Fangs Out

by David Freed

  “So I’ve been told.”

  I asked her about the status of Bunny Myers and Myers’ gangbanging cousin, Li’l Sinister, who’d tried to make me fly them to Mexico. Rosario said sheriff’s forensics investigators had found both of their fingerprints inside Janet Bollinger’s apartment. They’d also found two ceramic Hummel figurines in the trunk of Li’l Sinister’s car that they believed were stolen from Bollinger.

  “Bunny told me he never went inside the apartment,” I said.

  “He told me he did. Him and his cousin. They go in, see Janet Bollinger bleeding on the floor, and rabbit. Zuniga grabs a couple of Hummels on the way out the door.”

  “Why steal Hummels?”

  “His mother’s birthday was coming up.”

  “Nice.”

  “I don’t know if Walker was involved in Bollinger’s homicide, directly or not,” Rosario said, “but if we end up going after a Medal of Honor recipient, the sensitivity of that, in a military town like this? . . .”

  “You never answered my question, Detective.”

  Rosario looked over at me with her head cocked.

  “What was so important, you drove all the way over here to talk to me in person?”

  She hesitated, then turned and locked her eyes on mine. “I get the impression, Mr. Logan, there are things in this case you’re not telling me, either.”

  I realized that if I filled her in on what Dutch Holland’s pilot buddy, Al Demaerschalk, had seen that night at the airport, and what FAA inspector Paul Horvath had found inside my engine—that someone had purposely tried to bring down the Ruptured Duck, perhaps to thwart a homicide investigation—Rosario would call in the cavalry. That meant the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board and, for all I knew, half the Marine Corps. And that, as far as my ambitions were concerned, was a nonstarter.

  I learned serving with Alpha that there is not always strength in numbers. Too many hunters can trample the trail. Often, the most effective way to locate a target is to be small and stealthy, and to leave as few footprints as possible. That was my plan, so that I might find and personally punish whoever had done me and my airplane harm. Vengeance may not be very Buddhist-like, I realized, but then again, neither are chile verde burritos.

  “I’ve told you everything I can,” I told Rosario.

  “Can or will?”

  She could smell the lie on me as easily as I did.

  PAUL HORVATH was leaning into the Ruptured Duck’s mangled engine compartment, snapping close-up digital photographs of the carburetor, when I stopped by. I was anxious to have my plane trucked to Rancho Bonita as soon as possible so that Larry could begin piecing it back together, and I could get back to being a flight instructor whose business, putting it diplomatically, afforded abundant room for growth.

  “Take a look at this,” Horvath said. “I didn’t notice it until just now.”

  He pushed on the head of the carburetor drain plug with the tip of his index finger. The plug jiggled in its socket like a loose screw.

  “Whoever put this plug back the last time didn’t tighten it down with a wrench. They just hand-tightened it. Engine vibration would’ve shaken it loose, I’d say no more than fifteen or twenty minutes after takeoff, and there goes your fuel supply. Not only that: now you’ve got flammable gas splashing on a crankcase operating at near 400 degrees centigrade. Gasoline ignites at 257 degrees. You literally would’ve gone down in flames.”

  First the engine’s breather line. Now, the carburetor drain plug.

  “One way or the other,” Horvath said, “somebody meant to bring this airplane down.”

  “Somebody who knows planes.”

  The FAA man nodded and asked me if I had any enemies.

  “How much time you got?”

  Horvath smiled and snapped another photo, his eye twitching. He said he’d spoken with airport administrators and was frustrated to learn that surveillance cameras covered only about half of the gated entrances to Montgomery’s flight line—and that of the cameras in use, many didn’t capture images well after dark. No camera, he said, had been angled in the direction of my airplane the night it was sabotaged. Officials planned to go through what videotape there was, but it would likely take months. As for security gates, only about half were equipped with computerized keypads that recorded the comings and goings of authorized users whom airport officials had assigned individual pass codes. The other gates relied on old-fashioned, three-digit mechanical punch codes that rarely changed.

