“No way.”
Suddenly Sam burst into Clark’s room, flipping on the light, stuffing her cell phone into her bathrobe pocket. “Is that Annie?”
Clark put the phone to his chest. “No, it’s Jill calling from Belize; she wants her tropical fish back. Of course, it’s Annie. She’s at the airport—”
Annie interrupted. “I’ve got to go. Headed for the Admirals Club. Just hug her and tell her I’m okay.”
But Sam pulled the receiver away from Clark. “Annie, all those Peregrine emeralds and rubies are real. Really real. Your dad must have dug them up. They’re on your hat.”
Clark took the phone away. “Ignore Sam,” he advised.
“What’s she talking about, emeralds and rubies are real?”
“Just that she loves her brother. Don’t get yourself mixed up in something illegal. Good night, sweetheart. Call us. We love you.”
“You too. Okay, off to find the Dying Dad.”
Sam and Clark talked for a while about how it was a relief that Annie had landed safely in St. Louis, despite the storm. Clark hoped, but doubted, that Jack would be at the Admirals Club waiting for her. “Maybe now we can all get some sleep,” he sighed.
Sam was biting her lip so nervously that Clark asked her what her problem was. “Nothing,” she said evasively and hurried out of his room.
***
At the airport, Annie took a shuttle from the hangar to the main terminal where, glancing up at the dome, she was struck by what she saw. Floating in space above her hung the St. Louis airport’s prize possession, Charles Lindbergh’s 1934 Ryan Monocoupe D-145 with its sleek black-striped body. There was its registration number: NX211 in bold black letters on its orange under-wing, the ID number Lindbergh had been allowed to transfer to this plane from his earlier craft, the Spirit of St. Louis. NX211.
It was the same alphanumerical that made up part of one of her father’s passwords. So that was it. NX211. That’s why the PS in her father’s FedEx said “Lindbergh.” Now she had the bulk of the code, which combined her birth certificate information with the ID number of Lindbergh’s plane. All she needed was the other plane whose identification number was the last part of the password. She could solve this problem and return to her life.
In her peripheral vision she noticed a man, about her age, leaning against the wall by a news rack, leafing through magazines. He looked up, smiling broadly at her. He was a very handsome man with short dark-gold curled hair, wearing tight jeans, a sky-blue T-shirt, and old brown leather cowboy boots. Flustered, she forced herself to look at him. Neither of them looked away. Then Annie continued through the B/C/D connector and headed toward the Admirals Club.
As she passed by this young man, he waved at her. She waved back, but sarcastically.
The young man was the Miami detective whom D. K. Destin had forced Brad to bring along with him from Emerald, the young man who had persuaded D. K. that he had only Annie’s best interests at heart. He had been waiting outside the Admirals Club for Annie’s arrival ever since he’d landed at the airport in the Hopper Jet. As he watched Annie hurry away, he flipped open his cell phone and spoke briefly but urgently into it.
***
Back in Emerald, D. K. Destin, sitting in his wheelchair in the small messy office of his close-to-bankrupt Airworks, suddenly had an urge to call Sam, despite the late hour. He was a man who always acted on his sudden impulses. “I just got a feeling,” the Navy vet told Sam. He described the detective he’d met tonight named Dan Hart—
Sam jumped out of her bed. “Daniel Hart? From Miami?”
“Yeah, him. He was here, looking for Annie. I got Brad to give him a lift in his jet to St. Louis.”
Sam muted the DVD of Simone Signoret in Diabolique. “Why’d you do that? Sergeant Hart’s after Jack. He wants to arrest Jack.”
“Yeah, let him. This guy Hart said Annie’s in over her head with Jack’s crap and I believe him.” D. K. shook out his graying cornrows and spun his wheelchair around to look at a knotty-pine wall crowded with photographs. He located a framed clipping from the News of Emerald Weekly showing a grinning fourteen-year-old Annie pinning a ribbon on him as he sat in his wheelchair in front of the King of the Sky; a blue ribbon she’d just won in the national youth speed race. “Anyhow, why rag on me? You’re the one who told him Annie took off for St. Louis.”
