Hot Point (4 page)

Denise tried to see Vern more clearly. His dim silhouette looked the same. Mr. Casual and Easygoing being a former U.S. Coast Guard helicopter pilot was pretty hard to reconcile.

Though it did make a certain kind of sense. He'd been steady as a rock while his chopper trailed smoke. The sideslip to check his smoke trail and then straightening out without ever breaking formation spoke of lots of practice with emergency situations.

Maybe there was more to Vern Taylor than just being a charming flyboy with nothing but sex on his mind.

* * *

Vern had to make a joke. Something—no matter how feeble—before Denise's proximity totally overwhelmed his common sense and any shred of decency a man had to maintain around such a woman. This wasn't some bar babe. This was Denise frickin' Conroy.

“Your precious helicopter had a rough childhood.”

Yeah, there was a distraction that had possibilities. He'd been hyperconsciously aware of her from the moment he'd touched her arm after spooking her. Which was not a good thing. First off, Jasper was an okay guy, mostly. Though Vern had never much liked him. But if he was Denise's choice, he must be okay.

“You know”—he patted the chopper's main console as if soothing an unruly child—“street thug, gang wars, drive-by shootings. It's a tough life being an Army chopper, but, hey, someone has to do it.”

He let his mouth ramble as he breathed her in. Her scent, a crazy mix of woman and mechanic's grease, of hot metal and warm female, was making his head spin worse than when the #2 PRI SERVO PRESS warning had blinked on.

“This hose…” She brushed a long, delicate finger across the bullet crease as if to confirm its existence.

He felt the motion through his fingertips where he still held the failed piece of hose. It felt as if he'd been electroshocked where, well, you weren't supposed to feel for another man's woman.

“It must have caught a nick, but not bad enough to fail. Just enough to create a weak point. It was on the side away from what I could see with a visual inspection.” Denise had a soft voice, all out of keeping with the tough exterior she projected. There was a gentleness to it he'd never noticed before.

“Right.” Vern kicked his brain to keep it running because his own personal Auxiliary Power Unit was thinking thoughts that made him glad it was dark in the chopper's cockpit. “It was lurking until the time was right.”

“Until the time was right? For what?”

“Sure.” He swallowed hard and wished she'd lean back in her seat. He wished he was still in the predictable poker game he could see continuing under the camp lights. If he had stayed there rather than coming over to check on how she was doing, she wouldn't be mere inches away making every nerve jangle on full alarm. “It, uh, was waiting for a chance to really embarrass me on my second day solo.”

“You think this bit of hose was lying in wait for you before failing? You are going to take it personally? It's just a hose.”

“I take everything personally.”

By the shimmer of glistening hair shifting and catching the reflection of distant lights, he could see her tilt her head sideways to inspect him.

“Especially when it tries to kill me,” he added.

Which is exactly what she was doing to him. He slipped the bit of hose into his pocket to give his hands something to do.

Unable to sleep, Denise drove back from her town house at the foot of the mountain a couple hours before first light and started working on Firehawk Oh-Three. The night was cool but not chilly, one of the last warm fall nights. No one here except her, her helicopters, and the sleeping forest. She could unwind and focus in the silence.

It didn't take her long to find the patch over the hole made through the hull's skin by the bullet that had nicked the hydraulic hose. After that, her inspection went much faster. She went to every single patched hole and poked around until she could figure out the trajectory of whatever had punched it. This craft had endured a rough life. She cataloged thirty-four hits that penetrated the hull and several dozen grazes that had only creased the metal skin. Maybe that wasn't much by Army standards, but it was thirty-four too many in her world.

Bullets really creeped her out. Her mom had been shot in a grocery store holdup and had died in her dad's arms. It was months before he stopped flinching if Denise dropped something, like one of her schoolbooks. She went from a precocious nine to an adult ten in those same weeks with no one noticing, not even her.

Well, this helicopter had been a weapon of war, and it had been shot. She hoped that whoever had flown in it was okay.

One by one she traced each of the thirty-four lines of impact. By the inside shape of the penetration—behind the outside patch—she was able to estimate the angle of trajectory on each hit. She found scuffs and creases where rounds had hit secondary surfaces and finally spent the last of their energy. No fragments or leftover rounds. The Army mechanics had done a good job of it.

There was a long scrape on the shaft that drove the rear rotor, but it was utterly meaningless. No damage done beyond the cosmetic. Around sunrise she found a spot where bullet number thirty-two had taken the insulation off a wire for a weapons' system harness that no longer had any weapon to connect to. She replaced the wire anyway.

“You been here all night, Wrench?” She'd spotted Vern when he was halfway across the field from the bunkhouse, so his silent approach didn't alarm her this time. He came up to lean casually against the nose of the helicopter.

