Top Ten (10 page)

Six

Mr. Sandman

Mary Sue Salyers went out to play.

It was Saturday morning, early still one might think for a girl of eight to be leaving her house and six channels of cartoons, but Mary Sue had been planning this since last Saturday, when Randy Grant came up behind her and shoved her off the swing.

“My turn, runt,” he’d told her as she lay on the ground, tears coming to her eyes and sand stinging where it had rubbed into her knee. She’d watched Randy, a seventh grader at Hubert Humphrey Junior High, climb onto the swing that had been hers and push off, gaining speed and height above her. She’d crawled out of the way, her eyes wet without openly crying, his feet narrowly missing her as she made it into the clear off of the sand. There she’d brushed herself off and stood, and there she’d watched Randy Grant swing, and swing, and swing, and after a while she went to the monkey bars and climbed on top and watched him swing some more, and there, sitting high up there, she’d thought up her plan. Her idea. The super great idea that would mean she could swing on the middle swing, the one not near the bars that Marcie Moore had been bumped into by Randy Grant’s friend Lenny McCallister, and she could do it for as long as she wanted. Or at least until eleven, when it always seemed the big kids showed up at West Side Park.

And so this morning she was off, skipping cartoons to skip across the street and down Maple Drive, wearing tights and a thick sweater to beat back the morning chill. In five minutes she was at the park, and walking now so as not to slip on the dew glistening across the expanse of grass soon to go brown for winter. Walking carefully but quickly toward the swings, running once she reached the sand, because who cared if she fell there? That’s what sand was for.

And, boy, didn’t it look like Mr. Terrafini, the park’s gardener and janitor and just about everything else, had taken a rake to the sand the day before, because it looked clean and flat and almost new. And wasn’t Mary Sue delighted that she would be the first to test it out, which she already had, she realized, looking back behind to see her small footsteps pressed into the soft bed of sand. She smiled and stamped her name in it, spelling Mary Sue right in front of the middle swing, the one not near the bars where Marcie Moore had lost two teeth. Right where she could see it whenever she swung back, and right where it would be under her when she swung forward.

“I’m Mary Sue Salyers,” she said loudly, “and I get the middle swing today!”

And onto the middle swing she hopped, forgetting the morning dew that might be there. The damp surprised her through her dress and her tights, but only for a second, because after that she was pushing off. Walking the swing back on the pristine sand and getting a good jump. You see, the push off was the most important part. Her big brother had told her that. Had showed her, actually, how to get that big start, and stick your feet out front and lean waaaaay back as you swung forward, and then how to tuck your feet back under the swing and sit forward as you swung back. He said it got you moving like a pendusomething, and she had to agree, if a pendusomething was something that swung really high, because that’s what usually happened when she swung like her big brother showed her.

But not now, because there was a problem.

It wasn’t the jump off, because that went good. She got a big jump, and she pointed her legs straight out and leaned back as she swung forward, but as she started to swing back and tucked her legs under, she found out that Mr. Terrafini had evened the sand out a little too much. There wasn’t enough room for her tucked-under feet to make it without scraping the ground, and that was slowing her down. That shallow trench under the swing that had been worn in the sand by a thousand million kids was gone. Filled in. Smoothed out. Shoot!

So as she swung back a second time, taking a kind of extra jump off because she used her feet to push off again, she figured she’d have to be just like the first kid ever to get on the swing and tuck her feet up a little bit higher. And that was what she did.

It mostly worked.

But with every backswing, Mary Sue Salyers’ little sneakers caught a little bit of sand, brushing some, then some more, and still some more, until the depression that had been worn there by not quite a thousand million kids began to reappear. Layer by layer the sand was swept back, revealing more sand, and more sand, and more sand, and...

...and then the tip of a nose, and the whole nose after that, and cheeks and open eyes, and a dead mouth that smiled.

Seven

Meetings

The phone rang in room twelve of the Bright I Motor Hotel at five o’clock on Sunday. Five in the morning.

Ariel Grace rolled right from where she’d burrowed herself amongst the covers and pillows and snatched the handset up as it rang a second time.

“Yeah?”

