The Minotaur (27 page)

Amazingly enough, the car engine actually started after Toad
ground on it awhile. Jake had driven about forty miles at full
throttle, about a hundred miles per hour, so he shook his head in
wonder when the transmission engaged with a thunk and Toad
drove away trailing smoke.

15

The base dispensary contained an
emergency room, but no other hospital facilities. After Rita Mora-
via was cut out of her flight gear, cleaned up and examined by a
doctor, she was taken to a hospital in Reno, seventy miles away.
Toad Tarkington arrived at the dispensary as the ambulance was
driving away.

“0h. Doctor,” the corpsman called when he saw Toad coming
through the door, “here comes the other one.”

The doctor was only a year or two out of med school, but he had
already acquired the nuances of military practice. “In here.” He
gestured to an examining room. A corpsman followed them in and
closed the door. ‘”Strip to the skin,” the doctor said. “How do you
feel?” He grasped Toad’s wrist and glanced at his watch.

“Okay, Doc. The pilot took the bird hit. I just got splattered.”

“Did you become hypoxic, pass out, inhale any feathers or any-
thing like that?”

“No, sir. I just peed my pants.”

The doctor checked his watch again, then looked at Toad with
raised eyebrows.

“Not really,” Toad said, suddenly aware that he was no longer
in the company of his peers. “Sorry. How’s Moravia?”

The doctor was still all business. “Blurred vision in her left eye,
some bruises and cuts, nothing serious. But she’s an excellent can-
didate for a major-league infection. I gave her a large dose of peni-
cillin and sent her to the hospital in Reno for X rays and observa-
tion. She can stay there until we’re sure she’s okay.”

“And her eye?”

“I think it’ll be okay. They’ll look at that in Reno.”

The doctor spent the next five minutes examining Toad. He peed
in a bottle and gave a blood sample. The corpsman gathered up his
flight gear. Toad insisted it all be put in a duffel bag. He stood
holding his flight suit, which already had a hen-house smell.
“What am I going to do for clothes?”

“Got any money?”

He dug his wallet from the chest pocket. “Fifty-three dollars.”

The doctor added fifty dollars of his own money to Toad’s for-
tune and sent the corpsman to the exchange for underwear, trou-
sers, shirt, and tennis shoes. “Should be open until nineteen hun-
dred hours. You can make it if you hurry.” Toad gave the enlisted
man his sizes and expressed a few opinions about color and style.
The corpsman flashed Toad a wicked grin as he headed for the
door.

An hour later Tarkington had talked the doctor into loaning
him one of the navy sedans belonging to the dispensary. He was on
his way to the parking lot in his new duds when he met Jake
Grafton coming in.

“You okay?” the captain said.

“Yessir. Just fine. Thought I’d grab a little liberty.” Toad gave
Jake back the keys to the sedan he had used to get to the dispen-
sary, and displayed the keys to his borrowed vehicle. “I think your
car’s had it. Want to come with me?”

“Where you going?”

“Reno. That’s where they took Rita.” He told Jake what the
doctor had said.

Jake begged off. He still had security arrangements and phone
calls to make. “Call me from the hospital and tell me how she is.
I’ll be at the BOQ- Leave a message at the desk if I’m not there.”

Jake watched Toad drive away toward the main gate, then went
into the dispensary to see what the doctor really thought about
Rita’s left eye. She needed two great eyes to fly. Better than the
doctor or even Toad, Jake Grafton knew what flying meant to
Lieutenant Rita Moravia, U.S. Naval Aviator.

They had her in a semi-private room with a beautiful white-haired
lady who was fast asleep. Toad spent ten minutes talking to the
floor nurse and the internist before be went in. ‘They say you’re
gonna be okay,” he told Rita with a grin. She had a patch over her
left eye. Scratches and small cuts were visible on her cheek.

She raised a finger to her lips. “Mrs. Douglas went to sleep a few
minutes ago,” she whispered. Toad stood at the end of the bed
glancing uneasily at the shiny, stark hospital equipment. Just being
in a hospital made his leg ache.

“Here,” she said, still whispering, “pull this chair over and sit
down. Have you had any dinner?” It was almost 10 P.M.

“Uh-uh. How you doin’?” He sat gingerly on the forward por-
tion of the seat.

