Top Ten (21 page)

“Son,” Arlo said, and reached across the table to tap his boy on the back of his hand. “What is it that’s got you?”

Mills shook his head, mostly to himself. It was not a reply, a refusal, to his father’s question.

“What, son?”

Finally Mills looked up to his father. “Last week, pop, do you remember hearing about a robbery in Augusta?”

“Yeah. An armored car at a bank, wasn’t it?”

Mills nodded. “Two guards were killed. Executed.”

“Yeah?”

The day he’d flown in and Gareth hadn’t been there. And Lionel hadn’t been there. Just Nita. He’d wondered where they’d been...

“The guy I’m working for did it,” Mills told him.

“Son... Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I asked him about it. He gave me some cash this week to outfit the new plane, and the bills were all new. All in sequence. It wasn’t drug money, pop. I’ve seen enough of that. He was gone the day the robbery went down. It was putting two and two together.”

“He admitted it?”

Mills nodded solemnly. “I know the stuff I fly in for him hurts people. Some of it gets through.”

“But they stop more because of you.”

“Maybe,” Mills allowed. “But this thing that he did, it’s blood money, pop. People were killed for it.”

“You have no control over what he does.”

“But if this had been stopped two weeks ago, three weeks ago, those guards would be alive.”

“There’s more to this, son,” Arlo reminded him. Though he knew not what the ‘more’ was, what the bigger picture beyond hurting the drug dealers was, he was aware that there was a bigger prize. His boy had never told him that in so many words, but this very moment was confirmation of his belief. If there were not a bigger fish out there, he would not be agonizing about going on. He would end it and see that the people he had worked for were punished. Put away. That’s what his boy would do.

“That doesn’t make it easier,” Mills said. “It doesn’t make what I do...”

He stopped himself there. If he hadn’t, he didn’t know what he would say. What he might do. Call it off. End it. Shut Gareth and his crew down. Maybe the good guys would be able to get to Costain and the Fat Russian. Maybe.

Or maybe the things they were selling to Gareth that he was going to sell to some group somewhere would get to their final destination anyway. What did the Bureau think they were? SAMs? Well, wouldn’t that be lovely? What if they were just cases and cases of grenades? Better? Or machine guns? Would that be okay? Could he stop now if those were the merchandise Gareth was buying with his blood money?

No. No it would not be all right. He could not stop.

Mills looked to his father. To the soulful, worried eyes that had been that way for two years now. He wanted the worry to be gone.

“Pop, it’s okay. I’m just—”

“You know what I think?” Arlo said. “I think you should tell the lady when you see her next.” He saw his son’s gaze dip. “You are going to see her again, aren’t you?”

“I told her how and where to find me if she needed to.”

Arlo smiled. “So you decided to trust her. I’m glad you did.”

“Why?”

“Because you need someone besides me on your side.”

Mills nodded and tore the corner off another card.

“You don’t agree?” Arlo asked his son.

“I do, it’s just...”

“It’s what?” Arlo asked.

“I haven’t had to trust anyone but you for a long time, and...”

“What?”

“I don’t want to trust too much.”

“Why would that be a problem, son?”

The third corner of the card came off. “She seems like she’d be an easy person to put your faith in.”

Melancholy. That was the word Arlo thought of when looking at his boy right then. It was a big word, but his son seemed more than sad right then. Yes, more.

And that was something he should not be feeling, Arlo knew. He considered it his job for the past couple years to keep his boy’s spirits up, and letting him go on like this was an exercise in futility. So enough of it. On to better thoughts. Better things. Happy plans.

“Son, how about we forget the damn papers?” Arlo said, and Mills looked up, confused. “Let’s make a regular thing, okay?”

“You know I can’t make plans, pop. I could be flying down to who knows where on a moment’s notice.”

“So? If you don’t make it, I’ll leave. I’ll hang around a while just like we always planned. Okay? We can meet right here. Next Friday. Every Friday until you’re done.” Mills doubted his father with a look, but did not quash his desire outright. “If you think we should change the place, the time, we decide the week before. Move things around if you want. Just so we have something planned. Something to look forward to.”

Mills considered it in silence.

“What do you say, son?”

