Scott Free

by John Gilstrap

  Brandon scowled. “Excuse me?”

  Whitestone chuckled. “How about a cup of coffee? I have a pot brewing in my office, twenty-four–seven.”

  Confused, Brandon nodded. “Coffee, please.”

  Whitestone closed the door and gestured to a wooden chair. “Welcome to Utah,” he said. “The Mormon capital of the world. Not many coffee drinkers among the locals.” He walked to an ancient Mr. Coffee that perched precariously on a bookshelf. “Cream? Sugar?”

  “Both, please.” Brandon settled himself into the hardback chair. Whoever wrote the budgets for Arapaho County clearly didn’t care much about the aesthetics of the police chief’s personal office space. Wood for the chairs, gray metal for everything else.

  The chief presented Brandon with a steaming cup. “You’re from back east, right?”

  “Virginia. About fifteen miles west of D.C.”

  Whitestone set his own cup on his desk and sat heavily, folding his hands on the blotter. “Nice area. I was stationed at Fort Belvoir for two years back when I was young and stupid.” Clearly, he wanted to make this as lighthearted as he could, but Brandon was having none of it. The chief sighed. “Okay, well, actually, your wife summed it up pretty well this morning.”

  “My wife?”

  “On the morning news. You didn’t see her?”

  Brandon groaned against the headache that had begun to gather behind his eyes. “No, to tell you the truth, Chief, I spend as little time as possible watching, listening to or sharing oxygen with my ex-wife.”

  Whitestone made a curious face, but he didn’t pursue the point. “Well, here’s the long and the short of it. We don’t know much more now than we did twelve hours ago. The Cessna carrying your son and his friend apparently left around five o’clock last night, on their way to Salt Lake City. To our knowledge, they never arrived, and we presume that they have crashed.”

  He’d never get used to hearing the words spoken aloud. “But you know where they are, right?”

  “I can’t imagine how difficult this must be for you, Mr. O’Toole,” the chief said.

  “Call me Brandon, please. I asked you if you know where the plane went down.”

  Whitestone signaled the answer with a sigh. “Well, we’d like to think so. I mean, we know they started at SkyTop around four-thirty or five and presume they headed for the main airport in Salt Lake City, but the fact is they never filed a flight plan, so we don’t know anything for sure.”

  “But, we know generally,” Brandon prompted. “Assuming that they were headed where they said. And frankly, where else would they go?”

  “Like I said, I hope we do. With this storm blowing, though, we haven’t had a chance till this morning to actually go out looking for them.”

  Brandon pressed harder. “But if you know point A and you know point B, and you know how long they were in the air, then you must have a decent idea where the wreckage would be. Hell, when the Kennedy kid crashed a couple of years ago, they were able to pinpoint a spot in the ocean just from radar.”

  Whitestone’s face grew even darker. “Unfortunately, that was New York and Boston. This is Utah. Because your son’s plane was flying outside the normal flight paths, no one was paying too much attention. They had no transponder, so they were difficult to track. In the middle of a storm like that, it’s my understanding that it’s easy for a small plane to get lost in the ground clutter. Mind you, this is information I’ve only learned myself in the past few hours. As for plotting them on a map, that’s what we’re hoping to do. But it was damned windy out there last night. It could be…Well, there’s certainly plenty of hope that we’ll find them right where they’re supposed to be.”

  While the chief’s words said hope, Brandon noted that everything else projected the opposite. “Isn’t there some sort of locator beacon on the plane?”

  This time, Whitestone knew that his words would hurt. “Not this aircraft, no. Frankly, to be compliant with FAA regulations, it should have. Unfortunately, it appears that Cody Jamieson wasn’t always a rule-follower.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Brandon spat. “If that son of a bitch survived, I swear to God I’ll kill him myself. So, you’re telling me we’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “I’m not sure I’d characterize it quite that way—”

  “Don’t bullshit me, goddammit!” Brandon boomed, and then he backed off right away. “I’m sorry.”

  Whitestone shook it off. “No need. You’ve got to be frazzled. How did you get here, anyway? The airports are closed, and so are the roads.”

