Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 (47 page)

Quietly he turned away . He would not kill tonight. Eight times he had struck before, and eight souls sent wailing to that hell from which he had come. Many, many more had embraced darkness out of fear, while others let the devil in right this moment, let him come winding through their senses in the intoxicating strains of jazz. The music would possess them and they would never be free.

The twentieth century had dawned in hard, bright light, and it would end in primeval darkness, twisting down into oblivion like an airplane in a stall. He was the devil's retribution on this world, and even music gave the devil his due.

Lewis woke, his heart pounding in his chest, the dream fading even as he opened his eyes in the darkness of the bedroom. Beside him, Alma slept on. The radiator rattled softly, steam rising in the pipes from the furnace below. Outside, there was the faint ticking of ice against the window. There was no music.

He got up, padding to the window and pulling the drapes aside. Nothing moved in the yard, the trees limned darkly with water not quite frozen. The lights were still on in Mitch's apartment over the garage. It must not be that late. Mitch was a night owl and he stayed up past any of the rest of them, listening to the radio in his place where it wouldn't keep anyone awake. Was it Mitch's radio that had woken him, that had wormed its way into his dreams? It would have to have been awfully loud with all the windows closed. And there wasn't a sound now.

Lewis shook his head. A bad dream, one of the ones that didn't make sense. Not about something happening now, he thought. Something that happened a long time ago, not something coming. It felt different. A memory, not a precognition. Only not his memory. He frowned. The more he tried to remember, the more the details of the dream escaped him. Streets and rain and jazz, and something bad that happened… It was gone, washed clear. The dream faded even as he reached for it. A bad dream, Lewis said. But one that required no action. Whatever it was, it was over and done.

He crawled back under the mound of blankets, snuggling up to Alma. And surely they had trouble enough without borrowing more.

I
t had been nearly a month, and no answer to her letter to Henry Kershaw in his Los Angeles office. Maybe he wasn’t there, he had half a dozen shops at airfields across the country, but it was time to stop thinking about the Great Passenger Derby and start worrying about more likely work. Alma bent over the ledger in the narrow room she used as her office when it was too cold to work at the hangar. Which it definitely was now, with the price of coal what it was, and the jobs so few and very far between. Better not to try to heat the office at the hangar, and do the books here, after she and Mitch had made their daily check on the planes. The cold wasn't all that good for them, but at least they could fire up the engines now and then, make sure the oil was ok and all the fuel lines and control wires in good shape. Admittedly, that cost money — fuel money, coal money, her own time and Mitch's — but they couldn't afford to get a job and discover that the machinery wasn't ready.

She looked at the ledger again, at the balance dwindling in the far right column. No work for two weeks, not since a piddling little job that barely paid for the fuel they'd burned; she'd pared the cost to something Harriman could afford, on the theory that he'd recognize what a better deal it was and hire them again, but the weather had been rough, and she wasn't sure he'd risk being sick again even if it did save him four hours each way.

Maybe she could save a little more on the groceries. She'd already stopped buying clothes, was still wearing the winter coat she'd bought four years ago, though the fur collar was looking a bit moth-eaten, and she was almost ashamed to let Lewis see her lingerie. Of course, if it wasn't for the odd skills Lewis had picked up here and there, they'd all be walking around in socks that were out at toe and heel: it had seemed odd, at first, to see him settle down by the radio with yarn and needle and a darning egg, but she couldn't argue with the results.

If only they hadn't lost their mail contract. That still rankled, all the more so because they hadn't done anything wrong. She and Mitch and Lewis had played by the rules, applied for their contract and won it fairly, delivered the mail every day to the main feeder line in Denver. They'd even made enough money to hire a fourth pilot, and she'd counted on that money to get them through the hard times. When the Air Mail Act passed the previous year, she hadn't been worried. Yes, the way the payments were made changed, and it was no longer a flat subsidy for flying mail, but they had the Terrier and it looked as though it would be easy enough to switch to a combined mail and passenger service, just the way the government seemed to want. Ok, they didn't run a daily passenger service of at least 250 miles, but they came close and were prepared to step up and make it happen, and they'd held a mail contract for more than two years anyway. But then the postmaster general had pulled the rug out from under everyone, taken all the contracts away from the smaller carriers and handed them over in a chunk to three giant airlines, two of which he'd more or less created by forcing smaller companies to merge if they wanted to get the new contracts. There was no room at that table for a little company like Gilchrist Aviation, with two planes and three pilots. And with that contract, they'd lost their only steady income, except for Jerry's salary for teaching at the high school. You couldn't run a company on that — you could barely feed and house four people on that, never mind have anything left over.

