Fangs Out (28 page)

“I’ll let you know what I find when I get there,” she said. “I just hope she’s OK.”

I could’ve said, “That makes two of us.” What I said instead was, “You’re a good woman, Savannah.”

She seemed pleased.

As I hung up, a black, unmarked police car rolled into the lot and pulled up beside my rented Escalade so that the driver’s side windows were facing each other. Behind the wheel was Detective Alicia Rosario. She was alone.

“I was just over at Hub Walker’s house,” she said. “Wanted to ask him a few questions on the Bollinger homicide. He said if you were still in town, this is where I’d find you.”

“What was so important, you couldn’t just call me?”

She shut off the engine, got out of her cruiser, and got in on the passenger’s side of my Escalade.

“Hub Walker won the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

“It’s not
Congressional
Medal of Honor, Detective. It’s just ‘Medal of Honor.’ And you don’t ‘win’ it. You
receive
it.”

Rosario gave me a hard sideways look. She didn’t like being lectured.

“Something doesn’t smell right about your Medal of Honor
recipient,”
she said.

I said nothing.

“Hub Walker and Janet Bollinger were involved in a car accident the day after Dorian Munz was executed. Are you aware of that?”

“I heard something along those lines. Doesn’t make Walker a murderer.”

“Agreed,” Rosario said. “But when I was talking to him about what happened to Bollinger, he seemed a little, I don’t know . . .” Her words trailed off.

“Like he knew something you didn’t?”

She nodded as she gazed out at the runway, trying to piece the puzzle together. “Janet Bollinger starts dating Dorian Munz after her good friend, Ruth Walker, breaks up with him. Munz goes on trial for murdering Walker, Bollinger testifies against him, Munz is executed, then Bollinger gets stabbed to death—
stabbed,
not shot. Pulling a trigger, that’s easy. But stabbing somebody to death? Feeling that blade cutting through flesh? Man, you gotta want that person dead pretty bad.”

“So I’ve been told.”

I asked her about the status of Bunny Myers and Myers’ gangbanging cousin, Li’l Sinister, who’d tried to make me fly them to Mexico. Rosario said sheriff’s forensics investigators had found both of their fingerprints inside Janet Bollinger’s apartment. They’d also found two ceramic Hummel figurines in the trunk of Li’l Sinister’s car that they believed were stolen from Bollinger.

“Bunny told me he never went inside the apartment,” I said.

“He told me he did. Him and his cousin. They go in, see Janet Bollinger bleeding on the floor, and rabbit. Zuniga grabs a couple of Hummels on the way out the door.”

“Why steal Hummels?”

“His mother’s birthday was coming up.”

“Nice.”

“I don’t know if Walker was involved in Bollinger’s homicide, directly or not,” Rosario said, “but if we end up going after a Medal of Honor
recipient,
the sensitivity of that, in a military town like this? . . .”

“You never answered my question, Detective.”

Rosario looked over at me with her head cocked.

“What was so important, you drove all the way over here to talk to me in person?”

She hesitated, then turned and locked her eyes on mine. “I get the impression, Mr. Logan, there are things in this case you’re not telling me, either.”

I realized that if I filled her in on what Dutch Holland’s pilot buddy, Al Demaerschalk, had seen that night at the airport, and what FAA inspector Paul Horvath had found inside my engine—that someone had purposely tried to bring down the
Ruptured Duck,
perhaps to thwart a homicide investigation—Rosario would call in the cavalry. That meant the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board and, for all I knew, half the Marine Corps. And that, as far as my ambitions were concerned, was a nonstarter.

I learned serving with Alpha that there is not always strength in numbers. Too many hunters can trample the trail. Often, the most effective way to locate a target is to be small and stealthy, and to leave as few footprints as possible. That was my plan, so that I might find and personally punish whoever had done me and my airplane harm. Vengeance may not be very Buddhist-like, I realized, but then again, neither are
chile verde
burritos.

“I’ve told you everything I can,” I told Rosario.

“Can or will?”

She could smell the lie on me as easily as I did.

P
AUL
H
ORVATH
was leaning into the
Ruptured Duck’s
mangled engine compartment, snapping close-up digital photographs of the carburetor, when I stopped by. I was anxious to have my plane trucked to Rancho Bonita as soon as possible so that Larry could begin piecing it back together, and I could get back to being a flight instructor whose business, putting it diplomatically, afforded abundant room for growth.

“Take a look at this,” Horvath said. “I didn’t notice it until just now.”

He pushed on the head of the carburetor drain plug with the tip of his index finger. The plug jiggled in its socket like a loose screw.

“Whoever put this plug back the last time didn’t tighten it down with a wrench. They just hand-tightened it. Engine vibration would’ve shaken it loose, I’d say no more than fifteen or twenty minutes after takeoff, and there goes your fuel supply. Not only that: now you’ve got flammable gas splashing on a crankcase operating at near 400 degrees centigrade. Gasoline ignites at 257 degrees. You literally would’ve gone down in flames.”

