Fast Friends

by Susan Dunlap

  “Sorry, miss.” The security guard offered a limp-lipped smile.

  Ellen jammed her teeth together to keep her jaw from dropping.

  “Thing is, miss, we’re looking for two women, but neither description fits you.”

  “Really?” she blurted out.

  “Yeah, one’s a five two blonde and the other one has brown hair like yours, but she’s six feet tall.”

  Ellen didn’t trust her voice. She nodded, got back in the car and headed toward the hangar to the twin-engine tie-down beyond. When. Liza lifted the blanket and stuck her head between the bucket seats, Ellen said, “Looks like Gwen’s husband saved face with the cops. Must’ve said his wife was overpowered by an Amazon. Or maybe Gwen’s friend the waitress did us a favor.”

  “Hey, where are you going? The freeway’s to the left.”

  “Stay down!” Ellen kept the car at 30 mph. The highway patrolman was getting out of his car by the hangar. She waved, and kept going. On the far side of the hangar were two more patrol cars and a group of uniformed men and women talking to a tall red-haired man. “Our pilot. Our former pilot.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Stay down.”

  “What are you doing, Ellen?”

  “Waiting for inspiration. Isn’t that what you do?” The hangar was far enough behind now to be visible in the rearview mirror. One patrolman was looking toward them but making no motion. Ahead, the road made a sharp left around a maze of larger planes, twin-engines. At the far side she could make out a thin man with a ponytail looping between crafts. She slowed. When she checked him again he was climbing into a plane.

  The road to her left probably led back to the freeway, and safety, for the moment. Her heart was still banging in her chest; sweat coated her back. Decisions clicked almost too fast to catch. Safety didn’t exist. She’d taken the prudent route all her life—no more. She was sick of being pushed around by men who lost bicycle races, by Larry Best, by the man who killed Harry. If she was going to get herself shot, it damn well wouldn’t be in the ass while she was grubbing around for an escape hole.

  Portland had been awful in the end. But, till then it was great; it was like being…alive.

  She stepped on the gas and shot around the planes. “You got what you need, Liza?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Ellen dragged Liza’s purse onto her lap as she pulled up on the far side of the plane.

  “Hey…what’re you doing?” the pilot yelled.

  Ellen took a deep breath to control her shaking. The plane’s passenger’s door was still open. She grabbed Liza’s gun, stepped out of the car and onto the plane’s wing and braced herself in front of the doorway.

  “Hey, lady, what the hell—”

  He was tall, tan under that tight ponytail, and clearly he worked out. His open mouth exposed perfect teeth. He wasn’t Larry Best but he could have been. His mouth moved again but all she heard was the snap of the wind against metal, the chugging of her heart like the bellows of a mine miles below the earth.

  She raised the gun. “Keep your hands where I can see them. You’re flying us out of here.”

  “What? I can’t just fly off anywhere.”

  “You can if you want to live.”

  “You’re not going to shoot that gun,” he scoffed.

  She aimed at his groin. “You want a trial shot? I don’t have time to argue. You fly or I shoot. Which is it?”

  He glared from her through the doorway and back. “Fly,” he muttered.

  “Get in, Liza.”

  As she adjusted her stance and let Liza slip into the back, she noted the first bit of good fortune they had had—the plane had only one door and it was on this side. There was no way out for the pilot. Keeping the gun pointed at him, she maneuvered into the passenger seat and had Liza pull the door shut and turn the latch on the top.

  “Ground control,” the pilot put on his headset. “I’ve got to contact them.”

  “Wait. Think very carefully before you say anything about us. We’ve got nothing to lose. If the cops catch up with us they’re going to shoot first and ask questions second. Two men are already dead. One more won’t make a bit of difference to anyone. Except to you.”

  He didn’t move, but it was clear from the way he was running his teeth over his lip that he was still considering.

  “You could get a couple words out before I shoot. Maybe you could even wrestle the gun out of my hand before Liza shoots you. Maybe you’d even survive that and live to take one of the police bullets when they came at us.”

  “Lady, you are crazy.”

