Calabash calmly turned and went for Chucky. Something exploded, and the sound, well above the pain threshold, slammed around the confined space. The airplane staggered, slewed, then fell. Sybel screamed. Jellyroll, with a clipped yelp, was thrown from my lap to the floor. For an instant, I thought Calabash had shot Chucky, but there he was, like the rest of us, screaming, and bouncing to and fro. The explosion had originated in the cockpit! Beemon? Had Jones shot Beemon?
No. The airplane leveled off, and with it the engine noise; the monotone returned, and we welcomed it, hope for survival at least until we arrived at Dutch Frigate Shoals.
"Chucky." Beemon turned aft and called. Chucky picked himself up from under his seat and staggered forward. He leaned in to talk to the pilot, then began to yank at Jones's shoulder, but Jones fought him. No. The difficulty in dislodging Jones was due to his dead weight. Jones's head, eyes open, lolled in a way no living head could, a Raggedy Ann head, as Chucky pulled his upper body from the seat and dragged him by the armpits aft along the short aisle. A yellow plastic handle protruded from the center of his chest. Blood, still on the move, soaked his clothes all the way under his crotch. Numbly, we watched Chucky, averting his eyes from his load, open a hatch in the bulkhead, enter himself, then drag Jones through. His heels hooked on the bottom of the hatchway. Chucky reached an arm out the hatch and one by one lifted them in by the shoes. Did we really just see that?
Chucky returned and flopped in the portside seat. He was shaken, shoulders heaving for breath. When he caught it, he called forward, "Whenever you're ready, Chief." Then he looked at me.
A loud rush of air and an ear-popping pressure change, then abruptly it was over, pressure and noise back to normal. I suddenly had to sleep. I didn't want to know what caused that change. I felt the edges of hysteria brush across my brain as a caution not to try to figure it out. Jones was just back there, where you don't want to go even briefly, even to relieve this throbbing pressure from the bladder, back where they store the people with screwdrivers in their hearts. Just sleep. Windows would have helped, sunlight to cut the psychic darkness, the dream of blood-soaked crotches passing by, but there were no windows, a tube of riveted aluminum, that was all, louder than the IRT express bearing us to an island full of bod fockers. Sleep will turn all that to a sunny beach. Suddenly that fucking Chucky was beside me, poking me in the arm muscle, disturbing my sleep. "What!"
"Did he say where we're going?"
"Dutch Frigate Shoals."
"Shit," muttered Chucky, standing, returning to his seat.
"Wait, what's going to happen when we get there?"
"He didn't tell you?"
"If he told me, I wouldn't be asking, would I!"
"You take a peek behind that wall, four-eyes." He flopped in his seat and lit a cigarette. Sybel asked him for one. He complied. I didn't want to look back there, but I did. I twisted the recessed latch and punched the little door open. I waited for my eyes to adjust. There was a catwalk leading around them, not much more than a crawl space, but Jones was gone. A catwalk. Around the bombs. Four bombs, squat and black with little propellers on the nose, toggled to a strong tripod frame above the bomb-bay doors, which had opened for Jones, I concluded, but now were closed.
We must be over the ocean, I reasoned sluggishly, where Jones would never be found. I was relieved. I felt a strange and giddy happiness. We weren't being delivered to our deaths on this Dutch Frigate Shoals. It was going to be them, not us! It felt like a gift.
TWENTY-SIX
I CLIMBED INTO the right-hand seat. He had taped the photographs of his family to the instrument panel, and now he was crying silently to himself. Like the copilot in the war movie, I looked away from him in deference to the sanction against masculine tears my generation inherited from his, as I put on the earphones. I watched the ocean, on which the late afternoon sun shimmered in blinding contrast to black-and-white war movies.
A high-pitched whine made my ears itch. I followed the sound to its source, a thumb-round bullet hole in the side window inches from Beemon's temple.
"I think she wanted me to kill her, Arthur."
"You—? Did you?"
He nodded.
