The Black Sheep

by Patricia Ryan

  He drained his glass and poured half of the remaining champagne into it, and the rest into Harley’s.

  “This is probably not a good idea.” she said, between sips. “I don’t hold my liquor very well. I’m likely to fall asleep on you.” She did appear exceptionally relaxed.

  “I’m not much of a drinker, either,” he admitted. “Drinking and flying don’t mix any better than drinking and driving. If anything, worse.”

  “You weren’t drinking when you had your... when you crashed your airplane. Were you?”

  “No way. I’ve never flown under the influence. That crash had nothing to do with alcohol. Mainly it just had to do with bad luck.” She nodded and deposited a cherry pit into her hand, then flung it into the woods. There was an enormous boulder at the edge of the blanket, and he leaned back against it and looked away from Harley and the fire, toward the black waves slapping the shore. “Extreme bad luck.” He tossed back the last of his champagne and set the glass aside.

  She stared at him, her own empty glass on the blanket next to her. When he looked at her, she looked away, rubbing her arms.

  “Are you cold?” he asked.

  “A little.”

  He reached for the second blanket and unfolded it. “Come here. Sit next to me.” He draped the blanket over their shoulders and wrapped his arms around her. She settled back against him, her head nestled against his chest, her small body curled comfortably into his.

  “Extreme bad luck,” she murmured, as if the words had an interesting sound.

  “Mainly extreme bad weather,” he said, and expelled a long, heavy sigh. “But there were other problems. Instrument failure no one could have anticipated, plus I was flying at night, which never helps.” Did she want to hear this? As if in unspoken answer, she nodded, and he continued. “I was on a routine cargo run between Anchorage and Fairbanks when it happened. You know Mount McKinley?” She nodded again. “Just down the block from there. All of a sudden this blizzard came out of nowhere. Totally unpredicted. Complete whiteout, high winds, no visibility. Suddenly I was shearing the tops off trees. I guess I hit the mountain at a pretty good angle—not dead-on, or I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. Kind of tumbled down, rolling over as I went. The fuselage broke up, my cargo went all over the place. Finally came to rest on a flat spot in the middle of all these fir trees.”

  She twisted her head to look up at him. “Were you able to get out, go for help?”

  “Oh, no. Not a chance. The whole left side of the cockpit had gotten smashed up, and the whole left side of me with it. There were pieces of metal and glass sticking out of me.” He felt her shiver, and held her tighter. “I was pinned in there like a butterfly in a box.”

  “Could you reach the radio?”

  “Yeah, but it was out of commission.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I watched it snow. I just stared out through the broken windshield and watched it fall out of the night sky. It never stopped, just kept coming, big flakes the size of my fist piling up outside. Piling up fast, in this deadly silence. The plane was getting buried under it. I knew by morning there’d be no trace of me. They’d never find me. I realized I was gonna die. I didn’t see how I could get to help, or how I could recover, if I did. My left leg was destroyed. And I knew that just about every other bone on my left side was broken. The bleeding wasn’t very bad, but the pain was. It was overwhelming, but there was no way to make it go away, so I had to concentrate on denying it. I tried to think about other things—anything except the pain and the cold and the fact that I was gonna die. Mainly I thought about my dad.” He realized this was the first time in years that he had referred to his father as anything other than R.H. “I kept wondering if he’d ever find out I’d been killed. I don’t think dying bothered me as much as his not knowing, which struck me as kind of strange, considering how long it had been since I’d even seen him. I thought about him and about my mother.”

  “Do you remember her very well?”

  “Mainly bits and pieces. But I remember the Christmas before she died. She wore a green silk dress and her hair was in a braid down her back. I got my first guitar that year, a little one. I’m sure it was her idea. For a while I couldn’t get that Christmas out of my mind. I think it was the smell of all the broken fir trees around.”

  “Were you awake the whole time?”

