Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

  And, too, there wasn’t much heavy lifting, so Anna was content to be Utterback’s Girl Friday.

  ALICE UTTERBACK CRAWLED beneath the remaining shreds of the blasted wing on the passenger side of the Beechcraft. A black cord was around her neck, both ends disappearing into her shirt pocket. Pulling on the cord, she dragged out a small, powerful Maglite and began tracing the beam methodically over the instrument panel.

  Clutching the clipboard to her chest, Anna frog-walked in as close as she could get and watched the proceedings. The ghosts had been hauled off along with the corpses and she was glad. Despite the macabre remnants of humanity—a burned button, what could have been blood or oil spattered beneath the instrument panel in the one unburned portion of the floorboards—the cockpit was cleansed of emotion. Now it was just a puzzle and Anna was enjoying watching the chief investigator gather together the pieces.

  “Norman Hull said two killed,” Alice remarked without stopping her work.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Anna said.

  “Pilot was a private contractor?”

  “Slattery Hammond.” Anna filled in the name.

  Alice clicked the Maglite off and rocked back on her heels. “Slattery Hammond. Why am I not surprised?”

  Anna waited. The question was rhetorical and with Alice Utterback somehow one wasn’t tempted to pry.

  “I flew with him once or twice when I worked in Region Six—in Washington State,” Utterback volunteered. “He was a hotshot. Or thought he was. One of those fellas you’ve got to get to know quick because they aren’t going to live all that long. Too bad they usually manage to take someone with them when they go. The passenger was the district ranger here?”

  “Todd Belfore.”

  Alice switched her light back on and returned her focus to the instrument panel. “Norman said he left a widow.”

  “She’s in a hospital in St. Marys. Or was yesterday. She’s seriously pregnant.”

  “That’s a pity,” Alice said, and: “Write this down.” Speaking slowly, undoubtedly accustomed to giving dictation to people not trained in shorthand, she listed the readings on the instruments: “Gas valve is on the auxiliary tanks, landing gear is up, altimeter looks about right, throttles . . . too damaged to tell.”

  In her best Catholic school hand, Anna wrote down every word.

  “Does this tell you anything?” she asked.

  “Not much,” Alice admitted. “But you never know. We may turn up something.”

  Shorty came over then and they cleared out, leaving him room to photograph the interior of the plane.

  Utterback strolled around in what appeared to be an aimless fashion. Hands shoved deep in her pockets, she scuffed through the duff, gazed at the trees, the sky, whistling soundlessly. Finally she stopped, pinched her underlip in a thoughtful way, and stared intently at the ground.

  “What?” Anna asked after a minute.

  “I think I’m getting a cold sore,” Alice said abstractedly. “I hate those doggone things.” She plucked a little longer at the offending lip, then said: “Write this down. Put it in parentheses so I’ll know it’s just me guesstimating and not God’s honest truth.

  “It looks like Hammond was flying too low and too slow. For some reason the airplane rolled sharply to the left and flew nose down. He hadn’t left himself any maneuvering room and stacked it, inverted, nose down.”

  “Got something, Alice?” Wayne called.

  “Nothing to take to the bank.”

  Again Utterback wandered off. Scribbling, Anna tagged along.

  “Inboards blew?” Alice asked. “There’s two on each wing, one close in, one further out—inboards and outboards,” she said before Anna was forced to expose her ignorance. “Did the ones close in explode?”

  “Yes, ma’am. The left tank exploded on impact and the right shortly after we arrived.”

  Alice was nodding; it tallied with what she’d seen. “Got the severed wingtips mapped?” she hollered at Rick and Shorty.

  “Right yes. Left no,” the Forest Service man called back.

  Alice resumed her soundless whistling and meandered toward the aircraft’s right wing. It lay forty yards north of the fuselage and was still, to some extent, intact. The outboard tank inside the wing had not been ruptured. Cables and lines snaked out to shredded ends like the sinews and ligaments of a severed limb. Leaf litter, plowed up on impact, covered the leading edge. The trailing edge was a foot off the ground, lending an aspect of movement and speed to the derelict wing.