  She let a moment pass before she said, “Believe it.”

  “I’ll lose my license.”

  “No you won’t,” Liza said disgustedly. “You’ll tell them you had two crazy ladies with guns in here and what were you going to do? They’ll say, ‘Crazy fucking broads,’ and take you for a beer. So, let’s go.”

  He opened the window and yelled, “Clear.” The engines started up. The pig let out a squeal as the pilot made contact with ground control and requested permission to take off.

  The pilot was talking about frequencies, requesting permission to taxi for take-off, and checking gauges. Replies came through the headset, inaudible to her. The plane rolled forward, made a sharp turn at the end of the runway and stopped.

  “Eureka Tower, Four-Four-Delta, at the hold line. Request permission for take-off.” He checked gauges and controls, nodded, apparently at some comment on the headset. “Roger. I’ve got the E.L.T. on.”

  He eased in the throttle and the plane picked up speed, jostled them, and then they were climbing in air.

  Ellen waited until they leveled off to say, “Turn north.”

  “Where are we headed?”

  “North, out of California.” For the first time she took her eyes off the pilot and glanced back at Liza. The two of them smiled.

  Thirty-Six

  “E.L.T.?” THE AIR TRAFFIC controller scratched his chin. “Why the hell would Four-Four-Delta want to activate his Electronic Locating Transmitter?”

  “He wouldn’t. Not unless he’s trying to tell us something.”

  “Hey, what’s that car doing out in the middle of the field? That’s where Four-Four-Delta came from.”

  “I’ll call security. Let them deal with it.” He picked up the receiver, just as it started to ring, murmured, “Uh huh, uh huh, gotcha.” He was still holding the phone as he said, “Security just told me the damnedest thing. You know those two babes the C.H.P.’s after? That’s them there in Four-Four-Delta. That was their car out there on the field. Chips are fit to be tied. Getting heat big time from some brass in L.A. Do you know where they’re headed?”

  “North. Fourteen forty-four’s in Oregon now. He’s on radar track.”

  Thirty-Seven

  FRANK BENTEC FELT A strange calm infuse him. It was as if he was not entering Oregon but stepping onto a movie set. None of the rules of real life, of California, held. Here in this world it was all fiction.

  He could have blown a gasket half an hour ago when he got the word from Pete Hanks that Liza Silvestri had escaped, and worse that she was in Oregon, and worst of all that Hanks had taken it upon himself to call in the Feds.

  For a moment he saw the whole fucking deal slipping through his fingers. California was webbed with his connections. In Oregon he was nothing. Even if he had been, the Feds wouldn’t care. He had been so steamed he nearly choked.

  But nineteen years on the Force had taught him to keep his cool, to flip the scene and see if it played better bottom up. California authorities hadn’t connected him to any crime yet. The Feds weren’t going to be at every landing site in Oregon; it would take them time to deploy men. Meanwhile, he’d be landing on Liza Silvestri’s tail.

  For Dale Evans in Eureka the debacle had been a personal indictment. His one chance to catch a high-profile fugitive and he blew it. It was Evans’s gush of contrition that shoved Bentec back to practicality. “No tim
e for regrets, Evans. We’re all professionals here. Have a charter waiting for me, a plane faster than Liza Silvestri’s, and we’ll nab her at the next stop.” Evans had liked that “we” stuff.

  He was half an hour behind Silvestri, Evans told him in the thirty-second drive to the charter.

  Things were under control. In Oregon he’d still be the Assistant to the Commissioner of Police, Los Angeles, with all the rights and privileges. He’d have time; just less than he’d thought. The window of opportunity was closing, but it was still a window and he was the only one sitting on the sill.

  When he landed in Oregon he’d be the charming, competent police official eager to exploit his years of experience to make every local cop look good, willing to take the chances and give them the credit, eager and willing to be on the front lines.

  Thirty-Eight

  LIZA CAME AWAKE IN the back of the plane. The drone of rotors clobbered her ears. She was freezing except for her chest, which was warm. Hot. For a moment she thought the coarse hair rubbing her chin was Jay’s beard and it was Sunday morning in the apartment and they were dragging themselves up after hours of sleep and lovemaking. But it was Felton, snuggled close.

