The dejected shake of her head caused the tough-as-nails image to slip further still. "No," Micki admitted, lowering her gaze. "Not anymore. They were killed in a car accident five years ago."
"I'm sorry."
"Me, too."
"Any other family?"
When she glanced up, the flinty look was back in her eyes. "It's just me, Mr. Hardigan. No brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, or uncles. Now are there any other personal details you think you might want to know, or will we get on with it?"
She handed him a clipboard containing a Charter Agreement specifying her fee for the flight, insurance and liabilities coverage, and a pen to sign at the bottom.
"I just meant that sometimes it's easier when there's other family," Luke said as he put his signature on the dotted line. He smiled faintly at childhood memories. "I have four kid brothers, and with a family as large as that there's always somebody on your side. It must be hard for you, all alone."
"Why, because I'm a woman?" She took back her clipboard. "I don't need 'somebody on my side,' I do just fine on my own. I'm a survivor."
Luke held eye contact with her for an extended moment, inexplicably wishing he could forget the felonious circumstances that had brought him into her life. But he couldn't—wouldn't—if only for the sake of the young man who had died in the Coast Guard accident just days ago.
When she moved away to the copy machine, he reminded himself that he was there to expose the rot that had made its way into this picturesque community and tainted certain inhabitants. His job was to bust them wide open so that Federal action could be taken against the ringleaders, and perhaps even against Micki Jacinto. If she were proven guilty, then there would be no mercy, not even if she had already tasted the bitterness of personal hardship.
Not even if he found her so incredibly attractive...
Clearing the lump out of his throat and the fantasy out of his head, Luke turned to the map on the wall.
The dots of land that made up the Florida Keys were like insignificant peas floating around in a giant bowl of blue soup. On one side was the Atlantic Ocean and on the other the Gulf of Mexico, with a tiny broken string of islands threading their precarious way out into the watery unknown. To a city boy like Luke, the Keys were some superfluous pebbles that God had dropped at the very end of the earth.
"So where are we headed today, beautiful?" he asked, his chauvinist tone embellished to fit the circumstances. It scored him the reaction he wanted.
Pushing a photocopy of the signed agreement at him, Micki glowered again. For the second time that morning he got the impression that she wanted to slug him. Having no doubts that she would, if given the chance, brought a genuine grin to his face.
"First, I'm headed home to change my clothes," she said.
Luke eyed her scantily clad figure appraisingly. "Don't on my account."
"Look, Hardigan, let's get one thing straight—"
"Can we get a look at those islands, too?" he cut in.
"What?"
Luke tapped his finger on the wall map, indicating a cluster of small islands off the Gulf side of Big Pine Key. "They look kind of scenic," he said, putting his cover story to the test. "See, I make a living out of selling pretty pictures. Do you think we could fly out over them so I could snap a few shots?"
Micki stared at the map with an unreadable expression, and Luke held his breath. If she were involved with the Bad Guys, then surely she would refuse, not wanting to risk an innocent tourist spying their operation from the air. And if she did refuse, it would be Step One in building his guilty case against her.
Sparing him a cursory glance, she said, "It'll cost you extra, having to go way out past Big Pine Key like that."
"Okay, name your price."
"Aviation fuel is not cheap, you know."
He shrugged. "So I have to sell a couple of extra shots to break even, no big deal. What do you say?"
She considered that for a moment, making Luke wonder whether she was innocent of all knowledge of the criminal activity he had come to investigate and just a shrewd businesswoman, or if she was about to ruthlessly sell out her associates for a tidy profit.
"All right, I'll take you there."
"Great."
"After I go home and change," she insisted.
"Fair enough." Luke kept his expression neutral despite this fortunate turn of events. At this point, it was in his best interests to be agreeable.
Three strides carried Micki to the office door, where she paused to wave at the utility shelf skirting the front window. On it was a coffee percolator with a half-full carafe, cups, creamer, and sugar. The gesture was clearly a business afterthought, not a concession for his personal comfort. "Help yourself, I'll be back in fifteen minutes."
