The Tin Man (5 page)

“ ‘If you ain’t Patrol, you ain’t shit’—is that what you think, Cargo?” Chandler asked. “All other police work is a waste, right?”

“No,” LaFortier shot back. “But sworn officers to work a truancy task force, or a graffiti task force, or a ‘traffic-signal dodger’ task force? Give me a break.
I need guys on Patrol, not giving speeches in front of the garden clubs on how we shouldn’t try to beat yellow traffic lights. Do away with all the bullshit, Tom, that’s all I’m saying.”

“The chief comes down here to congratulate the new rookies, and you gotta dump all this shit on him with the whole place listening in,” Chandler said, shaking his head. “Real smart. Makes you wonder why the graveyard-shift roster will permanently have your name on it.”

“You better get going, Captain—master’s waiting for someone to open the door for him,” LaFortier said acidly.

Chandler shook his head in exasperation. “Even the solid cops turn bitter after a while, I guess,” he said, then turned up the collar on his overcoat and left.

LaFortier finished his drink with a quick toss. “At least my ass is out on the street where it belongs, not sitting in a country club playing footsie with the mayor,” he said half-aloud. To Paul he said, “Tomorrow evening, be at the South Station by eight, ready for inspection, and we’ll go over a few things. Thanks for the party, Mr. McLanahan.” LaFortier lumbered off.

“Sheesh, he’s a big guy. They make bulletproof vests big enough for him?” Patrick deadpanned.

“Oh yes,” Paul responded. “He looks like a big blue billboard.” He grinned. “Mr. McLanahan,” he mimicked. “Sounds like you’re an old fart, bro.”

“I
am
an old fart, bro,” Patrick said. “But I can still kick your ass.”

“Have another; drink, bro—you’ll stay in fantasy-land longer,” Paul shot back.

But Wendy’s face was serious. “What do you think about all this going on between the cops and the chief and the city, Paul?” she asked.

“I don’t think about it,” Paul replied. “Budget cuts aré a way of life, but officer safety is never being compromised. Tensions will always exist, but the City and the chief always support the troops.” He smiled reassuringly, then put his arms ground Wendy’s and Patrick’s waists. “It means a lot that you came up here from San Diego. I know the docs probably told you not to travel. You’re due next week, aren’t you, Wendy?”

“Not for almost three weeks. And unless I was confined to bed, Paul, we weren’t going to miss your graduation. Besides, the boss flew into town, so we were able to hop a ride on the corporate jet. We head back tomorrow afternoon.”

“Worked out perfectly then,” Paul said. Wendy gave him a kiss and scooped up more shot glasses and beer mugs. Paul turned to his brother. “Wendy looks great, and so do you. San Diego must agree with you.”

“Yep, it’s great,” Patrick said. “Seventy-two degrees and mostly sunny every day. We love it.”

“We didn’t hear much from you for a while there. It seemed like you dropped off the face of the earth last spring. Lot going on at work?”

“Yes.” Patrick wasn’t about to tell his brother that he had been busy flying secret attack missions over the Formosa Strait, trying without success to keep China from devastating Taiwan with nuclear weapons—or that he and Wendy had ejected from an experimental B-5? bomber over central China, were captured, and were part of a prisoner exchange.

“Well, at least can you tell me about this new company you work for? I remember you were forced to retire, because you came back here to work the bar—but then all of a sudden you’re gone again, and the next we know you’re in San Diego.”

“I can’t really talk about the company too much
either, Paul,” Patrick said. “They’re involved in a lot of classified stuff for the military.”

“But you’re flying again, right?”

Patrick looked puzzled. “Flying? What makes you think I’m flying again?”

Paul gave his older brother a satisfied grin. Yup, he had guessed right and he knew it. “I remember your face, your talk, your entire body language when you were flying for the Air Force, bro,” he said. “You were one supercharged dude back then. You were
grooving
I mean, really getting into life! You look that way now. I know you’re all excited about having a kid and all, but I remember the only other time you were this—well, hell,
alive!
—was when you were flying, dropping bombs from big-ass bombers or flying some new supersecret plane you could never talk about.”

