The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  I took a step back, tripped over something, and almost went down.

  “Be careful.” Jack directed the light down to my feet. It was a box I’d stumbled over. He moved the beam back to the workbench, so I used my own light to see what it was. I picked up an in-flight magazine out of the box and held it under one of the lamps.

  “Jack, look at this.”

  He turned, caught sight of the cover, and stared at it.

  “Look at the date,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything, but in the silence I heard his breathing slow down. He swung around and tried to use his flashlight to sweep the hangar behind us. It was useless. The beam was feeble against the overpowering space.

  “I’m going to find a light switch for the overheads.”

  “Are you sure that’s smart?”

  “I’m sure it’s not, but I can’t think of what else to do.” He used the flashlight to check his watch. “We should still have over an hour before that car comes around. I’m not leaving until we know what’s going on in here, and we’re not going to figure it out one lamp at a time. I’ll flip it right off again.”

  As he moved away, I followed his progress in the dark by the light in his hand and listened to him carefully picking his way forward.

  It took a long time. While I waited, I tried to make out the dark shapes that were all around, towering above me, and crowded into the back of the hangar. Some were as tall as the high windows along the ceiling. The longer I waited, the more my skin prickled. I rubbed my arms and felt the goose bumps forming. I came away with black paint on both my sweaty palms. I tried to wipe it off on my stiff jeans.

  “Found it,” Jack said. And the lights went on—overhead lights blazing so brightly and so suddenly, my eyes squeezed themselves shut.

  But not before I’d seen it. Not before I’d seen enough to make me afraid to open them again.

  I did it in degrees, looking first at the small space around me just to get oriented. Then I broadened my scope, looking up and out.

  The first thing that registered was the tail because it was the least damaged and most recognizable piece of the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of airplane parts that lay spread on the concrete all around me. Except for the odd angle at which it was tipped, and the fact that there was no fuselage attached to it, the tail appeared as it must have the day the airplane had rolled out of the factory for the last time. That would have been the day Air Sentinel had taken delivery, because that’s whose logo was emblazoned across the stabilizer. And that’s whose in-flight magazine we’d found in the box. It was from January, the month of the accident in Ecuador.

  I did a complete 360, and what I saw literally sucked the air out of my lungs. It was what looked like the entire aircraft in pieces. Broken pieces. Ripped and cracked and scorched and shredded pieces. Enormous structures and assemblies ripped apart with the force… well, with the force of a jet flying into a mountain.

  I looked across the hangar at Jack. He didn’t say anything, but the lights stayed on. He was probably, like me, too stunned to move. I started moving toward him.

  Close to the front of the hangar where the two of us were standing, the parts were more or less organized into groups. Seats all together along one of the walls. A group of boxes that all had cables poking out. Sheet metal stacked on end in racks. One of the massive engines was mounted on a base of some kind. Pieces of it were scattered around it in boxes, on more workbenches, and on the ground.

  Then there were the cosmetic pieces, some of which, like the tail and the in-flight magazines, looked eerily undisturbed. Carpeted bulkheads, first-class leather seats, tray tables, laminated safety cards. I could see them here and there, interspersed with severed cables and frayed insulation, smashed fuses and electronic components, valves, cylinders, and huge slabs of bent and twisted aluminum skin. It was like seeing a jumble of body parts—a face next to a ruptured kidney, or a couple of manicured hands lying next to a shattered spine and a broken fibula.

  Toward the back, the parts were less organized. They were thrown together in a large jumble as if some massive force had lifted them off that mountain in Ecuador and flung them across the continents until they hit the back wall of this hangar and came to rest, piled at odd angles, almost to the ceiling.

  There was also that strong smell. Aviation fuel and grease and something decaying and rotten, and I started thinking about the bodies and the blood and the tissue—the people who had been in this accident, and what such a catastrophic force had done to them. My mouth began to water, and fill with the taste of something sour coming up the back of my throat.

  “This is the accident aircraft,” I said, just to see what it sounded like out loud. “This is the wreckage from Ecuador.”

