Top Ten (8 page)

Ariel stood from the bed and stepped close to the TV as the next view cycled up. There he was, behind the counter, something in his hand. Flat and thin and light colored. The bulletin. He’d picked it up.

Why would he do that?

Her brow bunched down as she wondered. Wondered and watched as the sorting room came up, and there he was, walking through with the bulletin in hand, though smaller now, and she saw him fold it down to a still smaller square and then in the back lot she could not see it anymore but could see very plainly him pushing something down into the front pocket of his dark pants.

To snow again the tape went, and there it stayed, the TV hissing white noise as Ariel turned very slowly away from it, the remote still in her hand but thoughts of using it a million miles away.

Other thoughts were much, much closer. They ticked off in her head like parts of an equation tumbling toward a sum.

He was angry.

He was enraged.

He has an ego.

He berated Doris May with the bulletin.

He took the bulletin.

He was yelling at Doris May.

Was he angry at Doris May?

Or...

Her wonderings ceased suddenly there.

“You were there earlier,” Ariel said. That she knew. It was on another tape the Bureau lab had sent. His visit that morning had been captured on tape, though no clearer image of him had been. He’d bought one stamp, from Doris May, had addressed a letter at the table and had mailed it. Except...

...except that wasn’t all he had done.

Another image had made a memory.

Ariel retrieved the earlier tape from the top of the low bureau near the TV and ejected the tape of Doris May’s slaughter, feeding the earlier one in and setting it to play.

The sequence was five minutes long, stuttering between locations as the latter one did. She watched, this one for the third time maybe. It had meant little she thought. Until now.

There. There he came. In the front door and to the—

Counter. This switch picked him up as he arrived at the service window. The window staffed by Doris. Doris smiled. Said something. Sorting room—two workers working, flinging letters into stacked bins. Back lot–cars parked, a dog sniffing the gravelly ground. The lobby, empty. The counter again, and Doris sliding a single stamp across the counter as she put some coins in the cash drawer. Michaelangelo turning away and...

Ariel breathed hard and deep through the interruption as the sorting room and back lot were visited yet again. And then...

...there he was, at the counter, taking an envelope from inside his jacket. Ariel remembered this, but it hadn’t struck her until now—what was about to happen. The scenes cycled again. Back in the lobby Michaelangelo had a pen coming off the envelope. He’d written something on it. Addressing it, likely, since an address was all there was when his letters arrived at the Metropolitan Museum. Then...

“Come on,” Ariel implored the cycle of images as counter, and sorting room, and back lot were spied once more. “Come on.”

And again to the lobby, his hand coming back from the out of town mail slot, hovering for a moment as he became still...

There. There is where it happens.

Through the other spaces and back to the lobby. She looked quickly at her watch, noting the time. Then to Michaelangelo, standing there, his right hand hanging, floating, and then coming down slowly. More interruptions, then on him again, and his hand was at his side, and it was clenched. It was hard to tell from the quality of the image, but Ariel thought the newly made fist might be trembling.

Anger. He was angry there. Hours before he was angry with Doris May–or angry about
something
in the presence of Doris May. And what was he angry about these many hours earlier?

Ariel couldn’t jump into his mind, but she could her own, and oddly at this moment she thought there might be some symmetry between his reaction to the small square of paper he was staring at, and her own to one that she had just a few days before.

She looked at her watch. One minute. The cycle repeated itself seven more times. He was still standing there, still staring at the bulletin, his fist now thumping gently against his leg. And another cycle, and ten more, and when he finally backed away from the table and the most wanted bulletin posted to the wall before it Ariel checked her watch and noted that he had been fixed in position for just under three minutes.

“You weren’t angry at Doris,” Ariel said as she froze the image one last time, Michaelangelo’s dark and murky profile centered on the screen. “You weren’t angry at her at all.”

*   *   *

Glass? Glass? Was that glass?

The questions interrupted a dream, one of her on a beach as a much younger woman with seven men servicing her every nasty need. Shut the imaginary visit to Deandra Waley’s own personal vision of nirvana down cold.

Glass? Was that glass?

The questions came from the rational part of herself. From that little space inside one’s brain where a light is always left on...just in case. Left on so that things out of the ordinary might register. Might raise alarm. Might rouse.

