by Anne Stuart
He caught her hand before it connected with his face, his fingers bruising on her narrow wrist. "Haven't you learned your lesson yet?" he said, leaning closer across the table, oblivious to the two men watching. "I hit back."
"Let go of me, you—you womanizer!" she ground out.
He did, leaning back and laughing. "Surely you can do better than that?"
"Listen, we're not getting anywhere," Sparks said in a troubled voice. "Angie, would you at least consider waiting...?"
His voice trailed off, drowned by the commotion at the front door. "That's all I needed," Angela muttered, draining her vanilla Coke as she watched Charlie Olker's huge form enter the bar. "I'm leaving."
This time it was Will's hand that grabbed hers, forestalling her hasty exit. "Wait," he said, his voice low and oddly anxious. "Don't get his attention."
She didn't even bother thinking about how peculiar that was, too busy noticing Clancy's sudden frown as he glanced over at Will. "I don't think it'll do any good," he said in his low, amused voice. "Charlie didn't come for any social reasons. He came for Angela."
Indeed, as he waded through the greetings of the other pilots and mechanics, it was clear that Olker was making a beeline for their table. For a moment she considered crawling under it, then gave up the notion, straightening her shoulders and meeting his oily gaze as he lumbered up to them.
"Such a happy group," he said, his half-smoked cigar clamped between yellow teeth. "Things must be going pretty well at Hogan Air Transport if you can afford to socialize like this."
"Things are going very well," Angela said evenly. "What do you want, Charlie?"
"Nothing at all, Angela. I'm here on purely social reasons. How are you, Sparks? How's the eyesight?"
Sparks growled at him in sullen response.
Charlie turned to Clancy. "And you, Clancy? How's the famous flyboy? No jealous husbands running you out of town yet? You must have tamed down a bit in your old age."
"I'm just a pussycat, Olker," Clancy said, and if Olker heard the thin thread of menace beneath Clancy's voice, he chose to ignore it.
Olker turned his attention to Will. "And you must be the new mechanic I've heard so much about. What was the name again?"
"Parsons," Will said in a harsh, defiant voice. "Will Parsons."
"That's it. Funny, but it seems as if I've met you before," Charlie mused. "There's something awfully familiar about you."
His words startled Angela momentarily out of her rage. She'd felt the same thing, and if anyone but her worst enemy had said that, she would have said something. As it was, she ignored her sudden shock of recognition.
"What is it you want, Olker?" she broke in. "You don't have a social bone in your body. Who are you out to get this time?"
"You wound me, Angela," he protested. "I just heard you were planning a little flight and I wanted to wish you luck. Buy you a bottle of champagne as a good-luck present."
"No champagne," she said in a strangled gasp, then managed a tight smile. "Maybe after I complete the flight, Charlie."
"Which you will, of course," he said smoothly, an evil smile in his piggy eyes. "How could you fail, with Clancy's assistance?"
"Clancy isn't assisting me, Olker," she snapped, enraged. "I'm doing it on my own."
"Of course you are," he said soothingly. "And why should he help you?" He leaned across the table, pushing his fleshy face close to hers. "After all, it's his record you're trying to break."
Chapter Fifteen
She left them stranded at Tony's. For one moment everything had seemed to stop, the noise, the sound, everything, as she took in Clancy's guilty expression, Olker's triumph, Sparks's worry. Sparks knew. Parsons knew. Everyone knew but Angela.
No one tried to stop her as she pushed away from the table and stumbled for the exit. It was probably only her imagination that made her think everyone was watching, laughing at her. Or even worse, pitying her for being such a gullible fool.
"Damn, damn, damn," she said out loud, pounding the steering wheel as she drove through the twilight. "Damn them all!"
She hated being lied to. She hated things being covered up, she hated the thought of them all knowing and not saying a word as she planned her stupid little jaunt. It reminded her of Frank, her father, flying whiskey in for the mob, all the while pretending he was making all that money from flight lessons. It was Frank's duplicity that had cost him his life, cost old Mrs. McCarthy and Goldie their lives, too. She hated it, hated him, hated everyone.