“Get yourself up and dressed, Grace.” It was Jaworski. Sounding bright and chipper. Not dragging. “Shower if you have time. Do you remember how to get to Oneida County Airport? Near Utica?”

Ariel looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It was early. Dark early, she could tell with a glance at the drape-covered window. The yellow glow of the streetlight still lay prominent on it.

“Yes,” she answered. Saturday she’d picked up rush copies of the enhanced images the lab had processed from the Pembry Post Office. It had been a wasted trip. “Why?”

“You’ve got a flight in forty minutes.”

“A flight?” Ariel asked, then realization jerked her fast from sleep’s bog. “Did Michaelangelo—”

“Yes,” Jaworski told her. Over the connection she thought she heard coffee being poured, and early morning news on a radio.

“Where?” she asked him, sitting up now, dragging her feet from under the covers, the front of her oversized tee bunching on her bare legs. She switched on a light.

“Minnesota. But you’re not going there. They want to see you in Washington.”

“They who?”

“The order came from the director’s office.”

The director?
Revelation bugged her eyes. “Sir, did he get my report? Is this about that?”

“I would guess it is since the body they found was Francis Gunther’s.”

The name was familiar. She might have had it without hesitation if not just roused from sleep. “On the most wanted list?”

“Number nine.”

“How did Michaelangelo...”

“Find him? I don’t know.” There was a pause and a quiet slurp as Jaworski sipped his coffee. “The local cops weren’t sure what they had when they found him. It took them ‘til damn near midnight before they knew what they had.”

“What did he do to him?”

“I’m not sure, yet. The locals’ description wasn’t very precise.”

“What did they say?”

Another sip. “They said he’d been boned and folded.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. But, Grace, this is to be kept quiet. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“That comes from the director’s office, too.”

“Right.”

“You’ve got thirty nine minutes to get to Oneida.”

“Okay,” she said, standing with the phone still to her cheek.

“And Grace...”

“Yes?”

“You weren’t in the ten ring with your report, but you were on the target. That’s as close as anybody’s gotten trying to predict what this freak will do. It was good work.”

She smiled at the handset. “Thank you, sir.”

“Now get your butt moving.”

The connection clicked off. Ariel held the phone for half a minute, the smile on her lips lingering. She had been right. Michaelangelo had been angered. Angered to the point of reaction. And she had called it. She was struck with the irrational urge to call Jack Hale and let him know how right she’d been on this one, but he’d know. Soon enough he’d know, she figured.

She had no idea how right she was.

*   *   *

He’d had her for a day now, putting her through the paces, some low and slow, and some high speed maneuvering just to make sure she could give what he might have to ask of her someday. So far she was a beaut. But she wasn’t ready. That’s why he brought her to Nico.

“Sweet, Mills baby, sweet,” Nico Trane commented as he walked around the Cessna, wiping his hands on a rag and leering at the twenty year old aircraft as though it were some dancing girl in a halter top. “Seventy eight?”

“Seventy seven,” Mills answered, and glanced at the clock high on the hangar wall. It was almost noon. He needed to get moving. “So you know what I need?”

“What you need is what you get from Nico,” the master mechanic said, stopping at the port crew and cargo door which was open, top half up, bottom half folded down to steps. He gave a look inside and turned to Mills. “Mills, my friend, when you return tomorrow morning, this Cessna 402B, in as good a condition as it already is, will be decked out and tweaked up like any and all the fine flying machines I have so lovingly modified for you.”

“I want the new night stuff. Not that French crap.”

“American made,” Nico assured him. “New auto pilot, radio, RWR, the works. Plus I’m gonna throw in something new.”

“New better be useful,” Mills told him.

“Oh, it could come in handy,” Nico boasted. “Mighty, mighty handy.”

Mills checked the time again. “Early Monday, right?”

“Seven in the a.m. tomorrow. Bright and early. I’ll even have her washed.”

“You’re a prince,” Mills complimented him, and Nico gave him a bow. “You got the car for me?”

“Just off the tarmac.” Nico reached one semi-clean hand into the front of his coveralls and tossed Mills a set of keys. “Fool left them under his back tire. How easy is that? I hope you like Buicks.”