  The sun had climbed past meridian. Anna’s stomach was beginning to growl tentatively for lunch. Down in the live oaks there wasn’t the faintest breath of air and the temperature was near a hundred degrees. Sweat ringed the men’s armpits, staining their shirts all the way to the belt line. Rivulets trickled down Anna’s neck and back, doing an excellent job of mimicking the sensation of little tick feet burrowing down for a snack.

  Alice was completely untouched: her weathered skin was dry and powdery-looking, her white hair lying in neat waves. Twice she circled the wingtip. Anna stood aside, pen poised, trying to look intelligent. “Could he have run out of gas?” she ventured.

  “Could’ve,” Alice said. “Always take a look.” She crouched down by the trailing edge and removed the gas cap. “Hey, Shorty,” she called. “I need to take a peek in the outboard tank. Got a match?”

  Familiar laughter at a standard joke filtered back to them as Utterback poked the beam of her Maglite into the recesses of the gas tank.

  “Nearly half full. Write that down,” she said. “Right auxiliary a quarter full—make it a quarter.”

  Dutifully Anna scratched out the word “half,” feeling a mild resentment that her so-far perfect notes were now besmirched.

  “My, my, what have we here?” Alice took off her glasses and pushed her eyeball up to the tank’s opening. “Some sort of foreign object.”

  Anna resisted the childish urge to say, “Let me see! Let me see!”

  Shorty had come up behind them. “Let me see,” he demanded, and Anna was jealous.

  “Looky.” Alice handed him the Maglite. “Way in the back. Kind of an amoeba thing.”

  “Quit with the fifty-cent words,” Shorty grunted as he squatted to look.

  After some discussion as to the nature of the alien item, Anna was dispatched to find something with which to fish it out. “Maybe a coat hanger,” was Alice Utterback’s unhelpful suggestion.

  Lest she miss out on anything, Anna jogged to where the pumper truck was parked on the road. Amid the collected garbage behind the seat was a length of welding rod. Feeling mildly heroic, she carried her prize back to the accident site.

  “Perfect,” Alice said, and Anna was rewarded for her zeal.

  Five minutes’ careful maneuvering produced a plastic bag, the sort the grocery stores provide by the roll in the produce section.

  With great care, Alice laid it out on the wing. The excitement had attracted the others and the six of them stood around staring at it.

  “Got stuck in by accident?” Shorty offered, then argued with himself. “Not likely. Too big. You’d have to poke it down on purpose.”

  “Could have been there for years,” Wayne suggested. He was the mechanic and that gave his opinion weight. “I’ve found stranger stuff. Once I found a used condom in the tail of an old J-three Cub. The bag might have fallen in when the tank was being manufactured and got sealed up.”

  “How long will plastic last in hundred-octane solution?” Alice asked.

  Nobody knew.

  “You know what to do for your next science project,” she said. “Bag it and send it to the National Transportation Safety Board lab. Maybe there was something in it.”

  “Sugar,” Anna said. The parks were well enough versed in the methods of monkey wrenchers for her to take a stab at the obvious. Sugar in the gas tank was the oldest of tricks, almost a cliché, but very effective.

  “Why not just pour the sugar in? Why stuff in the whole bag
?” Alice asked.

  “Good measure?”

  Everyone ignored Anna.

  “Would it cause the aircraft to malfunction and crash, Mrs. Utterback?” the chief ranger asked. Hull always sounded stilted, and Anna began to wonder if English was his second language.

  “It’d wreck the engine,” Alice said, “but it shouldn’t cause a crash like this. Photograph it. Bag it,” she said again, and lost interest. Speculations were of little import. When the facts came back from the lab the issue would be reopened.

  With a purpose that was a mystery to all, Alice stomped off, Anna in tow, and set up camp at the ruin of the left wing where it rested a dozen yards from its fellow.

  The left outboard fuel tank was ruptured, the gasoline all leaked away, but Alice wouldn’t leave it alone. While the others continued with their mapping and data collection, she and Anna sifted through the litter around the ruined wing. Twice Anna asked what they were looking for. Twice she was told: “Just looking.”

