Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 (56 page)

“Everything all right?” Alma asked.

“Looks good,” Lewis answered. Maybe a suitcase had fallen over? If it happened again, he’d send Mitch back to check.

They had the TWA Ford in sight for most of the flight to the pass, and Alma, peering through binoculars, swore she’d caught sight of the Corsair ahead of them. “They’re making good speed,” she said, tucking the binoculars away again, “but they’ll have to stop for fuel. I wonder if they’ll go north or south?”

“I’d go south,” Lewis said. “There’s a string of railroad towns on the southern edge of the desert there.”

“Me, too,” Alma said.

As they began the climb to Banning, Lewis frowned at the fuel gauges. It seemed as though they were burning fuel a little faster than he would have expected. Well, once they were over the pass, he could dial back the mixture again, that would help. He was glad they hadn’t tried to hop the mountains.

“We weren’t supposed to hit a headwind, were we?”

Alma shook her head. “Not much wind at all, and supposed to be at our tail. Why?”

“Fuel consumption’s up,” Lewis answered. “I’ll thin it out once we’re past Banning.”

Alma reached for her clipboard, frowning as she scribbled notes. “Keep an eye on it. I allowed almost an extra hour’s flying time —”

“We’re making good time,” Lewis said. “I’ve just been running a little rich, I think.”

“Keep an eye on it,” Alma said again.

They threaded the Banning Pass in the TWA Ford’s wake, a bright dot far in the distance, and leveled out again at a more comfortable cruising altitude. Lewis adjusted the fuel mixture until he was running more than usually lean, listening for any signs of discontent from the engines. They sounded all right, and he squinted at the fuel gauges. “What do you think?”

Alma bit her lip. “We’ll save at least forty-five minutes taking the direct line.” She glanced at her clipboard again, at the papers covered with figures. “Even if we’re burning a little more fuel, we should have the margin.”

“We’ll do it,” Lewis said. He glanced at the compass, settling onto the new heading. The TWA Ford was gone, he realized, and glanced out his side window to see the bigger plane turning north, following the highway. Their loss, he told himself, and focused on flying.

A
n hour into the desert, and he was beginning to think they’d made a bad mistake. They were still burning fuel at a faster rate than they should be, and as the tanks emptied, he was beginning to feel drag in the tail. Alma bent over her clipboard again, came up frowning.

“We’re still good,” she said, “but — I don’t like not knowing why.”

“I can’t cut back the mixture any further,” Lewis said. “And we’re tail-heavy all of a sudden.”

“Maybe one of the suitcases slid,” Alma said, unfastening herself from her seat. “I’ll tell Mitch to take a look.”

“Thanks,” Lewis said. They were no longer flying into the bright sun of morning, a relief to the eyes, but the Mojave stretched pale and empty beneath his wing, broken only by darker ridges of rock. Ugly country, too barren even for the Indians. He glanced at the fuel gauge again, willing its motion to slow.

The cockpit door opened, and Alma slid back into her place. “Mitch is checking —”

There was a crash and a thumping from the cabin, enough to unbalance the Terrier for a moment. Lewis steadied it, casting one wild glance over his shoulder. Alma was already out of her seat again when Jerry flung the cockpit door open.

“We have a goddamned stowaway,” he announced.

“What?” Alma’s voice scaled up.

“That
soi-disant
countess,” Jerry said. “She was in the baggage compartment.”

“All the way?” Alma grimaced, knowing it was a stupid question.

“Yes.” Jerry paused. “Mitch said we deliberately went light on fuel.”

Alma closed her eyes. “We did.”

Lewis took a deep breath. That was why they were burning more fuel than expected, that was why everything was just that little bit off. They were carrying more weight than they’d thought, and so the numbers didn’t add up. Couldn’t add up.

“We could dump her,” Jerry said.

“No, we can’t,” Alma said firmly.

“I could.”

“No.” Alma shook her head. “Get back there, find out what she wants —”

“Oh, my God,” Jerry said. “She stole Henry’s necklace. What do you want to bet she was hiding it on the plane when I found her? Though why she stowed away —”

“I don’t really care,” Alma said. “Just make sure she can’t do any more harm. I need to figure out if we’re going to have enough fuel to make Flagstaff.”

