Flat Spin

by David Freed

  She’s nothing to you anymore, I told myself.

  I almost believed it.

  The light turned red at Federal Avenue, across the street from the old post office that was now a carpet showroom. A homeless guy was on the sidewalk out front, smoking a joint. Curled asleep beside him was a long, fat dog that looked like it had been assembled by committee. A hand-lettered cardboard sign was propped against the man’s legs. It said, “Ninjas kidnapped my family. Need money for Kung Fu lessons.” I tossed him a buck. Fair pay for a good laugh.

  The light turned green. I hooked a right at the traffic circle and merged onto the freeway northbound, heading for the airport.

  Larry was sitting at a weathered picnic table in the shade behind his hangar, listening to Rush Limbaugh on a portable radio and eating his lunch—bologna and cheese sandwich, bag-o-chips and a Dr. Pepper. Larry had the same thing for lunch every day. Once, I heard him complain to his wife about the way she’d made his sandwich. “How many times I gotta tell ya,” he seethed low into the phone, “you put the fuckin’ cheese between the fuckin’ slices of bologna.” I believe it was the last sandwich she ever made him.

  “I got your money,” I said out the window as I pulled in and climbed out of my truck. “All of it.”

  “Call CNN,” Larry said. “They’re gonna definitely wanna break into regular programming for this.”

  “You know, Larry, for a comedian, you make a pretty piss-poor airplane mechanic.”

  I sat down opposite him at the picnic table and wrote out a check.

  Larry picked crumbs out of his arm fur, watching me. “What’d you do, rob a bank or something?”

  “Ex-father-in-law.”

  “You robbed your ex-father-in-law?”

  “More or less.”

  I gave him the check. Larry folded it without looking at it and put it in his wallet.

  “You been subleasing from me for, what, two years? That’s the first time I’ve heard you say word one about family.”

  “He’s not family.”

  “Used to be, though, right?” Larry said.

  “How ’bout them Dodgers?” I said.

  Larry grunted and finished his soda. My phone rang. The caller was male and foreign. His inflection was Spanish or Romanian, possibly Moldovan. Sort of like Dracula, only younger and hipper.

  He said his name was Eugen Dragomir, and that he was a student at Cal State Rancho Bonita, whose campus was just up the road from the airport. The kid had seen my listing on Craigslist, he said, and was interested in learning to fly. Every other flight school between Camarillo and San Luis Obispo advertised online. Splashy, colorful web sites with animated graphics and streaming video testimonials from their many satisfied students. The fact that Dragomir could find no such web site for Above the Clouds Aviation, let alone any mention of it on Google, impressed him.

  “Definitely old school,” Dragomir said. “I want to learn from the best. Someone who knows what they’re doing, who has been flying a long time.”

  “Well, as the old saying goes, there are old pilots and bold pilots,” I said, trotting out the dustiest aphorism in the history of manned flight, “but there are no old, bold pilots.”

  He wanted to get started right away and said he could be by within the hour. I said my airplane and I would be ready.

  Twenty minutes later, Eugen Dragomir rolled into Larry’s hangar on a skateboard with a “Sex Wax” sticker on it. Gangly didn’t begin to describe him. He was built like a 3-iron with a backpack and dark, Eastern European dreadlocks. He was wearing black Chuck Taylor high-tops, laces dragging on the ground, surfer shorts that came down below his knobby knees and a T-shirt with a visage of Bob Marley on his chest. A shark’s tooth dangled from a leather strand looped around his pencil neck. He bobbed, swinging his spaghetti arms, as we strode out to the flight line. He was from Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, a fifth-year senior studying petrochemical engineering because that’s what his petrochemical engineer father wanted.

  “But I’m thinking of switching majors.”

  “To what?”

  “Astronaut. I want to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

  “You mean, ‘To boldly go where no person has gone before.’ Space is a very politically correct place these days, Eugen.”

  He nodded like I was Confucius. He was all business, there to learn. I liked that.

