Текст книги "Flat Spin"

Автор книги: David Freed

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David Freed
Flat Spin

For Karoline and Jerry, who gave me life

and

Don and Mitch, who gave me wings

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“There are three rules for writing the novel,” the great William Somerset Maugham once said. “Unfortunately no one knows what they are.” With all due respect to Maugham’s literary genius, I believe that one of those rules is to be surrounded by smart, supportive friends and relatives who can both challenge and comfort a humble scribe as he lurches along that darkly self-doubting path that is a first novel.

I am indebted to many such wonderful people. Their myriad contributions appear tangibly on the pages of this book, even if their names do not.

My thanks to El Jefe, author par excellence and former Navy SEAL Chuck Pfarrer, whose courage and inspiration by example, generosity of spirit, and depthless humor over two-plus decades of friendship have hauled me out of more than a few shell craters of my own making.

I would be remiss without thanking my late, brilliant editor, Dale Fetherling, who read an early version of this book and offered constructive comments edged with always tactfully delivered, “What in the hell were you thinking?”-type notations. Ditto the skilled, ever-sage Dick Barnes, another of my mentors and former editors from the Los Angeles Times. Other talented, hawkeyed journalists were not afraid to weigh in critically when assessing my often tortured efforts, and are deserving of praise. Among them: Barbara Baker, Scott Duke Harris, and especially Barb Hallett, whose effusiveness after reading an early draft convinced me that maybe I was on to something. Thanks also to editor Anne Bensson, whose deft assessment of my deficiencies in plot improved the outcome immeasurably.

For their guidance on matters technical, I would like to express my appreciation to two longtime friends, Sergeant Arthur Ames, PhD (Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department, retired); and Captain Greg Meyer (Los Angeles Police Department, retired). Thanks also to Terry Harris, the most competent, certified flight instructor from whom any pilot could ever hope to learn – even if she does like working the rudder pedals with her bare feet.

Jill Marr of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency is as loyal an ally and effective an agent as there is and I am fortunate to be represented by her, as I am to be published by Judith and Martin Shepard, who took a chance on me when others were unwilling. I’d also like to give a well-deserved shout-out to artist Lon Kirschner for his excellent book jacket design, and to Joslyn Pine for her meticulous copyediting.

To Doug Barr; Norm Draper; Steve Chawkins and Jane Hulse; Dennis Franklin; Howard Hilt; John Jarrett; Jim and Bev Kreyger; John and Cathy Maier; Jay Pfeiffer; Maggie Roiphe; Carl and Helen Schaukowitch; Bob and Edna Sizlo; Bruce Smith; Ty Smith; Scott Weiner; Steve Wick; the many members of the Bates, Freed and Kash clans; my amazingly talented sister, Lisa Pavelka, and her industrious brood; my warrior surrogate sons, Mathew Best and Mike Eggli; and my own awe-inspiring children, Rachel Ann and Army National Guard 1^st Lt. Robert M. Freed, I am blessed by your presence and made whole by your laughter.

To my beautiful partner, Dr. Elizabeth Bates Freed, who, on more evenings than I care to admit, prodded me to “finish the damn book” after bringing me red wine and insisting that I read to her what I’d struggled to write that day, when I would’ve been only too happy to pursue other, less trying avocations (like, say, alligator wrestling), I remain forever yours.

Finally, to Aurelia Valley, a transformational high school English teacher from suburban Denver who struggled mightily to instill in her distracted, working-class students a love of prose and recognized some potential in one of them, encouraging him to explore the writer’s life, I offer my belated gratitude. I only wish I could have thanked you before you were gone.

EPIGRAPH

Live thy life as it were spoil and pluck the joys that fly.

– Martial, Epigrams, AD 86

PROLOGUE

Arlo Echevarria opened his door in flip-flops and a foul mood.

“You got the wrong address, dude. I didn’t order any pizza.”

The Domino’s guy stood there mutely on the front step, cap pulled low, face obscured in the dim buttery glow of Echevarria’s jelly jar porch light, cradling a pizza hot pouch in both arms like it was baby Jesus.

“What are you, deaf? I said you got the wrong address.” Echevarria went to push the door closed, but the Domino’s guy blocked it with his foot, drawing a blue steel semi-auto from the red vinyl pouch.

Echevarria yelled, “Wait a—”

Boom.

The .40-caliber hollow point splintered rib bone and mushroomed through Echevarria’s left lung, blowing a kebab-size chunk of flesh out his back and dropping him like 164 pounds of wet laundry.

Boom. Boom.

Slugs two and three made pulp of Echevarria’s liver and spleen. The coroner would deem all three wounds potentially fatal. Any cynical street cop, which is to say, any cop, would deem them all sweet, sweet shooting: three rounds, center mass, square in the 10-ring.

