by Stuart Woods
A teenaged boy ran out of the building and asked what would be his pleasure.
“Actually, I just rented the car, so I don’t need any gas yet,” Igor replied. “What I could use is a little information.”
“What kind of information, sir?”
“A couple of friends of mine passed through here last week, and I’m trying to find them. They were driving a black Lincoln Navigator. Have you seen anybody like that?”
“No, sir, but I only work after school. If they came by here before that, I wouldn’t have seen them.”
“Who would have been working here while you were in school?”
“Last week? That would be Billy Burnett.”
“May I speak with him?”
“I’m afraid he moved on at the end of last week. He was only here for, I don’t know, two or three weeks. He was helping us out while my uncle, Tom Fields, the owner of the place, was taking care of his wife.”
“Do you know where Billy Burnett moved on to?”
“I don’t know. Uncle Tom said he just got in his airplane and flew away.”
“What kind of airplane did he fly?”
“When he got here he had a nice Cessna 182 RG, but he swapped it with a feller for a like-new Piper Malibu that had a turboprop conversion.”
“You remember his tail number?”
“November one, two, three, tango, foxtrot.”
“What’s your name, son?”
“Bobby.”
“You’re a bright boy, Bobby, and I appreciate your help. Where’d Billy take off from? Gallup?”
“No, sir, we got an airstrip behind the buildings, here.”
“Do you mind showing me?”
“No, sir. Come on.” The boy led him through a workshop, and Igor saw a backhoe and a forklift through a door leading to the next building.
Out back there was, in fact, an airstrip, with a windsock and a fuel tank marked 100LL. An old Stearman biplane was tied down at one end. “You mind if I take a stroll around?” Igor asked the boy.
“No, sir, but I gotta get back out front, in case somebody wants gas.”
“You go ahead,” Igor said. “I won’t get lost.” The boy ran back through the shop, and Igor unfolded the printouts of the GPS tracking. He located his position behind the buildings, then he began walking, checking the printout now and then, following the dotted line that led, first east, then north into what appeared to be a solid forest of piñon trees, none of them more than about six or eight feet high. But they weren’t all that close together, and there was room for a big car to drive among them.
He checked his bearings and walked into the trees on a path approximating the dotted line, and a couple hundred yards later, he came to a clearing. He looked around for tire tracks but saw none. There had been a big line of thunderstorms through here last week, he remembered, because they had come through Phoenix, too, then gone on into Texas. A hard rain would have obliterated tire tracks. Then he saw something that interested him.
A few yards into the clearing he came to a slight indentation in the earth, and it was rectangular—about eight feet wide and twenty feet long. It was as if a large hole had been dug, then filled in again, then the dirt had settled. He thought about what that might mean, and he wished he had a metal detector.
“Something I can help you with?” a voice behind him said. Igor turned to find a man of about sixty standing behind him.
“Good day to you,” Igor said. “You must be Mr. Tom Fields.”
“I am.”
“Your nephew was showing me your airstrip, and I just took a little stroll.”
Fields nodded at the papers in his hand. “You looking for something out here?”
“I’m looking for a couple of friends of mine who passed through here last week, driving a black Lincoln Navigator. Did you by any chance see or talk to them?”
Fields shook his head. “No, I was home with my sick wife most of last week. If my nephew Bobby didn’t see them, Billy Burnett might have.”
“That’s what Bobby told me. He also said that Billy moved on late last week. Do you have any idea where he went? I’d like to talk to him.”
“No, he just said he had a lot of country to see. He had recently sold his business in New York State and retired. He happened to land here, looking for fuel, and we got to talking, had lunch together. He knew his way around cars and machinery, and I invited him home for supper and asked if he’d like to work for me for a while. He did, but he never would take any money.”
“Do you have his address or a phone number?”
“I don’t think he has an address anymore, but I think I have his cell phone number in the office. Come on, and I’ll see if I can find it.”
“Mr. Fields, before we go, can you tell me what that is?” He pointed to the big indentation in the desert soil.
“Never seen that before,” Fields replied. “Looks like something heavy must have made it.”
“Or maybe there was a hole dug, then refilled.”
“Could be that, too,” Fields agreed.
“Is that your backhoe in the building next to your shop?”
“Yes, I’ve got a little equipment-rental business.”
“Did Billy Burnett know how to operate a backhoe?”
“Might’ve. He was handy with machinery.”
“Do you think he might have used your backhoe to bury something out here?”
Fields looked at the indentation, then back at Igor. “What, exactly, are you getting at?”
Igor didn’t speak for a moment.
“You mean, like a Lincoln Navigator?”
“It seems like a possibility.”
“That’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” Fields said. “Why would Billy do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know,” Igor said honestly. “Do you, by any chance, have a metal detector?”
“No, I don’t, and I don’t know where you’d find a thing like that. I mean, this area isn’t exactly a Civil War battlefield. You’re not going to find any old bayonets out here.”