  I walked him through the preflight inspection, showing him how to check the Duck’s control surfaces for loose rivets, climbing up on the wings to make sure there was adequate gas in the tanks, checking the oil, looking inside the engine compartment for anything that didn’t look right, undoing the tie-down lines. He shadowed my every move, cocking his head as he listened, soaking it all in. When the walk-around was complete, I opened the left side door for him.

  “Hop in.”

  “You want me to fly?”

  “That’s generally what pilots do.”

  “This is sick!”

  After we got in and locked the doors, I explained enginestart procedures and let him do the starting. I demonstrated how to dial in the ATIS frequency for current conditions on the field, including winds, dew point and altimeter setting.

  I changed frequencies to Clearance Delivery and let the controllers know who we were and where we wanted to fly.

  “Good afternoon, Clearance,” I said, “Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima.”

  “Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, Rancho Bonita Clearance, good afternoon.”

  “Four Charlie Lima is a 172 slant uniform, northwest departure with information Yankee, 4,500 feet. We’ll be doing some maneuvering outside the class delta. Request traffic advisories.”

  “Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, on request.”

  We waited.

  “Dude, this is, like, the baddest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Eugen said. “I mean, once I took my girlfriend to bungee jumping and she was all, ‘I’m freaked,’ and I was all—”

  “Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima”—I held up my finger for Eugen to be quiet while the controller came back on the radio with our clearance—“expect Runway One-Seven left. Fly runway heading after departure. Maintain VFR at or below 1,500 feet. Expect own navigation within three minutes. Departure frequency, 125.4. Squawk 4621.”

  I jotted down a shorthand version of the instructions in a small notebook I keep in the plane for such purposes and read them back to the controller.

  “Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, read back correct. Contact ground, 121.6. Have a good flight.”

  I explained how next we contacted ground control to receive taxiing instructions.

  “Tell them, ‘Ground, Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, ready to taxi from Premier with Yankee.’”

  Eugen keyed the radio and repeated what I’d said.

  “Skyhawk, Four Charlie Lima, roger. Taxi to One-Seven left via Bravo, hold short 2-6.”

  The kid was totally jazzed. I let him steer the plane. We nearly ran off the taxiway, but only once. Not bad for a beginner. At the run-up area next to the runway, with the airplane’s parking brake set, I showed him how we revved the engine to 1700 RPMs, to make sure everything worked properly. Then we taxied to the hold-short line of the assigned runway. I switched radio frequencies to the tower.

  “Rancho Bonita tower, Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, ready One-Seven left.”

  “Four Charlie Lima, Rancho Bonita Tower, traffic on two-mile base. Runway One-Seven left, cleared for immediate takeoff.”

  “OK,” I said, folding my hands placidly in my lap, “you’ve got the airplane.”

  I’ve watched fighter jocks with 5,000 hours take off with less elegance. The kid took to flying like a starving man at an all-you-can-eat buffet. We flew for an hour. Steep turns. Turns around a point. Climbs. Dives. Standard stuff for a fifty dollar introductory lesson. Just enough to make it all look effortless. Eugen Dragomir was a natural. I almost let him land.

  “You sure you’ve never done this before?” I said as we were walking back toward my of
fice.

  “Maybe, like, in a previous life or something.” He dug a damp, crumpled fifty dollar bill out of his board shorts. “If my father wrote a check for five thousand, would that be OK to start?”

  “Sounds mucho bueno to me.”

  Another five grand. My day was looking better and better. I found a fresh logbook in my desk. I filled in the particulars of Eugen Dragomir’s maiden flight, signed my name, and gave it to him. He held the book in his hand like it was a precious thing.

  “Fortunately for you,” I said, “my schedule’s pretty flexible at present. Lemme know when the funds arrive. You’ll be soloing in no time, guaranteed.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  We bumped fists, then he retrieved his skateboard where he’d left it, against the wall of Larry’s hangar. As he coasted toward the security gate, he smiled and waved with his thumb and pinkie extended, one of those Hawaiian “hang loose” signs.