“What are you talking about? What’s all this about secret bombers? I never told you …”

“Don’t bother denying it—I know it’s true,” Paul said. “You practically salivate when something comes on the news about a war in Europe or the Middle East and the press thinks the Air Force flew a secret mission. Plus, you cut your hair—looks military-regulation length again.”

“Mr. Detective here,” Patrick laughed. “Just graduates from the academy and he thinks he’s Columbo. No, I work for Sky Masters, Inc., and that’s all I can say.”

“I know you, Patrick,” Paul said. “This company you work for, they’re involved in sortie real hightech shit, aren’t they? I mean, real twenty-first-century
Star Weirs
stuff, right?”

“Paul, I …”

“You can’t talk about it,” Paul finished for him. “I know, I know. Someday, though, I’d like to know more about it. I’ve always been fascinated by all the
stuff you could never tell me about, ever since you were flying B-52’s.” Paul hesitated, and Patrick felt that old telepathic connection again. It sounded silly, but it was nonetheless true: His brother could tap his head and find out all he wanted to-know anytime he wanted. That was reassuring, somehow…. “I
know
you had something to do with what happened to that aircraft carrier, and that nuclear attack on Guam,” Paul went on. “I got the same feeling when I heard those stories about the conflict in Europe between Russia and Lithuania, and earlier with China and the Philippines. You were there both times. You were up to your elbows in it.”

“Someday, maybe I can tell you,” Patrick said with a smile. “Right now, all I can tell you is this: It’s
really
cosmic.”

“Well, be sure to let me know when you invent a phaser and force field for cops on the beat,” Paul said, clapping his brother warmly on the shoulder before heading off to make another circuit of the room. “I’ll be first in line to try them out.”

H
er touch was light and soothing, loving and caring—but her hand was warm and moist, and as if a Klaxon had suddenly gone off, Patrick was instantly awake. “Wendy?”

“I love you, sweetheart,” she answered.

Patrick pushed himself up and peered at the red LED numerals of the clock on the nightstand; it read 5:05
A.M
. He turned on his bedside light. Wendy was sitting upright in bed, her right hand still touching him, her left hand gently rubbing her belly. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

But she obviously wasn’t fine. “Are you having contractions?”

“Oh,
yes,”
she replied, and he heard a twinge in her voice. If his wife ever used foul language, he decided, the likelier answer would have been, “Fucking-A, Sherlock, I’m having contractions!”

“How long?”

“A couple of hours. But no real pattern. Very irregular. It’s probably Braxton-Hicks again.”

“Oh. Okay.” It was a lame response, but what else do you say? “Gee, dear, you’re in pain, and I’m really concerned, but it’s not
that
pain, the
official
pain, so I’ll go back to sleep now”? Braxton-Hicks contractions, sometimes mistaken for real labor pains, had been a regular occurrence for Wendy all during her pregnancy. So things were stirring, but the action probably wouldn’t start for several days. Right? Wendy wasn’t due for another three weeks. And first babies were more often late than early—right?

They had left the party downtown right after midnight. They were staying in a suite at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Sacramento, not far from the tavern. During the ride back to the hotel, he sensed that Wendy seemed a bit more uncomfortable than usual, but that was probably due to fatigue—her normal bedtime was closer; to nine
P.M.

They probably never should have come to Sacramento at this stage—hers was the definition of a high-risk pregnancy. Wendy Tork McLanahan, an electronics and aeronautical engineer first on contract to the U.S. Air Force and now an executive and chief designer for a small Arkansas-based high-tech aerospace firm, had spent most of the past two years in and out of hospitals after twice ejecting out of experimental military bombers, the latest just last June over the People’s Republic of China, along
with Patrick and the crew’s copilot, Nancy Cheshire. Wendy had just recovered from her injuries from the
first
ejection when she was forced to eject from the second plane.

Thankfully,-she did not lose the fetus. After a brief hospital stay and a few weeks to recuperate—and be debriefed by what seemed like every agency in the U.S. government except the Department of Agriculture—Wendy returned to work and kept on with her duties as vice president in charge of advanced avionics design at Sky Masters, Inc. until her maternity leave began two weeks ago.

She was in great shape, the baby was fine, and she had insisted they could not miss Paul’s celebration. And after all that had happened over the past two years, Patrick wanted a family life, a
normal
life, more than anything else in the world. He hadn’t done much of the family thing for most of the last ten years, and he was anxious to get reacquainted with everyone.

