Flat Spin (2 page)

The little four-cylinder Lycoming thrummed to life with a death-cheating growl.

I eased back on the yoke, rolled in some trim and dumped full flaps as I kicked the rudder and banked the
Duck
hard left, keeping one eye on the airspeed while clearing the roof of the Rancho Bonita Athletic Club by less than ten feet. We turned final with an eight-knot crosswind and touched down on Runway One-Seven left like a butterfly with sore feet. If the theater critics in the tower were watching, they never said a word.

“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, where are you parking today?” the controller asked pleasantly as we rolled out.

“Charlie Lima’s going to Premier Aviation.”

My answer was met with scratchy static through the headphones. After a few seconds, the controller asked again: Where were we parking? He obviously hadn’t heard my response to his question. The
Duck
’s ancient, unpredictable communication radios were acting up yet again. I smacked the audio panel where I always smacked it with the heel of my hand, keyed the mic button on my control yoke and said, “Charlie Lima to Premier Aviation.”

“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, roger. Exit on Echo, cross One-Seven left and contact ground, point six.”

I repeated his instructions back to him, tapped the toe brakes and jockeyed the plane off the active runway. After we crossed Runway One-Seven left, I stopped short of the parallel taxiway and dialed in 121.6 on my number-two radio.

“Rancho Bonita ground, Cessna four Charlie Lima, clear of One-Seven left at Echo, taxi Premier.”

“Cessna four Charlie Lima, taxi as requested.”

Charise was gulping air like a gaffed tuna. Her eyeliner had run with her tears, painting a thin black stripe down each cheek. The effect reminded me of one of those annoying street mimes always trying to feel their way out of imaginary boxes.

“I’ve never been that close to death,” Charise said, “and I don’t want to ever be again!”

“Well, Charise, I believe it was Cicero who once said, ‘Anybody is liable to err, but only a fool persists in error.’ We learn from our mistakes, make sure we don’t repeat them.”

She was looking at me with her mouth open. “You’re saying it was
my
fault?”

“You pulled the mixture control, Charise. The engine doesn’t like that. The engine will take its ball and go home.”

“Well, maybe I did or maybe I didn’t, but if I’m not mistaken, Logan, I believe
you’re
the flight instructor. You should’ve
instructed
me. I mean, my God, what am I paying you all this money for?”

She wiped the tears from her cheeks, smearing the black streaks and transferring eyeliner onto her fingers, then noticed her fingertips and panicked anew. She reached into the backseat, retrieved a gold compact from an alligator skin clutch and went to work on her face with a silk handkerchief, attacking her smudged cheeks like a monkey scratching itself. She was wearing wedge sandals with four-inch cork heels and $350 blue jeans that looked like they were sprayed on. Her low-cut knit top was cream-colored and two sizes too small, accentuating a set of baby feeders that either her ex, Dr. Nip/Tuck, designed or the Lord did when Mrs. Lord wasn’t looking. Her lips were alluring little bee-stung pillows. The skin under her chin was pulled Miss Teen USA tight. Whatever Charise MacInerny may have looked like before the advent of modern cosmetic surgery, she was definitely slammin’ now.

“To tell you the truth,” she said, angling her little mirror this way and that, making sure she’d scrubbed off all the errant eyeliner, “I’m not sure this whole flying thing is right for me. I mean, you actually have to
remember
things.”

There was a time when I would have told her she was wrong, that nearly anybody can learn to be a pilot. And even though I knew full-well after our first flight lesson that Charise MacInerny’s near-total lack of hand-eye coordination, not to mention smarts, placed her solidly outside the “nearly anybody” envelope, we would have gone up again and again. At forty-eight dollars an hour, another hundred an hour for the plane rental, plus fuel, I would have taken her for all she was worth. And, after she’d logged about fifty hours and had yet to solo because the idea of having to actually take off and land a small airplane all by herself still freaked the living Botox out of her, I would have politely suggested that perhaps she was better suited to other, more earthbound recreational pursuits.