I'm uncertain what happened then. Did I fall asleep? Absurd. Yet day became night, and I missed the change. Her own father had killed her. When he said so with that short nod, I was squinting into the sun, but when my awareness returned, sea, sky, and horizon were gone, no stars or moon, blackness. The only light in our world glowed red for night vision behind the old-fashioned dials, and the red bled eerily through the photos taped over it. He was saying something, speaking to me as if it were unremarkable that day should vanish into night during a nod of the head.
Billie's "I'm dead" note was duct-taped above the compass and under the row of photographs. He pointed to the note, tapped it with his fingernail, and he said, "She knew what you'd do. She knew her man. The photographs, they're all about my life, but this note is all about you."
"What do you mean?" I asked as if I didn't know.
"My daughter set it up. The whole goddam thing. Somehow she learned I was alive, then she set it up so I might kill her. But she had to have somebody to tell me who I'd killed or else her revenge wouldn't work. You with me, Arthur? You look a tad bilious. Think how I feel. But you were the man for the job."
"I don't believe that," I lied, and D.B. laughed at me.
This had been a family affair from the beginning, and I was nothing more than the gentleman caller.
"Acappella Productions," he was saying. "I looked it up. It means alone, without accompaniment, but you and I, we know she had a hell of a lot of accompaniment. Only we didn't know that's what we were."
"Tell me what happened."
"When? You mean the night she died?"
"Don't say it that way. She didn't just die, like from a stroke."
"I found her tied up in the tub. I went to her apartment, because that's where all my employees flocked when I threw a scare into them, and I found her tied and gagged with her own panties. Jones did that, left her like that while he went looking for the photos. She looked at me standing over her and began to choke, so I removed the gag. She wasn't choking. She was laughing."
I pictured the scene played out against the night as if it were the wide screen, Billie contorted, probably in pain, but laughing at her father.
"She said, 'You're dead, Pop.' Pop. She actually called me that. Course I missed the joke at that point. Right then I was thinking here's this grifter all tied up, helpless, but she's acting all out of character for a grifter caught in the act. Put yourself in my place, Arthur, what would you have done?"
"Hell, under the circumstances, I'd have drowned her. Only way to teach a grifter."
"I didn't intend to drown her, Arthur. I wanted to find out some things. How did she know about the doctors, the whole Florida business? What were these photographs she said would hang me? I had my life to protect, Arthur, so I ran some water in the tub. Put her face in it. She drowned. I look back on it, I'm convinced that's the way she wanted it."
"Now you're batting a thousand," I spit, enraged at the scene I saw before me, Billie drowned, her hair undulating on the surface, her bound hands clenched into fists.
"What'd you say?"
"Two for two. You got both your kids!"
His head didn't turn; he flew his airplane. After a while, he said, "Here, you take over." He was climbing out of the cockpit.
"Are you nuts!"
"Just while I take a pee."
"It's on autopilot, isn't it?"
"Autopilot's in the shop." He turned and walked aft.
No, he wouldn't do that. It was on autopilot. Right? No! We were accelerating. I gripped the half wheel. No, we were diving! That meant the nose must come up—
Behind me, I heard Sybel shout and Beemon pointed at me, made the okay sign, and walked aft.
I heaved back on the wheel. Things slowed down. That felt better, now I could think. Why were t
he engines screaming as if in distress? The stall! I had read the books, I knew the danger. When dick-up pilots raise the nose too high, the angle of attack grows so extreme that the wings lose all lift properties and they stall. Then the aircraft drops out of the air. Get the nose down! The books say that surviving pilots fly with a light touch. They don't bend the wheel into a pretzel out of crippling terror. I eased the wheel forward and felt us edge over the top of the arc. Why were we diving? How long does it take for a pee! I yanked the wheel into my stomach. Almost immediately my seat began to shudder. Now I'd done it, totally fucked the laminar flow. So I shoved the wheel forward again, but nothing happened except that the shudder grew more violent. We were finished. We would fall into a spin from which I could never recover. A seat cushion or a thermos bottle might float ashore somewhere, and a strolling yuppie might toe the jetsam curiously before moving on.
"Give it a little throttle," a calm voice advised. Beemon! He was back, headphones on, and he was flying.
