Top Ten (7 page)

“Good. Inside. Come.”

They entered the small shack, Mills first, Costain behind him, and finally the fat Russian, who pulled the flimsy door shut behind, likely the most physical thing he’d done in a while, Mills thought. The floor was sand and there were no windows. Virgin daylight poked through several large holes rusted in the corrugated roof, which even this early was radiating heat from outside to in, setting the space to swelter. There was the familiar table in the center, long and rectangular, it had been crafted out of scrap who knew how many years before, and bore the marks of much use. Mills had often wondered what things had been discussed at this table in his absence. What deals had been done.

And the deal now being done. He wondered about that, too. Wondered as he put the large duffel on the table and unzipped it lengthwise along its top. He spread the opening wide to reveal the contents.

The Fat Russian smiled.

Yves, too, though to the expression he added a satisfied little nod.

Mills gave it a look, though he had already seen it. In-flight he had opened the duffel and made a rudimentary assessment of the contents. Stacks of hundred dollar bills. A hundred to a bundle. Two hundred bundles. Two million dollars, give or take. And that was just this duffel.

“Four more like this one still in the plane, gentlemen, compliments of Mr. Hoag.” Mills smiled with them now. Ten million dollars was a lot to smile about.

“Excellent,” Costain said. “Beautiful.”

How many dozens of payments like this one had been made already to Costain? Seven that Mills knew of, having made those flights personally. Not all had transferred moneys in this amount, though one had involved nearly fifteen million. And none of that counted the flights Skunky or Lane had made. Yes, Yves Costain was being made an even richer man here. He was being paid handsomely.

The question that nagged Mills was,
for what
?

Costain reached for the duffle and zipped it slowly up, patting it once when it was closed. “You will convey my thanks to Mr. Hoag for following the payment schedule.”

“I will,” Mills said. Costain smiled wistfully at him over the bag of money.

“One more payment, Mills. Then I shall see you no more.”

One more
, Mills thought. Gareth hadn’t just been dramatic. It was close. Things were winding down. But down to what?

“Unless...” Costain began. “Unless you wish to work for me...”

“Yves...”

“I can always use a pilot like you. Have you flown in Africa? A large continent with few radars and a refreshing tolerance toward bribery. You would like it.”

“You’re kind, Yves.” Mills looked to the Fat Russian. He had stopped smiling.

“Refreshments by the lagoon?” Costain suggested. “And more talk of your future.”

“You’re a persistent man, Yves.”

“It is one of my more charming qualities,” Costain admitted jokingly. He went to the door and let Mills and the Fat Russian out, following them into the thin shade of the date palms. “Mills, you will stay for the day, won’t you. We are roasting a pig.”

“I should go, Yves.”

“Should nothing. You will stay and have a meal with us.”

What was he to do? In no way did he want to offend this man, because to offend him might sully his relationship with Gareth Dean Hoag. And that was a relationship he would not jeopardize. “All right, Yves.”

“Yes,” Costain said, pleased. “You see—I am not only persistent, but persuasive.”

Mills agreed wholeheartedly with a laugh.

“Refreshments, then. Come.”

Mills gestured to the Beech resting at the end of the runway. “Let me get the rest of the bags.”

“Raoul will get it,” Costain told him, but Mills shook his head.

“They’re my responsibility until they’re off that plane. I’ll only be a minute.”

Mills jogged off toward the Beech. Costain and the Fat Russian watched him.

“I don’t trust him,” the Fat Russian said in his native tongue.

“
Ni moi non plus
,” Costain agreed in his.

*   *   *

At nine a.m., heeding the ring of her doorbell, Deandra Waley, fifty nine, opened the front door of her small house on East Twelfth Street in Raven Cloud, Minnesota, and found a man standing on the leaning porch with a pumpkin under his arm.

She stared at him and kept the screen door shut, her hand on its inner latch.

“Good morning,” the man said, smiling. “Would you like to buy a pumpkin?”

Her eyes bugged. “Excuse me, sonny?”

