Top Ten (20 page)

“Christ! God! Help me!”

*   *   *

“Got it!” the call came over the radio. “King Five, we’ve got it! Carlls Corner. A half mile outside town. A phone booth on the north side of route Fifty Six.”

“Got it.” Ariel looked to Romero. “You know how to get there?”

He’d familiarized himself with maps of the area that morning, and had driven the roads since arriving late Friday, so all Tom Romero did in response to his passenger’s question was put his foot to the gas and get them moving. Fast.

*   *   *

Racy Rob Logget was beginning to sweat. His stomach was churning. This was not what he had wanted. It was only a radio show, for Christ’s sake. Only a topic meant to get people talking. Calling. Thinking.

Jesus, all he’d wanted was ratings. He didn’t think the guy would do
this
.

“You still there?” Racy Rob asked the dead air. It had been silent for ten seconds. An eternity on the radio.

Sounds. Shuffling. Wet noises. And then, “I’m still here.”

Racy Rob swallowed. “Where’s Bobby Jack?”

A crunch and a snap assaulted the airwaves. “From life comes death. From life I make death, and from death I make art.”

“Is...is Bobby Jack alive, Michaelangelo? Is he still alive?”

“You wanted to crucify him for his sins, didn’t you?”

“I was trying to get people... I was just trying to start a conversation.”

Crunch. Snap. No cry. No scream. Just one voice.

“You succeeded.”

Racy Rob put his lips almost to the mike. “Is he dead?”

“You must appreciate what I do. The sacrifices I make. I should not be degraded.”

“Is he dead?”

Sirens began to rise, small sounds far off over the phone.

“Is he dead?”

“You will respect what I do. You will honor it.”

Racy Rob looked up to Leigh Taday as the sirens grew loud now over the airwaves. Her eyes were saucers, round and shocky at what was transpiring.

“Is he suffering?” Racy Rob asked, the sirens wailing now in his headphones.

“That is the process,” Michaelangelo said. “The way of my art.”

There now. There now. The sirens were on top of him now. They had to be. Racy Rob took the mike in hand and pulled it and the arm that suspended it with him as he turned in his chair. “Well, you sick fuck, I hope you suffer. I hope that after they put the cuffs on you they beat you with their sticks and stomp you with their boots. What do you think of that? Huh? Are they about to wail on you, Mikey? Huh?”

“I don’t believe so.”

Racy Rob’s face went slack. It wasn’t the only one.

*   *   *

Two New Jersey State Police cruiser had led the way from Vineland, and others were converging from Millville and Bridgeton. They and three FBI units screeched to a stop at the pair of phone booths on Route 56. Ariel Grace had the passenger door open even before the car had stopped and hit the pavement running, drawing her weapon as she did.

The only problem was, there was no one to point it at.

“Where is he?” one of the State Police officers asked as he and six others converged on the booths.

Ariel Grace moved slowly toward the booths. Les Zacks and Joe Peck skirted the side of the road with one of the State Police officers and checked the area behind the booths. It was clear.

“This is crazy,” Zacks said, keeping his weapon ready.

But Ariel knew it was not. Behind, not completely drowned out by the sirens still wailing, she could hear the conversation still playing out on the radio. Michaelangelo and Racy Rob Logget were still on the air. And in front of her, made very apparent as she reached the phone booths, was the way Michaelangelo had made that possible.

“I don’t believe this,” Tome Romero said, coming up to join her and seeing the handset from one booth taped to the handset from another, mouthpiece to earpiece and earpiece to mouthpiece. Michaelangelo was talking to Racy Rob, all right, but he was doing it from somewhere else.

Ariel went to the phones and ripped them apart. She put one to her ear and heard Racy Rob asking what was happening. She dropped that one and snugged the other to her face. On the other end she heard a breathy chuckle.

“Hello,” she said.

“I suppose you’ll try to trace the call I made to the phone your holding before I connected it to the one you’re not.”

“You’re on a cell phone,” Ariel said. “In other words, don’t bother.”

“It would be a waste of your time.”

“We have ways of locating cellular calls,” she told him, but she could imagine his head shaking at her.

