The Burning Day (6 page)

Suddenly Johnny Shakes smiled. “Oh, well,” he mused aloud. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll actually win something, this time.”

Chapter 9

I wondered what Mary Wiggins had been up to in that hotel room. I sat in my car and watched her walk down the stairs and get into her car and leave. I waited five minutes, just in case she forgot something and had to come back.

A few minutes later I walked up the stairs and stopped in front of the door to her room. I keep some lock picks on my person, and I am rather skilled in their use. In no time at all I was inside Mary Wiggin’s room.

I looked around. She was coming back, all right. An open suitcase full of clothes was on the bed, and I could see a makeup bag and other toilet articles in the bathroom, since the door had been left open and the light on. I went over to the table by the telephone. There, on the stationary pad, was written, “Bessemer Airport, 9:00 p.m.” Bessemer was a suburb that lay just to the southwest of Birmingham. If there was an airfield out there, I didn’t know where it was. Like everyone else, if I had occasion to fly, I used the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport.

Whatever was going on, Mary Wiggins had plenty of time to keep her date at the airport. Assuming the note referred to nine that night, she had seven hours, since it was only a little after two as I sat perusing the contents of her room. There wasn’t a lot other than the clothes and the note. Mary either traveled light, or wasn’t planning on staying long. Either way, there was no indication of a male presence in the room. The bed hadn’t even been slept in. I let myself out, and went back down to my car.

The entire affair seemed strange. Mary wasn’t acting like someone with something to hide, although I couldn’t for the life of me figure out just what it was that she was doing. An airport might be the meeting place for the other man, although I could think of more discreet locations. Maybe he was a pilot or an airplane mechanic, out there at this small airport—if he even existed. Maybe Mary wasn’t cheating on Henry, but she had piqued my interest. She certainly wasn’t acting like someone with a husband, or someone who gave a damn.

I decided to find the Bessemer airport, and be there when Mary showed up at nine o’clock that evening. Maybe then I would have something to report back to the broken-hearted Henry. Something told me that I was in for an unexpected surprise. I could feel a tension growing that confused me, since I had too few details to really piece anything together. But when men and women spend their waking hours skulking around plotting clandestine meetings, there are usually dark deeds in the offing.
 

I had the feeling that I was going to learn a lot about Mary Wiggins’ secret life when night fell over Bessemer.
 

~

I drove out to Bessemer and took a side road off Highway 459 that took me to Morgan Road, where there were signs that directed me to Bessemer Regional Airport. The low-flying planes that roared overhead confirmed I was in the right area. The airfield sat at the end of its own access road. It was a tidy, medium-sized airport with a white control tower and an orange windsock on a pole, and two neat lines of airplanes awaiting their owners. I parked in a lot marked for customers, and walked over to the small concourse and went inside. A couple of pleasant-looking women in blue blazers greeted me from behind a desk.

“Can I help you, sir?” One woman asked as I approached.

“I hope so. I think a friend of mine took the wrong flight trying to get into Birmingham. I think he might be flying into Bessemer. Could you tell me what flights are coming in, say, around 8:45 tonight?”

“Sure. Just a moment.” She rattled off a quick staccato burst of typing on her computer keyboard, and turned her monitor around so that I could see the schedule she’d brought up. There were just three flights coming in from 8:30 to 8:45 p.m. Not exactly ATL, but that made it easier.

“Where’s your friend flying in from?” The other girl asked. I smiled without taking my eyes off the screen and pretended to be absorbed in thought while I composed a likely story. One of the flights on the screen was a puddle-jumper, coming in from ATL. One was a personal flight, due in from Memphis, and the third was a charter jet, point of origin Chicago.

“I think my friend’s probably on that Atlanta flight,” I said finally. “Could I get a printout of that?”