  “It’s the Triple Seven that goes with your logbook,” he said.

  “What is it doing here?”

  “I don’t know how, but Jimmy must have stolen it.”

  I looked around, trying to process Jack’s statement. Some of the parts were gigantic. Besides the tail and the engines, there was a large slab of wing, and what looked like the landing gear. “How do you figure he did that, Jack?” It seemed impossible to me.

  “Maybe he stole it from the company that salvaged it. Maybe he bought it from them out the back door.” He shrugged. “Maybe he took it off the side of the mountain himself.”

  “How does a private U.S. citizen get access to a crash site in South America? How would he get up the mountainside ahead of the authorities, whoever they may be, and cart off an entire airplane? Where does he get the equipment? How does he even know there’s a crash?”

  “I don’t know the how.” Jack nodded toward the worktable where we’d seen the soldering equipment. “But I know the why.”

  And that’s the moment when it all came together for me. I took a step back, and then another, as if another few feet of space and distance might make it easier to comprehend the incomprehensible. What was even more overwhelming than the sheer volume of parts and the magnitude of whatever operation had to have been mounted to bring it all here was the notion that these parts, bent and broken and burned, were being readied to go back into the inventories of active commercial aircraft.

  Jack stood shaking his head with an expression bordering on admiration. “Fucking Jimmy. He’s got balls. I have to give him that.”

  The unmistakable sound of a slamming car door cut through the thick silence in the hangar. I looked at Jack just as the second slam sounded.

  “Go. Go,” he hissed. “Go.”

  He pushed me back in the direction we had come and followed right behind me. The lights were on this time, which made it easier, but it was still dangerous to maneuver through the obstacle course of dense coils, sharp edges, hanging cables, and cardboard boxes.

  The walls began to rattle and a dull rumble filled the hangar as the big doors opened. If there had been a warning—the sound of an engine or the tires rolling over cracked pavement—we had been too insulated, too stunned, or too far away to hear. And now it was too late. I looked up at the plywood bathroom door where we had come through. So close. We weren’t going to make it. If we were going to use the noise of the rumbling door as cover, we had to do it fast.

  My instinct was to drop to the floor. From there I saw Jack lunge toward a piece of the wing leaning up against the wall. It offered good cover if he could narrow himself enough to wedge in. The door was open and I could hear voices. I went all the way down, flattening myself to the ground, flashlight in hand. My jeans protected my legs, but I could feel on my bare arms that the cement floor was stained with grease, and thick with the dust and grit and God knows what else that had settled in it. It was also cold, probably because my skin felt feverishly hot.

  I didn’t dare lift my head. I turned it as far as it would go, which meant one ear was pinned to the ground. I was glad I hadn’t worn earrings. I spotted a large piece of scorched sheet metal that had enough of a bow shape that I thought I could crawl under. I s
tarted toward it, inching on my stomach, stopping every few seconds to remind myself to breathe and to listen. Whoever was out there was loitering toward the front of the hangar. There were two different voices.

  The edges of the sheet metal were as sharp as German kitchen knives. Once in, I didn’t know if I could get out unscathed, but I had no time to go anywhere else. I stuck my head in and tried to angle my shoulders through. It was a very tight fit, and the sharp ragged edges kept catching my shirt.

  They were coming toward the back, toward us, rummaging along the way. The voices were getting louder. I wriggled out and flipped over on my back. I used my hands to keep the jagged edge away and was able to squirm quietly into the hiding place. It was dark inside, and the air was close. I stuck the flashlight into my waistband. It was uncomfortable, pressing against my pelvic bone, but I didn’t want it rolling away at the wrong time, and I wanted both hands free. I could see through a ten-inch hooded gap where the sheet metal didn’t quite touch the ground. Hopefully, I was back far enough that no one could see my blackened face there.

  It took a long time for the two of them to cross the distance from the front of the warehouse because they were picking their way through the parts field, stopping every now and then to rummage around in the pieces of the aircraft.

