The Quick Adios (Times Six) (28 page)

Passing through 8,000 feet I pointed at weather to the northwest.

“Too far away to affect us,” he said. “We’ll have clear air all the way into SRQ. It might get lumpy closer to land. Heat of the day.”

I gave him thumb’s up, listened to the engine sounds, the constant, pulsing hum. I let my mind drift back to Key West, to the front door of 5 Brothers Grocery and my encounter with Sonya Timber.

I had left Sonya out of my Beeson Way crime scene analysis. While logic told me that, with Anya’s help, she could have had access to the building, I couldn’t guess a motive for Sonya to hurt Amanda Beeson. Unless the twins had expanded the love making, turned it into a trapezoid. Or maybe Sonya wanted to reshuffle the triangle, cut Amanda out of the affair and form a scissor-sister arrangement that allowed her to quit working in a lumber yard. The more I thought about her, the more she fit. I wanted to suggest to Glenn Steffey her possible link to Amanda’s death. I pulled out my cell phone.

“Good luck,”said Sherwin. “A cell tower in the Gulf of Mexico?”

I looked down at my useless phone. A screen note told me I had a text message from Wiley Fecko that must have arrived while we were still on the ground, while Sherwin was revving his turboprops. I rarely initiate a text. The concept makes the phone companies look far too brilliant. They sell us a phone that sends and receives free email, then charge us extra to send typed messages over their phone line. What am I missing?

“Found bronze Hyundai still on William St. Got tag number. Leased 5 days ago to R. Fonteneau of St. Petersburg, Fla. Same dude you described to Det. Watkins on phone 3 days ago. We will ramp up our look.”

An opening, finally. A link between Ocilla Ramirez, the boss or business partner of murder victim Greg Pulver, and Robert Fonteneau, the man who had shared my taxi from the airport four days earlier, the Canadian who had come to the island to settle a dead friend’s affairs—presumably Emerson Caldwell’s—and who apparently showed a Florida ID to rent a car. Beth Watkins and Fred Liska needed this.

“I pretty much know the answer in advance,” I said, “but is there any way to send a message over the radio?”

“If it doesn’t pertain to operating this aircraft or reporting an emergency,” said Sherwin, “the FAA would not approve. Nor would the message be delivered.”

Out of touch with the world and my mind had turned into a fountain of clues.

I thought back to my lessons with Del, the Navy Flying Club instructor. He loved to fly west to Ballast Key, Woman Key, Man Key and the Marquesas. He claimed it was for stall training but he loved to sightsee. Every so often he would take control to dive low and chase sharks which I thought was stupid. At twenty bucks an hour I didn’t complain. I also hated practicing stalls though I knew it was fundamental to flying safely, but I loved the car that Del drove to the airport on our lesson days, an antique Chevy hardtop with a Corvette engine. It was a sleeper, a plain-looking car with hidden muscle. My enjoyment of cars like that since high school inspired me to own and drive the ‘66 Shelby that I had disguised as a beat-up Mustang.

“Damn,” said Sherwin. “I’ve got port engine temp up, oil temp up, oil pressure down.” A scarlet LED on the dashboard lip triple-flashed at him. He pressed a button under it and the light flashed three times again. He pressed more buttons, pulled his procedures manual onto his lap and opened it to a tabbed section. He ran his finger down one page then a couple others. “This isn’t right, to overheat. The damned oil cooler must be leaking, but that’s next to impossible.”

“Meaning what?” I said.

“This is going to be an expensive trip, Rutledge, but not for us. The question is, do I let the engine run itself to death?”

“If it really lets go, could it damage the wing?” I said.

“Probably not,” he said, “but we’ll be okay if I shut it down to save it.”

We started a slow climb. “Altitude is our friend,” he said, “just in case the other engine quits, and have to glide toward shore.” He called Miami Central to request 12,000 feet.

I let him concentrate. He feathered his prop, shut down the port engine, then switched frequencies and identified himself to Sarasota-Bradenton. “We’ll be coming in with only one engine on line,” he said. “Two aboard. I don’t foresee a problem.”

The tower came back: “We’ll keep an eye on you. Consider RSW, Fort Myers.”

“I have it dialed in, thank you,” said Sherwin.

“What’s that, a rescue service?” I said. “Are they going into emergency mode?”

“Southwest Florida International Airport,” he said. “RSW is their identifier.”

“How far away?”

