He watched Hano and Ramirez talk and laugh, silhouetted by the runway flames. What were they talking about? His willingness to sit there? It also occurred to him that they were talking about hauling him out of the car and shooting him—shooting him and burying him somewhere out there in the darkness. One less loose end.
He shook his head. He was tired, and wanted to get the fuck out of there.
Finally, the guy with the gun walked away, and Hano came walking over. Huh, Martin thought. The guy didn’t leave until Hano came back to the car.
“Okay, Mr. Pilot,” Hano said when he opened the door. He was all smiles now. “Sorry it took so long. But the plane’s all loaded up now. We can get going.”
Walking over to the plane, Martin looked around for Ramirez. He figured he’d at least get to shake his hand. Or give him a nod. Something, anyway. But he was gone, and pretty soon Martin was starting up the plane.
Up in the air Hano was a chatterbox. He wanted to vacation in Mexico soon, maybe do some sport fishing. He joked again with Martin about not getting to go out to Ensenada and see “Miss Mexico.” He talked about some upcoming horse races, and the extra money he was going to have from this job, about how great the setup was. No one seemed to think to look up in the sky to catch drug smugglers.
“They’re stopping all the cars and tearing them apart,” he said. “But we’re up here, and it’s like we’re invisible. Especially at night.” He shook his head. “What a joke,” he said.
They shook hands and said good-bye in Santa Barbara. Martin could tell that as far as Hano was concerned, everything was A-okay.
But once he was alone and back in the air, Martin felt an overwhelming sense of sadness. For a while he felt the urge to cry—even hoped that he would, for the relief it might bring. But there weren’t any tears, and so he just had to deal with the sudden and fairly intense feeling of desolation that was gripping him, six thousand feet in the air. What was he doing? Yes, he was working—making money—and that was motivation enough. But what was he doing? He’d felt like a fucking idiot back there at Ramirez’s place. And while that in itself wasn’t a big deal, the problem was that he always felt that way—and always had. Sure, there were bright spots: the first time Linda told him that she loved him (which wasn’t until after their shotgun wedding and Sarah’s birth); the time Sarah was three and said she’d missed him, even though he’d only been out of the room for a minute; the time he heard Peter brag to a boy down the street about how his dad had caught a shark with three legs (it was a three-foot shark); the first time a racehorse he owned won a race. But in general his life was made up of moments like the one back in Ramirez’s car: looking on while other people did the things that mattered. Just wait here, Martin. Eventually you’ll belong, but not right now.
Not for the first time, he thought about cutting the engine and pointing the plane downward . . . He could just let gravity do its work. Plunge through the darkness—he’d be dead in no time. But he didn’t want to be found with a load of heroin in his plane. For one thing, he was pretty sure that would void his life insurance policy, and Linda and the kids wouldn’t get a dime. They’d be completely screwed. But he also didn’t want to give that cop Slater the satisfaction of finding him with a load of drugs. At least not like that. If he was going to catch Martin, he was going to have to work a little harder than that.
He thought about flying past Hayward and the Bay Area, maybe up to Reno. If he knew someone who’d buy the heroin from him, he could use it to start a new life and be a new person. Just disappear. They’d think he’d crashed somewhere—that he’d gotten off course over the low clouds and run out of gas over the ocean. “He probably realized too late where he was,” someone, a cop of some sort or maybe Ludwig, would say to Linda. Ludwig wouldn’t really believe that he’d made a mistake like that. He might say it to Linda, but he wouldn’t believe it. Though Linda probably wouldn’t believe it, either. She knew he might just be capable of bailing out—saying fuck it, it’s your problem now, not mine. But knowing Linda, she’d hunt him down and then kill him herself. And she’d do it in a sly way: she’d hand him a drink with poison in it, and then, when he was lying there on the ground, choking to death, tell him she’d done it.
“Did you really think you could walk out on me like that, Martin?” she’d ask. “After all the shit I put up with from you? I don’t think so.”
