Top Ten (23 page)

Jaworski stared down at her for a moment from his partial perch on her desk. “I could really use you right now, Grace.”

She didn’t doubt that. But someone else needed her, too. Maybe more. “I’m sorry, sir.”

Jaworski gave her a quick nod. “You’ll explain this to me someday, Agent Grace, I hope.”

“I hope so, too,” Ariel told him.

Jaworski left her to her work, but when he passed by the bullpen just five minutes later she was long gone.

Twenty Four

Protectors

Mills DeVane had several places of residence, a necessity considering his status as a wanted man. An apartment in Atlanta, an old worn two bedroom house in Macon, and another apartment in Tallahassee. Nita Berry and Lionel Price dropped him a block from his Tallahassee place, pulling into a mini mart parking lot on Springhill Road to let him out. He slid the van’s side door shut and looked up. The sky billowed gray. The air smelled wet but the ground was dry. There was going to be rain. Hard rain. Mills could feel it.

“You watch your back,” Lionel told him through the open passenger window. He was speaking past Nita, who sat there dutifully with a pistol tucked between her thighs.

“He’s nowhere near here,” Mills assured them. He thought it a convincing example of bravado.

“Like he was nowhere near that guy in Jersey,” Lionel said. He’d seen the picture in that supermarket rag, and it made him glad he was not Mills DeVane. It also made him wish he didn’t know Mills DeVane.

“I’ll be fine,” Mills said, shrugging off their concern. Actually it was Gareth’s concern. He had had them drive him home from Crutch Field after taking the new plane on a short hop down to Cali for a pick up. Down Monday, back Tuesday. Another lousy hundred pounds, but the flight was clean and sweet. No complications. And no Customs this time, thank God. But once on the ground his employer had Lionel and Nita hustle him off. Babysit him, if you will, and take him home. Make sure that he got there and didn’t end up with his fingers cut off and glued around his head. Or worse.

Gareth had seemed particularly anxious, Mills had thought. He wondered if his employer’s big score was no longer just close, but imminent. That was the vibe Gareth Dean Hoag was giving off.

Nita reached out the passenger window and put her hand to his cheek. “Be careful, baby.”

He smiled appreciatively, though her touch revolted him. Their concern revolted him. “I will.”

“Don’t take any long trips,” Lionel told Mills. “Gareth said he’ll be in touch soon.”

“Sure.” Imminent, Mills was thinking again. Sooner than soon.

“Later days, Mills,” Lionel said, then added, “And get a haircut.” The big man behind the wheel shook his long red mane. “You’re starting to look like me.”

Mills stepped back from Lionel’s dull blue van and watched it pull away. Two blocks up Springhill Road it turned. Once it was out of sight Mills began to walk. Behind him he could hear planes taking off from Tallahassee Municipal, and farther off to the south the first pulses of thunder were beginning to growl. He ran a hand through the thickening mop atop his head and sped his pace. A block shy of where Lionel’s van had disappeared he turned.

He wished he hadn’t.

A police car was coming up Dandywood Drive. His street. Coming at him. He continued to walk. Didn’t dip his head. Avert his eyes. Stop and turn around. No, he walked on, just another citizen out for a stroll, maybe coming home from an early shift. Maybe coming home from the unemployment office. It could have been anything. Anything that would not draw attention.

And it worked. Like a hundred times before he had been mere feet from an officer of the law, two in this instance, and nothing had happened. The Tallahassee Police Department unit just cruised on by and turned north on Springhill Road.

But Mills did not see it turn. He did not look back. Halfway up the block he made a fast turn up a driveway and made his way to the back stairs of 4750 Dandywood Drive.

It was a mid seventies building, but looked like mid fifties. The blue paint was peeling, the grounds were unkempt, and the stairwell that led up to the apartments on the second floor seemed perpetually damp and populated by bugs that would skitter underfoot.

A fat black roach crunched beneath Mills’s boot as he mounted the stairs. He had his key out and let himself into unit D.

The door had barely closed when he heard the voice.

“So this is how international drug smugglers live.”

The first split second he’d been startled. Very quickly, though, recognition calmed him, and he turned to see Ariel Grace leaning against the half wall that separated living room from kitchen.