“Mr. Fields, you say you rent equipment. Could I rent your backhoe for an hour or two?”
“Do you know how to operate a backhoe?”
“No, sir, but I expect you do.”
Fields looked at the indentation, then back at Igor. “It’s a hundred dollars an hour, plus operator,” he said.
Igor produced some bills, peeled off five hundred dollars, and offered it to Fields. “Will that do it?”
“Yessir, it will,” Fields said, pocketing the money. “Hang on a minute, I’ll go crank up the backhoe. You’ve got me interested, now. I’ll get Billy’s number for you, too.”
“Thank you, sir.” Igor stood and stared at the indentation. Ten minutes later, he heard the backhoe coming.
Fields stopped and handed him a slip of paper. “There’s Billy Burnett’s cell number. You want this whole area dug up?”
“I think just a trench down the middle would do it,” Igor replied.
• • •
A little under an hour later, the scoop of the backhoe struck something hard, making a noise.
“Sounds like metal,” Fields said, climbing down from the backhoe and taking a shovel out of the toolbox bolted to the side. He walked into the trench and started digging.
Igor followed him. “Here, let me do that,” he said. He took the shovel from the older man and started a new trench within the old one. Soon, he had a hole two feet by three. “What do you make of that?” he asked Fields, nodding at the hole.
Fields got down on his knees and brushed away some soil with his hands. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “I reckon that’s the underside of a car or truck,” he said. “Or maybe a Lincoln Navigator.” He got back on the backhoe and started to enlarge the trench he had dug.
>
After another fifteen minutes of digging, he had exposed the entire bottom of the vehicle. He switched off the backhoe. “Take a look at this,” he shouted to the man behind him. He didn’t get a reply, so Fields turned and looked. The man was gone. Fields walked back to the filling station and checked out front. The man’s car was gone, too.
Fields went to the office and dialed Billy Burnett’s number.
“Is that you, Tom?” Billy said.
“That’s right, Billy.”
“What’s up? You and the wife and Bobby okay?”
“Yeah, we’re okay. I found something pretty weird out behind the airstrip, though.”
A moment’s silence. “What did you find, Tom?”
“Well, this feller came by here looking for a couple of friends of his driving a Lincoln Navigator. He found this indentation in the ground out back, so I got the backhoe out and did some digging, and sure enough, there’s a car buried out there, upside down.”
“I see,” Billy said. “Can you describe the man for me?”
“I’d say about thirty-five, six-two, well built, sandy hair. Had an accent of some kind—I couldn’t place it, but his English was good.”
“I see.”
“You want to tell me about this, Billy?”
“Tom, to tell you the truth, I don’t think you want to know.”
“What do you think I ought to do? Should I call the sheriff or the state police?”
“Anybody in the car you found?”
“I haven’t looked.”
“Tom, you could call the police, but if you do, your life and your business are going to be disrupted for weeks, maybe months to come. My best advice is to fill up the hole, walk away, and put it out of your mind.”
“Who were those two fellers, Billy?”
“They were very bad people who followed that boy and his friends I ordered the tire for. They were going to hurt them. They tried to kill me.”
Fields thought about it for a minute. “Well,” he said, finally, “I don’t reckon they’re worth digging up, then.”
“Thank you, Tom. My best to your wife and Bobby.”
Fields hung up, went outside, and started up the backhoe.
• • •
Teddy had no sooner hung up than his phone rang again. The caller ID said PRIVATE NUMBER. “Hello?”
“Is this Billy Burnett?” An accented man’s voice.
“I’m sorry, you’ve got a wrong number.” He broke the connection, but the phone immediately rang again.
“Hello?”
“Billy? It’s Charmaine.”
“Hey, there. Can I call you right back?”
“Sure.” She gave him the number.
Teddy hung up, opened the cell phone, and removed the SIM card, then he broke the card in half, stomped on the phone several times, and put the pieces in the wastebasket. He got another throwaway phone from his briefcase and called Charmaine back.
“I thought I might come down to L.A. tomorrow,” she said. “Would you like that?”
“I certainly would. What time will you arrive?”
“Let’s see, I guess around six-thirty or seven.”
“Well, meet me at a restaurant called Michael’s, on Third Street, in Santa Monica. You can Google it for the exact address.”
“I’ll do that,” she said. “Can you put me up for a night or two?”
“You betcha,” Teddy said. “Oh, let me give you a new phone number, the old phone broke.”
Igor sat in the parking lot of the Gallup airport. He got out his cell phone and called the Albuquerque Flight Service Station. He was connected to a briefer by an automated system.
“Gallup Flight Service.”
Igor filed an IFR flight plan to Phoenix Sky Harbor, and when he was done, the briefer said, “Anything else I can do for you?”
“Tell me, is there any way you can look up a tail number and tell me if there was a flight plan filed, say, a week ago, for that number?”
“What’s the number?”
“November one, two, three, tango, foxtrot. A JetPROP.”
