by E. R. FALLON
Wright sat back in his chair, entwined his fingers and rested them on top of his pot belly stomach. “Sometimes in bed at night, after we made love, she used to joke – at least I thought she was joking – about committing a robbery and then fleeing the country. This was before we found out she couldn’t have children. And that’s just what she did, right, commit a robbery? That’s why I’m not one hundred percent surprised.”
“How many times did she mention this?” Maple asked.
“Tons of times. Enough times that I still remember her saying it years later.”
“You mentioned she said she would flee the country,” Harry said. She never bothered with an actual notepad. “Did she ever say where to?”
Wright nodded. “Yeah. She said she’d go to Cuba. She admired the Communists, she said. Because of how they shared everything. Like I said, she was a bit wild. She had a rough go of it when she was younger, from what I gather.”
Maple looked straight at Harry and their gazes locked. Cuba. Emily Will. Plane. Joyce and Albert were going to use Emily to fly them to Cuba with the stolen cash. They’d land in a field somewhere and then have freedom forever. Everyone in law enforcement knew that if the Fishers got safely to Cuba the law might never get them back to the US. Cuba was seen by law enforcement as being a haven for fugitives, with weak extradition laws and motives. If the Fishers got to Cuba they would almost certainly never return.
And Emily Will? Would they kill her once she no longer served a purpose in their plans? Or would they set her free overseas? Killing her would fit more with what Harry had come to view as they Joyce-Albert modus operandi.
Where would they get a plane from?
John Wright left and Harry looked out the window and could see him below, outside the police station smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk.
She got a call on her cell phone from the sheriff a few counties over. It was just her and Maple at the station. Nolan had gone to the hospital to see Carlow, who was recovering nicely. Harry and Maple had shared the cost of flowers to send to Carlow’s hospital room. Nolan hadn’t mentioned Carlow thanking them for the flowers and Harry wondered if Carlow still disliked her.
“A pickup truck matching the description and the license plate number of the one you’re looking for was involved in a high-speed chase earlier today,” the sheriff told Harry over the phone. “Unfortunately, they successfully outran the deputy.”
“Was the deputy hurt?” Harry asked.
“Thankfully, no.”
“Were there three people inside the vehicle? A man and two women?” She wanted to make sure Emily was okay.
“The deputy who pursued them couldn’t see inside the vehicle well enough to identify the passengers.”
When Harry hung up she asked Maple for a map.
“A map?” he said.
“Yes, a map. Get one now!” So many thoughts were racing through her head that she couldn’t think.
Maple bolted across the room and tore a map of the state off the wall next to the case board they’d created over time. Harry grabbed it from him and spread it on the floor. She knelt down and Maple crouched next to her. She found the location on the map where the pickup truck had been spotted last. It was close to a private airport.
“I think I know where the Fishers are headed.” Harry took out her phone again.
“Where?” Maple asked.
She motioned for him to wait. “I need to ask someone local.” She texted Nolan and asked him about the airport on the map. Harry tapped the heel of her shoe impatiently on the floor while she waited for him to respond. When he finally did reply, Harry read the long text out loud to Maple: ‘That airport is closed for the winter. It’s a small place. A nearby summer community uses it during the warm season. Rich people mostly. I believe they store their planes there over the winter.’
“That’s where they’re headed,” Harry shouted at Maple.
He gave her a smile. “Good work, Cannon.”
“Thanks. I’ll call Nolan to tell him to get the bomb squad ready, and we’re going to need more officers as backup to meet us there.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Albert turned onto a main road, drove nervously for a few minutes and then got off at an exit. He drove for a few more minutes and then stopped at a chained gate in front of what looked like a small airport closed for the winter. Joyce waited with me when Albert got out of the truck and undid the chain. Then he climbed back into the truck.
“Easy,” Albert said to Joyce. “They probably figure this little area is so safe, who’d steal from them?” He chuckled to himself and Joyce smiled.