“I’ll be finished here before that would bear any fruit. I might leave the phone so you can put it to your cheeks and feel where I’ve been.”

The sirens were cut off. Ariel still turned into the confines of the booth as though she were having the most intimate of conversations. “When does this all end?”

“Art never ends.”

“Why is this art?”

“Explaining myself seems to do no good.”

“I don’t see how it’s Art, Michaelangelo. It’s murder. It’s slaughter.”

“Each creation is carefully planned.”

She nodded doubtfully. “Doris May? Deandra Waley? Did you plan their ‘creation’?”

“Purpose, dear lady, whoever you are. I, as you put it,
slaughter
only for a purpose. To further my art.”

“Right. Doris May was a big obstacle to you.”

“I had a question for Doris. She couldn’t answer. She went to pieces.”

Ariel sniffed a humorless laugh. “You can’t keep this up.”

No answer came.

“Hello.”

Ariel heard a car start. Heard a car drive away.

“Dammit,” she swore, and let the phone drop from her hand. She looked at it as it swung at the end of its cord and realized his offer concerning the cell phone was needless. He’d held this phone to his face. Breathed upon it.

She rubbed her cheek softly and walked away.

Eighteen

Running To Safety

It was right there, six pages in, taking up almost the whole page, and Desmond Hart could not take his eyes off of it.

He heard something out in the hall and did look away from the Wednesday edition of the
Star
. Looked away and picked up the pistol laying next to him on the old couch. He pointed it at the door as the sounds grew louder, louder, louder, and then passed as a wave of giggles. Children running in the halls of the old tenement in Harlem. That was all it was. All it was.

Desmond Hart set the gun down again, his hand shaking as he did. He closed it in fist and put that to his mouth. It trembled there as he looked again to the tabloid folded open to the page that was scaring the shit out of him.

A photographer had gotten there first. That was obvious. There was no sheet on the guy. No nothing. The cops would have never let a shutterbug take that picture. It was almost as if the guy, the maniac,
wanted
people to see what he had done.

What he had done.

Desmond Hart’s heart raced as he studied the picture. The picture of some unlucky bastard named Robert Jack McCormack sitting on a bus bench, his fingers snipped off and somehow stuck around his head, protruding like a crown of thorns. Like Jesus, Desmond thought. Like the sweet Jesus his mother had taught him about.

He unfolded the fist at his mouth and looked at his own fingers, wondering what the maniac would do with them if he found him. That, though, was not his only worry.

“Oh, momma,” he said aloud in the dark and run down room he had paid some hooker a grand for. Just to sleep in. For a few nights. Until he could figure this out. Figure out how to stay away from this guy. How to stay safe. And...

...and how to keep his momma safe.

God, if the maniac went after her like he did that first guy’s momma... It would be for nothing. She didn’t know where he was. She hadn’t even talked to him in six months, since that last time he called her and asked for help and she told him he should turn himself in and pray for forgiveness.

He wondered if praying to Jesus would do any good now, and laughed tearily at the co-opted image of Christ tucked inside the
Star
.

But the laughter did not last. Could not last as long as that maniac out there would come looking for him. Sure, there was a little time. He wasn’t next on the list. But what if his turn did come? What would happen to him?

What might happen to his momma?

He couldn’t stand the thought of that. He could not.

The gun resting next to him drew his attention. His protector. It could also be his savior from this nightmare. A pull of the trigger, a flash. Maybe he wouldn’t even hear the sound. Feel the bullet. Maybe it would be that easy. Except...

...except he did not want to die. He did not. Especially by his own hand. The truth be told, he was afraid to die that way. Much more afraid than if he was to go down while pulling a job. That might not be right, but his momma had told him when he was young that God sent those who threw away his greatest gift straight to hell for eternity and beyond.

It wasn’t that he believed so much in hell. It was that he knew what his momma would think of him if he were to take his own life, and he could not stand that. However tempting it might be.

But what other choice did he have? he wondered, just as another gaggle of children ran laughing outside the door. He did not pick up the gun this time, but when they had passed he was still looking at the door.

Then he looked at the gun.