Fizz joined her at the door, wagging his tail in expectation of a ride.
"No, you wait here, boy." She patted the dog, met Luke's gaze with a look that could melt a man at twenty paces, then left.
With a disappointed whine, Fizz returned to his blanket. Through the glass office front, Luke watched Micki don her biking leathers while fighting down another pang of attraction, this one inspired by the slow way that cool leather slid over her hot skin.
Damn. This... interest... in her had to stop. Micki Jacinto was a suspect, not a potential date, and it would make this case a lot easier on them both if he remembered that in the future.
Again masquerading as a simple tourist, he helped himself to some strong, black coffee, waiting until her leather-clad, helmeted figure had disappeared around the last plane in the hangar. One sip of coffee told him that particular pot had been brewing since Christmas. Distastefully setting it aside, Luke checked his watch.
He gave Micki two minutes to get to her bike and another two to actually leave. Then he moved, like a bear to honey, zeroing in on the notebook computer peeking out from under the papers on her desk. As he made himself comfortable in her chair, he threw a grin at the dog she thought she had left standing guard.
"What do you say, boy? Is she a handful or what?"
Fizz whined and stretched out on his side.
"Yeah, thought you'd say that," Luke said with a chuckle.
His amusement evaporated as he pulled out the computer and opened the case. Fifteen unattended minutes, he thought in grim satisfaction, gave him more than enough time to thoroughly search her files.
***
Concealed by the tail fin of a Mooney 201, Dirk Jurgensen listened as Micki's motorcycle faded into the distance. Her angry stride and the way she jiggled her key ring as she stomped past him, unaware of his presence, bespoke her mindset in clear and precise detail. She was pissed at Luke Hardigan, and Dirk couldn't say he blamed her.
For the last hour, he had been standing in the cool, dark shade of his maintenance hangar, ogling Micki through a pair of binoculars as she stretched and moved to polish her plane. The moment he had seen that snoop, Hardigan, get out of his rental car, Dirk had climbed into his work truck and headed across the tarmac.
What was Hardigan doing there so early?
Dirk had missed seeing Micki play her winning hand, but suddenly, missing the punch line of her joke was the least of his problems. He hadn't been able to hear what was being said inside her office, but he had been able to see their every move through the glass front. And what he'd seen he didn't like.
Luke Hardigan, with his fake gold watch and innocent tourist façade, had asked too many questions at The Sandpiper last night for it to sit comfortably with Dirk and his private business dealings. The moment the guy had tapped on Micki's wall map and indicated the area northwest of Big Pine Key, he'd had an unnerving suspicion that he knew what the veiled interrogation was really all about.
Dirk pulled the half-burned cigarette from the corner of his mouth and crushed it on the concrete hangar floor. Keeping the Mooney between himself and Micki's office, he watched the man, whom she had foolishly left alone, tap on the keys of her notebook computer.
Good luck, pal, Dirk thou
ght with a knowing smirk.
Micki was hopelessly technophobic. She'd wanted a laptop for record keeping and running her business even less than she wanted expensive diamond jewelry and the silk and satin lingerie he'd tried to give her. Maybe, this time, there was a plus side to her stubbornness, because no one was going to find anything even vaguely incriminating on that computer.
Hardigan, arriving at the same conclusion, abandoned the laptop and moved to the gray metal filing cabinet instead. Slowly, methodically, he went through the drawers. In the bottom one he found a Pilot's Log Book, the pages of which held his interest for a good two minutes.
Dirk frowned. If Hardigan was smart enough to cross-reference the flight dates with her business ledger...
Despite appearances, when it came to her father's business Micki kept exemplary records. She carefully reported all expenses, no doubt including the Avgas purchased in Miami the times she had unknowingly trafficked inventory to Dirk's 'aunt's junk shop,' and no doubt including Dirk's payments to her for said deliveries. Those records could do a lot of damage to a person's credibility in court.
