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Chapter 15
Jack loved small planes. The first time he went up in one he expected it to be herky-jerky and immediate-like a bumpy ride on a hard sprung car. He hadn’t expected the soft, floating feeling of riding on a river of air, like a noisy canoe in the sky. Grounded humans didn’t think much about air. Flying in a small plane taught you quickly the sea of air wasn’t all that less thick than a sea of water.
He thought being a pilot would give him freedom, the same kind of freedom his Air, the web, and mobile gave him. He thought he would have time to go more places and avoid the anthill traffic. His theory was correct, but he discovered something emotionally he already knew intellectually. There are limits to the time a man can invest in being good at things. Something as important as taking off and landing a plane was better left to the highly experienced expert. Maybe now he was only working fifty hours a week he’d have time to fly enough to become an expert.
Damn it, Jack! Why didn’t you pay more attention?
Jack stuffed his feelings as far inside as he could.
The pilot was a hell of a lot better than Jack had ever been. She put them down with hardly a bounce. The little plane went from being an efficient, semi-comfortable, flying taxi to a loud, uncomfortable oven.
Brigit’s guess on time had been pessimistic. Their brand new attorney wasn’t more than five feet tall even in heels. She wore a dark blue power suit that looked black until they were under one of the too-bright floodlights near the main terminal. She looked out of place at a regional airport in the middle of a hot runway.
She was somewhere in that great age-range for women, between forty and fifty, where the outside image sometimes starts to fade. Sometimes it’s only then that their core comes through. Her very dark blue eyes, which he thought were contacts and found out later weren’t, were large in her round face. She had a wide, but thin-lipped mouth below a snub of a nose. Her hair was that wonderful silver-gray some women are lucky enough to get by nature and others pay a lot for at a good salon.
Brigit shook his hand first, making long eye contact and holding the grip. She did the same with Lee. “I don’t know how hard this is going to be. I haven’t called the cop shop yet. We’ll just show up at the Aunt’s house so we don’t give them time to hide the kid. I called a PI I used to work with, former cop, and he is on his way, already has a place set up to keep the kid at a hotel in Weaverville. Turns out Mike already contracted with him to keep an eye on Heather.”
They had walked out of the airplane into a too warm a night. It had only been 104 in Redding that day. Now that it was approaching midnight, it was down to 80. They climbed into Brigit’s Suburban, heading onto I-5 and cutting over to 299 for the hour trip into Weaverville. Whenever they came near a bridge over a creek or a finger of a lake, Brigit slowed. Sometimes she slowed by taking her foot off the gas and sometimes with a little brake. The rest of the time she found the best line on nearly every turn and took them as fast as her-land train allowed, so it wasn’t caution. Four Orvis rod cases stuck out from under the tarp in back. She was self-programmed to slow near water for fish sign. He doubted she even realized she was doing it. Jack wondered, maybe for the first time, what programming he followed that people could see and predict.
Lee’s silence spoke volumes on the plane. On the ground, in the air-conditioned silence of the Suburban, her quiet was a scream. Lee rode shotgun. He took the seat directly behind her. Tai Chi, Yoga, and the rest gave her a rubber-boned smoothness, but tonight she sat up straight and stiff as a new West Point cadet. He unhooked his seat belt and leaned forward, shoving his head in between her head and the passenger door. She softened, leaned a little to the left to let him in and then nuzzled him with her head.
“You okay?”
She shook her head no, thumping him on the temple. She sniffed back tears, before they made a little river down her face. He wiped them away with his fingers.
“You know what it is. That poor, poor girl has got to be destroyed. I didn’t spend much time with my father, but we were so connected by our gifts. I was away at school, he was always working, but when he died… It took me a year to get even partially sane. It’s not just her pain I feel now.”
The sheriff’s station in Weaverville wasn’t manned for the night. If the aunt called the cops, and they responded, they could settle the issue on the spot. Brigit had all the toys in her land train but couldn’t program the address into her GPS. After three wrong tries, they turned off a BLM road onto a deeply potholed gravel track. They followed the track down through a wash and then up to a sagging doublewide on a couple of scruffy looking acres.
