Crashers (32 page)

Someone rapped on the window of his Outback. Dennis freaked, his heart trip-hammering.

A man stood out in the rain, an umbrella shadowing his face. He twirled his finger in mid-air, the symbol for “roll down your window.”

What, what, what?
Had the FBI agent found out something? Had the teen chick in the black jeans been fiddling around with his doctored FDR file? Dennis rolled his window down a few inches. The man tilted back his umbrella. It was the pathologist. Tomburg? Tomquist?

“Hey. It's Dennis, right?”

Dennis wet his lips. “Yes?”

“A few of us are going to grab a beer at our hotel in Keizer. Want to come?”

Dennis almost started to giggle with relief. “Ah, sure. Why not?”

“It's the Chemeketa Inn,” the pathologist said. “It's right on the highway. I'll see you there.” He turned and darted over to his rental.

Dennis rolled up his window, the surge of fear-turned-relief making him shake.

He turned over the engine.
Calm down!
he chastised himself. There was no way the Go-Team could be onto him. Same for the big FBI agent he'd met. He was absolutely sure of that. After all, if the FBI had been on his trail, his friend the Internet lurker would have said something.

Lucas Bell called the night shift at the Atlanta field office and asked how soon someone could get to the apartment with the answering machine. It would be secured before midnight, the agent in charge told him. They'd have a forensic unit scour the place for prints, too.

Lucas wasn't too worried about the Atlanta agents finding finger-prints. He knew he hadn't left any when he'd set up the telephone and answering machine for Donal O'Meara and his crew.

IT WAS HALF PAST eleven by the time Tommy got to the Trail Head Bar and Grille, on the ground floor of the Keizer hotel. He was bone tired; too tired to just go to bed, he knew. A quick drink with some of the crew leaders would loosen the knotted muscles in his shoulders and back.

The group he found was plenty quiet. They'd ordered two pitchers, but none of their glasses had been touched. Kiki and Isaiah were there, along with John Roby and the FBI liaison, Ray Calabrese. Dennis Silverman arrived within seconds of Tommy. As they walked in, Kiki pushed back her chair and walked to the bar.

“Glad you could make it.” Isaiah shook Dennis's hand. “That's a cool contraption you guys built.”

“I can only stay for a quick sip,” Dennis told the group. “I'm flying out tomorrow for a business trip. Hey, can I see one of your comm systems?”

Smiling at Dennis's techno-geek excitement, Tommy handed him his ear jack and belt-clip control box. Dennis immediately pried the back off the control unit and peered into it. Tommy realized the gang had picked a table next to the room's baby grand piano. “Wonder if this thing's got any gas in it,” he said, sitting and lifting the keyboard cover. He began noodling, no real song in mind.

Isaiah was about to put a glass of beer in front of Tommy when Kiki
returned, handing the pathologist a glass of seltzer with a lime wedge. Tommy smiled up at her.

Susan lifted her drink and said, “To Meghan Danvers. A good person and a good pilot.”

Ever since they'd heard her speaking on the cockpit voice recorder, every one of them had become her advocate. They hadn't realized it at the time, but they had. And now they were about to collectively sign a formal report that would end her reputation just as surely as Flight 818 had ended her life.

“To Meghan Danvers,” Tommy repeated, stopping playing long enough to toast. They clinked their glasses.

Dennis cleared his throat. “Um, she did screw up the flight. Didn't she?”

“Suppose so.” John Roby patted the engineer on the shoulder. “But the whole picture's a different kettle of fish, innit. The good captain lived a fine life. She was a mother and a wife and a pilot with hundreds of hours of perfect flying to her name. She was a good person who made a bad mistake. That shouldn't be forgotten.”

“Speaking of her mistake,” Kiki cut in. “That was a good presentation, Dennis. That FDR of yours is pretty impressive.” Tommy let loose with a little fanfare on the keyboard, echoing Kiki's compliment.

Dennis grinned and gulped beer. “Thanks. We're pretty proud of that puppy.”

“It'll revolutionize the industry,” Isaiah predicted.

“That's the idea. Believe me, you didn't see half of what that baby can do.”

Some of the crashers seemed to be listening. Others stared into their beers. Tomzak noodled at the keyboard. For an Austin resident, his tastes ran to show tunes and lounge standards.