First the engine’s breather line. Now, the carburetor drain plug.

“One way or the other,” Horvath said, “somebody meant to bring this airplane down.”

“Somebody who knows planes.”

The FAA man nodded and asked me if I had any enemies.

“How much time you got?”

Horvath smiled and snapped another photo, his eye twitching. He said he’d spoken with airport administrators and was frustrated to learn that surveillance cameras covered only about half of the gated entrances to Montgomery’s flight line—and that of the cameras in use, many didn’t capture images well after dark. No camera, he said, had been angled in the direction of my airplane the night it was sabotaged. Officials planned to go through what videotape there was, but it would likely take months. As for security gates, only about half were equipped with computerized keypads that recorded the comings and goings of authorized users whom airport officials had assigned individual pass codes. The other gates relied on old-fashioned, three-digit mechanical punch codes that rarely changed.

“The bottom line,” Horvath said, “is that security at most small airports, including this one, leaks like a sieve.”

Should I have shared with him the information that Dutch Holland had conveyed to me, about Al Demaerschalk having witnessed a man cloaked in coveralls and a baseball cap getting out of a pickup truck to open the
Duck
’s cowling? Probably. But, as with Detective Rosario, my desires did not revolve so much around seeing justice served as they did retaliation.

“How long before I get my plane back?”

“Not for awhile.”

“Can you be any more specific?”

“Wish I could, Mr. Logan. It’s not up to me.”

Horvath said he would turn over a final report to his supervisors, detailing his findings on the accident, probably within two weeks. His supervisors would then review the report before kicking it upstairs to FAA headquarters in Washington, D.C. It would be up to the aviation bigwigs there to decide when to release the
Duck
back to my care. The good news, Horvath said, was that his report would indicate the crash was in no way the result of pilot error. It was unavoidable, the apparent consequence of a criminal act.

“If anything, Mr. Logan, you probably deserve a commendation. That was a fine piece of airmanship, getting back down without incurring any injuries to your passengers or anyone on the ground. You should be proud of yourself.”

“I just want my plane back, Mr. Horvath.”

He nodded like he understood what was in my head.

D
EFENSE ATTORNEY
Charles Dowd said he had an urgent need to speak with me. About what he wouldn’t reveal over the phone, but the anxiety in his voice was palpable as I walked from the hangar housing the
Ruptured Duck
to my rental car.

“Is there somewhere we can meet? I’d prefer it be away from my office.”

“I’m at Montgomery Airport,” I said “There’s a Mexican restaurant inside the terminal, upstairs. We could meet there if you want.”

Dowd paused. “I’m not too familiar with that part of town.”

Not familiar with that part of town?
San Diego may be a large city, but it’s not exactly Beijing. Hadn’t Dowd mentioned when we first met that he’d been practicing law locally for more than twenty-five years? How could he claim not to know his way around a community after living and working in it a quarter-century? Either he didn’t get out much or he was lying. But why be evasive? Had Dowd been involved in what happened to my airplane and now wanted to throw me off whatever trail might lead me back to him? For his own safety, I hoped not.

“We can meet wherever you want,” I said.

The attorney suggested a bar in Imperial Beach that was located, curiously enough, less than three blocks from the late Janet Bollinger’s apartment. I told him I was on my way.

“I’ll be there,” he said.

I had no idea what Dowd wanted to discuss, or whether he posed a legitimate threat. Still, if I learned anything toiling for Uncle Sugar, it’s that the quickest way to end up on the wrong side of the grass is to assume that anyone is innocent. That includes attorneys. Especially attorneys.

Driving from the airport eastbound toward the 805 freeway, I spotted a small scuba diving supply shop and pulled in. The manager was about my age. He looked like he’d spent about twenty years too long in the sun.

“Help you find something?”

I told him I needed a knife. He asked me with a grin if I was worried about sharks.

“You could say that.”

He unlocked the back of a display case, unsheathed a knife, and laid it on the glass countertop.

“Top-of-the-line. Pure titanium for durability, sharpness, hardness, strength and abrasion resistance. One hundred percent corrosion resistant and guaranteed not to rust. That’s why it’s the official knife of Delta and the Green Berets.”

Spoken like a true chair-borne commando. Anyone familiar with Special Forces knows that when it comes to knives, nothing is official. Operators carry whatever feels best in their hands. I counted among my friends any number of hard-chargers who never even packed a knife. Why get yourself all bloody, they reasoned, when the government issues you unlimited bullets and silencer-equipped firearms?

“How much?” I asked, hefting the blade.

“With tax, you’re looking at about $115.”

I peered into the display case and pointed to a virtually identical knife.

“What about that one?”

“No self-respecting operator would ever be caught dead using that knife.”

“Humor me.”

“It’s on sale. Twenty-two bucks and change.”

“Music to my ears. I’ll take it.”