Sam sighed. “I know. He tricked it out of me.”
“Nah, instincts,” D. K. insisted. “I got a good feeling from this guy, Sammy. It’s like I get a tickling in my legs every now and again and I know who’s gonna win the Super Bowl. Hart’s a good guy. He’s trying to help Annie out of a big mess Jack’s trying to get her into. Let the guy do it.”
“Brad can do it. That’s what I sent Brad to do! Get Jack out of St. Louis before he gets arrested.”
D. K. laughed. “You’re such a goddamn fairy godmother. Did you send in the Marines too?”
“Are you still in that office, D. K? Go home.”
“No thanks.” Since the death of his wife, D. K. had hated the sight of his house and almost always slept on the daybed in his trailer at the airfield. “Sammy, love’s a bitch.”
“Love’s a bastard.”
“That too,” he agreed. “Nothing that’s much better though. Beer maybe.”
“Cigarettes.” Sam sighed. “Hey, listen, when I’m eighty, I’m going to start smoking and drinking again.”
“Your mistake was quitting,” D. K. told her. “Like love. You gotta keep at it.”
Chapter 26
Midnight
Inside the spacious Admirals Club, Annie asked a receptionist if she would page Jack Peregrine. To her surprise, the receptionist gestured at Annie’s naval cap and slacks and shirt and said, “Oh, Jack Peregrine. Hang on.” She came back with a co-worker, who asked, “Are you Lt. Anne Goode?”
“Yes, I am,” said Annie, surprised. “Why?”
They told her that a nice elderly woman had come into the Club just recently and left a birthday card for her, insisting that Annie would be by soon and pleading with them to give it to her. It had no envelope and was a flowery Happy Birthday card. To My Daughter it said in raised letters on the front. There was a scribbled unsigned message inside under a terrible poem about a little bud of a girl blossoming into a beautiful woman. The message said:
Annie. Wrong to get you involved.
Stay out of this. Go home. Love you.
She squeezed the birthday card into a tight ball, shoved it into the pocket of her father’s old flight jacket. “Goddamn him.”
“Pardon? Are you okay?” the older of the receptionists asked her. “The woman said to give you the card.”
Annie asked, “What woman? Who left it? What did she look like? Did she give a name?”
“No, no name. Just an elderly woman,” replied the receptionist defensively. “She said that someone had asked her to drop off this card, that you were in the military. We thought it was strange but she said she was running for a plane and she left.” Both receptionists went back to helping other customers.
Annie looked everywhere in the Admirals Club, even waited for a man to come out of the bathroom and asked him if anyone else was in there. No sign of her father. Not much of a surprise. Her cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number. With foreboding she answered it. She almost wasn’t shocked to hear Jack’s voice. “Annie, you okay? Where are you?” He sounded out of breath.
“The Admirals Club in St. Louis, damn it! Where are you?”
“You made it! Sam gave me your cell number but it wasn’t answering. Where’s the King?”
“Terminal E. Are you back at the Royal Coach?”
“Annie, listen.” He gathered more breath. “Tell me the password. Tell me the password! I’ve got a pencil. Go.”
She was pacing so intensely that the Admirals Club receptionists stopped what they were doing to stare at her. “No, you give me my mother’s name. That’s the deal. Give me her name.”
Between short breaths he said, “Geraldine Jeffers…The cops are all over this place. If I try to get to the King, they’ll grab me.”
Memory clicked. “Geraldine Jeffers was in Palm Beach Story. Claudette Colbert played her! Fuck you, Dad.”
“Calm down. Just walk out, go back to the King. There’s a panel in its tail. Use the key I gave you. There’s a courier case in the panel. Take it to Raffy. You understand? Go to the Dorado in Miami. Raffy will meet you there. He’ll find you. Help me out, Annie. And don’t talk to anybody unless you have to. If you have to, say I never showed at the airport, say I blew you off. Don’t let them know you’re going to Miami.”
