Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery (28 page)

"Now you're batting a thousand," I spit, enraged at the scene I saw before me, Billie drowned, her hair undulating on the surface, her bound hands clenched into fists.

"What'd you say?"

"Two for two. You got
both
your kids!"

His head didn't turn; he flew his airplane. After a while, he said, "Here, you take over." He was climbing out of the cockpit.

"Are you nuts!"

"Just while I take a pee."

"It's on autopilot, isn't it?"

"Autopilot's in the shop." He turned and walked aft.

No, he wouldn't do that. It was on autopilot. Right? No! We were accelerating. I gripped the half wheel. No, we were
diving!
That meant the nose must come up—

Behind me, I heard Sybel shout and Beemon pointed at me, made the okay sign, and walked aft.

I heaved back on the wheel. Things slowed down. That felt better, now I could think. Why were the engines screaming as if in distress? The stall! I had read the books, I knew the danger. When dick-up pilots raise the nose too high, the angle of attack grows so extreme that the wings lose all lift properties and they stall. Then the aircraft drops out of the air. Get the nose down! The books say that surviving pilots fly with a light touch. They don't bend the wheel into a pretzel out of crippling terror. I eased the wheel forward and felt us edge over the top of the arc. Why were we diving? How long does it take for a pee! I yanked the wheel into my stomach. Almost immediately my seat began to shudder. Now I'd done it, totally fucked the laminar flow. So I
shoved the wheel forward again, but nothing happened except that the shudder grew more violent. We were finished. We would fall into a spin from which I could never recover. A seat cushion or a thermos bottle might float ashore somewhere, and a strolling yuppie might toe the jetsam curiously before moving on.

"Give it a little throttle," a calm voice advised. Beemon! He was back, headphones on, and he was flying.

I was gasping for breath. My arms ached. "What did you do that for? Are you crazy!"

"Well, pard, the fact is I don't like your attitude. You come aboard my favorite airplane and tell me some pretty foul news only to go all righteous on me. Hell, you can't even fly my favorite airplane. That was a ham-handed piece of work, all that up and down. You don't have any instincts. You about killed us in the time it takes a real pilot to spray one. You can't pretend to know a goddam thing about my life unless you got about five thousand hours in your book. Besides which you're nothing more than an outsider at the family fracas. So if you don't change that righteous attitude, I ain't inviting you along again."

I understood, sort of. I nodded. "There's another thing you don't seem to know," I said, the outsider.

"I've had enough revelations for one flight."

"Eleanor lives at Bright Bay."

"Eleanor. As in my ex-wife Eleanor?"

"As in Billie's mother." It was my job to tell. I didn't leave it unfinished, Billie.

"Why
there?
Must be thousands of nursing homes in New York."

He seemed smaller now, compressed into his seat. The Ace of Aces seemed to me a vulnerable little boy. I didn't want to pity him; I wanted my loathing untainted. Tears flooded the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes. I wondered if Billie would have felt gratified at that.

"Keene and Osley. Billie learned about the Moxie business. That's the only connection I can think of. Who is the burned man at Bright Bay?"

"Harry. He's been there since the crash in Moxie. The doctors have done all they can for him."

"So you switched identities?
Why?"

"I needed a new one, since I was supposed to have been killed in that crash. His was handy. We discussed it. I loved him, too. Look," he said quietly. "There it is."

It was land, reef tops on which stray mangrove roots had taken hold. One islet was about the size and shape of a bus roof, and five others, smaller, barely out of water, were strung along behind.

"Hen and Chickens Reef. Pretty slick piece of flying if you didn't notice due to all the emotional distractions. Dead on the landfall after six hours over water at night."

"Brilliant," I said.

"Brilliant? That's quite a compliment coming from a flyboy like you. Now we bend east forty degrees." He began the turn. "Did you talk to Eleanor?"

"Yes."

"Was she—? How did she seem to you, Arthur?"

"She seemed—" I stopped. My impulse was to lie, to make her life sound better than it was. Why did I want to protect his feelings? What about my feelings? "Her mind is gone. She thinks Harry Pine is you. At least, I think that's what she thinks."

TWENTY-SEVEN

T
HE DYING DAWN fanned the east with streaks of red, and an island began to form and grow on the horizon. D.B. sat straight in his seat, pulled on his shades, and said, "Dutch Frigate Shoals."

"Do you really mean to bomb it?"

"Sure."

This was it, the drug war. When Cobb told me about it, I hadn't expected to be in the vanguard of the air assault. "Who's down there?" I asked.

"A scumbag name of Jackie. That's the transshipment point for all the dope bound for the East Coast. Jackie's an old fart, about my age. He used to be pals with all the scumbags. Papa Doc, Somoza, the Colonels. He and Klaus Barbie were buddies. No, I got no compunction about blowing Jackie to shit. I just hope he don't keep pets."

We passed low and less than a mile to the north of Dutch Frigate Shoals, crescent-shaped, like a waning moon. The southern arc was overgrown in scrub and mangrove, but all vegetation had been cut away in the north to accommodate human luxury. There was a sun-bleached airstrip, two planes parked on it, a white house with a pink roof from which radio antennae sprouted incongruously. And there was a long whitewashed dock to which a motorboat with a tuna tower was tied. Also crescent-shaped, the house curved around a blue tile swimming pool. The water shimmered invitingly. I saw no movement.

"This is what you do? Bomb villas for the Mafia?"

"Nope, this is my first. But don't get righteous again. You live off your dog. My daughter is the reason we're here."

"How so?"

"Let's say you're my boss, Luigi Boombott, and you employ this asshole to do some flying for you. This pilot's been dependable up till now, but lately his entire holdings are falling apart on
Eyewitness News
. His building gets torched, his employees shoot each other to pieces on a residential street. This guy's trouble, and why bother? Pilots come a dime a dozen. You could get an astronaut, if you wanted to hang around with one. Get
rid
of that asshole. And they would have, too, except I struck this deal with them."

