Текст книги "Flat Spin"

Автор книги: David Freed

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FIVE

I lifted off from El Molino that afternoon with a bellyful of halibut and $25,000 in my pocket, drawn on Gilbert Carlisle’s personal account at the Bank of Bimini. The money had come with one stipulation: Savannah was never to know that her father had paid me to talk to the police. I was to tell her only that I’d had a change of heart and decided to cooperate with the authorities because I realized it was the right thing to do. Or some such nonsense. Carlisle was so confident I would take his money that he’d had the cashier’s check drafted the day before we met, according to the bank time stamp on the stub.

If the LAPD knew that I’d been paid to enlighten them about what Echevarria once did for a living, they would likely dismiss my information as less than objective. Carlisle didn’t want that. Neither did I. Much as I hated to admit it, I was becoming increasingly curious about who might’ve murdered my former co-worker and romantic rival.

The list of suspects would’ve easily stretched around the block. War criminals. Cocaine kingpins. Serial killers. Traitors. Terrorists. The ones who got away. Survivors of the ones who didn’t. All would’ve had good reason to kill Echevarria, or any other former go-to guy. The problem was, they would’ve had to know his real name to find him. We always used aliases in the field for that very reason. My gut told me that Echevarria’s death had nothing to do with his having once worked for the government. But I wasn’t being paid to play Sam Spade. I was being paid to make my ex-wife and her father happy. For $25,000, considering the delicate state of my personal finances, I’d make sure both were ecstatic.

The headwinds I fought flying north to see Carlisle shifted south and turned to quartering headwinds by the time I flew home. Typical. I climbed to 7,500 feet, then 9,500, then 11,500. There was little difference in the quality of the ride, nor in my ground speed. The air was churned up like white water on a river. I struggled to keep the Duck level and on course. By the time I landed back in Rancho Bonita, my arms felt heavy. The fingers of my left hand ached where I had gripped the yoke. I decided that whoever it was at Cessna who ruled out wing-leveling autopilots as standard equipment on 172’s should come back in the next life as a fruit fly. Not a very Zen-like thought, I realized, but if the Buddha held a pilot’s certificate, I knew he’d feel the same way.

I tied down the airplane, got in my truck and hit the freeway, driving south toward Rancho Bonita. Twelve minutes later, I was sitting in the Bank of America parking lot downtown, staring at a $25,000 cashier’s check and wrestling anew with my conscience, wondering what I was doing even thinking about depositing Carlisle’s bribe money. My phone rang. It was Savannah.

“I wanted to apologize for my behavior yesterday,” she said. “Showing up unannounced. Some of the things I said. I guess I just wasn’t thinking.”

“Heat of the moment.”

“Still no excuse.”

I was quiet.

“Well, anyway,” Savannah said, “I just wanted to say how sorry I was, barging into your life like that. I won’t ever bother you again.”

“Is that a promise or a threat?”

“It’s whatever you want it to be.”

I pondered the check in my hand, tapping it against the steering wheel.

“I always thought we had something, Logan,” Savannah said, “but after awhile, you were never around to appreciate it. You were always gone. You don’t water a flower, it dies. You stopped being there for me. Arlo was.”

“I stopped being there because Arlo sent me off on business assignments while he took care of business at home. You ever stop to think about that?”

She was quiet.

“Did you love him?”

“I suppose you could call it that.”

“Like you loved me?”

There was silence for what seemed like a long time. Then she said, “No. Not like I loved you.”

A sea green Buick Skylark pulled in beside me. An ancient old man wearing one of those white Navy “skipper” caps with gold scrambled eggs on the bill, the kind of hats sailboat owners put on when they want to look especially goofy, got out and hobbled around to open the door for his passenger, an old lady wearing an identical hat. She kissed his hand while he tenderly helped her out of the Buick. Who says there’s no such thing as eternal domestic bliss? I couldn’t help it; I sighed like a schoolgirl.

