Much though she detested herself for thinking it, even for a moment, she missed Sam Brenckmann. She hated how he was so laid back about things, the music business, practically everything, but he was nice guy and she should not have pleaded with Johnny line up the deal with a bunch of no hopers like the Limonville Brothers. No, that was just plain mean of her. Maybe, ending up in a shit hole like this was God’s way of telling her she had been a bad girl once too often lately.
She had been sick in the cruiser.
That had really pissed off the cops; afterwards she felt a lot better.
The big black guy, his name was Wayne, or at least she thought that was what he said, had taken her like a whore and basically, she had loved it. He either had not noticed or did not care that she was out of her head and had puke in her hair. Some guys were like that; Sam would have cleaned her up and put her to bed, probably watched over her while she slept it off. Sam would definitely not have fucked her so hard she kept passing out…
Johnny had gone ape shit when he walked into the bedroom. He had chased Wayne, or was it John? Anyway, he had chased the big black guy out of the house waving a Navy Colt. She had been so out of it that she thought that was kind of funny at the time; right up until Johnny came back upstairs and pulled the same number on her.
A gentleman would have let her find her panties and her shoulder bag before he threw her out onto the street in the middle of a fucking nuclear war!
As Sam once told her: ‘What’s a guy to do, babe? The age of chivalry is over…’
“Miranda Margaret Sullivan!”
That name sounded familiar.
“MIRANDA MARGARET SULLIVAN!”
Shit! That’s me!
“Yeah,” Miranda muttered. She was dreadfully weary and just wanted to lie down and to go back to sleep.
Strong hands grabbed her arms above the elbows and walked her out of the holding cell.
“Jesus, Miranda!”
She peered bleary-eyed at the reassuring bulk of her parents’ San Francisco lawyer.
Miranda had known Harvey Fleischer all her life and describing Uncle Harvey as her parents’ lawyer, was a bit like saying the Attorney General of the United States of American was just the President’s kid brother; it might be factually accurate but it grossly misrepresented the true nature of the long-term relationship. Her father and mother were the public faces, Harvey the brains behind the quarter century long partnership between the former two bit part, B-movie actors and the seemingly unassuming, bumbling lawyer.
“Hi, Uncle Harvey,” Miranda said sulkily, her gaze childishly affixed to her bare feet.
What the fuck happened to my shoes?
“You look like shit, kid!”
That was the way she felt about it, too.
Miranda’s lower lip quivered.
Harvey Fleischer put his arm around her shoulders.
“I can’t send you back to your Ma and Pa like this, sweetie,” he said in a courtroom voice that brooked no dissent. “You’ll have to come back home with me. Your Aunt Molly will look after you.”
“I don’t want to make trouble between you and…”
“I’ll tell your Pa there was a godammed curfew or something.”
There had always been an aching gap in the otherwise happy and rock-solid marriage of Harvey and Molly Fleischer. They had no children. Aunt Molly had tried for a kid several times; but something always went wrong and eventually, her Aunt and Uncle had given up trying. Basically, before it killed Molly; this Harvey had once confided one night to Miranda’s parents when he was a little more drunk than he thought he was. Miranda and her four siblings had always treated the Fleischer’s big house on Nob Hill as a second home, especially in the holidays.
Harvey Fleischer had been a college linebacker in his younger days. Never the fleetest or lithest of men he had filled out over the years, becoming a heavy footed, granite presence with an increasingly gravelly voice that tended to bestow immense gravitas upon the most trite of pronouncements. It was the best part of thirty years since Miranda’s — then future parents — had turned to Harvey to get out from under their contract with a small time Hollywood agent and begun the painful business of surgically removing them from suffocating constraints of their respective studio contracts. The rest, as they say, was history.
“What happened to you, sweetie?” Harvey Fleischer gently asked Miranda as they drove away in his Lincoln — last year’s model because he did not like to look too prosperous — down eerily deserted city streets.
“Somebody spiked my drink at a party,” Miranda lied.
“I don’t mean tonight,” the man told her. “I mean the last couple of years. Dropping out of college like that? Taking up with those weirdoes and beatniks along Haight Street. Jesus, Miranda! You’re better than that!”
If her father or mother had dared to say that she would have screamed in their faces and jumped out of the car.
“Is it true about the war?” She asked.
Harvey Fleischer was silent for several seconds.
“Yeah, maybe. Nobody knows. The people at City Hall say the President will make an announcement sometime today. Seattle got taken out, someplace up around Vancouver, too. And other places up north…”
“Seattle? Vancouver?”
“Yeah, why?”
Miranda sobbed uncontrollably.
The Limonville Brothers Strummers Band had been scheduled to play some no hope backwoods town around Vancouver tonight…
Sam Brenckmann was most likely dead and she had killed him.
Chapter 20
The bomber’s wheels kissed the tarmac and The Big Cigar rolled immaculately down the centreline of Minot Air Force Base’s four mile long main runway. The engines throttled back and the struts of the wing rider outboard undercarriage legs took the strain.
Lieutenant Nathan Zabriski would have relaxed at that moment had not the whole aircraft stunk of AVGAS. Everybody and everything in the cabin was drenched in fuel; if so much electrical equipment had not already shorted out or had had to be turned off after the Gorky air burst, the B-52 would have ignited like a Roman candle when the main coupling valve had failed at the end of the air-to-air refuelling evolution thirty-three thousand feet over the Arctic ice cap.
As the tanker and bomber had parted somewhere between fifty and a hundred gallons of AVGAS had flooded the forward crew compartment of the B-52 before the KC-135’s boom master had cut the pumps and hit the emergency de-coupling switch.
Nobody dared to move a muscle while The Big Cigar slowed.
The outer engines reversed thrust, the huge bomber shuddered.
It was way too risky to touch the brakes.
Nathan shut his eyes and waited for the aircraft to blow up.
The Big Cigar had been flying on fumes when the KC-135 tanker eventually found the B-52. With most of her instrumentation inoperative the bomber had had no alternative but to fly a standard search pattern around the point at which Nathan’s dead reckoning predicted the nearest aerial gas station ought to have been orbiting. If the tanker’s skipper had not turned on his homing beacon and his recognition lights, The Big Cigar would have crashed in the Arctic several hours ago.