There was a dead Ford Ranger on what would have been the lawn if there had been any grass. A gray primer covered Power Wagon was parked next to the trailer facing out. A digger pine had been dragged to lean on an ancient stump near the aluminum hovel. It looked like someone cut the digger for firewood a log at a time. Lights showed. The sound of bad country music barely carried over the breaks in hoarse barking from the Pit Bull chained up to the trailer hitch. The dog had wound his chain around the front post under the hitch so tight he could barely stand, much less get at them. His water dish was dry and his ribs showed.
A big man, belly over his belt, shoved the door open and asked, “Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck do you want?”
The John Deer hat was pulled down so far in front it was hard to see any of his face except the gray and black beard. Jack came to a stop at the bottom of the splintered steps. Beer smell floated down to him.
Brigit stepped forward and said in a courtroom voice, “My name is Brigit Williams. I am an attorney and officer of the court. I have a court order remanding Heather Maria Reyes into the custody of Jack McDonald, who is standing in front of you. Please have her come outside.”
A woman’s voice screeched from inside the trailer, “Tell them she’s not here.”
“She’s not here,” beer boy said.
HEATHER practiced twenty times more with her homemade grappling hook. She heard a car off in the distance. It came closer and closer. And then it stopped. That poor dog kept barking. After she got out she would come back for the dog. When asshole boyfriend yelled at her the pit bull lunged at him.
She heard a woman’s voice, Jack’s voice and asshole yelling some back. Rescue!
She waited a few seconds to calm herself like she did before a penalty kick, swung her grappling hook, snagged the two by four on her first try and pulled to the side as hard as she could. The two-by-four wouldn’t budge and then it sprang sideways and made a big bang. She was out of the bathroom, then at the back door and then out.
BEFORE the sound of their lies died in the dry air, the back door Jack hadn’t seen hammered open and slammed against the thin walls of the metal shack. Heather sprinted into Lee’s arms. The screechy voice attached itself to a messy woman, maybe in her late forties, trying to share too small a doorway with beer-belly boy.
“Heather, you get back up here. I am your auntie, flesh and blood. You can’t go with these strangers. We care about you. Your poor father…”
“The only thing you and your asshole boyfriend care about is the money and you know it. Dad told me if anything happened he wanted me to go with Lee and Jack, not you. I am old enough to make up my own mind anyway.”
They backed up to the Suburban and got onboard, ignoring the screeching woman and bellowing man.
“Can we get out of here? I’m sure asshole boyfriend has a shotgun or hunting rifle handy,” Jack said.
Brigit spun the big SUV around as if it were a BMW and gunned it down the drive and onto the road. Jack rode shotgun while Lee and Heather cried and huddled in the next set of seats.
BRIGIT’s cop had booked them into the best hotel in town, with solid, brick walls and only two stories. They had taken four rooms, two of them suites and all connecting, on the second floor at the end of the hall. Brigit knocked. The quality of the light out of the peephole didn’t change, but the door opened. The ex-cop was maybe fifteen years older than Jack and tall enough to look down at him. They were about the same weight, just distributed differently. The cop had that quiet confidence cops used to have when they still cared enough to serve and protect.
He held out his hand and said, “I’m Bill Saxon. You won’t need to worry about keeping Heather safe. I have three daughters. All with their own families now, but they are still my babies.”
Bill’s hands were large and his grip firm and dry. He thought about Bill’s age and physical condition. Then he thought about Bill’s mission. It wasn’t Bill’s job to wrestle with anyone who got near Heather with harmful intent. It was Bill’s job to shoot them until he ran out of bullets or they stopped doing anything threatening. A strong grip, clear eye, skill, and willingness to pull the trigger were all that were necessary. There were ex-cops at the judo club. Half of them were drunks. Bill’s eyes were clear and Bill didn’t give Jack the uneasy feeling he learned from the cradle around Ma and Pa.
Lee, Brigit, and Heather all walked into the big bedroom to talk. Jack looked at the clock, thinking way too much had happened for it to only be two a.m. He sat in the overstuffed chair in the corner to rest his eyes for a few minutes. When he opened them it was five in the morning and Mike’s house was on fire.