After a moment Mills smiled at his father. The man who had known him better than he knew himself for a long time now. Smiled and said, “I guess I’ll see you next Friday.”

Twenty One

Dead Letter

Every piece of inmate mail arriving at the Metropolitan Detention Center at 100 29
^th
Street in Brooklyn, New York, was subject to opening and inspection by MDC staff. The only exception were communications between lawyers and their clients. Simple fluoroscoping sufficed then, and would not violate the sanctity of attorney-client privilege.

A single letter bearing the preprinted name and address of Aaron Rhodes, Attorney At Law, arrived by U.S. Mail Saturday morning the 30
^th
of October and was treated in this manner. It was thin and light, and examination by electronic means revealed that no objects of metal construction were contained therein. Not a staple, not a paper clip. If there had been, the attorney would have been contacted and requested to come to the MDC to personally remove said objects.

As it was, though, this was not necessary, and the letter bearing the destination Desmond Hart, Inmate, was forwarded forthwith to Cell 17 in the protective custody ward.

There had been publicity concerning this inmate. He arrived with some notoriety already attached. Certain segments of any prison population were known to prey upon those of a higher profile. MDC Brooklyn was no exception, and for this reason Desmond Hart was tucked quietly away in his cell when a guard came early Saturday morning and tapped twice on the solid door, then slid the letter from his attorney through the food slot.

Desmond Hart got up from his bunk where he’d been reading a comic book and retrieved the letter from the floor where it had fallen. Returning to his bunk and sitting with his back against the wall, he opened the letter wondering what his attorney would be sending him this soon. Reading it, tears began to stream slowly down his face, and anyone passing Cell 17 in the next few minutes might have heard soft weeping.

After that they would have heard nothing at all.

Twenty Two

Writings

He was not under suicide watch and required no special handling other than the isolation of a PC cell, so unless Desmond Hart made a fuss or asked for something he was to be left alone like any other inmate. It was not a surprise, then, when the guard bringing his lunch just after noon found him clothed from the waist down and slumped on the toilet, his tee shirt shoved in his mouth, and blood everywhere.

Ariel and Jaworski arrived just past three that afternoon and stood with Warden Nat Hayes outside cell seventeen looking through its open door.

“We’re on lockdown,” Hayes told them, then considered the scene inside the cell and shook his head. “Not that it’s likely he had help.”

Ariel stepped gingerly inside, minding the puddled blood on the concrete floor. Jaworski stayed out.

“What wounds did the doctor notice?” Jaworski asked the warden.

“Before he backed away? His finger, the way it is.” And the way it was, his right index finger, was missing the last inch of itself. “It’s a pretty ragged wound. The doc says it looks like he gnawed it off.”

“Did you find it?” Ariel asked from inside Cell 17.

“No. We didn’t tear the place apart, though.”

“Where’d all the blood come from?” Jaworski asked. “He didn’t bleed to death from the finger wound.”

Hayes bent and pointed low toward Desmond Hart’s neck where it was obscured by the tee shirt hanging from his mouth. “Carotid. If you look at the nails on his good hand they’re all packed with flesh underneath.”

“Like he clawed through his skin,” Jaworski said.

“Right.” Hayes now pointed to the wall above Desmond Hart’s bunk. “We might not have even called you if it weren’t for what he wrote on the wall.”

Ariel looked up from Desmond Hart’s lifeless form and read what had been written on the wall. Written in blood, likely by Desmond Hart using the tip of his severed finger as a stylus.

art is

“Art is,” Hayes read aloud. “I don’t know what it means, but considering this guy’s very recent connection to Michaelangelo, we thought you should take a look.”

Jaworski nodded and leaned in, not wanting to crowd the space where Ariel was having a careful look-see.

“It’s obvious the guy committed suicide, but it’s a damn strange way,” Hayes commented.

“Nobody heard a thing, right?” Jaworski checked.

“Not a thing,” Hayes confirmed. His lieutenant had briefed them on the way up from his office, but seeing, he figured, was a bit different that hearing. Or believing. “The way it looks to me is he used his shirt to gag off his own screams. I mean, this could not have been painless.”