  “The bottom line,” Horvath said, “is that security at most small airports, including this one, leaks like a sieve.”

  Should I have shared with him the information that Dutch Holland had conveyed to me, about Al Demaerschalk having witnessed a man cloaked in coveralls and a baseball cap getting out of a pickup truck to open the Duck’s cowling? Probably. But, as with Detective Rosario, my desires did not revolve so much around seeing justice served as they did retaliation.

  “How long before I get my plane back?”

  “Not for awhile.”

  “Can you be any more specific?”

  “Wish I could, Mr. Logan. It’s not up to me.”

  Horvath said he would turn over a final report to his supervisors, detailing his findings on the accident, probably within two weeks. His supervisors would then review the report before kicking it upstairs to FAA headquarters in Washington, D.C. It would be up to the aviation bigwigs there to decide when to release the Duck back to my care. The good news, Horvath said, was that his report would indicate the crash was in no way the result of pilot error. It was unavoidable, the apparent consequence of a criminal act.

  “If anything, Mr. Logan, you probably deserve a commendation. That was a fine piece of airmanship, getting back down without incurring any injuries to your passengers or anyone on the ground. You should be proud of yourself.”

  “I just want my plane back, Mr. Horvath.”

  He nodded like he understood what was in my head.

  DEFENSE ATTORNEY Charles Dowd said he had an urgent need to speak with me. About what he wouldn’t reveal over the phone, but the anxiety in his voice was palpable as I walked from the hangar housing the Ruptured Duck to my rental car.

  “Is there somewhere we can meet? I’d prefer it be away from my office.”

  “I’m at Montgomery Airport,” I said “There’s a Mexican restaurant inside the terminal, upstairs. We could meet there if you want.”

  Dowd paused. “I’m not too familiar with that part of town.”

  Not familiar with that part of town? San Diego may be a large city, but it’s not exactly Beijing. Hadn’t Dowd mentioned when we first met that he’d been practicing law locally for more than twenty-five years? How could he claim not to know his way around a community after living and working in it a quarter-century? Either he didn’t get out much or he was lying. But why be evasive? Had Dowd been involved in what happened to my airplane and now wanted to throw me off whatever trail might lead me back to him? For his own safety, I hoped not.

  “We can meet wherever you want,” I said.

  The attorney suggested a bar in Imperial Beach that was located, curiously enough, less than three blocks from the late Janet Bollinger’s apartment. I told him I was on my way.

  “I’ll be there,” he said.

  I had no idea what Dowd wanted to discuss, or whether he posed a legitimate threat. Still, if I learned anything toiling for Uncle Sugar, it’s that the quickest way to end up on the wrong side of the grass is to assume that anyone is innocent. That includes attorneys. Especially attorneys.

  Driving from the airport eastbound toward the 805 freeway, I spotted a small scuba diving supply shop and pulled in. The manager was about my age. He looked like he’d spent about twenty years too long in the sun.

  “Help you find something?”

  I told him I needed a knife. He asked me with a grin if I was worried about sharks.

  “You could say that.”

  He unlocked the
back of a display case, unsheathed a knife, and laid it on the glass countertop.

  “Top-of-the-line. Pure titanium for durability, sharpness, hardness, strength and abrasion resistance. One hundred percent corrosion resistant and guaranteed not to rust. That’s why it’s the official knife of Delta and the Green Berets.”

  Spoken like a true chair-borne commando. Anyone familiar with Special Forces knows that when it comes to knives, nothing is official. Operators carry whatever feels best in their hands. I counted among my friends any number of hard-chargers who never even packed a knife. Why get yourself all bloody, they reasoned, when the government issues you unlimited bullets and silencer-equipped firearms?

  “How much?” I asked, hefting the blade.

  “With tax, you’re looking at about $115.”

  I peered into the display case and pointed to a virtually identical knife.

  “What about that one?”

  “No self-respecting operator would ever be caught dead using that knife.”

  “Humor me.”

  “It’s on sale. Twenty-two bucks and change.”

  “Music to my ears. I’ll take it.”