Susan said, “What do you mean?”

Dennis absently put Tommy's communications gear back together. “The Gamelan doesn't just track problems and monitor them, it can fix some.”

Everyone glanced around, except Ray Calabrese, who seemed to be studying the head on his beer with rapt attention.

“So why'd the jet crash?” Tommy asked, hammering out a dirgelike “Moon River.”

“Oh, it can only fix small, electrical problems, and ones that have been noted and fixed in the past. Like a word-processing system that knows, from past experience, that if you type
t-e-h,
you really meant to type
t-h-e,
so it corrects it whenever it sees it. The Gamelan can do that, too. So long as it's a minor fix.”

Isaiah shook his head. “Damn, man, I'm getting too old for this. Planes that repair themselves?”

Tommy said, “Yeah, you're gettin' a little gray up there. . . .”

Isaiah said, “Fuck you, Bobby Darin.”

Dennis Silverman—who had never, ever, traded bon mots with another person—looked up quickly to see if there would be a fight. He couldn't figure out why Isaiah tilted back his chair, held his beer closer to Tommy. Tommy lifted his seltzer and clinked glasses with Isaiah.
How do people do that?
Dennis wondered. He had never mastered that level of human connection and had long ago considered that a good thing.

“Well, anyway, it's a remarkable machine,” Kiki said. She gingerly clinked her glass against Dennis's. He blushed and took a sip.

Ray—who had not spoken since the group had gathered—took a long gulp of beer, brushed his lips with a napkin, and said, “Could the Gamelan crash a jet?”

Dennis performed a picture-perfect spit-take, à la Danny Thomas, beer particulate floating across the table. Everyone backed up.

“Well, shit, New York,” Tommy drawled, switching to “Lullaby of Broadway.” “Give the fella a heart attack, why don't you.”

An easy laugh circulated around the table. John Roby shook his head and smiled. “You're an investigation in search of a crime, mate. You're bloody near as stubborn as Tommy.”

Tommy winced. “Yeah, but I know when to cry uncle. It's pilot error. I wish to hell it weren't, but it is.”

Dennis's mind had been racing a thousand miles an hour, trying to come up with an appropriate answer to the agent's devastating question, when it suddenly dawned on him that the conversation had moved right on. Nobody had expected an answer, because nobody seriously thought the question deserved one. Apparently, not even Agent Calabrese.

“You're grasping at straws,” Kiki said to Ray, and grasped his forearm, giving it a friendly shake. “We like that around here. To the fraternity of straw-graspers!”

The crashers raised their glasses. After a sip, Kiki added, “Of course, I agree with Agent Calabrese.”

“Ray,” Ray said.

Kiki nodded. “Something about this doesn't track.”

“Don't disagree,” John cut in. “But that child whose curfew Tommy helped break showed us what happened. The number-three engine tore itself to bits in midair, didn't it, and peppered the fuselage with shrapnel.
Peter's a complete prat but he's not often wrong. That twisted pieces of metal—what did he call 'em, blocker doors? He and Walter say that's a reverser in the act of, y'know, reversing. And, Dennis? That visual display of the flight data was brilliant. I'm not taking a piss with you, Kiki, it's just . . .” He shrugged.

Kiki sighed. “Yeah. I guess so. But look: the pilot and the copilot didn't see the reverser warning? Sure, I can buy that. So what did the copilot see? What made him say, ‘What's that,' and tap on something? I've got to figure that out, or I'm never going to be satisfied.”

Ray looked perplexed, so John explained about Kiki's hunt for the tapping sound. “Did the copilot wear a ring?” Ray asked.

“No. I checked that.” Kiki finished her drink. “I'm exhausted. I'm going to bed.”

With a murmur of agreement, Susan and the men drained their drinks, too. Money was tossed onto the table, more than covering the bill.

As they stood, Tommy lowered the cover over the keyboard, then clapped Dennis on the back. “Hey. I meant what I said, kid. Nice job today. I hope we get to work together again, sometime in the future.”

Dennis grinned. “Well, you never know when a jet's going to crash, do you?”