“Halloween is coming,” he told her, looking past where she stood to the room within. Couch, TV–this was the living room. Two windows on the west side. He had come up the street from that direction. There were bushes on that side of the white craftsman house. Overgrown bushes. That was good. “If you buy early you get the pick of the crop.”

Her stare narrowed down on him. “Are you serious?”

“Oh yes, ma’am,” he assured her through the screen door. The one just inside that—the one that would be closed at night—was of simple wooden construction. Single lock. Likely a chain as well. As if that would do any good. “A good pumpkin can make the holiday.”

“Boy, you are crazy,” she told him. “First, you a white boy in a neighborhood that don’t much trust white folks. Second, you talkin’ about Halloween—
it’s a month off, boy!
If I was to buy a pumpkin now, it’d be clean through rotted by then.”

“Nineteen days, ma’am,” he said. There were no children’s toys strewn about the yard. No sign of youngsters at all, in fact. That was good, too. Almost as good as the absence of any disturbed canine barking at his presence now. Yes, that was
very
good. “Almost three weeks. Not a month.”

She shook her head at him. “Get yourself the hell off my porch and off my property and back to the nuthouse where you belong.”

The inner door slammed in his face. He heard a chain being set as it rattled shut. He smiled and left Deandra Waley’s porch, her property, and her street. But he was not going to the nuthouse. Why would he want to go there? That’s where crazy people lived.

*   *   *

Why is he angry? Why?

The question nagged Ariel Grace now as she sat on the bed in her room at the Bright I Motor Hotel, back against the headboard, a soda can in one hand and the VCR remote in the other. Nagged her as it had since that morning when the Pembry Post Office tape had arrived by overnight courier from the FBI lab. She’d watched it twenty times at the office already, the first few disturbing her as Doris May was tortured and killed and cut up, but after that she let herself become numb to the carnage, the viciousness. She focused. Watched. Studied.

And now, with Wednesday winding down, she relaxed (if that were possible considering her activity) in her room with a beverage from the vending machine near the office and the quaking image of what had happened in the Pembry Post Office last Friday paused on the motel TV. She’d borrowed a VCR from the office, and had hooked it up to the wall-mounted twenty inch Zenith certain that some damage had been done in the connection process. That, however, didn’t bother her. What did was that she had watched the scenes another ten times or so and still she couldn’t get it. Why? Why was Michaelangelo so angry?

She pressed play and the scenes came to flat life once again. The images on screen alternated every two seconds between the Post Office’s four cameras–lobby, counter, sorting room, back lot. The lobby would pop up for a breath, then the counter, then the sort room, and finally the back lot before going back to the lobby in an endless, disjointed loop of what had happened Friday evening. A cost saving feature, it was, requiring just one recording deck, but damned if it hadn’t been maddening at first. By afternoon, though, Ariel had become used to it, having almost memorized the sequence, from his pounce upon Doris May in the back lot, to his taking her at knife point through the sorting room and past the counter to the lobby. There he’d forced her to the table next to the mail slots. There he had begun to berate her. There he had become angry.

There was no sound, but
that
was anger she was seeing, Ariel knew. None of his face was visible–Jaworski had been right about that–but his body language spoke volumes of what was driving him. His quick movements, his abuse of her, grabbing her by the hair,
saying
something to her. And her shaking her head. And finally nodding.

And showing her the thing he’d ripped off the wall–the missing most wanted bulletin, Ariel had decided. He’d shoved it in her face. Rubbed her nose in it, at one point. Was he threatening her with it, saying ‘
Do you know who I am? Do you know what I am capable of?
’ Was he saying that?

If so, why would that make him mad?

Ariel watched the tape until it turned to snow then rewound it again. She rubbed her eyes and went to her stomach, laying with her head at the foot of the bed, hands with soda and remote dangling over the edge. She sipped the soda and listened to the tape machine whir. When a loud and abrupt click signaled its stop she put the can of soda on the bronzish carpet and pressed play yet again. Time thirty one or thirty two or thirty three. She’d lost count.