Ariel squatted down next to where Desmond Hart sat on the toilet, his body slumped back but his head lolled forward, and examined what she could see very carefully. The hand whose finger had been mutilated lay palm up on his lap, blood pooled in the natural cup it formed. A fly had landed near its edge like some animal come to a watering hole. Ariel shooed it away with a wave. Then waved the scent away as well. Desmond Hart’s bowels had released their contents sometime earlier. There would be plenty more flies soon if the coroner didn’t get him out of there.

She continued looking, bending somewhat awkwardly over a large pool of blood at Desmond Hart’s feet to see where his other hand was. It was dangling next to him, the nails and fingers bloody, just as Warden Hayes had said. Her nose twitched severely. The odor this close to him was strong. A little too strong. She leaned back and started to rise out of her crouch but...

“Wait a minute.” She stopped halfway up, then bent forward at the waist, putting her face very close to the dead man. Very close so she could look down into the darkness between and below his slightly parted legs. “Flashlight. Anyone have a flashlight.”

A guard had a small one and passed it in. Ariel reached back and took it and twisted the lens to a narrow beam, shining that down into the dim recesses of the toilet bowl. “There’s something in there.”

“In where?” Jaworski asked. “The toilet?”

She looked back to him, nodding. “It looks like sheets of paper.”

Jaworski turned to Hayes. “Get the coroner’s people in here now. I want him off that toilet.”

*   *   *

Bryan Marks had had a long trip. A long, long trip. He’d turned a lot of miles that day and still had more to go, but as he got closer to his folks’ home in Watertown, as he rolled through the increasingly familiar landscape between Binghamton and Syracuse, he started to get hit with a major case of the nods.

Christ
, he thought, blinking fast and more often as he rolled up I 81. It was only three damn thirty. Still light out, though that was fading fast. Sure, he’d started off at four that morning and had only stopped for gas and a couple burgers—plus the one bathroom break that coincided with neither gas nor food (the forty four ounce soda he’d picked up at the mini-mart while filling up had been the culprit there). Sure, Roanoke was seven hundred miles and eleven plus hours behind him. And, yes, sure, he could have left yesterday and not tried to compress the annual trip to his parents’ monstrous Halloween party into a twelve hour dash from Virginia. But Shelbee had wanted to
be with
him
last night, and, God, if
being with
Shelbee wasn’t as close to heaven as a man could get without dying first. And, well, she had left about midnight, and though he had fallen asleep pretty quick thereafter that meant he’d gotten about three, three and a half hours of sleep. And...

...and man he was just about ready to close his eyes and drive off into a phone pole somewhere. What a gift that would be for moms and pops.

“Fuck it,” he said to the windshield of his suddenly very unwieldy Paseo and signaled toward the exit that would let him off near Whitney Point.

Whitney Point. Hmm. Didn’t have a high school buddy that moved there? Got married and moved there. Worked as an accountant, he thought. What was the guy’s name? Mark Wills. The teachers used to call them the comedy team of Marks and Mark. Jeez, how long had it been? Six. Seven years. Man. Too long. Too long for old buddies to be incommunicado.

“Stroke of luck,” Bryan Marks said to himself as he glided down the offramp and turned toward the bright yellow sign of a roadside motel. Stroke of luck for sure. It would be perfect. He’d call his folks, tell them he’d be there first thing in the morning, then he’d catch a little shut eye, maybe three, four hours, just to freshen up, then he’d take a shot at looking up his old buddy Mark Wills and see if maybe they couldn’t get together for a few Saturday night beers for old time’s sake.

Yeah, Bryan Marks thought as he turned left into the half empty lot of the Super 9 Motel. That sounded like a plan.

*   *   *

The coroner’s people had Desmond Hart off the toilet by four. They bagged his hands and placed him on a sheet before wrapping him up and zipping him inside a body bag. They wheeled him away on a gurney just as a Bureau forensics team from Headquarters, Manhattan, arrived.

They noted two sheets of paper and an envelope mostly floating in the blood/water mixture that had filled the bowl. As they removed those and placed them on plastic sheets laid out on the bunk, they saw that the missing tip of Desmond Hart’s right index finger had been hidden by the paper.