Jerry backed out, closing the door behind him. Lewis looked at the fuel gauge again, and then made himself look away. “We’ll be cutting it close.”

“If we can make it at all,” Alma said, and bent over her clipboard again.

"H
e wouldn't really do it," Mitch said. He looked at the woman sitting on the floor against the bulkhead, her hair falling out of its loose bun, the heat pulling the shape out of her finger waves. She looked utterly unrepentant, though he thought she was probably trying to look pathetic. "We don't really throw people out of planes, ma'am."

"Make me walk the plank?" She lifted her head with a hint of a challenge in her eyes.

"Don't tempt me," Jerry said. He glanced forward at the cockpit where Lewis and Alma talked in low voices, consulting over the controls and the no doubt disturbing instrument readings. "You do realize that you may actually kill us all."

"Surely…"

"Surely I'm being dramatic?" Jerry demanded. "Do you have any idea what will happen if we run out of fuel over the desert? Do you know what happens when a plane runs out of fuel in mid air?"

A tiny wrinkle began between her brows and she looked at Mitch.

"We're not going to crash. Probably," Mitch amended. "If we get to that point, Lewis will set us down."

"Well, then…" she began.

"Only there's no field, you see," Mitch said. "Just Arizona desert. If we have to put down fifty or sixty miles short of Flagstaff, it's going to be an awfully long walk." And one Jerry couldn't make, but that went without saying. A guy with a wooden leg tramping through fifty miles of desert with inadequate supplies and the temperature in the 90s was a recipe for disaster. No, he'd have to take either Lewis or Alma and go for help, leaving the other one with the bogus countess, Jerry and the plane. And he was looking forward to that like a root canal. Not to mention that it would pretty much mean they'd lose the race.

She cast around. "Isn't there anything you could throw overboard?"

"You?" Jerry asked.

Mitch shook his head. "There's the emergency supplies, but those are the things we'll need if we have to land. I'm not about to start chucking the water out the hatch."

Her eyes glittered. "You like to play it safe?"

"I do," Mitch said. "There's no point in taking a bet you'll probably lose."

The countess tossed her disheveled head. "And I thought you were the ace."

"I'm the ace who's still alive," Mitch said, more sharply than he intended.

"You really don't get it," Jerry said. "The weight is calculated very, very carefully for an air race. We have exactly enough fuel to get us where we're going as quickly as possible. If we add a couple of hundred pounds…"

"Hardly that, darling."

"Well, better than a hundred and fifty," Jerry snapped. "If we go down, you're going down too."

"I didn't think I was going to have to stay on the plane," she said, drawing her knees up, her voice ripe with exasperation. "I waited outside the hangar until you and Mrs. Segura left. I thought you'd go have breakfast since you'd been there all night! Silly me!" She threw up her hands. "How was I to know you'd be back in ten minutes? So I had to stay in the luggage compartment. Then you," she looked daggers at Mitch, "fastened the latch! What was I supposed to do then? Bang and yell for you to let me out?"

"In which case you'd have been caught red-handed in LA with the stolen necklace which you did actually steal," Mitch said. "But what if we hadn't found you until we got to Flagstaff?"

"I thought once you did you'd surely get off the plane," she said. "Then I'd crawl out the inside hatch and be on my way."

"With the necklace," Jerry said. "As soon as we get to Flagstaff, we're calling the police."

"Oh, come on now!"

"You stole the necklace from Henry, you're a professional thief, and you tried to make your escape on our plane. Tell me one reason we shouldn't call the police." Jerry glared right back.

"But I'll go to jail!"

"I expect so," Jerry said.

She turned dark, pleading eyes to Mitch. "Surely you can't go along with this! Darling, if only you knew…" She blinked furiously. "I admit that my life has been checkered, but if you had any idea the terrible things that have caused me to end up this way…" Her voice choked and she looked skyward. "I wasn't born like this. And if my husband hadn't been killed in the war…"

"I'm sorry to hear that," Mitch said.

"It was terrible," she said. "We had only been married a few weeks before he left for the front. And then there I was, amid the chaos of the Russian Revolution, amid unspeakable violence…"

"What city were you in?" Mitch asked.

"Minsk," she said. "Minsk. It was horrible. The things that happened…"

"So he was in the Russian army?"

A momentary flicker of something crossed her face. "Yes, of course. Being Russian."

