Hot Start (21 page)

Walking to my truck, it began to rain. We’re not talking deluge or even measurable precipitation. A few drops, really, barely enough to wet the sidewalk, yet the effect was transformative. I could feel the temperature dropping. By the time I got home, with fans going and windows open, my apartment was almost habitable.

Kiddiot was nowhere around. I cleaned out the old dried food in his bowl, which he hadn’t touched, and replaced it with fresh new food, which I knew he wouldn’t touch either. No cat lover could ever say I didn’t try.

I took a shower, turned on the radio, and opened some vegetable beef soup, eating it cold from the can, thus saving myself having to wash dishes and helping to save the planet at the same time. The truth was, I was feeling less environmentally conscientious than I was lazy.

Reports on the big car crash up on Chumash Pass led the local news. There was nothing on the Hollister case, no follow-ups, no new developments. I felt a certain relief in that. Call it a respite. All I wanted to do was chill and not have to think about anything substantive for a while. Just veg. That ambition lasted less than ten minutes. My phone vibrated.

“Is this Logan?” said the voice on the other end. He sounded young.

“It is.”

“Mr. Logan, Evan Gantz. I used to fly for Roy and Toni Hollister. You e-mailed me a few days ago.”

“Thanks for getting back to me.”

Gantz said his sister was getting married in Riverside, east of Los Angeles. He’d be there for the next three days, though the only free time he had was the following morning. Would I be willing to come out to talk to him in person?

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but I don’t know who you are or why you’re wanting to talk to me about this, and the only way I’m willing to do that is face-to-face. I hope you understand.”

“I do. I’d probably be just as cautious.”

We arranged to meet at 1100 hours at West Coast Air Service, the FBO at the Riverside airport. I hoped the cooling trend held. Cooler air would likely mean smoother air and a more comfortable flight. The little nerdy weather guy I usually watched on local TV, who over-enunciated every word and always got way too excited describing the jet stream, said that all of California was in for milder conditions. I had my doubts. I’d found his forecasts to be about as accurate as horoscopes. I made plans to get a full weather briefing over the phone the next morning from FAA Flight Service before launching.

For the first time in many nights, I didn’t feel the need to sleep outside. Inside the garage, the temperature was almost tolerable. I pulled back the top sheet, turned off the lights and bedded down. Kiddiot joined me instantly, announcing his presence with his usual high-pitched chirp.

“Who invited you up here, you worthless pelt?” I said and reached out to pet him.

He sniffed my hand like it was diseased, then walked away and curled up near my feet—out of reach, as if I’d offended him.

I dreamed about strafing Iraqi armor and about polar bears with psychedelic coats who spoke English with French Canadian accents. I dreamed about the first time I kissed Savannah, the softness of her lips, the way she pulled back and favored me with the sweetest smile I’d ever seen, as though surprised by how good that kiss had felt.

The taste of her lips was full on my brain as I awakened to the crack of gunshots.

SEVENTEEN

T
hey came in quick succession, two rounds that penetrated the wall less than six inches apart. The first passed through without hitting anything and exited by way of my bathroom window, shattering the glass and ending up who knows where. The second bullet would’ve probably taken off the top of my head had the first shot not prompted Kiddiot and me to hit the deck. With tires squealing outside in the alley, I grabbed my snubnose .357 from under the bed and headed out the door, crouching along the dog-eared pickets of the privacy fence and out the back gate, ready to fire—but car and shooter were gone.

The first thing I did after calling 911 was to stash the revolver back under my bed. No use giving some Quick Draw McGraw with a badge an excuse to ventilate the wrong guy— the kind of shooting that at Alpha we used to call “awful but lawful.” Kiddiot was holed up far under the bed, the fur on his back still up, his tail twitching side-to-side.

“Relax, buddy. Whoever it was, missed.” I reached in to pet him and he batted my hand away with claws outstretched. Kiddiot gets grumpy when his beauty sleep is interrupted for any reason, including near-fatal gunfire.

I found a flashlight and set about assessing the damage done, waiting for the police to show up.

Both bullet holes were roughly nickel-size in diameter. This told me that both rounds were something larger than a .22. That both had penetrated an exterior wall and kept going—with such velocity that the first shot had shattered a window—suggested to me that they’d been fired from a rifle, not a handgun.

