Fangs Out (23 page)

“You didn’t know anything about Greg Castle’s paternity test until I told you about it, Hub. I think that counts for something. He also wasn’t planning on commissioning an audit until I suggested it. That counts for something, too.”

“That test don’t count ’cuz Greg won’t release it to the press. And he told me that audit was something Castle Robotics was probably gonna do anyway. From where I’m standing, that means you haven’t held up your end of the bargain.”

“I flew down here in good faith to work for you. I did the work, my plane now looks like something my cat coughed up, and did I mention I almost got killed? From where I’m standing, or sitting, as the case may be, that’s easily worth five grand.”

“A deal’s a deal,” Walker said coldly, “and you didn’t hold up your end of the deal.”

Crissy swept into the kitchen in black running tights and a gray, UC San Diego hoodie, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Hub asked her if Ryder was still sleeping.

“Like a log.”

She nabbed a bottle of fluorescent green energy drink from the refrigerator and asked me pleasantly how I’d slept, as if what had occurred between the two of us the night before hadn’t.

“That crazy bird kept him up,” Hub said before I could respond, “like it did me.”

Crissy took a long swallow from her bottle. “He just needs a little comfort,” she said, looking at me with a small, telling smile that Hub, waiting on the coffee, didn’t catch. “Like we all do.”

I pretended not to notice, and asked Walker again how he’d heard so quickly that arrests had been made in the Janet Bollinger case.

“I heard,” Crissy said. “I got up early to do yoga and turned on the radio. It was on the news. I’m just so relieved they caught them.”

Hub poured the coffee. “Janet was a nice girl,” he said, “even if she did get involved with Munz. Nobody deserves to die like she did. Her or my daughter.”

He stared out at the pool, pursing his lips. Crissy caressed his arm, said she’d be back from her run in forty-five minutes, and gave him a departing peck on the cheek. I waited until I heard the front door open and latch closed.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, Hub.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Janet Bollinger was stabbed two days ago. Somebody drove onto the flight line at Montgomery Field that night and tinkered with the engine on my airplane. That’s why I crashed.”

“And you think
I
had something to do with that?”

I said nothing and watched him.

Walker began pacing angrily. “You got no right saying something like that to me in my own house. No right at all.”

“Did you go out that night, Hub?”

“I told you. I couldn’t sleep that night. I took a pill.”

He strode across the kitchen to a gumwood desk built into a small alcove and yanked opened a side drawer. Fearing he might be going for a weapon, I reached across the counter for a steak knife from a butcher block carving set—paranoia wasn’t a mental disorder among Alpha operators, it was a job requirement—when I realized that Walker wasn’t attempting to arm himself. He was reaching for his checkbook and a pen.

He scribbled out a check like he couldn’t do it fast enough, tore it off, and slapped it on the counter in front of me. The amount was $5,000.

“Time for you to hit the road, Mr. Logan.”

I
BRUSHED
my teeth, gathered together my kit, and returned to the main house. I wanted to apologize to Hub for casting aspersions, but there was no one home. Walker, I assumed, had driven his granddaughter to school, and Crissy was not yet back from jogging. I jotted a note that said simply, “Blue skies—Logan,” placed it on the kitchen counter, and left through the front door, making sure it was locked behind me.

Across the street, Major Kilgore, U.S. Marine Corps retired, was hosing down a silver Lincoln Town Car sporting a bumper sticker that proclaimed global warming to be a hoax of the liberal left. He paused to watch me toss my duffel in the back of the Escalade.

“Your pal’s no hero,” Kilgore yelled. “He’s a jerk.”

“Thanks for the heads-up.”

I climbed in, cranked the ignition, turned to look over my shoulder, and began backing out of the Walkers’ long driveway. Kilgore slammed down his hose with the water still running and came storming toward the Escalade before I’d reached the street.

His eyes were like pinballs, bouncing around in their sockets. My sightline went instinctively to his hands, which appeared empty. But as we converged, he dug into the right front pocket of his Bermuda shorts. I had no intention of waiting to find out if he was packing or merely playing pocket pool. I cut the wheel sharply and drove off the driveway in reverse, onto the Walkers’ lawn, angling straight for him. He was a half-second from being flattened by 5,800 pounds of Motor City metal when I cut the wheel again, just missing him, as he leapt sideways to avoid being hit, like Superman jumping through a window.

I stood on the brakes, slammed the SUV into park and jumped out. Kilgore was lying on the grass, stunned and gasping but otherwise unscathed. In his right hand was a piece of paper he’d removed from his pocket.

“You could’ve killed me!”

“The operative word being
could’ve
.”

I tried to help him up, but the major would have none of it. He got to his feet, dusting himself off, livid. The paper in his hand was some story he’d snagged off the Internet detailing how Georgia’s Congressional delegation had expended no shortage of political juice to help get Hub Walker the Medal of Honor.

“They call him a hero,” Kilgore said, “but a
real
hero would never block his neighbor’s view with his goddamn trees!”

I assured the major that I would blast off letters straight away to the White House, the Pentagon, and, time permitting, the International Court in the Hague, supporting his assertion that Walker be stripped of his medal given such egregious violations of neighborhood decorum.

“Thanks,” Kilgore said, a bit surprised that I saw things his way.

“Don’t mention it.”

Hub Walker was right about one thing: his neighbor was crazier than a three-day weekend in Reno.