Her father sounded so close that Annie jerked quickly around to look, as if he might be calling her from a few feet away. But the modern expanse of lobby, granite floor and cherry wood walls, was empty. From the doorway a slender middle-aged woman, wearing flip-flops and a pink sweatshirt with kittens on it, looked in tentatively, then as if she’d made a mistake, closed the door. A small gray-haired Japanese couple in matching blue blazers came in and studied the Departures screen.
“Hang on, Dad.” Annie ran out into the terminal gates area and checked up and down the busy connector to see if she could spot her father. She wasn’t sure whether she would still recognize him even if she did see him. “Are you here in this airport?” she yelled into the phone. “Goddamn it, answer me!”
The young good-looking man in the blue T-shirt, who was still reading at the news rack, glanced over at her.
Annie turned her back on him and lowered her voice. “Answer me, Dad!”
“…I’ve got to go. Just be careful, Annie. I don’t want you hurt.”
She took a fast breath. “A little late for that!”
“We’ll hook back up in Miami. Bring the case. And thank Brad. Here I go.”
Annie muttered, “‘Thank Brad’?”
The phone went dead.
She felt in the pocket of the leather flight jacket. The emerald was there. So was the tiny key. “Use the key,” her father had said. “There’s a panel. Take the case to Raffy.” What case? What panel? She hated this, having her life flipped upside down, like their past on the road, like a plane in a spiral.
The woman in the pink sweatshirt knocked into Annie as she strode out of a Starbucks and headed into the terminal walkway. She was talking on her cell phone, telling someone to hurry because their flight was leaving. Her cheaply dyed hair was pulled back in a ponytail that she kept yanking. “Hey, watch where you’re going!” Annie called after her.
The woman turned back and frowned, yelled, “Sorry,” hurried on.
Annie set down her travel bag, which barked sharply.
Across the corridor the handsome man in the blue T-shirt laughed.
Frustrated, Annie yelled at him. “What are you laughing at?!”
He smiled and called back, “I see a beautiful woman in the midnight hour, it makes me happy.”
“Give me a break.” Annie slammed back through the doors into the Admirals Club, but her heart pounded and to her astonishment, she realized that the jolt came from the compliment the strange young man in the blue shirt had paid her.
Trying to shake off the effect of the remark, she hit Incoming on her phone, reaching the number from which her father had just now called her. A gravel-voiced woman answered immediately with the phrase, “Baggage Claim.” When Annie asked who she was, she said that she was a security attendant at the St. Louis Airport’s East Terminal. Annie advised her to keep a closer eye on her desk phone and hung up.
So her father had been leaving the airport from baggage claim only five minutes ago. Should she run around looking for him in this huge space? Should she call the police on him? Or should she follow his instructions, go to Miami, and assume she would meet him there?
Everything in Annie had been trained to commit to go. But it would take more than a day to fly to the southern tip of Florida in the little Piper Warrior, even if she could find somebody here at STL who could quickly repair or replace its engine. She thought about letting her father, and so her mother, disappear out of her life again. She thought about forgetting this mysterious panel in the King with the courier case inside that she was supposed to deliver to this mysterious Raffy Rook. She could find herself a nice motel here at the airport and get some needed sleep. In the morning she could fly home to Emerald one way or the other and have her birthday party at Pilgrim’s Rest and in general go back to her life without Jack Peregrine in it.
Walking fast as she hurried to a decision, she found herself on the lower level of the main terminal, where she passed a large five-paneled mural on the wall. The mural was titled, “Black Americans in Flight.” Studying the group portrait, she felt disappointed on D. K. Destin’s behalf. He would have loved being one of the pilots depicted there. There could have been a picture of D. K. holding his unconscious navigator up out of the China Sea, clinging to the wreckage of their attack bomber’s fuselage, waiting for rescue for all those hours. She thought of how D. K. hadn’t let his crewmate slip into the sea, how (as Rafael Rook would have said), he had found that he couldn’t take it or leave it.
All of a sudden Annie’s old childhood nightmare curiously came back to her, her dream of flying the little red plane, her father tilting away to the horizon, the woman on the ship in the ocean waves, arms raised as if calling for help.
Now it was her father who was like the woman on the ship in her dream. It was her father who was calling, “Help me, Annie.”