Then again at the door, where his gaze lingered, another choice presenting itself, one he would never have considered just the day before. But it was not yesterday. It was today. And a dead man made into Jesus was looking up at him in black and white.

He did not want to end up a picture in a supermarket rag, and so Desmond Hart tucked his pistol in his waistband and headed for the door.

Nineteen

Surrender

Late Wednesday afternoon Ariel Grace was back in Damascus with Jaworski in his office discussing how Robert Jack McCormack had been found. They were not alone in being unable to come up with an explanation.

“So aside from being a totally insane freak, our boy is a psychic.” Jaworski leaned his back to the wall by the door and shook his head. His face seemed fuller. His color better. His mood, though, had not changed. “Is that about what we’re thinking now?”

“Does it matter how he found him?” Ariel asked him. She was sitting in jeans and sweatshirt, her weapon exposed on her hip. She had planned to look again at two of Michaelangelo’s earlier victims based upon something he’d said on the phone, but Jaworski had intercepted her and called her in. “If we beat our heads doing that, we might miss something important.”

“I think it is important how this freak finds people that we can’t. This time without apparently going through anyone else.”

“I don’t,” Ariel disagreed.

Jaworski was about to drive his side of the argument home further when Les Zacks opened his door after a quick knock. “You might want to come see this.”

Ariel and Jaworski followed Zacks out to the bullpen where a TV was running. They joined three other agents who were gathered around it. The scene was the steps of the Federal District Courthouse in Manhattan. A man in a suit was talking. Mikes were ganged before him. His teeth were yellow but he smiled.

“What is it?” Ariel asked.

Jenny Thomas was the one who answered. “Michaelangelo just got outmaneuvered. Number two just turned himself in.”

Son of a bitch, Ariel thought, and looked back to the TV.

*   *   *

“Mr. Rhodes! Mr. Rhodes!”

The shouts came from a dozen different places among the crowd of reporters, leaving it to Aaron Rhodes to pick one. He flashed his sickly grin at a cute reporter he had seen on one of the local stations. “Carol, yes, go ahead.”

“Aren’t you afraid for yourself now, Mr. Rhodes, since Judge Fredericks has appointed you to represent Desmond Hart?”

Appointed
, Aaron Rhodes thought to himself, glad that he was already smiling. Hell, he’d practically begged Calvin Fredericks to give him Desmond Hart when word got out that he’d turned himself in. Luckily old Cal owed him a favor or two, otherwise this juicy one might have gone to some overworked public defender, and what did a PD need media coverage for? It would have been a waste. “Carol, my client is in federal custody. Michaelangelo couldn’t use me to get him out if he wanted to.” He chuckled now for effect. “Plus, I have a few spaces to wait, so why would I be worried?”

More questions flew at him, but Aaron Rhodes waved them off. He had places to go, interviews to give. This had been a good start. He was certain that just oodles of people had seen his face and now knew who he was.

He was right about that. Right about that in spades.

Twenty

Living Trust

They had hardly said a word through eight hands, but that didn’t mean they weren’t glad to be together. They were always glad to be together. It was simply that the same thoughts were weighing on each of them. Thoughts of what was happening. What danger might be spinning this way.

Arlo worried for his son, and knew his son worried for him. Especially now.

“They’ll get him,” Arlo said for the sake of doing so as he gauged the pair of jacks in his hand. “They’ve got plenty of time to get him. He can’t just keep going boom boom boom.”

“We don’t have to talk about it, pop,” Mills told him.

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

Mills shook his head and rearranged his hand. It was still crap in any order. “I don’t think it matters. I just...”

Arlo put his hand down on the table, face up. He was conceding this hand to move to other matters. “What is it, son? What’s on your mind?”

Mills chuckled, still holding his hand. It was something to focus on. “Pop, let’s not get into stuff that nothing can be done about.”

Arlo watched his son pick the cards. Watched him slowly and precisely tear the corner from one, as if marking it for a big score, though he knew, he could tell, that he was doing so absently. Absorbed by something. Something that wasn’t fear. Something that seemed to be eating at him, almost as if he were guilty about something.