“You’ll be watching movies on Lifetime before long,” I mumbled to myself.

“Did you say something?”

“Yeah. I said I need my head examined.”

Any man with an ounce of self-respect would’ve ripped the check in half, hung up, and moved on with his life. But no man with an ounce of brains would’ve ever surrendered Savannah Carlisle as easily as I did. Maybe this was a way back to her. Even if it wasn’t, it was still twenty-five large.

“I need the number for the detectives handling the case,” I said.

“You’ll call them? Really?”

“You said you wanted me to talk to them. I’ll talk to them.”

“Oh, Logan, that’s fantastic!” The delight in Savannah’s voice was genuine. “What made you change your mind?”

I watched Methuselah and his bride hobble arm-in-arm into the bank. She was leaning her head on his shoulder.

“Just give me the number,” I said, “before I start heaving.”

* * *

The lead investigator in Echevarria’s homicide answered his phone at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire station on the first ring.

“Detective Czarnek.”

Gravelly baritone. Smoker. He sounded world-weary and badass. Somebody in the background was singing “Girl Watcher” by the O’Kaysions. I could hear others laughing. I identified myself and explained why I was calling. It took him a second to connect the dots.

“Which case was it again?”

“Arlo Echevarria.”

“Echevarria, Echevarria.” I heard a drawer slide open and the sound of files being gone through. “Echevarria, Echevarria. Oh, yeah, right. Echevarria, Arlo. And you say you’re who again?”

I repeated my name. I told him that I was calling from Rancho Bonita, but that I’d be happy to drive to Los Angeles to meet with him at his convenience, to provide whatever information I could.

“You say you’re up in Rancho Bonita?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Nice town if you can afford it.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, I tell you what, Mr. – what’d you say your name was again?”

“Logan.”

“Mr. Logan, I wouldn’t mind taking a little drive up the coast and come see you. Give my partner and me an excuse to breathe some air we can’t actually see for a change.”

“OK by me.”

“There’s a little Mexican place up your way I’ve eaten at– El Grande’s,” Czarnek said. “Best tortas this side of Ensenada. I believe the city of Los Angeles can afford to spring for lunch. What’s tomorrow looking like for you?”

El Grande Taqueria is an anonymous, green and white taco shack on the working class, lower east side of Rancho Bonita, an eatery with undersized, overpriced servings and no atmosphere– unless you count the beer trucks and lowriders rumbling past outside. You order your food at one window and pick it up at another. Hardly haute cuisine, but more than a few aficionados swear by the place. Half a dozen Mexican joints on Verde Street offered tastier chow in larger portions and at lower prices. But if the good taxpayers of Los Angeles were willing to spring for lunch, who was I to play enchilada snob? Two free meals in two days. An underemployed flight instructor could get used to that kind of treatment.

“Tomorrow’s good,” I said.

“Eleven o’clock?”

“A little early for Mexican food, isn’t it?”

“We like to start early around here,” Czarnek said. “Beat the traffic that way.”

Whoever it was who was singing in the background was now joined by what sounded like at least two other male voices. The tune had changed. It was now Paul Anka’s “(You’re) Having My Baby.” A man singing about the wonderment of pregnancy. Listening to it felt like the lyrical equivalent of being water-boarded. I told Czarnek I’d see him at eleven and signed off.

After that, I went inside the bank and deposited Gil Carlisle’s check.

* * *

LAPD homicide Detective Keith Czarnek was not what I imagined over the phone. He was about fifty and built like a pear. Pink cheeks. Pudgy hands. Receding blonde hair and a high forehead that was beaded with sweat and precancerous skin lesions. Except for the faded Marine Corps eagle, globe and anchor tattooed on his left forearm, and the requisite push-broom cop moustache insulating his top lip, there was nothing badass about the man.

“I’d mainline this stuff if I could,” Czarnek said as he spooned salsa onto his torta.

“Face it,” said Czarnek’s partner, Detective John Windhauser, working on his fourth fish taco, “you’re a beaner food addict.”