“Hang on a second.” The sound of typing could be heard. “Where from?”
“Probably a VFR takeoff and he opened his flight plan in the air.”
“I’ve got a couple of flight plans for that number: one from Las Vegas, New Mexico, to Albuquerque Golden Eagle, then another one from there to Santa Fe, then one from Santa Fe to Gallup, but he canceled in the air short of Gallup. That’s it.”
“Thanks so much,” Igor said, then hung up. He got on his laptop, went online and to a program called FlightAware. He typed in the tail number, and a message said that no aircraft with that number was currently in the air. He started at the end of the week before and worked backward, but found no trace of the airplane leaving the Mesa Grande area. Billy Burnett had not turned on his transponder: smart. He did, however, catch the airplane two days later, landing at Las Vegas International, and three days after that, departing. Burnett turned off his transponder after leaving Las Vegas airspace, though, and he could have gone anywhere, so Igor didn’t know where to look next.
Igor checked his watch: just after two PM. He calculated the time in Paris, then dialed a number.
“Who is this?” an annoyed man asked.
“It’s Igor, in New Mexico.”
“Ah, Igor,” Majorov said. “Did you find Ivan and Yevgeny?”
“Yes. They’re buried in the desert at Mesa Grande, inside the Navigator.”
A baffled silence. “You’re not making any sense.”
“Someone killed both of them, then put them in their car, dug a large hole with a backhoe, and pushed the car into it. Then he filled up the hole again. I had a man dig down until we found the car.”
“Holy shit. What did you do then?”
“I got the hell out of there. I expect the man called the police.”
“Do you have any idea who did this?”
“I think it was probably a man called Billy Burnett.”
“Who is he?”
“He was working at a filling station in Mesa Grande when Ivan and Yevgeny stopped there. They had followed the Barrington boy and his friends into the town, where they had stopped for the night. Something happened, some sort of disagreement, I guess, and there was a fight. Ivan and Yevgeny lost.”
“I want you to find this Billy Barnett,” Majorov said.
“Burnett.”
“Whatever. Find him.”
“And take him out?”
“Maybe not. I think I want to talk to him myself, if he took on two of my best men and killed them.”
“I warn you, he’s not going to be easy to find. He has no fixed address, and when he left Mesa Grande I traced him on the FlightAware program flying into Las Vegas, but he left three days later and I couldn’t tell where he went. He has a cell number, and I called it, but he said I had a wrong number. I called back, and the number was engaged, and when I called back again, I got a recorded message from the phone company saying that the number didn’t exist. He probably destroyed the phone.”
“Igor, I want him found. Think of something.”
“I’ve got one chance. If I keep a watch every day on the computer, I might catch him in the air again and be able to trace him.”
“I have some business in Las Vegas, and I will be there the day after tomorrow, at the usual hotel. I’ll call you when I get there.”
“Good. In the meantime, I’ll keep watch for the tail number.” Igor hung up, turned in his rental car, and flew back to Phoenix.
The following morning he went to his office, set his laptop on the conference table, turned it on, and logged onto FlightAware. N123TF was not in the air. He called in an assistant and sat him down at the computer. “I want you to sit here for as long as you can and
watch for this tail number.” He wrote it down. “When you get tired or hungry or have to go to the toilet, get someone to replace you, all day, every day. We’re going to watch the skies for that airplane. Got it?”
The man sat down, nodded, and stared at the screen.
Teddy sat at the bar, nursing a drink for nearly an hour before Charmaine showed up. She came in looking very un-Vegas, in a pretty cotton dress, her hair in a ponytail.
“Hey, there,” he said, getting down from his stool and hugging her. “Let’s get our table.” He left some money on the bar for his drink and signaled to the headwaiter that they were ready to sit down. A moment later they were at a good table in the garden, taking in the night air.
“I didn’t think I’d get down to L.A. this soon,” she said. “But fortunately, something came up that gave me an excuse.”
Teddy waited for the waiter to set down her martini and some menus before he spoke again. “Let me guess what came up,” he said.
“I don’t think you can guess.”
“My guess is Pete Genaro suggested you come see me.”
She blushed a little and stared into her drink. “Why would you think that?”
“Pete was having a little trouble categorizing me when I checked out, and my guess is, he wants to know more.”
She took a sip of her martini. “Pete said you were one hell of a poker player.”
“Maybe so, but rusty. I hadn’t played in years. That’s why I lost the first night.”
“Pete said he thought you could have won a lot more, if you’d put your mind to it. I think you were down the first night because you wanted to be.”
“You’re a smart girl,” Teddy said. “Tell you what, before you go back to Vegas, we’ll work up a little story about me for you to tell Pete.”
“I wouldn’t like to lie to Pete,” she said. “That could have repercussions.”
“You won’t be lying, you’ll be telling him what I said when you asked me some questions.”
“Well, maybe in that case . . .”
“All right, let’s get that out of the way, so we can concentrate on each other. Ask me some questions.”