by David Freed
“Hey.”
“Hey.” He waved away tendrils of pot smoke, snubbing out his blunt on the top of a Budweiser can. “What’s up?”
I showed him Savannah’s picture, explaining what had purportedly happened in the parking lot earlier in the day. He shook his head apologetically.
“I’ve been sleeping all day, dude. I was supposed to be over here this afternoon, plowing this shit, but I dunno, man. Fell asleep. Next thing I know, it’s like, ‘Where am I? What planet is this? What time is it?’ You know what I’m saying?”
“We all have our off days.”
I asked him if he knew anybody in town who drove a green van.
“A green van . . . a green van . . .” He closed his eyes, trying to focus, working the question like a contestant on final Jeopardy. “No, dude,” he said after several seconds, “can’t say that I do. My buddy, Twitch, he’s got this totally tricked-out blue van with a Porta-Potty in it and everything, but it’s, like—”
“Blue.”
“Exactly.”
“Look, if you do happen to spot any green vans, or the woman from that picture,” I said, handing him my card, “I’d appreciate a call.”
“No worries.” He grabbed his own business card from above the sun visor and handed it to me. “You need any snow plowed, firewood, run some errands, there’s my number, right there. Ask anybody, OK? I’m, like, totally reliable.”
“I’ll, like, keep you in mind.”
Back inside the Yukon, I glanced at his card in the glow of the dashboard instruments. His corporate DBA was, “The Plowman Cometh.”
Clever. I wondered if I’d ever smile again.
THE RED message light was blinking on my beige-colored room phone when I got back to the Econo Lodge. It was Streeter. He’d called about an hour earlier to apprise me that the fingerprint dusting of the room where Savannah and I stayed had proven inconclusive. The only prints the sheriff’s technician had been able to find and identify were left by Johnny and Gwen Kavitch, which didn’t set off any bells considering the couple ran the B&B and handled room cleaning themselves. Streeter noted that he’d received my message about the green van and had passed it on to his department’s patrol units as well as surrounding law enforcement agencies.
“Don’t think we’re giving up, we haven’t even started,” he said on the machine. “I’m still confident we’ll find her. I also have an update on the Lovejoy homicide I thought you’d find interesting. Call me when you get a chance.”
Streeter had been unable to reach me on my cell phone. The thought occurred to me: what if Crocodile Dundee had the same problem—tried to call me with instructions and couldn’t get through because I had yet to figure out all of my phone’s mind-numbing, over-engineered features. What if he’d taken his frustration out on Savannah? My face felt flush and my mouth went dry.
Walking quickly into the bathroom, I filled a plastic cup with water and gulped it down, refilled the cup, and drank that, too. Suddenly, I couldn’t catch my breath. My heart began pounding crazily, like it was skipping beats, and for a moment, I thought I was dying. Not even in a firefight, or diving in on a heavily defended target, had I ever felt anything remotely close to panic. But that’s what it was. A panic attack. Complete, unbridled terror.
I went and sat down on the corner of the bed, closed my eyes, and concentrated, trying to will my heart to normalcy. When that didn’t work, I rolled onto the floor and did stomach crunches to the point of exhaustion. That seemed to do the trick; the skipping beats stopped. I lay back on the carpet, my right triceps in spasm, too tired to move.
The Buddha believed that fear is the result of attachment—to ourselves, our possessions, the people we love. Everything in life is transient, including life. Embrace that transience, recognize that all those attachments are fleeting, Buddhists reason, and you’ll ultimately shed your fear. Could be all of that is true. I don’t really know. But if the Buddha had sat in the same room with Savannah for even five minutes, he might’ve better understood the erratic beating of my heart and my sense of near-paralytic dread at the prospect of never seeing her again.
My cell phone was on the nightstand above me. I pushed myself off the floor and grabbed it, peering closely at the screen, trying to figure out if I’d missed Dundee’s call or text message. Whether he’d tried to reach me or not, I couldn’t tell; advancements in digital communications are an anathema to the analog me. I lay down on the bed, not bothering to undress or pull down the bedspread, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the sun was coming up and my phone was chiming with an incoming text message:
Behind Applebee’s. Suitcase. You got 10 minutes. Will call to confirm you have it. No cops or she dies. You’re late, she dies.