But here they were, four hundred miles away from home, and the baby was obviously headed down the chute very soon. Decisions. Good, bad, who the hell knew? Stop waffling and deal with it
now
, Patrick told himself.

“I’m going to call Dr. Linus in San Diego, just in case, get someone standing by,” he told Wendy. Her nod and her touch told Patrick she really didn’t think it was false labor this time, so he picked up the telephone. Time to get moving. “Jon’s got the company jet at Mather demoing that electro-reactive cargo liner technology,” Patrick reminded her. “I think we should try to make it back to San Diego.” Dr. Jon Masters, their boss and president of Sky Masters, Inc., was at the Aerojet-General rocket plant east of Sacramento, to demonstrate a new lightweight technology he developed for protecting
an airliner’s cargo compartment from a bomb blast. “The jet can be fueled up and ready to go in less than two hours, and we can be at Mather in thirty minutes and at the hospital in Coronado in four hours.”

“All right,” Wendy responded. “I’ll get dressed.” She swung her legs out of bed and headed for the bathroom, then stopped halfway. “Dear?”

“What, sweetheart?” Patrick replied. He turned, Wendy was reaching for a towel—and then he saw the growing bloody puddle on the white tile floor, and leaped out of bed with a speed and agility he thought he had lost long ago.

He knew then that they weren’t going to make it back to Coronado.

W
hat’s the latest on Patrick and Wendy, Helen?” Jonathan Colin Masters, Ph.D, asked by way of a voice check. The boyish-looking chief engineer and president of Sky Masters, Inc. was setting up a small video camera in front of a first-class seat inside a Boeing 727 airliner fuselage.

“What? Jon, are you listening to me at
all?”
his vice president and chairman of the board of directors, Dr. Helen Kaddiri, asked through the video-conference link. Kaddiri was several years older than Masters, one of the original founders of the small high-tech aerospace firm that now bore Jon Masters’s name. She tolerated his high-school antics
and laid-back style of doing business because Jon knew how to build systems that the government wanted, and he knew how to sell them—but this, Kaddiri thought, was going way too far. Worse, Masters didn’t even seem to care that he was risking his life just to sell a product. He was nuts.

“Can you hear me? Is this thing working?”

“I hear you fine, Jon,” Kaddiri said.

“I asked, have you heard anything about Wendy since the message that they were heading to the hospital?” Masters repeated.

“Jon, pay attention to what I’m saying to you,” said a frustrated Kaddiri. “We have other ways of doing this demonstration—”

“Helen, we’ve been over this a million times,” Masters interrupted. “I’m doing
this.
Now, is there any word from Patrick and Wendy or not?”

Kaddiri closed her eyes, unable to argue any longer. Nuts—that was the only logical explanation. Insane. Definition of a death wish, of childlike feelings of invulnerability.

Kaddiri was conducting the technology demonstration briefing at a videoconference center at the Federal Aviation Administration headquarters in Washington, D.C. Several research directors of the FAA, along with aerospace-manufacturer and airline representatives, were outside the conference room awaiting the start of Masters’s remote video demonstration, beamed via a two-way datalink using Sky Masters’s low-Earth-orbit satellites, called NIRTSats (for Need It Right This Second satellites), specifically launched for this demonstration. Jon was back in California, about to conduct the demonstration itself. He was literally sitting atop a powder keg, as both of them knew, and all he could think about was Patrick and Wendy McLanahan’s new arrival.

“Stand by one, Jon,” Kaddiri replied with an exasperated sigh, then turned to heir assistant, who made a phone call and came back with an answer a few moments later. “Wendy McLanahan was admitted to Mercy San Juan Hospital in Citrus Heights, east of Sacramento, this morning around five-thirty. Everyone’s doing fine,” Kaddiri responded over the videolink. “No other word. Happy?”

“She’s been in labor since five-thirty?” Masters asked incredulously.

“She’s apparently been in labor since
three
A.M.
, Jon,” Kaddiri corrected him. She could see him wince at the thought of being in pain for that long. If Jon were a woman, she decided, he’d get one contraction and immediately want to reach up inside and yank the kid out himself. “Everything’s going to be fine. Wendy’s a tough girl, and they’ve got some good docs up there.”