Things like the sound of breaking glass.

“Glass,” she whispered sleepily, and hefted herself up to her elbows. She blinked at the darkness. The darkness in her bedroom. The darkness beyond its open door. Nothing. Not a thing to see.

So she listened. Had she heard glass? Breaking glass? Or...

...or had it just been part of the dream. Waves crashing on that beach. Or her rattled screams of ecstasy, baby, yesssss.

Nothing
, she thought, listening and looking. Not a damn thing. That pissed her off to no end.

“Come back to me babies,” she said softly, and fell into her pillows. “Come back and do me some more.”

She fidgeted around for a moment, wanting sleep to take her back down to that dream, but the sandman was a little too slow in his doings right then, so she thought she might help him along a little. Give him a hint of where he left off.

“Oh, yesss, baby, yesss,” she whispered to herself and took a long pillow from beneath her head and worked it under the covers, spreading her legs and pulling her nightgown up as she slipped it between. Her knees came together, clamping the pillow tight. Her hands fisted bunches of its downy mass and moved it, maneuvered it right, yesss, right, oh just so right, yesss bab—

The feel of heavy leather over her mouth snapped her dreamy eyes open. Darkness was above her. And darkness had a knife.

“I’m sorry,” the pumpkin salesman said, putting his weight to his hand as she screamed against it. With a flick of his blade he drew a line across her forehead. She screamed more as the line oozed red. “I require your assistance for awhile.”

Her ragged cry pounded uselessly against his leathered palm. She kept it up until he pointed the wet tip of his blade at her left eye.

“The artisans in primitive cultures used ocular fluid to stain their implements,” he told her. “Would you like me to demonstrate?”

She had no idea what ocuwhat fluid was, but that thing was pointing at her
eye
. And he’d cut her already. She shut herself up in one quick hurry.

“Good.” He sat on the bed next to her and leaned close, his chest against hers. He felt her nipples poke him through the sheets. “This won’t take long, I hope. I just need to speak to you for a while.”

He eased his hand from her mouth just a bit.

“About...about...about what?” Deandra Waley asked the crazy pumpkin salesman with the knife.

“Who,” he corrected her, coming closer still, his face a deep shadow over hers now.

“Who?”

He nodded and moved the knife to the side of her head, placing its tip in her left ear. He began to twist it slowly back and forth. “We’re going to talk about Francis.”

Tears filled her eyes. She shook her head. He moved fast and cut her left earlobe off and clamped off her scream.

For the next two hours she shook her head not once.

*   *   *

The Customs plane had him.

A P3-AEW Airborne Early Warning aircraft out of Florida had picked up the unidentified craft six hundred miles off the coast just after midnight and dispatched a Cessna Citation to intercept and shadow him. The suspect plane had not been squawking, meaning either its transponder had failed or the pilot had turned it conveniently off. The Customs radar crew aboard the P3 had not been born the previous day, and, couple with the fact that the pilot had his bird very, very low over the water, well, it was a fair guess he wasn’t a happy flier just off course and trying to make his way back home.

“Tiger Alpha Nine, you have him?” the pilot of the P3 asked the approaching Citation.

“Got ‘em, Tiger Lima Four. He’s ours now.”

“Roger,” the P3 pilot acknowledged, and turned his surveillance plane back toward Florida. It had been a long afternoon and night, and it was time for them to put ‘er away for the night. They’d keep a radar eye on things until range made that impractical, but the fix was in for this game already. No way a twin turboprop Beech was going to get away from the Citation and the two turbo
jets
that drove it. Game, set, match for the Air Interdiction Program yet again. “Hang ‘em high, Tiger Alpha Nine.”

“With a big assist from Tiger Lima Four,” the Citation’s pilot said, then put his attention on the Beech that was wave hopping five hundred feet and a half mile ahead of him. “Hello there, you kwazy wabbit.”