I was gasping for breath. My arms ached. "What did you do that for? Are you crazy!"
"Well, pard, the fact is I don't like your attitude. You come aboard my favorite airplane and tell me some pretty foul news only to go all righteous on me. Hell, you can't even fly my favorite airplane. That was a ham-handed piece of work, all that up and down. You don't have any instincts. You about killed us in the time it takes a real pilot to spray one. You can't pretend to know a goddam thing about my life unless you got about five thousand hours in your book. Besides which you're nothing more than an outsider at the family fracas. So if you don't change that righteous attitude, I ain't inviting you along again."
I understood, sort of. I nodded. "There's another thing you don't seem to know," I said, the outsider.
"I've had enough revelations for one flight."
"Eleanor lives at Bright Bay."
"Eleanor. As in my ex-wife Eleanor?"
"As in Billie's mother." It was my job to tell. I didn't leave it unfinished, Billie.
"Why there? Must be thousands of nursing homes in New York."
He seemed smaller now, compressed into his seat. The Ace of Aces seemed to me a vulnerable little boy. I didn't want to pity him; I wanted my loathing untainted. Tears flooded the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes. I wondered if Billie would have felt gratified at that.
"Keene and Osley. Billie learned about the Moxie business. That's the only connection I can think of. Who is the burned man at Bright Bay?"
"Harry. He's been there since the crash in Moxie. The doctors have done all they can for him."
"So you switched identities? Why?"
"I needed a new one, since I was supposed to have been killed in that crash. His was handy. We discussed it. I loved him, too. Look," he said quietly. "There it is."
It was land, reef tops on which stray mangrove roots had taken hold. One islet was about the size and shape of a bus roof, and five others, smaller, barely out of water, were strung along behind.
"Hen and Chickens Reef. Pretty slick piece of flying if you didn't notice due to all the emotional distractions. Dead on the landfall after six hours over water at night."
"Brilliant," I said.
"Brilliant? That's quite a compliment coming from a flyboy like you. Now we bend east forty degrees." He began the turn. "Did you talk to Eleanor?"
"Yes."
"Was she—? How did she seem to you, Arthur?"
"She seemed—" I stopped. My impulse was to lie, to make her life sound better than it was. Why did I want to protect his feelings? What about my feelings? "Her mind is gone. She thinks Harry Pine is you. At least, I think that's what she thinks."
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE DYING DAWN fanned the east with streaks of red, and an island began to form and grow on the horizon. D.B. sat straight in his seat, pulled on his shades, and said, "Dutch Frigate Shoals."
"Do you really mean to bomb it?"
"Sure."
This was it, the drug war. When Cobb told me about it, I hadn't expected to be in the vanguard of the air assault. "Who's down there?" I asked.
"A scumbag name of Jackie. That's the transshipment point for all the dope bound for the East Coast. Jackie's an old fart, about my age. He used to be pals with all the scumbags. Papa Doc, Somoza, the Colonels. He and Klaus Barbie were buddies. No, I got no compunction about blowing Jackie to shit. I just hope he don't keep pets."
We passed low and less than a mile to the north of Dutch Frigate Shoals, crescent-shaped, like a waning moon. The southern arc was overgrown in scrub and mangrove, but all vegetation had been cut away in the north to accommodate human luxury. There was a sun-bleached airstrip, two planes parked on it, a white house with a pink roof from which radio antennae sprouted incongruously. And there was a long whitewashed dock to which a motorboat with a tuna tower was tied. Also crescent-shaped, the house curved around a blue tile swimming pool. The water shimmered invitingly. I saw no movement.
"This is what you do? Bomb villas for the Mafia?"
"Nope, this is my first. But don't get righteous again. You live off your dog. My daughter is the reason we're here."
"How so?"
"Let's say you're my boss, Luigi Boombott, and you employ this asshole to do some flying for you. This pilot's been dependable up till now, but lately his entire holdings are falling apart on Eyewitness News. His building gets torched, his employees shoot each other to pieces on a residential street. This guy's trouble, and why bother? Pilots come a dime a dozen. You could get an astronaut, if you wanted to hang around with one. Get rid of that asshole. And they would have, too, except I struck this deal with them."