The Domino’s guy tucked the pistol up under his shirt, then calmly gathered his spent brass, depositing each casing in the hot pouch before disappearing into a pleasantly temperate San Fernando Valley evening. The tang of cordite lingered on the breeze with the perfume of night-blooming jasmine.

A rookie and her field training officer, both working the night watch out of Devonshire Division, punched the at-scene button on their mobile data terminal six minutes after catching the “shots fired” call. They found Echevarria lying facedown, unresponsive, inside the entryway, blocking his partially opened front door. Hoping to save a life and impress her FTO, the rookie bulled open the door, sliding the body and smearing blood across the oak parquet floor, thus disturbing both a homicide scene and the on-call LAPD homicide detectives who would arrive later along with more than a dozen other uniformed patrol officers, all of whom raced to the scene to get their nightly dose of gore, even though the need for lights and sirens had long since passed, along with the decedent.

Several of Echevarria’s neighbors told police they’d heard him yell, heard what sounded like firecrackers, and glimpsed the killer through their windows. They described him as five-foot-five and 180 pounds. Or five-foot-ten and 160 pounds. Or well over six feet, on the thin side, with a long loping stride – kind of like Gomer Pyle, who used to be on TV back when TV was worth watching. One witness said the shooter was a Latino in his late twenties. Another said he was Arabic in his thirties. Two witnesses said the killer was a Caucasian with a West Hollywood tan. Still others described him as “Jewish-looking” or “the Italian-type” or even Indian – the tomahawk-chop-Geronimo kind, not the kind that worship cows and wrap goddamn bed sheets around their heads. Whoever murdered Echevarria was swarthy and clean-shaven. The witnesses all agreed on that. They also agreed on the getaway car: nobody saw one.

On Echevarria’s coffee table, investigators snapped digital photographs of an empty pint bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey, three recently emptied takeout cartons from a Chinese restaurant on nearby Sherman Way, and a paperback copy of Cover-up: The Secret of UFO Technology Transfer, detailing American industry’s covertly profitable relationship with space aliens. Wedged in the waistband of Echevarria’s plaid flannel Costco lounge pants, under his bloodsoaked “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for the Other Guy” T-shirt, they found a nine-millimeter Beretta, Model 92FS, standard U.S. military issue. The pistol held a full fifteen-round clip. The firing chamber was empty.

“Like tits on a nun,” one particularly salty patrolman observed.

The paid funeral notice that ran in the Los Angeles Times six days later said Echevarria had “set off to see the Lord to receive the angel wings he’d deserved for so long.” It said he was born in Oakland in 1961, that he’d earned a business degree from San Francisco State, and that he’d built a successful international marketing company in the Bay Area before taking early retirement and relocating south to LA, there to enjoy the balmier weather, Dodger baseball, and serving his favorite charities, none of which were specified. Survivors included his “devoted wife and soul mate,” Savannah, and a twenty-year-old son from a previous marriage who worshipped him “for the exceptionally caring parent that he was.” No mention was made of Echevarria having been gunned down and gone off to see the Lord in flip-flops and Costco lounge pants. His passing, it was noted, had been “sudden and unexpected.”

Of course, anyone who knew the real Arlo Echevarria knew the obit was mostly all bullshit.

Especially the unexpected part.

ONE

We were turning final when the engine died.

My student was a frosted blonde divorcee named Charise MacInerny with all of six hours in her private pilot’s logbook, who’d decided that learning to fly was an excellent way to show her plastic surgeon ex-husband that she was still every bit as alluring as that gold-digging, cheerleader-turned-pharmaceutical sales rep slut he’d dumped her for. Charise swiveled her ridiculously blue Malibu Barbie eyes toward me, wide with horror, and said, “Fucking do something!”

My plane, the Ruptured Duck, was 300 feet above ground level, half a mile from the runway and dropping faster than the Dow in October. Charise had extended too far downwind in the pattern and surrendered too much altitude, while I’d been stupidly mesmerized by the postcard pretty coastline and shimmering sea of diamonds beyond, wondering how the hell I was ever going to pay for the 2,000-hour overhaul due on the Duck’s power plant.

“I have the airplane,” I said in my nothing-rattles-me-I’m-a-certified-flight-instructor voice.

I grabbed the copilot’s yoke with my right hand, yanked the carburetor heat control with my left, and brought the nose up to sixty-five knots indicated – best glide speed in a Cessna 172. Then I reached down between the seats, keeping my eyes outside the cockpit to maintain spatial orientation, and groped the fuel selector valve: it was turned to both tanks. The gas gauges registered more than half-full – plenty of go juice – yet the engine was deader than a resolution the morning after New Year’s Day.