“I imagined mansions and yachts,” Ariel told him, smiling.

Mills tossed his keys atop the small TV just inside the door. “You buy mansions and yachts and all kinds of people get interested in you.”

She nodded and flipped the wall switch to bring some light to the situation. Heavy drapes held the day outside at bay.

“You had no trouble finding the place, I imagine,” Mills said. Twelve feet of ratty carpet separated them. He closed a bit of the distance and sat in the recliner that had come with the place. He ran his hand through his hair and shook his head at her. “All I said was don’t dress like a cop.”

Ariel looked down at herself. Loose and shredded dungarees. Baggy shirt. Down vest. Old and floppy jungle hat from the Nam era. “What’s wrong?”

He chuckled softly. “You look homeless.”

“I’ve been living out of a suitcase for almost a month. I feel homeless.”

She came and sat on the couch facing him. It creaked and she was certain she heard fabric tear as her body settled into it. “I came through the park like you said.”

“How long did you wait?”

“Yesterday. I left last night. Came back this morning.”

He looked around. “You might have cleaned up a little.”

She smiled. “Not in the job description.”

“You’re lucky, you know. I almost went to Atlanta.”

“I would have gone there then.”

“We could have played tag for weeks.”

“You may not have weeks,” she told him direly.

“He’s not going up the list anymore. I know. Hoag has his two right hands chauffeuring me now. Playing bodyguard.” He picked at the arm of the recliner. “You know how that feels to have scum’s scum as my protectors?”

“Now you have me, too.”

He looked up at her. He shook his head.

“Special Agent Hale said yes.”

“I don’t care what Jack said. Having Hoag’s people drop me home is one thing. You can’t stay close enough to matter a damn without putting
me
at risk.”

It hadn’t been intended as a verbal slap, but to Ariel it sure felt like one. “You have to be protected.”

“This thing is almost over.” He stood and walked past her, rubbing at his head again, pulling at the strands gone wild. He should have gotten it cut weeks ago. It was friggin driving him crazy now.

“If Michaelangelo shows up and you don’t have protection, it
will
be over,” Ariel said. She was following him now into the kitchen.

“I’m not God damn defenseless, you know,” he told her, but from the look in her eyes, eyes that had seen more of what the maniac was capable of than he had, she thought that not enough of a guarantee. “I’ve had—” He stopped suddenly and yanked at his hair. “Dammit! Dammit!”

“What?”

“I hate having hair like this!”

At first she thought he might be joking, but very soon she knew that he was not.

He stormed past her again and out of the kitchen, to the living room again where he pointed at the dingy walls, the water-stained ceiling, the ratty carpet. “I hate living like this! I hate wearing these clothes! I hate getting chased by fucking Customs planes, by people that are on
my
side! I hate having to put in at Gurley, or Sugarpine, or Tangelo Flats, or any other piss-poor field that’s just as likely to eat my ride as let me roll out safely! I hate eating what I eat, with people I have to—” He saw the way she was looking at him and stopped, scratching at his head. “I’m fucking tired, okay. I’m just fucking tired of my hair. That’s all. It’s just bugging the shit out of me.”

“I understand,” she told him, staying back, letting the steam that he’d vented dissipate for a minute.

“I just...”

She nodded. “Do you have a scissors?”

He looked to her. “You saying you can cut hair?”

“I’m saying I’ll cut yours.”

His fingers combed through the mop once more. “Have you cut hair before?”

“It’s been a while,” she told him. “But I don’t think I can make it look any worse than it does.”

A thin smile flashed from him, then it was gone. “Scissors are in the bathroom.”

She glanced down the hall. “Sit down in the kitchen. At the table.”

*   *   *

He listened to the blades slice together. Felt the excess of his hair fall away, some onto the sheet she’d draped around him, though most tumbled to the floor and was gathering in brown mounds.

“It’s thick,” she said.

“It’s been a while.”

She snipped. Moving up the back of his head, up from the nape of his neck, her fingers sliding beneath his hair and lifting it for each cut. When she’d started his neck was like stone, his shoulders flat and square. He’d calmed, she thought. There was a slouch to him. A relaxation.