"You blow up the competition and they don't kill you."
"Basically. Except I have to vanish. We won't be able to play squash on Thursdays anymore."
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Maybe I'll retire to St. Pete Beach, play shuffleboard and listen to the bugs get electrocuted. I'm feeling kind of old. You're looking a little aged yourself."
"I feel it."
"Well, it's almost over now. We'll just swing up-sun to confuse the flak gunners. A flight through hot steel."
"You're kidding."
"Yeah, they're probably asleep with their dorks in hand. Jackie samples his wares. Arthur, how did my daughter know I'm alive?"
"I don't know, for sure."
"Do you have an idea?"
"I think Eleanor saw you. There's a photograph on her wall. It shows Billie and Eleanor together in Billie's studio. She could have seen you the day it was taken. Your face is different, a lot of years have passed, but maybe there was something she recognized, your walk, a gesture. I don't know, but I bet that picture was taken about a year ago."
He sat silently, sadly, for a while before he pressed us into our seats with a cowboy bank to the right. I liked it. When we leveled off, D.B. straightened in his seat and produced another Baby Ruth from his shirt pocket. He bit the wrapper off and broke the bar in half. We went in munching.
The pink roof filled the windscreen. "We're operational, Arthur."
The roof vanished beneath our nose like a fantasy. Nothing happened. Was this all some kind of sick joke?
No. Explosions slewed the tail around.
We turned 180 degrees.
Jackie's house had become a hole. Not even a jagged piece of wall stood upright. Pink chunks were strewn all over the island, and others were sinking in the shallow sea. Some parts hadn't even come down yet. Little fires flickered in the hole, and only half of the pool remained in the earth; the rest was flickering down like blue tile confetti. Transfixed, I watched the boat roll onto its side like a bathtub toy, fill and sink in the transparent water.
"We'll strafe some."
"Huh?"
He pointed the black nose at the airplanes parked on a coral revetment covered with swimming pool parts and opened fire. The cannon, or whatever it was, slammed the bottom of my seat, and red baseballs arced out, seemingly in slow motion. The single-engine p
lane withered and collapsed like a silent-comedy prop. The gun beneath my seat was so powerful its recoil seemed to cause the black bomber to slow noticeably. D.B. turned slightly, aimed at the twin-engine airplane, and after no more than six whacks to my spine, the gas tanks exploded. A wing jinked high in the air, and a flaming ball that might have been an engine rolled into the water and steamed spectacularly.
D.B. stood the B-26 on its wing and we orbited his destruction. It was total. I sat in a puddle of sweat reminding myself that what I was seeing was heavily actual. It only looked like a war movie in living color. The cockpit reeked acridly of gunpowder.
"Too bad," he said. "That was a nice twin Beech. Did you see it?"
"Briefly."
He put us on a course due west, and in minutes we were flying over deep blue Gulf Stream water. Fly west from the Bahamas and you come upon the coast of Florida.
"You're going back, aren't you?" I asked, but I didn't need an answer.
"Harry and I, we had some good times out of Moxie Field, but you know, Arthur, we should never have survived the war. That was our big mistake. We were good at war, but we never fit in after it ended. We should have flown into a bridge like your old man did."
"How do you know he flew into a bridge? I didn't tell you that.
"They have books, Arthur. I looked it up. He was young."
"Twenty-one." I began to feel cold from the drying sweat and the devastation.
"What do you think we ought to do with these photographs, pard?"
"I don't know. They're yours. I guess this note is mine."
I knew somehow what he was going to do with them even before he slid open the little side window. Summer air entered with a roar. One by one, he pulled them off the instrument panel and fed them to the slipstream. The note alone remained taped in place. I peeled it off and handed it to him. After it was gone, he closed the window.
"Can I try it again?" I asked.
"Try what?"
"Flying."
"Sure. She's all yours."
I found the rudder pedals, then took the wheel in my fingertips.
Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery Page 20