Bad Penny

by John D. Brown

  “We’ve got about fifteen knots,” Pinto said. “This should be fun.”

  “Fun?” Frank asked. “As in a wing falling off kind of fun?”

  Pinto just smiled.

  Frank began to suspect this was going to be a rough ride.

  The plane bumped along. A gust shook them as the plane rushed across the fields and between the buildings. Pinto gave the plane more throttle. A few seconds later he was lined up with the runway, and gave it yet more gas. The little plane shot forward. Henry gave a woof.

  They bumped down the dirt runway, the plane picking up speed. Another gust raced across the open land. It slammed into the plane, lifting it up in a nice little hop and setting it right back down. All of which demonstrated why you wore seat belts in these contraptions. No seat belts and that wind would have introduced his head to the ceiling.

  The plane continued to pick up speed. Frank wondered momentarily what Pinto would do if they got too close to the end of the runway. But he didn’t need to worry. The plane began to lighten. A moment later there was one more bump, and then Pinto was pulling back on the wheel, and they were rising above the fields in a sliding float. Pinto pulled back a bit more and the Cessna began to climb at a fairly steep angle.

  The houses and cars below them grew small, toy-like. The land stretched out until Frank could see Lander and the ranches beyond making their small quilts of green and brown patches in the middle of the sagebrush.

  Another gust hit them. The tone of the propeller changed; the plane dropped a bit and then shot up like a roller coaster.

  “Hoo!” Pinto said. “Put your hands in the air!”

  Frank shook his head. Pilot humor.

  They climbed into the wind for about another minute or two, the plane hopping and sliding every now and again, then Pinto leveled it off. The view of the Wind River mountains and the surrounding land was spectacular. Frank spotted Eden close to the southern horizon.

  Henry looked out his window and let out a happy bark.

  “Okay, Kemosabe,” Pinto said. “What’s our target? We’ve got about six hours of gas.”

  Frank opened the road atlas on his lap. It was now 4:30 p.m. Ed had a two-hour head start. He made the calculations assuming Ed had taken the interstate, which meant he could be as far as 160 miles out. That was all the way to Elk Mountain if he went east. If he’d gone west, he’d be in Salt Lake City.

  But Frank had already figured he was going east, mostly likely to Colorado because of the plates. There were three main ways into Colorado from Rock Springs. The first was Highway 191, which ran straight south into Utah. After sixty or seventy miles you came to Vernal; Ed could head east from there through Dinosaur on Highway 40. That route would take you right though mountains in eastern Utah and the Rockies west of Denver. That was a lot of mountain.

  The second route was to head east a piece on I-80, turn south to run through Baggs to Craig, Colorado, and then hook up with Highway 40 there. That one avoided the mountains on the first leg, but took you right into the same twisting and climbing in the Colorado piece.

  Something about all that mountain driving snagged in Frank’s mind. Why had Ed wanted to switch cars?

  At first Frank thought it was because the car was dirty and the authorities were after him. Ed was trying to go to ground. But the presence of the kidnapped girl changed that.

  The cops might be after him, but that didn’t feel right. If she was from a rival gang, then maybe her boys would be after Ed, but Ed had picked her up way out in Utah, not Colorado. Any of her homies would be way off their turf. Ed had to be bringing her back.

  So why ask for a trade?

  Maybe Ed had wanted to drop in, maybe make sure his info on Frank was good. But Frank didn’t think so. Maybe Ed had car troubles; something wrong with the radiator. Could be something else. But Ed couldn’t stop in and get it fixed, not with a girl tied up in the trunk.

  The riskiest time guarding precious cargo was during transport. Which was why a sizeable portion of America’s gold was in Fort Knox—a fort. not in a bunch of vans driving around the countryside. It was why they kept felons locked down in another type of fort. There were too many uncontrolled variables when you were out on the road. And a kidnappee would only make things more risky. They’d drug her and keep her sedated so she was less likely to call out or make sounds. They had probably drugged Tony as well. But even with a drugged prisoner, things could go wrong. Tony had proven that when he’d walked by and sprung the girl. So Ed would want to be on the road as little as possible. And if his car did have troubles, he certainly didn’t want to be going up and down mountainous roads.