She rubbed her eyes, trying to make the numbers take better shape. Mitch had offered to sell his car, but he wasn't likely to get a decent price for it. Nobody was in the market for sports cars these days. At least she owned the house outright, Gil's last gift to her — maybe she could mortgage it, if they got desperate for cash, although how she'd make the payments was another question entirely. Sell a plane — sell the Jenny, sadly, her baby, but, again, no one was in the market for aircraft right now. No, if she was going to sell the Jenny, better try to hold off until summer, when somebody might need a crop duster badly enough to pay close to what it was worth....

Somehow they had to scare up more work, that was all there was to it, but for the life of her, she couldn't see how. They were known, they were reliable, everybody's first choice, but nobody else had any money to spare, either. She reached for her pocket knife, unfolded it to whittle her pencil to a sharper point. The Great Passenger Derby still nagged at her — $25,000 to the winner — but she shook her head. Unless and until Henry answered her latter, there was no point even thinking about that money. It cost $5.00 just to send off for the entry forms, the one that disclosed the actual race route; it was $500 to enter the race, and, while Jerry might talk about Henry owing them, she wasn't convinced he had the money to spare, either.

Lewis thinks he does. Lewis thinks he will.

Her hands faltered on the pencil. Lewis saw things, sometimes, possible futures and inevitable outcomes, mostly in dreams but now more and more under conscious control. And if they had money, they could afford to send him to someone to learn to use his talent — there were still lodges out there that could be trusted, who could teach a natural clairvoyant to make best use of his skills. But that was out of the question, too. They simply couldn't afford to be without his income.

There was a knock at the door, and she looked up. "Yes?"

The knob turned, and Lewis stuck his head through the open door. "May we come in?"

He was smiling like a kid at Christmas, and Alma's heart lifted in spite of knowing better. "Sure. Is there a job?"

"I got something for you," Lewis said, and tossed a thick white envelope onto the ledger. Jerry and Mitch were behind him, crowding into the little room.

Alma looked down at it, a typewritten envelope addressed to A. Gilchrist, Gilchrist Aviation, the return address TexAv Fuels in San Angelo, Texas.... She reached for the letter opener, already knowing what it would be: the entry forms and the route information for the Great Passenger Derby.

"Lewis, you shouldn't — that was five dollars!" A week's groceries, if they were careful.

"I won it off Jerry in a poker game," Lewis said, straight-faced, but Mitch spoiled it by snickering. Lewis was a terrible poker player, but Jerry was the only one of them whose money wasn't tied up in the business....

"Chicago paid me a little extra for that last article," Jerry said, gently. "I figured it was worth a shot."

Alma shook her head, unfolding the pages as though they might bite. The top sheet was typewritten, a form letter thanking "Mr. Gilchrist" for his interest in the race, and then the rest were mimeographed entry forms and half a dozen pages listing the legs of the race and the various requirements and extra contests.

"They're only allowing stock planes. And you have to carry a passenger," she said, skimming through the rules. "Someone who's not a pilot."

"Jerry," Mitch said, promptly, and Jerry shook his head.

"I'm out, Mitch. School's in session, remember?"

"Damn." Mitch looked genuinely stricken, and Alma shook her head.

"Nothing's decided. It's still $500 just to enter."

She turned over the pages as she spoke, eyes flickering across the blurred print. A full transcontinental race in six legs, Los Angeles to Coconut Grove — a suburb of Miami, the route notes helpfully pointed out, with a private airfield. Six legs, one mandatory layover, with inspection — well, technically they were expected to stay overnight in each leg's destination city, which made sense. Night flying was always a bitch.

