But it didn't. We landed at Palisadoes soon after noon.
I planned to keep the Mitchell there a few days, learning about her while I had a long runway for errors, and getting her hydraulics patched up. We parked off behind the pier of cargo sheds and went to phone Whitmore.
He wasn't available, but J.B. got Luiz at Oranariz. After a bit of chat she put me on for a technical report.
'Tell Whitmore,' I reported, 'that she's a tired old lady, but still a lady. There's a bit of a bombsight mounting left in the nose, so you can probably fix a camera on that. And you could work another sideways out of the old gun windows down behind the bomb-bay, if you want to. We've got about three hundred dollars-worth of work to do on the hydraulics and rewiring the intercom system. But that should cover it.'
'Fine. Get J.B. to sign you an okay, and you can get somebody started on it.'
'And tell him I'll fly her up to Ochoríosas soon as it's done. Two or three days.'
'I will tell him. Have you seen Diego Ingles yet?'
'No. Was he supposed to be here?'
'I expected him to be. He and I drove down last night to meet you when we thought you were coming then. I had to be back at work today, but he was most anxious to see the new aeroplane so he stayed.'
'Well, it's a bit early for him to be up and about yet. You want to speak to J.B. again?'
'No – only tell her to hurry back. One of the extras has broken his ankle and talks of suing us for a million bucks. We want her to break his spirit also.'
I rang off and passed on the message. J.B.'s eyes guttered ferociously. 'Goddamned extras who try and make a name by doing something crazy in camera and break their necks andthen sueus. I'll see that bastard never works in pictures again.'
Suddenly she wanted to be off and into the fight. I watched her go. She was quite a lawyer. Perhaps even quite a woman -if her lawyer let her be.
I went upstairs and had my usual lunch of beer and hot dogs before starting work on the Mitchell. Word of her had got around already – an airport's a small village when it comes to gossip – and die refuelling supervisor was almost polite to me. I knew why, too: the Mitchell's fuel Consumption seemed to work out around 145 gallons an hour – five times as much as the Dove's.
After that I waved Whitmore's name and income around die hangars until I had a couple of mechanics tracing down the hydraulic lines. I could see from their faces that diey didn't believe what they were finding and couldn't find anything they might have believed.
But she was like that all the way through. As a plane built towards the end of the war, she had started life full of hasty modifications: extra gun hatches chopped out all over, chunks of armour plate slapped on here and there, auxiliary fuel tanks stuffed into every corner. And since then, most of the gun hatches had been roughly sealed up, yet anodier tank had been built into the bomb bay, somebody had added diree swivelling armchairs and piece of carpet in die narrow cabin behind die bomb-bay, carved out four pordioles and installed a hot-air system diat looked like two metal pydions in position 69.
I had a short sentimental moment of wanting to strip her down and bring her back to being Beautiful Dreamer again. But die idea passed: she had more 'improvements' to come, yet anodier job to do. And at her age, that was glory enough. Iwent back to work with an uneasy feeling that the same thought might apply to pilots.
By five o'clock, when my mechanics started showing symptoms of raging thirst, we had a rough idea of how the system worked, even if not why, and had found two leaking joints, a sticky valve, and a shaky pump. After an hour of overtime rates we had the pump stripped and knew what parts we needed. I sent an Aircraft-On-Ground cable to North American in California asking them to air-freight spares if they had any left, then called it a day.
Diego still hadn't shown up, which was odd if he really wanted to meet the Mitchell – but not so odd if he'd found something else twenty years old and rather less modified. Aeroplanes ran a bad fourth to sex in his life.
By the time I'd cured my own thirst and went over to collect the jeep from the cargo pier, we were into the short tropical twilight. The tall lights around the loading bay came on as I walked across, turning the concrete blue and cold in contradiction to the soft warm air. Everybody else had gone – cargo planes, without passengers to worry about, work union hours -and all the sheds were locked except the last, which never held anything but my jeep and a few cargo trolleys.
I drove round the end of the terminal pier heading for the back gate, slowing up for a last look at the Mitchell. She stood there, dark, lonely, but with that watchful look all nose-wheel aeroplanes have, unable to sit back and rest on their tails. A cluttered old lady on sentry duty…
Hell, I was getting sentimental about that box of junk. Still, I didn't have any other aeroplane to get sentimental about now. Or maybe it was because she'd once fought a war.
I was about to pull away when I remembered the heap of plastic covers that I'd used to stretch over the Dove's engines and cockpit when she was standing in the sun. Without the Dove, they'd sat in the back seat of the jeep all week, and I was lucky nobody had pinched them. There are enough Jamaicans for whom a few square feet of plastic are halfway to a house. Now, maybe, the Mitchell could use them. I got out and yanked them off the seat.
Then I knew what had made Diego late.
He'd been there some time, so he just stuck out over the side of the jeep, stiff as the plank from the side of a pirate galleon. Then the drag of the covers, as I dropped them, toppled him over and he fell with a sound I can hear again whenever I close my eyes. I closed my eyes then, too.
When I had them open and focused again, he was lying beside the back wheel, in the curled, crunched shape set by the space behind the jeep's front seats. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to know, I rolled him so he balanced on his back, and in the dim back-glow of the neon lights on the far side of the cargo pier I could see the splatter of black blood on his white shirt front. When I looked closer, there wasn't just one hole, but dozens of small ones.
Then I started the long walk back across the bright cold concrete to the warm lights of the terminal. Except that I ran a lot of it.
SIXTEEN
'A shotgun,' said the inspector. 'When you think about it, that tells us quite a lot.'
There were two of them: an English inspector and a Jamaican sergeant. The inspector was a man with pale cold eyes, a neat little moustache, clipped hair, and the general finicky-tough look you get from Englishmen who come out to be cops in somebody else's country. He was wearing a summer suit, but made it look a lot smarter than the sergeant's uniform. The sergeant was a long, loose man with a thin bony face and big solemn eyes.
It was nearly ten o'clock and we were still up in an office near the top of the control tower. A dusty-white room lined with the usual maps covered with the usual coloured strings and wax-pencil scribbles. There was an old travel-agent's model of a DC- 7C on the desk and the inspector couldn't keep his hands off it: twizzling it on its stand, flicking the propellers.
The sergeant said gravely: 'Not many shotguns in Jamaica, sir.'
'Exactly. It's not anative weapon. That's one thing. Second, it means premeditation; you don't just happen to have a shotgun with you. And finally, it means he wasn't killed here.'
He looked at me, with the hint of a triumphant smile behind the toughness, waiting for me to ask why.
I said: 'You mean the noise?'
He frowned and spun a couple of propellers quickly. 'Yes, exactly. I know the airport's a noisy place, but they'd still have heard a shotgun up here. If he was killed here some time last night.' And he nodded out of the window towards the end cargo shed, 200 yards away.