Night Flight

by Donna Ball

  Cathy found the address, which she had never expected to use for anything other than Christmas cards, and beside it the phone number. She read the information aloud. "But I'm leaving now," she repeated to the voice on the other end of the phone. "I'll be there. Tell Jack . . . I'll be there."

  She didn't know what else was said, if anything. She didn't even remember hanging up the phone,going to her bedroom, pulling on her jeans, snatching up her purse.

  Ellen said, "Let me go with you. It's the middle of the night, you shouldn't go alone . . ."

  Cathy shook her head frantically. "I don't know how long I'll be. I don't know what—" She had to draw a deep breath then, literally gasping it in like a diver surfacing for air. "He was in surgery. I don't know how serious. The kids ... I have to get there. The kids . . ."

  Janie and Christopher, age five, all alone in a strange hospital room, their daddy hurt and their Aunt Cathy so far away. . . how terrified they must be. How lost and alone. Cathy tried not to think about it. She couldn't think about it, she couldn't start crying, not now. She had to get there. She had to get to Jack, she had to be there for his children.

  Ellen thrust an overnight bag into her hands and Cathy stared at it for a moment as though she had never seen it before. Had she packed it, or had Ellen?

  "Do you know how to get there?” Ellen insisted. “Your car doesn’t even have GPS.”

  Cathy hurried past her. "I've got maps.”

  "What about money?"

  "I think so."

  Ellen followed her to the porch. "For God's sake Cathy, are you okay to drive?"

  Cathy nodded distractedly, then turned to hug her friend briefly, fiercely. "Stay here tonight, will you, in case they try to call?"

  Ellen squeezed her hands tightly. "Of course I will. You call me the minute you get there. No, call me sooner, from the road, in case . . ."

  Cathy nodded, turning for the steps.

  Ellen caught her arm. "Cathy, for God's sake be careful!"

  "I will," she answered, or thought she answered; she didn't really know. She tossed her bag and her purse into the car and climbed in, slamming the door behind her.

  Ellen's face was at the open window. "Cathy . . ."

  But her eyes were full of helplessness and she didn't know what to say, and that was when Cathy felt the tears burn her throat. She had to look away.

  "I'll call," she promised hoarsely, and she started the engine.

  And her phone was still in the top drawer of her dresser, where she had left it a week ago.

  **************

  Chapter Two

  Cathy's hands tightened on the steering wheel as she guided the car, looking for the service station that belonged to the Amoco sign she'd seen from the expressway. So far she'd passed a Gulf station and a Texaco, both closed, and she'd gone at least a mile out of her way. What if the Amoco was closed too?

  At one-thirty in the morning the only people on the streets in Portersville, California were looking for trouble. Decent people had long since closed their curtains and set their alarm clocks. Stores and roadside marts had closed; neon signs were dark, shutters were down. Streetlights were few and far between. There were no bars, nightclubs, or late- night movies, and restaurants had turned off the lights on their marquees. Along the narrow access road that ran above the expressway, Cathy Hamilton's car was the only thing that moved.

  A catch of panic, dry and stale, dug into the back of her throat, and Cathy swallowed it back quickly. The fuel indicator read a quarter of a tank, and in the Honda that could mean another hundred miles or so. She would go farther up the expressway if she had to; but she didn't want to. She had started to panic the minutes she had discovered her phone was not, in fact, in her purse, by which time she was too far away to go back for it. For the past fifteen minutes the need to call the hospital had been pressing down on her, and she didn't think she could wait any longer. There had to be a pay phone at the service station. She had been driving an hour and she didn't know how much farther it was to Albany, Oregon ... six hours? Eight? Three? How could she go even three more hours without knowing . . . something?

  A new panic caught her unexpectedly, roiling up in her chest like a dust storm of smothering proportions. Jack, don't die. God, don't die, please . . .

  She saw the Amoco station.

  The sign that towered over the surrounding landscape and could be seen for half a mile in either direction from the expressway belonged to a mini- mart with two self-service pumps and a faded "Open Twenty-Four Hours" sign in the window. About twenty yards away from the building was a telephone stand.

  Thank you, Jesus.

  As she swung into the parking lot Cathy saw the first signs of life since leaving the expressway. One car was just pulling away from the pumps. Two others were parked in the shadows, and one of them was empty. A dark blue sedan was pulled close to a dumpster at the side of the building, and two men in the front seat looked as though they were waiting for someone. The man in the driver's seat was wearing a faded red fishing cap and a plaid shirt, the passenger was drinking a styrofoam cup of coffee. Inside the brightly lit store she could see a teenage clerk and a male customer.

  Cathy registered all this with a part of her mind that was always actively recording details without really stopping to notice them at all, nor caring what those details meant. Jack sometimes teased her about her inability to see the forest for the trees. In the orchestra she became so absorbed in the sounds of each individual instrument that she rarely heard the symphony; she compulsively alphabetized her spices and arranged her closet according to color, but could let the dishes pile up for days without noticing, and rarely made her bed. It was a form of tunnel vision, and she lived her life the same way: it was a series of details, each unconnected to the others but somehow forming a larger picture that, more often than not, escaped her.