Charise was hyperventilating. “I don’t want to die, Logan!” she yelled into the boom microphone of her headset. “Please don’t let me die! Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus oh mother of JESUS!”

“Chill out, Charise. It’ll be OK.”

Or, quite possibly, not.

Ahead of us was a BMW dealership, a lumberyard, and a parking lot jammed with yellow school buses – not the most forgiving locales to attempt what we aviators euphemistically like to call an “off-airport” landing, and what TV anchors refer to as a “lead story.” In a flash, I envisioned myself at the top of the evening news: An incompetent flight instructor and his comely student died today when their single-engine airplane… If the crash didn’t kill me, the humiliation of my own inattention would.

I glanced down at the mixture control, which is what I should’ve done to begin with. The red knob was pulled all the way out. Instead of easing back on the black throttle control knob to reduce airspeed, as she was supposed to have done, Charise had inexplicably pulled the fuel-air mixture, effectively starving the engine of gas. I shoved the red knob forward hard enough that I thought for a second the metal shaft might snap in half, retarded the throttle control to a quarter-inch, then reached across Charise’s supple thighs with my left hand and cranked the ignition key.

The little four-cylinder Lycoming thrummed to life with a death-cheating growl.

I eased back on the yoke, rolled in some trim and dumped full flaps as I kicked the rudder and banked the Duck hard left, keeping one eye on the airspeed while clearing the roof of the Rancho Bonita Athletic Club by less than ten feet. We turned final with an eight-knot crosswind and touched down on Runway One-Seven left like a butterfly with sore feet. If the theater critics in the tower were watching, they never said a word.

“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, where are you parking today?” the controller asked pleasantly as we rolled out.

“Charlie Lima’s going to Premier Aviation.”

My answer was met with scratchy static through the headphones. After a few seconds, the controller asked again: Where were we parking? He obviously hadn’t heard my response to his question. The Duck’s ancient, unpredictable communication radios were acting up yet again. I smacked the audio panel where I always smacked it with the heel of my hand, keyed the mic button on my control yoke and said, “Charlie Lima to Premier Aviation.”

“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, roger. Exit on Echo, cross One-Seven left and contact ground, point six.”

I repeated his instructions back to him, tapped the toe brakes and jockeyed the plane off the active runway. After we crossed Runway One-Seven left, I stopped short of the parallel taxiway and dialed in 121.6 on my number-two radio.

“Rancho Bonita ground, Cessna four Charlie Lima, clear of One-Seven left at Echo, taxi Premier.”

“Cessna four Charlie Lima, taxi as requested.”

Charise was gulping air like a gaffed tuna. Her eyeliner had run with her tears, painting a thin black stripe down each cheek. The effect reminded me of one of those annoying street mimes always trying to feel their way out of imaginary boxes.

“I’ve never been that close to death,” Charise said, “and I don’t want to ever be again!”

“Well, Charise, I believe it was Cicero who once said, ‘Anybody is liable to err, but only a fool persists in error.’ We learn from our mistakes, make sure we don’t repeat them.”

She was looking at me with her mouth open. “You’re saying it was my fault?”

“You pulled the mixture control, Charise. The engine doesn’t like that. The engine will take its ball and go home.”

“Well, maybe I did or maybe I didn’t, but if I’m not mistaken, Logan, I believe you’re the flight instructor. You should’ve instructed me. I mean, my God, what am I paying you all this money for?”

She wiped the tears from her cheeks, smearing the black streaks and transferring eyeliner onto her fingers, then noticed her fingertips and panicked anew. She reached into the backseat, retrieved a gold compact from an alligator skin clutch and went to work on her face with a silk handkerchief, attacking her smudged cheeks like a monkey scratching itself. She was wearing wedge sandals with four-inch cork heels and $350 blue jeans that looked like they were sprayed on. Her low-cut knit top was cream-colored and two sizes too small, accentuating a set of baby feeders that either her ex, Dr. Nip/Tuck, designed or the Lord did when Mrs. Lord wasn’t looking. Her lips were alluring little bee-stung pillows. The skin under her chin was pulled Miss Teen USA tight. Whatever Charise MacInerny may have looked like before the advent of modern cosmetic surgery, she was definitely slammin’ now.

“To tell you the truth,” she said, angling her little mirror this way and that, making sure she’d scrubbed off all the errant eyeliner, “I’m not sure this whole flying thing is right for me. I mean, you actually have to remember things.”