  Brandon shrugged. “You’ll have to talk to the pilot about the airport, but those barricades don’t really close a road. They just provide an extra obstacle. Besides, nothing performs like a rental car. So, tell me about your search efforts so far. You have crews hiking up into the mountains?”

  “Where would I send them to? Like I said, we don’t know—”

  “What about airplanes?”

  “The Air National Guard has provided an airplane to monitor radio frequencies for distress calls, but for the time being—”

  “I meant search planes.”

  Whitestone set his jaw. “Please, Mr. O’Toole. Brandon. I know what you’d like to see out there, but until the weather breaks, there are limits to what we can do.”

  “And for right now, the best you can do is sit around with your thumb up your ass?”

  Whitestone’s eyes went hot. “We’re doing what we can,” he said at length. “Out here, Mother Nature calls more shots than we do. If that looks to you like we’re sitting on our thumbs, I’m sorry. The weather’s supposed to clear this afternoon.”

  Brandon wanted to break something. Time was their most lethal enemy, next to the weather, and Chief Whitestone was telling him that his team of rescuers—if, indeed there even was such a team—didn’t have the balls to face down either one. “You’re giving up, then?”

  Whitestone shook his head. “God, no. First chance we get, we’ll be all over that mountain looking for them. Search and rescue is a dangerous business in the best of circumstances, and we’re all willing to stretch the odds to make a save. But we can’t do an air search until the weather dies down, and it just doesn’t make sense to send ground teams in to wander aimlessly. Surely you understand that.”

  “What I don’t understand is, why this Jamieson kid has more balls than your entire police department. He was a reckless idiot, but at least he had the courage to try something.”

  Whitestone’s eyes burned hotter. “Mr. O’Toole, I want you to do us both a favor, okay? Never mistake bravado for bravery. Foolishness for guts. With all respect, your son and Cody Jamieson did a stupid, stupid thing. And nobody on my staff wants to duplicate their stupidity. I’m sure that hurts, but it’s just the way it is.”

  Brandon heard the air rush out of his lungs as the news sank in, and for a moment, he wondered if he’d be able to take a breath at all.

  “Are you all right?” Whitestone rose from his chair and reached across the desk to place his hand atop Brandon’s. “I’m sorry if that was too much detail. I thought…You impressed me as someone who appreciated bluntness.”

  Brandon inhaled deeply and held it for a second. “I just get so angry—” He cut himself off. Whitestone was a cop, not a psychologist. Brandon would deal with his anger on his own time. “I appreciate your candor—your bluntness, as you say. I want to know every little detail.”

  Whitestone watched the other man carefully for a long moment before lowering himself back into his seat. “This needn’t be all down time,” he said, reaching into his desk drawer for a pad of yellow legal paper. “Tell me about your son. Do you have any recent pictures?”

  Brandon pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and opened it, grateful to be doing something useful. He found Scott’s school picture and handed it over. “This is about two years old—eighth grade, I think. He’s sixteen now and he’s grown about six inches since then, but hasn’t gained an ounce.” Long
and thin, the boy in the photo stared at the camera with his head cocked, a crooked grin exposing perfect teeth. The blue eyes showed a serious side, too, giving the impression that maybe he knew a few more secrets than he should.

  “Handsome boy,” Whitestone said. “Would I recognize him from this photo?”

  Brandon nodded. “I think so, yes. Except for the goatee that only he can see. Oh, and his hair is blue now.”

  That brought the chief’s eyes up. “Excuse me?”

  Brandon smiled. “Closer to purple, actually. The kids on his soccer team call him Smurf.”

  Whitestone laughed. “Artist or musician?”

  “Sounds like the voice of experience.”

  “I’ve got a thirteen-year-old drummer at home. I lost the earring battle two years ago, but haven’t faced the hair war yet.”