  “No, eventually I lost consciousness, but apparently I was awake until dawn. The snow completely covered the plane by then, but I remember seeing the glow of sunlight through it, and I thought, this is the last sunlight I’ll ever see. Now that there was some light, I could see my cigarettes, just out of reach. Drove me crazy, not being able to get to them. I thought, damn, I won’t even have to feel guilty about smoking, ’cause I’m dying anyway. Then I was out of it for a while, and I woke up to the sound of a shovel scraping against the windshield. Then this face looked through the glass and smiled at me, and I realized they’d found me, after all. I don’t remember, but they said I asked for a cigarette before I passed out again. I came to in the hospital a week later.”

  “You were unconscious for a whole week?”

  “More or less. They said I came out of it once in a while, but I don’t remember. The first couple of days they thought I wasn’t gonna make it, and they wanted to notify my next of kin. They asked my pilots and my friends, but all they could say was they didn’t know. I had never gotten close enough to any of them to tell them who my father was or where he lived. I pictured the funeral, if it had come to that. Some small, generic ceremony at some funeral home in Seward with about a dozen people, tops—my pilots and a few buddies, guys I hung out with. They would have said, ‘Wasn’t Tucker Hale a swell guy and aren’t we lucky it happened to him and not us?’ The only women there would have been Molly Little and maybe a few of the girlfriends and wives. No other woman knew me well enough to come. No one would have cried.”

  Harley murmured something. It sounded like, “I’d have cried.”

  Tucker was seized with desire for her, but it was more than the simple physical desire he had felt a thousand times before. He wanted to feel her beneath him and around him. He wanted to be a part of her, he wanted to lose himself inside her. At that moment it took all of his self-control not to lower her to the blanket and make love to her.

  He took a deep, shaky breath. He had to wait. For one thing, she had drunk half a bottle of champagne, for which she had little tolerance, and he drew the line at taking advantage of an inebriated woman. For another, they had a deal. In a day or two she would be his, on her own terms. She had to know that, and it didn’t seem to bother her—in fact, he sensed that she looked forward to it as much as he. He had often speculated on her motives for initiating the deal in the first place. She had to know she might lose. She had seen his trophies. Of course, she had wanted to rehabilitate him—and it had worked—but he suspected she had another, perhaps subconscious, motive. It was possible that she had simply wanted to enforce a waiting period before they consummated their relationship. She knew that he had no interest in waiting; he had made that clear from the beginning. But she did. Hence the deal. Hence six weeks of being with her, taking his time with her, getting to know her. He felt as if he knew her as well as he knew himself. She had changed him. She was a part of him now. That felt both comforting and frightening.

  He closed his eyes for a while and listened to the reassuring rhythm of the waves. Quietly he said, “I did a lot of thinking in the hospital. Nothing had really mattered to me for a long time. Then I cracked up the plane and things started to matter. People... my father. I came back here because, no matter what he did or didn’t do, he’s my father. He matters. And now... I don’t know how this happened, but... you matter, too. You matter a lot. I think I’ve fallen... I think I’m...”

  He shook his head. “I’ve never said this to a woman before. It’s hard. How do people do this? Help me out, Harley. Tell me you want me to say it.” Her breathing was very regular and sh
e felt warm and heavy against him. “Harley?”

  She was asleep. She had warned him that might happen. He kissed the top of her head. Now what? Wake her up? He didn’t have the heart for that. And he certainly couldn’t carry her back up to the house. Carefully he laid her down on the blanket, curled on her side, then fit his big body to hers, spoon-style, and covered them both with the second blanket. It wouldn’t be the first time he had spent the night on this beach—in this very spot, in fact. But it would be the first time he’d have someone to hold while he slept.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LATE THE NEXT MORNING, Harley opened and closed drawers in R.H’s desk, idly searching for stamps, her mind preoccupied by three conflicting forces: the warm afterglow of having awakened on the beach in Tucker’s arms, the nausea and pain of her first hangover, and the knowledge that the phone bill was due in two days.

