“What’s that?” Punky asked, grounding him in the reality of what was at stake.
He looked at her over his shoulder and saw where she was pointing. On a rural highway just left of their nose, he spotted what looked like a car flipped onto its back with a large semitruck sitting idle on the shoulder nearby.
“Let’s take a closer look,” he said, pulling power and dipping the bush plane’s nose to descend from fifteen hundred feet. They jostled through the up drafts and down drafts of the turbulent air sweeping across the crops, and he angled his approach to parallel the road, then reached up to add a notch of flaps.
He slowed to sixty-five knots, then added a second notch as he picked a freshly plowed field and aligned his nose with the orderly rows. Aside from the flashing red and blue lights of police cars surrounding the scene of the accident, the ground beneath them was deserted.
Colt slowed another ten knots, then added the final notch of flaps. He hadn’t touched the throttle since setting the power to begin their descent, but his eyes never stopped scanning his intended landing area, and his mind never stopped processing the dozens of changing variables that went into an off-field landing. If he flew fourth- and fifth-generation fighters like they were an extension of his body, he flew the Carbon Cub like it was his body.
At forty-five knots, he pulled back slightly on the stick and rounded out the approach to slow further and positioned the bush plane for a three-point landing, setting both thirty-five-inch Alaska Bushwheel tires and tail Baby Bushwheel on the ground at the same time. The heavy-duty suspension absorbed most of the impact, but still the plane bucked when he applied brakes and raised the tailwheel off the ground to bleed off the rest of his speed. He came to a stop alongside the inverted car.
“Is that…” Punky’s voice was faint.
Colt could hear her anguish. “What kind of car was Rick driving?” he asked.
She let out a little sob that confirmed his fear. “A silver BMW,” she said.
The police officers on the scene appraised them with professional skepticism. Colt was sure they hadn’t expected an experimental airplane to descend out of the sky and were probably wondering what the newcomers planned on doing. He answered that question by turning off the engine and opening his window.
When a uniformed sheriff's deputy saw him unstrapping, he walked over and raised a hand to stop him. “Whoa,” he said. “You can’t just land that here. This is a crime scene.”
Colt heard him but didn’t care. He climbed down from the front seat and approached the deputy. “What happened?”
“Who are you?” The deputy looked over his shoulder when Punky climbed out of the airplane behind him, then back to Colt. “Who’s she?”
Colt had to admire Punky’s grit. He knew Rick’s phone call had shaken her and seeing the overturned car had only confirmed her fears, but she walked right past Colt and held her credentials up to the deputy. “Special Agent King with NCIS.”
“This is our jurisdiction—”
“And that’s my partner,” she replied, pointing a finger at the wrecked BMW.
The deputy dropped his chin to his chest in a universal sign of respect, then quietly shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am. He was gone before we got here.”
“Is he…”
Colt heard the tremor in her voice. “I don’t think this is a good idea, Punky.”
“I need to see,” she said, her voice vibrating with fear and grief. But the look of determination on her face hadn’t changed even after being presented with concrete evidence that Rick had fallen victim to foul play.
“Ma’am,” the deputy said, holding out his hands to stop her. “You really don’t want to see this.”
Punky moved to step around him, but Colt reached out and gripped her shoulders, gently holding her in place. “Maybe you should listen to him.”
The deputy appraised Colt again. “Who are you?”
“Just a friend,” he replied.
At last, Punky stopped resisting Colt’s attempt to keep her from crossing the road and seeing what was beyond the yellow crime scene tape. But he could tell she hadn’t given up on avenging Rick’s death. “What can you tell me?”
The deputy bit his lip, clearly uncomfortable with sharing information about an ongoing investigation, especially one that was so fresh. He looked at Punky and asked, “Were you investigating somebody at Cal Poly?”
She cocked her head to the side. “What makes you ask that?”
“We found a note that read, ‘Cal Poly faculty, question mark.’”
Punky looked up at Colt, and he shrugged his shoulders in reply. He knew where Cal Poly was, and he could tell it meant something to her, but she wasn’t willing to share that information with the deputy for some reason. She looked back at the deputy, then to the airplane. “Maybe we should leave.”
Colt furrowed his brow, wondering why the sudden change of heart. But he wasn’t about to question her, at least not in front of the deputy. After everything she had been through, he knew she had her reasons. He tried putting himself in her shoes and tried feeling what she felt, but he couldn’t imagine her loss. He knew she was committed to finding Rick’s killer, and he was committed to helping her.
Without another word, Punky started walking back to the plane. Colt hurried to shake the deputy’s hand and thank him for the information, then followed her back to the Carbon Cub. After several paces, he pulled even with her and asked, “Okay, what was that all about?”
“Rick told me he had followed TANDY to San Luis Obispo.”
“And?”
“And if Rick thought somebody at Cal Poly was involved, then it’s something we should look into.”
“We’re not flying to San Luis Obispo,” he said. He was committed to helping her, but he had already entertained her curiosity enough by flying past Point Mugu to reach Santa Maria.
“We don’t have to.”
He puzzled over her answer for a moment, then looked back at the deputy. “Why didn’t you tell him that?”
“Because this is personal.”
Colt let her get situated in the back seat, then climbed back into his perch up front. She watched him run through the startup procedure from memory, setting the mixture to rich and opening the throttle half an inch. He looked to both sides, ensuring the prop arc was clear, then flipped on the master switch.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Let’s do it,” she replied.
“Clear prop!” Colt yelled through the open window.
He engaged the starter, and she watched the Borer prop turn over from the back seat as the engine coughed and caught with a belch of smoke. After turning on the avionics, he worked the stick between his legs in a box pattern to verify the control surfaces were free and functioning as they should.
Satisfied, he slowly advanced the throttle while dancing on the rudder pedals to steer the plane to an open stretch of dirt beyond the plowed rows. Then, without warning, he shoved the throttle to the stop and nosed forward on the stick to lift the tail off the ground. She felt the airspeed increasing, then watched as he reached up for the flap lever while pulling back on the stick at the same time to drop the tailwheel back onto the ground.
The immediate addition of lift from the flaps and increased angle of attack popped the Carbon Cub into the air. Despite her experience in the plane, she felt herself tense as he quickly lowered the nose and held their altitude barely ten feet in the air, accelerating to a comfortable climbing speed. She remained quiet until they had reached seventy miles per hour, when Colt eased back on the stick and let the airplane climb.
“I’m going to get some answers,” she said over the intercom.