  No, Ed was not going down to Highway 40. He was simply trying to get his cargo to its destination as quickly as possible.

  I-80 stretched to the east, the quickest way to Colorado. Ed would be heading to Cheyenne and then straight down to Fort Collins and on to Denver, or whatever the destination was.

  “How fast will this thing fly?”

  “You’ve got ground speed and air speed,” Pinto said, “which are two different things. When you’re in the air, the plane’s like a boat in a river. If the boat can go twenty miles per hour, and the river is moving ten miles per hour with it, then the boat can go thirty, but maybe only ten if it’s going against the current.”

  “We’re heading east,” Frank said.

  “That would be with the wind,” Pinto said, “which means we can probably do 190 easy. Maybe 200, depending.”

  Frank nodded. “You have a pencil?”

  “In the pocket behind Sam’s seat.”

  Frank fished in the pocket and came up with an old thing featuring an exceedingly dull point. Ed wouldn’t be going faster than the normal traffic because he wouldn’t want to attract attention. Wyoming cops loved pulling over out-of-staters. So Ed would probably cruise with the slower vehicles. In fact, 80 mph was probably too generous. Frank figured Ed had, maximum, a 160 mile head start, and that was if his gas tank was full and they didn’t need to make any stops and nothing broke down. Frank did a bit of math on the edge of the atlas. “We’ll catch up in a little less than two hours,” he said.

  He measured the distance on the map. “I think we can get ahead of them if we shoot straight for Cheyenne. We’ll work back from there.”

  “Roger,” Pinto said, dipped one side of the plane, and banked a soft turn.

  “How far up are we?” Sam asked.

  “About 5,000 feet.”

  Behind them the tall peaks of the Wind Rivers rose into the sky. In front of them lay a line of small brown hills that didn’t rise nearly high enough to get the water the Wind Rivers did. Or maybe the Wind Rivers forced all the water out of clouds that passed over them, leaving nothing for the country beyond. A cloud shadow.

  Pinto took a course that followed Highway 287 below, which ran between two lines of mostly barren hills stretching out roughly in the direction of Cheyenne. The hills were about four miles apart. A river squiggled its way between them, parts of it flashing like a mirror in the sun. The land was green for about a quarter mile on either side of the river, irrigated by a patchwork of ranches. Beyond that, the sage desert stretched forever.

  Most of Wyoming was like that—farms here and there clustering thinly along the scarce small rivers that were probably what people back East would call creeks. Roads like a thin spiderweb connecting it all. Every ten, twenty, sometimes forty miles along one of those lines was a small town, sometimes nothing more than a couple of houses. Sometimes it was a mine or a natural gas plant. Tiny dots and threads of civilization in miles and miles and miles of huge, open, very often treeless, landscape.

  Frank knew he probably wouldn’t be back to make his graveyard shift at Walmart. So he made a few calls and finally got someone to cover. The dispatcher back in Rock Springs called to follow up on his missing person report, but Frank told her what he told the officer and then set up a time the next day to bring Tony in as he told the officer he would. When he hung up from the
last call, he was on the edge of nausea. The wind was pretty strong, and all the jarring was working on him. He used to have an iron gut, but something had happened in prison. He took in some big breaths and focused his vision on a wisp of cloud a few miles in front of them. It was now about ten to five. Ed should be calling soon. Unless he’d changed his mind, which Ed was wont to do.

  There’d been an old guy in the prison. He was doing four years for battery with a deadly weapon. He’d taken a bowling ball to a big tough-guy neighbor who kept throwing dog doo in his yard. Nailed him as he went out to his car one morning. Ed had chummed up to the old guy and then turned on a dime. First he’d demanded the guy’s spot in the yard. Then he’d demanded soap. Food. He took socks, crayons. Whatever the guy had. He just kept pushing and pushing until one day old Bowling Ball had enough. He came at Ed, and Ed shanked him with a poker made from wire. It had been fast, and the guards hadn’t seen.