I called Mrs. Schmulowitz as I drove away. Her answering machine picked up. The message was unmistakably hers:

“You have reached the Schmulowitz residence. This call may be recorded or monitored for quality and training purposes. If you do not wish for this call to be monitored or recorded, then let this
facacta
machine—which has too many buttons and numbers that are too small for me to read them all—know that you do not wish to be recorded or monitored when you leave your message. Thank you for calling.”

Beep.

“Hello, Mrs. Schmulowitz, Cordell Logan here. I’m calling to find out how you’re doing after your surgery. Hope you’re doing great. Also, I’m wondering whether that cat who lets me live with him ever showed up. Please let me know if you get a chance. You have my number. Shalom.”

I found an ATM machine not far from the Taco Bell I’d visited the night before and deposited Walker’s check before he changed his mind and put a stop-payment on it. It took me three tries to punch in my PIN correctly. I was more tired than I realized.

The beach was two blocks away. I hooked a right past Hornblend Street, found abundant free parking outside a CVS pharmacy, secured the Escalade with the key chain remote, and was soon lying on soft, warm sand. The ocean was sapphire. I closed my eyes and tried not to think. All I wanted to do was sleep. And I did, for five minutes, until retired airline pilot Dutch Holland called.

“I lied to you,” he said. “I was running my mouth. I didn’t see anybody tinkering with your airplane. I can’t hardly see my hands in front of my face anymore. Macular degeneration. You got any idea what that feels like, knowing you’ll never fly again?”

“No, sir, I don’t. But I’m sure it’s not pleasant.”

“It was my pal, Al Demaerschalk. He was the one who saw your airplane that night. He can’t hear worth a hoot anymore but his eyes are still sharp. He told me what he saw and I told you like I’d seen it myself. I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted to feel like a big man. Been awhile since I was.”

Holland said he’d been sitting outside his hangar the night before the crash, just as he’d told me originally, only he’d left out the fact that Al had been there, too. It was around nine o’clock, Holland said, when Al noticed the pickup truck drive onto the tarmac. Somebody got out, opened the
Ruptured Duck
’s cowling, did something to the engine, got back in and drove off. Vehicles of all kinds come and go on the flight line at all hours. Neither man thought much about it until the next day, Dutch said, after my crash. And even then, he and Demaerschalk failed to make a connection between the crash and what they’d seen the night before until after I happened to meet them at lunch.

“I couldn’t tell you for sure,” Holland said, “but with those eyes of his, I wouldn’t be surprised if Al saw more’n he let on, even to me. Hard to say, though. He didn’t want to get into it. You can’t really have a conversation with him these days. He just can’t hear.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this before, Dutch?”

“Al keeps a room with his son and daughter-in-law, over at their house in Point Loma. They’ve been talking about taking away his car before he hurts himself, and putting him in the home. So he’s been staying in my hangar with me. He didn’t want anybody to know where he was at.”

“I need to talk to him.”

“He’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“Took off. Says he’s afraid whoever messed with your plane might come after him. He also thinks it’ll make his kids madder at him than they already are, give ’em one more reason to put him in the home.”

“I understand, Dutch, believe me, but Al’s a pilot. You harm one pilot, you harm all of us. You damage one plane, you damage them all. I can’t believe he’d sit by and let that happen, do you?”

The old man was silent for a few seconds. “Well, when you put it that way . . .”

I asked Holland if he had any idea where Al might have gone.

“The Eastern Sierra, probably. He’s got a little cabin up in the Owens Valley. Got his own dirt strip. Hasn’t flown in there for years, though. Not since he lost his medical.”

I asked for driving directions.

“I couldn’t begin to tell you how to drive there ’cuz I never did,” Holland said. “We always flew. It’s south and west of Bishop somewhere. I could probably find it from the air if I had to.”

“We could take your airplane.”

“My airplane?”

“Assuming it’s still airworthy. I’ll even pay for fuel.”

“I can’t fly,” Holland said. “My medical’s not current.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m a flight instructor. You’ll be flying with me.”

Holland mulled my proposal. “It’s a deal,” he said with a rising excitement, “but I’m flying left seat.”

“It’s your airplane, Cap’n.”

There was a doughnut shop just north of Montgomery Airport. I stopped off for a quick breakfast—two plain cake bad boys and one large coffee. Inside were six molded plastic tables and seats, orange-colored, scrawled with gang graffiti. I dunked my doughnuts and savored each soggy morsel.
If loving deep-fried dough is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

I was polishing off doughnut number two when I glanced out the window and spotted a young, thin Asian man with dyed red hair standing across busy Balboa Avenue, about thirty meters away. He was aiming a digital camera at me. Or, if not at me, at the doughnut shop in which I was breakfasting.

Under normal circumstances, I would’ve disregarded him.
It’s a free country, pal, snap all the pictures you want.
But these weren’t normal circumstances. Chinese intelligence was supposedly spying on Castle Robotics. Janet Bollinger, who’d worked at Castle Robotics, was dead. And someone had intentionally trashed my airplane. Was the Chinese government behind it all? I flashed on the two Asians in the Lexus I’d seen taking photos outside Castle’s headquarters two days earlier. And now this guy with his camera across the street.

Call it coincidence—like when you read a word for the first time, and all of a sudden, you hear that word everywhere—but I was up and moving toward the door before I knew it.

By the time I burst outside, the guy with the camera was gone.