Hot Start

by David Freed

  The first thing I did after calling 911 was to stash the revolver back under my bed. No use giving some Quick Draw McGraw with a badge an excuse to ventilate the wrong guy— the kind of shooting that at Alpha we used to call “awful but lawful.” Kiddiot was holed up far under the bed, the fur on his back still up, his tail twitching side-to-side.

  “Relax, buddy. Whoever it was, missed.” I reached in to pet him and he batted my hand away with claws outstretched. Kiddiot gets grumpy when his beauty sleep is interrupted for any reason, including near-fatal gunfire.

  I found a flashlight and set about assessing the damage done, waiting for the police to show up.

  Both bullet holes were roughly nickel-size in diameter. This told me that both rounds were something larger than a .22. That both had penetrated an exterior wall and kept going—with such velocity that the first shot had shattered a window—suggested to me that they’d been fired from a rifle, not a handgun.

  The second bullet, the one that zipped over my bed, narrowly missing my noggin, appeared to have caromed off the stove at a sharp angle, slammed into a cast iron skillet sitting on my counter, and fragmented. I found a piece of it on the floor near the sink. The only thing I could really tell from the gnarled bit of lead was that it wasn’t copper jacketed, like the bullet I’d discovered lodged in the Hollisters’ trellis. That didn’t rule out the possibility that the same weapon had been used in both shootings. The fragment, along with any others found, would have to be analyzed in a forensics lab before reaching that kind of conclusion. However, I doubted things would get that far. Shootings rarely occur in America’s Monaco, but nobody had been hurt in this one, and the Rancho Bonita Police Department, with barely more than one hundred members, was understaffed and overworked. I doubted they would make the effort.

  The responding officer had dark circles under his eyes and was built like a beer keg. I handed him the bullet fragment. He looked at it with marginal interest and popped it in his shirt pocket. “Can you think of anybody who’d want to do something like this to you?” he wanted to know.

  How much time you got? That would’ve been the appropriate answer, but we would’ve been there all night and Kiddiot needed his sleep.

  “Nobody comes readily to mind,” I said.

  The cop yawned and said a detective would be by in the morning to canvass the neighborhood for possible witnesses and take a more thorough report. He then walked out to check for tire tracks in the alley while his partner, a bony old-timer wearing reading glasses, analyzed the bullet holes with his Maglite.

  “We get a lot of these kinds of calls, drive-bys, usually over on the west side, though,” the older cop said. “Big street gang problem over there. Lotta people in this town, they don’t know this stuff. They don’t want to know it.”

  “You think this was gang-related?”

  “Possibly. Unless you got bill collectors after you, or a pissed-off ex, something like that.”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

  Kiddiot was watching us from under the bed, his front paws tucked under his chest. The cop nodded to him.

  “That your cat?”

  “More or less.”

  “My cat’s unbelievably smart,” the cop said. “Knows about twenty tricks.”

  “My guess is they’re not related.”

  The cop smiled. His teeth were the color of caramel corn. “You know, for a guy whose house just got shot at, you sure do seem matter-of-fact about it, like it’s not your first time.”

  “Don’t let looks fool you,” I said. “I’m shaking like a tambourine inside.”

  “Somehow I don’t believe that.”

  I walked him out. His partner had illuminated the alley with the sidelight on their black-and-white radio car and was taking photos from various angles of a tire track left in the asphalt. Somewhere down the block, a dog was barking. Stan, the retired postal worker next door, was standing outside his back fence in a Hugh Hefner red silk robe, demanding to know what the hell was going on.

  “Everything’s under control, sir,” the older cop said. “There’s nothing more to see out here. Please go back inside.”

  “I heard gunshots,” Stan said. “I know gunshots when I hear them. I was in ’Nam.”

  “Sir,” the cop said, “please go back inside. Everything’s OK.”

  Stan held his ground.

  I noticed a couple of galvanized roofing nails in the alley, their heads flattened, like they’d been run over by a car. I stooped and ran my fingers over a tire track. There was a subtle but noticeable irregularity in the zigzag tread pattern.