It began again, and in a moment she saw him surprising her, then he was gone and the system cycled through lobby, counter, and sorting room before coming to the back lot again. The cycling continued in two second snippets. Ariel saw a flash of the knife and then she was back in the lobby again. Counter. Sort room. And back lot again as he held the knife before her, displaying it.

Ariel paused it there. The scene quivered. She came off her stomach and sat cross-legged now on the end of the bed, leaning toward the frozen scene on the motel TV. Toward the image of Michaelangelo showing Doris May his knife. Displaying it for her. Displaying it...

...calmly.

His stance was steady. There was no animation. She was frightened. He seemed composed.
Experienced
.

And he was that, wasn’t he, Ariel realized. So why was he calm here and later...

She fast forwarded the tape to where he appeared to her to become agitated, there at the table, just before he ripped the most wanted bulletin from the wall.

She paused again, but was not quick enough on the button and ended up on an empty scene of the counter. She rewound, and found her place this time, stilling the image just right.

There, he was showing it to her. Showing it. Saying something, because...

She advanced the tape a bit, through counter, sorting room, and back lot, until she saw Doris May nodding.

She froze it there. There on Doris May terrified and nodding. Nodding to what, though? A question? ‘
Do you recognize me?
’

She let it play again through the cycle, and stopped on a more frightened Doris May, her hair bunched in Michaelangelo’s fist. He was showing her the bulletin again—no, he was forcing it upon her, angrily, enraged, leaning toward her, over her.

Again she stilled the scene. Stilled it on his rage. And the object of his rage, Doris May, already bleeding and now having a piece of paper shoved in her face. Why?

She had nodded. Counter. Sorting room. Back lot. He was
enraged
. Why? Had her response not been what he wanted?

But her response to what?

Ariel shook her head tiredly and let the tape play again. Let it play through. Through a minute or so at the counter and Doris staring at the bulletin, Michaelangelo next to her, just standing there, looking at it together.

Why?

And then there she was, looking back to him. Counter. Sorting room. Back lot. Her head shaking. Saying something. ‘No’? ‘Please’? What? Counter. Sorting room. Back lot. And Michaelangelo putting the bulletin on the table, his knife going to her breast. Counter. Sorting room. Back lot. And Doris May slumping to the floor, her life gushing out her neck. Counter. Sorting room. Back lot.

Ariel watched it happen again. The cutting. The butchery. The slaughter of Doris May. The pieces of her being carried one, two, three at a time past the counter. Those pieces being taken into one room off a small hallway visible from the sorting room camera, then directly across the hall to another as Michaelangelo made himself busy with his art.

Ariel sipped her soda as Michaelangelo came back to the lobby for the last piece of Doris May—her head. He worked it with his feet like a soccer ball, kicking it easily a few feet, then a few more, until he had it behind the counter and down that hall and into the first room. It never left that room.

But he did.

Back to the lobby, with a stack of papers in hand. A roll of tape as well. To the doors he went and arranged them, with great care, adjusting the pieces so that each was just right. Calm again. Working precisely. Just...

...just like an artist.

But he was not that. He only thought he was. Believed he was. Some master.

To the pool of wet death left where he’d cut her down. He flattened his hand and put it into the mess. Got it sloppy with Doris May’s blood before standing and reaching to the wall near the table and putting his message there.
She went to pieces
.

Telling all what to think of this, just like the titles of his more masculine works. He was the master, after all. Above all. Better, more knowledgeable than she, or Jaworski, or anyone who would be privy to his creations.

He had an ego, Ariel thought. Like most artists, those who considered themselves masters, especially, this one had an ego. His work had to be explained to those whose eyes would fall upon it. Those unworthy, incapable of understanding it themselves. Its meaning. Its...

Her thumb came down on the pause button and stilled Michaelangelo as he was leaving the lobby, walking casually, heading toward the counter, one of his hands reaching out. To something. For something.

She let it play again and it jumped through the locations.

“Damn,” she swore, wanting a continuous view here. When it came back to the lobby he was gone. And so was the bulletin he’d put on the table before cutting Doris May to pieces. The most wanted bulletin.