Fangs Out (2 page)

I repeated the instructions to the controller, leaving out the part about the “equipment,” also known as the airport crash trucks, whose crews rarely get any
real
action to speak of and were probably salivating at the possibility.

The Mooney pilot repeated that his fuel gauge needles were bouncing on empty.

“Think positive,” I radioed him. “We’ll be down soon.”

“Hopefully not too soon,” he said.

We started down through the soup.

I wish I could say that it was a descent into hell. That flying blind, we iced up and spiraled out of control, managing to pull out only inches from impact. Or that visibility was so limited, we nearly collided and only by some miracle cheated death. But that would’ve been the Hollywood version. This wasn’t. With the Mooney a wispy ghost glued to my left wing, I centered the localizer and glide slope needles on my VOR and rode them down like I’d done on countless other instrument approaches under far lousier conditions. At 300 feet, the clouds gave way and there was the runway, half a mile dead ahead.

Booyah.

“That’s one I owe you,” the Mooney pilot radioed.

“Rock on.”

I shoved my throttle to the firewall, informed the tower I was initiating a missed approach and climbed back into the soup.

T
HE
PILOT
and his wife were standing beside their airplane outside mechanic Larry Kropf’s hangar as I taxied in. Larry, a hirsute man-mountain from whom I sublet a glorified storage closet that I had the temerity to call an “international flight school,” already had the Mooney’s cowling open and was noodling around inside the engine compartment. He was wearing his usual low-riding, blue Dickies work pants, revealing his usual six inches of butt crack, and a faded, oil-smeared gray T-shirt that said on the back, “In dog years, I’m dead.”

I toggled off the
Ruptured Duck
’s avionics master switch and pulled the mixture control. The Mooney pilot had my door open and was shaking my hand almost before the propeller had stopped spinning.

“You’re one helluva stick, fella,” he said.

“If I was, I’d definitely be making more money than I am.”

He grinned. “You must be flying for a regional carrier.”

“He’s a flight instructor,” Larry said. “A broke one at that.”

“Thanks, Larry. I love you, too.”

“My name’s Walker,” the Mooney pilot said, still pumping my hand.

“Cordell Logan.”

“Well, it’s a damn pleasure, Mr. Logan.”

He volunteered that he and his wife were flying home to San Diego after attending a charity fund-raiser in Carmel when his vacuum pump gave up the ghost. Larry had already concluded that the pump was beyond repair and would need replacing. There was also a problem apparently with the fuel sensors on Walker’s plane. Even though the gauges had indicated his wing tanks were all but dry, the Mooney, as it turned out, still had plenty of gas left.

“How long you figure it’ll take to fix everything?” Walker’s wife asked Larry.

“I get the parts in, you’ll be on your way tomorrow afternoon.”

“Guess it looks like we’re laying over in Rancho Bonita.” Walker turned to me. “I’d appreciate a hotel recommendation. Something reasonably priced, if there is such a thing around these parts.”

“Good luck with that,” I said, almost laughing as I climbed out of my plane.

Dwarfed on one side by verdant, 4,000-foot mountains, and cuddled on the other by the Pacific, Rancho Bonita perches on a hilly, south-facing strip of earth that is among the most picturesque and least affordable locales in all of America. An average two-bedroom fixer can run close to $1 million. A gallon of gas costs twenty-five cents more than anywhere else on the mainland. Everything is more expensive in “California’s Monaco,” as the city’s landed gentry like to call it. But the trust fund babies and reclusive show biz luminaries who make up a disproportionate percentage of its population rarely complain. Nor, for that matter, do Rancho Bonita’s many other, lesser residents. Surrounded by natural beauty and graced with arguably the most perfect weather on the planet, everybody smiles a lot and counts their blessings, even if it means scrounging for work and slowly draining their life savings in the process.

“I know where there’s a flophouse downtown,” Larry said, his head still buried in the Mooney’s engine compartment. “Put my in-laws up there last time they were in town. It’s clean and cheap. They even have Magic Fingers.”