The second bullet, the one that zipped over my bed, narrowly missing my noggin, appeared to have caromed off the stove at a sharp angle, slammed into a cast iron skillet sitting on my counter, and fragmented. I found a piece of it on the floor near the sink. The only thing I could really tell from the gnarled bit of lead was that it wasn’t copper jacketed, like the bullet I’d discovered lodged in the Hollisters’ trellis. That didn’t rule out the possibility that the same weapon had been used in both shootings. The fragment, along with any others found, would have to be analyzed in a forensics lab before reaching that kind of conclusion. However, I doubted things would get that far. Shootings rarely occur in America’s Monaco, but nobody had been hurt in this one, and the Rancho Bonita Police Department, with barely more than one hundred members, was understaffed and overworked. I doubted they would make the effort.

The responding officer had dark circles under his eyes and was built like a beer keg. I handed him the bullet fragment. He looked at it with marginal interest and popped it in his shirt pocket. “Can you think of anybody who’d want to do something like this to you?” he wanted to know.

How much time you got?
That would’ve been the appropriate answer, but we would’ve been there all night and Kiddiot needed his sleep.

“Nobody comes readily to mind,” I said.

The cop yawned and said a detective would be by in the morning to canvass the neighborhood for possible witnesses and take a more thorough report. He then walked out to check for tire tracks in the alley while his partner, a bony old-timer wearing reading glasses, analyzed the bullet holes with his Maglite.

“We get a lot of these kinds of calls, drive-bys, usually over on the west side, though,” the older cop said. “Big street gang problem over there. Lotta people in this town, they don’t know this stuff. They don’t
want
to know it.”

“You think this was gang-related?”

“Possibly. Unless you got bill collectors after you, or a pissed-off ex, something like that.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

Kiddiot was watching us from under the bed, his front paws tucked under his chest. The cop nodded to him.

“That your cat?”

“More or less.”

“My cat’s unbelievably smart,” the cop said. “Knows about twenty tricks.”

“My guess is they’re not related.”

The cop smiled. His teeth were the color of caramel corn. “You know, for a guy whose house just got shot at, you sure do seem matter-of-fact about it, like it’s not your first time.”

“Don’t let looks fool you,” I said. “I’m shaking like a tambourine inside.”

“Somehow I don’t believe that.”

I walked him out. His partner had illuminated the alley with the sidelight on their black-and-white radio car and was taking photos from various angles of a tire track left in the asphalt. Somewhere down the block, a dog was barking. Stan, the retired postal worker next door, was standing outside his back fence in a Hugh Hefner red silk robe, demanding to know what the hell was going on.

“Everything’s under control, sir,” the older cop said. “There’s nothing more to see out here. Please go back inside.”

“I heard gunshots,” Stan said. “I know gunshots when I hear them. I was in ’Nam.”

“Sir,” the cop said, “please go back inside. Everything’s OK.”

Stan held his ground.

I noticed a couple of galvanized roofing nails in the alley, their heads flattened, like they’d been run over by a car. I stooped and ran my fingers over a tire track. There was a subtle but noticeable irregularity in the zigzag tread pattern.

“Fresh rubber,” I said, sniffing my fingertips. “Left rear tire, slightly underinflated, by the looks of it. And this looks to be some type of obstruction in the tread pattern along the outside shoulder. A screw or a rock, maybe.”

The two cops looked at each other, then back at me.

“Says who?” the human beer keg asked.

I could’ve told him that when I was with Alpha, we’d learned tracking skills from FBI footwear-and-tire-track examiners, but they probably wouldn’t have believed me.

“I read a lot,” I said.

“I was in Vietnam,” Stan said again, almost pleading this time.

“I was too,” the old cop said, and went over to talk to him.