  Near sundown, as the men were packing their equipment to leave, Alice Utterback muttered, “Bingo,” and, “Eureka.” Buried in the leaf litter seven feet from the ruptured tank, she’d found what she was searching for: a second plastic bag.

  “Somebody was up to something,” she said. “But I’ll be jiggered if I know what.”

  CHAPTER Eleven

  IN THE FLATLANDS of east Georgia the sun set in slow motion. Twilight filtered down like fine dust, a gray drift over the brash colors of summer. Anna drove, Alice Utterback riding shotgun. There was no place they had to be and Anna idled along at twenty miles per hour enjoying herself. After a day of following Alice it felt good simply to sit. Utterback never seemed to tire and while the others took breaks for a cigarette, a drink, a bull session, the two of them had worked.

  Even now the chief investigator was not truly relaxed. The plastic sacks they’d found in the Beechcraft’s outboard fuel tanks rested in sealed evidence bags on the truck’s dashboard. Ignoring the kaleidoscope of green and gold spinning past the windows, Alice stared at the bags and Anna fancied she could hear the well-oiled gears of the older woman’s brain whirring.

  “Clearly the bags were stuck in the tanks on purpose,” Alice said after a while, talking more to herself than to Anna. “Though to what purpose I can’t imagine. There’s just no good reason. Hammond might’ve stuck them there to smuggle something but it’d be a pretty feeble attempt. If they had anything in them you’d have a heck of a time fishing them out, and if they didn’t, what’s the point?”

  “Could they gum up the works somehow?” Anna asked. “Like sand or throwing a wooden shoe in the machinery?”

  “Sabotage?” Alice echoed. “Not really. I mean I suppose they could float around in there, maybe settle over the fuel outlet and stop it up. But the odds of both of them doing it at the same time and staying put long enough to cut off the gas are pretty slim. Something sure as heck stacked that Beechcraft though. Hammond was a boob but he wasn’t a bad pilot. Still, short of some kind of interference, Hammond shouldn’t have plowed in like he did. The Beechcraft is a forgiving little airplane. Under most conditions it’ll see you home—or at least to a flat spot. If somebody wanted to kill him, there are better ways.”

  “Would anybody want to kill Slattery Hammond?” Anna asked.

  “Oh sure. He was one of those guys that always had something going. A bit of a schemer. And he was flying drug interdiction. That wouldn’t endear him in some circles.”

  “You think he was onto something?”

  “I doubt it. Those guys play hardball. I can’t see a dope dealer stuffing sandwich bags in a fuel tank—not unless Slattery was about to bust up a ring of ten-year-olds. What was that fella’s name with him? Belfore? Maybe he’d got on the wrong side of somebody.”

  “He wasn’t even supposed to be in the plane,” Anna said. “The chief ranger was scheduled for that flight.”

  “Maybe somebody knew he and Hull switched.”

  A memory surfaced in Anna’s mind: Tabby in a red dress, partially lit by the glow of a headlight, crying: “You would leave me!” as her husband grabbed at her.

  “Maybe,” Anna conceded. “Or maybe somebody was after Norman.”

  “Moot point anyway. These bags just don’t hold water as murder weapons. We’ll learn more tomorrow.” Alice wiped the evidence off the dashboard into a leather briefcase, effectively closing the investigation for the day.

  “Watch it!” she yelled suddenly, and Anna slammed on the brakes. On the dirt, stopping the tires had little effect on forward movement and they skidded ahead. Two vehicles, both lightweight trucks, one the chief ranger’s, the other borrowed from maintenance to carry Wayne and Shorty, were stopped in the middle of the road. Neither had taillights or flashers showing. Even as Anna cursed them she knew she’d never mention it; she too was driving blind. Evening had crept upon them so imperceptibly, she’d not realized how dark it had grown.

  Several feet short of Norman Hull’s rear bumper the truck shuddered to a stop. Half a moment later a choking cloud of fine white dust engulfed them.

  Feeling righteous, if belatedly so, Anna switched on the truck’s lights to avoid waylaying another unwary motorist. The headlights raked the side of the blue pickup truck and, as the dust cleared, picked out a group of men huddled beyond it to the side of the road.