Albert drove slowly into the airport, gazing this way and that the farther he pulled in, as if to check for a security guard.
I pretended to sleep but could see a few smaller planes covered by tan tarps toward the back and a hangar for larger planes in the middle of the space out of my half gaze. I wondered if they were going to take one of the smaller planes, which would be the easier option, or if they would try to break into the hangar and steal a larger plane. I didn’t see any security cameras anywhere but they might not have been visible. But at that point Joyce and Albert probably didn’t care if anyone saw them or me.
The late afternoon sky was overcast and raindrops trickled onto the pickup truck. The flight to Cuba would take us well into the night, and it wasn’t easy flying in the dark on one of those little airplanes, and I wondered what kind of navigation equipment they had inside them and how I would land in unlighted territory. I’d used airplanes just like them at the flight school, and in the military I’d only used jets. There was a difference. In the distance I saw a large tract of open fields, farmland.
“Are you excited?” Albert said to Joyce. “Just a few more hours now until forever freedom.”
Joyce gave him a side-eye look. “I’ll be excited when we arrive there.”
“Relax, Joycee, there’s nobody here. It’s abandoned this time of the year. We already staked it out weeks ago.”
“I’m worried about the girl,” Joyce said quietly.
Emily figured ‘the girl’ meant her.
“Why? She’s not going to do anything. Our plan has worked so far. We’re here. We just need to get to Cuba now. With this money, we’ll be set for life there.”
“She’s starting to question us,” Joyce said.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t explain it. I used to want her to like me. Not that she and I would ever be friends, or could ever be, with what’s going on. Now I don’t care if she likes me. I just want her to help us and then be done with her. In the barn she gave me this look like she wasn’t under our control anymore. She seemed remarkably calm. I’m worried. And you know I never say I’m worried unless I am.”
“Maybe your hypnotizing her stopped working.”
I forgot I’d been pretending to sleep and opened my eyes and shot up. What?
“Albert,” Joyce scolded. She spoke between clenched teeth, “Did she hear you?”
I had heard but I stayed silent.
“Did you hear him?” Joyce asked me. “Oh, never mind, you’re just going to lie anyway,” she interrupted me before I could speak.
Albert’s words had prompted me, and it gradually dawned on me and then became clear. I remembered. I remembered I hadn’t killed a man.
Joyce had hypnotized me. Joyce must have been a hypnotist for Dr. Tompkins. Dr. Tompkins had once suggested that as part of my therapy, but then when I’d asked him about it later he told me the person who’d done that wasn’t employed by him any longer. I had assumed he’d fired the person.
I couldn’t tell if I was part of Albert’s and Joyce’s plan all along or whether I was something spontaneous. It was really Albert who had come to my front door banging, not another man – not a home invader, or a salesman like they’d said. I had let Albert inside after he threatened to shoot me. He’d tapped something against the door.
“Do you hear that? That’s my gun,”
he’d said.
Joyce came in after and hypnotized me as Albert held me down. During the process, Joyce told me over and over that when I woke I’d believed I’d killed someone. She’d given me precise details of the event.
Now that I remembered, I was filled with a renewed ambition to put up a fight and not let them win, now that they no longer could hold the killing over me. At the same time I knew wouldn’t make it far barefoot in the freezing weather with them chasing me and armed. It had started to snow and that mixed with the rain to make sleet.
Albert stopped the pickup truck in front of the tarp-covered small planes and Joyce kept giving me looks like she knew I’d heard what Albert said.
Albert got out of the truck to look at the planes and left me alone with Joyce.
“Do you have to go to the bathroom?” she asked me.
I did and nodded without thinking.
“Too bad for you then,” she said.
“Can I have some water? Joyce, you said I could have some before I flew you guys.”
“Albert already gave you some.”
“Yeah, but you said I could have some when we got here.”
“Shut up. It’ll just make you have to go to the bathroom more anyway.”