  She pulled close to the telephone stand and grabbed some coins from the dashboard drawer where she always tossed loose change. A black man in a denim jacket came out of the store as she reached the telephone. It was twenty minutes before two.

  She had to spend some time in the dim light of the telephone trying to decipher the directions for making a long distance call. She never made long distance calls away from home. That was what cell phones were for. Damn it, how could she be so careless?

  Finally she dialed the operator. "I want to make a credit card call to Mercy Hospital in Albany, Oregon. I don't know the number."

  "The number for long distance information is — "

  "No! I don't want information. This is an emergency."

  "May I have your credit card number, please?"

  Cathy gave her number and waited for the sequence of electronic bleeps and switches for the callto be completed. She caught a fuzzy glimpse of her reflection in the three-sided plexiglass that surrounded the phone booth: a white face surrounded by an unkempt mass of dark hair, punctuated by eyes that were too big and too shocked-looking to be her own. The blue nightshirt with its honey-bear transfer on the front was half tucked into and half trailing out of her jeans. I should have at least brushed my hair, she thought, focusing once again on details to keep her mind off the beating of her heart, which grew louder and more insistent with each breath. I'll have to put on makeup before I see Jack. Maybe I have some blush in my purse . . .

  "I'm sorry, that line is busy."

  "Busy?" Cathy's hand, braced against the body of the telephone, tightened on the slick plastic. "How can it be busy? It's a hospital, it's one-thirty in the morning — "

  "I'm sorry," the operator repeated firmly. "Please try your call again in a few minutes."

  Cathy pressed the disconnect hook and took another few deep breaths. Busy. A small-town hospital, probably only one operator on duty, that was okay. She'd try again. First she would get gas, then she'd call Ellen, just in case, then she would try the hospital again.

  She started to replace the receiver, and then she noticed, superimposed upon her own ref
lection, the tall man coming toward her. Some instinct warned her to stay where she was, with her hand on the disconnect and the receiver braced against her shoulder, pretending to ignore him as she watched his reflection come closer. It would be much harder to snatch a purse here in this small enclosure than out in the open, and if she didn't meet his eyes maybe he would walk on by. Maybe he just wanted to use the telephone.

  She felt the muscles around her skull go tense, and she held her breath as his shadow fell over her, blotting out his reflection. He moved with an easy, casual gait, hands in pockets, head slightly bent, looking neither right nor left. Cathy's fingers dug into the receiver.

  The man passed close by her but didn't stop. He said in a low voice, without looking at her, "It's off tonight, babe. You've been made."

  And he continued walking straight past her, toward a red Corvette parked near the curb.

  The skin on the back of Cathy's neck crawled. She didn't move, she didn't stare, she barely breathed. She had, in fact, no time to react at all, or even to register what she had heard, because the telephone suddenly shrilled in her ear.

  She jumped, and her hand automatically released the disconnect hook. A voice, husky and male, said, "Nine oh double-u -one five, four oh en oh two."

  A coldness gripped Cathy's spine; her heart was thundering wildly. Details, none of which made sense. Three cars parked at an out-of-the-way mini- mart in an otherwise deserted town. A cryptic warning from a black man. A call that was not meant for her. Two men in a blue sedan watching her. It didn't have to make sense. Something was very wrong here.

  Christ, she thought. She replaced the receiver and took a step back from the telephone stand. Behind her, she heard a car door open. She looked frantically toward her own car, which suddenly seemed too far away. Christ. . .

  ***************

  In the blue sedan Dave Jenks and Toby Miller watched alertly and tried to pretend that the adrenaline surge was nothing more than too much caffeine. They spent six nights out of ten like this, following leads they never expected to pan out, and there was no reason to think this night would be any different.

  They had spent the last three hours drinking coffee, eating stale chips out of a bag, and playing one of those word games Toby was all the time pulling out of his hat; this one was naming a word that ended in the first letter of the last word named. Dave groused about the games and Toby kept making them up just to irritate him, but Dave always played along. There was a part of him that enjoyed the challenge even when he was over his head, as he often was with Toby.

  Toby was fifteen years younger than Dave and lacked that much experience, but it rarely, if ever, showed. Dave had resented that unexpected competence on the part of the younger man at first, but over the three years they had been partners he had had more than one occasion to be grateful for it. Toby could be a smart-ass at times, but he was a good-natured one, and he knew when to admit he was wrong. He was going to college part-time and said he wanted to be a lawyer, but Dave tried not to hold that against him. Dave was neither very intellectual nor ambitious, but he had a secret admiration for those who were. Besides, if he thought back far enough Dave, too, could remember a time when he had wanted to be something other than an aging cop in a fading town.

  "Xenophobia," said Toby, just as the woman in the red Honda pulled up.

  "What the hell is that?" Dave watched the woman get out of the car and start toward the telephone.

  "Somebody who's afraid of what they don't understand. Different races, cultures, that kind of thing." They were both watching the woman now.

  "Shit. Your head is just full of that crap, isn't it? Who the hell ever uses a word like that?"

  Toby said, "She's ten minutes late."

  Dave grunted.

  "Doesn't look much like I expected."