  I picked out the voices. One was deep and mellifluous. I pictured him as a big man with a barrel chest and a wide mouth. Like a bass. The second man’s voice was thinner and grainier. He sounded like a tall, reedy smoker. They were getting close enough that I could begin to understand what they were saying.

  “…shit, man… believe this… what kind of…” That was Wide Mouth. His voice was louder and easier to hear. I couldn’t understand everything he was saying, but from his excited and breathless delivery, my impression was he was seeing this stash for the first time.

  I listened through every pore in my skin, trying to make out the words and put them together. “Take whatever you want…” said Reedy Man. “…you got it.”

  “I might… some of them seats over there—” Wide Mouth was getting closer—“because I can sell them on the Internet. Put them up on one of them auction sites. I read an article the other day that told how some fool bought some B727 seats for six hundred dollars on eBay, some that weren’t even in no crash.”

  “Whatever you take…” Reedy Man sounded exasperated. “…can’t tell anyone where it’s… fucking Feds…”

  “Well, shit, Jimmy. That’s what makes them worth anything at all.”

  Jimmy? A drop of sweat trickled off my forehead and ran back into my hair. It felt like an ant crawling across my scalp. That was Wide Mouth talking which meant Reedy Man was Jimmy Zacharias. Knowing that changed the atmosphere, made the air more combustible. I wondered what Jack was thinking.

  “Then pick something else, something you can sell straight up.” Knowing it was Jimmy made him sound different, more menacing.

  “You’ll throw in all the paperwork?”

  “Hurry up. They’re going to be coming back soon. Fucking assholes left the lights on again.”

  One of them moved something that made my metal cover rattle. A jolt shimmered from the top of my head right on down my spine. They were that close? Of course they were close. If I could hear him that clearly, they were very close. There was more movement and someone’s leather Timberland boot appeared next to my face. Close enough that I could smell the sweaty leather.

  I stopped breathing and closed my eyes and concentrated every thought on being somewhere else. I pictured myself floating on a river in a tube on clear, cool water under a brazen blue sky. When someone started moving things around over my head, I tried to float along and relax my muscles and my brain and let the tension flow out.

  Then it got worse.

  The instant I heard the nails clicking across the concrete, I knew Bull was coming. He must have been out doing his business before, but he was there now. He didn’t seem to be coming for us—his trot wasn’t intent enough—but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t pick up the scent any second. I felt all the air go out of my hiding place. I imagined the grease on the ground as a pool of my blood, blood that would gush from my throat after Bull had ripped it out.

  “I reckon I’d be better off with some of them smaller components up front.” Wide Mouth was moving away. I heard him leaving, and then the boot—it must have been Jimmy’s—started away as well. But the dog didn’t. I heard him again. His gait was more purposeful. I imagined his nose to the greasy cement. I imagined him picking up the scent. I held my stomach muscles tight to keep from shaking.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Wide Mouth asked.

  “He likes to scrape around in there for the rats. That pile is mostly cabin parts and it’s crawling with them because of the dried blood and skin and shit. He’s going to get hurt. Bull, get out of there.”

  No way. He came closer, his four paws dancing in primal anticipation. I couldn’t see his head, but I heard his excited yelping.

  “BULL!”

  Bull was down on his stomach, his snout to the pavement, snuffling forward, trying to make himself flat enough to crawl under a piece of fuselage that was between him and me. It was me he smelled. It was my uninvited presence he sensed, and he looked as if he would chew through solid steel to get to me.

  Jimmy jerked him back hard. The dog’s squeal was pained and high pitched. “It’s nothing but rats!” he yelled. “I told you that. You go in there you’re going to get cut. Go on outside.”

  Bull was down on the floor heaving with all his strength against Jimmy’s restraining hand. He did a frantic visual sweep, snout low to the ground. Just before Jimmy yanked him up by the neck, his eyes locked on mine. He went insane, and all I could think about was his powerful jaws closed around my throat.