The room clock read 7:35 A.M. The text had come in two minutes earlier. I grabbed my duffel bag and bolted, throwing open the motel’s office door on my way to my car.
“Where’s the Applebee’s?”
The college kid manning the front desk pushed her stringy brown hair behind one multipierced ear and looked up at me from a copy of the Hunger Games.
“Excuse me?”
“Applebee’s. Where is it?”
She pointed. “Take a right on Lake Tahoe Boulevard. It’s about three and a half miles. But I’m pretty sure they don’t open ’til—”
I reached the Yukon, tossed my duffel into the passenger seat, hopped in, fired up the engine, and roared out, onto the boulevard.
The road was still snow packed and icy in spots, but traffic fortunately was sparse. I fishtailed around a garbage truck and a snail-like Mercedes 450 whose driver, a wizened old man, looked to be steering with one hand and conducting Beethoven’s Fifth with the other. As I glanced back to pass him, a deer and her spotted fawn bounded out of nowhere, directly into my path. I cut the wheel hard left and slid along the shoulder, fighting to keep 5,200 pounds of SUV from going off the road. How I avoided hitting Bambi and his mother, I’ll never know.
The Yukon’s odometer told me I had another two miles to go. That was assuming the desk clerk was correct in her distance estimate. Assuming the clock on the dashboard was set correctly, I had six minutes to get there, find a suitcase, and send a text message acknowledging that whatever was in that suitcase was in my possession, or Savannah would die.
The traffic light ahead was red. Vehicles were beginning to back up in either direction. I cut right, laying on the horn and blew through the T-intersection.
Four minutes.
I gunned the accelerator on the straightaways, the speedometer creeping past eighty, and eased up on the curves. Every fiber in me screamed go faster. I probably could’ve, too, but not without upping the risk past what Indy race car drivers like to call “being stupid.” We’d learned all about high-speed and evasive-driving techniques at Alpha from an instructor who’d spent more than thirty years running guns in Latin America for everyone from the Sandinistas to the Medellin Cartel. Jose Camacho was a slight little man with rotted teeth who’d dropped out of school in third grade, but who fathomed inherently and intimately the physics of wheeled vehicles. He didn’t drive them so much as strapped them on. “A car is like a woman,” he’d tell us, “each different, yet each the same. Learn to touch her in the way she desires to be touched. Never push her beyond what she desires, and she will fill your heart forever.”
Ever so subtly, I could feel the Yukon swaying left and right as the front tires danced on patches of black ice.
I heeded the words of Jose Camacho and slowed down.
Three minutes.
The landscape passed by as a blur. Towering pine forests and minimalls punctuated by stand-alone ski shops, banks, burger joints, cafés, and budget motels. Ordinarily, I would’ve mentally catalogued them all, consciously and automatically mapping my exfiltration route—the byproduct of escape and evasion training. But I was so laser-focused on making it to Applebee’s in time, I barely noticed any of it.
Two minutes.
The ro
ad faded left and suddenly I was tapping like crazy on the brakes, hook-sliding on the ice to a stop. An eighteen-wheeler had jackknifed 200 meters ahead of me. The road in either direction was blocked with traffic.
I pulled out of line, bouncing over the sidewalk in front of the Highland Inn, jumped out of the Yukon, and sprinted.
Where the hell was Applebee’s? How much farther up the road? I ran like I did back in the day, with lightning bolts on my football helmet. I was never the fastest receiver, but I had good hands and a nose for the end zone. I used that nose now, racing toward my objective as fast as my calcified knees would carry me.
I’d run about 200 meters when Applebee’s came into view on my left with its green shingled roof and stone façade. The expansive, snow-covered parking lot in back was empty save for a weathered, silver Honda Civic with Nevada tags. The car was unoccupied.
I looked around frantically. Not a suitcase in sight.
