Top Ten (33 page)

“My name is—”

“Your name,” Ariel said, cutting the madman off, “is Mickey Dickless. Mickey
Dickless
.”

He said nothing. Made no move for a moment. There was just the rush of breath in and out of his nose and the heave of his narrow, taut chest beneath the dark clothes he wore.

“I’ve got the name right, don’t I?” Ariel asked, and she saw very clearly his index finger begin to twitch upon the trigger. He was reacting to
her
. “Mickey Dickless.”

“I’m going to enjoy killing you.”

“Don’t pull that fucking trigger!” Mills shouted, and the madman snapped a look his way.

“Is the bruise swelling on your face not convincing enough? Shall I give you another?”

With one good eye and one slowly closing eye Mills matched the madman’s stare. “I don’t care what you do, but unless you want to experience emergency depressurization and kill everybody onboard—you, me, her—then you’d better save the fucking gunplay for when we get on the ground!”

“The name fits...Dickless,” Ariel said, smirking obviously.

His finger shook, aching to bear down upon the trigger. But for the pilot’s admonition it might have.

It would not have to, though. A gun was an easy, detached way of killing, but by no means the only way. Others were available to him. Other ways. Intimate ways. Blade. Cord. Hand.

Hand.

The most intimate of ways. He could see it, imagine it, choking the offending breath off. Stopping the flow of words of lies of...

...truths...

“Dickless,” Ariel said again, and Michaelangelo exploded.

“SHUT UP!” he screamed, coming out of the seat and into the cabin, hands clamped suddenly over his ears as he crouched low in the restrictive space. “STOP CALLING ME THAT!”

“Dickless!” Ariel herself cried back, though not at a level which could approach the almost pained wail the madman had loosed. And pained it likely was. Pained she knew it was. From old, painful memories of terrible, terrible events. Things that had shaped a boy and twisted a man.

Yes there was pain in him, but hurt could not erase evil, nor the evil he had done. Or the evil he was planning to do to a town that had mostly forgotten him, moved on.

“Dickless!” she shouted again, and despite the realities of what she had to do, it hurt now to call him that. It hurt to hurt him. But she had to. “
DICKLESS!
”

His hands came fast away from his ears, and he ripped the cap from his head where it touched the Piper’s bare ceiling, revealing a face less shadowed. A chiseled, pulsing mask of hate aimed at Ariel. Right at Ariel.

Coming right at Ariel.

He moved a stooping step, still holding the gun, his free hand reaching out toward her now. She backed away as much as her tether would allow, increasing the distance, making him
have
to come to her. Wanting him to come to her. Beckoning him to come to her.

“Dickless,” she said one final time, and the whites of his sunken eyes flared, hate becoming rage. Becoming desire. A desire to kill, and kill only for killing’s sake. Not for art. No, not now it would not be for art.

Another step and he was fully into the cabin, just the Piper’s deadly cargo between them. Between Ariel and the long, sinewy fingers reaching out for her. Coming to her. Coming at her face.

“CLEAR AIR!” she shouted as loud as she could, and for only the briefest of instants there was a reaction to what she’d cried out on Michaelangelo’s face. A flash of confusion amongst the hate. Just a dancing twinkle of wonder in his eye.

And then he was tossed hard against the left side of the fuselage as Mills tipped the Piper severely in a hard right half roll, his head and back slamming into the bare metal between the line of windows. Ariel, too, was thrown, her body flopping like a rag doll, feet impacting the crumpled form of the madman while her upper body stayed fixed to the tac nuke’s case.

And then, as a bit of composure was trickling back into the madman’s senses, a half roll snapped the Piper to the left and flung its aft passengers hard against the right side of the cabin, Michaelangelo nearly crushing Ariel as his weight came down upon her.

She gasped, and Mills pulled the Piper’s nose up sharply, its speed dropping as it crossed through twenty three thousand feet, stall speed approaching and all that wasn’t tethered in back sliding aft. Most of Ariel’s body moved that way, no choice in the matter for her, physics and a stout pair of handcuffs vying for supremacy right then. And she felt it. Felt like a tug of war was going on, and for sure her arm was going to be the loser. Her arm and those ribs that had suddenly come to painful life, adrenalin no longer enough to mute the hurt.