We were sitting on molded white plastic chairs, around a molded plastic table. El Grande Taqueria was mobbed as usual. It was approximately 140 degrees in the shade of the restaurant’s corrugated plastic awning. I picked at a cheese enchilada that had coagulated on my plate into a formless red and yellow blob.

“So,” Windhauser said, low enough so the diners around us couldn’t hear, “Mr. Echevarria was shot almost a month ago. How is it you decide to contact us only now?”

“I only heard about it a few days ago,” I said.

Windhauser nodded a little too empathetically. He had a snowy crew cut and a cleft chin, and his face looked like Verdun, pockmarked and ravaged by the acne he’d evidently suffered as a teenager some five decades earlier. He wore pleated Dockers khakis and soft-soled black walking shoes and, like Czarnek, a short-sleeved, light-blue dress shirt. Windhauser’s tie was red paisley. Czarnek’s tie was one of those brown knit jobs with a square bottom, the kind popular back when Eisenhower was in the White House. Czarnek’s gold tie bar said “187”—California penal code for homicide. Windhauser’s tie tack was a set of tiny dangling handcuffs. Both detectives had removed their winter-weight wool sport coats and slung them over their seat backs as a concession to the merciless autumn heat. Other diners tried not to stare at the badge and Kimber .45-caliber pistol clipped to each of their belts.

“You can’t find food like this in LA. This stuff ’s authentico,” Czarnek said, mopping up chili sauce with a piece of tortilla. Drops of sweat fell from his face onto his plate.

“Got some salsa on your tie,” Windhauser advised his partner.

“Look who’s talking.”

Windhauser looked down and held up his own tie for closer inspection. “Fuck.” He dipped his paper napkin in his water glass and scrubbed the stain clean.

Neither cop seemed particularly eager to discuss Echevarria’s murder. I didn’t push it. We ate and talked mostly about flying. Windhauser boasted of having served two tours as a door gunner on a Huey in Vietnam. Czarnek confided that he got airsick riding the flying Dumbos at Disneyland. Their approach was straight from the Big Book of Standard Police Interrogation Techniques. Take your time. Build rapport. Put the interview subject at ease before you start jamming him. They smiled openly, their torsos and feet pointed toward me. Their rate of speech, vocal tone, the size and number of their gestures, all mirrored mine. The subliminal message they were trying to send was, “We like you. You should trust us.” Both detectives were playing good cop. I wondered how long and which one would turn bad first. My money was on Windhauser. He had a tough time not narrowing his eyes when he looked at me.

“Must be nice, having your own airplane,” Czarnek said, sipping iced horchata through a straw.

“The Ruptured Duck’s a good bird – aside from the fact that something’s always breaking. That’s what happens when you get old and crotchety.”

“The Ruptured Duck. What kind of name is that?’” Windhauser asked.

“Everybody getting out of the service at the end of World War Two was supposed to wear a temporary insignia on their uniforms to let the military police know they’d been honorably discharged and weren’t AWOL. The insignia was intended to look like an eagle inside a wreath. Only everybody decided that the eagle looked more like a duck. Some wiseacre said it looked like a ‘ruptured duck.’ The name stuck.”

“So you went with it,” Czarnek said.

“I would’ve gone with Tweetie, but it was already taken.”

Czarnek smiled. Windhauser wiped his mouth, wadded his paper napkin, and tossed it on his plate. Then he sucked down some Diet Pepsi. Czarnek sniffed audibly and cleared his throat. The prearranged signal. Time to get down to police business.

“So, Mr. Logan,” Windhauser said, “you say you knew Mr. Echevarria how?”

“We hunted terrorists together and usually killed them.”

The two LAPD detectives glanced at each other, then at me.

“You wanna run that one by us again?” Czarnek said.

