I gave her a Bose headset to match my own.
“Bautista,” she screamed into it. Her brother.
I nodded, released the parking brake, and backtracked to the end of the runway. After a final scan of the sky to make sure it was empty I increased the throttle and the Cessna quickly picked up speed. My eyes dashed back and forth between the airspeed indicator, watching it climb toward the magic number, and the far end of the runway as it came closer and closer.
As we approached the hanger again María’s assailant Bautista reappeared and ran out in front of the plane, blocking our way. I had maybe two seconds to decide what to do – keep going and kill him or swerve to the side, wreck the plane and maybe kill ourselves.
María decided for me. She reached over, grabbed the steering column tightly and even began pulling it back. I screamed out a “No!” and wrenched her hand away. By now we were past Bautista and, thankfully, I hadn’t felt an impact thump. I pushed forward on the yoke to keep the nose on the ground. The Cessna speeded up even more and the airspeed hit optimum. I glanced quickly sideways to make sure that María was behaving herself and pulled back on the yoke. After a breathless moment the plane’s wheels suddenly went silent. The runway disappeared beneath us. We were safely in the air.
As the plane lifted I looked out the side window and spotted Bautista. Still on the runway, he staggered to his feet, looked up and shook his fist. He seemed to be staring straight at me.
I veered sharply to the right to avoid the slopes ahead, climbed to eight thousand feet, set the GPS and glanced at my watch. Eighteen minutes past twelve noon. With a tailwind between twenty to sixty knots and a journey of about a hundred and thirty nautical miles, we had a flight time of no more than a couple of hours ahead of us.
Assuming everything went well over the Andes. I tried not to think about the challenge coming up.
Chapter 12
“That was stupid,” I said into the headset.
She refused to talk about it. All she would say was, “He wanted it for himself,” then clammed up. I knew she had more than enough on her mind, so I let it pass. It was as much as I could do to get her to pull down her seatbelt.
The Cessna had a fuel capacity of nearly ninety gallons and was full to the brim, which guaranteed it a huge range. It was the mountains ahead that I was concerned about. I switched on the built-in oxygen system housed in a panel above my head, took us up to fifteen thousand feet and used the turbocharger to take advantage of the tailwind.
The land beneath us was sparse and barren. Dried out riverbeds and salt lakes gave way to rising cordillera, a wall of flint-sharp gray cleaving the sky. If the plain below was arid scrubland, the mountains ahead were a hard rock desert. Upon inspection, the yellow and brown patches amid the general grayness were simply different shades of rock – I couldn’t spot the tiniest trace of vegetation. I’d read somewhere that the mountains’ height on this side of the Andes prevented rainfall getting this far in from the Pacific. Here, on the Argentine side, whatever soil there was in the folds and crevices of the mountains was no more than dead volcanic scree.
Through binoculars my eyes vainly traced the slopes for something, anything, signalling life. There were no trees, no shrubs, not even a patch of grass. Above about thirteen thousand feet the snow became prevalent, monotonous, unbroken. I gave up the search and climbed to eighteen thousand feet.
I switched to autopilot and reassured myself that the next couple of hours would be nothing but routine. We would be flying over a low pass called Planchon soon, the middle point of the range. I sat back, took a deep breath, tried to relax.
As soon as we got above the mountains proper I thought again about the challenge ahead. A dense blanket of cloud obscured my vision of the peaks below. No biggie, I told myself; nothing to see anyway and I was well used to flying IFR, or instrument flight rules. I didn’t need the visual. The tailwind changed to a wicked headwind, reducing my speed to under a hundred and seventy knots and decreasing.
Then the crap really hit the fan. I checked my GPS and my jaw dropped. It was displaying an alert. The signal strength indicated low, with only six of twelve satellite channels showing. I had to be over Planchon by now though I couldn’t see it due to the clouds below. Attempting to switch to visual flight rules I descended three thousand feet and turned the Cessna at right angles to align it along the route through the pass. Assuming we were over the pass . . . I still couldn’t see it. Not for the first time, I wished I could contact the airport ahead for confirmation and instructions, but I’d foolishly sworn to María that I’d keep radio silence.
At the lower altitude the plane entered a cloud and began to jump and shake in the varying air currents. María stirred and gave me a frightened look. Something that should have occurred to me all along finally entered my head.
“Do you have your cell phone on?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she replied, “It’s back there, in my bag.”
“Switch it off,” I said, “I think it’s affecting the GPS.” This had never happened to me before, but I’d heard other pilots talk about it. A cell phone three or four feet away from the GPS . . . it shouldn’t make any difference but once in a blue moon this sort of thing occurred. I cursed myself for not thinking of it earlier.
She reached around and searched in her bag for the phone. The bag had multiple pockets and pouches, and she seemed to be taking forever.