I watched Albert outside. He’d lifted up the tarps one by one and seemed to be checking the different airplanes for open doors and to see if any of them had keys inside them. He seemed to have chosen a small Cessna, which I’d used at the flight school, and had its door open but I couldn’t tell if he’d found its keys. Then Albert waved to Joyce.
Joyce undid one of my handcuffs so I could leave the pickup truck.
“Come on.” She ordered me outside with the gun pointed at me.
“Can I have my shoes? It’s freezing.”
Joyce ignored me.
I waited outside with her while Albert unloaded the money from the pickup truck onto the plane and very slowly carried the bomb, outside of the box but covered with what had been his outer shirt, inside the plane to do something with it that I couldn’t see. I noticed they didn’t take my belongings from the truck, which was bad news for me. My feet felt frozen and raw from pain on the cold ground. Did they expect me to fly barefoot?
I did know they expected me to take off right from there. There was no help for miles, and even if that cop car had spotted us help was unlikely to come for a while. I’d die of hypothermia and frostbite if I fled barefoot. I knew what I had to do. I would have to land the plane in that farmland right after takeoff and scramble the heck out of there before that bomb blew everything, human and machine, to millions of pieces.
Joyce made me stand there, freezing my ass off, while Albert appeared to hotwire the plane.
“I don’t know why you thought there’d be keys in it,” she said to him.
Albert shrugged. His face looked red from bending over to work on the wires. “Lots of people leave their keys in their cars and stuff.”
“Yeah, but these are airplanes. They’re worth a lot more.”
“What about these?” I jangled my handcuffs at Joyce.
“You can still fly with those on,” she said.
“How am I supposed to use my hands?”
“We’ll fix you to the controller or something. So you can still use the one hand but won’t get any ideas.”
She grabbed my shoes from inside the truck and threw them at me. “Here, put these on.”
I complied and thought about bolting then. Either they’d shoot at me and might not miss or they wouldn’t shoot because they needed me.
Before I could decide what to do I heard a roar. Albert had managed to get the plane started and Joyce ordered me to board ahead of her. It felt strange walking in shoes again after having been barefoot for so long. My body throbbed from the pain of Joyce’s beating me in the barn. And then I was trapped with them on the plane and it was too late to make a run for it. I decided I would carry out the same plan I would have done if they hadn’t given me my shoes.
Joyce used the gun to push me by my back into the pilot’s area. Albert went out and tossed the stolen pickup truck keys into the adjacent weed-filled vacant lot.
I could see the runway too far to our left. “It’s dangerous to take off from here. We aren’t on the runway. The airspace might not be clear enough to take off from here.”
Joyce seemed unfazed by my apprehension. “If there’s anyone who can do it, you can. You’re an expert flyer.”
Joyce ordered me to sit down in the pilot’s seat and then strapped me in and affixed one of my handcuffs to the controller so that I had only one hand free. Then Albert got in and shut the door.
Joyce yelled at me and I began to take off. I hadn’t flown in so long that I wasn’t sure if I’d remember how, but once I got on the plane and in the pilot’s seat, it came back to me naturally. I was once again doing what I’d been so well trained to do for so many years. It was a shame the circumstances were so dire.
Joyce double checked to make sure they’d brought the money inside the plane from the truck. I didn’t bother to tell her and Albert they shouldn’t be walking around the plane and should sit down in the passenger seats and buckle up their seatbelts in case the ride wasn’t smooth.
“There’s no guarantee the Cuban government won’t stop me from landing,” I said.
“Be quiet and don’t try anything funny,” Joyce said to me.
“Yeah.” Albert gestured to the bomb which I just noticed he’d put behind my seat.
I glanced at Joyce and she looked pale as we went forward and rose into the air above the tarmac. If the plane had been any larger, we wouldn’t have made it above the ground from that starting point.