“We’ll fly within twenty miles of it,” said Sherwin, “but Sarasota’s only another forty-five from there. There’s also a smaller airport, Page Field, in Fort Myers, which they should have told me about first.”

“You think anyone could have monkeyed with the motor or…”

“No,” said Sherwin. “We can’t be thinking like that. It’s a minor stroke of shit luck, that’s all. A little extra work for the hired help.”

He showed that work by the shifting in his seat, using his rudder pedals to hold our course, to control yaw, the pull to one side. “This can’t be right,” he said. “I’m seeing the same movement on the starboard engine’s gauges. Temps up, pressure down, but not as bad as the port side engine.”

“And it’s not a gauge malfunction?” I said.

“I don’t know… No, no,” he said.

“Do we want altitude now?” I said, “or do we want to turn toward land?”

“Oh, umm, land… but I don’t think I’m shutting down that right engine.”

I sensed his absorption of our situation, his mind hurrying to sift the chances of a gauge malfunction versus the loss of both engines. He eased our heading eastward but his mouth hung ajar as if his brain had shut down with the port side engine.

“Life jackets aboard?” I said.

“Right behind your seat. There should be four inflatables.”

I reached to pull out all four. No harm in doubling up the Day-Glo orange. “How about safety pamphlets or procedures to review?”

Sherwin pulled a sheaf of photocopied pages from the back of his log book. “I’ve got to pay attention. Can you read this to yourself and tell me what pertains?”

I skimmed the printout titled
Offshore Ditching Procedures
. Its intro paragraph gave basic stats on survival, facts meant, I supposed, to be encouraging. Odds were better in a high-wing airplane. Not us, so I had no need to share that with Sherwin. The 82 percent survival rate of blue-water ditching rose to 88 percent in coastal and inshore waters. Comforting.

“We can survive a splash landing,” I said, “but we could die trying to reach land and save the plane. What’s our stall speed?”

“Right at 90 miles per hour,”said Sherwin. “If we crapped out, I’d add twenty to that until I saw the beach. Read me some more from those pages.”

“Best to touch down into the wind and parallel to swells,” I said, reading almost word for word. “Most airplanes don’t flip, but dig in one wing, turn and settle upright or settle straight ahead with a bit of nose under the surface. Once in the water, stick with something big and visible. Search and Rescue can’t see swimmers. Don’t inflate your vest until you’re outside the plane. If you can see land from down in the water, swimming for it is okay.”

“I’ll race you to the beach,” he said.

“Unless there’s a coastal rip,” I said. “Does this plane have an automatic EPIRB?”

“It’s called an ELT, an Emergency Locator Transmitter. It sends out an automatic 406 MHz beacon to GEOSAR.”

The plane twisted right. I felt a surge, then heard a deep, crunching vibration. A rush of wind replaced the throbbing engine that had hauled us to altitude.

Sherwin spoke the obvious. “We just lost starboard.” He pushed forward on his yoke, aimed us downward for about fifteen seconds, played it like a stall to ensure we could hold airspeed, then raised the nose to a glide angle.

“Will your port side restart?”

He checked his gauges, shook his head. “The temps are higher than when I shut it down. Right now it wouldn’t last two minutes. I’ll try it when we’re closer to land.” He punched buttons under the radio and keyed his mike. “SRQ, zero-six-foxtrot-foxtrot with both engines gone, squawking seven-seven-zero-zero.”

“Roger, Foxtrot. Do you have enough electrical power to stay with us?”

Sherwin said, “Affirmative.”

“Redirect to Page Field, FMY, sir. Glide flaps up. Vector zero-seven-two, range twenty-two miles.” SRQ closed out by giving us the FMY tower frequency.

“Thank you,” said Sherwin. He switched his radio transmitter, checked in with Page Field and repeated his emergency status info.

The FMY tower came back, “We have your squawk, sir. Vector zero-seven-three, range twenty miles.”

We stopped talking. Sherwin worked to streamline the fuselage, to monitor his rate of descent as the aircraft crept closer to the coast. I peered at the seawater of different colors and depths, different temperatures, and tried to judge the height of waves. It was essentially the same water I had looked into behind the Hogfish Grill three days earlier. I had watched fish glide under the liquid shimmer, bugs skate across the surface. This time it was no different than a sheet of concrete to the horizon, ready to claw and shred the King Air like a massive cheese grater. And I would bounce against hard objects inside the craft, not caring, technically dead long before I became liquid and part of the sea. It sure would end my career in crime photography, but it was a screwed-up way to do it.

