Top Ten (30 page)

“Fuck it! Fuck it!”

“What is it, dammit?!” Lionel pleaded, his fingers digging into the armrests soft padding as the Piper took a severe nose-down attitude and picked up speed. “Mills! What the fuck...”

Mills feigned difficulty in pulling the Piper level for a long moment, then brought it back to a shaky semblance of level flight, with all the rolls and gyrations he was attaching to it.

“God dammit, man, what’s going on?” Lionel demanded, the oddest shrill to his voice. An almost feminine whine so unbecoming him that Mills had to fight the urge to look his way and see if there were an equally uncharacteristic expression of sissy-like fear upon his face.

“We’ve got a control problem,” Mills said, using his calm but firm voice. His in-control voice. His I-m-the-pilot-and-you’re-gonna-make-it voice. “Hydraulic, electronic...I don’t know. But we’ve gotta set down.”

“Shit man, set it the fuck down. Set it down.”

Mills kept his shaky plane in a shallow, undulating descent, and shook his head at the windscreen. “Gareth is not going to be happy.”

“Gareth?!” Lionel said loudly above the metallic creaking and popping that seemed to be coming from everywhere around him. “Fuck Gareth. He can bring us another fucking plane. Just land, man. Land.”

“I’m gonna try.”

Lionel pushed himself back hard against the seat as the Piper went into another steep dive, his eyes fixed forward on the gray-black collage of sky and earth coming up at him.

*   *   *

Ariel missed the turn and slammed on the brakes just past a sign telling her she had three miles to go to Concord. But she didn’t want to go to Concord. She wanted, she needed, to turn right off the main road between Zebulon and Concord. A turn she was now seeing in her rearview through billows of tire smoke rising from the blacktop.

She looked back over her shoulder and dropped the Bureau car in reverse, stomping on the accelerator and flying backward east in the westbound lane of travel, which was thankfully devoid of any travelers at the late hour. Hell, she’d hardly passed a soul once she left the main highway coming south out of Atlanta, and had seen zero signs of life after Zebulon, save the rare spot of a house’s light far off in the distance beyond the expansive fields of cotton.

Fields like those on either side of the single lane road she was now throttling down, having gotten the car going forward again after a hard right. Wide, wide tracts of open land with clumps of trees and thickening brush showing themselves every now and then, getting thicker as she progressed down the rutted lane, encroaching on the road the further she traveled.

She slowed, and finally stopped, killing the headlights and turning the dome light on. She reached right, but the map book was not there. Not on the seat. Instead it was on the floor, having slid there with the madman’s yearbook during her skidding stop. She undid her seatbelt and retrieved the map book, leaving the yearbook she’d brought with her from 1251 West Lemontree. The yearbook she’d poured over on the lonely two hour flight down to Atlanta. The yearbook that was her only glimpse at what the killer Michaelangelo had once been.

But that could not help her now. The map book could, and she flipped through the pages to get back to the one representing a small square of Pike County. A small square between Zebulon and Concord. A small square with a faint line representing a road. A road at the end of which was a short, thick line with the tag Sugarpine Field fixed to it. After a few seconds she found the page. She traced the tip of her finger along the faint line from main road to the airfield, then she looked out the windshield.

“Fuck,” she muttered, wondering if this was the road. The right road. If it was, she couldn’t just go blazing up there in the Bureau car she’d acquired from the rookie gofer. All that was likely to do was alert anyone at the end of the road that someone was coming.

If...
If this was the right road.

Ariel put the map book aside and opened her door, stepping out into the damp chill hugging the earth that night. She could feel fog on its way.

But there was no fog yet. Just a gray cast to the lowering sky. She blinked at the mist settling from it and looked up the road with tangles of growth fencing it on either side. How could she be sure this was the road. That this wasn’t a waste of time. Time she might not have to...

Her uncertainty died right then and there. Not through any revelation. Not because of any signpost spotted near the single track through the fields. No, it retreated and certainty came as the hum of an airplane met her ears. A motoring drone rising, growing louder and nearer behind and above. She turned and looked and in the sinking shroud of clouds almost directly over her now she saw a brilliant, diffused glow as the lights of a descending aircraft came on.

