The Third Rule Of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (30 page)

“I understand.”

“I wish you woulda told me earlier, man.”

“I’m sorry.”

Finally, I called Heather and recounted my run-in with Bets at County-USC, just in case it came up.

“What the hell were you thinking?” she said. “Do you know how much trouble I could be in?” Then she said, “Wait, are you telling me you were working for her? For Bets frigging McMurtry? And you didn’t let me know?” I could practically hear her teeth gnashing.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m never ever talking to you about work stuff again.”

“I understand.”

I didn’t bother calling Mike (asleep), or Cielo (trouble). I trudged into my house exhausted and embarrassed, my shoulders bowed under the weight of all my missteps and apologies. Tank met me at the door.

“Looks like it’s just you and me, Tank,” I said. I spooned a can of food into his bowl. Then I sent myself to bed without supper.

C
HAPTER
18

But the next day found me hunkered down in the Shelby with my binoculars, my camera, and a large cup, listening on the radio to a KNX 1070 news report on none other than Tea Party darling Bets McMurtry. According to the newscaster, the assemblywoman had checked into the hospital overnight for some routine tests but was absolutely fine and back on the fund-raising trail for her causes. I could confirm that information, because at that very moment I was looking through my binoculars at the candidate herself. She and Goodhue had stepped out of the J.W. Marriot downtown, where KNX told me Bets had just delivered a rousing speech to a herd of hedge-fund managers.

I’m sure they loved her.

Bets, her larger-than-life, red-rimmed sunglasses shielding her face, climbed into the front passenger seat of Mark Goodhue’s Mercedes, which I had followed from the Aon two hours earlier. I’d been parked downtown since 7
A.M.
What can I say? I had woken up with lots of free time on my hands and a gigantic flea bite to scratch.

Goodhue was the only route left to the flea.

I didn’t have Bill. I didn’t have Clancy. I didn’t even have Heather, not really. But I did have my intuition, my determination, misguided though it might be, and $93,000 dollars left in the fund willed to me by Julius Rosen, who represented the real beginning of the Chaco Morales tale. I hoped it was enough.

The Mercedes swerved out of the hotel parking lot. I could see the two occupants having what looked like a heated conversation in the front seat. Good. As long as they were fighting, they wouldn’t pay any attention to me and my yellow Mustang, trailing a few cars behind them. As soon as we merged onto the 105, I knew. Bets was about to become airborne again. This time, I was determined to follow her all the way to her destination.

I ignored the heart palpitations, letting me know I hadn’t addressed my recently acquired fear of flying in toy planes or any other small aircraft.

I skirted around the cavernous pothole, now marked by traffic cones. It was even deeper, if that was possible. Two blocks on, the Hawthorne airport looked as innocuous and unobtrusive as the last time I paid it a visit. The diner was quiet, the parking lot virtually empty. I circled the block and reclaimed my previous surveillance post, keeping watch as Goodhue continued past the entrance. Now what? He drove along the fenced perimeter, continuing past three large helicopters lined up in a row, and pulled into the private parking area of a small building next to the control tower. Goodhue helped Bets out of the car, and both disappeared through the door.

I started my car and circled the large block surrounding the airport. I lucked out. There was a commuter parking area directly across from the tower. I claimed a good space, facing the airport. I zoomed in on the building across the road from me and found the name of the business, etched in glass on the front door.

Oh, no. No, no, no.

The sign on the door said:

PREMIER CHARTERS

H
ELICOPTER
C
HARTER
S
OLUTIONS SINCE
1989

I sat for a few minutes, hoping I was mistaken. Watched as McMurtry and Goodhue stepped out the backdoor of the building and slowly crossed the tarmac toward the metallic flying impossibility awaiting them. Goodhue and another man—the pilot, I assumed—helped Bets into the creature’s stomach.

You don’t have to do this, Tenzing.

The last time I was this close to a helicopter, there was a crazed man inside, aiming a gun at my head. Which felt safer than the last and only time I was inside one. We had just landed, if you could call it that. I was in pursuit of the same crazed man when the giant iron insect dangled precariously off one side of a precipice, holding on by one thin strut. I bailed out immediately. Since then, my healthy discomfort about flying in anything dependent on rotary blades had deepened into what I considered a completely rational terror.

