Don't Know Jack (15 page)

Gaspar came up behind her and flashed his badge, too.

“What’s the problem?” he said.

Kim held her breath while the agents looked them both over. In the corner of her eye she saw the plane begin to move.

“You’re too late,” one of the TSA guys said.

“Let’s pretend we’re not,” Kim replied.

The phone was still buzzing.

Time stood still.

Then the first agent said, “OK, hurry.”

Agent two opened the departure door wide enough to slip through. Kim ran. Gaspar followed. The door sucked shut behind them. The boss’s phone bounced against Kim’s hip as she ran. She turned the final corner and saw the jet way separating from the plane’s open door. She stopped at the widening gap. Cold November air blew into the tunnel. The flight attendant was on the phone in the cabin. To the gate agent, presumably. She called out to the jet way engineer. The jet way stopped moving. The plane stopped moving.

Four feet of empty space.

Maybe five.

The stewardess said, “You can make it. I’ve done it lots of times.”

Kim lifted her computer bag off the travel bag and telescoped its handle down. She grabbed one heavy bag in each hand, swung both, and tossed them over the void. The stewardess set them out of the way. Kim breathed in, breathed out, rocked back and forth like a varsity high jumper, and leapt across the empty black hole into the plane. The stewardess caught her by the arm and then they both moved out of the way to let Gaspar follow.

Gaspar had a problem.

He was right-handed. Therefore he would want to push off from his right leg. But his right leg was the one with the limp. And even if he could push off with his left, would his right leg be sturdy enough to stick his landing?

“Can’t we go back?” Kim asked.

“You don’t want to know what would happen if we did that,” the stewardess said.

So Kim braced her foot at the raised edge of the bulkhead doorframe. She grasped the molded handle on the inside frame with her left hand and leaned her body outside, into the frosty abyss, jutting her right arm toward him as far as she could reach.

“
Now
, Gaspar,” she called.

“On my way,” he called back.

In one fluid motion, as if they’d choreographed the move and practiced for decades, he backed off ten feet, and transferred his heavier bag to his left hand, and slung his computer bag over his back, and came in at a run. He got his bags swinging for momentum, he got his feet in place, and he pushed off with his right leg.

His right leg didn’t hold.

No elegant arcing trajectory.

The weight of his bags jerked him onward while gravity pulled him down. Kim lunged and grabbed his left forearm in her right hand and she pulled with all her 97 pounds of body weight and hauled him in. His left foot landed inside the bulkhead frame. He sprawled on the galley floor. She thought he might have said, “Thanks,” with something very vulnerable in his voice. Something she didn’t want to be there. Not now. Not ever. For her sake, as well as his.

But whatever, they were on the plane.

Not that being on another plane was a good thing, Kim felt.

Gaspar struggled to his feet, breathing hard, and he said, “Thanks,” again.

Kim said, “From now on, we’ll answer to Karl and Helen.”

“What?”

“You know the Flying Wallendas are Germans, right?”

She got the grin she’d hoped for. He said, “Yeah, Gertrude. I know.”

She felt better, as if equilibrium had been restored. She watched the flight attendant secure the hatch. If the hatch failed, the plane would crash. She couldn’t move until the hatch was securely closed.

Her cell phone was still ringing.

 She watched the attendant lock the door lever and test it. Then she moved.

Seat 1A was open.

She hated 1A.

Too much open space around 1A.

From 1A, she could see the galley and the door to the flight deck. She could hear the flight attendants talking among themselves or on the phone with the cockpit crew.

In 1A she’d be the first to know when something went wrong.

No.

She glanced back. “You take 1A,” she told Gaspar, before she hurried back to 3D.

She shoved her computer bag under the seat in front of her and left her larger bag in the aisle for the attendant to heave into the overhead. She belted herself in as tightly as possible and grabbed both armrests and closed her eyes and prayed.

The cell phone had stopped ringing.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Atlanta, Georgia

November 2

7:45 a.m.

Gaspar picked a full sized sedan at the rental counter in Atlanta. A black Crown Vic. The kind of car Kim hated because it was too big, and too low to the ground. She’d have to pull the seat all the way up to reach the pedals. Even then, she couldn’t see the road beyond the long front hood. Not that she needed to worry. Gaspar wouldn’t let her drive anyway.

“Much better,” he said. “This is the kind of car G-men ought to drive, Tila Tequila.”

“Absolutely. Unless the airbag deploys and suffocates me, the most serious problem is a seatbelt that scrapes my neck and cuts my head off.”

He looked over at her scowling face and laughed. “Should I go back for a booster seat?”

She bent at the waist and scooted forward to reach her travel bag in the foot-well, and rooted around to find what she needed.

“Seriously?” Gaspar asked. “Do you want me to get a different vehicle?  I’m glad to do it, but now’s the time to say so.”