  Brandon made a dismissive motion with his hands. “I don’t even fight it. I think he’s up to three earrings—maybe it’s four. I know there’s two in at least one ear. I figure what the hell? It’s his money and he’s on the honor roll every quarter.” He laughed as he recalled the day Scott broached the hair issue. “It’s a look, he tells me, for his band. He’s lead guitar, and features himself to be the next Kirk Hammett.”

  “Ah, heavy metal. I get a headache just thinking about it.”

  “Scott’s actually pretty good,” Brandon said. “And if you can’t listen to the Stones, then Metallica ain’t a bad substitute. Anyway, I made him wait six months on the hair, and when he still wanted it, I said okay.”

  Whitestone seemed genuinely intrigued. “Is it permanent?”

  “As permanent as any dye, I suppose. I mean they had to bleach it down to white before turning it blue. Now, ask me if I’m washing blue-stained pillowcases every week. The answer is yes.”

  The chief shook his head. “And I thought I was daring by wearing a ponytail halfway to my ass.”

  God, wasn’t that the truth? Brandon thought back to the screaming matches he’d had with his own father over the length of his hair. A career Navy aviator and an Academy grad, his father knew only one hairstyle—high-and-tight—and saw the hippie movement as a bunch of Communist sissy-boys. When young and rebellious Brandon had refused to get a haircut, his father had produced a straight razor and threatened to take care of it himself. Only the intervention of his mom saved the boy from a bloodbath, but from that day on, his dad introduced the boy as “my daughter, Brandon.” They never spoke again, his father and he, after that day with the razor. Eight months later, nearly to the day, a surface-to-air missile reduced Lieutenant Commander Curtis O’Toole to so much humidity over the skies of Hanoi.

  Brandon dedicated his life to avoiding the same mistakes with his own son. Sitting there in Barry Whitestone’s office, his brain flashed images of the morning when Scott was maybe three hours old and they made eye contact for the first time; not just the squirmy look-at-all-the-new-stuff gaze that he’d seen earlier, but that real, bonding, I-trust-you-with-my-life stare. It came with a smile, and Brandon realized in that instant that all the times when he thought he’d fallen in love had just been poor imitations of the real thing.

  Under different circumstances, the long silence that filled the chief’s office might have felt uncomfortable, but this one didn’t. Here, two fathers sat together, one of them facing down a nightmare, and the other wondering how he would cope in similar circumstances. Life shouldn’t be as fragile as this, Brandon thought. It shouldn’t be permitted that years of hard work and attention and wonderful times could be wiped out so quickly. Thousands of people logged millions of hours in the sky every year. Why should it be Scott who added a notch to the statistics? Why not a kid who was less deserving of an easy, happy life?

  Brandon felt pressure building behind his eyes as he pondered these things. Sometimes life was so damned unfair that he couldn’t stand it. But he wouldn’t lose control. Not here, and certainly not in front of a stranger. If he gave up hope, then so would everyone else. And there was hope, dammit. Plenty of it.

  When he glanced up at the chief, Whitestone at first looked away, but then tentatively returned his gaze. “He’s alive, you know,” Brandon said, pleased that his voice still sounded strong.

  Whitestone set his jaw, nodded. “And we’ll find him.”

  9

  WHAT CODY JAMIESON LACKED in flying skills he made up for in preparedness. Scott had struck the jackpot on tools. The Cessna had a full complement, including the Holy Grail du jour: a three-foot, folding G.I. shovel just like the ones he’d seen in countless war movies. In addition, the toolbox, whose latch miraculously had not even sprung during the impact, contained screwdrivers, a hammer and a socket set. So, if the occasion arose for him to, say, mount a ceiling fan out here, he was all set.

  All morning long, Scott had been dreading the task of digging a larger shelter, wondering the whole time how he was going to get this super-powdery fluff to pack down tight enough to make good walls. The answer, he’d decided, was simply to dig deeper, but he didn’t know if he had enough strength left to do that.

  That’s when he noticed the severed right wing resting at the base of a towering pine, and the brainstorm hit: why dig when you can build? Sven was the first to encourage his students to take obvious shortcuts, particularly when it came to building shelters, making use of ground cover or natural formations. Caves, he’d said, were a particularly fine choice. With the wing, he could build his own cave. Digging was simple when you didn’t have to worry about the ceiling collapsing.

