"The connection may not be great,” she warned me. "Just push that button to talk."
It wasn't.
"Sawyer, is that you?"
"Alan? God. It's good to hear your voice. If my dad was here, he'd say I'm in a fine pickle."
The sound was scratchy. I spent an extra second processing her words. "The gear just won't come down?"
"Not yet. I think if he did me, he did me good."
"Don't say that. This is only intended to frighten you."
"It's working."
"Sorry. Didn't get that."
"I said it's working. I'm scared."
"How much fuel do you have left?"
"Twenty minutes, half an hour."
"You can bring it down, you know. You can. You'll just scratch the belly a little bit."
"It's not the belly I'm worried about. It's burying the propeller, that's when things will get dicey."
"You can do it." I didn't have a clue what it would require of Sawyer to avoid burying the propeller. I was afraid I was doing nothing more than an adequate impression of a shrink standing on the sidelines leading cheers for some psychological athletic competition.
"You know what? Time is passing pretty slowly up here and this is all reminding me of that time on the unit, that patient of Arnie's who had the knife. Do you remember?"
My reaction, which I kept to myself, was that Travis, arnie's patient with the Swiss Army knife, was a rank amateur compared to whoever it was who had screwed with Sawyer's landing gear. I said. "Of course I remember. But I don't think I'm going to be of much help this time. You'll do fine on your own."
"Thanks for your vote of confidence." Her tone was sardonic.
I thought she was going to say something else, she didn't, the silence between us grew into seconds and felt awkward. I could think of nothing to say that didn't sound banal, she cracked it. "I'm afraid that I need to go. See if the folks at the Beechcraft factory in Wichita have checked in with any advice. I wish I knew why the manual assist isn't working. But, hey, I'll see you one way or another in about half an hour, right?"
"I'm counting on it." I said. I was aware that the circumstances were beseeching something emotional from me and I consciously fought an impulse to tell her that I loved her.
I assumed it was ancient, the impulse.
"Bye,” she said.
Guy walked with me as I returned to the tarmac, wa waited, staring at the sky: watching the gray dot that was Sawyer grow in size as the plane approached us then receded into the distant sky and she flew away. Once or twice I lost sight of the plane altogether. I wondered if it had exploded or disintegrated but kept the thought private, holding my breath until the sunlight again glinted off metal or glass and I could discern it in the distance.
Gloria joined us after a few minutes. I smelled her perfume before I heard her approach, she stood between Guy and me, slightly behind us. "The tower was thinking of moving her over to Sky Harbor or Williams, but she's going to have to come down here, there's a UPS plane with a blown tire blocking a runway intersection at Sky Harbor anyway, they're mobilizing the emergency equipment to get in place here."
Could anything else go wrong? "What will it be like?" I asked. "When she comes down."
Gloria touched my wrist as she answered. "Most situations like this end up okay, a lot depends on these winds we're having, they've been gusting like this all morning. In calm air— How experienced is she, anyway?"
"I'm not sure, she flies all the time. It's her own plane."
"That's good, assuming she's experienced, in calm air she should be able to get it down okay, she's going to have to make sure she keeps that nose up, though, to—"
"Keep the propeller off the runway."
"Yeah."
"She told me about that while we were on the radio." I explained. "But if the wind gusts?"
A tiny plane with two seats and its wing mounted above the cabin began to taxi past us, the sharp drone of its engine stopping our dialogue. Guy yelled in my ear. "That's a Cessna, a one-fifty. It's not like your friend's, hers is much bigger than that one and has the wing below."
Gloria waited until the small plane had taxied away to answer my earlier question about the wind. "Everything about landing is harder in crosswinds like this, without the gear down, her margin for error is seriously reduced because the propeller blades are so much closer to the ground when she actually touches down. Does that make sense?"
I nodded.
"The good news is that she'll be running almost dry, the risk of fire if anything, you know, goes wrong will be reduced, the controllers have called a couple of senior instructors into the tower to coach her down, she'll cut all her power at the end."