This last thought made him laugh out loud. The sound of his own voice startled him, but somehow it helped him shift the gears of his mood just a little bit. Fuck it, he thought. I’m sleeping in my own bed tonight, and maybe when I wake up in the morning things will be a little better. I’ll be five thousand dollars richer, anyway. He laughed again. Then he started singing a song to himself, just to keep the sound of himself there with him in the cockpit. He realized it was “Country Roads,” the John Denver song he’d sung at the restaurant in Ensenada on his first trip to Mexico, and this made him laugh yet again.
The instrument panel told him he was somewhere over the Santa Cruz mountains. But a few minutes later when he looked out the window he realized that he could actually see the lights of San Jose down below in the distance. The coastal clouds were finally clearing out. He’d be touching down soon. Good. He was really beat, and he needed to get out of the plane and drive home. Something—that frightening feeling of sadness, or maybe emptiness (it was hard to say what it was, exactly)—had tried to follow him back from Mexico. It had slipped into the plane with the drugs, or maybe with Hano, and it had grabbed him from behind for a few minutes, had tussled with him. But he’d managed to slip free, and if he just kept moving, it probably wouldn’t catch up with him. Or not for a while, at least. And that was all you could ask for, really. Just a little bit of time and distance between you and the thing that was chasing you.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Martin was right in the middle of telling Ludwig about his crappy morning, about how he’d decided to surprise Sarah by taking her out to breakfast, letting her be late for school. Or summer school. Her grades had been so bad that she’d been forced to sign up for an extra month of classes, three mornings a week. It was some sort of deal the school had cut so that she and a few other kids could get credit for classes they’d failed and graduate from junior high. She was miserable about it—beaten down and humiliated. So Martin thought he’d do something nice for her, a special little breakfast with dad, maybe a chance to talk, figure things out.
But, he explained, she’d been pissy. First she said she wasn’t hungry, and then that the food wasn’t any good, even though the little diner in Walnut Station had always been her favorite place. Martin was just about to tell Ludwig how she’d said he was boring and wanted to leave, which ended up with him yelling at her right there in the diner. But before he could get the last part of the story out (the dramatic part, which was actually kind of funny, he knew)—he saw the black Camaro pull into the parking area out in front of the office.
“What’s wrong?” Ludwig said, following his gaze. “Who is that?”
“Nothing,” Martin said. He stood up from his desk and put his hands on his hips. “Or nothing’s wrong, I mean. This is the guy I told you about. The drug detective. The one who came by here before—from the plane that crashed up in Humboldt County.” He stood there looking out the window, waiting for Slater to emerge from his car.
“Really?” Ludwig said. He swung his legs off of his desk and leaned forward, peering out through the plate glass window. “What’s he doing here now?”
Martin looked at Ludwig, then back out at Slater’s car. “How the fuck do I know what he’s doing here?” he asked. “He wants to crawl up my ass again, I guess. Or up our asses. See if we’ve sold any more drug planes.”
Ludwig sat there, looking out the window at Slater. “But we haven’t sold any planes,” he said. “Tell him that. Tell him to send some drug smugglers our way and we’ll sell them some planes—and then we’ll turn them in to him. How about telling him that?”
/> Martin watched as Slater got out of his car and took a long, patient look around the lot. He had the same basic outfit as the last two times he’d seen him—jeans, T-shirt—but he was also wearing sunglasses—aviators—which Martin found both irritating and intimidating.
It was just over a week since his second trip to Mexico. Had the drugs hit the market already? Had there been a sudden wave of heroin overdoses caused by an extra-potent shipment of Mexican brown (or a bad shipment, one laced with rat poison or some other horrible substance)? That was the kind of thing that would happen on TV: the shipment trickles down to the streets, and the dedicated cop starts sniffing around, following leads, turning up the heat.
Fuck, Martin thought. He stood there watching Slater look around.
“Jesus,” Ludwig said. He stood up now, too. “Look at him. He really does look like a narco guy, doesn’t he?”