I aimed my binoculars at the chopper. The body was cream-colored, the dark blue undercarriage striped in white, turquoise, yellow, and red. With its twin engines and dual rotors—large blades overhead, small ones at the tail—the machinery seemed sturdy enough, but my innards weren’t fooled.

“Fear,” I announced out loud.
No doubt about it this time, Lama Yeshe. My belly is one big ball of fear.

The front and back rotors whirred to life, quickly accelerating into a blur of blades. The helicopter rose, hovered for a few moments like a hummingbird, and then angled up, up, and away. I pulled on my windbreaker and packed my weapon of choice—the final wad of bills from my Julius Rosen Memorial Petty Cash Stash. Chaco’s three-step route to the top echoed in my brain: bribes, bribes, and bribes. Like a martial arts master, I would now turn Chaco’s best offensive move against him.

I crossed the road after checking both sides for oncoming traffic, though getting hit by a car might be preferable to what lay ahead. I entered the office of Premier Charters. The décor was ‘coptor-centric, with several framed aerial photographs of Los Angeles on the walls and a small tin helicopter dangling from the ceiling like a toy bug. I counted two small offices to the left and a fridge and coffee maker to the right. A hidden speaker blared an old Doors song, “Riders on the Storm,” which I recognized because Valerie, my mother, played it incessantly when I was a child.

Maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe Premier Charters owned only one of the choppers outside. I approached the counter, where a young, bouncy blonde, her hair streaked with purple, peered at a computer screen as her jaws worked a wad of gum.

“Good afternoon? Can I help you? I’m Amber?” she chirped, in that adolescent singsong that lifts every statement into a question. She reached under the counter to lower the volume of Jim Morrison’s wail.

“Yes,” I said. “How do I go about finding out where that helicopter is going?”

Instead of eyeing me with suspicion, hers widened with excitement. “Omigod, I knew it, I knew that was her. Are you the paparazzi?” She removed her gum and looked around for somewhere to stash it, settling on folding it inside a glossy tourist brochure.

Rather than answer, I smiled mysteriously. She was free to interpret in any way she wished. What I did say was, “Did you know that paparazzi pay real cash for good tips?”

She looked around, although we were the only two people there. “I think I may have heard that? Like, with TMZ?”

Chaco’s tutelage aside, I’ve traveled in and out of India most of my life, so bribery has been a necessary evil. In any case, it didn’t take a black belt in Green Fu to melt this girl’s heart. I slid two Benjamins across the counter. She picked them up, her expression reverent.

“This is my first time,” she said, fingering the $100 bills. “We’ve never had paparazzi here before.”

I waited. I didn’t want to sully the purity of the moment for her.

“Right,” she said, suddenly officious. “So, do you just want the coordinates, or would you prefer to charter your own helicopter?”

My vocal chords tightened. “You have more than one?”

“Oh, yes, we have three helicopters? They’re all AW109’s? Two for passengers, one for rescues?”

She pecked on the computer and squinted at the screen. “Sam’s available right now?”

This was good news for my case and disastrous news for my equilibrium. I inhaled deeply and let my breath out slowly. “How much to follow that other helicopter?”

More pecking, more squinting. “That will be, well, about five hours total? Round trip? Two down, the same coming back, plus you pay for wait-time if he sits there longer than fifteen minutes?” She tapped a few keys and said, “Okay, um, seven thousand. Do you want me to book it for you?”

I shuddered at the thought, and the cost, but I did.

I gave her my credit card, which had recently been bumped up to a $30,000 limit, as if the powers that be had learned about my new nest egg, even though my savings account was with a different bank. I wouldn’t put it past them.

She ran the card, which didn’t burst into flames at the unusually high charge. Then she turned away and had a quick conversation on her office phone, her cheeks pink from all the excitement. Within moments, a helicopter pilot with hair the color of a raw carrot emerged from one of the small side offices and strode directly outside to one of the remaining parked choppers. He disappeared inside.

Amber passed over a form to fill out. “For the passenger manifesto?” She opened one hand. “Passport, please?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I need your passport,” she said. “For coming back?”