He wore an unzipped fleece jacket against the cool morning. The open front revealed a fire T-shirt from a blaze two years ago that had seen a few too many washings. The material was so thin that it took no great effort to imagine the man underneath. None! So she looked away and returned her attention to the last two bullet trajectories. That didn't stop her from thinking about how nice six feet and one inch of lean and casual pilot looked in the first light of day.

“Only for a few hours.” When he asked what she'd figured out, she eyed him carefully. “Do you actually want to know, or are you merely being polite?”

His grin was easy. “Bit of both. I'm interested, though I don't expect to understand a tenth of what you do. I'm a lowly pilot who breaks choppers, not some, you know, ‘Goddess-Incarnate Mechanic'”—he put air quotes around the title—“who can actually fix them.”

“I should get a bumper sticker.”

“I'll get it for you. The polite part is terribly self-serving. If I show interest in what you're doing to my helicopter”—he let it drag out making it absolutely clear that he knew it was the first half of a really lame pickup line—“then you're just that much more likely to take really good care of my chopper. Anything that makes you take more care of the chopper is good for the preservation of my skin. I'm rather attached to my skin. I like having it intact.”

She had to laugh. Okay, so he hadn't gone for the pickup line about him showing interest to make her like him more. Which actually did make her like him more. She'd bet that he knew that too, but found she didn't care.

He was an attentive student as she used the last two bullet holes to demonstrate what she'd been doing. She really did appreciate a pilot showing interest in what she did; so many of them didn't. The mechanic, male or female, blended into the background for most pilots.

Mickey and Gordon might not even have known she existed if she'd been a guy; though they were both such hounds that she'd have to be seriously “plain Jane” not to have them notice her being a woman. Bruce was no better. Vanessa was still so overwhelmed at being hired by MHA—to fill the MD500 that Vern had vacated when moving to the Firehawk—that a mechanic was still wholly invisible to her, male or female.

Mark Henderson treated everyone with equal respect, so equal that Denise felt invisible to him too. Emily and Jeannie certainly knew who took care of their birds, and she'd count both as friends, as much as she ever had friends.

But Vern saw her.

Really saw her, which was both uncomfortable and interesting. And both emotional responses were for the same reason: they evoked the question of “Why?”

She studied him without really looking at him as he held the last panel in place for her to screw back down. If she had an emergency and needed help, Vern was probably the one she'd call without thinking about how she might be imposing. That too was a revelation she wasn't expecting.

Everyone's life was a checklist. Like the inspection list on her Firehawk repair report, like her dad's tally of what chores were owed or skipped when she was a kid. Everything had been a balance sheet with Jasper. It was how life worked. Though with him, she'd always been on the losing side for reasons she still didn't understand. Some failure in her attempts to be a woman when she was actually just a mechanic.

Except Vern didn't work that way. He simply gave. She'd witnessed it a hundred times. Someone was moving and Vern was the first to volunteer to haul boxes. Someone was down sick? Vern would fill in no matter how nasty or dull the chore.

Even yesterday's flight. He'd flown at the back of the returning Firehawks' formation. She'd bet it wasn't because he was the newest. It was because he hadn't thought it was of any importance where he flew. Emily would always take the lead, part of being an ex-Army major, and Jeannie would always take Emily's wing position. Vern was fine with bringing up the rear.

A guy with no ego on the line, which ranked most unusual in her experience. Unusual? Totally unheard of.

She focused on anchoring the last of the screws to finish her inspection on bullet number thirty-four as Betsy's bell announced breakfast. Its peal heralded the sunrise and flushed the early-bird crows and jays abruptly into the morning sky.

Vern's hands remained steady and patient while she finished her work, even though they stood close enough that she could hear his stomach grumble when the vagaries of the morning air wafted the smells of bacon and coffee across the field.

“Coffee,” he moaned quietly like a pitiful child, but he kept the piece of bodywork in place as she drove the last screws home, then double-checked that she hadn't missed any.

She finished, signed the bottom of the log on her tablet, then made her dad's hand sign for “okay to fly” as she did at the end of every repair.

“What was that?”

“What was what?” No one had ever noticed or asked about that. Vern was noticing everything about her. Jasper sure hadn't. By the end of their relationship, she'd been near enough invisible. Might have been pretty invisible at the start, now that she thought about it. It was as if even being around Vern was slowly shining a flashlight on quite how pitiful her relationship with Jasper had been. “It's a hand sign my dad made up.”

“Do it again.”

She wanted to refuse. It was their private sign, only her and Dad, but she did it again.

“Slower.”

This time when she made the gesture, he copied it fairly accurately.

“What does it mean?”

“It means everything is okay. It comes from American Sign Language.”

He leaned back against the just-repaired panel, crossed his arms, and made it clear he wasn't leaving until she explained. Irritating man.

“Fine. You know how to make an ‘I love you' sign?”