  “Fresh rubber,” I said, sniffing my fingertips. “Left rear tire, slightly underinflated, by the looks of it. And this looks to be some type of obstruction in the tread pattern along the outside shoulder. A screw or a rock, maybe.”

  The two cops looked at each other, then back at me.

  “Says who?” the human beer keg asked.

  I could’ve told him that when I was with Alpha, we’d learned tracking skills from FBI footwear-and-tire-track examiners, but they probably wouldn’t have believed me.

  “I read a lot,” I said.

  “I was in Vietnam,” Stan said again, almost pleading this time.

  “I was too,” the old cop said, and went over to talk to him.

  I’m not so naive to think that I’d been the victim of a gang-related drive-by or some misguided, random act of violence. I’d been targeted because of what I’d once done for a living or, more likely, because of my peripheral involvement in the Hollister case. Somewhere along the way, I’d touched a nerve and now somebody was trying to scare me off. I was fairly certain that whoever it was had meant to frighten more than kill me. Drive-by shootings are usually spray and pray. Low return and high risk. A good chance of missing the intended target and getting caught, regardless. The actual art of killing requires much more deliberative action. You work out contingencies well ahead of time. You carefully map out your in-fil and ex-fil routes. You never pull the trigger until you’re absolutely ready, until you’ve maximized the odds that the target will stay dead. If you do your homework and take your time, you minimize the risk of that would-be target coming back to bite you. All of which is exactly what I intended to do when I found who’d shot at me.

  SLEEP LARGELY eluded me that night. I was out of bed by 0500. I showered, toasted a couple of pieces of stale bread, and checked weather on my laptop. Riverside was reporting clear skies, with five miles visibility in haze. Haze was a misnomer. Anything east of Los Angeles is air pollution. I got dressed and drove to the airport.

  The Ruptured Duck fired up, no problem. Air Traffic Control assigned me standard IFR routing to Riverside at 6,000 feet: San Marcos-Kwang-Camarillo-Van Nuys-Victor 186-Paradise-direct. I programmed the aerial waypoints into my yoke-mounted GPS and the one installed in the instrument panel, then radioed ground control that I was ready to roll. I was given clearance to taxi to the engine run-up area east of Runway One-Six Left. All of the Duck’s control surfaces appeared to be functioning normally. Ditto all of the flight instruments. As I pulled up to the runway hold-short line, I radioed, “Tower, Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima is ready at One-Six Left.”

  “Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, winds variable at three, Runway One-Six Left, cleared for takeoff.”

  I repeated the clearance, turned onto the runway, aligned my heading indicator with the runway’s magnetic designation, tightened my seat belt and shoulder restraint, and slowly pushed the throttle forward. The airspeed needle came alive at forty knots. At a steady sixty-five, I began smoothly pulling back on the controls. Just like that, I was airborne.

  The GPS had projected seventy minutes to Riverside. With favorable winds and no deviations from air traffic control, I’d be there well ahead of my 1100 meeting with Evan Gantz, Roy Hollister’s former pilot.

  Fate had other plans.

  Even from a distance, one can distinguish turkey vultures from other large birds by how awkwardly they
change directions. A hawk or eagle will wheel solidly into a turn, its wings holding the angle of bank with a stunt pilot’s precision. A vulture aviates like someone who’s had too much to drink, wings rocking, always overcorrecting.

  The vulture that crashed into my airplane as I was climbing through 800 feet flew that way.

  He appeared out of ten o’clock high as if from nowhere, a wobbling speck of black and gray that flashed full-size in an instant and smashed through the Duck’s left windscreen with such velocity that for a second I was transported back to the skies over Iraq, certain that I’d taken antiaircraft fire. Shards of Plexiglas showered the cockpit, along with pieces of vulture. I thought I was bleeding to death until I realized it wasn’t my blood dripping into my eyes; it was the bird’s. Instinctively I pushed the nose of the plane over to avoid stalling.