“If it will get me to Atlanta I’ll like it. Is it hot?”

Nico looked at the clock now. “When the guy gets his boat back in off the lake and finds his trailer sitting there all alone, well, I guess it’ll be hot then.”

Mills gave Nico a thump on the shoulder and headed for the door.

“I’ll do her up nice,” Nico shouted after him. Mills had no doubt about that.

He found the car right where Nico said it would be, just off Crutch Field’s aging tarmac. He got in, started it up, and spun the tires as he hurried away.

*   *   *

Daniel Weaver, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, rose from the wingback chair to greet Ariel Grace as she was shown into room 404 at the Carrington Hotel in downtown Washington, just three blocks from the J. Edgar Hoover Building where she’d expected to be meeting him. Some bewilderment still showed on her face.

“Agent Grace. Come in. I’m pleased to meet you.”

Ariel shook his hand.

“This is Assistant Director Mike Kellerman,” the director said, introducing one of the men with him.

“Sir,” Ariel said, shaking his hand as well.

“We met in Atlanta once,” Kellerman told her. “Retirement party for Terry Harman.”

Ariel nodded. “I remember sir.”

“I was Terry’s SAC in Dallas. What’s he up to now? Do you know?”

“Last I heard he was getting kissed a lot by his grandkids,” Ariel said. She looked back to the director and noted that the pleasantness about his face was suddenly tempered as he gestured behind her.

“You already know Jack Hale,” the director said, and Ariel turned slowly to see him standing behind the suite’s well stocked wet bar.

“Hello, Ariel,” he said, and poured himself a glass of ginger ale.

She could only stare at him for the longest moment, not knowing what to say. No—not knowing whether to say what she wanted to say. In the end the director didn’t give her the chance.

“You’re probably wondering what the heck is going on,” Weaver said to her.

She kept her gaze fixed on Jack Hale as he came from behind the bar to join them. “Yes sir. You could say I’m a little...curious.”

“We’ll try to explain it all. Have a seat.” The director looked to the agent who’d brought Ariel from the airport. “Pete, that’s all for now.”

Pete nodded and dutifully left. He’d stand outside the door until the meeting was over.

The director and assistant director took the two wingbacks in the suite’s sitting area, while Jack Hale positioned himself on the small couch across from them. Ariel was left with no choice but to sit next to him.

“I’m sorry, Agent Grace,” Director Weaver said. “We didn’t offer you anything to drink.”

Shot of vodka, she wanted to say, but obviously couldn’t. In reply she simply shook her head.

“There’s fizzy water,” Jack Hale informed her, smiling at her profile. “With lime.”

“No thank you, Agent Hale,” she said without looking at him, hating that he remembered her favorite drink from the Atlanta office. Hating and wondering what his game was now. What the hell this whole thing was now.

Director Weaver sensed her discomfort and started to talk. “We’re meeting here, Agent Grace, because we can’t chance being seen together at Hoover. You’ll understand soon.”

Glancing at Jack Hale out of the corner of her eye she sure as hell hoped she would. Because some explaining was needed.

“Mike here knows more about the situation as it stands, so I’ll let him proceed.”

“What situation, sir?” Ariel asked.

“You heard about Task Force Ten’s fugitive striking again,” Kellerman said.

“Michaelangelo, yes sir.”

“You know who he killed...”

“Francis Gunther.”

“Number nine on the most wanted list,” Jack Hale said. Ariel gave him a quick look and a bare nod. “The police in Raven Cloud, Minnesota, went to inform his mother a few hours ago and found her carved up like a pumpkin in her kitchen. Michaelangelo had painted the walls with her blood.”

“That’s how he got to Francis,” Ariel observed softly, almost a thought spun aloud. “Through his mother.” She looked to all three senior Bureau men. “He doesn’t have to follow rules like we do to find someone.”

“Did Agent Jaworski tell you anything more?” Kellerman asked her, but before she could answer the director jumped in.

“How is Bernie, Agent Grace? How’s he looking?”

She’d only known Jaworski just shy of a week and she was being asked to offer judgment on his condition. “Bad earlier this week, sir, but he sounded good this morning on the phone.”