I told them how Echevarria and I had been assigned to a top-secret team of government assassins tasked in the wake of September 11th with terminating individuals across the globe who had been deemed threats to the homeland. I even used the term, “extreme prejudice.” I explained how our rules of engagement dictated that there were no rules of engagement. I told them how we operated with clear understanding that if any of us were ever captured by hostile forces, the Secretary truly would disavow any knowledge of our activities. I explained that there was no shortage of evil people around the globe who would’ve loved to murder Echevarria, but that they were all on the run, or hunkered down overseas in remote rat holes like the tribal belt between Pakistan and Afghanistan, pursued relentlessly by counterterrorist forces and unable to take a decent dump in peace, let alone locate and murder a retired go-to guy living in anonymous obscurity in the San Fernando Valley. Yes, I told the two LAPD detectives, I knew it all sounded like so much made-up Hollywood, Mission Impossible guano, but there it was. The straight poop on Arlo Echevarria. They could do with the information as they wished, I said. I didn’t care one way or the other.

Czarnek and Windhauser studied me. They looked at each other. Then they both started laughing.

“Oh, man,” Czarnek said, dabbing at the corners of his eyes, “that is some wicked good shit.”

“Extreme prejudice,” Windhauser said, mimicking me between spasms. “Christ.”

They had responded in the very manner I had anticipated, with disbelief. Everybody lies to the police. Cops hear crazy crap all the time from people they’re sworn to protect as well as those they get paid to arrest: the CIA planted a chip in my head and is controlling my thoughts; Martians are living in my attic; the devil made me do it. But the “I Was a Paid Assassin for the Government” spiel, that was a new one.

Windhauser’s laughter tapered to a cold smile. He fixed me with an iron stare meant to intimidate. “Some little hottie down at the beach you’re trying to hit on, she might fall for that crock of shit. But you’re not talking to her now, are you?”

“Could be little hotties down at the beach aren’t necessarily my cup of tea if you get my drift, Detective, and I think you do.” I winked at him provocatively.

Windhauser’s smile departed altogether.

“If you think I’m gay,” he said, “you’re mistaken.”

“Nothing wrong with being gay,” I said. “Plenty of people are gay. They come out of the closet all the time. Even homicide cops.”

Windhauser gripped the arms of his chair, his blood pressure twenty points higher than it was a minute before. He looked over at his partner and said, “Who the fuck does this asshole think he is?”

Czarnek unwrapped a piece of Nicorette White Ice Mint gum, watching me.

“We just want the truth, Mr. Logan,” he said.

“I told you the truth.”

Windhauser said, “I can’t fucking believe we drove all the way up here to talk to this lying lump of shit.”

“Be honest, Detective,” I said, “you drove all the way up here for the tacos.”

Windhauser glowered. A V-shaped vein rose in the middle of his forehead and throbbed noticeably.

“We talked to Mr. Echevarria’s wife,” Czarnek said. “She told us he worked for the federal government. But we can’t find any record of that.”

“You won’t. Our operations were classified.”

Windhauser got to his feet suddenly, like he wanted to lay hands on me. His plastic chair clattered onto its side. Other diners paused and looked over to see what the commotion was about. The restaurant fell silent.

“C’mon, partner, let’s get out of here,” Windhauser said, grabbing his jacket off the floor. “This guy’s fucking nuts.”

Czarnek stayed put, eyeing me. “Mrs. Echevarria told us she used to be your wife.”

“She was. I never knew what true happiness was until we got married. Then it was too late.”

“Why’d you break up, you don’t mind me asking?”

“She dumped me.”

“Why?” Windhauser demanded

“Because she fell in love with Echevarria.”

Czarnek stopped chewing his gum. The detectives traded another look. Windhauser righted his chair and lowered himself into it.

“How exactly would you describe your relationship with your ex-wife?” Windhauser said.

“Strained.”

“What about with Mr. Echevarria?” Czarnek said. “What kind of relationship did you have with him?”

“We had no relationship. Not after what he did to me.”