"You blow up the competition and they don't kill you."

"Basically. Except I have to vanish. We won't be able to play squash on Thursdays anymore."

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Maybe I'll retire to St. Pete Beach, play shuffleboard and listen to the bugs get electrocuted. I'm feeling kind of old. You're looking a little aged yourself."

"I feel it."

"Well, it's almost over now. We'll just swing up-sun to confuse the flak gunners. A flight through hot steel."

"You're kidding."

"Yeah, they're probably asleep with their dorks in hand. Jackie samples his wares. Arthur, how did my daughter know I'm alive?"

"I don't know, for sure."

"Do you have an idea?"

"I think Eleanor saw you. There's a photograph on her wall. It shows Billie and Eleanor together in Billie's studio. She could have seen you the day it was taken. Your face is different, a lot of years have passed, but maybe there was something she recognized, your walk, a gesture. I don't know, but I bet that picture was taken about a year ago."

He sat silently, sadly, for a while before he pressed us into our seats with a cowboy bank to the right. I liked it. When we leveled off, D.B. straightened in his seat and produced another Baby Ruth from his shirt pocket. He bit the wrapper off and broke the bar in half. We went in munching.

The pink roof filled the windscreen. "We're operational, Arthur."

The roof vanished beneath our nose like a fantasy. Nothing happened. Was this all some kind of sick joke?

No. Explosions slewed the tail around.

We turned 180 degrees.

Jackie's house had become a hole. Not even a jagged piece of wall stood upright. Pink chunks were strewn all over the island, and others were sinking in the shallow sea. Some parts hadn't even come down yet. Little fires flickered in the hole, and only half of the pool remained in the earth; the rest was flickering down like blue tile confetti. Transfixed, I watched the boat roll onto its side like a bathtub toy, fill and sink in the transparent water.

"We'll strafe some."

"Huh?"

He pointed the black nose at the airplanes parked on a coral revetment covered with swimming pool parts and opened fire. The cannon, or whatever it was, slammed the bottom of my seat, and red baseballs arced out, seemingly in slow motion. The single-engine plane withered and collapsed like a silent-comedy prop. The gun beneath my seat was so powerful its recoil seemed to cause the black bomber to slow noticeably. D.B. turned slightly, aimed at the twin-engine airplane, and after no more than six whacks to my spine, the gas tanks exploded. A wing jinked high in the air, and a flaming ball that might have been an engine rolled into the water and steamed spectacularly.

D.B. stood the B-26 on its wing and we orbited his destruction. It was total. I sat in a puddle of sweat reminding myself that
what I was seeing was heavily actual. It only looked like a war movie in living color. The cockpit reeked acridly of gunpowder.

"Too bad," he said. "That was a nice twin Beech. Did you see it?"

"Briefly."

He put us on a course due west, and in minutes we were flying over deep blue Gulf Stream water. Fly west from the Bahamas and you come upon the coast of Florida.

"You're going back, aren't you?" I asked, but I didn't need an answer.

"Harry and I, we had some good times out of Moxie Field, but you know, Arthur, we should never have survived the war. That was our big mistake. We were good at war, but we never fit in after it ended. We should have flown into a bridge like your old man did."

"How do you know he flew into a bridge? I didn't tell you that.

"They have books, Arthur. I looked it up. He was young."

"Twenty-one." I began to feel cold from the drying sweat and the devastation.

"What do you think we ought to do with these photographs, pard?"

"I don't know. They're yours. I guess this note is mine."

I knew somehow what he was going to do with them even before he slid open the little side window. Summer air entered with a roar. One by one, he pulled them off the instrument panel and fed them to the slipstream. The note alone remained taped in place. I peeled it off and handed it to him. After it was gone, he closed the window.

"Can I try it again?" I asked.

"Try what?"

"Flying."

"Sure. She's all yours."

I found the rudder pedals, then took the wheel in my fingertips.

"That's the way," he said. "The light touch." He sat back and folded his arms across his chest. "Why don't you gain some altitude? We don't need to horse around down here on the deck."

I eased back on the wheel and the horizon slipped below the nose.

"Good. Give it some gas. Like a car going uphill."

I felt around for the throttles on the console between us. D.B. took my hand in his and brought it to the levers. We pushed them forward until the climb grew steady and powerful. I leveled off, deftly, I thought.

"Fine. Here, let me trim her up some. Shock waves from the bombs jacked the tail out of trim."

"Yeah," I agreed. Shock waves from bombs. "Can I try a turn?"

"She's all yours."

I needed help with the first one, but after that I felt comfortable and confident turning. I even flew a big figure eight. I don't know how long we turned and banked around towering cumulus chimneys, but soon I lost all sense of direction in my concentration on the light touch. D.B. tapped the compass and motioned for a turn to the west.

The coast of Florida appeared first as a smudge on the horizon, then materialized, a long yellow beach, white breakers, tall glass condos, and low, rich houses with red-tile roofs. I took her all the way. The houses in the subdivisions grew squarer and poorer with more objects in the yards as we flew inland until houses gave way entirely to agriculture on the banks of Lake Okeechobee.

"There's Moxie," D.B. said, pointing down at a short grassy airstrip. Planes were parked between the runway and endless bean fields. There was a miniature control tower with a limp orange windsock. "I better take her now."

I gave up the controls.

D.B. said, "You're a natural, pard."

"Really?"

"You can always spot 'em."

"So this is it?" I said.

"What more do you want?"

What more did I want? I wanted something. I longed for something.

"I'm not going to hurt anyone, if that's what you mean. Anyone else. But you'll have to make your own way home from here."