Without any questions, the first young lady printed out the screen for me, as I’d hoped. I thanked them and walked casually outside while looking it over. Whoever Mary was planning on meeting could be on any of those flights, of course. Maybe he wasn’t on any of them, though. It was equally possible that she was meeting someone in Bessemer, and they had chosen the smaller airport to leave from, just in case someone like me was snooping around at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International. Either way, I should see Mary, coming or going.

I had plenty of time until 9:00 p.m., so I drove to downtown Bessemer, where I found a restaurant called the Bright Star. It was a nice, upscale place with a horseshoe-shaped bar and a Turn of the Century look, back from when that phrase still meant the turn of the Nineteenth Century into the Twentieth. Time flies. I sat down in a rear booth and had myself some Red Snapper and salad, both of which were excellent. While I sat and savored the great food, my mind kept going back to Mary Wiggins, and her appointment with whatever fate she had planned for herself.

I loitered around Bessemer for a while, visited the public library, read the newspapers, had some coffee, and walked around a local mall. Then I sat in my car and thought some more.
 

Finally, eight o’clock rolled around, and I headed back out to the airport, just in case Mary had decided to show up early. She hadn’t.

I settled into a seat in the main hallway and watched a couple of planes come in and taxi up to the terminal. It wasn’t a very busy airport, only a few smaller passenger jets and lots of private traffic. I watched a couple of Lear jets come in and disgorge several squads of well-to-do business types, but they already had women on their arms when they arrived; none of them were Mary’s man.

I glanced at my watch. Eight-thirty. I started looking around for Mary, herself. It was possible, though it didn’t seem likely, that she planned to meet her paramour outside of the main building, at a hanger perhaps. I mulled this over and went back to my car. From my vantage point in the parking lot, I could watch Mary as she arrived, and I could follow her and her lover as they left—unless, of course, their plan was to leave by plane, in which case I wouldn’t be able to follow her, anyway. But I could still get the plane’s FAA number if it happened that way. So I waited outside.

Around 8:55 I started to get a little concerned. Mary was running a little late, if she was going to meet someone she wanted to run away with and live happily ever after. I had seen plenty of people do just that, and they were always in a breathless hurry.
 

After 9:15, I was fairly sure Mary wasn’t coming, or at least, whatever else was going on, she was in no breathless hurry. What’s more, no one arrived via plane that looked the least bit interesting, either.

A couple of things could have happened, I reasoned. Either she had received another call from whoever had called her previously, with a change of plans, or someone had gotten cold feet. Based on what Henry Wiggins had told me, I was betting on the change of plans scenario. I decided to go back to Mary’s hotel and see what she was up to there.

~

When I arrived back at Mary’s hotel, I wasn’t surprised to find that she was gone. The desk clerk told me that she had returned around seven, and checked out soon after. I asked him if she seemed upset or in a hurry, and he told me he didn’t know. Since he was just out of adolescence and Mary was a beautiful woman, I felt sure he had noted her mood. But twenty dollars failed to jog his memory.
 

So, with the sinking feeling that I had wasted most of the afternoon, I left and drove back up Birmingham’s spine to Mountainbrook. I drove past the Wiggins abode, where Henry’s BMW roadster sat, lonely and dejected in the two-car garage, just like Henry himself must look, lying all alone in the king-sized bed which I was certain he had bought and placed upstairs for he and his beautiful bride.

So Mary had failed to keep her appointment at the airport. Clearly, it wasn’t some sudden pang of remorse. She hadn’t fled back to Henry, or called him to come to her. He was at home with the lights out, and her car was not in the driveway or the garage.

There had to have been a change of plans, I thought . . . unless.

I turned around and went back to Bessemer. I drove to the mall where I had killed time earlier and looked around until I found a magazine stand. I walked up to the old fellow behind the counter and nodded. He smiled pleasantly enough, and returned my nod.

“How can I help you?”

“Do you have any maps of the area?” I asked him.

“Map? You mean of Bessemer?” He snorted. “What do you need a map of this town for?”

“Well, I was looking for something, and I come from just up the road, you know, but I think I must have made a mistake.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Someone told me they had a place near the airport. I drove around out there and I couldn’t seem to find it. I was wondering . . .”

