Free Top Ten by Ryne Douglas Pearson Page A

nightgown up as she slipped it between. Her knees came together, clamping the pillow tight. Her hands fisted bunches of its downy mass and moved it, maneuvered it right, yesss, right, oh just so right, yesss bab—
    The feel of heavy leather over her mouth snapped her dreamy eyes open. Darkness was above her. And darkness had a knife.
    “I’m sorry,” the pumpkin salesman said, putting his weight to his hand as she screamed against it. With a flick of his blade he drew a line across her forehead. She screamed more as the line oozed red. “I require your assistance for awhile.”
    Her ragged cry pounded uselessly against his leathered palm. She kept it up until he pointed the wet tip of his blade at her left eye.
    “The artisans in primitive cultures used ocular fluid to stain their implements,” he told her. “Would you like me to demonstrate?”
    She had no idea what ocuwhat fluid was, but that thing was pointing at her eye . And he’d cut her already. She shut herself up in one quick hurry.
    “Good.” He sat on the bed next to her and leaned close, his chest against hers. He felt her nipples poke him through the sheets. “This won’t take long, I hope. I just need to speak to you for a while.”
    He eased his hand from her mouth just a bit.
    “About...about...about what?” Deandra Waley asked the crazy pumpkin salesman with the knife.
    “Who,” he corrected her, coming closer still, his face a deep shadow over hers now.
    “Who?”
    He nodded and moved the knife to the side of her head, placing its tip in her left ear. He began to twist it slowly back and forth. “We’re going to talk about Francis.”
    Tears filled her eyes. She shook her head. He moved fast and cut her left earlobe off and clamped off her scream.
    For the next two hours she shook her head not once.
    *   *   *
    The Customs plane had him.
    A P3-AEW Airborne Early Warning aircraft out of Florida had picked up the unidentified craft six hundred miles off the coast just after midnight and dispatched a Cessna Citation to intercept and shadow him. The suspect plane had not been squawking, meaning either its transponder had failed or the pilot had turned it conveniently off. The Customs radar crew aboard the P3 had not been born the previous day, and, couple with the fact that the pilot had his bird very, very low over the water, well, it was a fair guess he wasn’t a happy flier just off course and trying to make his way back home.
    “Tiger Alpha Nine, you have him?” the pilot of the P3 asked the approaching Citation.
    “Got ‘em, Tiger Lima Four. He’s ours now.”
    “Roger,” the P3 pilot acknowledged, and turned his surveillance plane back toward Florida. It had been a long afternoon and night, and it was time for them to put ‘er away for the night. They’d keep a radar eye on things until range made that impractical, but the fix was in for this game already. No way a twin turboprop Beech was going to get away from the Citation and the two turbo jets that drove it. Game, set, match for the Air Interdiction Program yet again. “Hang ‘em high, Tiger Alpha Nine.”
    “With a big assist from Tiger Lima Four,” the Citation’s pilot said, then put his attention on the Beech that was wave hopping five hundred feet and a half mile ahead of him. “Hello there, you kwazy wabbit.”
    His right seater chuckled and logged the time that they’d taken over the surveillance. It was still that–just a cautious look-see from a distance, because nothing illegal had yet been overtly done. Of course, once this yahoo landed and the Blackhawk helis swooped in to put a couple SWAT teams on his ass, well, maybe a search of that Beech might turn up some evidence of wrongdoing. Maybe a few hundred kilos of evidence. Until then, it was Tiger Alpha Nine’s job to stay back, watch where this guy was going, and call in the Blackhawks and their arrest teams when landfall was imminent.
    “Fuck!” Tiger Alpha Nine’s pilot swore, and his right