With the log book in hand, Hardigan moved back to the desk and skillfully slipped Micki's ledger from the bottom of the pile of paper clutter. As he began to match entries, Dirk ducked behind the tail fin and gritted his teeth. In the right hands, that ledger implicated Micki in a Federal crime. If convicted, she could face a two million dollar fine and a minimum sentence of five to ten.
Worse, in Hardigan's hands, it implicated him.
Risking another peek, Dirk watched the man move to the photocopy machine and duplicate several pages from the log book and the ledger. Holding them in his teeth as he returned both books to their places, Hardigan folded the copies and put them in the side pocket of the camera bag he dragged up onto Micki's chair. Then, slipping easily back into the role of sightseeing philanderer, he sat and picked up his discarded coffee cup.
Having seen enough, Dirk turned away. Reynolds needed to be warned that there was company coming, and told to hide the merchandise before it could be seen from the air.
Silently pushing away from the Mooney, Dirk pulled his phone from his pocket and headed back to his truck. It was time to get the hired help off their lazy butts, while he looked into possibly getting those photocopies back. While they may not be admissible in court, they were enough to get the local authorities sniffing about.
'Authorities' and 'sniffing' were two words Dirk did not like in the same sentence. Neither did his boss, Mr. Van Allen.
***
The aerial view of the Keys was one Micki never tired of seeing. The scattered islands were like a necklace of deep green jewels spilled across the clear azure blue ocean. Airborne and leveled off at one thousand feet, they headed out over the Atlantic toward West Turtle Shoal, giving Tim Lewis' charter boat a friendly buzz as it crossed Hawk Channel for open sea, and allowing Luke to photograph the coral flats and shallow aquamarine water closer to the shoreline. In the wide stretches of ocean they caught glimpses of dolphins at play, while just past the scuba area at Coffins Patch they found a cluster of fishing boats anchored in anticipation of the deep sea angling at the edge of the Continental Shelf.
Keeping one eye on her flying and the other on her passenger, Micki watched Luke click off a half dozen digital photos as they banked around and headed for the lower keys. Reaching behind, she spared a pat for Fizz, who relaxed in one of the rear seats of the four-seater Cessna, strapped into a harness made especially for him.
The route was one she knew by heart, having flown it a couple of hundred times. It dictated that they follow the Intercoastal Waterway down as far as Sugarloaf Key before turning for home again, staying well clear of both the Naval Air Station at Boca Chica and Key West International Airport. It was on the return trip to Marathon that she made a slight deviation from normal, flying due north out over the warm Gulf waters and the profuse sprinkling of tiny islands off Big Pine Key that so interested Luke Hardigan.
As they reached the area, his body language changed from casual tourist to intent observer. Curiosity roused, Micki watched him delve into the camera bag at his feet and bring out the heavy artillery; a telephoto zoom lens that was a foot long if it was an inch. That struck her as odd. True, her own photographic expertise was limited to point-n-click vacation snapshots, but surely wide angle panoramas of the ocean and islands were more picturesque—more marketable—than the sort of extreme close-ups of palm trees he was going to get with that monster lens.
As if sensing her attention, he half-turned to her and motioned that he would like to drop closer to the islands below them. Switching to the internal intercom so that she could hear him over the drone of the plane's single engine, she asked for clarification. "What?"
Luke spoke into the small microphone slung on the end of his headset's flexible arm. "Closer. I want to get a closer look. Take us down lower."
"Why?" The question was out of Micki's mouth before she even thought about the consequences.
He gave her that condescending grin she was beginning to hate. "Because I'm the paying customer and I'm telling you to."
Micki's jaw tightened. Paying customer or not, this man was really starting to get to her, and instinct rather than business sense kicked in.
"Whatever you say, Yank." She shoved the control yoke forward to pitch the nose down with a vengeance. The engine revved higher as they lost altitude and gained airspeed very quickly.
Luke swore, dropping everything and hanging on for dear life as their normally split view of ocean and sky became a window filled with nothing but blue-green water coming up to meet them. Fast. Even Fizz raised his head to protest the move.
