Top Ten (3 page)

Mills bent to look under his wings. “Not a big deal, Gareth.”

“A lot of people waiting for you at that party,” Gareth said. Mills stood and zipped his parka against the rain slanting at him. “Imagine their surprise when the guest of honor didn’t show up.”

“Imagine,” Mills agreed, grinning calmly, casually, cautiously.

“Imagine my relief, as well.”

Mills nodded, and Gareth raised the shotgun fast and put its barrel against his employee’s face, forcing him back against the slick white fuselage of the Beech.

“Jesus, Gareth, take it easy,” Mills implored him, twisting his face away from the weapon as best he could, eyeing the sudden and unexpected threat sideways.

“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain,” Gareth warned him.

“Sorry. Sorry.”

“You were in Atlanta.”

“Yes.”

“You were not in Atlanta on my business.”

“No.”

“Then why were you in Atlanta?”

“You know I have other customers.”

“None who pay you like I do.”

“You contracted me two years ago saying you had a year’s worth of deliveries. Two years. You think I can’t do the math, Gareth? You’re not going to be paying me forever.”

“Thinking about the future, are you?”

Mills nodded, the muzzle of the shotgun scraping his cheek.

“Who were you flying for tonight?”

Mills swallowed and said nothing. The muzzle pulled back from his face and the light blazed at him once again. He squinted at the glare.

“Who were you flying for?” Gareth repeated.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Moreno? Barker Meeks? Who were you flying for?”

How the hell did he know about them? “I’m not going to tell you.”

Silence from behind the light, a long silence, then the sound of the safety being thrown. The light went black and the weapon came down.

“Good answer,” Gareth said. Mills reached up and touched his cheek. A small round circle indented the flesh. “There were a hundred officers of the law waiting for you tonight, every one of them with a question like that for you, I’d imagine.”

“You think I’d talk?” Mills challenged his employer.

“I think I can’t afford to take that chance,” Gareth said, and the gun he cradled drew a long gaze from Mills.

“You gonna kill me, Gareth?”

“I’m going to
counsel
you,” Gareth corrected. “Against the error of your ways.”

“I’m not stopping my sidelines, Gareth. Some of those people
would
kill me if I tried.”

“Drug dealers are a dangerous lot,” Gareth said with a snicker, and again Mills’s gaze was drawn to the shotgun.

“Anyone can be, I guess.”

To that Gareth nodded. “I suppose.”

“You know,” Mills began, “you have other pilots.”

Thunder shook the night, and Gareth glanced toward its source. “None who can fly in stuff like this. Or would.”

Mills looked down the makeshift runway as the last of the flares was stamped out, just the blackening trail of his touchdown and rollout leading back toward the trees. In daylight it could be seen as a field, one where sugar beets had grown some time ago, but long gone fallow now. Gareth Dean Hoag owned it, and the hundred twelve acres around it. Rotten land, the locals said it was. But Gareth had seen some value in it. It and the barn big enough to park a plane in.

“Did they spell my name right this time?” Mills asked. “Big D, big V?”

Gareth nodded. “But that picture they got still doesn’t do you justice.”

“Good. Make it harder for the
federales
.”

“You were lucky tonight, number five. But you need to be careful. Especially now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I got another deposit coming up,” Gareth explained. “Special things after that. I don’t want to lose you.”

“Skunky or Lane could take it,” Mills suggested, but Gareth shook his head. The two who’d put out the flares joined them now, Nita Berry and Lionel Price, Gareth’s ‘other’ halves.

“You can get in and out of anywhere,” Gareth told him, and Mills knew he should be pleased. But what he was was tired. “Better than anyone.”

“I always told you so.”

The night exploded and lit them with white hot radiance. Gareth cast a joyous face to the raging sky. “Soon, number five. Big things are coming soon.”

“He shits you not,” Lionel said. Nita tucked her hand in Gareth’s front pocket and agreed with a nod.

Mills wiped his eyes, the night spitting hard at him now, at them all now, a squall line moving through, a harsher piece of the storm upon them.

“Big things,” Gareth repeated, laughing now as the heavens dumped on them.