She shrugged. ‘Thanks for saving my bacon.”

He waved it away. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked, glancing
at the sleeping Mrs. Douglas.

“Broken hip. She fell in her kitchen this morning. They’re going
to pin it tomorrow evening. She’s been in a lot of pain today,”

Toad nodded vaguely and examined the sheets that covered
Rita. Hospital sheets always looked so perfect, even with a body
between them. Her hair was a mess. They had cleaned it and made
no attempt to pretty it up. That’s what’s wrong with hospitals—
your dignity is left at the front door on the way in.

“That shirt you’re wearing is the most horrid garment I have—
What are those colors? Chartreuse and mauve?”

“Beats me,” Toad muttered, glancing at his torso with distaste.
“One of the corpsmen picked it out at the exchange. He thought I
would cut a dashing figure in it, I guess.”

“Dashing is not the word I would use.”

They sat for a while, each trying to think of something to say-
“Guess your helmet visor saved your eyes,” he said at last “Cush-
ioned the impact”

“It’s amazing, when you stop to think about it. I thought about
it all the way over here in the ambulance. The ambulance only goes
ten miles over the speed limit, so everything on the road passes it.
Lights flashing, and everyone whizzing by. So I had plenty of time
to think about the odds. It’s amazing.”

“What is?”

“How with the whole wide sky to fly in, all those thousands of
cubic miles, that bird and I tried to fly in exactly the same little
piece of it. A foot further left, that bird would have missed the
cockpit, a foot to the right and it would have hit the nose, a foot
higher—“

“Life’s like that. No guarantees. You never know.”

“Is that what combat is like?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Weren’t you and Captain Grafton—over the Med?”

Toad shrugged and slid further back into the chair. He crossed
his leg with the pin in it over the good one and massaged it gently.
“One flight. A couple minutes of being scared stiff and too busy to
even sweat it That wasn’t combat. Combat is day in and day out
knowing they’re going to be shooting and being scared before you
go and going anyway. I’ve never done that. Hope I never have to.”
He grinned wryly and cocked his head to better match the angle of
hers against the pillow. “I’m a peacetime drugstore cowboy- Didn’t
you know? Make love not war.”

“The Silver Star fooled me.”

“Medals don’t mean shit over the Med. CAG had the guts and
determination, enough for him and me both with a lot left over.
He’s a balls-out fighter. Those Arab fighter jocks were hopelessly
outclassed—at least that’s what I kept telling myself then. Still tell
myself that on nights when I wake up thinking about it I’m even
beginning to believe it”

She smoothed the sheets with her right hand.

“How’s your left shoulder?”

“Just bruised. Hurts now- If this eye-clears up …”

“It will.”

“Got some cuts on the eyeball. Lots of bird flesh and even the
stem of a little feather.”

“It’ll be okay.”

“I suppose.”

“You’ll fly again. Just wait and see- You’re too good to stay on
the ground. A person with your talent belongs in a cockpit.”

“Ummm.”

He put his feet on the floor, leaned forward and captured a hand.
“listen, Rita—Ginger—I know how you feel. The fickle finger of
fate just reached out and zinged you a little one and reminded you
that you’re mortal clay. We all are. But—you know all this—
you’ve got to live every day the best you can, put the throttles
against the stops and fly. Flying is what it’s all about. And when
that final flight comes, that last day, as come it will, then look the
Man straight in the eye and tell Him it’s been a hell of a great ride.
And thank Him. That’s the way you have to live it. That’s the only
way it can be done.”

She took her hand from his and touched his cheek.

“Get a good night’s sleep. Get well. You got a lot of flying left to
do.” He stood. “I’ll look in on you tomorrow afternoon. Hang
tough.”

“Thanks for coming by.”

He paused at the door and winked. “We fly together. Remem-
ber?”

“Kiss me, lover.”

He glanced at Mrs. Douglas. Her eyes were closed and she
seemed to be asleep. He bent over Rita and gave her his best effort.

It was 1 P.M. the next day when Luis Camacho pulled into his
driveway in Silver Spring and let himself into his house. His wife
was at work and his son was in school. The house felt strange on a
weekday with both of them gone. He walked slowly through the
downstairs, looking it over, listening to the refrigerator hum, look-
ing out the windows.