“Albert,” I said when we were safely in the air. “She’s dying. Joyce is dying, eventually. She has nothing to lose. You don’t. Dismantle the bomb. Please.” I figured if he made the bomb then he could undo it.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Joyce put the gun to my head. “You promised not to say anything. Shut up and fly.”
Albert looked like all the blood had been drained from his face. Before I spoke I hadn’t known if he knew about Joyce’s illness, but clearly he hadn’t. “What’s she talking about, Joycee?”
“I have ALS,” she said somberly.
“You weren’t going to tell me? When were you planning to tell me, when you died in Cuba?”
“No. I would’ve told you. I would’ve told you when I felt the moment was right, and it has never been right. I wanted to tell you myself, soon, then this … ”
Joyce dug the gun deeper into the side of my forehead and I winced. Would she kill me and risk them crashing? Or did she know it wasn’t loaded and wanted to scare me? There were no bullets, and I was sure of that this time. I just had this feeling. I steeled myself and felt like all the air had been sucked out of me as I waited to see if I was right. It was only my life after all.
“No, Joyce!” Albert screamed.
Then everything went silent.
She pulled the trigger. No bullets, like I’d thought. Albert hadn’t been sure about it like me. Joyce tossed the gun to the floor and it clanked against the hard surface. Only the bomb tethered me to them now.
We were directly over that big farming field I’d seen from the truck. I didn’t see anybody down there except for lots of vehicles on the adjacent road that looked like cop cars with red sirens flashing. Had they come there for me?
The vacant lot had been too nearby to land safely. And there was no way I would risk making a dangerous landing in the mountains or the ocean, which would have been my only options if I waited any longer. Now was my only chance. I just had to do it and risk the bomb going off.
I hadn’t killed that man. There was no salesman. But even if I successfully flew them to Cuba, it wasn’t like I could just hop on a plane and return home.
Joyce despised me now, maybe she’d always had, and they would kill me in Cuba. Despite her promise they wouldn’t, I recalled what she’d thought sh
e told Albert in secret, something I’d never forget. “No traces”, Joyce had said. And I was a trace.
Perhaps I should have attempted to flee on foot and risk frostbite and hypothermia out there, but even I knew that was a very painful and lonely way to die. I hadn’t known then that the police would show up.
Joyce seemed to realize what I was doing and she struggled with me as I dove the plane downward toward the farmland. I did it quickly and the plane bumped up and down from the sudden changes in elevation. Then the plane heaved forward and then jerked back and tossed the standing Albert into the cabin.
I could see what looked like tons of police cars racing with flashing lights going opposite us toward the airport on the road below.
I swore I’d never drink again if I survived. A low-fuel alarm sounded. They hadn’t bothered to check that in their haste, and neither had I. I was glad I hadn’t, because it gave me motivation to do what I had to do next.
I crash-landed the plane onto the farm field and it mercilessly bounced up and down. My legs felt like they would give out from the force of the impact.
“You …” Joyce got thrown back toward Albert.
From a quick look over my shoulder I got a glimpse of blood, and they both seemed pretty injured. I undid my belt but couldn’t release my handcuff from the controller. I banged it against the hard area between the controller and the wall until I broke free.
I had to get out of there before the fiery heat or the plane fuel or both reached the bomb and intensified the explosion I knew would happen at any second. Through the smoke-covered windows I could see the airport behind us filling up with police cars.
For a moment I considered searching for the robbery money among the wreckage – I wondered if I should start my own flight school with it – but I kicked open the door and ran faster than I ever had in my life toward the police with my hands up, my lungs sucked of air and my mouth dry from the heat of the bomb exploding behind me.
My whole body tingled with pain from the heat of the flames, and I dove behind a piece of old farm equipment onto the ground to avoid the spreading fire. I looked back at the inferno and couldn’t believe I’d survived. It looked like how I remember Bobby’s wreck had looked in the war. He hadn’t survived. I had. How the heck had I survived? I wasn’t religious but it felt like there might have been someone watching over me, giving me a second chance. Why was I getting another chance?