“You’ve done this before,” Mills observed.

“For my dad when I was in high school.”

“How did he look?”

She laughed and gave his head a gentle shove. When it bounced back to her she started running her hands over his scalp to check for long spots. His head seemed to loll under her touch.

It settled back and came to rest against her breasts.

Her hands skimmed above his scalp now, palms hovering so that the ends of the hair she’d just shorn brushed her skin. His head leaned back more. She could see his face, his eyes. They were closed. He might have been asleep, lost in a dream, and she might have thought that if not for the tear rolling slowly down his cheek.

“Are you thinking about her?”

His eyes opened, but he did not look at Ariel. “He told you?”

“That she died.”

Mills’s head tipped a bit forward, his gaze cast at the threadbare carpet just beyond the kitchen’s bubbling linoleum.

“How did she die?” Ariel asked, clipping still, but slowly, wielding the shears with care, finger-combing his hair tenderly.

“Stupidly,” Mills answered, a breathy something spurting from him. Not chuckle. Not cry. Maybe a remnant of some disbelieving gasp loosed long ago. “In an airplane of all places.”

A few strands gone, and a few strands more, Ariel letting things be for a moment before going on. “On an airplane?”

He might have nodded had the blades of the shears not been upon him. Had the comfort of her touch not been upon him. “Turbulence.”

She stopped. “What do you mean?”

“We’re flying back from a vacation,” he explained, a wisp of smile flashing, one she could not see. “From Hawaii. The big island. Have you ever been?”

She shook her head and tentatively began to clip again, catching what stragglers she had missed. “No.”

His smile widened, as if a warm breeze was washing over him right then and there, spent waves lapping at his feet and fingers meshed with his. “It’s a beautiful place. We swam, we walked. We drove this jeep we rented through canyons that were so green and alive that...”

Ariel could not see it, but the mask of joy memory had dredged from within him drizzled away in the silence that trailed off his incomplete recollection.

“What happened?” Ariel asked. Prodded, really, wondering if this might be something he needed. To recount it. To release it. “You said something about turbulence.”

A few breaths hissed quietly in and out before he replied. “Clear air turbulence. Unstable air that’s just there. A pilot sees nothing, knows nothing, until it hits. Until it tosses his plane around like a toy. His plane and everything in it like dice in a cup.”

“You were thrown around,” Ariel said, and felt the slight shake the back of his head gave to her supposition.

“Not me,” he said softly, maybe shamefully. “I’m a pilot. I know better than to have my seat belt off when I’m a passenger.”

“She wasn’t wearing hers?”

“She was coming back from asking the stew for a soda,” he said. Ariel heard him sniff deeply. “A soda for me.”

Damn...

“I was thirsty, and she had the aisle seat. She’s walking back with my soda when the plane hits bad air. It drops, and she’s launched into the overheads.” He quieted briefly. “It was instant. That’s what the doctors told me. They say that like a broken neck is just the finest damn way to check out, but how do they know? How can they know?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and set the scissors on the counter to her right. With both hands now she caressed the sides of his head, his ears, his cheeks, his neck.

“I wish all the sorries added up could bring her back,” he said solemnly. “But...”

Her fingertips drew soft, feathery lines upon his neck. “What made you think of her now.”

He could have said that it just happens. That images of his dead wife, recollections of her look, her way, her scent, came to him from out of nowhere at the strangest points in time. Any of those reasonings would have, could have explained the surfacing of her bittersweet memory, but none would have been true to this moment. To this reason.

“You’re the only woman to touch me since...her.”

“I’m cutting your hair,” she said, smiling sweetly. Her hands were on his shoulders. She didn’t think they should be there, but let them stay. Let them move.

“Is that what you’re doing?” He closed his eyes again. One of his hands came up and touched hers where it was upon his shoulder.

She breathed slow and deep through her nose, places in her trembling. This shouldn’t be happening. It shouldn’t. She thought that very strongly as his hand slid up her forearm, under the sleeve of her shirt, his fingers gliding so softly upon her skin.

“Say stop,” Mills told her, his eyes shut tight, closing out all but the feel of her touch upon him, his touch upon her.