  “Hit a deer,” Anna said as she opened the door.

  IT WASN’T A deer, it was a beautiful young man from Austria. And he hadn’t been hit by a car, he’d been shot.

  As Anna and Alice approached, the knot of men untied itself. Rick spoke first. “Anna, get your butt over here and take a look at this guy’s leg.”

  Anna did as she was told. The young Austrian sat on a berm of white dirt and shell that Mitch Hanson had dredged from the south end of the island to resurface the inland roads. In the uncertain light he looked terribly pale. His hair, pulled back in a ponytail, was a harsh contrast in dark brown. He was probably not more than twenty-five, but pain and exhaustion pulled taut the skin of his face and he looked considerably older.

  Beside him was a young Indian woman—American, not East Indian—as strikingly beautiful as her companion. She was slight and dark, her face made up of clear planes and sculpted curves. Eyes and hair were close to true black. From her small, perfect ears hung stylized bear fetishes in turquoise saddled with silver.

  She had both hands pressed over her mouth as if to keep from screaming or vomiting. The instant Alice and Anna entered the circle the hands fluttered apart and she began trying to talk.

  What she had been holding in was gasps. Even as her hands flew through the air trying to tell her story, words were gusted out incoherently. She was panting, as if she’d just run the hundred-yard dash.

  “Sorry,” she finally managed. “I can’t breathe. The thing—the bullet—got Guenther in the leg. I’ve been carrying him for miles.”

  “Dragging,” the Austrian said in perfect English, accented just enough to make even a middle-aged ranger’s heart skip a beat.

  Dragging was probably closer to the mark from the look of them. Guenther was a good-sized man, six feet, maybe 175 pounds. The woman was slight of frame and slender. “What’s your name?” Anna asked her.

  “Shawna.”

  “Breathe, Shawna.” To Guenther, Anna said: “I’m Anna Pigeon. I’m an emergency medical technician. Can I look at your leg?”

  Wayne or Shorty had gone back to the truck and turned on the headlamps. The hard, unilateral light obscured utterly what was in shadow and ruthlessly illuminated all else.

  Feeling a need to explain why nothing had been done prior to her arrival, Rick said: “We got here maybe a minute before you.”

  Anna grunted her acceptance of that as she shined Alice Utterback’s Maglite behind the Austrian’s knee.

  Both hikers were dressed in shorts, heavy boots, and knee-high socks. Guenther’s left leg below the knee was swathed in layers of fabric obviously cannibalized from out of
their packs. T-shirts of various colors made up the bulk of it.

  “It hasn’t bled through,” Anna said. “How long ago did it happen?” Guenther and Shawna looked at one another. Time had clearly ceased to be a measurable linear entity.

  “Four hours?” Shawna guessed.

  “An hour?” Guenther offered.

  “A while,” Anna compromised. They were satisfied with that. “I doubt there’s much I can do you haven’t already done,” she went on. “You’re still up and talking. I’d say the two of you did a dynamite job. I’m not going to mess with the dressing—all it would do is start the bleeding again. When we get you to a doctor, he can take it off.”

  “I was planning to take the boat to the mainland later,” Hull said. He and his wife and their thirteen-year-old daughter lived in St. Marys, a small town just across the estuary from Cumberland. “We’ll go ahead and leave now. I’ll drive you to the hospital there.”

  “Sooner is better,” Anna agreed.

  “Anna, if you will get the young lady’s statement en route, I would appreciate it,” Hull said, and began issuing instructions for the loading and transport of the injured man.

  Guenther was settled in the back of the chief ranger’s pickup on a pad of blankets. Wayne rode beside him to keep him company and to keep an eye on him.

  Shawna tucked herself in the cab of the pumper truck between Anna and Alice. “I love him,” she said wearily as she buckled herself in, “but he can sure be a pain in the ass. I hope the doctors give him drugs. He needs mellowing out big-time.”

  She’d regained breath and equilibrium. As Anna fell in line, the last in their little convoy, she asked again what happened.

  “Turnabout’s fair play,” Alice said, and assuming the role of secretary, pulled a legal pad out of her briefcase to take notes.