He found his leather driving gloves in the hall closet, the pigskin
ones his parents had given him two Christmases ago that he never
wore because they were too nice. The batteries in the flashlight
stowed in the catchall drawer in the kitchen still had some juice,
amazingly enough. He tucked the light into his hip pocket and let
himself out the kitchen door into the backyard. The wooden fence
between his house and Albright’s had a gate with a rusty latch, no
lock. The Labrador wanted to come with him, but he shooed it
back and latched the gate behind him.

He opened his packet of lock picks on Harlan Albright’s picnic
table. He stared at them a moment, trying to decide. It had been a
while. Let’s see, the lock is a Yale.

Opening it took ten minutes. The Lab finally quit whining next
door. Probably he went back to his favorite spot in the sun and lay
down. Camacho was beginning to think he wasn’t going to get this
lock when it clicked.

Albright had no fancy alarms, or none that Camacho had ever
seen. Service manager at a local garage, he couldn’t afford the
visibility that a Fort Knox security system would give him. But no
doubt he had some little doodads here and there to let him know if
be had any unwanted visitors.

Luis Camacho stood in the door and carefully examined the
interior- It looked precisely as he remembered it, exactly the way
he had seen it for years. He stepped inside, eased the door shut and
listened.

Albright’s house was similar to his, one of four variations on the
same basic floor plan the tract builder had used in half the houses
in this subdivision. Other than minor interior adjustments, most of
the differences were in the front facades.

As he stood there the faint hum of the refrigerator shut off.
Albright’s fridge was quieter than his. Probably newer too. He
closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to shut out the faint sound
of a car passing on the side street. Only a few creaks and groans as
the house continued to warm in the early afternoon sun.

He moved slowly through the kitchen and into the family room.
A bachelor, Albright spent his evenings here, watching TV or
reading. Camacho moved slowly, checking the walls and looking
behind pictures—O’Keeffe prints—and tugging at the carpet edges.
He inspected the books in the built-in bookcase, then randomly
removed a few and checked the integrity of the wall behind by
rapping with a knuckle. He didn’t know what he hoped to find, but
he would recognize it when he saw it. If there was anything to find,
which was doubtful.

The garage was next, then the basement. It was still unfinished,
no ceiling or drywall to cover the unpainted cinder blocks. Damp.
Only two naked bulbs overhead, plus .the one on the stairs. He
glanced at the accumulated junk and the layers of dust and grime,
and decided Albright cleaned his basement on the same schedule
used by every other bachelor who owned one—never. There were
some tools piled carelessly in one corner: a drill, a saber saw, a
hammer, a box of hand tools. They were covered with the same
thickness of dirt that covered everything else. Some cans of paint
that looked like they had never been opened. Perhaps he had had a
fit of enthusiasm which had waned on the way home from the
hardware store. Camacho went back upstairs, consciously re-
minding himself to flip off the light switch at the head of the stairs.

He stopped dead in the kitchen. He turned and went back to the
basement door. He opened it. Light switch on. What was that? Was
it a noise? Lights off. Yes, there was a noise, some kind of faint
grinding, just for a half second or so. He repeated the procedure.
He wasn’t imagining things. He could hear something.

In the slanted ceiling of the stairway, down about three feet from
the bulb, was a dusty screen. Several of the strands had been
pushed aside, perhaps by a careless jab from a broom handle, leav-
ing a hole. He flipped the light several more times. He could just
barely hear it, the most minute of noises, hard to recognize.

The screen was held on with four screws. Bare metal could be
seen on the screw slots. When he got them out and lowered the
screen he could see the camera lens. Rubber padding held on with
rubber bands covered the camera body. A wire led to it He stood
on the stairs and examined it with his flashlight, then reached up
and removed the camera, excess wire following along.

The wire was connected to a gadget on top with a small alligator
clip. With the stairwell light off, he undipped it and carried the
camera to the kitchen table. Unwrapping the rubber padding with
gloves on was difficult, so he took them off.

The gadget on top was some kind of an electromagnetic doo-
hickey with a lever. When the current was turned on by flipping
the light switch, the magnet was energized and caused this steel pin
to push the camera shutter button, tripping the shutter. When the
current ceased, a spring reset the lever, which released the shutter
button and allowed the film to be automatically advanced by the
camera.