But that was the old me. Before I regrew that thing priests call a conscience and the Buddha calls enlightenment. Don’t get me wrong. The new me still needed the money as much as the old me. Even more so. There comes a point in life, however, when you realize it’s not always about the bucks. It’s only about the bucks most of the time.

“Well, Charise, there are always sailing lessons.”

“
Sailing lessons
? Are you kidding? I get seasick in the Jacuzzi.”

She touched up her lips with one of those liquid lipstick pen things, making sure the coverage was perfect with a dab of her manicured pinkie finger, then shed her headset and brushed out her gilded cougar mane.

I steered the
Duck
into an open tie-down spot along taxiway Bravo in front of Premier Aviation, one of two fixed-base operations on the field catering to mostly rich, corporate flyers. I turned off the avionics master switch and leaned the mixture until the engine sputtered and quit. After we got out of the airplane, I braced the nose wheel with a pair of black rubber chocks sitting on the tarmac.

Charise handed me her logbook without a word. I wrote down the date, the aircraft type, the plane’s tail number, the total time we’d flown that day (1.2 hours), the amount of instruction she’d received (1.2 hours), and the number of touch-and-go’s we’d made (7). In the “Remarks and Endorsements” section I nearly wrote, “Came perilously close to buying the farm,” but instead put, “Practiced emergency procedures.”Then, for grins, I jotted, “We’ll always have Paris.”

The old me might’ve suggested we go grab an umbrella drink on the beach after sharing so harrowing a near-death experience. Maybe we would’ve ended up at her place or, God forbid, mine. I was no Brad Pitt, but I was no Meatloaf, either. I still owned my own hair and all my teeth. The plumbing still worked just fine, thank you very much. I was a solid six-one and 190 pounds, a mere five pounds more than I’d been back in the day, snagging footballs for the Air Force Academy and studying Sartre, a rare Humanities major on a campus thick with geeky aeronautical engineers. But, like I said, that was the old me. I signed the entry and handed her back her logbook.

“Well,” I said, “at least it wasn’t boring.”

“You can say that again.”

“At least it wasn’t boring.”

She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. It beat a firm handshake any day of the week.

“Take care of yourself, Logan.”

“Don’t go changing, Charise.”

I watched her glide into the parking lot where a tall, tanned man in his late thirties was leaning against a silver Lamborghini Diablo convertible, smoking a cigarette. He wore a dark-colored suit with a crisp white dress shirt and a rep necktie striped blue and gold, cinched way too tight. His dark hair matched the gloss of his wingtips. His eyes were cloaked behind a pair of cool guy Ray-Bans.

A personal injury attorney. Had to be. There has to be more puke-inducing ways to earn a living than chasing ambulances, I thought to myself, though none came readily to mind.

He flicked away his smoke as Charise approached. She showed him what I’d written in her logbook. He nodded like he almost cared, then flashed me a stony smile as he held open the passenger door for her on his $200,000 road rocket. After she was comfortably settled in, he gingerly closed the door, then hustled around to the driver’s side, glancing my way to make sure I was still watching. He hopped in, fired up the Lamborghini and roared out onto Mayfield Place, grinding the transmission as he upshifted. Charise never looked back.

Oh, well.

I took my time tying down the
Duck
. Over at the commercial terminal, a turboprop taxied in and disgorged its passengers. High overhead, a turkey vulture wheeled unsteadily in the morning air. Two black SUVs drove onto the ramp and parked beside a Dassault Falcon 7X. A large, middle-age woman in sweat pants, who looked very much like Rancho Bonita’s most famous resident, the star of a wildly successful TV talk show and publishing empire, stepped out of the lead SUV. She chatted up one of her personal assistants while others transferred a queen’s procession of designer luggage onto the jet.

I wanted to yell, “You go, girl!” but somehow restrained myself.

