“The operative word being could’ve.”
I tried to help him up, but the major would have none of it. He got to his feet, dusting himself off, livid. The paper in his hand was some story he’d snagged off the Internet detailing how Georgia’s Congressional delegation had expended no shortage of political juice to help get Hub Walker the Medal of Honor.
“They call him a hero,” Kilgore said, “but a real hero would never block his neighbor’s view with his goddamn trees!”
I assured the major that I would blast off letters straight away to the White House, the Pentagon, and, time permitting, the International Court in the Hague, supporting his assertion that Walker be stripped of his medal given such egregious violations of neighborhood decorum.
“Thanks,” Kilgore said, a bit surprised that I saw things his way.
“Don’t mention it.”
Hub Walker was right about one thing: his neighbor was crazier than a three-day weekend in Reno.
I called Mrs. Schmulowitz as I drove away. Her answering machine picked up. The message was unmistakably hers:
“You have reached the Schmulowitz residence. This call may be recorded or monitored for quality and training purposes. If you do not wish for this call to be monitored or recorded, then let this facacta machine — which has too many buttons and numbers that are too small for me to read them all — know that you do not wish to be recorded or monitored when you leave your message. Thank you for calling.”
Beep.
“Hello, Mrs. Schmulowitz, Cordell Logan here. I’m calling to find out how you’re doing after your surgery. Hope you’re doing great. Also, I’m wondering whether that cat who lets me live with him ever showed up. Please let me know if you get a chance. You have my number. Shalom.”
I found an ATM machine not far from the Taco Bell I’d visited the night before and deposited Walker’s check before he changed his mind and put a stop-payment on it. It took me three tries to punch in my PIN correctly. I was more tired than I realized.
The beach was two blocks away. I hooked a right past Hornblend Street, found abundant free parking outside a CVS pharmacy, secured the Escalade with the key chain remote, and was soon lying on soft, warm sand. The ocean was sapphire. I closed my eyes and tried not to think. All I wanted to do was sleep. And I did, for five minutes, until retired airline pilot Dutch Holland called.
“I lied to you,” he said. “I was running my mouth. I didn’t see anybody tinkering with your airplane. I can’t hardly see my hands in front of my face anymore. Macular degeneration. You got any idea what that feels like, knowing you’ll never fly again?”
“No, sir, I don’t. But I’m sure it’s not pleasant.”
“It was my pal, Al Demaerschalk. He was the one who saw your airplane that night. He can’t hear worth a hoot anymore but his eyes are still sharp. He told me what he saw and I told you like I’d seen it myself. I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted to feel like a big man. Been awhile since I was.”
Holland said he’d been sitting outside his hangar the night before the crash, just as he’d told me originally, only he’d left out the fact that Al had been there, too. It was around nine o’clock, Holland said, when Al noticed the pickup truck drive onto the tarmac. Somebody got out, opened the Ruptured Duck’s cowling, did something to the engine, got back in and drove off. Vehicles of all kinds come and go on the flight line at all hours. Neither man thought much about it until the next day, Dutch said, after my crash. And even then, he and Demaerschalk failed to make a connection between the crash and what they’d seen the night before until after I happened to meet them at lunch.
“I couldn’t tell you for sure,” Holland said, “but with those eyes of his, I wouldn’t be surprised if Al saw more’n he let on, even to me. Hard to say, though. He didn’t want to get into it. You can’t really have a conversation with him these days. He just can’t hear.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this before, Dutch?”
“Al keeps a room with his son and daughter-in-law, over at their house in Point Loma. They’ve been talking about taking away his car before he hurts himself, and putting him in the home. So he’s been staying in my hangar with me. He didn’t want anybody to know where he was at.”
“I need to talk to him.”
“He’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“Took off. Says he’s afraid whoever messed with your plane might come after him. He also thinks it’ll make his kids madder at him than they already are, give ’em one more reason to put him in the home.”
“I understand, Dutch, believe me, but Al’s a pilot. You harm one pilot, you harm all of us. You damage one plane, you damage them all. I can’t believe he’d sit by and let that happen, do you?”
The old man was silent for a few seconds. “Well, when you put it that way…”
I asked Holland if he had any idea where Al might have gone.
“The Eastern Sierra, probably. He’s got a little cabin up in the Owens Valley. Got his own dirt strip. Hasn’t flown in there for years, though. Not since he lost his medical.”
I asked for driving directions.
“I couldn’t begin to tell you how to drive there ’cuz I never did,” Holland said. “We always flew. It’s south and west of Bishop somewhere. I could probably find it from the air if I had to.”
“We could take your airplane.”
“My airplane?”
“Assuming it’s still airworthy. I’ll even pay for fuel.”
“I can’t fly,” Holland said. “My medical’s not current.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m a flight instructor. You’ll be flying with me.”
Holland mulled my proposal. “It’s a deal,” he said with a rising excitement, “but I’m flying left seat.”
“It’s your airplane, Cap’n.”
There was a doughnut shop just north of Montgomery Airport. I stopped off for a quick breakfast — two plain cake bad boys and one large coffee. Inside were six molded plastic tables and seats, orange-colored, scrawled with gang graffiti. I dunked my doughnuts and savored each soggy morsel. If loving deep-fried dough is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
I was polishing off doughnut number two when I glanced out the window and spotted a young, thin Asian man with dyed red hair standing across busy Balboa Avenue, about thirty meters away. He was aiming a digital camera at me. Or, if not at me, at the doughnut shop in which I was breakfasting.
Under normal circumstances, I would’ve disregarded him. It’s a free country, pal, snap all the pictures you want. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Chinese intelligence was supposedly spying on Castle Robotics. Janet Bollinger, who’d worked at Castle Robotics, was dead. And someone had intentionally trashed my airplane. Was the Chinese government behind it all? I flashed on the two Asians in the Lexus I’d seen taking photos outside Castle’s headquarters two days earlier. And now this guy with his camera across the street.
Call it coincidence — like when you read a word for the first time, and all of a sudden, you hear that word everywhere — but I was up and moving toward the door before I knew it.
By the time I burst outside, the guy with the camera was gone.
Dutch Holland’s Piper Cherokee hadn’t flown in more than two years, which coincided with how long it had been since the FAA yanked Holland’s medical certificate, effectively grounding him. That, however, hadn’t stopped him from putting the airplane through FAA-mandated annual inspections and running its engine at least once a week, if only to keep everything properly greased for its next owner.
By the time I got to Montgomery Field, he’d already penciled in a flight plan to the Owens Valley on a couple of aeronautical charts and telephoned Lockheed flight service for a weather briefing. Forecasts called for light winds out of the west along our proposed route, with clear skies and visibility unlimited — CAVU in pilot lingo.