There was, however, a battered gray Dumpster adjacent to the restaurant’s rear door.
One minute.
I threw open the Dumpster’s hinged steel top. It crashed against the back with a loud clang. Inside, piled high, were plastic trash bags stuffed with fetid table scraps, used paper napkins and the other disposable detritus of dining out. I began heaving bags onto the snow like a homeless man possessed, one after the other.
And there it was: an old suitcase.
I leaned in, hauled it out with both hands, breathing hard, and set it down. It felt like it weighed about fifty pounds. The sides were fabric, scotch plaid, darkened by stains of who-knows-what. A small padlock secured the suitcase’s single zippered opening.
My Casio G-Shock showed 0745. I’d made it just in time. I reached for my cell phone, waiting for it to ring with further instructions from Crocodile Dundee. Then I remembered:
I’d left my phone in the car.
TWELVE
How long it took to haul the suitcase back to the Yukon I couldn’t tell you, only that I was thoroughly spent by the time I got there, and that my phone was ringing. The first words out of my mouth when I answered it were, “I’m sorry.”
“What the hell, mate?” Crocodile Dundee was seething on the other end. “I told you ten minutes. Do you want your lady to die?”
I closed my eyes and tried to slow my heart rate.
“I had a problem. It’s been resolved. I’ve got the suitcase. What do you want me to do with it?”
“How do I know you’ve got it? Maybe you don’t. You’d say anything to save her.”
I described it for him. The pattern of the fabric. The stains.
“Yeah, OK, good, you’ve got it. Not many suitcases look like that piece of shit anymore, do they?” Dundee laughed. “I mean, when you think about it, how long did it take ’em to figure out you could put wheels on goddamn luggage, right?”
His tone was casual, cordial. I fantasized about putting a bullet behind his ear.
“I’m assuming you’re smart enough to know that if you try opening it, or tampering with it in any way, she dies.”
“Understood.”
“You’re going to fly it to Santa Maria,” Crocodile Dundee said. “There’s a hotel right there on the field, a Radisson. You’re going to walk in with the suitcase through the back door, through the lobby and out the front door. There’ll be a red, four-door Hyundai parked in the third row, closest to the entrance. You’re going to slide the suitcase under that car. Then you’re going to walk back into the hotel and you’re going to sit in the lobby for an hour. You’ll be under observation the entire time, so don’t think about trying anything, or—”
“She dies. You’ve made your point.”
“It’s now eight fifteen. You’ll deliver the suitcase by no later than eleven fifteen. That gives you three hours.”
“That’s virtually impossible. Santa Maria is more than 250 miles from Tahoe. I’m flying a Cessna 172, not a Learjet.”
“Not my problem.”
“What if I run into a headwind? Or air traffic control starts vectoring me? I can’t do it in three hours.”
“It’s not subject to negotiation, asshole. Three hours. Not a minute later. Whatever goodwill I was feeling for you was just spent being late for the pickup.”
I struggled to maintain control, to not threaten him.
“Let me talk to her. I need to know she’s still OK.”
“Oh, she’s more than OK, if you know what I mean.”
He laughed, like it was all some big game.
“She’s pregnant,” I said. “Let me talk to her. Please.”
“Hang on a sec,” Crocodile Dundee said. “Here’s the lovely lady right now.”
I could hear Savannah over the phone screaming out in muffled agony, as if her mouth was taped shut, followed by pathetic, heart-wrenching whimpering. Pain seared through the left side of my chest as if I’d been stabbed.
I didn’t ask what torture Dundee had inflicted on her. I didn’t plead with him to not do it again. I knew that no words I could muster would appeal to such a monster because monsters have no humanity. Some human beings are little more than rabid dogs. They can’t be rehabilitated. They need to be put down for the better good. Dundee was one of them.
The palm of my left hand felt wet. I looked down and realized I was bleeding: I’d balled my fist so tightly, my fingernails had broken the skin.
“Three hours, mate,” Dundee said. “You best get moving. You’re burning daylight.”