She didn't want to go home. For all she knew, Constance knew it was Clancy's record she'd been so sure she'd break. No, that was impossible. The only thing Constance found more boring than politics was flying. If she'd known, she wouldn't have paid any attention. Besides, Constance had never kept a secret in her entire life.
The night was clear and warm, and Angela's rage filled her with such adrenaline that she knew she would never sleep. Without thinking she turned the Packard toward the hangar, the place she always went for comfort, for safety when the world was falling apart. Hugging an airplane was a damned poor substitute for a human being, but right now there was no human being she felt like hugging.
She flicked on all the lights as she moved through the hangar. Her bright blue Lockheed was sitting by the side doors, pretty and perky and ready to go. And so was she, damn it.
The telephone call to the weather services gave her a faint green light. And that was all she needed to hear. She rolled the plane out onto the tarmac herself, grunting and sweating but not unused to the manual labor. She had muscles in her long arms that didn't belong in Schiaparelli evening dresses, and she was proud of them. They served her in good stead that warm June night.
This time she left her flask behind, settling for what was on hand in the tiny kitchenette of the hangar. A can of tomato juice, a box of Ritz crackers, and a jar of Ovaltine. She didn't need food—when she went on a flight like this she seldom ate a thing, but she had enough sense to provide for all contingencies. Even Amelia Earhart sucked on tomato juice while she flew. She probably had to carry a case of it as she traveled through darkest Africa.
Angela wondered where AE was. Almost finished with her 'round-the-world trek, circling the globe at its widest point, with only someone else's husband for company. She'd left her own bullying spouse behind, and Angela wondered again why AE had ever married him. Why someone as independent and fiercely proud as AE allowed herself to be tied to some damned man.
Angela wasn't going to make a similar mistake. She almost had with Hal. Clancy was right, curse his black Irish soul. Guilt had a great deal to do with her need to complete Hal's flight. She hadn't loved him enough to go to bed with him, hadn't loved him enough to marry him. All she'd done was delay and delay, and Hal had died. For some stupid reason she thought completing his flight would make it up to him.
But now she had another, excellent reason. She was going to grind Clancy's record into the dust, and then she was deliberately going to seek out any records he still held and smash them, too. She was going to strip him of every honor until he was nothing but the washed-up pilot she knew him to be.
The Lockheed was gassed up, tuned up sweet and sassy and ready to go. The engine started with a quiet purr, the propellers spun smoothly, and Angela didn't even bother to go back and turn off the lights or relock the hangar. If someone wanted to come in and wreak havoc, they could be her guest. With any luck they'd destroy Clancy's precious Fokker.
She took off into the night with a soaring leap at the sky, and within moments the familiar, queer sort of peace and excitement all rolled into one settled around her. She loved night flying, with the sky purply blue around her, the lights far below, the rich velvet comfort of it all. She loved flying in the day, with the limitless blue sky, the bright glare of the sun, the sheer joy of being alive. Damn, she just loved flying, so much that for the first few hours heading northeast, she could forget how much she hated Jack Clancy.
She was somewhere over the provin
ce of Quebec when she started thinking about him again. For an hour or so she planned her revenge, imagining each flight she remembered hearing of him make, fantasizing about smashing each of those aging records. That image soon palled and the Sperry autopilot was doing a splendid job, so Angela scrunched down in her seat and thought about the next forty-eight hours. She had more than enough gas to make it to the small landing field west of St. John's. She'd arranged for the tanks of gas to be delivered more than six months ago, certain that sooner or later she'd be making the flight. It was money she couldn't afford to shell out at that time, but she'd done it as a gesture of good faith to herself. She could only hope that someone hadn't happened upon her fuel tanks in the forsaken Canadian wilderness and pumped them dry.