  Dave drained the dregs of his lukewarm coffee and crumpled the cup on the dashboard. The woman at the telephone was small-figured, with shoulder-length curly black hair that could have benefited from the use of a comb. Her skin was so fair that in the parking lot lights it looked almost fluorescent. The jeans and big tee shirt she wore looked a little rumpled, and she carried an oversize canvas purse that somehow didn't go with the image he had formed of her. He supposed he, too, had expected someone a bit more exotic.

  He shrugged and said, "They never do."

  Out of the corner of his eye Dave saw the black man leave the store and start toward her. Toby saw it too and put his hand on the door handle.

  "Wait," Dave said. "See what happens."

  Toby muttered, "Geez, I hate coming into the middle of a game where I don't know the players."

  They both settled back tensely to watch.

  The black man passed by her. He may have spoken to her, but they were too far away to hear and she gave no sign. Toby risked glancing at Dave. He said uneasily, "You know, I'm starting not to like this."

  "You're just xenophobic." But Dave knew the feeling. Suddenly, what had started out to be a routine operation seemed a little too pat, and at the same time shot full of holes. Or maybe he had spent too many nights waiting for nothing to happen. Maybe he just got spooked when something actully did.

  "It could be a setup."

  "Or she could just be calling her babysitter."

  But the guy in the denim jacket hadn't walked fifteen feet out of his way just to smell her perfume. It had looked like a contact to Dave. To both of them.

  "I still don't see why we didn't just take the call ourselves."

  "She's being watched. We move toward the phone and there's no call."

  It followed that they, too, were under surveillance, and waiting didn't make their position any safer. But they were both trying not to think about that now. They really hadn't expected it to go this far.

  Dave added, "We wait 'til she takes the call, then move in on her. Carefully."

  "If there is a call."

  Dave said, "Is that with an x or a z?"

  "Figure it out yourself."

  The phone rang.

  Dave murmured, "Well, what d'ya know about that? Looks like we hit pay dirt." His heart was beating hard.

  "So now it gets fun. Who's the lucky man?"

  "I vote for the guy that knows how to spell xenophobia."

  Toby opened the door and Dave picked up the radio mike. "Suspect appears to have made contact," he said. "We're moving in."

  Cathy had pulled the car against the curb sloppily, so that she had to walk all the way around the back to get to the driver's door. Her heart was beating so rapidly that everything else, even the movement of her legs, seemed in slow motion. She tried to get her keys out of her purse. Hadn't Jack told her a dozen times never to wait until she got to her car to look for her keys? Those few moments, standing in the dark, fumbling in her purse for her keys, were when a woman was most vulnerable to attack. She was in the dark now, and she could hear footsteps coming up behind her; the lighted mini-mart was less than fifty yards away but it might as well have been across a chasm. The footsteps were getting closer and she had never felt more vulnerable in her life.

  The hand closed around her upper arm just as she reached for the door, and her knees went weak. She remembered all the things Jack had tried to teach her about kicking and gouging and screaming at the top of her lungs; in her line of work she was out a lot late at night and he worried about her safety. In a town like Lynn Haven there wasn't much to worry about, but Cathy had always thought she could take care of herself. She had always imagined her reflexes quick, her outrage empowering, her survival instinct sharp. But the stranger gripped her arm hard enough to shoot bolts of pain through her shoulder, a wave of terror choked off her breath, her knees buckled, and she couldn’t even plea for her life.

  "Stay cool and nobody is going to get hurt." His voice was low and controlled. The pressure on her arm dragged her a few steps forward. "We're going to walk very quietly over to that car and have us a little talk."

  Another bolt of sharp-edged terror
stabbed at her as she glanced frantically toward the car, where the man in the red cap was waiting. She looked desperately up at her captor and registered a blurred impression of a man younger than she was, with red hair and fair skin that was sprinkled with freckles, and she thought, Do something! Run, scream, fight . . . But he was stronger than she was—his grip was unbreakable. The self-loathing that rose up inside her was almost as paralyzing as the fear as she gasped, "Please, I'll do anything you say, just let me-"

  She did not recognize the loud cracking sound that split the night, nor did she register the significance of the droplets of moisture that splattered her skin and the front of her nightshirt. She only knew that the grip on her arm was suddenly released; the red-haired man was thrown away from her so abruptly that she staggered and almost fell, and she was free.

  She tore at the door-handle of her car, which mercifully she had forgotten to lock after all, and flung herself inside. There was a shout and another sharp crack, and that was when Cathy noticed the black man in the denim jacket stagger and fall not five feet away from her, close enough that she could see the shock on his face and hear his gun scrape against the asphalt as it flew from his fingers. Details, played out against the background of her mind like a television show she watched with only half her attention. Meanwhile, her fingers scrambled through her purse and a greater part of her mind was screaming, Keys. . . keys. . . dear God, let me find them . . .

  In the distance was the sound of sobs, which might have been her own. Outside, muffled by the glass of her closed window, more shouts. The key ring was in her hand but the key would not fit in the ignition. She cried out in frustration and her heart missed a beat as she fumbled with the keys and almost dropped them on the floor. She could hear running footsteps. Oh, God, please . . .