“If there was another airport here in Bessemer?”

“Yeah. I know that it’s a funny question.”

“Not at all. You’re probably too young to remember it, but there
is
another airport. I should say, there
was
another. It’s been closed since just after the first Gulf War, but I think the military still uses it to train helicopter pilots. I’ve seen Army choppers buzzing around out there. There’s no civilian air traffic, though. Not any that I know about, anyway, though anything’s possible, I guess.”

“Well, perhaps that’s where they were talking about.”

He looked at me again, and this time the look took in the color of my skin, which told me a few things. He seemed to decide that a friend of mine might possibly live out there, because he nodded and said, “Yep. I bet that’s it. That old airport, it’s out in the boonies.” By the boonies I figured he meant a mostly black part of town, somewhere that he might feel uncomfortable going.

“Can you tell me how to get there?”

“I’d be glad to. You might want to wait to go, though, mister. If I was you, I’d go tomorrow morning. It’s after dark now, and that’s a rough side of town, out there.”

He gave me directions and I thanked him. I felt a tingling, like I had happened onto a door in a dark room. Mary hadn’t changed her plans or missed her appointment. She’d been right on time. I was simply in the wrong place. What business she could have in the night, at an abandoned airstrip on the wrong side of town was intriguing, to say the least. Mary Wiggins was shaping up to be one very interesting woman, and I hadn’t even met her yet.

~

I was out on the end of town in no time, where the road flattened out and became nothing but a gray strip, flanked by power lines and neglected shoulders, a textbook example of dying urban sprawl and civic neglect. As I hit the tail end of the streets, the city fell away, and the urban aftermath was a mixed pedigree of buildings and lots of sprawl that was about half-urban, half-rural.
 

There were small scattered forests of trees and thick, wild gouts of vegetation that had flourished and overshadowed the boarded-up houses and the rusting cars that sat in mute ruin in abandoned lots. People loitered in doorways and on street corners, and many stared openly through the windshield at me. There was a hostile vibe. I was a stranger, which to most of them put me squarely in the “probably a cop” category.

There were young men in gang colors on most corners, and sometimes young women hanging out with them. Whether they were selling something, looking to buy something, or just marking their turf, they were clearly ready for trouble. They didn’t dress like Don Ganato, or talk like Longshot Lonnie O’Malley, but they represented the same enterprise. Those young men and women were the present and the future of Organized Crime. They were the merger between the old time gangsters and street hoodlums of the American past. The dapper Don and his Irish counterpart were old school. This was the wave of the future.

Now, it was the young minority kids who openly professed themselves ‘gangstas,’ the self-styled drug lords and vice kingpins of the new millennium. For them there was no college but prison and no code but one of macho violence and drug deal protocol. They kill each other on a daily basis and keep the status quo simple, brutal and depressingly obvious. They long to make every city into the projects from which they sprang, bettering nothing. They long to make every person into a user or a seller, because they do not know that man can be bettered. They want to make every block in every city into gang turf, over which they have absolute rule. Their name is legion, and they never tire.
 

I avoided their malevolent gaze as much as possible, and made my way past that last human outpost on the road to nowhere, and came to a place where the pavement became blacktop. It was the end of the city, all right. I was looking back in the direction of Birmingham now, and its lights made a faint glow in the distance.
 

I drove slowly over the bumpy road until I finally reached a sign, barely legible but still standing on the shoulder. “Bessemer Municipal Airport” the faded legend informed me, and proclaimed that there were “Regional Flights to all Points.” I continued my creeping progress along the road, and I drove out to the old airfield. Although it was just outside the Bessemer city limits, you might never know it was there. The airfield itself was down an overgrown road, one that had long ago lost its paved surface; it forlornly snaked away into the undergrowth. The recent rains had left shallow streams here and there, small rivers that crossed the road at low points and a couple of times made the rear tires of my car spin in an uncertain manner.