 

Once again, as they had the night before, Tommy and Kiki ended up on the same elevator to the same floor. Tommy leaned against the wall of the elevator, yawning. Kiki reached over and rubbed his shoulder. His muscles were knotted and twitched.

“Poor baby. You know, you could have delegated the autopsies. You are the Investigator in Charge.”

“That's Susan's nutty notion,” Tommy said as they stepped out and fumbled for their keys. “I don't know what the hell I'm doing, trying to run this show. Most of the time I feel three-fourths foolish and a quarter flash.”

“Well, you did a good job,” Kiki said as they reached their doors. She leaned in and pecked him on the cheek. “Good night, Doctor.”

“Good night, Lieutenant,” Tommy said, throwing her a sloppy salute. He kissed her back.

And kissed her again. This time on the lips. Kiki touched the stubble on his cheek, ran her finger down the length of his jaw.

They parted. Tommy's face was flush, his gray eyes sparkling. After a moment, he looked down and said, “Yeah. Look, I'm sorry. I—”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Kiki said. She took his key from him, swiped the lock, and led Tommy by the hand into his hotel room.

Tommy slept like the dead, curled against Kiki's long, narrow back.

He climbed out of bed around six, stretched and groaned, and sighed contentedly. Steam escaped from the half-open bathroom door. Tommy crossed to the telephone and shouted, “Hey! I'm calling room service. How do you take your coffee?” He was slightly embarrassed to have to ask. They'd been together all those months in Kentucky.

He hit the button and the line connected. “Hi. I'm in room five seventeen. Can I get two coffees and—”

He turned, stunned, as Kiki Duvall burst out of the bathroom, stark naked, water pouring off her long, muscled frame and darkening the carpet under her feet.

She stared at him, green eyes wide with shock and understanding. “Milk!” she shouted. “Milk! Tommy, it's milk!”

Tommy stared at the nude madwoman a moment, then spoke into the phone. “Can I get milk with one of those?”

 

Tommy and Kiki dressed and made it to one of the rentals in ten minutes. Kiki brought a towel and dried her hair in the car. “Shit,” she said. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”

“Not your fault,” Tommy said, slipping on the glasses he wore to see distances. He reversed out of a parking space and zoomed toward the parking lot exit. “We all missed it.”

“I was so busy listening to the sounds on the recorder, I forgot to listen to the words,” Kiki said, raking a brush savagely though her hair. The scowl on her face almost cracked the mirror on the passenger-side sun visor. “I mean, we heard Kazmanski ask for a cup of coffee! I should have known he'd have milk with it, plus something to stir it with.”

They hit the freeway. Traffic was still light at that hour but the rain had picked up during the night. “Kiki, don't get your hopes up. It still looks like pilot error, even if we find a spoon up there.”

It was only six thirty in the morning, Thursday, when Donal O'Meara and Daria Gibron stepped off the bus. “Jay-sus!” O'Meara sneered at the newly appeared sun. “It's got to be eighty bloody degrees out here.”

Daria inhaled the dry air, smiled wistfully as the promise of heat filled her lungs.

If she closed her eyes, she could have been back in Tel Aviv.

The weather pattern that drove the heat up from Mexico into California was heaving a major-league storm onto the shores of Oregon and Washington. By the time Tommy and Kiki reached the airfield, the rain was slicing down at a sharp angle. They saw it wash in discrete waves across the tarmac.

Tommy pulled into the covered car park. “Look,” he said. “Last night was great, but let's not tell everyone. You know . . . ?”

“God, no!” Kiki touched his arm. “Absolutely. Besides, it'll complicate things. And . . . it was one night.”

“Right,” he said.

“Right.”

“Okay.”

They climbed out and sprinted for the hangar. Once inside, they stopped, staring at the ruined Vermeer 111. The crushed nose cone, which had been resting nose down on the flatbed truck the night before, now hung three stories in the air. More than ever, it looked to Tommy like a bullet dug out of a wall.

The fuselage rested on its own web of scaffolding, a gap of an inch or two separating it from the crumpled flight deck. Behind that, the empennage and tail cone had been mounted, also in close proximity to the fuselage. Both damaged wings—but only two of four engines—had been mounted during the night and rested in place. One was torn apart in a lab in Gresham and the other had disintegrated.