  Invoking the lesson he’d learned last night, Scott removed his parka and turtleneck and hung them up on protruding pieces of wreckage, opting to work only in his long-sleeve undershirt. Even at that, he was sweating by the time he was done.

  Using his new shovel, Scott first dug a foxhole, down as close to the forest floor as he could get, and then he placed the overburden up around the edge of the hole until the rim was about as high as his chin. With that done, he built himself a little shelf to sleep on, remembering from his class that the coldest air would settle to the lowest spot of any enclosure. Next, he lined the entire hole with the softest, most pliable pine boughs he could find. Insulation was king out here. If Sven had said it once, he’d said it a thousand times.

  The final step in Scott’s construction project was to drag the severed wing over the top of his creation, giving himself a solid roof, which he reinforced with a good three feet of insulating snow, packing it down as tightly as the dry powder would allow. By the time he was done, the shelter was nearly big enough to stand in, and at least as big as any two-man tent you’d buy at the sporting goods store. As more snow fell, the shelter’s insulation properties would only improve. As a final test, he lay down on his handiwork and smiled. Call it skill or call it luck, but his first-ever shelter-from-scratch was actually comfortable. For the door, he utilized the right-hand cockpit door, which he removed with the help of the hammer and screwdriver from the tool kit.

  Sometimes, it’s the little things that make you want to dance or belt out a war whoop. Scott had remembered, and he’d performed, and the result was a hell of a lot better, even, than what he and his dad had put together for the class. Maybe it wasn’t all a lost cause, after all. Maybe he could actually pull this thing off. Wouldn’t that be a kick?

  As he pulled his sweater and parka back on, Scott forced himself to return to his mental checklist. What was he forgetting? He had short-term survival taken care of. Sort of. He had shelter. Now he needed food and water. Eating snow was not an option, even though it intuitively seemed like a solution to thirst. Sven had made the point repeatedly: frozen liquids cooled you from the inside out, thus inviting hypothermia. As for food, well, he didn’t have an immediate answer for that, either. That left him with the remaining priority of rescue.

  He’d read Lord of the Flies and he’d seen Cast Away, so he knew even without dredging up the lessons from his survival class that he needed to focus his energy on building a fire. Problem was, Ralph
and Piggy and Tom Hanks all found themselves on overheated islands. How the hell was he supposed to get things to burn in the snow? Even if he had matches (which he didn’t), how would he sustain the flame once it ignited? Seemed to Scott that even if he got something to catch, it would put itself out as the ground around it melted.

  Hell of a thing to leave out of the lecture, Sven.

  One thing at a time. Find a source of fire, and then worry about keeping it burning. He’d been all through Cody Jamieson’s pockets, and found nothing remotely resembling a match. Or flint and steel or even two sticks to rub together. American Cancer Society be damned, why didn’t people smoke anymore?

  There had to be a way. There’s always a way; you just have to look at things from a different angle. Kind of like those find-the-word puzzles where turning the sheet upside down sometimes made things more obvious.

  Scott hiked back to the wreckage for another look. The arcing from the night before had stopped, so he figured that the battery had died. Not that he’d know how to convert electricity to fire anyway. Seemed to him that as they were taking off, he remembered seeing a box about the size of an automobile first aid kit, marked Emergency in red letters, attached to the bulkhead just behind the pilot’s seat.

  That’s what he was looking for. Surely, whoever manufactured an emergency kit for airplanes must have foreseen the possibility of a crash, and the need to signal somebody. That only made sense. With any luck at all, the emergency kit would be manufactured out of the same stuff that they made black boxes out of for airliners.

  Snow hadn’t accumulated much inside the cockpit, thanks to the smallness of the openings, and the compartment’s orientation away from the wind. The place was a mess of papers and scattered debris, though, among which he found another flashlight, a dog-eared topographical map that he figured might come in handy, and there, wedged under a piece of the backseat, the emergency kit. He carried it back outside and sat in the snow to open it.