“So, what you’re saying is, the two of you stopped being friends after your wife left you for him. Is that what you’re saying?”

I didn’t say anything. I could see where this was going. Czarnek reached into the breast pocket of his sport coat and got out a reporter’s notebook. He flipped through the narrow pages to find where he’d jotted down the date of Echevarria’s murder– October 24th. He asked me if I remembered what I was doing that night.

“It was a Monday,” Czarnek added.

“I would’ve been watching football.”

“By yourself?”

“With my landlady.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“She makes me dinner every Monday night during football season. We always watch the game together.”

“You two ever get it on?” Windhauser said. “Maybe at halftime?”

Another tactic from the Big Book of Standard Police Interrogation Techniques: Bad Cop periodically lets fly an outrageous accusation intended to infuriate the suspect who comes unglued and, in his unbridled anger, blurts the truth of his crime.

“My landlady is in her eighties,” I said. “She only goes for old guys, Detective Windhauser. Like you.”

Windhauser glared. His partner stifled a smile.

“You pretty sure she can vouch for your whereabouts that evening?” Czarnek asked.

“You’ll have to ask her that.”

“We intend to,” Windhauser said.

The detectives were staring at me in a new light, a light that told me even though I was the one who’d called them, I was now suspect numero uno in the homicide of Arlo Echevarria.

SIX

Inside the walled fortress that is America’s intelligence community, analysts are trained to scientifically consider all possible explanations when trying to determine who bombed the jetliner or blew up the office tower. Unfortunately, intelligence analysts are human. Like all humans, they quickly form opinions as to guilt or innocence, then instinctively pursue the evidence that will buttress their preconceived beliefs. Evidence that conflicts with those preconceptions is commonly disregarded. Which is why we sometimes end up invading the wrong country.

Professionals in other occupations are no different. A patient complains of a stomachache. His doctor concludes that the patient must have indigestion or an ulcer because the last five patients he treated with similar symptoms had indigestion or an ulcer. The patient is sent home with antibiotics or a bottle of Tums and dies that night from a burst appendix. Two LAPD homicide detectives conclude that an ex-husband murdered the man his wife left him for because the detectives have investigated dozens of murders over the years and it is always the ex-husband or former boyfriend who did it.

Still, I walked out of El Grande Taqueria that day a free man. No handcuffs. No threats of, “We’re going to have to take you down to the station for further questioning.” Czarnek thanked me for agreeing to meet with them. He asked me if I would be willing to take a polygraph test at some point in the near future. I said I wouldn’t mind at all. He said they’d be in touch and urged me to have a nice day, while Windhauser said nothing. I could tell by the way they watched me as I got in my truck, parked two spaces down from their unmarked Crown Vic, that it wouldn’t matter whether I passed a lie-detector test or not. They’d already made up their minds about who murdered Arlo Echevarria. Like intelligence analysts, now all they had to do was make the pieces fit their puzzle.

I waited for a break in the traffic, then burned an illegal U-turn across three lanes of traffic while my new friends from the LAPD watched. I tossed them a casual wave and motored south on Verde Street, feeling a sense of relief. I’d done what my ex-wife wanted me to do, done what my ex-father-in-law had paid me to do. I’d told the police what I knew about the real Arlo Echevarria. If they didn’t want to hear it, that was their problem. As far as I was concerned, I had fulfilled my end of the deal. I may still have been curious about who murdered Echevarria, but not so curious that I was willing to become more involved than I already was. Goddamn Savannah. I couldn’t decide which I regretted more, cashing her father’s check or not having been born rich.

She’s nothing to you anymore, I told myself.

I almost believed it.

The light turned red at Federal Avenue, across the street from the old post office that was now a carpet showroom. A homeless guy was on the sidewalk out front, smoking a joint. Curled asleep beside him was a long, fat dog that looked like it had been assembled by committee. A hand-lettered cardboard sign was propped against the man’s legs. It said, “Ninjas kidnapped my family. Need money for Kung Fu lessons.” I tossed him a buck. Fair pay for a good laugh.