*   *   *

Troopers Jimmy Nance and Kyle Callahan of the New York State Police were cruising down Roseland Road toward the coffee shop at the Pembry Lanes, the former extolling to his rookie partner of three weeks the utter magnificence of the Lanes’ lemon meringue pie and how fantastic it was with a good cup of coffee, when the sweep of their unit’s headlights lit up the front of the town post office.

“Ho-ly Moses,” Trooper Kyle Callahan exclaimed calmly from behind the wheel, slowing the dark blue Chevy Caprice to a stop at the curb as his partner put a spotlight on the building. “Ain’t teenagers got nothing better to do on a Friday night?”

“You call it in,” Nance instructed as he swung the passenger side door open. “I’ll have a look-see at what the fine young citizens of Pembry have cooked up this time.”

And cooked up was a darn good way to put it, Nance thought as he stepped from the warmth of his cruiser and took his flashlight from its place on his Sam Browne. The last time the kids from Hollister High had gotten some beer and stupidity in them at the start of a weekend, two dumpsters and an empty shed had gone up in smoke. And though there was nary a hint of smoke or flame coming from inside the Pembry Post Office, there was going to be damage inside. Oh, yes. That Jimmy Nance could tell quite plainly as he got to the top step and shined his flashlight on the twin glass doors that let into the building.

“Hooligans,” he commented, shaking his head and playing the light over the display that had been plastered upon the inside of the glass. “Where the hell are your parents when you’re pulling this crap?”

“Someone’s gonna call the postmaster,” Callahan said as he reached his partner’s side. He took his own flashlight in hand and added its beam to the mix. “Creative little buggers.”

“It don’t take much creativity to photocopy your teet, Callahan,” Nance said, and illuminated one of the three dozen or so pieces of paper taped to the inside of the glass doors, each a small section of a human–a very
naked
human–body that had been arranged into a garish mosaic of the female form. “Sick little punks.”

“Can you imagine the positions she must’ve had to get into to get all her parts on the glass?” Callahan asked, taking a moment to survey the creation, stepping back to take it in whole as one might a museum piece, noting the careful mating of all the sections of the body into a whole and how the assembled black and white image seemed to him to be of a woman cut out of mid-air, arms and legs outstretched as if falling, the picture oddly intriguing, and disturbing, and vexing for one very obvious reason. “So how come there’s no head, Jimmy?”

Nance shook his head at his trainee’s question. “These kids are stupid, Kyle–not dumb. They’re not going to put a damn photocopy of one of their faces up there.”

“True,” Callahan agreed, catching the logic he should never have missed. But then it was the obvious that tripped you up sometimes. It was that way with criminals, especially. Folks would do something they shouldn’t in a place they shouldn’t be, they’d wipe down the door knobs and light switches to get rid of their fingerprints, but they’d forget that they leaned against a doorjamb, or a banister, or some other thing like—
oh, yes, like that!
“Jimmy, we might just have a line on these little shits.”

“How?”

Callahan shined his light at the weird mosaic’s right hand, which was palm and finger tips down and clear as the October sky above them. “We got ourselves some prints.”

“I’ll be...” Trooper Jimmy Nance never finished the exclamation. Not when his own light shined upon the figure’s right hand, from a sharper angle than his partner’s, and lit up what was covered by the overlapping piece of the paper above it. His free hand went to his pistol and he said, “Oh, God dammit Kyle! Dammit! Look!”

Callahan sidestepped toward his partner and peered under the obscuring flap of paper as best he could, which was plenty good enough to see that when the copy of the hand had been made, the appendage had not been connected to any arm. The ragged cut just at the wrist made that quite indisputable.

This was no case of vandalism. At least none like they’d ever seen.

“Mother, mother, mother, what the hell is this?” Callahan asked himself as he stared wide-eyed at the macabre image.

“Call it in, Kyle,” Jimmy Nance instructed, his hand wrapping tight around the grip of his holstered pistol now. Breath puffed from him like the white exhaust of an ancient locomotive at speed, fast and furious.

“What the hell do we call in?” Callahan asked.

“I don’t know,” Nance answered, and put his light close to the captured image of the severed hand. Close enough that it touched the glass and moved the door.

He drew his weapon now and took a step back. “Kyle, it’s open.”