  I SLID in behind the wheel of the Escalade, lifted the left leg of my jeans, and lashed the knife still in its sheath to my calf, then tugged the jeans back down. My phone rang.

  “I got your good news and your bad news,” Buzz said.

  “What’s the good news?”

  “I talked to a cryptologist I know over at NCC.”

  “And the bad news?”

  “He told me he couldn’t run your RFI.”

  Had my request for information come in through official channels, Buzz’s code-breaking friend at the National Counterterrorism Center would’ve fed “CAPCAFLR” into the NSA’s supercomputer at Fort Meade. The computer would’ve assigned each letter a numerical value correlating to its respective position in the alphabet, then played with more than 180,000 possible combinations. The numbers would’ve been fed through a dozen code-breaking software packages, reconverted back to letters, and the letters to potentially relevant words. But, because my request was for nongovernment purposes, the only assistance Buzz’s buddy was willing to render was wild speculation that the “PCA” in CAPCAFLR possibly stood for “principal component analysis,” a procedure that relies on something called an “orthogonal transformation” to convert correlated variables into linearly uncorrelated variables.

  “Orthogonal transformation? Who’s your friend? Mr. Spock?”

  “Don’t go getting your bun all in a twist, Logan. I’m just telling you what he told me.”

  Buzz said he had to get back to work. I told him I appreciated his efforts regardless, and that I was still working on snagging the opera CDs I’d promised him.

  CAPCAFLR. Two vowels. Six consonants. I stared intently at the scrap of paper on which Al Demaerschalk had scrawled eight letters. Maybe it wasn’t some sophisticated code. Maybe it was an abbreviation. Or an acronym. Like me, Al Demaerschalk was a former military pilot. The military loves acronyms. They use tens of thousands of them. My personal favorite was always MRE, which stands for “Meal Ready to Eat,” unless you’re forced to eat them for weeks on end, wherein they become known synonymously as “Meals Rejected by Ethiopians.” But if CAPCAFLR was a military acronym, Buzz would’ve catalogued it inside his encyclopedic mind, and told me.

  I hooked a right onto Convoy Street out of the dive shop’s parking lot and braked to a stop almost immediately as the traffic signal on Aero Drive went red. Two twenty-somethings who looked like they belonged in a sorority pulled up beside me in a silver Porsche Targa, sound system thumping out a rap tune, the title of which, I believe, was, “Freaky as She Wanna Be.” The passenger looked over at me.

  I head-bobbed to the pounding rhythm like I was gettin’ down with my bad self.

  She smiled and blew me a kiss as the light turned green. I noticed the rear license plate as the Porsche zoomed away. It said, “MZBHAVN” and, below that, “ca.dmv.gov.”

  Something clicked in my brain. I pulled to the curb and hit the redial button on my phone.

  “Sorry to bother you again, Buzz. I just had a thought.”

  “Those are fairly rare for you, aren’t they, Logan?”

  “What if CAPCAFLR’s a license plate number? A vanity plate. Charlie Alpha stands for California. Papa-Charlie-Alpha-Foxtrot-Lima-Romeo is the plate number itself.”

  “You’re asking me to run it for you?”

  “Would you?”

  “I’m not your goddamn slave, Logan. Just because you saved my bacon once or twice in the field doesn’t give you the right to ring me up whenever you get an itch and expect me to scratch it. I’m a key player in the battle against international terrorism. Do you know what that means?”

  “It means that anytime you go answering one of my backchannel RFI’s, you run the risk of stepping on your meat and being charged with misuse of government resources.”

  “Correct. It also means I’m taking my eye off about fifty Mini-me Osamas who, if they’re not trying to poison the food supply, are all running around out there with a brick of C-4 hidden in their turbans and a hard-on for mom and apple pie. The taxpayer is paying me to help introduce these guys to the seventy-two virgins. But am I doing that? No, Logan, I’m not. And you want to know why I’m not?”

  “Because you’re too busy helping me.”

  “There it is.”

  I told him I valued our friendship and that I was sorry for having distracted him in his hunt for terrorists. It wouldn’t happen again.