  I returned the gesture, feeling rather foolish.

  California State University, Rancho Bonita, with its 18,500 undergrads and architectural hodgepodge of a campus nestled on a picturesque bluff overlooking the Pacific, is known perennially as a top-ten party school. Few students who ventured off campus and wanted me to teach them how to fly ever came close to mastering that goal. Surfing, boozing, blazing, and getting laid invariably took precedence. Eugen Dragomir seemed different. A studious kid. A great potential pilot.

  Working with Alpha had compelled me to be distrustful of my fellow man. It was liberating, watching him roll away on his skateboard, to realize that you don’t always have to question the motives and hidden agendas of everybody you meet. You can’t go around being suspicious of everybody you cross paths with, I told myself. Not everybody’s out to kill you.

  Driving home that afternoon, somebody tried to kill me.

  A car was following me. I first noticed it in my side-view mirror as I merged from the airport onto the southbound freeway, just past the Orchard Avenue exit. It was a white, two-door Honda Accord coupe, fifty meters in trail. No front license plate. Rear spoiler. Fat rims. Lowered suspension. Windshield tinted impenetrably black. A ride for dweebs convinced that tricking out a Japanese economy car will somehow improve their odds with the ladies.

  I drifted casually into the fast lane. The Honda followed. I angled back into the center lane. The Honda did likewise, its driver careful to keep at least five car-lengths between us. My speedometer showed seventy. I bumped it up to seventy-five. The Honda driver pulled out into the fast lane and passed the cars separating us to settle in behind me once more, still keeping his distance. I knew I couldn’t outrun him, not in an aging Tacoma with nearly as many miles on it as the space shuttle. What I could do, though, was fall back on my training and evade him.

  I mashed down on the accelerator. It was like stepping on a dead frog. The speedometer crept slowly past eighty, then eighty-five. The front end began to wobble like Ronnie Reagan’s head. The Honda driver knew he’d been made. He abandoned any pretense of a covert tail, floored it, and rapidly closed the gap between us.

  The exit off the freeway at Valley View was a quarter-mile ahead. I waited until the Honda was about twenty feet behind me, then veered violently across traffic, cutting off a housewife in a silver minivan who made her displeasure known with an angry toot from her horn. Sorry, lady. I fishtailed onto the exit ramp, hoping my pursuer would overshoot the turnoff.

  When I looked back, he was drafting my rear bumper.

  We rocketed onto Valley View, the two of us, down a steep hill past San Roberto High School on the left and the Wisteria Shopping Center on the right. The light turned red just as I shot across the intersection at Hendricks Boulevard. The Honda never slowed down.

  A quarter-mile straight ahead, Valley View came to a dead end. I could see it. So could the Honda driver behind his black tinted windows. I figured he was going to try to ram me and drive my truck into the wooden barrier at the end of the road. Why, I have no idea, but I wasn’t about to wait and let him prove my theory correct.

  I slammed the gearshift into second and flicked my steering wheel to the right a little, increasing the load transfer to the outer tires, then yanked hard on the emergency brake and spun left. The tires smoked and screamed as I skidded 180 degrees, coming to an abrupt stop in the opposite direction—your standard bootlegger’s turn. Caught off-guard, the Honda driver overshot, skidded left and crashed broadside into the wooden barrier. He backed up, tires smoking, and reversed course to come at me again, but by then I’d already put 100 yards between us, turning down Zink Street and out of his sight line.

  Zink gave way to a maze of residential streets with names like Cinderella Lane and Del Monaco Drive. There was a depressing sameness to all of the houses that no variance in landscaping or paint schemes could mute. I was glad I didn’t live there.

  By the time I found my way back out onto Hendricks, the main drag, my pursuer was nowhere around. I was angry at myself for not having had the presence of mind to read the Honda’s rear license plate before bolting, but there was no use worrying about that now. I turned left onto Hendricks and drove back to the airport, checking my mirrors frequently.

