Top Ten (2 page)

“Ten...”

Her lips began to quiver. “Please...”

He set the bulletin on the table and turned the woman around so that she faced him, gently guiding her to that position, his manner suddenly becalmed. “We needn’t cover number ten, I suppose. Tell me, what is your name?”

“D-d-doris.”

“Without the stutter, I imagine.”

“Please let me go,” she begged in the most pitiful of whimpers, groveling most sincerely. “I have a child, and...and...and...”

His head shook silent regret. “You’re not going to be able to help me after all, I see.”

“My little boy, he’s...he’s...”

He touched the knife to her lips and she fell instantly silent. “Don’t tell me about your little boy, Doris. When I was a boy I was made to play little league baseball. They put me in right field.” He gazed at her desperate face for a moment, but saw chalk dust rising from green fields turned brown and heard laughter from the leaning bleachers. “I am not a child anymore, Doris, and I will not allow myself to be put in right field. I most certainly... I...”

Quiet came over him, a deep and settled stillness as he drifted off, to an old place that was not a diamond of grass dying under the summer sun, but a better place where hushed corridors smelled of cool grace and sang with mad brilliance. Soon a fond twinkle danced on his gaze and he was back. Back and savoring the sight of sweet Doris without shame.

“A thousand years ago Therata captured the nymph of Mygoria in marble,” he told her, and she shuddered as the knife came suddenly to her left breast, the tip tracing across the thin material over her nipple. “Her mams were magnificent.”

“Please... Don’t... Not that... Please...”

In the silence beyond her pleas he noted an amusing and incorrect assumption. A misconception so laughable that a grin curled one side of his mouth. “Oh, Doris, do you think I am going to
violate
you?”

Her breath wheezed in and out in fast, dry sobs, the point of the blade slowly circling the soft crest beneath her blouse.

“Doris, I am not a rapist,” he said, and slipped the blade deep between her fifth and sixth ribs, puncturing her left lung and nicking the vital muscle that was her heart, withdrawing it quick and easy, like a palette knife from gouache. His free hand clamped fast over her mouth, pinning her to the wall and trapping the scream that did finally rise, a cry for mercy that God might hear, but no one else. “I am an artist.”

He pushed her chin upward and with a quick stroke carved a crimson grin across her throat.

*   *   *

“Clusterfuck.”

His back was to her, but FBI Special Agent Ariel Grace knew precisely for whom her supervisor’s comment was intended.

“Sixty friggin’ agents, lord knows how many blue suits, and to the last they’re all just standing around waiting to get rained on.” Jack Hale, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau’s Atlanta field office, lifted his gaze toward the threatening sky and shook his head. “Beautiful. I’d call this a well executed operation, Grace.”

“He was supposed to be here, sir,” Ariel told the ASAC, with certainty so firm that he turned sharply toward her. “I’m positive of that.”

Hale glared at her. “Then why isn’t he?”

“Why don’t you ask whoever left their ride parked on the boulevard?” Ariel suggested, gesturing with her head to a gaggle of agents milling about in front of the Proper Peach Motel. “A blind man wouldn’t have missed those hubcaps and that antennae.”

“There is no Bureau car on the boulevard,” Hale challenged her. “I came from that direction.”

“There was.”

“You saw this?”

“No,” she told the ASAC, hands going to her hips, the unbuttoned front of her windbreaker flapping in the stout breeze. “But Atlanta P.D. reported it. That would have spooked him, easy.”

“Did Atlanta P.D. think enough of it to note the plate?” Hale asked.

“They described a Bureau car, sir,” Ariel said, unwilling to give up ground on this.

A disgusted nod moved Hale’s sour face. “Wonderful, Grace. Blame another agent. Blame their car—which
you
never eyeballed. Blame every last man or woman with a badge within a mile of here for Mills DeVane not showing up for this meeting you were
sooo
certain of. Blame everyone, Grace. You can even blame me, ‘cause I’m the one who apparently was fool enough to let you run this case.” He stepped close to her now, his six-five frame towering over her. “But whatever you do, don’t blame yourself. No. Don’t do
that
.”

Ariel seethed, swallowing her desire to spit venom back at the ASAC. “My work on this case was solid.”