Michaelangelo, though, was completely at the mercy of the laws of motion, and he hit viciously against the aft bulkhead. In some aircraft of this make there would have been a very confining but useable toilet there, but Nico Trane had stripped this Piper to its bones, and all there was to meet Michaelangelo was a thick panel of aircraft aluminum that at the moment might as well have been a concrete slab. It felt the same, and knocked the wind right out of him.

But with a loud, animal-like gasp he sucked breath back in. Drew it deep and looked up and forced himself to his feet just as Mills cut power back and put the piper into a steep dive, Ariel sliding forward. All that was not tied down sliding forward.

All but Michaelangelo.

In the narrow, short confines of the cabin, he planted feet wide on the floor and, stooping, his strong shoulders and both hands pressed against the ceiling, wedging himself in place. Negating the effect of the man-made turbulence Mills was creating. Except...

...except this last maneuver was not meant for him. This Michaelangelo realized when the Piper leveled out and Mills leaned partially out of the cockpit, twisting severely and reaching for something. Something on the cabin floor.

No!

By instinct Michaelangelo looked to each of his hands. Hands planted firmly upon the Piper’s roof. Hands that held nothing. Hands that held no gun.

Mills got a finger on the weapon and scratched at it, pulling it toward him. Quarter inch, half inch, inch, until he had two fingers on it, and three, and four, and a thumb, and his whole hand now curled around the grip and even before he brought the weapon up he was looking. Looking aft. Aft at the madman who was looking at...

Shit!

She was dazed, but then that was not an unlikely potentiality considering the beating she’d just been given in the guts of this angry metal bird. Dazed to the point that she was momentarily unaware of her surroundings. Unaware of the danger still present. The danger she was pulling herself toward as she dragged herself toward the point where her stinging arm was tethered.

And toward the madman.

Mills brought the gun up fast, but not fast enough. By the time it was pointed at where Michaelangelo had wedged himself he was no longer there. He’d launched himself at Ariel and now had her in his grip. Had his hands around her throat as he held her body between he and Mills. Between he and the gun.

Mills put the gun on him there. Aimed at him there. But could not get a shot. Not a clear shot. Pieces of the madman ducked in and out behind Ariel as she fought against the fingers constricting her throat. Choking off her air from behind, thumbs pressing dangerously at the soft base of her skull. Her eyes bulged, her face a scarlet bubble seeming ready to explode, and in the moment before she was certain she was going to die she saw Mills, leaning back, gun in hand as he flew the Piper one handed, and she said something to him. Not in word, because that was impossible. Instead she mouthed it. Mouthed her plea. Her
permission.

Take...the...shot...

He saw her. Heard her. Wanted to do as she wished. But there was not enough of the cowering madman to shoot at. Just flashes of him. And if he fired and missed, just as he’d warned Michaelangelo, there could be...

It all came so fast. So quickly to him, the realization, the decision, the sight of Ariel beginning to go limp and his own hand letting go the yoke just briefly to cinch his seat belt, his aim shifting, moving off of the jittering madman to a window on the right side of the aircraft, one almost opposite the cabin door on the left. Mills set his aim there and took hold of the yoke once more, hard hold of it, and squeezed the trigger just as Ariel’s eyes began to flutter shut.

At twenty three thousand two hundred feet above sea level, the difference in air pressure between the thin, cold atmosphere outside and the comfortably pressurized cabin of the Piper was considerable. Not what it would have been at thirty thousand feet, but then it didn’t have to be. Mills knew that. Michaelangelo was about to learn that.

The bullet struck the thick window farthest back on the Piper’s right side, punching a small hole that would not stay that way. In an incomprehensibly fast moment the vacuum created by the opening of a passage from thick air to thin widened the hole to include the whole window, the glass that had been there instantly pulverized by the negative pressure and sucked into the darkness beyond. The window frame, too, was compromised, welds and seams failing as the ring of metal tore free and pulled with it a strip of the outer fuselage that opened a narrow tear from inside to out. A hole that everything not tied down now rushed to. Now was sucked to.