THEY SAT ON THE vinyl-cushioned couches in the waiting area by the big front window. Linda had picked them out—the couches and the round coffee table (she had also picked out the big plastic plants between the two couches). She said the couches had a nice modern look that went with the building, and that the off-white color would brighten the place. Plus, the vinyl was easy to clean. Martin agreed they looked good, but they weren’t very comfortable. The cushions were thin, and if you sat there for more than a couple of minutes you could feel the wooden frames jabbing at you. And the truth was that the white vinyl didn’t clean off very well; there were coffee stains all over the cushions.
Slater had spread a couple of sheets of mug shots on the coffee table, and Martin and Ludwig were looking through them. That was why Slater had shown up: there was another guy they were looking at in connection with the Humboldt case, and he wanted Martin (and now Ludwig) to look at some more people, see if they recognized anyone.
“But the guy who bought that plane came in alone,” Martin said.
“I know,” Slater said. “But now we think that this might be a wider circle of people, and it looks like they might have another plane they’re using. We tracked down some information about a series of flight plans someone filed up at the airport in Redding. And we think it might be this guy, the one connected to the Humboldt thing—you know, your guy. The guy who crashed.”
“And you want to know if one of these other guys bought a plane here, too,” Martin said.
Slater looked at Ludwig and pointed at Martin.
“Your boss is pretty sharp,” he said, smiling. “Nothing gets past him.”
Ludwig laughed, and he and Slater exchanged a look.
Jesus, Martin thought. Don’t tell me these two are going to end up being pals.
It wouldn’t surprise him. They were actually kind of similar. Both were somewhere in their mid- to late thirties, and both were kind of good-looking in that rough and tumble way women tended to like. But most of all, they both had that working-class thing going on—or that up-from-working-class thing. The whole “Sure, I’m white collar, but I’m not pretending to be anything I’m not” thing.
Martin decided to ignore them. He was tired of Jim Slater and his penchant for just showing up, uninvited. “What was the make of the plane?” he asked.
“Uh, hold on,” Slater said. He stood up and dug around in his front pocket, and then pulled out a folded-up piece of pink paper. Martin remembered that Slater had done something like this when he was at his house out in Walnut Station. Hadn’t he pulled out a crinkled-up piece of paper with information scribbled on it? It occurred to him that this seeming lack of organization was actually just a show—a pretend messiness, one that was intended to get guys like Martin to let their guard down.
“Okay,” Slater said. “It’s a Piper Cherokee PA 32-300. That’s what it says in the flight plan, anyway.”
“We’ve sold a couple of those in the past few years,” Ludwig said. “What year is it?”
Slater sat down and looked again at his little piece of pink paper.
“Nineteen sixty-seven,” he said.
Ludwig looked over at Martin. “Have we ever sold a sixty-seven three hundred?” he asked, a thoughtful look on his face. “That doesn’t sound familiar.” He looked back at Slater. “I don’t think so, but I’m not positive. Let me take a look.”
Martin watched as Ludwig jumped up and walked over to the three file cabinets by the coffee machine. He could tell that Ludwig was hoping to find out that the guy had actually bought the plane from Anderson Aircrafts. It was the same way Martin had felt at his house, just before identifying the guy in the mug shots. He’d wanted to be part of something exciting like that. An arrest, or a bust, or whatever.
But, he knew, he’d also wanted to please Slater. It was more than a little ridiculous. A guy shows up out of nowhere, flashes his badge, and the next thing you know you’re doing everything you can to make him happy (or almost everything—Martin wasn’t going to turn himself in just to score points with Slater, that was for sure). But there was something about Slater that made you feel that way. He was an alpha dog, the kind the other dogs in the pack gave over to: moved out of the way, averted their eyes, let him have first shot at the females in heat.
Martin looked at Slater and saw that he was looking back at him. He had that cocky half smile on his face, and Martin had the feeling he wouldn’t mind sitting in the waiting area of Anderson Aircrafts all day long. Chatting and just generally being a nuisance.
Fucking hell, Martin thought. He didn’t know what to say. Go away. I hate you.