She glanced quickly inside the Bureau car, at the phone in its cradle on the hump between the seats. She hadn’t called for backup, for assistance, because of one simply factor. A factor that was a man. An aging man. Arlo Donovan, father of Teddy Donovan, a son missing in action, some might say. Yes, she hadn’t brought anyone into this attempt of hers to get ahead of the madman because there was the very real likelihood that Arlo Donovan was with that very madman. And alive. He would have to be alive because what purpose would he serve dead?

Dead. What he could very well be if a hundred agents swarmed the area. Not that there were that many Bureau types east of North Dakota right then. There were local police, to be certain. State police. Any and all would have assisted her. But assisted her in what? Getting an old man killed. And killing the only link Mills...the only link Teddy Donovan had to who he really was.

No. That could not be the way. They’d thrown manpower at him for how long now? Too long, she knew. They hadn’t been smart.

She needed to be that in spades right now. And she would have to be that, and more, on her own.

Ariel left the door of the Bureau car open and started up the road at a cautious trot, taking her weapon from her holster as the plane descended in the unseen distance ahead of her.

Thirty Three

Chips

Sugarpine Field was no longer in regular use, and had not been lit in the evening hours for some years now, and though he would have preferred to use Nico Trane’s night vision gear to set the Piper down with, the aerobatic song and dance he was performing to keep Lionel Price convinced he was on the edge of death made it a necessity that Mills DeVane keep his eyes forward. Looking out of the aircraft, through the windscreen, and not at some shaky, green-tinted, computer enhanced version of what lay ahead. And that meant one thing: lights.

He’d put those on at five hundred feet and a mile out, bringing the Piper in slow, both hands tight on the artificially jerky yoke. It had been six months since he’d put in here, and he had no idea what the runway conditions were. At least there still was a runway, he could see as the Piper descended finally below the soup.

“Hang on,” Mills told his frightened passenger for effect. It was a useless warning; Lionel price had never held anything so tight as he was the armrests of the seat he feared—almost
believed
—he was going to die in.

The Piper’s xenon lights lit up the pitted and weed ravaged strip of concrete that had once been a pristine runway. Mills eased the throttles back, slowing the plane and taking his aerobatics down several notches. If there was one place a pilot didn’t want his rocking and rolling it was when rubber was about to meet the road, because the road was hard and would chew a plane up in the blink of an eye.

“It’s speed sensitive,” Mills told his passenger as he kept focused on the approaching runway. “It’s not as bad at lower speed.”

“Good,” Lionel said, liking the sound of ‘not as bad’. The only thing he would have liked hearing better was ‘we’re down’.

“Here we go,” Mills said, gripping the yoke tight with both hands now, for real, because he truly didn’t know how bad Sugarpine’s runway was. It wasn’t great the last time he landed on it, and six months of weather could do a number on an already battered bed of concrete. “Hang on...”

Again, no prompting was needed for Lionel, and when the Piper’s wheels finally contacted the hard runway his grip that could not have been any tighter on the armrests doubled on itself and the fabric covering the fireproof padding ripped. He closed his eyes, briefly, expecting the crunch of metal to be what he next heard, but...

...but instead he heard the engines begin to spin down. To slow. And when he opened his eyes he saw the runway ahead level out as the nose wheel touched down, just a mild yelp from it, and he felt the Piper move on a straight, if somewhat bumpy course down the worn ribbon of concrete toward a pair of leaning old buildings at its end.

“Holy shit,” Lionel swore, with relief, his head dipping forward and his deathgrip on the armrests loosening. “Oh fucking Jesus.”

Mills cut the throttle way back and steered the Piper toward the old abandoned hangar and service center at the north end of the runway. That would be where the troops would be. Maybe a sharpshooter or two with beads already on Mr. Lionel Price. Good. Good times two, Mills thought, and kept the front of the Piper pointed just that way as he brought it to a stop leaving any rifleman a clear shot.