I took her down slowly and we entered another cloud bank. The plane lurched alarmingly, the nose pounding down while the tail end kicked up. I quickly backed off the throttle to reduce airspeed in an attempt to fly straight and level and shouted into the headset to María to prepare for the worst. Another gust of turbulence tossed us about then we hit a downdraft and plummeted several hundred feet. For several seconds I felt weightless in my seat. By now I was truly flying blind and didn’t like it one bit. We hit a second air pocket and sank like a stone for a further few hundred feet. I reduced the power even more and the sound of the engine shifted from a raging roar, with the prop chopping hard and fast, to a quiet idle. The altimeter and vertical airspeed indicators both showed further loss of altitude. I could hear all sorts of stuff being bounced around.
Yet another rapid fall finally brought us out of the clouds. The view which opened up beneath me was not a broad valley pass as planned but the rocky edge of a snow-covered mountain no more than ten feet from the tip of the starboard wing. My hips tightened, and my breath caught in my chest as I moved the rudder to try to get straight and level.
Finally the plane straightened, I applied power and pulled on the yoke to climb again. The engine roared and the plane vibrated. It rose a little but not fast enough. Too little, too late. The slopes ahead of us increased in size. If I tried to turn now, the plane would stall and crash upside down. Chances of us surviving, practically zero.
“Brace yourself in case we down!” I shouted to María.
Everything now appeared as a white streak of blurry images. Instinctively I knew I had to slow down. A wall of white appeared to the right in my peripheral vision.
“Hang on, we’re going to crash!” I screamed.
Our right wing contacted the side of the mountain, producing a deafening clash of broken metal and torn canvas. It broke right off, somersaulted over the fuselage, and crashed into the tail. The rudder came off too and was sucked away into the icy, gaping void.
Immediately the plane veered starboard. I swung hard to port to counter steer, but it only made things worse. The left wingtip dipped and dragged across the ground until I was sure it too would break away. Somehow it held, and we rose a little again. María’s screams filled my headset. The plane hurtled toward the jagged mountain ahead where it would smash to pieces against a wall of rock. Again, our chances of surviving the impact were zero.
I pulled back on the yoke and raised the nose. The remaining wing and fuselage flared up, acted like an airbrake and slowed us down but I was still being jostled so violently that I cou
ldn’t hold my hand steady enough to cut the engine or kill the power. With seconds to spare I put the nose down and got the plane lower so that the undercarriage scraped along the ground. We belly-flopped bump, bump, bump, the plane gave one last forward lurch and the nose crumpled into deep snow only inches away from the rock face. The entire front of the plane folded like an accordion and my chest was compressed tight against the steering yoke.
The breath was forced out of my flattened body. I coughed once and spat up some thick red gobs. A strained wheezing broke the silence and I realised it was me, desperately trying to get air into my lungs.
I couldn’t breathe. I croaked out a pitiful “Help me,” knowing there was no-one but María to hear. Pinned into my seat like a squashed pop can, I couldn’t turn to check on her. I wavered in and out of consciousness, sinking into a murky oblivion and then suddenly rising to the top, only to drop into the murk again.
Just a little oxygen, please. My chest fluttered and a mouthful of air crept in. My hand reached for the seat belt buckle, my fingers groped, searched, at last found. I released the buckle and my lungs burned with cold air.
My head grew dizzy, sight blurred. I had no idea where I was or how I’d got here. My eyes began to close, and I surrendered to the dark.
Chapter 13
Vancouver, BC, Canada, a year later.
“How are the flashbacks?”
I took another sip from my paper cup of water to give me time to think. Meanwhile Abby Levy sat across from me, her expression neutral, pen poised over a lined notepad. What should I tell her? The truth, of course. There’s no point in lying to your psychiatrist.
“I’d like to say they’re getting better. I think they were . . . were fading into the past, I mean. But this latest thing has brought them right back. Before I know it, I have a little film reel playing in my head.”
“When do you most get them?”
“Same as usual. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, in the shower, when I’m doing laundry, those sorts of times. When I’m not thinking about anything else and my mind’s blank.” And plenty of other times too, but I couldn’t detail them all.
She nodded and waited for me to continue.
I drank more water and looked around the office, my eyes settling on the photograph on the wall of Abby’s polydactyl cat, Mister Abigail. A male cat called Abigail with seven toes on each front paw. I gathered my thoughts. We’d spent the last hour going over my reactions to the parcel bomb. That had kept Abby busy scribbling; she’d filled several pages already. What to discuss next?
“How is your medication going?” Abby said, breaking the silence, “Still taking the escitalopram?”
“Sure. My happy pill. One a day, keeps me singing in the shower.”
“Last time you mentioned side effects of . . .,” she looked down at her notes, “diarrhoea?”
Man is this embarrassing. “That seems to have cleared up,” I answered hastily, “Since I started taking it after food.” Better than the chronic constipation I’d suffered this time last year, due to my unnatural diet then.
Abby nodded and scribbled something on her yellow pad. “We talked about you writing your experiences all down,” she said.
“Yes, we did.” I hadn’t done it, of course.
“You should think about doing that, I really think it would help,” she continued. “You told me you read a lot, tried your hand at a novel, stuff like that?”
“I still have it in a bottom drawer,” I said. Actually I had it on a memory stick, but bottom drawer sounded better.