  “Tower,” I said, my heart making like a machine-gun, “be advised, Four Charlie Lima has just sustained a bird strike. We’re returning to the field.”

  “Charlie Lima, roger. Cleared to land any runway, your discretion. Are you declaring an emergency at this time?”

  The wind howled, and I mean howled. I could barely hear the controller in my headset. Responding to him was hardly a priority under the circumstances. Pilots are taught in an emergency to aviate, not communicate. Flying the airplane trumps radioing your predicament to a voice on the ground incapable of understanding it. Call it arrogance. Or stupidity. Either way, the Duck still seemed solid enough in my hands. I didn’t need anybody else’s help getting us safely back down on the ground.

  “Four Charlie Lima,” the controller repeated, “how do you hear? Are you declaring an emergency?” Even above the wind, I could discern the anxiety in his voice.

  “Negative,” I shouted into my boom mike, the noise of the wind screaming like a freight train. “Charlie Lima’s landing One-Six Left.”

  Altitude wasn’t an issue. I cranked the yoke hard over and down, executing a diving 180-degree turn to the left that set me up on a near-perfect downwind leg. The only problem was my eyes: bird blood and the wind had reduced my vision to an agonizingly painful squint. Tears streamed back along my temples. I would’ve killed for a set of goggles.

  Glancing down at the field, now 500 feet below me, I could see that the airport’s resident firefighters had swung into action. Two lime-green fire engines loaded with foam retardant were rolling onto the taxiway paralleling the runway on which I was preparing to land, their lights flashing. Alongside was a paramedic unit.

  As they say, better safe than sorry.

  I chopped power, dumped full flaps, and turned short final. The landing was otherwise uneventful.

  “Thanks for the help, fellas, regardless,” I radioed as I rolled out and slowed down.

  The ambulance and fire engines waited until I’d turned safely off the runway before shutting off their emergency lights and slinking back to their station on the north side of the field. Yet another false alarm. You could almost feel the crews’ disappointment.

  My mechanic friend Larry was waiting outside, wiping his ever-dirty hands on a rag. I didn’t bother parking in my normal spot. I taxied over directly in front of his hangar, shut down the Duck’s engine, and hopped out.

  “Good lord,” Larry said.

  Vulture blood and entrails, mixed with bits of black feathers, streamed aft from what remained of the airplane’s windscreen. Blood coated the leading edge of the portside wing all the way across the top of the passenger compartment to the starboard wing root. The Duck was a mess and so, apparently, was I.

  “You look like you just went twelve rounds with Big Bird. You OK, Logan?”

  “Far as I can tell.”

  Not a scratch. Amazing. My polo shirt was sticky with bird gore. I stripped it off and used a clean part to wipe my face as Larry leaned inside the plane and glanced around.

  “Well,” he said, reaching into the backseat and gingerly holding up what was left of the vulture by one foot, “as my teenage daughter, the National Honor Society student, might say, ‘Gross me out.’ You’re lucky this homely sumbitch didn’t take your head off when he decided to commit suicide. I mean, look at the size of this thing.”

  The carcass was headless. Blood dripped on the tarmac.

  “You can wash up in the hangar,” Larry said. “Might as well burn those clothes. Vulture stink don’t come out.”

  “It sounds like you’re speaking from personal experience.”

  He grunted, mildly amused, and heaved what was left of the dead bird into a trash can.

  “Hey, Logan?”

  “Yeah, Larry?”

  “I just want to say, I’m glad you’re still with us, but if you want me to change out your windscreen, you’re gonna have to clean up inside your plane first, cuz no way I’m working around chunks of dead bird.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  LARRY HAD one of those flimsy, freestanding plastic shower stalls in the back of his hangar. Soap was a pump bottle of heavy-duty, degreasing hand cleaner. What he didn’t have was towels. I air-dried as I walked naked to the storage closet that served as my business office, where I kept a set of clean clothes—or thought I did. I couldn’t find them. Larry fortunately had spares. I practically swam in a pair of his navy blue work pants. On the front of the T-shirt he loaned me were the words, “Please tell your boobs to stop staring at my eyes.” The shirt was not what I would call my style, but it would have to do until I got home and changed.