He glanced over and saw that Ludwig had his head buried in the open drawer of a file cabinet. He was mumbling something, but Martin couldn’t quite hear what.
“So where is this plane now?” Martin asked, mainly for the sake of having something to say. He knew Slater didn’t know where the plane was. Moreover, he, Martin, didn’t care where the plane was.
“Well,” Slater said. “If you’d asked me that question last week, I’d have told you that I didn’t have a clue. But we just found out that David Little, the one who bought the plane from you guys here, actually owns a bunch of land out in Livermore. And we’re thinking that it might be stashed out there somewhere.”
He looked at Martin and adjusted his sunglasses where they were perched on his head. They were tucked into his hair, and Martin felt a quick stab of jealousy as he thought about how careful he had to be when he did something like that—more than once, he’d pushed his toupee off balance doing that kind of thing.
Huh, Martin thought. Livermore wasn’t that far from Walnut Station. You drove south to Pleasanton, where Val lived, and then east fifteen or twenty minutes. It wasn’t as nice as Walnut Station or Pleasanton. Yes, the Rolling Stones had played out there, at the speedway, but it was mostly a bunch of hick ranchers who thought it was still 1950. So what was going on? Was everyone in the East Bay turning to drug smuggling?
“So why don’t you just go out there and look around?” Martin asked. “You can do that if you want, right?”
Slater laughed. “Oh, we can do it, all right,” he said. “We’re the police—we can pretty much do whatever we want. But the problem is that we’re talking about a lot of land out there. He’s got twenty-five hundred acres, or something crazy like that. And it’s really hilly, or a lot of it is, anyway. Canyons and a lot of oak trees. We drove around for a while but it’s just me and one other guy. There’s only so much ground we can cover. Plus, we don’t have the right kind of car. My Camaro isn’t exactly the kind of car you take up into the hills, you know.”
Martin was about to respond when Ludwig came back over from the file cabinets.
“Okay,” he said to Martin and Slater. He was holding a couple of file folders. Jesus, Martin thought. When I ask him to grab some files it takes at least half an hour.
“These are for the Piper Cherokees we’ve sold the past few years,” Ludwig said. “But I don’t think we’ve sold a ’sixty-seven.”
He tossed the files onto the coffee table. Martin looked at the plain manila
exteriors of the files and thought about the sheets of paper inside. Contracts. Personal-information forms. Bank statements. Loan applications. Tax returns. All the paper that made the wheels turn, and that left a clearly marked trail back to wherever it was that you were trying to hide. Maybe in a place like Mexico you could just sort of disappear into the ether, hop in your plane and vanish. Here, though, there was always a way to find you. Basically, once a guy like Slater started in after you, it was only a matter of time before he tracked you down.
“Thanks,” Slater said. But he didn’t reach out to grab the files. Instead he just sat there, looking down at them. Martin felt as if he understood. Who wanted to go rooting through a bunch of old files? Plus, he had a feeling a guy like Slater was more interested in the action part of things, the rundowns and the shootouts. Sure, he’d been shot a couple of times, and he was semiretired out here in the suburbs. But Martin was willing to bet he still got off on that rush of adrenaline that came with the hot pursuit of the bad guy.
“Listen,” Slater said. “I have a question for you guys. This is gonna sound a little nutty, but just hear me out.”
He looked up at Ludwig, who was still standing there next to the couch, and then over at Martin.
“Okay,” Ludwig said.
Martin nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”
“Well,” Slater said. He folded his arms and leaned back on the couch. “What would you guys think about flying me out there? You know, out to this guy’s property in Livermore. Or out over this guy’s property, I mean. So I could see what’s going on. I mean, it’s not very far, right? And maybe that way I can see something. You know, from up above.”
Martin stared at Slater. Had he really just asked to be taken up in one of Martin’s planes? Why not just ask if he could join Martin for his next trip down to Mexico? It was almost as if Slater were yanking Martin’s chain, trying to scare the shit out of him. Martin felt a panicked urge to jump up and flee—just jump in his car and start driving.
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