Hale considered her for a long moment before looking away toward the taped-off front of the Proper Peach. “Solid? We just wasted a whole lot of dollars and time pissing off a motel full of people and busting one very unlucky junkie who chose to shoot up in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s an interesting take on ‘solid’.”

Lights from the TV trucks lined up on the boulevard glared suddenly to life. It was one minute ‘til eleven.

“Congratulations, Grace,” Hale said, giving the electronic vultures a desultory glance. “Looks like your solid police work is going to be the lead on the late news.”

The first spots of mist began to brush her face as Hale turned to walk away.

“You’re off this case, Grace,” Jack Hale informed her, not even affording her a look as he delivered his decision. “Pick up your reassignment in the morning.”

The ASAC turned to leave her there, but a hand on his arm stopped him cold. Her hand. He looked at it, then at her.

“Wait one minute, Jack,” Ariel said, a weak and shocky smile on her face, as if she had just been the victim of some absurdly unfunny joke. “What the hell was that?”

“You want to get your hand off me?” the ASAC asked. It was not a question.

Ariel maintained her grip while the last bit of false smile drained from her face, then her hand slipped off of him. “What is going on, Jack?”

“You heard me.”

“You’re taking DeVane away from me?”

“Yes.”

Deep lines cleaved into her brow. Was she hearing him right? Was she? “You’re booting me all the way off this case?”

“You did hear me,” Hale said Harshly. He glanced impatiently over his shoulder toward the camera crews. He needed to get to them. He
wanted
to get to them. Anything to get away from her. “So are we done now, Ariel?”

Her head cocked quizzically at him, that uncertain smile coming again. “Jack.” She inched closer to him and spoke in soft, measured tones. Reasonable tones. She could be reasonable, he could be reasonable. Right? “Jack. Come on. You can’t take DeVane away from me. I’ve worked this case like a dog. You know that. I’m on him, Jack. I’m close. I know it.”

Hale stared at her briefly then surveyed the scene around them. He looked back to her and shook his head, thinking of what to say. “I can’t tolerate ‘close’ Ariel. I’m sorry.”

“Jack,” she called to him as he turned and left her there, alone and on display, the stares of a hundred or so law enforcement brethren hot upon her as he went to the line of cameras and reporters, their mikes stabbing at him like daggers. She watched him for a moment, unable to move, her being feeling disconnected from the moment. This could not have happened. No way could it have happened. Jack Hale could not have taken her case away.
Would
not have taken it away.

But he had. And he’d taken her away from it.

“I was close, you idiot,” she muttered to herself as she watched Jack Hale from a distance, doing his PR thing for the newsies, and then she could watch no more. She turned away. Through the front lot of the Proper Peach Motel she walked, toward the knots of agents waiting for the order to stand down, to pack up, to head home, an order she could no longer give, and so she waded through them. Through the debacle her meticulously planned fugitive warrant service had become. Some asked her what was going on; some averted their eyes having shrewdly guessed exactly what was going on. The rest stepped silently aside as she hurried to her car.

She sat behind the wheel and stared out through the skim of new rain sheeting down the windshield, asking herself the thousand why’s. Why had Jack Hale done it? Booted her? For nothing? For one warrant service that would have gone down smooth as silk if that damned car hadn’t been parked on the...

She stopped herself. Because she was starting to hate Jack Hale, and he was not the one who truly deserved the brunt of her enmity right then. Some, but the lion’s share of it belonged to the man who was nowhere to be found. Who should have been in handcuffs in the seat behind her right then, but wasn’t. The man whose capture was no longer her concern, but for whom she had a question. A single, simple question that she asked the watery night.

“Where the hell are you, Mills DeVane?”

*   *   *

The Atlantic night roared, thunder high in the weeping black sky and wind whipping a froth upon the dark and violent sea. Waves were at forty feet. The twin engine Beech was at sixty.

It had fought the storm to make the Florida coast after a fast flight from the north of Georgia, its pilot’s departure premature and hasty, but nonetheless successful. The field attendant was on his payroll and would dispose of the stolen car left behind, and would remember nothing of any encounter with anyone remotely resembling the pilot, a generous man he simply called ‘Buddy’.