Guy asked, "Is Tom up there? In the tower?"
Gloria nodded, then explained to me, "Tom's our lead instructor, he taught both of us to fly, he's good."
Guy seconded the opinion about their instructor and then asked Gloria something about another employee who was late showing up for work, as she answered, my mind drifted to Sawyer, although I'd never seen her plane. I'd been in small aircraft before. I could see her in the little cockpit with the high dash, the propeller blades cutting a neat, perfectly rounded arc in front of her, she hadn't sounded that frightened on the phone. I wondered if she was terrified.
Gloria turned to leave. "Oh, by the way, nothing on TV about that fire in Colorado. Sorry." She reached back and touched me on my shoulder.
"Thanks for checking."
Guy nodded at the sky and asked. "Is she, like, your girlfriend? The woman in the plane?"
I shook my head. "No." I said, "just an old friend." To make conversation, I added. "What about Gloria? Are you and she... ?"
He laughed.
We stared at the sky some more.
A minute later, no more, Gloria came running back outside through the glass doors, her pleated skirt and blond waves bouncing in unison, she cried, "She's out of fuel, she's coming in without power."
What?
"She's out of fuel? I thought she said she had plenty of fuel? What the hell happened?"
"I don't know. I was inside listening to the tower traffic, and in a calm voice she suddenly reports she's losing power. Tom called over, he thinks the fuel gauges must be inaccurate."
"What now?"
Gloria said. "It means it's an engine-out landing."
"Which means what?"
"Which means that for right now she's flying a glider."
"Her plane will glide all right?"
"Yes, she's done it before; she's practiced engine-out landings, we all have. It's part of the training."
"But not without landing gear?"
"No, she doesn't have any practice doing engine-outs without landing gear, that part's brand-new for her. But at least she won't have to worry about the propeller problem anymore."
"Why not?"
"It won't be spinning. Before, with power, she would have had to cut the engine just as she flared for touchdown in order to still the propeller blades. Now she doesn't have to worry about it. What she does have to do is pray that none of the blades stopped in the six o'clock position."
"Because then she'll bury it?"
Gloria said. "Yes, then she'll bury it. It'll protrude below the fuselage for sure."
My heart was forcing blood into my arteries ferociously. I could hear it roar in my ears. I could feel the pressure building in my vessels. My muscles were taut and ready for my adversary. I felt absolutely ready to take on a thousand monsters.
But there was nothing I could do.
I asked. "Where will she come down?"
"Over there." Guy pointed. "On twenty-one."
"How soon?"
"Any minute."
TWENTY-FOUR
"I'd like to go over there. To the runway, where we can see her come in. Can we drive over there?"
"Not to the runway." Gloria said. "But we can drive over to Desert Aviation, they're right on the other side of the taxiway, they're
in a better position to see her approach."
Guy said. "Good idea. I'll get the truck."
We squeezed into the cab of a little Nissan pickup with the Blue Skies Aviation logo on the doors and followed some indecipherable path on the tarmac to the offices and hangars of Desert Aviation. I assumed that Desert was Blue Skies' main competitor at the airport. Guy parked the truck in a lot that was out of sight of the runway, the three of us hopped out of the cab and ran around the corner of the building. Haifa dozen employees were already outside, strung out like pearls on a string, watching the denouement of the events that they: too, had been following on the tower radio.
A couple of the men found Gloria's approach much more interesting than they found Sawyer's. One of them smiled at her, she seemed not to notice, he turned to her and said. "Is that one of yours up there?"
Without looking at him, she said. "No, we're just going to service it, the pilot's his girlfriend." She pointed at me, granting me the smile the other man coveted.
I didn't correct her about the girlfriend part.