There was a time when I would have told her she was wrong, that nearly anybody can learn to be a pilot. And even though I knew full-well after our first flight lesson that Charise MacInerny’s near-total lack of hand-eye coordination, not to mention smarts, placed her solidly outside the “nearly anybody” envelope, we would have gone up again and again. At forty-eight dollars an hour, another hundred an hour for the plane rental, plus fuel, I would have taken her for all she was worth. And, after she’d logged about fifty hours and had yet to solo because the idea of having to actually take off and land a small airplane all by herself still freaked the living Botox out of her, I would have politely suggested that perhaps she was better suited to other, more earthbound recreational pursuits.

But that was the old me. Before I regrew that thing priests call a conscience and the Buddha calls enlightenment. Don’t get me wrong. The new me still needed the money as much as the old me. Even more so. There comes a point in life, however, when you realize it’s not always about the bucks. It’s only about the bucks most of the time.

“Well, Charise, there are always sailing lessons.”

“Sailing lessons? Are you kidding? I get seasick in the Jacuzzi.”

She touched up her lips with one of those liquid lipstick pen things, making sure the coverage was perfect with a dab of her manicured pinkie finger, then shed her headset and brushed out her gilded cougar mane.

I steered the Duck into an open tie-down spot along taxiway Bravo in front of Premier Aviation, one of two fixed-base operations on the field catering to mostly rich, corporate flyers. I turned off the avionics master switch and leaned the mixture until the engine sputtered and quit. After we got out of the airplane, I braced the nose wheel with a pair of black rubber chocks sitting on the tarmac.

Charise handed me her logbook without a word. I wrote down the date, the aircraft type, the plane’s tail number, the total time we’d flown that day (1.2 hours), the amount of instruction she’d received (1.2 hours), and the number of touch-and-go’s we’d made (7). In the “Remarks and Endorsements” section I nearly wrote, “Came perilously close to buying the farm,” but instead put, “Practiced emergency procedures.”Then, for grins, I jotted, “We’ll always have Paris.”

The old me might’ve suggested we go grab an umbrella drink on the beach after sharing so harrowing a near-death experience. Maybe we would’ve ended up at her place or, God forbid, mine. I was no Brad Pitt, but I was no Meatloaf, either. I still owned my own hair and all my teeth. The plumbing still worked just fine, thank you very much. I was a solid six-one and 190 pounds, a mere five pounds more than I’d been back in the day, snagging footballs for the Air Force Academy and studying Sartre, a rare Humanities major on a campus thick with geeky aeronautical engineers. But, like I said, that was the old me. I signed the entry and handed her back her logbook.

“Well,” I said, “at least it wasn’t boring.”

“You can say that again.”

“At least it wasn’t boring.”

She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. It beat a firm handshake any day of the week.

“Take care of yourself, Logan.”

“Don’t go changing, Charise.”

I watched her glide into the parking lot where a tall, tanned man in his late thirties was leaning against a silver Lamborghini Diablo convertible, smoking a cigarette. He wore a dark-colored suit with a crisp white dress shirt and a rep necktie striped blue and gold, cinched way too tight. His dark hair matched the gloss of his wingtips. His eyes were cloaked behind a pair of cool guy Ray-Bans.

A personal injury attorney. Had to be. There has to be more puke-inducing ways to earn a living than chasing ambulances, I thought to myself, though none came readily to mind.

He flicked away his smoke as Charise approached. She showed him what I’d written in her logbook. He nodded like he almost cared, then flashed me a stony smile as he held open the passenger door for her on his $200,000 road rocket. After she was comfortably settled in, he gingerly closed the door, then hustled around to the driver’s side, glancing my way to make sure I was still watching. He hopped in, fired up the Lamborghini and roared out onto Mayfield Place, grinding the transmission as he upshifted. Charise never looked back.

Oh, well.

I took my time tying down the Duck. Over at the commercial terminal, a turboprop taxied in and disgorged its passengers. High overhead, a turkey vulture wheeled unsteadily in the morning air. Two black SUVs drove onto the ramp and parked beside a Dassault Falcon 7X. A large, middle-age woman in sweat pants, who looked very much like Rancho Bonita’s most famous resident, the star of a wildly successful TV talk show and publishing empire, stepped out of the lead SUV. She chatted up one of her personal assistants while others transferred a queen’s procession of designer luggage onto the jet.

I wanted to yell, “You go, girl!” but somehow restrained myself.

Had I been able to afford my own personal assistant, I might’ve checked in to see what was next on my busy schedule. Truth was, I needed no reminder to know that I had nothing going the rest of the day. Or the rest of the week, for that matter. I was fresh out of students, with no immediate prospect of any new ones. If I were a religious man, which I’m not, at least not in a conventional sense, I would’ve prayed that my monthly retirement check from Uncle Sugar was waiting in my mailbox when I got home. A breakfast burrito loomed large on my radar, then maybe a nap.

The last thing on my mind was murder.