"Ah," Mitch said. "Not Polish or Hungarian."

She gave him a grand smile. "Why would you think that, darling? I told you I was Russian. White Russian."

"A White Russian countess from Minsk," Mitch agreed. "And after the war you went to…"

"Poland," she said quickly. "During the Second Polish Republic."

"Ah," he said. "Poland. Logical place for a Russian countess."

"Absolutely." She gave him a brilliant smile. "Poland was absolutely full of Poles."

"Not Hungarian Jews," Mitch said.

She blinked. "Why would there be?"

"No reason," Mitch said. "So then you did what?"

"I stayed with a tragic relation in Prague," she said. "Tragic. He was dying of gout."

Mitch felt his mouth twitching, and she saw it with a prim look, Jerry looking back and forth between them as though he were watching a tennis match.

"Mitch, what the hell?" he said. "When were you in Eastern Europe?"

"Right after the war," Mitch said, his eyes on the countess instead. "I spent some time in Budapest as a military attaché. Right before the White Terror. Strangely enough, I recognize a Hungarian accent."

"How very nice," she said. "If I meet any Hungarians I'll be sure to tell them."

"So how did you become a jewel thief?" Jerry asked, as though he found this weirdly fascinating.

"Do tell us," Mitch said. "I'm sure it's a fascinating story." He sat down, leaning back in the seat. "This is after Prague?"

"My second husband was a master criminal," she said, crossing her ankles in their pretty strappy shoes. "I met him in London and I had no idea, of course. I thought he was a perfect gentleman. I had no idea that he was using all those house parties as a way to rob people! I thought he just went to Monte Carlo for his health! I had no idea that we were there so that he could burgle a maharajah!"

"Ah," Mitch said. "I take it you distracted the poor guy with your feminine wiles while your husband robbed him blind?"

"Something like that." She rewarded Mitch with another smile. "I left him, of course, but the damage was done! I was hopelessly morally corrupted! It's the old story, I'm afraid. An innocent girl led down the primrose path, not realizing what she has become until it's too late." Her eyelashes fluttered closed. "I still pray that a good man may save me from this life."

"You're a pathological liar," Jerry said flatly. "Or you're nuts."

"And being a good man I should trust that you're really reforming and not turn you over to the police," Mitch said.

"Exactly!" The countess beamed. "I knew you'd catch on."

"Humm," Mitch said. "I suppose that does bear thinking about."

"We are calling the police when we get to Flagstaff," Jerry said. "Mitch."

"But you've got the necklace," she said. "You can give it back to Kershaw when you see him. It's an ugly old thing anyway. And there's no harm done. You just give it back and we're all square."

"Except for the part about you being a felon," Jerry pointed out.

"Darling," she said. "Must you use that word?"

"How about thief?" Mitch said.

"So déclassé."

"Cat burglar? Second story woman?" Mitch grinned. "There's always a dame?"

"Clearly you and I read the same magazines," the countess purred.

"A match made in heaven," Jerry snapped. "She steals a necklace, stows away, and may yet crash the plane, and you're playing some scene out of Black Mask!!"

"With extra plum dumplings," Mitch said, not looking away from her. She did twitch, just a little. "I'll tell you what. If you behave until we get to Flagstaff, and if we have to put down early you're helpful and useful, then maybe we won't call the police."

"Darling, I knew you'd be my champion!" she said. "I'll be such a good little girl. You'll hardly know I'm here."

"Oh God," Jerry groaned.

"But if we crash the plane, you'll probably die," Mitch said, getting to his feet. "So I'm just going to mosey on up to the cockpit now and see how the fuel consumption is playing out." He looked back at the countess. "By the way, do you have a name?"

"It's Anastasia," she said brightly. "Like the lost princess."

"Of course it is," Mitch said. He shook his head and leaned into the cockpit. "How's it looking?"

Alma glanced up from the co-pilot's seat. "You want to trade with me?"

"Yeah," Mitch said. That meant it wasn't good. The Terrier was his plane more than anyone else's, and if push came to shove he'd want to take the controls.

Lewis looked at him sideways. "Everything ok back there?"

"I think I've talked Jerry out of making her walk the plank," Mitch said. "And maybe talked her into behaving until we get to Flagstaff."