“Coming back?” I was starting to sound like her.

“Across the border? You’re going to Mexico?”

Well, shit on a stick, as Bets would say.

I peeled off eight more $100 bills. “I, um, I forgot my passport? But I think I can get a copy of it sent here?”

She nodded. She understood me perfectly.

I filled out the information.

An hour later, I was strapping myself into a luxurious leather passenger seat the same rich cream color as the helicopter. As Bill likes to say, all systems were go, once I had managed to rouse Mike from bed so he could e-mail Amber a PDF of my passport. Luckily I’d sent a color scan of it to him, photo included, for safekeeping when I traveled to India to be with my father. At Mike’s urging. Now I owed him two favors.

I was seated directly behind Pilot Sam. He turned from the blinking electronic console. “Buckled up? Ready?”

I nodded. Another lie. My stomach was telling me the opposite. Many things in nature have wings on them, from pesky mosquitoes to majestic eagles. But as far as I know, nature has yet to evolve a creature, hummingbird aside, with a spinning object on its head that propels it straight upward, turning the whole flying deal into something completely unnatural. To my primitive mind, anything that rises straight up is equally capable of returning to earth in a vertical plummet. I’ve been told that helicopters don’t drop like a bowling ball if the engine quits, but then, I’ve been told a lot of things that turned out to be dead wrong.

Sam motioned for me to put on the aviation headset lying on the empty seat next to me. Ever since I’d lined his pockets with an extra $500, he was Mr. Share-the-Helicopter-Love. My plump earphones crackled to life as Sam exchanged takeoff chatter with the tiny control tower. He goosed the engine, and we lifted off, smoothly enough. Despite that fact, my stomach flipped over, registering the unlikely defiance of gravity. We banked left, and I attempted slow, steady breaths, trying to reunite with the bottom third of my stomach, the part that was pretending I was still on the ground.

“Off we go,” Sam said.

I opted for silence.

We pulled out of the L.A. haze and headed a few miles offshore. Then Sam banked left again and took us southward, hugging the coastline. I popped two pieces of spearmint gum in my mouth, a parting gift from Amber, and focused on chewing and counting breaths. My single goal was to keep the choppy waves of anxiety from turning into an embarrassing mini-tsunami. Just in case, I had mapped out the location of the white barf bag tucked into a compartment under my seat.

After 35 grim minutes we alighted on a runway just north of the main Tijuana International Airport Terminal. Sam did a little of this and that, before turning to me.

“Wait here,” he said.

I waited. He was in and out of an official-looking customs building in about five minutes.

“That was fast,” I said.

“General Aviation Building. These guys know us well. They approve of our job: ferrying rich tourists to Mexico to spend
mucho dinero
. By the way, anybody asks, you’re going fishing in Baja for the day. Like they do.” He chuckled to himself, an inside joke.

“Okay, then,” I said. “I’m going fishing.” It wasn’t untrue.

After I’d done another hour of white-knuckle battle with my dread, I saw Sam murmur into his mouthpiece. He leaned right, as if to check on something outside. He turned to me and pointed to his headset. I put mine on and heard, “There’s Jack, our other pilot, coming back. He wants to know where I’m going.”

Just then, our twin flew past us, some distance away and a half-mile or so closer to land. Sam answered my concerns before I could express them. “Don’t worry. I got this covered.”

He switched to a different frequency to have a private conversation. Then he was back. “Jack says good luck.”

“Good luck?”

“With the fishing.”

The flight stabilized slightly, along with my stomach, as we moved farther inward, chopping our way south down the western peninsula of Baja California. The signs of civilization, from housing to smog to green irrigated fields, fell away, replaced by a dry landscape dotted with gnarled creosote and the occasional cactus, arms up as if imploring the cloudless sky for rain. We passed a tiny village. Then, nothing. No wonder Sam chuckled about our fishing expedition. We had crossed into a waterless land.

Soon, I’d have some answers.

I was curious. “How far south of the border are we now?”

Sam glanced at the GPS coordinates and punched a button. “A couple hundred kilometers, maybe?”

The helicopter slowed its course, and Sam’s voice was loud in my ears. “Getting close. We should be there in about ten more minutes.”