Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 (14 page)

Reacting would have proved his point. Too emotional, too irresponsible to be given the awesome responsibility of saving men’s lives. And so she had been cool. No, cold. Professional. She’d spoken to Lt. Colonel Gilchrist as little as possible and only in the line of duty. Until the day he’d been sprayed with shrapnel from an explosive shell.

Ambulance drivers didn’t just drive the bus. Usually they were the first medical attention a wounded man received, and sometimes the only treatment. Especially if the wounds weren’t life threatening, and the man was stubborn. She’d spent two hours with a lamp set up, picking splinters of metal out of his back with tweezers. Most of them were tiny, little razor sharp needles that had been smoking hot when they’d cut through jacket and shirt and undershirt to lodge in his skin. Tiny, yes. And none of them dangerous in themselves. But infection killed more men than wounds, and they’d come through a filthy jacket on their way in. Every single one of them could be dangerous if they suppurated.

It must have hurt, her pulling each one out with tweezers, nipping at lacerated flesh with metal pincers, then dabbing it with raw alcohol, but he sat still like she told him to, occasionally swearing a blue streak and then asking her pardon.

“I’ve heard it all before, Colonel,” she said. And of course she had. By that time she’d been there four months and there wasn’t a lot she hadn’t seen or heard.

After that he treated her differently, with a cautious kind of respect, even if he no longer looked her up and down like a doll. She supposed that she’d earned his regard in some sense. In muddy, shapeless clothes it was hard to tell she was even female unless she spoke. She blended in, just Al. Pretty soon everyone had stopped apologizing for swearing in front of her. She’d stopped being female in any meaningful social sense, which suited her fine. Days and nights blurred together in a haze of exhaustion. There was only the corps.

Until the day Mitch was hit. He brought his plane in, wing dragging, and she could tell from the edge of the flight line that it was both plane and man to blame, and was running out on to the field with her kit before the props stopped rotating, Gil one step behind her. She jumped up on the wing and leaned over Mitch, his hands on the controls and his eyes pressed shut, his lap full of blood.

“Ok,” Mitch said calmly. “I’m going to die now.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Al snapped. “Gil, help me get him out of here. Get his shoulders.” She could already see. If it had been an artery he would have passed out long ago. It wasn’t going to kill him. Just cost him his life.

Gil rode with him in the ambulance, hunched in the back holding his hand, while she’d jolted over roads rutted by artillery caissons, rutted through mud and fill all the way down to the Roman stones beneath. Afterwards, when he was delivered to proper surgeons, she’d stood a moment by the ambulance, thinking about Mitch’s jokes and his thick Southern accent, his cool head and his offhand gallantry, the way he made the absurdly difficult seem effortless in the air. She’d begun to think of him as a friend, and even though he lived she wondered what the day had killed in him.

Gil came up behind her, leaned on the ambulance and lit a cigarette. They wouldn’t let you smoke in the hospital, not with the oxygen tanks around. He inhaled and blew out a long stream. “Crap,” he said quietly.

Al didn’t trust her voice to say anything.

In a moment he put his hand on her back. He didn’t say it was ok, because it wasn’t. He didn’t say that he knew she’d done all she could, because she had. He just stood there, his hand on the back of her shoulder, and after a moment she leaned against it.

T
he hotel room door opened and Alma heard Lewis’ quiet step. He was probably looking to see if she was asleep.

“I’m not,” Alma said, opening her eyes.

Lewis sat down on the edge of the bed, looking characteristically sheepish. “Are you ok?”

“Fine,” Alma said.

Lewis must have already talked to Jerry or Mitch. He looked around the room uncomfortably. “Alma, you know this isn’t what it looks like.”

Her gaze was perfectly steady. “It’s exactly what it looks like, Lewis. We are sharing a bed, and we’re not married.” She could hear the ghost of Gil in her voice,
call a spade a spade, Al. We’re spades.

Lewis swallowed hard. “If…” he began.

“Shhhh.” Alma sat up, putting her fingers to his lips. His skin was warm beneath her hand, a stubble of beard on his chin. “Don’t.” His eyes were hazel, and there was a tremor of hurt there. She put her hand to the side of his face. “It has to be about us. Do you see? It’s not about anyone else or what they think.”