He’d taken it up fast and kept it low, skimming the trees all the way to the beach. Out to sea, then a turn to the south to parallel the coast forty miles out, all the way to where he was now, giving all he had to a sixty knot headwind, gusts to almost ninety, throttles firewalled against the maelstrom. A major and monumental bitch if ever there was one.

But then what could one expect flying in a hurricane?

He went feet dry barely above a stall and hopped his way inland just above the trees, beacons left and right of his course telling him that JAX was to his south and TLH was almost due east. But neither Jacksonville or Tallahassee were his destination, nor any of the smaller fields like Hilliard, which was coming up fast as he crossed the black and desolate strip of pavement below that was I-95. No, the point of termination for this flight was like that for most all he had ever flown—just a strip of terra firma maybe long enough to land on and not too short to take off from. And all navigation beacons aside, his gut and his fuel gauge told him that he was going to be putting in pretty damn soon, one way or another.

He flipped a switch on the overhead console and an electronic display fuzzed to life on the instrument panel before him. The darkened cockpit glowed green with its light.

“Where’s the tree?” the pilot asked the display, his eyes moving between it and the windshield as his plane trembled through the storm’s weakening fringe. “Come on tree. Come on.”

The earth below was a jumble of featureless blacks and grays occasionally lit by bolts of lightning, but not on the display. The small screen which the pilot was using to find his way showed the terrain not as it was, but as it might be through the eyes of some nocturnal bird of prey adapted to squeeze even the faintest bit of light from the night, though these eagle eyes had cost seventy thousand dollars. And right then he was wishing for every penny’s worth of what it could do to find his landmark. That damn hundred and twenty foot southern yellow—

“Shit!” he screamed, looking up from the night vision display just in time to heel the Beech hard over to the right, missing the enormous pine by scant feet, cutting power and lowering flaps and gear as he caught his breath and put his plane wings-level in a shallow descent, his heart thudding, adrenaline stoking it, but everything fine, just fine. The field should be straight ahead now, and his expensive night eyes would have no trouble guiding him there, but a quick glance out the windshield told him that would not be necessary. In the dark distance he could make out a line of flares right where his centerline should be.

Someone was expecting him.

That could be good news or bad, but right then it didn’t matter because his right engine began sputtering, its life blood almost spent. The pilot cut it all the way back and fought the squirrelly winds toward the brightly burning beacons, clearing the last of the trees just as his left engine started to hack. That one, too, he cut back, both props dead weight now, the Beech vibrating as he brought it down, down, down, the white-hot flares closer, coming up at him, faster, faster, faster, the earth and he about to meet just as he brought the stick back, nose up, flaring the aircraft and setting the wheels down almost gently in the muddy grass.

Momentum carried the plane almost to the far end of the flare line before it stopped, the pilot turning off his systems before the batteries were drained. He undid his safety harness and had the small side door open just as the beam of a flashlight glared in his face.

“Who the fuck is that?” Mills DeVane asked, shielding his eyes with his hand, hard rain pecking at him.

“Hey there, number five,” the voice behind the light said.

“Gareth?”

The light clicked off and Mills could see that it was, rain cascading off Gareth Dean Hoag’s dark green poncho and gathering in the deep scruff of his gray-black beard. And he could see that the light which had blinded him was fixed beneath the barrel of one substantial looking scattergun.

“I’m in no mood to get shot, Gareth,” Mills said, and the man who paid him handsomely lowered the weapon. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

“Oh, I thought you might be back early after seeing the news,” Gareth said, and the night dazzled suddenly with electric brilliance as lightning pulsed the sky, one of its white hot fingers striking to the north of the field, a tree that way exploding with a sound rivaling the crack of thunder that rolled in fast behind the brightness. “You are one lucky flyboy.”

Mills glanced skyward as he hopped from the Beech and closed its door against the wet night. “This? I can get it up in any weather.”

“I’m not talking ‘bout the rain,” Gareth told him, cradling the shotgun across his chest as two men approached from a barn-like building and began stamping out the flares in the soupy mud. “I’m talking about the party you missed in the city. It was all over the news.”