The route took them across the southern states, probably in an attempt to stay in good weather during the early part of the year. Los Angeles to Flagstaff, Flagstaff to San Angelo, San Angelo to Little Rock, then to New Orleans for the mandatory stop, with full inspection. Then New Orleans to Pensacola, where they'd be expected to land, refuel, and stage a mail drop — well, they'd done that half a hundred times in the mountains, that shouldn't be that hard. And then one final leg, from Pensacola across the Florida panhandle and down the coast to Miami.

There was something.... She flipped back to the beginning, frowning thoughtfully. Any passenger plane could enter, but the specifics meant that the advantage would go to the big trimotors like their own Terrier. The other contestants would be flying mostly Fords and Fokkers, and if they were, if Gilchrist had the only Terrier in the race, or at least the only Terrier backed by the manufacturer....

"Oh," she said. "We need to wire Henry."

"What?" Mitch blinked.

"I thought you didn't think that was a good idea," Lewis said.

"We can win this," Alma said. In spite of herself, she was smiling. "It might have been made for us."

"We could fly to Los Angeles tomorrow," Mitch said. "It's not like we've got anything on the books."

"Day after tomorrow," Alma said, and tried not to think about the fuel costs. "We need to let Henry know we're coming."

Chapter Two

T
he dead man was standing in the rain outside the restaurant at the corner of Chartres Street. He was a big, heavy man in a Panama hat, and he was watching everyone who went into the restaurant closely. Stasi looked away, concentrating on the treacherous cobblestones and her high heeled black shoes with ankle straps, but he saw the movement of her eyes and knew she'd seen him. "Excuse me, ma'am. I was wondering if you might do me an itty-bitty favor?"

Stasi stopped under the green awning and rolled her eyes. "Only in New Orleans!" she said. "None of this 'ooga booga boo' or 'I have returned from beyond the grave!' Oh no! In New Orleans it's 'excuse me, would you do me a favor?'"

The dead man looked hurt. "I was trying to be a gentleman, seeing as how you looked like a lady."

Stasi sighed, patting at her damp hair, long and black and curled neatly in a bun at the back of her neck, the front done with pins in finger waves. "What do you want?"

"My brother Milward, he's the chef. Would it impose too much on you to go give him a message? Please, ma'am. I've been standing out here the better part of a week trying to get somebody to do it."

She looked at him levelly. "Do I look like a sucker to you?"

"You look like a kind-hearted lady." His blue eyes were painfully honest. "We Dead can tell things like that."

"Fine." Stasi rearranged her pocketbook, hoping that made loitering under the awning look natural. "What do you want?"

"Tell Milward that I put the strongbox down the dry well at granny's place. He'll know what I mean cause we used to play there together."

"You put the strongbox down the dry well at granny's." Stasi sighed again. "Fine. I'll tell him if I get a chance."

"I can't tell you how much I appreciate this, ma'am," the dead man began, but she brushed him off, opening the swinging door and stepping into the restaurant.

It was crowded on a rainy night, gleaming brass railings separating sets of white draped tables, every table filled, while waiters in black tie fairly flew about, trays of steaming crawfish etouffeé and Creole rice in hand.

The maitre d' met her before the door closed entirely. "Do you have a reservation, ma'am?"

"I'm meeting a gentleman." She looked around him, scanning the dining room. "Mr. Lanier."

"Ah yes." The maitre d' almost bowed. "He's expecting you. Right this way."

It was a table in the front bow window, romantic and thus a little isolated from the clatter of the dining room. Lanier stood up as she approached. He was tall and rugged, good looking in a way, with prematurely gray hair somewhat at odds with a face that couldn't have been quite forty. "I'm so pleased you could join me," he said, his accent thick enough to stand a spoon in. He stood while the maitre d' held out her chair and saw her into it, but waited until he left before he spoke again. "Miss Smirnoff, is it? I thought that was a brand of vodka."