The line went dead.
I promised myself that Dundee would be dead, too, soon enough.
MARLENE WAS playing solitaire on her computer at Summit Aviation Services when I came rushing in from the parking lot, lugging the suitcase. I tossed the Yukon’s keys on the counter, said my duffel and Savannah’s luggage were still in the back of the SUV, asked her to store them until I returned, that I wasn’t sure when that would be, told her to send me a bill, and raced for the door leading to the flight line.
“Gordon wanted to speak with you before you left,” she said, glancing anxiously toward the closed door of Gordon Priest’s office. I could see Priest through the glass inside, sitting at his desk, on the phone.
“It’ll have to wait.”
A pilot is required by regulations to thoroughly inspect his or her aircraft before takeoff. You check to make sure that nothing looks like it’s about to fall off the plane, that nothing furry or feathered has taken up residence inside the engine compartment or airframe, that the fuel has no water in it. A pilot also is expected to be fully briefed ahead of time on en route weather conditions, as well as those forecast at his intended destination.
I did none of that before hurriedly unchaining the Ruptured Duck, tossing the suitcase into the plane’s luggage compartment, and jumping into the left seat.
With precious seconds ticking by, I dug the Duck’s ignition key out of the front pocket of my jeans, swiftly running my hand over the circuit breakers to ensure they were all in. Mixture control knob full forward. Key in the ignition, four strokes on the primer, primer control set and locked, throttle open one-eighth inch, master switch on. Feet firmly on the toe brakes. Seat belt tight across my lap.
“Clear!” I shouted with my window open—the same warning every pilot yells before starting any piston-driven engine so that no bystander lurking nearby gets pureed by the propeller.
I cranked the key.
The prop turned listlessly, the engine cold and unwilling, then stopped.
I pumped the throttle control in and out and tried the ignition again. Another half-hearted propeller rotation.
Nothing.
“C’mon, Duck, not now.”
Then I looked down to my right and realized the fuel tank selector valve was in the “off” position. I normally left it on “both” tanks. I could only assume that the late Chad Lovejoy, who’d met Savannah and me planeside when we first landed, had switched the valve handle for whatever reason while refueling my Cessna. I flipped the indicator to �
�both” tanks, waited another few seconds for the gas to drain down from the wings, and rotated the ignition key once more.
The engine came alive like it was factory new.
I began taxiing immediately, pulling on my headset and rolling toward the freshly plowed runway, faster than I should’ve, leaning the fuel-air mixture and setting my altimeter to accommodate the 6,269-foot field elevation, while spinning the elevator trim wheel to a slightly nose-up, takeoff setting. To my right, an orange windsock danced limply on the breeze. The wind was out of the northeast—a good sign. It told me I’d be flying with something of a tailwind, at least after takeoff. A tailwind meant faster groundspeed.
It meant I might make it to Santa Maria on time.
I scanned the sky left and right, forward and back, for any other aircraft coming or going. There were none. The radio was quiet. I should’ve gone through my pretakeoff checklist the way I always did before each flight, testing the control inputs and engine to make sure everything’s working correctly, but I did none of that, either. There was no time. The Duck was old, there was no denying that, but he’d never let me down in all the time we’d been flying together. I keyed the mic and hoped his dependability held true.
“South Lake Tahoe traffic, Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima is rolling runway three-six with a right downwind departure, South Lake Tahoe.”
I squared the Duck to the runway’s centerline, twisting the directional guidance compass card to align with the strip’s magnetic heading, angled the ailerons into the quartering crosswind, then shoved the throttle full forward.
The Duck seemed to sense the urgency of our mission as the airspeed needle came alive. He accelerated quickly, faster than normal, it felt like. I lifted his nose in the cold air and we roared into the sky like an F-16. Well, maybe not like an F-16. Maybe not even close. But definitely not like an aging, four-seat airplane with faded paint and a 160-horsepower engine. We were making nearly 1,700 feet per minute in the climb. In a Cessna 172, that’s Guinness World Records material. I turned crosswind, then downwind.