Car crashes feel like they happen in slow motion. Plane wrecks, it turns out, actually do. I remembered the video of the DC-’0 somersaulting into the cornfield in Sioux City; and the fascinating tape of the 747 almost managing to belly-land just off the beach on that island off the coast of Africa.
The Desert Aviation mechanic, whose interest in Gloria hadn't waned, moved close to us, he had some binoculars around his neck. To impress Gloria, he took on the responsibility of providing a play-by-play on Sawyer's approach. His buddy fell into line doing the color.
The mechanic raised the binoculars. "Okay, she's just turning into final. I'd say she's a mile out."
"No, not that far. Is she low?"
"She's not low."
"If she's low she's screwed."
"She's not low."
"Still no gear?"
"Still no gear."
Gloria leaned over and whispered into my ear. "I think she is a little low. Not awful, but a little. I'd want to be up another hundred feet."
"What does that mean? Being a little low?"
"If she had power, it wouldn't mean anything, she'd just goose the throttle and get the altitude back. But remember she's gliding. If I'm right, she's gonna need some help from the winds to reach the runway."
I didn't like the sound of what I was hearing. "And if she doesn't get them? The winds?"
"She'll hit short. In the sagebrush, and she doesn't want to do that, there're no obstacles out there, but it's not level, and she needs level ground for this kind of landing." She squinted toward the sky. "But first, right now, she needs to fight a temptation to pull the nose up, because that will only drop her faster."
I assumed there wasn't time to remedy my ignorance about the laws that govern flight. Why, I wanted to know, would pointing the plane's nose up bring it down? I didn't ask.
"Glide path looks good," said one mechanic.
"Wrong again. I say she's low," offered his pessimistic friend.
"She's not low."
"You watch," he challenged.
In my periphery, I saw a fire truck pull into position on a taxiway almost directly in front of the tower, a hundred yards beyond it, parked in the shadows, was an ambulance with its engine running. Two paramedics stood in front of their vehicle, their hands cupping their eyes, trying to enhance their view.
Gloria touched my forearm gently, and her kindness shocked me back to attending to the sky above runway twenty-one.
The mechanic said. "She's over the highway, she's coming down short. Glide path is a little low. You were right, you little shit."
The little shit gleefully punched his buddy on the biceps. If any money changed hands I was going to kill one of them.
To me. Gloria whispered. "She's not doing too badly, she may still be able to catch the end of the pavement. Come on. Lord. Give her a lift, just a little updraft from the heat. Come on. Come on."
I could see the small plane clearly now, the first thing I checked was the position of the propeller blades. None of the three blades was near six o'clock. Not exactly four and eight, though— maybe three-thirty and seven-thirty. How far out was she? I couldn't tell. But I could tell that Sawyer's plane was no more than seventy-five feet from the ground and that she was descending fast, the wings were rocking up and down and the tail seemed to be scootching off to one side.
"Is she doing that? Why is she doing that to the tail?"
Gloria said. "She's crabbing. Those crosswinds I told you about? She's trying to stay aligned with the runway."
"How's her altitude?"
She squeezed ray hand and said. "I sure wish she was up a little higher." Her tone was as light as helium, almost
like a prayer.
• • ■
The plane was twenty feet from the ground yet seemed to be over a hundred yards from the beginning of the macadam. Sawyer wasn't going to make it.
As though she was reading my thoughts. Gloria said. "Sometimes here, in the desert, you feel it just before you touch down, a little bounce from the heat radiating off the ground, that's all she needs here. Just a little bounce from the sun gods. Just a solar push."
I reminded myself to breathe.
Guy said. "There! Look! She's up a little, isn't she?"
To my amazement. I could see it. I could see the results of an invisible hand that gently lifted the plane five feet higher, maybe ten, and it was apparent that Sawyer was fighting the controls, she brought the nose down once, then again, she jammed the tail over to the left.
"One more." Gloria implored. "We need one more bounce."
And there it was.