She'd cross that bridge when she came to it. She had every expectation that things would go as she planned. She'd arrive late morning, catch a few hours sleep in the tiny hut and then take off. Presuming the weather held. Presuming the airdrome was in good condition. Presuming a lot of things.
She switched on the radio, flying low enough to pick up a Canadian station. Fats Waller was singing about "Honeysuckle Rose," something that wasn't heard too often on WLS. Radio stations in the U.S. of A. tended to keep their music tightly segregated, even if the genteel North didn't go in for the hideous lynchings that had been plaguing the South for the last few years. For a moment Angela remembered Langston Howard and she muttered a small curse under her breath for the waste, the criminal waste, of talent and brains. And then she remembered Langston's friend Clancy and she got mad all over again.
The sun was rising over the Atlantic, sending pale lavender streams of color soaring across the sky. If her compass and maps were right, she should be heading up across New Brunswick now, and Newfoundland wasn't too far beyond. She'd been there before, during the transatlantic hops she'd flown herself and ridden as copilot for Hal. But this was the first time she'd been alone, without friends, without a mechanic, without any support at all.
Newfoundland sure was inconveniently located for such a crucial spot on the map, she thought, taking the Lockheed off autopilot and banking into the gentle breeze, heading north. It was the closest point to Europe, sticking out into the middle of the icy cold Atlantic. It should have been an aviation center to rival Chicago, but transatlantic crossings were still too rare to merit even something as fancy as an airport. And she was deliberately avoiding the more populous areas, such as they were. She'd heard too many horror stories about weary pilots crashing into houses and wiping out bystanders to want to risk such a catastrophe. She had no qualms at all about risking her own life. But nobody else's.
It was late morning when she finally sighted the wide stretch of tundra that served as a makeshift landing field. The tiny hut was there; the tanks of fuel were stacked beside it. She could only hope they were still full or she was going to be seeing far more of this still half-frozen wasteland than she ever wanted.
In the end she fouled up. She was more tired than she'd realized and still wound up by hurt and anger and fierce determination. She came in too fast, the turf was wet with recent heavy rains, frozen beneath, and the Lockheed kissed the ground, settled and then began to slide.
She felt the plane go out of control with a curious calm. After all, she was on land. How much damage could she do?
The plane kept going, even with the engine turned off to prevent a deadly oil spill and fire, and Angela gripped the steering wheel, her feet pumping ineffectually on the rudders. And then the plane went down, nose first, into a bog, flinging Angela against the windshield, smashing her forehead and the glass. Her last thought before she lost consciousness was sheer astonishment that such a thing could happen on land. The warm, sticky blood began to pour down her face, and then everything went black.
*
Clancy had had long nights in his life. He'd had miserable flights, flying into ice storms with pellets coating the windshield so that he couldn't see, fog so thick he couldn't even trust his own ears. He'd flown with empty gas tanks, birds smashing the windshield, winds tossing him up and down, engines on fire, wings broken, oil spewing over the propellers, every kind of aviation disaster you could think of. But never, never had he been in such a tight, furious panic as when he followed Angela Hogan on her crazy flight to Newfoundland.
He didn't even stop to consider that she might have simply gone for a ride to calm herself or flown to someplace sensible like New York to get away from her anger. When he finally managed to get to the airport in Tony's borrowed Hudson and found the hangar doors open, the lights blazing and the Lockheed gone, he'd known what had happened. And he'd almost broken his fist pounding with impotent fury on the side of his Fokker.
Parsons was with him, his thick glasses and heavy beard hiding whatever dismay he was feeling. It had taken one threat and a matter of moments before Parsons came up with copies of Angela's flight plan, including damnably vague directions for getting to her proposed jumping off place.
Clancy's only chance of stopping her was there. Even on a bad night he could fly faster and better than anyone on this earth, including Miss High-and-Mighty Hogan, and his twin-engine Fokker had the puny little Lockheed beat all to pieces. He was going to catch up with her in Newfoundland and stop her from making this crazy flight, stop her from killing herself if he had to wring her pretty little neck to do it.