And she couldn’t take it or leave it.
***
Trevor was asleep when Annie phoned him.
Good for her, making it to St. Louis in that storm, he said sleepily. Good for her. Get some rest. Call him in the morning.
“I need your help.” She asked Trevor to check one more thing for her tonight. “Please!”
“I’m trying to sleep here.”
“Come on,” she urged. “Why are you even in bed at this hour? It’s a holiday.”
“It’s almost 1 a.m. You’re going to seriously owe me,” he warned.
“Absolutely. That Burgundy you’re always talking about? Romanée-Conti, 1980? It’s yours.”
“Are you crazy? It’s five thousand dollars a bottle.”
“That is crazy. Forget I offered.” All she needed was the Federal Aviation Administration’s registration information for an aircraft with the identification number, N678ST. Trevor promised to call her back if she’d keep Eliot Ness for a month while he went on a dig to Turkey.
“Deal.”
***
Annie took the long MetroLink ride out to the gate at Terminal E, where a Hopper Jets tug had towed the King of the Sky. As she rode there, she called the Royal Coach night desk clerk. The same young man was on duty; he admitted cheerfully that her odd inquiries were the only interesting things going on at the motel. The strange customer, whom he’d told her about earlier, the man who’d cut off his pants legs and taken a swim and left the bloody towels, the man named Clark Goode? That man had stiffed the Royal Coach with a fake credit card. Annie gave him her card number to reimburse the motel.
“If he comes back, I’ll have to call the cops.”
“He won’t come back,” Annie predicted.
At the Hopper ground transportation desk, she told a female guard that she’d accidentally left a package in her plane. After examining all her paperwork, the guard walked her onto the tarmac and let her reenter the King.
Setting Malpy down in the copilot’s seat, Annie used her flashlight to search for any panel the key might fit. In the rear of the dark fuselage, near the tail, behind a quilted van pad, she located, to her surprise, a built-in panel that had a keyhole in it. The panel looked rusty at the hinges. After so many years of spending so many hours in the King, wasn’t it odd that she would never have noticed this panel? But then there had never been a reason for her to crawl to the far inside tip of the tail to examine the fuselage for hidden compartments.
She fit the key into the lock. It turned. But the section of the panel was stuck shut. Annie felt in the flight jacket pockets for her birthday present from Georgette—the little red leather case with the miniature tools in it. She used its screwdriver to pry loose the panel.
The beam of her flashlight illuminated a small rectangular case of shiny stainless steel inside the dark cavity. It was about a foot and a half long, eight inches tall. Between its two handles, it had a central combination lock with four dials of numbers.
Backing carefully out into the cockpit, Annie removed the protesting Malpy from his large cloth bag, shoved the courier case deep inside it and then put the dog on top.
With a jump down from the Piper’s wing back onto the tarmac, she waved at the guard, calling over, “Found it! Thanks a lot.”
Annie was back in the main terminal by the time Trevor called her. N678ST, he said, was the FAA identification number of a 1983 Cessna TU206 Amphibian, with a 1990 affidavit of ownership issued to a Florida Limited Liability Company named La Reina; La Reina had purchased the small seaplane at an auction of aircraft seized by the U.S. government. The two signatories were Clark Goode and Rafael Rook, both of 302 Ficus Avenue, Miami. The plane appeared to rent hangar space in Key West. “How’s that for helping you out in a hurry? I had to call in some favors.”
“Thank you very much.” Annie repeated, “Clark Goode and Rafael Rook.”
“Yeah. Rafael Rook’s that weird Cuban that called you?”
“Yes, Jack’s best friend.”
“And Clark’s your uncle, sort of.”
Annie air-spit indignantly. “Clark? Clark has no idea he’s been off buying amphibian planes and getting beaten up in motels. My dad just uses Clark’s name. So is this why the FBI’s involved? Is this why the government seized the aircraft? Did my dad and Rook really steal a gold statue called La Reina Coronada del Mar from Cuba? Trevor, I need you to find out about this Queen of the Sea.”
“You’ve got nothing left to trade.”
“I know. You have to do it for friendship.”
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 20