done when she'd come upon them in the woods. The fragile calm she and Gwen had knit for them shredded. The fragment of light or life Heath had seen in the limpet's eyes dove into her internal darkness.

The ranger raised both hands as if to show she was harmless and backed away, murmuring, "It's okay. Take it easy. Nobody's going to hurt you. You're okay."

The tone and gesture might have struck Heath as commendable in another person at another time, but the girls had ceased their shrieking and began to cry silently, not the snotty gulping children's sobs they'd trenched her neck with, but the slow, unstoppable tears of old women who know nothing but despair.

Heath had great respect for the instinctive character judgement of dogs and children. True, Wiley was wagging his tail, but this time he'd been outvoted.

four

It's okay. You're okay. My name's Anna..." Anna had walked into a lot of situations over the years where people weren't all that happy she'd shown up, but she couldn't remember entire parties bursting into tears at the sight of her. The rangers behind her, EMTs who'd brought the ambu-lance, didn't seem to reassure the children either, though Ryan, a seasonal so cute he actually had an echoing dimple on his left dimple, usually reduced girls of this age to simpering, giggling blobs of hormonal adora-tion without even trying.

The children weren't alone in their antipathy. A disabled woman, fifty-ish and probably fairly good-looking when her face wasn't screwed up preparatory to spitting nails, sat in a wheelchair near the picnic table.

It was impossible to tell how tall she was and, briefly, Anna wondered if the question of height became moot when one was relegated to a chair. Petite probably, she was delicate-boned, her face almost a perfect oval and capped by short, very dark hair in a pixie cut. Cheekbones slashed hard lines below her eyes. Dark