  The code inside requires you keep your mouth shut, so Frank played like he hadn’t seen a thing. Which meant he had to listen to Ed glory in his big showdown. On and on about the goading and the attack. On and on about the fine feel of the wire as it broke through the skin and muscle. On and on, trying to get Frank to talk about the details of his own kills in the service, until Frank had told him that if he didn’t want to look like a friggin’ idiot, he’d stop crowing about throwing down on some old grandpa.

  That had shut Ed up, for a while. It had also changed his demeanor, awakened some animosity that lurked in the corners of his eyes. Frank had never trusted Ed. He trusted him less after that. It was quite possible that Ed might have determined right then he was going to pay Frank back for the insult. Sooner or later, he was going to make Frank eat his words.

  Sam started to get sick. Pinto handed him some chewing gum and a bag. Then he offered a piece of gum to Frank.

  It was some minty thing. Frank took the piece and said, “Who’s the lady above the door?”

  Pinto looked over at the portrait of the handsome Black woman. “That’s my north star.”

  Frank unwrapped the gum and popped the stick in his mouth. “Yolanda?”

  “No, Yolanda was a woman my wife Kerry knew when we were first married. She was always getting away, going off to see Yolanda, going to bake a cake with Yolanda, going on a walk with Yolanda. Those two were joined at the hip. So I got me my own Yolanda.” He patted the plane.

  When Pinto didn’t go on, Sam said, “Kerry died a couple years back from cancer.”

  “She’d just turned forty,” Pinto said.

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “She loved to fly,” Pinto said. “Said it put everything in perspective. Made you look to the stars. Made you realize there was a lot more to this universe than the thin layer humans inhabited.”

  Getting some altitude certainly gave you something; right now the jerky flight was making Frank sick, but he nodded. He imagined Pinto and his wife had taken a number of rides in this plane—all decked out with fairies and lace. Maybe with Henry sitting in back like he was now.

  Pinto said, “Sometimes, I swear she still takes a ride now and again.”

  Frank didn’t know much about spirits and the next life. From what the pastors said, folks seemed to be constantly sucked up into the light or down into the other place. Like a tug-o-war between two huge vacuum cleaners. The earth ought to be a tidy place. But maybe a few souls got caught in the cracks and crannies. Maybe the vacuums didn’t reach everywhere. Frank knew he’d be motivated to find cover if Hell’s vacuum was coming after him.

  “You married?” Pinto asked.

  “No,” Frank said. “Mine didn’t quite work out.”

  Which was an understatement. It had started well enough. He had met Blanca one summer in Colombia. He was there teaching Colombian soldiers assigned to fight the cartels. She was broken down on the side of the road in a bad part of town. He and the other guys had stopped, helped get her on her way. Then she’d come back to the base to say thanks with empanadas. Frank had been struck the first time he saw her—quick-witted, smart, fun. Gorgeous Colombian skin and eyes. She worked for a bank, managing their ATMs.

  They saw each other multiple times. He sent her flowers, a necklace with a jade pendant, and Maduritos, these sweet plantain chips she loved. And then he had to leave. He told her on the patio of a restaurant, the mariachis playing in the background and red macaws squawking in the trees, that he was going to come for her. But Uncle Sam had other plans. So he paid a coyote to bring her over the border. He married her in Texas at the side of the sea.

  The first years were good. But he’d had to ship out a lot. She was alone and didn’t speak the language. He thought she was doing well. But the back-to-back military tours took their toll. He loved the service. Hated turning his back on his team, but there was no way things were going to work between him and her if something didn’t change. And so he left the Special Forces when his enlistment ended.

  But it was too little, too late. By the time he came home, Blanca was already halfway out the door. He said hello and her gorgeous hair and quick-witted smile walked right out of his life.

  A few weeks later, he made the dumbest decision of his life and got involved with Simon Haas, an acquaintance who was making big bucks in the private sector using the skills he’d learned on Uncle Sam’s dime. And he was doing it for clients that you didn’t ask questions about.