After a moment he nodded. “I do see.” Lewis shifted around, coming to sit so that she leaned back against him, his arm around her shoulders. “I’ve never met anyone like you,” he said.

“I don’t think there is anyone like me,” Alma said, and she couldn’t keep her voice from shaking a little. “I’m a strange bird.”

“Well,” said Lewis, after a moment, “I expect we all are.”

D
awn was showing gray outside the curtains by the time Jerry got back to the room. He was moving a lot slower than usual, his face drawn with what looked more like pain than exhaustion, and stood now in the middle of the room, swaying slightly, before he finally managed to get up the energy to strip off his suit coat. Mitch watched long enough to be sure he wasn’t actually going to fall over, then got up to fetch the bottle he’d left in the dresser drawer. He collected the tooth glasses, poured a stiff shot for each of them, and pressed one into Jerry’s free hand. The other man blinked, startled, then drained it at a gulp. He held it out, and Mitch refilled, it, trying to read Jerry’s expression. There was nothing there, though, just flat blue eyes staring at nothing, the lenses of his glasses catching the light. Mitch had learned long ago that what was said didn’t matter just as long as there was a human voice, and he added another splash of bourbon to the glass.

“C’mon, Jerry, drink up.”

Jerry blinked again, thoughts coming back from wherever he had been. He took another swallow, then stretched to set the glass on the bedside table. “It’s Alma I feel worst for.”

Mitch hesitated, not knowing how to respond.

“I forgot,” Jerry said. “I didn’t think about how we registered, I just thought it would be easier this way.”

“We none of us thought,” Mitch said. “And it was Al’s idea, remember.”

“Gil would have thought,” Jerry said.

That was unanswerable, though if Gil had been alive, Alma might not have cared as much. Mitch said, “He was a better liar than any of us.”

The ghost of a smile flickered across Jerry’s face. “Can you imagine what he’d have done if he’d been here?”

Carried it off with panache and a line of bullshit second to none, Mitch thought, but it felt too raw still to say. “I’m almost scared to think.”

“Yes —” Jerry stopped abruptly, wincing. “God. Help me get my leg off, will you?”

He dropped heavily onto the edge of the bed. Mitch gave him a wary look, beginning to be really worried now. He couldn’t remember the last time Jerry had actually asked for help. He got Jerry’s pants off, feeling the scars pull in his own low belly as he took the other man’s weight, started on his shirt before Jerry shook himself and started to cooperate. The belt and straps that held the wooden leg in place looked like an instrument of torture, and from Jerry’s expression that wasn’t far from the truth at this point. Jerry started to heave himself into a better position, but Mitch put a careful hand on his good knee.

“Drink,” he said. “Let me do this.”

For a second, he thought Jerry would refuse, but then he reached for his glass again and took a long swallow. Mitch turned his attention to the buckles, undoing the wide straps. He’d known they had to be tight to do any good, but he couldn’t help grimacing at the grooves they’d left in Jerry’s skin. He tugged the leg free, and winced again at the rubbed raw skin. Jerry flexed the knee, the absurd stump wagging. There wasn’t much more than five or six inches left, barely enough to fit into the carved socket.

“There’s some cream in my Dopp kit,” Jerry said.

“Right.” Mitch found the tube after a quick search, brought it back to the bed. Jerry took it, began to smooth the ointment onto the stump, face tightening.

“So,” Mitch said. “When did you start carrying a gun?”

“Packing heat,” Jerry said, with a snort of something like laughter. He closed the tube, reached for his drink again. It seemed to be hitting him harder than usual, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “Since this.” He lifted the stump. “I didn’t think it was wise to rely on fisticuffs.”

And if he could say ‘fisticuffs,’ Mitch thought, he wasn’t that drunk. Or maybe he was, nothing ever seemed to stop Jerry from talking. “Probably not.”

“The police kept it,” Jerry said. He leaned back against the headboard, eyes half closed behind his glasses.

“I’d expect them to,” Mitch said. He took a swallow of his own drink, letting the bourbon burn its way down his gut, fire to match the dull pain that had started where the scars had pulled. It happened now and again, as he’d been told it would, adhesions pulling loose, old scars newly inflamed by an injudicious movement. It would only be a problem if he bled — there were still shrapnel fragments in there somewhere — or if the pain got worse, and became something he didn’t know. But this was the same as always, and he sat still, waiting for it to ease away.