“I think writing it out would help with the recurring flashbacks. It might send them back into normal memory where they can become more distant. No-one but you has to read it.”
I’d thought about this before but now I really heard her for the first time. She was on to something. I should write the whole damn story down. It would help me to objectivise it and let it go. I’d get started on it and bring it to her next time.
“You’re right,” I conceded, “It’ll be my homework.”
We talked for another twenty minutes, mainly about stuff like mindfulness and the ‘wise mind’, then set up another appointment on her computer. The intervals had been gradually stretching out. . . I’d only been seeing her every three weeks but now we agreed to two weeks for the next while. Until things got better again.
I emerged onto West Broadway and walked the couple of blocks to Cambie Street. It was a lovely sunny day and I decided to get an iced double espresso in Starbucks on the corner and walk the remaining dozen blocks or so back to my house. Up the hill, opposite City Hall, I turned right onto Tenth Avenue and nipped through the cutely named Long Life Lane at the back of City Square mall. I was at the top of the steps when I saw him.
A guy in a dark hoodie, walking towards me from my left. He’d have come up the other set of steps from Cambie. Nothing odd about that. Only . . . I was pretty sure I remembered catching a glimpse of this guy in the line-up behind me in Starbucks.
Well, there still wasn’t anything peculiar about that. He had to walk in some direction after all. Pure coincidence and just a regular Joe. Except for the fact that he had the hood of his dark top pulled low down over his forehead on a blazing hot day. And no drink in his hand, Starbucks or otherwise.
I ignored him and told myself not to be stupid. Paranoia was something I didn’t need to add to my list of ailments, mental and physical. I ducked into the back entrance to City Square, rode the escalator to the top floor, ignored the dollar store where I often bought cheap chocolate bars, and exited onto Twelfth Avenue. At the lights I struggled not to look behind me.
At Heather I crossed the road and finally allowed myself to look back. I swung my head around slowly, trying to make it seem as natural as possible. No Hoodie. Ten minutes later I reached my quiet side street and made myself open my townhouse door calmly and unhurriedly.
Inside, I left the empty drink container in the hallway and ran up the stairs to the front bedroom. Very carefully I peered out of the side of the drapes, making sure there was no light behind me. The window was open several inches and I could hear sounds coming up from the street. For a minute or so all was quiet, and nothing happened outside.
Footsteps approached on the sidewalk. Hoodie stood at my front gate. Without raising his head he lit a cigarette and tossed the spent match over my gate. Then he was gone.
Chapter 14
The plain clothes cop’s name was J. D. Schuller and I’d talked to him before about persistent media hounds and angry internet stalkers, all of whom had now, thankfully, faded away. Schuller was probably around forty, cropped fair hair, average height, with a grizzled, muscular look about him. In short, a real tough bastard. He’d told me his rank the first time we’d met. I forgot it about ten seconds later.
We’d never actually discussed his official role beyond that he’d told me at the very beginning he was ‘assigned to my case’. It was a phrase that made me squirm. In practice it meant that, no matter when I called the local police station or who I talked to, it was always Schuller who appeared an hour or two later. Which is why he was sitting on my living room couch at this very moment.
Up until now I’d been telling myself that the bomb package was a bizarre mistake; that it had been meant for someone else. Now I realised that, deep down, I’d never really believed it. Hoodie had forced me to give up the pretense. Even if my shadow was just some jerk, the incident had really rattled me.
I’d just spent some time carefully telling Schuller all I knew about Hoodie.
He took a slug of water – the only thing liquid or solid he would ever accept from me – and put the tumbler down. “Doesn’t amount to much though, does it, Mr. Knox? With all you’ve been through it’s natural you’d get a bit jumpy from time to time,” he said, “Even today, I suppose.” In other words. . . I don’t believe you. And, why are you still such a kook?
“You don’t think it’s anything to worry about?”
; He rubbed a thick-fingered stubby hand across thin lips. “Hard to say. It could be a petty thief after your wallet. Then again, it’s probably just someone who lives down the block pausing to light a smoke on his way home.”
I curbed my natural instinct to push back. It got me nowhere with this asshole. “So it’s not related to the bomb package?”
“Don’t see how it could be. Anyway, we’re working on a theory about that based on new evidence that puts you in the clear.”
Puts me in the clear? As if I’d sent it to myself.
“What’s that?”
He leaned forward like he was about to share national secrets. “Keep this under your hat but we now know that the package probably wasn’t even meant for you.”
I let that one sink in for a moment. “How come?” I noticed my voice had become high pitched and swallowed hard.
Again, he gave a shifty little glance to his left, indicating arcane knowledge was about to be divulged, or perhaps who the real shooter was on the grassy knoll. “I don’t know if you’re much aware of your neighbours,” he began, laying on a nice dose of implied, why the hell aren’t you? “But two other people within a couple of blocks claim to be the real intended victim of the bomb. First, we have a CBC presenter across the street – family man, big house with a white veranda all along the front – who thinks it’s his gay ex-lover. Then, further down the road, there’s a right-wing blogger on a well known internet site who claims it’s Islamic fundamentalists.”
Shadow of a Killer Page 4