He cursed her halfway across Canada. He cursed himself the rest of the way. If only he'd shown the sense that had first made him run. He should have stayed in New York, stayed as far away from her as he possibly could. She had the ability to get under his skin like no other woman he'd ever known and he should be smart enough to keep away from a dame like that. But he hadn't been showing much brains lately, so why break a losing streak? When he caught up with her, he was going to paddle her until she couldn't sit down for a week. And then he was going to... Hell, he didn't know what he was going to do. He'd make it up as he went along.
He missed the tiny landing field twice, and the fuel in the Fokker was running low. He'd been in too much of a hurry to tank up completely before taking off after her, and he was paying the price for it now. Hell, it sure would be ironic if he fell into the ocean, out of gas, while he was trying to impress Angela with the foolishness of stunt flying.
The third time he flew over the field it was getting on into afternoon, and even the longest days of the year were shorter that far north. The sinking sun glinted off something down in a ravine, something bright blue, and he realized with sudden horror that that was Angela's plane. Stuck nose down in a bog.
His landing on the spongy ground was more along the lines of a controlled crash. He was out of the plane and racing along the muddy ground before the propellers stopped spinning, and under his breath he kept up a steady litany of curses and prayers, terrified of finding Angela's mangled, lifeless body still strapped in the cockpit of her plane.
He'd seen too many pilots die, men and women alike. He didn't know if he could stand to face another death. And not Angela's—please God, not his feisty Angel.
At least the plane hadn't burned. He yanked open the door, holding his breath, then releasing it with a gust of relief. She wasn't there. She'd managed to get out under her own steam—she couldn't be hurt that bad.
And then he saw the blood. It was everywhere, dried to a rusty brown, covering the leather seat, the instrument panel, the unopened can of tomato juice. He pulled his hand away from the door and realized it was covered with the same stuff, and the knot of fear tightened in his gut.
She wasn't lying in a sodden heap between the plane and the cabin. He forced himself to move with agonizing slowness, searching through the gathering gloom in case she'd somehow gotten disoriented and headed in the wrong direction. If she'd gone farther into the scrubby woods instead of toward the cabin, he'd have a hell of a time finding her. It was cold in the maritime provinces, even in June. And if she was still alive, frostbite wasn't going to help the situation.
He saw the bl
ood on the door of the hut with mingled relief and panic. There was no sound inside, and it took him a moment to steel himself to open the door.
It was dark inside, lit only by the quickly fading daylight. She was lying on a narrow, sagging cot, a green army blanket wrapped around her. He could see her hair matted with dark blood; he could see the deathly pale of her face. He glanced around the room. There was a pot-bellied stove kicking out a feeble amount of heat and a clothesline strung across the tiny room with her clothes hanging from it. Slamming the door behind him, he stepped into the hut, walked directly into the fragile rope and pulled it down.
She sat up instantly, the green blanket clutched in front of her, her face blank and panicked. And then her eyes focused on him and she made a sound that was somewhere between a squeak and a snarl. "What the hell are you doing here?"
She'd cut her forehead, but somehow she'd managed to clean it up. Head bumps always bled like crazy, but her angry eyes looked clear and steady, her color was slightly pale but all right, and the hands clutching that stupid blanket in front of her looked strong and steady.
"I would have thought I'd at least be greeted with a little relief, not to mention gratitude," he drawled, stripping off his leather flight jacket and dumping it on the only other piece of furniture the hut offered, a tiny straight-backed chair that wouldn't hold his big frame for more than a minute. "You sure as hell made a mess of your landing, Red. How'd you think you were going to get out of here?"
"My radio still works. I was going to call for help. From anyone but you," she said.
"Why?"
That stopped her cold. "Because," she said finally.
"Because," he echoed. "Not good enough, Red. Did you think to bring any water? You haven't done the world's greatest job cleaning that cut on your head."
"I didn't have a mirror," she said frostily. "And there's plenty of water around. I took a damned bath in it when I fell out of the plane. Go get some of that if my face offends you."