What had Liska called it? A quick adiós.

On the chance that I was riding the 80 percent survival rate, that I wouldn’t be crumpled like an old banana skin, I pulled the unused Ziploc bag from my pocket. I borrowed a pen from Sherwin’s notebook, scribbled a note, stuck it in my wallet and stuck the wallet, my house keys and my cell phone in the plastic bag. There was no room for my small camera, a replaceable item, but I tucked its memory card into my wallet. I had to loosen the belt to stuff the bag into my Levi’s front pockets. It would’ve been easier with cargo shorts, but I succeeded.

I had placed, in effect, all my valuables in the same cabinet.

I went back six days in my mind. Was this Pepe’s bar nude sending me away? Or some payback from the past that I hadn’t seen coming? That lovely young woman I left with one last look when I reported aboard ship for a four-month Navy deployment? Square away, sailor, I thought. If there was a time to get spiritual, it’s a little damned late. More important were lessons I had learned in the damage control school’s USS Buttercup or the Navy’s helo-dump tank. Make a mental list of survival techniques, escape procedures, methods to draw rescue. If you’re underwater, follow the bubbles. Work as a team and, if that’s impossible, get your teammate out when you go.

“Isn’t it amazing how few Harleys and sirens you hear up here?” said Sherwin. “Right now I could really use that road map that you mentioned.”

I glanced sideways. Sherwin looked almost too calm, and for some reason the odd timing of his remark took me back to my photo job for Malcolm Mason, my pictures of the boat that sank and was salvaged. The boat owner, in spite of his experience, had panicked and drowned. His passengers kept their calm, lashed together all the wreckage that floated to the surface, and made themselves a raft of trash.

One survivor had said the boat owner’s last words were,
“I can’t think of what to do next.”

I caught the familiar smell of the salt water below us, for the first time in my life a worrisome odor. We were closer to the beach or to death. Then came a waft of body odor from the pilot’s seat and a stink that told me Sherwin had pissed himself.

He ignored his drainage issue and asked me to swap headsets. “They’re going to fire questions at me, but I need to pay attention to my airspeed. Press this button if you want to talk to me without them hearing you.”

I heard: “Foxtrot-foxtrot, this is FMY. We have you heading zero-six-five at 900 feet. Please confirm.”

“That’s us,” I said.

“You are cleared to land at FMY, runway five, elevation thirteen, wind zero-eight-zero at ten. Emergency crews standing by.”

I said, “Thank you.”

“I don’t like that,” said Sherwin. “I’ve gone into Page Field a few times. We have Cape Coral on our left and Ft. Myers on the right. We have to clear some condos on approach.”

FMY Tower came back about ninety seconds later. “We have a King Air 90 pilot in the tower. Calculating your airspeed and rate of descent, you will not reach Page Field. We have alerted the Cape Coral Marine Rescue Unit and Lee County Sheriff. They are clearing the Caloosahatchee River of all recreational boat traffic.”

“Got that,” I said. “We have the river mouth in sight.”

“Lay it down easy, sir.”

Sherwin ran through an abbreviated landing list. “Undercarriage, seat belts,” he said. “Is your belt tight?”

I checked. “Yes.”

“Make it tighter, as tight as you can stand,” said Sherwin. “Will you join me in asking for a blessing from God?”

“I’d rather just have you steer.”

“I want to copy the Hudson River guy,” said Rodney. “I can’t think of his name. Every pilot in the world knows his name, and I can’t think of it when it might inspire me. I think it starts with an E.”

He wagged the wings, leaned to the right, then to the left. Was he checking how much control he still had? What if he discovered how little he had while we were leaning over? We’d be mincemeat if we cartwheeled or did a nose-over flip.

I glanced once again at his profile, trying not to stare. His indecision showed in his jaw movements and his squinting right eye. He was committed to a fast-moving event but baffled by it.

“His name starts with an S,” I said, “but it isn’t coming through to me, either.”

“Right you are, and it’s a long name,” said Sherwin.

“It’ll come to us, Rodney. Right now think about a plain old belly flop. You want to be level as a pool table. You want to put it on the water like you’re landing on soft-boiled eggs.”

The last thing I heard in the headset was faint as if the man speaking from the tower wished he didn’t have to say it: “We have lost radar contact.”