They’d made it to the highway. The Jeep picked up speed.
He turned to her now that the road was straight. “There’s some proverb. It’s probably Chinese. It goes, you sit on the mountain to watch the tigers fight.”
He turned his eyes back to the road. “What that means is, you let them eat each other. Instead of eating you.”
They continued south along the highway, back toward the city.
“Where are we going, or is that something else I don’t need to know?”
“Town up in the mountains,” he said shortly. “It’ll take us a couple of hours.”
“So there’s an airport?”
He snorted. “Not exactly. Good airstrip, though.”
Great, Michelle thought. Could this get any sketchier? She could just picture dark men with mustaches and gold chains loading bales of pot… or would it be bricks of cocaine? Off of donkeys. Or Jeeps. Set to a Don Henley song. Wasn’t there a movie like that, with Mel Gibson?
“And we’ll fly, we’ll fly where?”
“It’s a little tricky,” he muttered. “The plane’s a Caravan, and it only has about a nine-hundred-mile range, a little more with the extended tanks. But you can’t land a jet on that strip, and there’s no way I’m gonna risk going out of PVR.”
The Vallarta airport. “Because of the police?” It only made sense, Michelle thought, that if she wasn’t supposed to leave town, they’d watch for her at the airport.
Now he laughed. “The police aren’t a problem. There’s a private aerodrome there that we use, and normally everything’s taken care of. But with all the shit that’s gone down, I’m not gonna chance it. If Gary’s got a wild hair up his ass, it’s better to just go around him.”
“In a… So this is a small plane we’re taking?”
“Yeah, but they’re awesome little birds,” he said, with real enthusiasm. “Workhorses. You can practically land them in a ditch.”
Just great.
Bumpity -bumpity-bump.
“Hey, wake up. We’re here.”
“I’m awake,” she said. She was, more or less. She’d been drifting in and out along the way, but her ribs and shoulder hurt too much to let her sleep soundly, and when she’d come closest to real sleep, she’d had a nightmare about not being able to move, about being tangled up in sheets.
She stretched as he opened the driver’s door. The air had a crisp coolness to it that she hadn’t felt since she’d left Los Angeles. The trees had a different scent, less weighted with fruit and flowers.
Daniel came around and opened her door. “I’m going to start the preflight, so if you want to, you can wait in here, or outside, or in the plane-whatever you feel like. Let me know if you need a hand.”
“Okay.”
She swung her legs to the side and looked out the open car door. It was dark, but she could see the darker silhouettes of mountains ahead of her, surrounding a narrow valley. They’d parked in a dirt field, across from a whitewashed building about the size of a gas-station food mart, dimmed to gray in the moonlight.
Michelle braced herself against the car seat and pushed herself to her feet. There was a small plane up ahead, on the far side of the lot. Daniel had unlocked the pilot-side door, hoisted himself up into the cockpit.
There was no one around. No one in the little building by the field. No gold-toothed smugglers with bales of pot or bricks of cocaine. On a hillside some distance away, she could make out the lights of some sort of long, low building, forming the rough profile of a roof and archways, and she thought she could hear a strain of music drifting down from it, too indistinct for her to note anything but a vague melody.
He was right, it was cool up here in the mountains. She shivered a little and grabbed her sweater out of the tote bag, threading her right arm into the sleeve and draping the left awkwardly across her back and over the sling. She wished she could change, at least put on the shorts and shirt she’d brought, instead of having to wear the black dress. Maybe Daniel could help her before they took off.
She approached the plane. White with two-tone blue trim, “Caravan” written in cursive script above a logo on the taiclass="underline" a trident inside a circle.
There was a creak of metal, and a door on the side of the fuselage opened, and then Daniel lowered a ramp ladder strung on chains to the ground. “Climb on up if you want,” he said. “Seats in here are pretty comfortable.”
He came down the ladder carrying a folded stepstool. “This strip’s used mostly by sightseeing tours-Caravans fly in and out of here a couple of days a week. I flew this one in before I picked you up. Paid the guy who works here during the day some ‘rental.’ ” He made finger quotes with his hands.
“Should I ask whose plane this is?”
“Nope.” He leaned the stepstool against the ramp. “I’m going to get the stuff in the car.”
Well, it wasn’t a tiny plane, Michelle thought, peering up the ramp. The running lights and cabin lights were on. There were a couple of padded bucket-type seats toward the cockpit and what looked like a larger cargo compartment aft.
“Pretty sweet, huh?” Daniel swung one sturdy-looking duffel into the plane, then another. “I should just buy one of these and be a bush pilot.” He grinned. “Fly medicine to war orphans, you know? Be one of the good guys.”
He headed back to the Jeep. Michelle followed. Her tote bag and purse were still there, and she suddenly wanted to load them on the plane, to just get on with the next phase of the trip, wherever it was they were going.
“I’ll take your stuff over for you.” He went to the rear of the Jeep, opened up the back hatch, and grabbed the bag of golf clubs.
“Need a hand?”
She didn’t need to see him to know that it was Gary. Of course. He came around from the side of the building holding a flashlight, aiming it straight at her.
“Oh, if you could see your faces right now-classic!” he said. “I wish I had a camera. But that’s really more Michelle’s thing. Isn’t it, honey?”
“Gary, look,” Daniel began.
“You thought I wouldn’t find out? You thought you could just pull strings and work around me? Now, what makes you think you can do that?”
There was a crunch of gravel behind them, the rough hum of an engine. A car.
“You go crawling to Curt Dellinger like he’s gonna save your ass, like you’ve got some kind of high card you’re holding over him.” Gary laughed. “You think he gives a shit about you? Well, he doesn’t. You know what he does care about? Problems. And that’s what the two of you are.”
“We’re not going to cause any problems,” Daniel said, staring at Gary’s hands.
“Okay, here’s the deal.” Gary stepped closer, and now Michelle could see, behind the glare of the big metal flashlight, that his other hand held a gun. Of course.
“We can’t have people talking. Not that anybody’s likely to believe anything you have to say, Michelle, but… it’s the principle of the thing. It sets a bad example when people just say whatever shit they want to say and then they get away with it.
“And you know the way it works? You tell one person, and then it’s just so much easier to tell somebody else. Isn’t that right, Michelle? Because you told Danny, didn’t you? Even after I told you not to say anything to anybody. You went ahead and talked. Didn’t you?”
The engine behind them shut off. A car door creaked open.
“And then,” Gary said, stepping closer, coming right up to her, “you told someone else. You told old Charlie, right? And look what happened.”
“Fuck you, Gary,” she said.
Daniel put a hand on her arm. “No one is going to say anything else. Let’s not make this complicated.”
“Believe me, I’m planning on keeping things simple.” Gary took a step back, out of Daniel’s reach. “I’m willing to give you a break, Danny, just this once. Because, frankly, you’d be a pain in the ass to replace right now. So I’m giving you a onetime opportunity here. You show me that you’re loyal. You walk away from her, right now, and you do your job. That’s all you have to do.”