  Buzz grunted. “You’re just trying to make me feel guilty for saying no.”

  “I am not trying to make you feel guilty, Buzz. I still owe you the CDs. I’ll get them to you as soon as I can. I apologize for having wasted your time. The country definitely needs you more than I do.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “OK, you win—but this is the last time, Logan. Next time you want an intel dump, do us both a favor. Re-up and make the request through official channels yourself.”

  With my airplane out of commission for the foreseeable future and no immediate prospect of income in sight beyond my government pension check, I told him I’d definitely give his suggestion consideration.

  Seventeen

  Four Harley-Davidsons were angled on the curb outside the Drop Inn cocktail lounge where I’d agreed to meet defense attorney Charles Dowd. I parked down the block and had just stepped out of the Escalade when Savannah called.

  “I’m here at Mrs. Schmulowitz’s house. She’s not home.”

  “Did you check inside?”

  “The door’s locked. I rang the bell. Repeatedly.”

  “You need to check inside the house, Savannah.”

  “Logan, I just told you. The door’s locked. What would you like me to do, break in?”

  “That’s exactly what I’d like you to do.”

  “Logan, I am not going to burglarize your landlady’s house.”

  “What if she’s laid out in there and can’t get to the phone? You’re a life coach, Savannah. Here’s your chance to save a life.”

  Savannah growled with her teeth clenched—that exasperated sound women make when they know men are right but can’t admit it.

  “I’ll have to call you back,” she said testily.

  “Please do.”

  I walked toward the bar’s entrance.

  A bearded ZZ Top wannabe straddled backwards one of the motorcycles parked out front. He was wearing a sleeveless denim vest with “Mongols MC” stitched on the back and nuzzling a skanky blonde biker chick whose arms were draped around his beefy shoulders. They were both smoking unfiltered Camels.

  “News flash,” I said, striding past them, “cigarettes cause cancer.”

  “Fuck off.”

  That’s the thanks you get, trying to do your fellow man a solid.

  Wedged into a strip mall between a check-cashing joint and a cash-only dental clinic, the Drop Inn seemed right at home on
Imperial Beach’s Palm Avenue. Tacked to the front door was a laminated plastic sign, one of those red circles with a slash through it. Behind the slash was the silhouetted image of a pistol: no firearms allowed. I hoped attorney Dowd had paid heed. The last thing I needed was to bring a knife to a gunfight. I stood outside the door for a few seconds with my eyes closed, letting them adjust to the dim light that I knew awaited me on the other side of the door, then walked in.

  The Drop Inn offered no surprises. Dark and foreboding, it smelled of chewing tobacco and abject failure. Three rheumy-eyed regulars were parked at the bar, deep in their cups. Charles Dowd hunkered alone in a small corner table near the back, tie askew, suit coat off, sucking down a Corona. He waved me over.

  I watched his hands.

  “Thanks for coming on such short notice.”

  “No worries.”

  He caught the eye of the bartender, a narrow-hipped young woman with a lip ring and a violet-colored tank top who was washing glasses, and pointed to his empty bottle. She nodded.

  I pulled up a chair from a nearby table and sat down opposite him, with my back to the door. Putting your back to the door is never a good idea, especially in a biker bar, but it was either that or sit beside Dowd like we were going steady, and who knows how that would’ve been construed among the regulars?

  “This arrived in the mail this morning.” Dowd unfolded a sheet of paper and slid it across the table.

  It looked like an amateur’s hackneyed idea of a ransom note—multicolored letters in multiple fonts and sizes, clipped from magazines and pasted together. It read, “LEt it go or DIe like janET B.”

  “Let what go?”

  “I was hoping you might know,” Dowd said.

  “Know what?”

  “It.”

  “What is it, Mr. Dowd?”

  “You tell me.”

  I felt like I was trapped in an old Abbott and Costello bit.

  “Let’s try this one more time,” I said. “Who do you think sent you that letter and why?”

  “I don’t know who sent it, but it’s obviously a death threat,” Dowd said. “Somebody clearly wants me to back off the Munz case.”