A red San Diego fire engine pulled up, lights flashing. Three firefighters garbed head-to-toe in silver, Area 51-style hazmat suits climbed down from the truck. Two of them, armed with handheld extinguishers, began spraying down the plane even though there were no flames to fight. The third carried a medical kit and asked us if we required treatment.
“This man is a menace!” Lawless said, pointing at me as the firefighter tried to examine the cut on his forehead. “I’m placing him under arrest for attempted murder.” Lawless pushed the fireman aside, reached for his handcuffs and ordered me to turn around.
“Kurt, it was an accident,” Rosario said. “Be happy you’re alive. I am. I’m ecstatic, in fact. Now, why don’t you let the nice firefighter have a look at that cut?”
“He told us it was safe. Is that not what he said?” Lawless was breathing hard. “Well, it’s definitely not safe! We could’ve died, Rosario. And he knew it.”
Lawless grabbed my wrist to cuff me. I spun out of his hold.
“Listen to your partner, Detective. It was an accident.”
“Resisting arrest and attempted murder. That’s it!”
Again Lawless moved to handcuff me. Again I twisted free. Enraged, he pulled out his Glock.
“Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”
“Whoa,” the firefighter said, raising his own hands, “this is the freakiest plane crash I’ve ever responded to.”
“You’re being an idiot, Lawless,” Rosario said. “I’m lead investigator on this case. Now, either holster your pistol, and I mean right now, or I swear, I will report you to internal affairs on an out-of-policy weapons draw.”
Lawless eyeballed Rosario. He eyeballed me. Then, like some petulant little boy made to put away his playthings, he angrily holstered his gun and let the nice fireman patch up his face.
Rosario got out her phone and said she was calling authorities in Yuma to have them pick up Bunny and his cousin before they could hightail it across the border. She still didn’t trust the cops in Arizona, she said, but under the circumstances, there was no alternative.
I gazed forlornly at the Ruptured Duck and wondered when, if ever, he would play again among the clouds. Considering my airplane represented my sole source of income, the same could’ve just as easily been asked of me.
The crash led the nightly news on every TV station in San Diego. Three news helicopters orbited Montgomery Airport, relaying aerial shots of the Ruptured Duck, while reporters filed stand-ups live from the scene. They interviewed anybody they could find who’d claimed to have seen the crash, and even some who admitted they hadn’t. One old guy, who wore a 56th Fighter Group baseball cap and was identified as a former airline pilot, said he was in his hangar overlooking the flight line and could tell from the strained pitch of the Duck’s engine that a crash was imminent. But the most compelling eyewitness account came from a delivery van driver named Jay for “Pampered Bottoms Diaper Service” who said he happened to look over while cruising the frontage road to northbound Highway 163 with a truckload of soiled nappies, glimpsed the stricken Duck diving straight toward him, and “about crapped my pants.”
The worst part of all was that the newshounds had apparently checked the Duck’s tail number online and quickly determined my identity. Within an hour of my having debriefed various airport and local law enforcement authorities about the crash, yours truly was all over the airwaves. The story even led the news more than 200 miles away, in Rancho Bonita, where the local anchorwoman, a twenty-three-year-old former Miss Avocado Festival winner who couldn’t read from a TelePrompTer if the fate of the free world depended on it, got my name wrong, along with almost everything else:
“Topping the news tonight, a Rancho Bonita flight instructor identified by authorities as Cordell Hogan was seriously injured today along with three of his passengers when their small jet crashed while trying to make an emergency landing at a San Diego area airport. Witnesses said the airplane narrowly avoided hitting a bread truck.”
Among those watching, only because it was summer and there were no football games on, was my landlady, who called to make sure I was still breathing.
“I’m fine, Mrs. Schmulowitz. All’s well that ends well.”
“Listen, I know you love flying, Bubeleh,” she scolded me over the phone as I drove back to Hub Walker’s house, “but if human beings were meant to fly, God would’ve made it a lot easier to find parking at the airport.”
“People love to swim, Mrs. Schmulowitz, and I don’t hear you squawking about gills.”
“Swimming? Don’t get me started. It’s supposed to be such great exercise, low impact, good for your figure, blah blah blah. If all that’s true, how do you explain whales?”
“I’m not sure I follow you, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
“They look like big blobs floating around out there.”
“You don’t like whales?”
“Do I like whales? I love whales. I love whales like nobody’s business! But even whales drown — which is my point. Swimming is dangerous. Flying is dangerous. If I were you, I’d think about doing something less with the, you know, hazards. Square dancing. Now, there’s something you’re not gonna get killed doing.”
“I can’t make a living square dancing, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
“Well, you’re not doing too good with the flying from everything I can see.”
She had a point.
I told her I hoped to be home in a couple of days, just as soon as I could figure out what to do with my airplane, or what was left of it. Mrs. Schmulowitz promised to save me some of the brisket she’d cooked for Kiddiot.
“Did he come back?”
“Not yet, bubby. But I’m sure he will soon.”
A melancholy settled over me. My airplane was a wreck and my Kiddiot was still gone. He may have been the world’s most intellectually challenged cat, but he was still my intellectually challenged cat. The thought of life without him and the Duck left me feeling hollow inside.
“I’m getting my tummy tuck tomorrow,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “I’ll keep looking until then. He’s around here somewhere. I’ll leave some brisket out for him.”
I wished her a speedy recovery and made a mental note to buy her white daisies, her favorite, when I got home.
Crissy Walker met me at her front door with a warm embrace. Hub squeezed my shoulder and said he was relieved I was still alive.
“It’s a miracle you survived, from what I saw on the TV,” Hub said. “You must have some damn powerful angels looking out for you, son.”
In Buddhism, angels are known as devas. The only thing I knew about them is that they rarely intervene in human affairs. So maybe it was other angels who’d come to my rescue, like the workers at Cessna who, forty years earlier, had built into the Ruptured Duck’s cabin the structural integrity to withstand an event like the crash I’d just lived through without so much as a hangnail. Whoever or whatever was responsible for my good fortune, I was alive. And that was good enough for me.
The Walkers stepped aside and there was Savannah. She approached me with open arms, like she was going to enfold me, happy that I’d returned in one piece — then socked me in the stomach.
“What was that for?”
“Scaring me half to death.”
Once upon a time I would’ve seen a punch like that coming, slipped it easily and, had it not been my ex-wife, snapped the arm of whoever had thrown it.
You’re getting old, Logan. That or civilized.