  It had been good money, but it had also been dumb money. Almost nineteen months after Frank took off his camo, he found himself putting on another uniform—one that was Day-Glo orange. The consequences of his decision smashed through his idiot life like a tornado.

  Tony and Kim had been there for him. But now the consequences of those actions years ago were reaching out again to take them.

  Pinto said, “Kerry was one hell of a woman.”

  “You can say that again,” Sam said.

  Frank thought of Blanca, Kim, and Tony. He sighed with frustration.

  Pinto said, “She was a little bit of fire and a bit of banana cream pie.”

  They flew on in silence for a bit, and then Pinto looked over at Sam. “Have we said a prayer?”

  Sam nodded.

  Frank said, “Sam’s two and O. I think he’s hooked up to the wrong answering service.”

  Pinto said, “You praying to your Excel spreadsheets again?”

  “I’ve repented of that,” Sam said with a grin.

  Pinto said, “If anyone’s hooked up, it’s Sam.”

  “Well, then maybe I’m the one dragging us down. Because God’s not been answering my calls.”

  “Maybe you’re not going about it right,” Pinto said. “I once read this book that claimed to have the secret to life. The secret to getting anything you desired. Basically it said that God, the Universe, whatever you want to call it—it was this big vibrating genie. That was the secret, hidden for ages, now come to light. And all you had to do was vibrate your wishes out, and the Universe would respond. Things would suddenly pop out of the woodwork to help you. You vibrate a new TV, and suddenly there’s a coupon in the mail. You vibrate a better job, and suddenly your uncle’s mailman knows about one. Ask, and you shall receive. Vibrate, and the Universe will open the way.”

  “Tony’s with a psychopath, and you’re telling me the answer is to vibrate?”

  Pinto said, “It all seemed true. God’s like this big vending machine in the sky, but one that doesn’t work all the time. I mean I’ve prayed. Sometimes the candy bar falls; sometimes it doesn’t.”

  Frank had to admit it sometimes felt that way. Right now the machine wasn’t doing anything but eating his quarters.

  “But then I saw the flaw. Say you buy yourself a big yellow truck. What happens? Suddenly there ain’t nothing but big yellow trucks on the road, and you wonder where they all came from. But the thing is: they were there all along. What’s changed is your focus. What you paid attention to in the first place.

  “If you have a problem and start thinking
on it, you’re primed to notice solutions. And as you discuss it with others, you prime them to notice too. That isn’t some galactic genie. That’s just what happens when you’ve got a limited working memory that forces you to choose what to pay attention to. Same thing happens a lot of times when people pray. You’re praying, and so you’re paying attention. And so you can see the solutions that were there all along plus others that arise which you would have missed. It’s not a vending machine or a genie. It’s all big yella trucks.”

  “You’re saying I shouldn’t be waiting for help. There is no God. Prayer’s just a way to get focused.”

  “I didn’t say there wasn’t a God.”

  “You’re going to jinx the little connection I have with the upstairs brass.”

  “I’m not saying not to pray. I’m saying it’s easy to think every little thing has some divine origin. I’m saying you’ve got to have the right expectations. Sooner or later, unless you’re living on the moon, it’s going to rain, right? But you’ve got some farmer out there praying, and all he can see is that he prayed, and then it rained sometime later. And there’s no thinking about cause and effect. Did his prayer change the weather? Who knows? But to him it’s shazam—an answer! That, my friend, is your classic post hoc ergo propter hoc.”

  “Cut the Greek, Aristotle.”

  “It’s Latin,” Pinto said. “It means coincidental correlation, false cause. The two events just happened to occur one after the other. There’s no relationship whatsoever.”

  This guy wasn’t in witness protection. He was some farmer-philosopher combo transplanted from weird-land California.

  “But you can’t always say there isn’t a relationship,” Sam said. “It’s not always easy to separate out cause and effect. Sometimes when there are too many factors, or the effects take too long to show up, you can just as easily miss a causal relationship. Some folks used to believe smoking tobacco was healthy. The cancer effect happened too long after the cause for them to see the relationship. And sometimes it didn’t happen at all.”