  R.H., who distrusted the internet and refused to conduct financial business electronically, had made it clear that she was to pay all bills via snail mail. He had taken a sheet of stamps from one of the drawers and placed it on top of the desk, saying, “That should be enough, but if you need more, get them from the drawer.” Well, now she did need more, but she couldn’t remember which drawer he stored them in. She began searching them one by one, finding them irritatingly neat and organized, everything in tidy stacks at right angles. Or maybe she was just irritated because of the hangover. Everything ached. Her eyes hurt. It hurt to think—just to string one thought onto another.

  She came to a drawer containing a monogrammed leather photo album, which she lifted without opening. Beneath it lay a yellowed newspaper folded to reveal a particular article. The article was illustrated by a photograph of two policemen flanking a young man in handcuffs.

  The young man was Tucker.

  She blinked several times in an effort to clear her eyes and mind. Tucker in handcuffs.

  She took the newspaper from the drawer. It was an old copy of the Miami Herald, and paper-clipped to its edge was a business card engraved “Charles Madison, Jr., Attorney at Law,” giving a Wall Street address. There was a message written in fountain pen, beginning on the front of the card and continuing on the back: “R.H.— A friend in Fla. sent me this. Read it. It should cure you of the notion that it’s my Chet who’s the bad influence. —C.M.”

  Boldface words above the article read: Feds Crack Down On Drug Smugglers.

  Tucker Hale, twenty, was arrested at 5:30 a.m. today, charged with transporting cocaine and marijuana—

  Her stomach did a slow flip, and she suddenly felt starved for air. Lurching to the window, she raised it and tried to breathe deeply, but found herself gasping in time to her runaway heartbeat.

  She looked at the photograph. It had been taken indoors and lit with the glare of flashbulbs. Tucker, his hands cuffed in front, towered over the two burly policemen. His uncombed hair brushed his shoulders, and he wore jeans and a dark sweatshirt. He still had some adolescent lankiness, and his face looked smooth, unscarred and very young. Despite the indignity of the situation, he stood tall and looked straight ahead, his expression grim but calm.

  She skimmed the article, then reread it slowly. It described how, shortly after midnight, federal drug-enforcement agents aboard a surveillance vessel off the Florida coast had observed seven plastic-wrapped bundles being dropped into the water from a Piper Comanche.

  The agents intercepted the drugs as they were being loaded into a powerboat by an as-yet-unidentified accomplice. The accomplice opened fire and was killed in the ensuing exchange. The plane had been identified and was located two hours later at the Opa-Locka Airport just outside Miami. Tucker Hale was registered as the owner. The agents, accompanied by Dade County Police, went to Mr. Hale’s home, and he and his house-mate, Charles Madison III, were taken to the police station for questioning. Following lengthy interrogations, Mr. Madison was released and Mr. Hale was arrested and taken into custody.

  Harley’s head throbbed as if it were being squeezed repeatedly by a giant pair of hands. She felt woozy, faint. A movement from outside the window caught her eye: the black Jag pulling into the driveway. Tucker emerged, carrying a bagful of bagels. She slammed the window shut and went back to the desk to return the newspaper to its drawer.

  When she lifted the photo album she noticed something else beneath it, another folded newspaper with Chet’s father’s business card clipped to it. The headline announced Tucker Hale Guilty on All Counts, and beneath it, Street Value of Drugs $1.2 M, and, Maximum Sentence Expected. The picture showed Tucker in a suit, his hair conservatively shorn. Other men in suits surrounded him, all of them walking down the steps of a courthouse. Reporters crowded around, raising cameras and thrusting microphones at him. He ignored them, his eyes again directed straight ahead, strangely dignified despite the circumstances.

  Hearing Tucker in the hall, she quickly slipped the first newspaper in its place and shut the drawer.

  He appeared in the doorway and opened the bag. “You didn’t tell me what kind you liked, so I got one of everything—except blueberry. Those are a sin against God and nature”

  An image of Tucker in handcuffs superimposed itself on the man in the doorway. Harley turned away and leaned on the desk.