His right seater chuckled and logged the time that they’d taken over the surveillance. It was still that–just a cautious look-see from a distance, because nothing illegal had yet been overtly done. Of course, once this yahoo landed and the Blackhawk helis swooped in to put a couple SWAT teams on his ass, well, maybe a search of that Beech might turn up some evidence of wrongdoing. Maybe a few hundred kilos of evidence. Until then, it was Tiger Alpha Nine’s job to stay back, watch where this guy was going, and call in the Blackhawks and their arrest teams when landfall was imminent.

“Fuck!” Tiger Alpha Nine’s pilot swore, and his right seater looked up.

“What?”

“He made us,” the pilot said, and adjusted his course to match the turn the Beech had just made.

“How the fuck did he make us?”

“I don’t know, but he just firewalled it and is scraping those waves.” The pilot shook his head. “What’s the weather between here and the coast?”

“Clear,” the right seater told him. “He’s got nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

“He’s sure as hell trying,” the pilot said, knowing his co-pilot was right on the money. Over land and in clouds, maybe this guy could lose them. Eyeballing had its limits, and even radar didn’t like low-flying objects mixed in with ground clutter, but on the open ocean under clear skies, well, all this guy was asking for was—

“Whoa! Whoa!” the right seater yelled, looking down and right as they came upon the Beech fast. Or what was left of the Beech. “He bought it into a wave. Son of a bitch.”

The pilot shook his head. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen this, and it wouldn’t be the last. He slowed the Citation and put it into a slow orbit around the watery crash site. The foamy point of impact glowed atop the black and barren sea.

“Did he get out?” the pilot asked, concentrating on his own flying. He wasn’t going to end up swimming, or sinking, like the stupid bastard two hundred feet below.

“Don’t see a thing,” the right seater said. “Not a thing.”

The pilot nodded to himself and keyed the radio. “Tiger Lima Four, you on?”

“Do we have a swimmer?” the P3 pilot asked. “We lost radar contact with your boy.”

“Negative on the swimmer,” the Citation’s pilot told him. “Maybe a floater until the sharks get him. Is there any Coast Guard presence close by?”

“Neg-a-tive,” the P3 pilot informed him. “Three hundred miles north is about the closest.”

“Roger that.” The Citation pilot looked past his right seater now for a gander at the crash site, what there was of it. “He sank like a stone.”

“Like a big ol’ stone,” the right seater agreed. “So what’s the plan?”

Plan? What plan could there be. A Coast Guard cutter would take ten hours to get there. By then the guy would be chum crumbs. Plankton would be bigger than him in ten hours.

Unless, of course, he didn’t get out of the Beech, which in that case meant he’d be a meal for a whole different class of sea creatures. The kind that lived in dark world, say, twelve thousand feet down.

Plan? Did he have a plan? He sure did.

“Wish his sorry ass good riddance and let’s see if we can’t beat Tiger Lima Four back to Jacksonville,” the Citation’s said. His right seater gave the water below a wave and the bird as the plane leveled out and headed for home.

Four

Dead Men Walking

Thirty hours after it had left one field in Florida, the twin engine Beech was back at another, touching down this time on a strip of wild land in Suwannee County with the sun low behind it in the eastern sky. The rugged earth played havoc with the tires, chewing the right side main almost to a pulp, and the loose stone thrown up during landing left dozens of pits and nicks in the undercarriage from the wings back to the tail. When it finally came to a stop near where Gareth Dean Hoag and two of his associates stood, chances were it was going to have a hard time taking off again.

Then again, it wasn’t going anywhere in any case.

The pilot’s door tipped up and Mills DeVane gave the trio a wave. None of them waved back.

Something was wrong.

“Gareth,” Mills said, stepping onto the wing. The morning breeze tossed his hair in his eyes. He’d have to remember to get it cut soon.

“Number five,” Gareth said, and Mills came down from the wing.

“What’s wrong?” Mills asked his employer.

“Skunky never showed up,” Nita Berry told him.

Worry settled on Mills’s face. His look danced between Gareth and Nita and Lionel Price. Spent a fair amount on Lionel, actually, because he didn’t like the guy one bit. Plus, he was a crazy and dangerous one. Part warrior, part bible thumper. In his vision of the old testament, Jesus would have carried a MAC-10 in case some Jews needed to be greased. One dangerous mother, oh yes, Mills knew. But then, how un-dangerous were any of them?