“Not necessary.”  She pulled the seatbelt slack, and anchored the small alligator clamp from her bag onto the belt webbing immediately below the retractor. She settled into the seat and checked her adjustments. The shoulder harness now snugged across her body instead of her throat. She left the clamp’s wings up to be sure it would fly off in a collision and allow the retractor to do its job.

“German engineering at its finest,” he said.

“Precisely,” she said. She tested the harness again, flattened her hand, chopped her forearm from the elbow straight ahead, and said, “Engage.”

They stopped at a drive-through for coffee and greasy egg wraps, and then they joined the interstate traffic heading south. Sixty-six miles to the Margrave exit, according to the first road sign Kim noticed. The coffee was bad and the food was worse, but they were both hungry.

Gaspar chewed his eggs a while and flushed them down with the coffee before he asked, “Tell me again what Roscoe said about Sylvia Black.”

“She said a U.S. Marshall and a lawyer showed up at the jail around midnight with a federal court order. The desk guy released Sylvia into their custody. Now, they can’t find Sylvia, the lawyer’s office doesn’t answer the phone, and the Marshall’s office said no order ever existed.”

“So we got a dead lawyer, a phony Marshall, and a fake order, right?”

“Exactly.”

“I know these small town departments don’t always put the brightest bulb on the desk at night, but Brent seemed a lot savvier than that to me. He must have believed the two strangers, right?  So we must be missing something.”

“I’m not sure Brent was on duty. Remember he’d worked the night before and then straight through Harry Black’s shift, too. Once Brent took Sylvia back to the station and finished her intake, Roscoe might have sent him home.”

“What kind of court order was it?”

“Roscoe was a little irrational during the phone call, remember,” she said.

Gaspar shook his head, as if to clear out the cobwebs. “Doesn’t make any sense. The desk guy’s maybe new on the job, and yet he didn’t call Roscoe first?  Before letting a couple of strangers take his one and only inmate?”

Early morning sunlight bathed the countryside in pink and blue. Fall harvests were finished. Red dirt fields were wet mud saturated by yesterday’s rainstorm. “I don’t get it, either. We’ll have an opportunity to ask Roscoe shortly, I’m sure.”

They came up behind a grandpa poking along in an ancient wood-paneled truck loaded heavy with hogs. He was having trouble holding the truck in his lane. Maybe the truck was overloaded or maybe Gramps was just a bad driver. Regardless, his cargo’s stench was unavoidable.

Kim pinched her nostrils between thumb and forefinger.

Gaspar said, “No kidding,” and pulled out to pass on the left.

Gramps didn’t want to be passed, though. When Gaspar got alongside him, Gramps sped up and kept pace for half a mile or so. At the higher speed the truck’s random weaving was forcing Gaspar toward the median.

“Oh, for cripe sakes, Gramps, slow down,” Gaspar said. “You’re going to splatter that bacon all over the asphalt.”

“He can’t hear you, you know,” Kim said.

“Sorry, bad habit. Lot of crazy drivers in Miami. Griping at them is better than shooting at them.”

“Sometimes,” Kim said.

“Crazy old fool,” Gaspar said, but he returned the Crown Vic to a more reasonable cruising speed once Gramps was too far behind to catch up again. They ran along in the fast lane for a mile or so. Kim saw muddy fields and billboards advertising outlet malls, carpet discounts, and pecans farther down the road. Every now and then, an abandoned vehicle on the shoulder or in the median. Typical Interstate. Nothing more or less. Traffic cams mounted high enough to catch traffic scenes made her feel more secure, as always.

Gaspar asked, “Should we make some calls?  On the court order?  Easy enough to chase that down before we get to Margrave.”

“Not necessary,” Kim said. “Roscoe will have done all that by the time we get there. But she won’t find anything.”

“Because?”

“Because there’s nothing to find. There was no order. No U.S. Marshall would show up with a private lawyer in tow, or the other way around. If any part of that story was legitimate, they would have coordinated with Roscoe, at least.”

“The whole thing sounds like government work, doesn’t it?  There are national security courts that issue secret orders. Inmates do get picked up from local jails these days. Crime doesn’t happen only during business hours, either.”

Kim sighed. The sun had come out and it was hurting her eyes. She didn’t know where she’d put her sunglasses. “We’re talking about Sylvia Black here. Not a terrorist or a spy.”

“Good point. But whoever she is, Sylvia did not belong in Harry Black’s house. That’s for sure.”

“She didn’t belong anywhere in Margrave. But what reason would a national security court have to move Sylvia to federal custody?  She’d have to be a fugitive or in need of protection.”  Kim closed her eyes against the sun’s glare.

“Witness protection?”

“Unlikely. Sylvia didn’t strike me as valuable enough to be living under witness protection. Even if she had been, a single U.S. Marshall wouldn’t show up with a private lawyer in the middle of the night and grab her after she murdered her husband.”