Walker’s wife gave a quizzical look. “Magic Fingers?”

“You stick a quarter in a machine,” I said, “and the bed vibrates your fillings while you tell yourself it feels like a real massage.”

She smiled and took my hand firmly. “You saved our lives today. How can we ever repay you?”

A few methods came readily to mind. Amply proportioned in all the right places, Mrs. Walker was dressed in black silk slacks, glossy black pumps with high heels, and a scoop-neck, long-sleeved knit top that matched the honeyed hue of her shoulder-length tresses. She wore a small fortune in gold along with the air of an exceptionally attractive, middle-age woman long accustomed to men drooling over her.

“It was my pleasure, Mrs. Walker,” I said, reminding myself she was married and that part of me wished I still was. “I was just happy to help.”

“Call me Crissy, please.”

Larry yanked his head out of the Mooney’s engine compartment like it was on fire. He scrunched up his veined, bulbous nose and gaped at her through the half-inch-thick lenses of his Buddy Holly glasses.

“Crissy Walker? Playmate of the Year?
That
Crissy Walker?”

The smile drained from her face. “You must have me confused with someone else.”

“C’mon, I know it’s you. It
is
you, isn’t it?”

She exhaled. “I haven’t been
that
Crissy Walker in over twenty years.”

“I
knew
it.” Larry squealed like a kid come Christmas morning, which would’ve sounded cute had he actually been a kid. Not so cute coming from a guy who looks like the “before” picture in a Lap-Band infomercial. He wiped his greasy paw on his T-shirt, then offered it to her. “I’m a huge fan,” he said. “I used to look at your photo spread all the time. Sometimes three, four times a day.”

“Way too much information, Larry,” I said.

Crissy shook his hand tepidly.

Truth be told, I’d spent a little time myself admiring Crissy Walker’s pictures back in the day. We all did, my fellow Air Force Academy cadets and I. Who could blame us? There she was, stretched out on the wing of a B-17, wearing nothing more than a World War II bomber pilot’s cap and a smoldering, come-fly-with-me smile. The years had done little to diminish her emerald-eyed sensuality. But unlike my lascivious friend Larry, I was less awed by the former centerfold than I was by her husband. For the first time I could ever remember, I was truly starstruck.

“You’re Hub Walker,” I said.

He shrugged and smiled, embarrassed at being recognized.

“Reckon I am.”

I resisted the urge to squeal myself. Not because Walker was a big deal in film or on TV—why the world slathers adoration on mostly short, insecure people who stand in front of cameras pretending to be taller, self-assured people is beyond me. No, the reason I went weak in the knees was because in aviation circles, Hub Walker was nothing short of a living legend.

He was a natural pilot—talented enough to have flown with the Air Force’s Thunderbirds demonstration team. In Vietnam, he’d been a forward air controller, a Southern country boy piloting unarmed O-2 Skymasters at low level over the jungle canopy to purposely draw enemy fire, then directing fighter-bombers in to attack. Twice he’d been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery. In 1972, he’d intentionally crash-landed in a rice paddy to protect a Navy pilot who’d been shot down. Though badly wounded himself, Walker held off an entire NVA platoon for nearly an hour with nothing more than a German Luger pistol his father, a World War I doughboy, had given him. For his pluck, Hub Walker received the Medal of Honor.

Ceremonial jobs with defense contractors soon followed. He got paid big bucks to attend cocktail soirées and play golf with Congressional power brokers. He also grew addicted to prescription painkillers. Guilt-ridden at having survived combat when so many of his squadron mates hadn’t, he married his psychotherapist, who would die during labor less than a year later giving birth to their only child, a girl Walker named Ruth. A few years later, during a Memorial Day barbecue at the Playboy Mansion honoring America’s fighting men and women, he met Crissy.