“Gil made me get a .22,” Jerry said. “Said he knew I liked big guns, but he thought discretion was better.”

Mitch smiled in spite of himself. Yeah, that was Gil, all right, a double entendre said with a straight face, and just enough connection to demonstrable truth that no one could point a finger. “That’s Gil.”

“Yeah.” Jerry’s voice broke then, and Mitch looked away from the naked grief on his face.

“Go to sleep, Jer,” he said, gently, and got up, wincing, to put out the overhead light. Jerry slid down onto the pillows, setting his glasses aside, and Mitch switched off the bedside lamp for him. He should go to bed himself, he knew, but he could feel the pain settling in for a while, not agonizing, but enough to keep him awake, keep him from finding a comfortable position until whatever he’d strained loosened up again. He settled himself in the armchair instead, bending one leg and then the other until he found a workable position.

Outside the curtains, the light was getting stronger, the sky a paler gray, the room filled with familiar shadows. Jerry was asleep or passed out or anyway silent and unmoving, the stump tucked under the sheet, and Mitch felt the familiar bleak sorrow wash through him. It wasn’t fair, and never would be fair, and no one could expect it to be fair. At least he could still fly. He shifted his weight again, finding a new position, trying to focus on the memory of flight, the feel of the air around him, lift, control, freedom…. He closed his eyes, conjuring up the Terrier’s controls under his hands and feet, the instrument panel readings optimal, but even as he lost himself in the daydream, he felt the tug of the old fear. Someday even flying might not be enough.

Chapter Nine

T
hey ordered a late breakfast at the diner down the street from the hotel, lingering at their table while the bored waitress erased the blackboard and wrote out the lunch specials and the cook and the dishwasher called back and forth in Spanish, lifting their voices to be heard over the clatter of pans and the scrape of the spatula on the griddle. Jerry sipped his third cup of coffee, wishing his headache would go away. His stump still hurt, too, in spite of extra moleskin: it was looking like a day to be endured. Of course, they were all looking a little rough, Alma with dark circles under her eyes, Mitch with ghostly stubble on his cheeks. Even Lewis looked only half awake, and he hadn’t bothered with a tie. Alma was wearing slacks, and her plain blouse was buttoned almost to the chin. And that Jerry felt bad about.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, and Alma looked up sharply from the remains of her pancakes.

“So am I. I don’t really like being taken for a — a floozy.”

Jerry pushed his glasses back up onto his nose. “It wasn’t entirely my idea. In fact, if you’d gone when I told you to —”

“We’d’ve been down at the police station bailing you out at three in the morning,” Alma snapped. “If they’d even let you go.”

“At least you wouldn’t be worrying about what some cop thought about you,” Jerry said.

“Some cop,” Alma said. “The entire precinct, more like. Not to mention the clerk at the hotel. They all think I’m — well, at best, they think I’m some cheap little round-heels with no more sense than morals. Or they think I’m a hooker.”

“How do you think I feel?” Jerry glared at her. It felt good to snap, good to let out some of the pent-up misery. “I can either look like a four-eyed cripple who doesn’t know enough to know he’s being had —”

“Thank you very much,” Alma said.

“Or I can look like the kind of guy who’d screw his best friend’s wife.” Jerry stopped abruptly, aware of shaky ground, aware, too, that Lewis was scowling at him and the waitress was listening with interest. He felt the blood rising in his face, and abruptly Alma began to laugh.

“Oh, Jerry,” she said. “What a mess.”

“You see, kids?” Mitch said. “All better now.”

“Go chase yourself,” Alma said, but she was smiling.

Jerry grabbed the check, counted out a buck and change. Lewis gave the cook a glowering stare as they made their way out, and Jerry wondered what the man had said. Alma hadn’t noticed, though, and Lewis offered her his arm. On the sidewalk, Mitch paused to light a cigarette, and Jerry stopped gratefully, trying to settle his leg better. At least his headache seemed to be gone.

“What’s the damage?” Mitch said quietly. “I didn’t get a chance to ask last night.”

“I need to call Henry’s lawyer,” Jerry said. “It was clearly self-defense, and the cops knew the guy — somebody said he’d just got out of jail on an assault charge. Muscle for hire, and perfectly willing to try a little freelance mayhem on his off night.”