  To her left the sun was slipping fast and low into the fog. God, how long had she slept? Where were they now? She sat up slowly, moving with exquisite care so she didn’t wake Felton. No matter how bad things were they could be made worse by pig shit. To her right it was almost night. A wave of guilt and fear overtook her. Ellen was the one who needed to sleep, but there she was in the front seat staring straight ahead.

  “Where are we, Ellen?”

  “Eugene.”

  “Eugene, Oregon?”

  “We don’t have enough fuel for Portland,” the pilot declared, clearly anxious to talk. His neck was so tight it was bunched above his collar. She wondered what Ellen had said to keep him quiet all this time. “We’re fueling here.”

  It was dusk and the lights of the airfield below were barely brighter than the surroundings. There were roofs and roads, a river winding through town, but everything was dusted by the impending night. Even the tall pines around the town seemed closer to shadow than trees. The pilot contacted the tower and spoke official-sounding phrases into his headset. A jet landed and another was taking off. Ahead of them was a plane about the same size as theirs.

  “So we’re not going to the terminal at all then?” she asked.

  “Nope. No need. Just to the pumps.”

  “How much farther is Portland?”

  “Little over a hundred miles. That’s not counting if we get stacked up in a holding pattern,” he added quickly. Too quickly.

  Did Ellen catch that? Ellen’s face revealed nothing and Liza couldn’t decide whether Ellen didn’t read men well enough to catch this kind of thing or she was just too zonked out. The memory of Ellen commandeering the plane seeped back into her mind; she was as amazed now as then. Had that been like a tornado in L.A., a one-time burst before everything went back to normal? Or was the woman holding the gun one helluva new chick? If this was what friendship wrought, it was damned well okay. Maybe Ellen would come along to Richland. There had to be a way to get control of the shipment. Then the world would be theirs.

  The plane ahead of them touched down. They were making a lazy circle above. Through the angled window Liza could see easily the plane turning off the runway as if it was headed beyond the terminal to the hangars. Cars raced out from both sides of the hangar. She could just barely make out the light bars on the roofs. At what looked like the last moment the plane made a sharp turn and headed to the terminal. The cars moved back into the hangar.

  The pilot said, “Four-Four-Delta. Thanks for your help tonight.”

  Thanks for what? she was tempted to ask. It was making her real uneasy, him talking into a headset and getting answers in it she couldn’t hear.

  He dipped the nose of the plane and she watched as the white lights of the runway jumped up at them. The terminal was over to the side. “Where are the gas pumps we’re going to?”

  He didn’t answer. Either he was listening to words in the headset, or pretending to. Ellen was looking out her side window like a tourist enjoying the landing.

  Frantically, Liza checked the area near the hangars. Patrol cars were lined up in front, eight of them. The police weren’t even making an attempt to hide. Ellen glanced at them and turned to gaze out the front window, like the police cars were no more startling than roses in June.

  “Roger.” The pilot’s sudden smugness filled the cockpit like thick foam blocking out the roar of the wind. For a moment the world was deadly silent.

  The snapping of metal against metal cut through the silence. The click of the safety. Ellen held the gun chest-level, pointed at the pilot. “Make a hard right.”

  “Wha—”

  “Don’t talk. Sharp right. Now!”

  He didn’t shift. The plane was moving fast, toward the hangars. They were fifteen yards off the ground.

  “Now!”

  He kept going.

  The bullet skimmed his nose; he screamed and grabbed his face. The plane shuddered and for a moment Liza was sure they were going to crash.

  “Now!”

  He swung the plane hard to the right.

  “Speed up. Fast.”

  “Where are—”

  “Don’t talk! Keep going.”

  “Traffic.”

  “Go faster.” The plane shot across the macadam, across lights and lines that could be runway markers. “That’s it, keep going.”

  “We’re going to crash into those trees.”

  “Lift off.”

  The pilot looked too scared to argue.

