“Cruised by Hollywood ’s place a few minutes ago, on my way downtown. Looks like he’s home. That’s good news. Maybe he’ll show up,” Marino said.
“You should stake him out, make sure he does. That was our deal.” Lucy couldn’t stand depending on other people to get the job done. The damn weather. If she’d gotten here earlier, she would have tailed Hap Judd herself and made sure he didn’t miss their meeting.
“I got more important things to do right now than bird-dog some pervert who thinks he’s the next James Dean. Call if you get detoured and end up lost, Amelia Earhart.”
Lucy got off the phone and picked up her pace, thought about checking on her aunt, and then thought about the number she’d written down on her kneeboard. Maybe she should call the supervisor before she left the airport. Maybe it would be better to wait until tomorrow and call the ATC manager or, better yet, complain to the FAA and get the guy sent to refresher training. She was seething as she thought about what he’d broadcast over the tower’s frequency, making sure everybody on it heard him accuse her of being an incompetent pilot, accuse her of not knowing her way into an airport she flew in and out of several times a week.
She hangared her helicopter and Citation X jet here, for God’s sake. Maybe that was his motivation. To bring her down a notch or two, to rub it in because he’d heard the rumors or was making assumptions about what had happened to her during what everyone was calling the worst financial meltdown since the thirties. Only it wasn’t the crash of Wall Street that had done the real damage. Hannah Starr had. A favor, a gift her father, Rupe, would have wanted Lucy to have. A parting gesture. When Hannah was dating Bobby, that’s all she heard. Lucy this and Lucy that.
“He thought you were Einstein. A pretty Einstein but a tomboy. He adored you,” Hannah had said to Lucy not even six months ago.
Seductive or making fun, Lucy couldn’t tell what Hannah meant or knew or supposed. Rupe had known the facts of Lucy’s life, for damn sure. Thin gold-rimmed glasses, fuzzy white hair, and smoky blue eyes, a tiny man in tidy suits and as honest as he was smart. Didn’t give a shit who was in Lucy’s pants as long as they stayed out of her pockets, as long as it didn’t cost her in any way that counted. He understood why women loved women since he loved them, too, said he might very well be a lesbian because if he were a woman, he’d want women. So, what was anybody, anyway? It’s what’s in your heart, he used to say. Always smiling. A kind, decent man. The father Lucy never had. When he died last May during a business trip to Georgia, from a strain of salmonella infection that ran him down like a cement truck, Lucy had been disbelieving, devastated. How could someone like Rupe be done in by a jalapeño pepper? Was existence contingent on nothing more than the fucking decision to order nachos?
“We miss him terribly. He was my mentor and best buddy.” This past June. Hannah on her balcony, watching million-dollar boats roar by. “You did well with him. You can do even better with me.”
Lucy told her thanks but no thanks, told her more than once. She wasn’t comfortable turning over her entire portfolio to Hannah Starr. No fucking way, Lucy had politely said. At least she’d listened to her gut on that one, but she should have paid attention to what she felt about the favor. Don’t do it. But Lucy did. Maybe it was her need to impress Hannah because Lucy sensed a competition. Maybe it was her wound, the one Hannah stuck her finger in because she was cunning enough to recognize it. As a child Lucy had been abandoned by her father and as an adult didn’t want to be abandoned by Rupe. He had managed her finances from day one and had never been anything but honorable, and he’d cared about her. He was her friend. He would have wanted her to have something special on his way out of this life because she was so special to him.
“A tip he would have given you had he lived long enough,” said Hannah, brushing Lucy’s fingers as she handed her a business card, her practiced lavish scrawl on the back: Bay Bridge Finance and a phone number.
“You were like a daughter to him, and he made me promise to take care of you,” Hannah had said.
How could he have promised any such thing? Lucy realized that too late. He’d gotten sick so fast, Hannah never saw him or spoke to him before he died in Atlanta. Lucy hadn’t asked that question until nine figures later, and now was certain there had been more to it than the considerable kickback Hannah must have gotten for herding rich people to the slaughter. She’d wanted to hurt Lucy for the sake of hurting her, to maim her, to make her weak.
The air traffic controller couldn’t possibly know anything about what had happened to Lucy’s net worth, couldn’t have the slightest knowledge of her damage and degradation. She was being overly anxious, hypervigilant, and irrational, what Berger called pathological, in a foul mood because a surprise weekend she’d planned for months had been a flop and Berger had been distant and irritable, had rebuffed her in every way that mattered. Berger had ignored her in the town house and on Lucy’s way out the door, and onboard the helicopter it hadn’t gotten any better. She hadn’t talked about anything personal the first half of the flight, then spent the second half sending text messages from the helicopter’s cell phone because of Carley Crispin and yellow cabs and who knows what, every slight indirectly leading back to the same damn thing: Hannah. She had taken over Berger’s life and taken something else from Lucy, this time something priceless.
Lucy glanced at the control tower, the glass-enclosed top of it blazing like a lighthouse, and imagined the controller, the enemy sitting in front of a radar screen, staring at targets and beacon codes that represented real human beings in real aircraft, everybody doing the best they could to get where they were going safely, while he barked commands and insults. Piece of shit. She should confront him. She was going to confront someone.
“So, who towed my dolly out and turned it downwind?” she asked the first line crewman she saw inside the FBO.
“You sure?” He was a skinny, pimply kid in oversized insulated coveralls, marshalling wands in the pockets of his Dickies work coat. He wouldn’t look her in the eye.
“Am I sure?” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him right.
“You wanna ask my supervisor?”
“No, I don’t wanna ask your supervisor. This is the third time I’ve landed in a tailwind here in the past two weeks, F. J. Reed.” She read his name tag. “You know what that means? It means whoever’s towing my dolly out of the hangar orients it on the ramp with the tow bar pointed exactly the wrong way-directly downwind, so I land in a tailwind.”
“Not me. I would never orientate something downwind.”
“There’s no tate.”
“Huh?”
“Orient. As in the Far East,” Lucy said. “You know anything about aerodynamics, F. J. Reed? Airplanes, and that includes helicopters, land and take off into the wind, not with the wind on their ass. Crosswinds suck, too. Why? Because wind speed equals airspeed minus ground speed, and the direction of the wind changes the flight trajectory, fucks with the angle of attack. When you’re not into the wind on takeoff, it’s harder to reach translational lift. When you’re landing, you can settle with power, fucking crash. Who’s the controller I was talking to? You know the guys in the tower, right, F. J. Reed?”
“I donno anybody in the tower really.”
“Really?”
“Yes, ma’am. You’re the black chopper with the FLIR and the NightSun. Sort of looks like Homeland Security. But I’d know if you were. We know who comes in and out of here.”
Lucy was sure of it. He was the moron who had towed her dolly out and deliberately turned it downwind because the jerk in the control tower had instructed him or at the very least encouraged him to pick on her, to make a fool of her, to humiliate and belittle her.