  He approached her. The aroma of warm yeast mingled with onion and garlic, raisin and cinnamon, caused a swell of nausea to rise in her throat. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. Feeling his hand on the small of her back, she jerked away, then the hand was gone.

  His tone softened. “What’s the matter? Still hungover?” Without opening her eyes, she nodded. “Have you eaten anything?” She shook her head. “Dr. Hale recommends a poppy-seed bagel with cream cheese and lox, followed by as many laps as you can manage, to burn the toxins out of your system. I swam, and I feel great now.”

  How nice for you, she thought. How nice that you can feel great while I’m twisting inside.

  “I can’t eat,” she managed to say.

  “Nothing?” He replaced the hand on her back. “You’d really feel better if—”

  She opened her eyes. “I’m going for a run.” She shook off the hand and darted from the room, leaving him staring after her.

  TUCKER HALE GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS. She repeated the words over and over in her mind as she ran. They became her mantra. They seared themselves into her consciousness. They were hard words. They were painful. It hurt her to think them, yet she forced herself to think them over and over again.

  “Tucker Hale guilty on all counts.” She whispered the words out loud to reinforce them, to underline their truth. Tucker Hale had been found guilty on all counts. A court of law had determined that he had attempted to smuggle cocaine and marijuana into Florida in his Piper Comanche. That was the truth. She couldn’t afford to flinch from it.

  He had taken her in, charmed her, made himself a part of her life, all under false pretenses. Refusing to tell her what happened in Miami amounted to a lie by omission. So, technically; he had lied to her, despite his pious insistence that he never lied. She remembered his excuse when she had asked him directly about Miami and he had declined to answer. He was worried that she would judge him and find him lacking.

  Damn straight, she would find him lacking.

  He had been a drug dealer, just like her father. Well, not just like her father. Her father had been small potatoes compared to Tucker. Her father had peddled dime bags of pot and the occasional oxy and maybe a little meth to his fellow down-and-out bikers, making barely enough to keep them both fed. Tucker, on the other hand, had smuggled millions of dollars’ worth of drugs into the country, or had attempted to.

  Harley tried to piece it all together, struggling to remember the things he had told her about his past and his business, and reconstruct the things he hadn’t. After his music career had fizzled out, he’d moved to Miami—he and Chet— and saved up for a Piper Comanche. She couldn’t recall his saying exactly what kind of cargo he had intended the plane for, although now it was clear en
ough. The shipment that the feds intercepted might have been his first, or he might have been doing it for a while and had millions in a Swiss bank by the time they caught him. Harley didn’t know or care; a drug dealer was a drug dealer.

  Apparently they had sent him to prison, and when he got out, he moved to Alaska and saved up for another plane. He’d started as a humble bush pilot, he said, parlaying that into an air cargo business so successful that he had a staff of pilots, half-a-dozen planes, and enough pin money lying around to drive Jags off the lot when the spirit moved him.

  Harley began to wonder just what kind of cargo he’d built his business around. The possibility that he had returned to the same risky, but super-profitable business for which he had once been sent to jail could not be discounted.

  Did he really intend to give it all up and move back to Long Island? Maybe. Maybe the crash had convinced him it was time to retire. He was a wealthy man; he could certainly afford to.

  “Tucker Hale guilty on all counts,” she whispered again. It didn’t matter if he was getting out of the business. It didn’t even matter if he hadn’t been in the business since Miami. That he had been in it at all condemned him for eternity as far as she was concerned.

  She closed her eyes as she ran and saw her mother’s once-pretty face, made monstrous by an ugly, drug-induced death. No prison term could make up for the crime of preying on the weakness of people like Jennifer Sayers. Tucker had not paid his dues, and she could not forgive him.

  She opened her eyes to erase her mother’s image. He had kept the truth from her because he knew that, once she learned it, she would never want to have anything to do with him again. He had tricked her, ingratiated himself with her, and it shamed her that she had let it happen.