  Inside the hangar, I unlocked my desk, put the photo of Echevarria and me in the belly drawer and closed it. I opened the bottom drawer. Inside was a two-inch .357 Colt Python revolver. The little snub-nose had been my primary backup weapon during my time with Alpha. The only souvenir I kept from those days.

  I was beginning to think it might come in handy.

  SEVEN

  Being the wondering type, I couldn’t help but wonder whether my pursuer in the Honda was associated with Arlo Echevarria’s murder. Echevarria and I had brought to justice any number of rabid animals who’d passed themselves off as human. Was there any truth to Savannah’s assertion that maybe an embittered relative of one of those animals had hunted Echevarria down and now, maybe, was tracking me? I needed to lie low for awhile, get out of Dodge, until I could sort things out. Unless you’re NORAD, it’s a lot trickier to track a single-engine airplane than an imported pickup truck. So I flew.

  From above on a clear day, when the freeways are moving and the smog is on hiatus, the Los Angeles Basin can look like the most peaceful place on the planet. Stretching east from the Pacific, the aerial view is an amorphous pastiche of business districts, each with its own high-rise nucleus, and of verdant hills and blue reservoirs and tree-lined neighborhoods where aquamarine swimming pools dot every other backyard. Such are the delusions of tranquility derived from on-high. Only at ground level does hard reality emerge: that of an impersonal, often unforgiving megalopolis where people like Arlo Echevarria are butchered every day.

  Half an hour after departing Rancho Bonita, I landed at Van Nuys, the busiest general aviation airport in the nation. I taxied to transient parking on the north side of the field, to a secluded spot as far away from the street as I could find, shut down the Duck’s engine, and called the number on the business card Savannah had given me. There was no answer. I told her answering machine that I was in town for a couple of days and needed a place to stay, somewhere quiet, where I could think things through without distraction. She called back less than a minute later.

  “What happened? Did something happen? I know something happened.” She was breathless. I could practically hear her pulse pounding through the phone.

  “Nothing happened, Savannah. I just decided to get away for a couple of days, that’s all.”

  “Logan, I know you. You’ve never done a spontaneous thing in your life. You’re not the type to just ‘get away’ on the spur of the moment. It’s about Arlo, isn’t it?”

  I told her about the Honda trying to run me off the road. Probably just some kid looking for a cheap thrill, I said. Nothing to be alarmed about.

  “Like hell,” Savannah said.

  Fifteen minutes later, she rolled up in a platinum-colored Jaguar convertible. She was wearing a broad-brimmed floppy hat made from burgundy felt, a
nd oversized Gucci sunglasses.

  “Who’re you supposed to be, Mata Hari?”

  “Get in.”

  I tossed my beat-up leather flight bag onto the backseat. Stuffed inside were aerial charts, a razor, a toothbrush, a comb, two changes of clothes, and my revolver. I had barely lowered myself into her Jag when Savannah stomped on the gas, thundering out onto Hayvenhurst Avenue like Ricky Bobby at Talladega. We streaked through a red light and bombed a left on Sherman Way, making for the Santa Monica Freeway at thirty miles an hour over the posted limit.

  “Slow down, Savannah.”

  “You were the one who said somebody’s trying to kill you.”

  “I said somebody tried to run me off the road. A simple case of road rage. Now, slow down.”

  “Logan, do the math. Arlo’s dead. You could be next.”

  I did the math. Based on Savannah’s nominal driving skills, I calculated my chances at that moment of being killed in a vehicular accident were substantially greater than any threat posed by assassins unknown. I reached down and slid the Jaguar’s gearshift into neutral. Disengaged from the automatic transmission, with Savannah’s foot still on the gas, the engine screamed—nearly as loudly as she did.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Either slow it down or I’m punching out, right here and now.”

  I reached for the door handle.

  “OK, OK.” She eased up on the accelerator. “There, you happy now?”

  “Happy comes when your work and words benefit yourself and others.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Ask the Buddha. I’ll let you know when I figure it out myself.”