  Wide Mouth shouted. “Maybe there’s something in there.”

  Bull bared his teeth and thrust his slobbering face toward mine. I could smell his breath. It took every ounce of concentration not to jerk away from him. Jimmy struggled for control, and I prayed he could find it. I could see Bull’s hind legs as he leaped and yelped and tried to twist away. My arms were going to sleep at my side, the flashlight was pressed so far into my stomach I could feel it in my backbone, and I hadn’t breathed in so long I was about to pass out. And if he found me, I didn’t want to be lying there like a dead fish with arms that wouldn’t work.

  I used the cover of Bull’s racket to bring one hand up from my side. That worked out okay. When I brought the other one up, my shoulder brushed my metal shelter, which caused something else to shift. Jimmy must have clamped his hand across Bull’s snout and held his mouth shut. The dog held still and made the only noise he could, which was a sore, pinched whine. Jimmy kneeled down on one knee and started to lean over. But it took him a second because his big dog occupied both of his hands. I saw his knee come down. I wrapped my hand around the flashlight, the only weapon I had. I saw his hand touch the ground. I pictured him leaning down, but in that last second, something—a blur, a solid mass—skittered past my face. When it crossed my line of sight, a cold-shot went straight through me.

  It was a rat. A huge furry rat with tiny eyes, a long tail, and a pointy nose. It made a dash out from under my metal umbrella. It must have been mighty disoriented because that was also toward the crazed canine. It scampered right over Jimmy’s hand. The thought of those rat claws crawling over bare skin made my shoulders shake and my jaw clamp and both my hands curl into fists without any conscious direction from my brain.

  Jimmy wasn’t taking it well, either. When he spotted the rodent coming straight toward his face, it startled him enough that he stumbled backwards and landed on his butt.

  “Goddamn motherfucker,” he yelled.

  When Bull spotted the rat, he jerked away from Jimmy and took off, following the rodent to another part of the hangar.

  I heard Wide Mouth rushing over. “Look at the size of that thing.”

  “What the fuck, Jimmy? What are y
ou doing here?” That was… that wasn’t the voice of either one of them. It was a new voice, a third voice coming through the door, and right behind it the sound of two more car doors slamming. “Get the fucking dog in the car, now.”

  Jimmy stood up. He and Wide Mouth moved away, talking the whole time. Jimmy was calling for Bull. I heard a lot of raised voices, but outside the hangar and too far away to hear what they were saying. Whoever had just arrived was very angry.

  I heard all the sounds in reverse. The lights snapped off. The walls rattled again as someone pulled the big door shut and locked it. It sounded like a chain and a padlock. The voices faded out, and it was suddenly, blessedly quiet enough that I thought I could hear my own heart beating.

  I wanted to cry from the release of the brain-boiling tension that had built up inside. A lot of good that would do. Instead, I took in many big breaths, unballed my fists, flexed my fingers, and kept my eyes peeled for more rats. It wouldn’t be good to get startled again.

  I don’t know how much time passed before I heard Jack’s voice somewhere close by. “Alex.”

  “Over here.” I started to crawl out and snagged my shirt on the lip of the metal sheet. He reached down and carefully lifted my protective armor just enough that I could scramble out. The dimness felt comfortable, like an invisible force field.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  I didn’t know, but I nodded yes. It was more for myself since he couldn’t see it.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  I followed him out the way we’d come, through the window and back over the fence, grabbing the floor mats as we went. This time as I crossed the field, I was less picky about where I put my feet as long as it was one in front of the other. I kept thinking about Bull, about the way he’d chased me before, and I kept looking back for him. As we moved into the trees, we had to slow down, but we still made enough of a disturbance to agitate the wildlife.

  The return trip from the hangar seemed a lot faster than the trip in, but then we ran full speed all the way back. The car loomed ahead sooner than I expected. We were going to make it. We were going to crawl out of the swamp and back into civilization and take showers and wash the grease and the grit and the dog’s slobber off and feel human again.