  I e-mailed Evan Gantz to let him know what had happened and that I wouldn’t be meeting him in Riverside after all, apologizing for any inconvenience. If anyone could understand, I figured, it was another pilot. He called me a minute later.

  “I’ve nailed a few birds myself,” Gantz said. “Hit a goose once. Lost an engine. Those things really make a mess. Guts everywhere.”

  “Geese have nothing on turkey vultures,” I said.

  He hesitated, then he said, “So you wanted to ask me about hookers and politicians.”

  “You preferred to talk in person.”

  “And I still do, but I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Logan. You’ve got my curiosity up. I’ve got a couple of minutes. We can talk now if you want.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  Gantz said he’d started flying for Roy Hollister about four years earlier, rotating with Pete McManus depending on their respective availability. Sometimes Hollister flew his Citation alone, as pilot-in-command. Sometimes, particularly on long, transoceanic flights, he’d hire Gantz or McManus to fly right seat.

  “Roy Hollister was a good pilot,” Gantz said. “Always ahead of the plane. Knew what he was doing. Then, about a year ago, he changed.”

  “How so?”

  “More on edge, pissed off all the time. A lot more, I dunno, secretive, I guess you could say.”

  A private jet touched down out on the main runway, rumbling the hangar with its reverse thrusters. I waited for the noise to subside.

  “Explain that to me,” I said over the phone. “When you say he was more secretive . . . ?”

  “He just . . . he’d get mad at you for no reason. I remember once I asked him how his weekend was. I knew he was going flying somewhere by himself. He just blew up at me. Told me to mind my own business.”

  “What about call girls, flights back and forth to Europe?”

  “That one’s news to me,” Gantz said. “I’m not saying Roy couldn’t have been doing something like that—I always got the impression he was into kinky stuff, and his plane definitely had the range—but I never flew any passengers like that when I was with him. I would’ve noticed, believe me.”

  “What about Congressman Pierce Walton?”

  “That was one thing Roy wasn’t secretive about,” Gantz said. “He bragged about his friendship with Walton. My buddy the congressman this, my buddy the congressman that. Seemed like we were always flying Walton around to charity dinners and golf tournaments. He’s a super nice guy, by the way, Walton. Very humble
. Never had any issues with him.”

  “People tell me Toni Hollister was a real sweetheart too,” I said.

  “Toni? Toni was great. Super nice lady. Could never do enough for you. Used to bake us oatmeal cookies.”

  “Did you ever hear anything to the effect that she was having an affair?”

  Several seconds passed before he responded. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, you might want to talk to Pete McManus about that.”

  “Why McManus?”

  “I just . . .” There was a hesitancy in Gantz’s tone. “That’s all I’m really prepared to say. Anyway I really do have to go. Sister’s getting hitched. Big rehearsal lunch.”

  We’d already muttered good-byes when Gantz said, “One thing before I go. I’d really hate to see Toni dragged through the mud. Sort of like her being murdered twice, you know?”

  “I’ll try not to let that happen.”

  “Good luck with your plane, Mr. Logan.”

  “See you around the pattern, Evan.”

  Pilot Pete McManus had given me his card days earlier while we were both standing in the lunch line at Tequila Mockingbird. I dug it out of my wallet. He lived in a lower-middle-class neighborhood east of the airport, on Lomita Place. In Rancho Bonita, lower-middle-class can translate to $750,000 or more for even a two-bedroom, one-bath fixer. I went home, showered again, changed out of Larry’s clothes, and drove over.

  What I saw when I got there would take me a long time to forget.

  EIGHTEEN

  Pete McManus lived in a post-war, ranch-style tract house with peeling gray siding, a front lawn more dirt than grass, and a couple of palm trees out front, slowly dying of thirst. A faded blue and white Air Line Pilots Association decal was stuck to the corner of the front window. I rang the doorbell. It didn’t seem to work. I opened the screen door and rapped loudly.

  “Hello?”