The light turned green. I hooked a right at the traffic circle and merged onto the freeway northbound, heading for the airport.

* * *

Larry was sitting at a weathered picnic table in the shade behind his hangar, listening to Rush Limbaugh on a portable radio and eating his lunch – bologna and cheese sandwich, bag-o-chips and a Dr. Pepper. Larry had the same thing for lunch every day. Once, I heard him complain to his wife about the way she’d made his sandwich. “How many times I gotta tell ya,” he seethed low into the phone, “you put the fuckin’ cheese between the fuckin’ slices of bologna.” I believe it was the last sandwich she ever made him.

“I got your money,” I said out the window as I pulled in and climbed out of my truck. “All of it.”

“Call CNN,” Larry said. “They’re gonna definitely wanna break into regular programming for this.”

“You know, Larry, for a comedian, you make a pretty piss-poor airplane mechanic.”

I sat down opposite him at the picnic table and wrote out a check.

Larry picked crumbs out of his arm fur, watching me. “What’d you do, rob a bank or something?”

“Ex-father-in-law.”

“You robbed your ex-father-in-law?”

“More or less.”

I gave him the check. Larry folded it without looking at it and put it in his wallet.

“You been subleasing from me for, what, two years? That’s the first time I’ve heard you say word one about family.”

“He’s not family.”

“Used to be, though, right?” Larry said.

“How ’bout them Dodgers?” I said.

Larry grunted and finished his soda. My phone rang. The caller was male and foreign. His inflection was Spanish or Romanian, possibly Moldovan. Sort of like Dracula, only younger and hipper.

He said his name was Eugen Dragomir, and that he was a student at Cal State Rancho Bonita, whose campus was just up the road from the airport. The kid had seen my listing on Craigslist, he said, and was interested in learning to fly. Every other flight school between Camarillo and San Luis Obispo advertised online. Splashy, colorful web sites with animated graphics and streaming video testimonials from their many satisfied students. The fact that Dragomir could find no such web site for Above the Clouds Aviation, let alone any mention of it on Google, impressed him.

“Definitely old school,” Dragomir said. “I want to learn from the best. Someone who knows what they’re doing, who has been flying a long time.”

“Well, as the old saying goes, there are old pilots and bold pilots,” I said, trotting out the dustiest aphorism in the history of manned flight, “but there are no old, bold pilots.”

He wanted to get started right away and said he could be by within the hour. I said my airplane and I would be ready.

Twenty minutes later, Eugen Dragomir rolled into Larry’s hangar on a skateboard with a “Sex Wax” sticker on it. Gangly didn’t begin to describe him. He was built like a 3-iron with a backpack and dark, Eastern European dreadlocks. He was wearing black Chuck Taylor high-tops, laces dragging on the ground, surfer shorts that came down below his knobby knees and a T-shirt with a visage of Bob Marley on his chest. A shark’s tooth dangled from a leather strand looped around his pencil neck. He bobbed, swinging his spaghetti arms, as we strode out to the flight line. He was from Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, a fifth-year senior studying petrochemical engineering because that’s what his petrochemical engineer father wanted.

“But I’m thinking of switching majors.”

“To what?”

“Astronaut. I want to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

“You mean, ‘To boldly go where no person has gone before.’ Space is a very politically correct place these days, Eugen.”

He nodded like I was Confucius. He was all business, there to learn. I liked that.

I walked him through the preflight inspection, showing him how to check the Duck’s control surfaces for loose rivets, climbing up on the wings to make sure there was adequate gas in the tanks, checking the oil, looking inside the engine compartment for anything that didn’t look right, undoing the tie-down lines. He shadowed my every move, cocking his head as he listened, soaking it all in. When the walk-around was complete, I opened the left side door for him.

“Hop in.”

“You want me to fly?”

“That’s generally what pilots do.”

“This is sick!”