  Behind, across the field, cars were moving, red lights, blinking, sirens starting up.

  The plane barely cleared the low trees. A quarter mile beyond was what looked like a moonscape. A golf course.

  “Over there.” Ellen pointed to the left, to a fairway.

  “I can’t just—”

  With her free hand she grabbed a protruding knob. “Then I’ll do it.” She sounded dead calm.

  “Okay, okay, just get away. You’re going to get us all killed in here. Just let me land.”

  “Do it fast.”

  The plane was skimming the grass. Liza couldn’t believe how calm Ellen was. She scanned the golf course. There had to be a maintenance truck around. Or even a golf cart someone forgot. But there wasn’t. Just sand and grass, and trees ahead. Nowhere even to hide but the trees. At least Felton would be happy there. The plane was almost stopped. She clutched him hard, but she could tell he was too frightened even to squeal.

  “Sharp right!” Ellen ordered. “Okay, stop.” The plane jerked and slammed her into the side, but Ellen seemed unaffected. “We’re getting out. You are going straight down that hill. Get out, Liza. And you,” she wagged the gun at the pilot, “you can turn off the Emergency Location Transmitter now.”

  “You knew we were on radar all along? How’d you know that?”

  Ellen climbed out. “Downhill. Hurry, I may just shoot you to rid the world of one more asshole.”

  Liza was already running toward the trees when she heard Ellen yell, “That’s it, straight on, Liza.”

  She ran across the short grass. It’d rained here and the wet grass grabbed at her feet. She was clutching Felton to her chest. The tote bag was banging against her leg. Sirens in the distance squealed louder than Felton.

  The trees were too thin. They weren’t a forest. In a hundred yards there was a paved path. She stopped, panting. There was no place to hide. No sign of Ellen. She ruled out the path, and the woods. On instinct she headed back toward the airport.

  Thirty-Nine

  CAPTAIN RAYMOND ZERON SCREECHED the patrol car to a stop at the edge of the woods just south of the Eugene airport. “Where the hell are they going? I thought they were out of fuel. Get on to the tower, Unsel.”

  Unsel took the mic.

  Zeron kept on talking. “Dammit, the
Feds call us at the last moment, like we’ve got nothing on our plates up here except duck. ‘Pilot changed his mind,’ they say, as if that makes everything okay. They’re all set up at Portland. They can’t get their men down here. Do I hear any ‘we’re sorry’ or ‘we goofed?’ Not hardly. They dropped the ball, but now it’s all on us to go scrambling after it. What the hell’s going on with the tower?”

  “They say the plane lifted off.”

  “Hell, we know that.”

  “Then it dropped out of sight.”

  “Like in the golf course?”

  “That’s what they think.”

  “Let’s go. Get everyone on line two.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Every free car in town.”

  Unsel relayed the order to the dispatcher, but Zeron kept talking. “Here’s the thing, Unsel. We’ve got a two-pronged case here. A woman who murdered her husband in cold blood. She kills him and flees, steals a car from a teenager, kidnaps a pilot and shoots at him; we’re talking death penalty case here. This is a university town, Unsel, I don’t plan to have a crazed killer running loose in the girls’ dorms here.”

  “Ready to go, sir,” Unsel said, handing him the mike.

  “Take us around the edge, Unsel.” He motioned to the rough ground beyond the line of the trees. Cut over to the path.”

  “Okaaay.” Unsel hit the gas.

  Zeron braced against the dash. He clicked on the mike. “Who’s dispatching?”

  “Queen, sir.”

  “Everyone on line two, Queen?”

  “All accounted for.”

  “Okay. We’ve got two female fugitives in a small plane on the golf course. Pilot’s a hostage. Get there, lights and sirens. Spread out. I’m at the south end of the airport runways. I’ll be hooking around, coming up on the far side of the park. I’ll be handling the inner cordon. Mioki, set up an outer cordon a mile around the golf course. Check every vehicle coming out. Units one to five, you’re on the inner cordon. Meet me at the east end of the course. Move. The rest of you are outer cordon. Mioki take line three for that.”