A bigger bounce this time. No mistaking it, a certain ten feet. Suddenly; the nose of Sawyer's plane was above the parallel stripes at the end of the runway. Everyone cheered.
Except for me. I waited for the sparks and the screech and prayed I wouldn't see the propeller blades dig into the asphalt.
And then, all at once, it seemed it was over, the emergency trucks started rushing toward the plane, the crowd was cheering. Gloria was embracing me and telling me that God was so good, so good.
I noticed that my beeper was vibrating on my hip, and I wondered if Sheldon Salgado would agree with Gloria about God's good graces.
The Bonanza had scratched to a stop and sat forlornly in the middle of the runway, just left of the center, the door on the pilot's side opened and Sawyer climbed out and stood on the wing, she waved.
Right at me.
I started to walk toward her. No one stopped me, so I started to run, the paramedics got to her first, the firefighters only seconds behind. I weaved through the crowd that quickly gathered around the plane, found her just as she found me, and hugged her tightly.
"Great job." I said. "Incredible landing."
Into my ear, she said. "I don't know about that. But I'm glad you're here. I think I need a doctor."
Behind me someone was saying it was remarkable, that there wasn't much damage.
I thought, maybe not to the plane.
My beeper vibrated again.
Twenty minutes later. Sawyer was huddled beside her plane with Guy and the chief mechanic for Blue Skies Aviation. I went back to the waiting area to find out what my two pages were about.
The number on my pager was that of Sam's cell phone.
"Alan? Where the hell have you been? You didn't get my pages?"
"No. I got them. It's been nuts here. Sam. Real touch and go, but Sawyer got down okay. I'm sure the plane was sabotaged, a real sweet job. Our guy's fingerprints are all over everything."
"Not literally, right? Can't tie him to it?"
"No: I'm babbling. Not literally."
"Well, the news isn't so good here, there are three bodies in that doctor's house. But they're too scorched to ID."
"Oh, God."
"Yeah, I'm sorry."
My reaction to Sheldon's death was going to take some time to sort out, the most pressing feeling
s were responsibility and anger. Fear was in there, too. I asked Sam. "You feeling okay?"
"Me? I'm fine. But nobody's trying to kill me. It's the rest of you that I'm worried about."
"Is Lauren doing all right?"
"She's upset. But she's strong, you know that, she's in a conference right now, bargaining away one of my collars, probably, a whole gaggle of suits in there with her. I think I'm going to stick around for a while, maybe see her home, you know. Make sure that it's safe."
"Thanks, Sam."
"Listen, you're going to be home tonight, right? We're still on for walking tomorrow?"
"Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. How's the diet?"
"Don't ask."
Sawyer insisted that, despite the mishap with her plane, we keep our plans to drive to Cave Creek to confront Victor Garritson, aka Chester. Even as I drove off the airport property, I was still arguing that we accept the cards that fate had been dealing us and just fly— commercially— back to our respective homes.
"You won't get far using gambling metaphors with me, Alan. It's my territory, remember, and I don't lika being intimidated."
"That wasn't intimidation up there, that was attempted murder."
"I'm not convinced."
"Wait a second. You accept that Chester or D.B, or whoever it is sabotaged your plane?"
"We looked, that mechanic and me— he's good, by the way, we couldn't find anything. No evidence of sabotage at all."
"You're saying this was a coincidence? That your landing gear wouldn't come down and your fuel gauge misrepresented your fuel reserves? I'm sorry, but I'm afraid your denial is out of control. Sawyer."
She folded the map she was holding with great care and said. "One of the first rules of medicine, and you know this, alan, is that rare things happen rarely. I treat this as a mechanical problem until we see the evidence otherwise." She poked at the map with her index finger. "Next left, we're going northeast."
I pulled into the left lane.
She asked me. "Ever seen a card shark in action, a really good one? Someone who can deal off the top of the deck, or the bottom of the deck, or out of the middle of the deck, and you're watching for it and you can't see him do it and you can't figure any of it out?"
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