As I remembered it, she’d grown up Appalachian poor, the tomboy daughter of a veteran Air Force mechanic who’d instilled in her an appreciation of how airplanes worked, and a love of the outdoors. But with the visage of an angel and a body like vice itself, Crissy’s ambitions extended far beyond the humble hollers of her roots. She’d attended beauty college for awhile, dropped out to work as a flight attendant, and ended up posing
au naturel
on the pages of America’s most popular monthly men’s publication.

Walker would later thank Crissy for helping him beat his drug addiction and rescuing him from thoughts of suicide. She, in turn, would credit Walker for giving her life true purpose. Being the loving, supportive wife of a national icon was more than she ever could have hoped for growing up. They eloped to Las Vegas a month after meeting.

Their fairy-tale romance was profiled in magazines from
People
to
Flying.
I remembered reading one especially breathless article in
Cosmopolitan
between missions in our ready room outside Dammam during Desert Storm. The piece was headlined, “The Hero and the Hottie: A High-Altitude Love Story.” It made the rounds among my fellow sex-starved fighter jocks as quickly as Crissy Walker’s centerfold when I was at the Academy, where those of us on the football team voted her “Most Likely to Make You Feel Funny in Your Jockstrap.”

Larry dug a felt-tip pen out of his own pants, lifted his T-shirt, and asked her to autograph his massive gut.

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” she said.

“I’d never kid about what could be the greatest moment of my life.”

“Your wife might not think it’s so great,” I said.

“Mind your own business, Logan. Besides, Doreen’ll never know. She hasn’t seen me in the buff with the lights on for years. She has a heart condition. The shock would probably kill her.”

“I don’t sign body parts,” Crissy said.

“What if I knocked a hundred bucks off that replacement vacuum pump?”

“No.”

“OK. One-fifty. I gotta at least cover my costs.”

“No. And no means no. Not at any price. You got that?” She stormed past us, into the restroom of Larry’s hangar, and slammed the door shut.

Walker shrugged apologetically. “My wife gets a tad embarrassed over some of the decisions she made in her younger days. I’m happy to pay full price for the pump.”

“Suit yourself.”

A dejected Larry stuffed the pen in his pocket and went back to work on Hub Walker’s Mooney.

That night, over dinner on his dime, Walker insisted on telling me about how his daughter had been murdered, then offered me work that made me wish in hindsight I’d been born rich.

Two

C
rissy Walker was in a fish mood. I recommended a cozy seafood place called Hooked at the far end of the municipal wharf where I always ordered the grilled wild sea bass with salsa fresco and a whisper of cilantro. Walker and his wife both went with steamed crab legs. From our table, the street lights onshore were gauzy starbursts, refracted in the mist that had settled thick and damp over the Rancho Bonita waterfront.

“Ask anybody,” Walker said, downing his third Jack Daniel’s and signaling the waiter for another. “My daughter was a knockout. Smart as a whip, too. Second in her class at Annapolis.”

He pulled out his wallet and pulled out a picture of an athletic-looking brunette with strikingly blue eyes. She was wearing Navy whites and flanked by eight other cadets identically dressed, all grinning into the camera and holding hand-lettered signs that said, “Beat Army!” They all looked like they had their whole lives ahead of them, but none more so than Walker’s daughter, Ruth. He was right. She was a knockout.

“That’s what happens when you raise your kid in a Navy town,” Walker said with a bittersweet smile. “She never did want to go the Air Force route like her old man.”

“You did good work, Hub.”

I handed him back his photo. He looked away, out onto the dark ocean, his eyes moist, hoping I wouldn’t notice them.

Crissy leaned her head on his shoulder and stroked his arm affectionately. “I was only her stepmom, which I knew Ruth resented sometimes, but I don’t know how I could’ve loved her any more.”

Nearly a decade had passed, Walker said, since two SEAL team snipers out for a leisurely, ten-mile midnight run found his daughter’s body sprawled in the sandy bluffs behind Coronado beach, about a half-mile from the Center for Naval Special Warfare, where West Coast SEALs do much of their training.

“She died,” Walker nodded, gazing out the windows and into the murk, “on a night just like this.”