The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [316]
That Libby’d arrive in New York considerably ahead of us was a given; the only question was what she would do when she got there. Was her main concern now getting rid of all traces of Ana Linares, securing what money she could from Goo Goo Knox, and then heading out of the state, probably to the West, where wanted criminals could and often did disappear into new lives under assumed names? Such would’ve been the most logical set of moves, but nobody’d ever accused Libby Hatch of being logical. Clever and devious, yes, to a point what sometimes made her look brilliant; but at bottom her actions—her whole life—were deathly nonsensical, and I knew that if I was going to predict her next steps I’d have to think like the Doctor, instead of drawing on my lifelong experience with criminals whose goals were more practical.
As we crossed into New Jersey and dawn started to turn the sky a strange, glowing blue I put my mind to this task and came up with only one consideration what I figured was cause for hope: with all that she’d been through upstate, with all that’d been discovered and revealed about her life of murder and destruction, Libby’s desire and even need to keep Ana alive—to nurture her as a way of proving that she could, finally, care properly for a child—would be increased. She’d try to escape the city, there was no question about that; but I figured she’d make the attempt with the baby, and so long as she didn’t try to do Ana any harm, there wouldn’t be any cause for Kat to try to step in and maybe get herself killed. This reasoning was, I told myself, sound; and I clung to it as tightly as our train hugged the inner side of the Palisades on its way into Weehawken.
El Niño and I jumped off the train as soon as it came within sight of the Weehawken yard, then ran full out for the ferry station, still not exchanging a word. More and more the aborigine was becoming all business: having rested his hopes for a new life on Mr. Picton, he was determined to have his revenge, an act what, it seemed, was very important in the part of the world where he came from. All the way across the Hudson on the ferry he took to sharpening his arrows and knife and readying his short bow, along with mixing ingredients from a few small pouches into a small wooden vial what held a sticky, gluelike substance. This, I figured, was the poison what he used to coat the tips of his missiles, and I could only guess that he was tampering with the mixture to make it more deadly than it’d been on any of the occasions when I’d seen him use it. So dark and determined did his face become as he went about this process that I began to feel that I needed to get a few things straight with him.
“El Niño,” I said, “nobody knows better than me how you feel. But our first worry is making sure that we get Ana and Kat out alive, right?” The aborigine just nodded slowly as he dipped the points of his arrows into the wooden vial. “And you know what the rest of them—the Doctor and Miss Howard and the others—would say about what comes after, don’t you? They’d say that if we get the chance, we should take Libby Hatch alive and hold her for trial.”
“She has had her trial,” El Niño mumbled back. “Because of the trial she almost went free. I know that the others believe this, Señorito Stevie …” Tucking his last arrow carefully inside his jacket, he looked me dead in the eye. “But do you?”
I just shook my head. “I’m telling you what they’d say. Once we’re sure Kat and the baby are okay, what you do is you business, so far as I’m concerned.”
He nodded, looking toward the Franklin Street ferry station as it began to loom up large before us. “Yes. You and I understand these things …”
There wasn’t any other way to handle it. If I’d tried to stop El Niño from doing what he believed he had to, I’d’ve only ended up at odds with him;