After we got in and locked the doors, I explained enginestart procedures and let him do the starting. I demonstrated how to dial in the ATIS frequency for current conditions on the field, including winds, dew point and altimeter setting.

I changed frequencies to Clearance Delivery and let the controllers know who we were and where we wanted to fly.

“Good afternoon, Clearance,” I said, “Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima.”

“Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, Rancho Bonita Clearance, good afternoon.”

“Four Charlie Lima is a 172 slant uniform, northwest departure with information Yankee, 4,500 feet. We’ll be doing some maneuvering outside the class delta. Request traffic advisories.”

“Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, on request.”

We waited.

“Dude, this is, like, the baddest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Eugen said. “I mean, once I took my girlfriend to bungee jumping and she was all, ‘I’m freaked,’ and I was all—”

“Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima”—I held up my finger for Eugen to be quiet while the controller came back on the radio with our clearance—“expect Runway One-Seven left. Fly runway heading after departure. Maintain VFR at or below 1,500 feet. Expect own navigation within three minutes. Departure frequency, 125.4. Squawk 4621.”

I jotted down a shorthand version of the instructions in a small notebook I keep in the plane for such purposes and read them back to the controller.

“Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, read back correct. Contact ground, 121.6. Have a good flight.”

I explained how next we contacted ground control to receive taxiing instructions.

“Tell them, ‘Ground, Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, ready to taxi from Premier with Yankee.’”

Eugen keyed the radio and repeated what I’d said.

“Skyhawk, Four Charlie Lima, roger. Taxi to One-Seven left via Bravo, hold short 2–6.”

The kid was totally jazzed. I let him steer the plane. We nearly ran off the taxiway, but only once. Not bad for a beginner. At the run-up area next to the runway, with the airplane’s parking brake set, I showed him how we revved the engine to 1700 RPMs, to make sure everything worked properly. Then we taxied to the hold-short line of the assigned runway. I switched radio frequencies to the tower.

“Rancho Bonita tower, Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, ready One-Seven left.”

“Four Charlie Lima, Rancho Bonita Tower, traffic on two-mile base. Runway One-Seven left, cleared for immediate takeoff.”

“OK,” I said, folding my hands placidly in my lap, “you’ve got the airplane.”

I’ve watched fighter jocks with 5,000 hours take off with less elegance. The kid took to flying like a starving man at an all-you-can-eat buffet. We flew for an hour. Steep turns. Turns around a point. Climbs. Dives. Standard stuff for a fifty dollar introductory lesson. Just enough to make it all look effortless. Eugen Dragomir was a natural. I almost let him land.

“You sure you’ve never done this before?” I said as we were walking back toward my office.

“Maybe, like, in a previous life or something.” He dug a damp, crumpled fifty dollar bill out of his board shorts. “If my father wrote a check for five thousand, would that be OK to start?”

“Sounds mucho bueno to me.”

Another five grand. My day was looking better and better. I found a fresh logbook in my desk. I filled in the particulars of Eugen Dragomir’s maiden flight, signed my name, and gave it to him. He held the book in his hand like it was a precious thing.

“Fortunately for you,” I said, “my schedule’s pretty flexible at present. Lemme know when the funds arrive. You’ll be soloing in no time, guaranteed.”

“Can’t wait.”

We bumped fists, then he retrieved his skateboard where he’d left it, against the wall of Larry’s hangar. As he coasted toward the security gate, he smiled and waved with his thumb and pinkie extended, one of those Hawaiian “hang loose” signs.

I returned the gesture, feeling rather foolish.

California State University, Rancho Bonita, with its 18,500 undergrads and architectural hodgepodge of a campus nestled on a picturesque bluff overlooking the Pacific, is known perennially as a top-ten party school. Few students who ventured off campus and wanted me to teach them how to fly ever came close to mastering that goal. Surfing, boozing, blazing, and getting laid invariably took precedence. Eugen Dragomir seemed different. A studious kid. A great potential pilot.