The sensation of not moving. Of not flopping around in the air like he was strapped to the back of some drunk duck, was the most amazing relief to Lionel Price. But it was a relief that lasted but a few seconds after the Piper rolled to a stop.

“Oh shit,” the big man said in a quivering voice, then hastily undid his seatbelt and stepped past Mills, hunching over and hurriedly moving toward the cabin door on the aft left of the aircraft. Mills looked back and watched as Lionel, steadying himself with one hand on the inner fuselage, released the latch and swung the door out, not even waiting for the steps to fold down. He hopped out and a second later Mills could hear the big man chucking his lunch all over Sugarpine Field.

*   *   *

It was down, Ariel thought as she moved carefully up the lane, her weapon ready to her front. It had to be. The night had become silent. Gone was the whine of an aircraft, replaced by the chirps and clicks of bug and beast in the growth thick on either side of the road. Quiet but for these night sounds. Sounds she could tune out, making the world around her quiet. So quiet it could unnerve one.

A split second later, though, the quiet was gone. Gone with a crack of man-made thunder.

*   *   *

Mills was looking forward out the windscreen when he heard it. The shot. A very
close
shot. And not the sharp crack of a long gun fired at distance, but the sharp pop of a pistol very near. Just outside the cabin door of the Piper.

For a moment Mills froze, expecting lights to come of from everywhere. Expecting cars to pull out from behind the crumbling buildings. Expecting voices to rise, and commands to be given.

But there was none of that. None of that at all. There was only silence and a whiff of spent gunpowder. And then...

...then there was a voice.

“We meet again, Mr. DeVane.”

The skin all up and down Mills’s spine tightened. He recognized the voice. Only once had he heard it, closer then than now, in his ear before. Now it came from several feet behind. From the open cabin door. He turned in his seat and looked back past his deadly cargo to a form of death itself leaning halfway into the Piper.

“Would you be so kind as to join me outside?” Michaelangelo said, and pointed Jack Hale’s pistol at the man in the cockpit.

Mills stood slowly, knowing now that he was in as bad a position as he possibly could be.

About that he was soon to be proven wrong.

*   *   *

At the sound of the shot from ahead and to the right, Ariel bolted off the lane and into the brush, moving to cover by instinct. Once there among the brambles she paused, listening, but the retort of the shot had come from some distance off, she figured, and if there was more to be heard of softer value than that it would not be apparent from where she was crouched off the road. A hundred yards ahead the shot had emanated from. A hundred and fifty, maybe. A place she could not see. A place she needed to get to.

As she moved off through the thicket she wondered if that shot meant she was too late.

*   *   *

Mills hopped down from the Piper to the runway much as Lionel Price had and heard something wet splash underfoot. He looked down and saw a dark pool beneath his feet, and followed it with his gaze until he saw its source—Lionel Price laying face down in his own vomit beneath the Piper’s left wing, a good flow of blood percolating from the back of his head and a gun showing in his back waistband where his denim jacket had ridden up.

“He won’t be needing this,” Michaelangelo said, bending to retrieve the late Lionel Price’s weapon as he kept his own trained on his quarry.

Mills watched the man stand and snatch the gun up and toss it off into the scrub at the side of the runway. He was tall. Not as tall as Lionel, but somehow he seemed larger, his presence a dark, animated blot. A silhouette that was itself.

“You know who I am.”

Mills nodded. “I know who you are and I know what you are. Crazy.”

Michaelangelo smiled, the expression a bright nothing upon his shadowed face. “Do you know how many feet of arteries and veins there are in the human body?”

“Tell me,” Mills said, trying to sound cool, and calm, though that was getting increasingly impossible as he realized that this thing being here with him meant one thing: Jack Hale wasn’t coming. No one was coming. He was on his own.

“Shall I cut you open and see?”

The thought made Mills’s stomach tighten, but he did not let that dread show. That was what the thing a few feet from him wanted. “If that’s your plan, then go ahead and get it done with. Just know that I’ll go down swinging.”

Michaelangelo nodded pleasantly, acceptingly. “It was my plan, but then, plans change. Plans change with situations, and neither you nor I are in the same situation we were just this morning.”