Completely in control of her aircraft, Micki eased back and, with a wicked grin, set them straight and level again at five hundred feet.
Slowly, Luke pried his fingers out of the dash. "What the hell did you do that for?"
"Do what?" Micki looked suitably innocent of any deliberate wrongdoing. "You said lower, I got us lower." Unable to resist one last shot, her grin matched his earlier one. "I thought a hotshot like you would be used to pulling a few negative g's. Guess I was wrong about that, huh?"
Snorting eloquently, Luke plucked his digital camera out of his lap, but instead of pointing it out the window again, he exchanged it for something else in the camera bag at his feet. No one was more surprised than Micki when the 'something else' turned out to be a high-powered pair of black rubber binoculars—the kind she would have expected to see Rambo use.
Luke began to scan the lush greenery beneath them with the air of a man driven by a purpose that wasn't photographic. He had dropped his 'photographer' act when he'd dropped the camera, and was now well into a little spying.
Micki looked out her window to see if she could determine what had claimed Luke's attention. All she saw was a weathered fishing shanty with a red-hulled speedboat moored on the beach before it. What was so interesting about that?
She was considering asking the question aloud, when Luke said curtly, "Circle around that. I want a closer look." With an annoyed glance, he added, "Without any aerobatics, all right?"
Biting down on what she wanted to say, Micki complied with his wishes, taking them about the island again and skimming low past the shanty. It was constructed on poles to protect it from storm surges; a common precaution in the Florida Keys.
"Nice boat," she said across the intercom as Luke raised his camera again and clicked off several shots. It was an observation that quickly drew a frown. Now that she thought about it, the sleek, powerful boat didn't fit the profile of the local fishermen who usually inhabited such places on overnight fishing trips. Neither did the angry man who erupted onto the beach at their low-level pass. His words were lost to distance and the roar of the engine, but the meaning of his gestures were clear; get lost, and fast.
Micki slanted a glance at her passenger, who was still snapping photos with his monster lens. "I don't think he wants his picture taken, Yank."
Her lips twitched into a smile. "Maybe he thinks you're trying to horn in on his favorite fishing spot."
"Maybe." Luke's tone was dry and gave nothing away as he exchanged the camera for the binoculars again. He waved toward their previous course. "Let's go on."
Now why didn't that surprise her? The guy antagonizes the locals and then says, 'let's go on,' like it was no skin off his nose. Tourists. Someday, she was going to end up strangling one of them, and Luke Hardigan just may be the one with whom she started.
Clamping down hard on her irritation, she brought them back on course. Luke returned to his snooping, peering down at the islands with meticulous attention. Just what he was snooping for was a mystery Micki puzzled as she flew them toward the outer keys. An old fishing shanty or two didn't seem worth the effort of all that attention, but she decided that she really didn't want to take the time to figure it out. Like he said, he was the paying customer, and as long as he fronted with the money then he could hang by his toes from the undercarriage for all she cared.
Greenery flashed beneath them. These smaller keys were basically sandbars and mangrove swamps, untouched by all but the few adventurous souls who boated in for camping and fishing expeditions. Inaccessibility and the lack of fresh water kept both the land developers and the squatters away, which was exactly the reason why the Coast Guard had started using the area for training purposes. In other words, they were boring.
Seeking distraction, Micki nodded at the window beyond Luke's shoulder and said, "Look down there."
When he did, she rolled them into a tight forty-degree turn, banking on a dime so that they were looking 'down' the window instead of 'out' of it. At an altitude of five hundred feet, it was a good imitation of what it felt like to be water spiraling down a drain.
About half a mile offshore, a submerged orange-brown blob stood out against the shallow sandy bottom. "It's a downed helicopter," she volunteered. "We had a Coast Guard accident here a few days ago."
Micki immediately regretted having drawn this outsider's attention to the place where Razor had died. It was too personal, somehow. Too private.
Pilot Error Page 4