He weighed upward of two hundred twenty pounds, and when the differential in pressure worked to equalize itself it yanked Michaelangelo off of Ariel Grace with a force so sharp that no man could resist it. Instantly Michael Angelo Strange became a projectile, and when his still living body hit the tear in the fuselage it became a cork, and when the laws of physics overcame the resistance his body was providing the tear in the fuselage splintered into hundreds of web-like tears. The tear became a hole. A hole edged with razor-sharp jags of metal that shredded the killer known as Michaelangelo into dozens of unrecognizable pieces as he was sucked finally into the night and scattered over Arkadelphia, Alabama.

Mills had sucked a last breath as he squeezed off the shot, and his eyes closed instinctively when what was inside the Piper began being sucked out, but when he opened his eyes and looked once again and saw the gun gone from his hand and the madman gone from his plane he might have breathed a sigh of relief. But for two things he might have done that.

There was little air to breath, and Ariel, still tethered to the tac nuke’s metal case, was hanging limply at the end of her binding, legs drawn toward the opening in the Piper’s fuselage, flapping in the hurricane wind being whipped up in the now equalized pressure of the cabin.

He turned fast back to his instruments and reached for his oxygen mask, putting it on and putting the Piper into a steep dive. He could breath now, but he knew that she could not. There was precious little air up here for a human being, which meant he had to get her down to an altitude where she could breathe.

If she was still breathing.

He turned on the radio and did something he had not done for so very long—put out a call to the authorities for help.

The controller responding to his MAYDAY directed him a few miles south and west to the nearest field, a near mile long strip of asphalt in Walker County near the city of Jasper. He might have flown on to Birmingham, a big city with a bigger airport and bigger runways and cops and hospitals close by, but he needed to get down
now
. He didn’t know how much longer his battered plane would fly. Didn’t know how much damage had been done. And he didn’t know how much time Ariel had. If she had any at all.

Bevill Field was a daylight airport, which meant the runway lights should have been out. Mills could have fixed that with a few clicks of his mike on the specified frequency of 122.8, but that turned out not to be necessary. When he broke through the cloud cover at two thousand feet he saw a string of lights stretching out in the distance. And he saw a sight he thought more beautiful than that. He saw lights of red and blue, spinning in gangs up and down the sides of the approaching runway, and more lights coming on a road leading to Bevill Field. And when he lowered his gear and they groaned down and locked in place he thought that the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.

Until, of course, the Piper touched down with a jolt and he heard Ariel wince with pain and ask groggily but aloud what the hell was going on.

“It’s over,” he said in answer as the Piper rolled down the runway toward the waiting lights, looking back to her as her head came up. “It’s all over.”

She put a hand to her bruised and aching head and smiled at him. Smiled and chuckled even though it hurt. “Thank God.”

Epilogue

Fall To Grace

He testified for a week at each trial, his appearance a sensation to news media and lawyers alike. In the end two juries believed him and convicted Gareth Dean Hoag and Nita Berry of multiple crimes. The death penalty was an option, but that decision was yet to be made. If they needed to hear from him again, Teddy Donovan would come back.

But there were other trials to go, and on the fourth day of spring the year after he had almost been killed by the monster called Michaelangelo, Teddy Donovan left the Federal District Courthouse in Atlanta after a mild day on the stand telling of the illegal exploits of the Moreno brothers. He walked down the street and loosened his tie. Another southern summer was still officially months off, but it was sending out warnings already. Be ready, it said, it was going to be a hot one.

He bought a shaved ice from a vendor on Peachtree and kept on walking. Walking out in the open. Not caring if anyone was watching. Not caring if anyone recognized him, which people did on occasion after the news frenzy following what had happened. He could be out. Be who he was. Be Teddy Donovan.

Mills DeVane was gone. Gone that night in a plane over the heartland.

Teddy. I’m Teddy, he reminded himself often. Teddy Donovan. And if he didn’t, his father made sure to do so for him.