I’m not so naive to think that I’d been the victim of a gang-related drive-by or some misguided, random act of violence. I’d been targeted because of what I’d once done for a living or, more likely, because of my peripheral involvement in the Hollister case. Somewhere along the way, I’d touched a nerve and now somebody was trying to scare me off. I was fairly certain that whoever it was had meant to frighten more than kill me. Drive-by shootings are usually spray and pray. Low return and high risk. A good chance of missing the intended target and getting caught, regardless. The actual art of killing requires much more deliberative action. You work out contingencies well ahead of time. You carefully map out your in-fil and ex-fil routes. You never pull the trigger until you’re absolutely ready, until you’ve maximized the odds that the target will stay dead. If you do your homework and take your time, you minimize the risk of that would-be target coming back to bite you. All of which is exactly what I intended to do when I found who’d shot at me.

S
LEEP
LARGELY
eluded me that night. I was out of bed by 0500. I showered, toasted a couple of pieces of stale bread, and checked weather on my laptop. Riverside was reporting clear skies, with five miles visibility in haze. Haze was a misnomer. Anything east of Los Angeles is air pollution. I got dressed and drove to the airport.

The
Ruptured Duck
fired up, no problem. Air Traffic Control assigned me standard IFR routing to Riverside at 6,000 feet: San Marcos-Kwang-Camarillo-Van Nuys-Victor 186-Paradise-direct. I programmed the aerial waypoints into my yoke-mounted GPS and the one installed in the instrument panel, then radioed ground control that I was ready to roll. I was given clearance to taxi to the engine run-up area east of Runway One-Six Left. All of the
Duck’s
control surfaces appeared to be functioning normally. Ditto all of the flight instruments. As I pulled up to the runway hold-short line, I radioed, “Tower, Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima is ready at One-Six Left.”

“Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, winds variable at three, Runway One-Six Left, cleared for takeoff.”

I repeated the clearance, turned onto the runway, aligned my heading indicator with the runway’s magnetic designation, tightened my seat belt and shoulder restraint, and slowly pushed the throttle forward. The airspeed needle came alive at forty knots. At a steady sixty-five, I began smoothly pulling back on the controls. Just like that, I was airborne.

The GPS had projected seventy minutes to Riverside. With favorable winds and no deviations from air traffic control, I’d be there well ahead of my 1100 meeting with Evan Gantz, Roy Hollister’s former pilot.

Fate had other plans.

Even from a distance, one can distinguish turkey vultures from other large birds by how awkwardly they change directions. A hawk or eagle will wheel solidly into a turn, its wings holding the angle of bank with a stunt pilot’s precision. A vulture aviates like someone who’s had too much to drink, wings rocking, always overcorrecting.

The vulture that crashed into my airplane as I was climbing through 800 feet flew that way.

He appeared out of ten o’clock high as if from nowhere, a wobbling speck of black and gray that flashed full-size in an instant and smashed through the
Duck’s
left windscreen with such velocity that for a second I was transported back to the skies over Iraq, certain that I’d taken antiaircraft fire. Shards of Plexiglas showered the cockpit, along with pieces of vulture. I thought I was bleeding to death until I realized it wasn’t my blood dripping into my eyes; it was the bird’s. Instinctively I pushed the nose of the plane over to avoid stalling.

“Tower,” I said, my heart making like a machine-gun, “be advised, Four Charlie Lima has just sustained a bird strike. We’re returning to the field.”

“Charlie Lima, roger. Cleared to land any runway, your discretion. Are you declaring an emergency at this time?”

The wind howled, and I mean
howled
. I could barely hear the controller in my headset. Responding to him was hardly a priority under the circumstances. Pilots are taught in an emergency to aviate, not communicate. Flying the airplane trumps radioing your predicament to a voice on the ground incapable of understanding it. Call it arrogance. Or stupidity. Either way, the
Duck
still seemed solid enough in my hands. I didn’t need anybody else’s help getting us safely back down on the ground.

“Four Charlie Lima,” the controller repeated, “how do you hear? Are you declaring an emergency?” Even above the wind, I could discern the anxiety in his voice.

“Negative,” I shouted into my boom mike, the noise of the wind screaming like a freight train. “Charlie Lima’s landing One-Six Left.”

Altitude wasn’t an issue. I cranked the yoke hard over and down, executing a diving 180-degree turn to the left that set me up on a near-perfect downwind leg. The only problem was my eyes: bird blood and the wind had reduced my vision to an agonizingly painful squint. Tears streamed back along my temples. I would’ve killed for a set of goggles.