Callahan stepped back as well, drawing his own weapon and reaching up to the mike attached near his collar. “Trooper Ten, we have an open door, Pembry Post Office. Can you roll us a backup?”

The acknowledgment came from dispatch and Nance reached for the door.

“Shouldn’t we wait, Jimmy,” Callahan reminded his partner.

“I know folks that work here, Kyle. Let’s just see what we got.”

“Yeah, but backup’ll be here in five minutes.”

“If there’s anything that looks bad, we’ll pull back,” Nance said, and crouched low next to the right door. “Okay.”

Callahan assumed an entry position as well next to the left door. “Okay.”

“We go fast and cover the sides,” Nance said, and got a nod from his partner. “On me. Ready?” Another nod. And a breath. And another. And another. And... “Go.”

They pushed each swinging door inward in sync, Nance going right and Callahan left, the aim of their weapons tracking the sweep of their flashlights over the dark inside of the Pembry Post Office’s lobby.

“I got nothing, Kyle,” Nance told his partner in a hushed tone, the beam of his flashlight scanning the ranks of dull metal P.O. boxes filling the east wall.

“Jimmy?”

“Yeah?” Nance answered, crouched low still, not advancing yet as he lit up a dark corner behind a waste can.

“Jimmy?”

“What?”

“Jimmy?”

Finally Nance just looked over his shoulder, toward his partner, but saw instead what Kyle Callahan’s unmoving flashlight had lit up on the west wall. “No, Jesus. No.”

It was clear and stark under the harsh beam, the lettering was. Big and bold and red upon the white wall next to the courtesy table and bulletin board. Four words splashed there. One distressing message borne of the grotesque mosaic they had stumbled upon.

she went to pieces

“This is not good,” Callahan said, so quietly that his partner could barely hear him. “Not good, partner.”

“No, not good at all,” Nance concurred, and duck-walked the few steps toward his partner. Almost there his boot slipped on something slick. He shined his light on the old linoleum floor and saw thick red shoe prints leading both directions from their place at the front entrance to the side of the service counter. “We got a lot of blood, Kyle.”

Callahan looked, and lit up a second trail of bloody prints going back and forth from the writing on the wall to the service counter. “Jimmy, let’s back off now and wait for backup.”

Nance did not reply immediately, though his intention was now to agree with his partner and get some more manpower on scene before pressing their entry any further. But in the near silence before he could reply, he heard something. A soft and rhythmic sound. Maybe a clicking. Definitely mechanical.

“You hear that?” Nance asked.

“Jimmy, let’s back off.”

“Listen.”

Callahan did, and he could hear it, too, but right then he would have still wanted to wait for backup if what he’d heard was the Lord Himself saying ‘come on down, Kyle’. “Jimmy...”

Nance rose slowly out of his crouch and aimed his light and his weapon north at the far end of the lobby, covering the service counter and the hidden spaces beyond it. Just part of a doorway was visible, leading to a hallway it seemed from this vantage, and down that hallway there appeared to be...

“Kyle, you see that?”

Callahan stood and looked in the direction of his partner’s light, just as Nance clicked the beam briefly off. In the din that followed he could plainly see what had caught his partner’s eye. “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” Nance told him, studying the flashing light coming from the opening on the right side of the hallway, its rhythm long with but a brief burst of darkness between sustained pulses. Pulses that seemed synced to that sound. “But let’s find out.”

Callahan would have protested again, but his partner was already moving, his light back on and scouring the area before him. There was nothing to do but follow.

They made it to the service counter and carefully checked behind, finding only more footprints there, dark red under the glow of their flashlights. Nance moved first there, trying to straddle the bloody trail as he stepped behind the counter and peered down the hall, seeing the pulsing light more clearly now, and hearing the clicking with near full clarity, both things mating in a deduction that was confirmed by what he saw fluttering from the doorway on the right. Paper.

“Copy machine’s running,” he told Callahan in a hushed tone.

“Copy machine?”

Nance nodded and shined his light on the floor outside the doorway. Hundreds of sheets of paper were piled there, another one settling atop the uneven mound every few seconds, enough so that the bloody trail was obscured from view. Some pure white, and others showing something on their surface, depending on whether they were landing face up or face down, it was clear.