“Sure. Everyone knows that.” He held up his palm facing her with index finger and pinkie raised, the middle two fingers folded down, and his thumb to the side. Then he realized he was aiming it at her and jerked his hand down so quickly that he rapped his elbow sharply against the chopper and winced.

“If”—she spoke to cover her smile—“you turn that palm down and jab it forward twice, you have the sign for an airplane. Dad turned it sideways, thumb up. When he swings his hand to the side and up, it indicates an airplane repair is done and the plane is ready to fly.”

Vern did the gesture that way. Then inspected his hand. “No. You did something different.”

“Do you have to be so damned observant?”

He simply grinned down at her. “Mom's wanted me to be an artist. I was terrible, but I must have picked up something. Now give.”

She sighed, seeing no way out other than telling him to go jump. “Fine! I add the middle finger tight beside the index finger, which makes the letter
H
for helicopter. It says everything's okay in my ‘happy helicopter land.' Ugh! Please tell me I didn't say that aloud.”

“You did.”

No condescension that she could detect, but a grin worthy of Dennis Quaid it was so big.

“Or are you telling your helicopter that you love it? They like that, you know. It makes them want to fluff their little rotors.”

She shook her head to bring her hair forward and mask the heat rising to her cheeks. Denise could feel him grinning down at her. “So?” She knew she sounded like a petulant child.

“So,” Vern drawled out easily, “you love your helicopters. That's a good thing.”

A glance up at him showed that he wasn't teasing her, or not much. If he was, it was kindly. He understood. No one, not even her dad, had understood that about her.

Then Vern stood up and nodded toward the tables, which were rapidly filling up with people cramming down calories before the morning flights took off at thirty minutes after sunrise. As simple as that, he invited her to eat with him and they fell in together to head for the chow line.

She usually ate with her team and discussed upcoming maintenance or the latest FAA service bulletins. Or by herself.

She had a sudden urge that she couldn't explain to herself to make her “all okay in happy helicopter land” sign.

* * *

Vern knew he was being utterly ridiculous as he hovered over Brewer Reservoir east of Madras, Oregon. He was a dozen feet above the water, and the downwash of his Firehawk's rotors was tearing the water white with an outward-expanding wave of sparkling ripples. The hot midday sun that had baked the semiarid desert especially dry this season was also beautiful to watch as it lit the water. This was one of those moments that his mother would love to come and paint—that mixture of beauty and powerful change.

He lowered the Hawk's twenty feet of six-inch siphon hose into the water and hit the pumps. Forty seconds to take on a thousand gallons. And he was counting the gallons by the hundreds in a singsong voice that sounded silly even to him. MC Hammer had probably never in his life rapped about gallons of water loading into a helicopter. Good thing he was alone so that someone didn't lock him up for foolishness.

He often whistled or hummed while he flew. The beat of music lent itself well to the pulse and rhythm of flying. In the little MD500, he was more likely to whistle something quick and upbeat, maybe some of his mom's rock and roll. Music was her main career; he'd grown up sitting on his dad's knee watching her play at dances, in bars, and at small concert halls around the Northwest.

But the Firehawk called for something more serious and substantial, like Gregorian chants maybe. Except he didn't know any, and MCH didn't feel right, so he switched to Little Big Town because, damn, those women could sing even better than they looked. “Pontoon” was instantly stuck in his head in a way that he knew he'd be screwed for the next several hours, if not days.

He shut down the pumps and began winding in the siphon as he headed back to the fire—“on the pontoon.” Crap!

At least he was getting the hang of doing two things at once. He could feel himself shaving precious seconds off the process with each pass. Yesterday Emily and Jeannie had outrun him by almost twenty percent for number of loads, and it had stumped him. Today he was running only about ten percent behind and he was starting to understand why. Yes, they were damned good, but so was he. What they had that he didn't was practice in doing
three
things at once in the Firehawk.

But there was more cheering him up than achieving a higher drop-per-hour tally than yesterday.

For one thing, he'd seen how Denise had fine-tooth combed his chopper and how personally she took the hose failure from yesterday. It gave him a confidence in the Firehawk that he'd lost at the failure. Actually, he felt safer now than he had before. The woman was meticulous to the point of being compulsive, something he really appreciated in his mechanic.

“Hey, Mark.” He keyed the ICA frequency. “Where away?”

“We're sounding way too cheerful, aren't we?” Mark's voice was backed by a girlish giggle coming from his two-year-old daughter who often rode copilot in his command plane circling high and safe above the fire. “Remember, there is a wildland fire down there burning things.” Mark tried to sound serious, but Tessa belied that with another giggle.

Vern leaned forward to look up through the windscreen toward the ICA's Beech King Air circling high overhead. He caught a flash of sunlight reflecting off some part of it. “Just glad to be flying and beating down the flame. Can't that make a man happy?”

Mark snorted. “Drop on the inside of Emily's line. She's got the north end of it stopped for the moment; now I want you to kill it.”

“Consider it dead, boss.”