Had I been able to afford my own personal assistant, I might’ve checked in to see what was next on my busy schedule. Truth was, I needed no reminder to know that I had nothing going the rest of the day. Or the rest of the week, for that matter. I was fresh out of students, with no immediate prospect of any new ones. If I were a religious man, which I’m not, at least not in a conventional sense, I would’ve prayed that my monthly retirement check from Uncle Sugar was waiting in my mailbox when I got home. A breakfast burrito loomed large on my radar, then maybe a nap.

The last thing on my mind was murder.

T
WO

I
t was not yet nine a.m. and already eighty degrees when I walked in off the flight line that morning. Weird weather for early November if you live in North Dakota. Not so weird for the central coast of California.

Inside Larry Kropf ’s cavernous hangar, where Marine mechanics once toiled over gull-winged Corsair fighters destined for war in the Pacific, it was dank and cool. The place smelled of grease and history. Larry was balanced on a step stool, leaning precariously into the engine compartment of a V-tail Beech. All I could see of him were his elbows and the north end of his ass crack, peeking out the back of his low-riding, navy blue work pants.

“Somebody’s in your office,” he said without looking up. “Been there awhile.”

“Did they bring balloons?”

“Say again?”

“Publishers Clearing House. I’m a Super Prize finalist. This could be it, Larry. My ship has docked at last.”

Larry hitched up his pants and descended the stool gingerly, grimacing with each painful step while pushing his Buddy Holly glasses back up his nose with a finger thick as a Wisconsin brat. He was a wide man with furry forearms and a Grizzly Adams beard dense enough to hide small animals. His nose was flat and veined, tenderized by one too many bar fights and far too much tequila. Stretched across his cannonball belly was an oil-smeared gray T-shirt that said, “Guns Don’t Kill People, Postal Workers Do.”

“Didn’t see no balloons,” he said, rummaging through the drawers of a rolling tool chest stationed beside the Beechcraft’s wing.

“No balloons? Then screw ’em. I
was
gonna subscribe to
Cat Fancy
, up my chances of winning, but they can forget about it now.”

“Good. Then maybe you can finally pay me that back rent you owe me.”

“I’ll get you your money, Larry, as soon as I can. You know I’m good for it.”

“Only thing I know is, you haven’t paid me a dime in two months, Logan. Not to mention that spot weld I done on your exhaust stack and that’s been, what, four months?”

“Three months. But who’s counting, right?”

“I got bills to pay, too, OK?” Larry said. “I got a knee needs replacing. I got a kid needs braces. Five grand to get her teeth fixed so when she turns sixteen, I can stay up all night debating whether to take a shotgun to her pimply little prom date after he brings her home four hours late, or de-ball him with a pair of channel locks.”

“You know, Larry, I’m no psychotherapist, but I believe those would be called
issues
.”

“What about the fucking money you owe me, Logan? What about
those
issues?” He grabbed a socket wrench from the tool cabinet and climbed back up the step stool, pissed and in pain. “You know, Logan, I used to think you were a funny guy.
You
obviously think you’re a funny guy. But your bullshit’s getting pretty goddamn old. You’re a grown-ass man. Stiffing honest people. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

I was. And then some. If I’d had the dough, I would’ve paid him every penny I owed him right then and there. But what little I had in the bank was barely enough to cover next month’s rent on my apartment, let alone the rent I owed Larry for the cramped, converted storage room I sublet from him in his hangar and called a flight school. The
Ruptured Duck
, my four-seat 172 with its unreliable radios, hail-dimpled wings, and faded orange, yellow and white color scheme that practically screamed 1973, the year the plane came off Cessna’s Wichita assembly line, was the only inanimate object I owned of any value, and I’d already borrowed against it—twice.

“Look, I’ve got a government pension check coming in,” I said. “We’re talking $920. I’ll give you half as soon as I get it.”

“Sure you will.” He shook his head with disgust and disappeared once more into the Beech’s engine compartment. “You need to find yourself a job, Logan, a
real
job, cuz this flight instructor gig obviously ain’t working out too good for you.”

What can you say to the truth? I said nothing.

“I hear they’re hiring over at Sears,” Larry said.

“They’re always hiring over at Sears,” I said.