Burn- pigeon 16 by Nevada Barr

a game," Crimson Rose said. "They think you did something bad. Did you?"
    Clare fell to her knees. "No, honey, no, I didn't. I've lost my girls, and I have to find them. Nobody but me knows they're waiting for me." She put her arms around Crimson the way she had a hundred times over the years the Donovan children and hers had been playing together. This time it was harder to let go, to relinquish that special softness and warmth that is a child. Time refused her the luxury of prolonging it. "Run! Catch your brothers. Tell them."
    Crimson Rose ran, a flash of white swallowed by the black of the lilac's glossy leaves. Whether she ran to tell the police there was a murderess in the bushes or to stop Philip and Colt from doing so, Clare had no way of knowing. She turned and ran as quickly in the opposite direction. Mackie, torn between the two options, dithered but a heartbeat, then ran at her heels.

TEN
    As they headed out of Seattle, Blackie watched the road beyond the windshield wipers. Dawn was leaching the mystery from the liquid light running psychedelic on rain-dark streets, and he felt the same relief he always experienced with the coming of the day. Night was a time when things he didn't want to think about were around. Things like him, like Dougie.
    Worse , he thought, then smiled to himself. There wasn't much even long dead that was worse than Dougie was, or would be when he grew into his vices. The smile was short-lived, as were all Blackie's joys. He knew too much of the world to allow something so fragile to show for longer than a moment. It was bad juju to dwell on certain things, bad juju to mock them. Abruptly, he stabbed the ON button on the radio.
    A talk program, that was good, took more thought.
    He glanced at his companion. The kid wasn't watching the road like any normal person; hot-eyed, lips loose and damp, jaw slack, he was staring into the back of the van. Blackie knew the look; he'd seen it on the faces of Rick B's clients. It was the look men get when they want something real bad and are dreaming they've already got it.
    "Fucking watch the road," Blackie snarled.
    "It don't hurt'em none. They ain't moving. 'Cept the little darkie. You're moving, ain't you? Bet you move and wriggle and--"
    Blackie took his hand from the wheel and slammed the back of it across Dougie's face. He didn't worry the kid would hit back. His kind never did, at least not when you were looking. "Watch the fucking road," Blackie said but with less venom this time. Dougie was just a tool. No sense blunting your tools as long as they worked.
    Dougie dutifully turned his eyes to the front, apparently taking no umbrage from the fact he'd just been backhanded. Blackie had been to college; he read the papers, listened to National Public Radio. The legends and lore of modern psychology had not passed him by. Dougie was a perfect example of what happens to a boy when he's abused as a child and grows up finding comfort and familiarity in violence as well as a need to create it by tormenting other helpless beings. Except none of that had ever happened to little Douglas Dewitt. His folks didn't live more than two miles from Blackie's family. Nice people, nice house, nice kids. Except for Dougie. He'd been a bastard since he'd been old enough to kill the family gerbil.
    "Bad seed," Blackie muttered and turned up the radio. For a blessed few miles Dougie didn't say anything. The radio did the talking, that, and the sound of wheels on wet pavement, almost drowning out the faint whimpers from the little girl sitting in back with the two lumps under the blankets. Blackie slowed the van to sixty-nine miles per hour and switched on cruise control. With this load, getting stopped by even a stupid cop would be bad trouble. The road unrolled between the knuckles of his hands on the wheel; the white line came at him in a blur; the talk radio droned.
    "Do you think Mr. B might give me a freebie?" Dougie's thin voice squirted into the emptiness Blackie