Hot Start

by David Freed

  I took my hands off the controls as we bounced violently across the sky and said, “You have the airplane.”

  “I have the airplane,” she said from the left seat with an unwarranted overconfidence. “What would you like me to do?”

  “Let’s maintain present altitude and try a full, standard-rate, coordinated turn to the left.”

  “. . . Standard-rate?”

  “Joy, we discussed this, remember? You establish a fifteen-degree angle of bank using your attitude indicator and turn coordinator, and turn the airplane at three degrees per second, remember?”

  “Roger.”

  Things didn’t go well from the get-go. In turbulence at times severe, Joy overcorrected like the rookie she was and tipped the Duck over on his left wingtip. We nearly went inverted.

  “My airplane,” I said, grabbing the yoke and restoring us to something approaching straight and level flight. “Joy, just for your information, in a Cessna 172, a roll is something you eat, not do, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “How’re you holding up? You all right?”

  She nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t. “I didn’t realize it could get this bumpy,” she said as we slammed through the air, trying not to look as terrified as she was.

  “Usually, when it’s cooler, it’s much smoother up here, believe me.”

  “The wings aren’t going to fall off or anything, are they?”

  “Hopefully not.”

  I smiled. She didn’t.

  “Bad joke,” I said. “Ready to try it again?”

  “Roger,” she said, this time not nearly as enthusiastically.

  I instructed her to execute a standard-rate turn to the right and again relinquished the controls. Again she nearly killed us, tipping us too far over in the bank. Only this time, for reasons that defied explanation, she smashed down on the left rudder pedal and hauled up on the nose. The Duck immediately snap-rolled and corkscrewed into a tight spin.

  We were looking straight down into the ocean in a seventy-degree dive, straining against our shoulder belts, the waves coming up fast.

  “Your airplane!” Joy screamed.

  As if I didn’t know that already. I chopped the power to idle cutoff, forced the wings level, kicked in opposite rudder to break the spin, then hauled back smoothly on the elevator to break the dive. We pulled out above the whitecaps with less than 200 feet to spare. I saw a flying fish. That’s how close we got.

  Joy said she was ready to head back to the barn. I told her I thought that was a fine idea and asked her if she wanted to take the controls. She declined and didn’t look at me once the rest of the flight, her head in her lap. After we landed and taxied in, she accused me of purposely trying to scare her into quitting.

  “You knew what it was like up there,” she said, “but still, we went up.”

  I reminded her that we’d gone flying at her insistence, not mine.

  “You could’ve told me no, but you didn’t, because you wanted the money.” Her movie-screen forehead was beaded with sweat. Her prim little bun was wilting from the heat. “You knew, Logan. And that’s what’s important. You’re dangerously irresponsible and I will never fly with you again. Ever.”

  “Don’t sugarcoat it, Joy. Tell me what you really think.”

  She raised her middle finger and stormed away.

  As they say in Paris, “C’est la guerre,” which I’m pretty sure means, “That is the train station,” or some such. Who really understands the French, anyway?

  I noticed a fresh ding in the already heavily scarred fairing covering the Duck’s nose wheel—the likely result of some small stone the propeller had sucked in before takeoff. I had a can of spray paint somewhere. I’d get to the repair when I could. All I wanted to do at that moment was escape the sun.

  THE LITTLE fan on my battered metal, government-surplus desk was doing its best, but it was toasty inside the hangar and getting toastier. In a couple of hours, the place would be all but uninhabitable. I was thinking about canceling the two other students I had on my schedule that afternoon and calling it a day when aircraft mechanic Larry Kropf, the guy I sublet the office from, ambled in. Under his arm was a folded newspaper.

  “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the delicious creamy filling of my favorite cookie.”

  “Help yourself, Larry.”

  He snatched up the package of Oreos like a grizzly going after a salmon and ate them two at a time. Despite lap band surgery, Larry had recently ballooned back to somewhere north of 300 pounds. He was King Kong furry, with an unkempt beard and Buddy Holly-style glasses, behind which sat the soft eyes of a cocker spaniel. A Tuskegee Airmen baseball cap was perched atop a helmet of coarse graying hair that hadn’t seen a comb in days, if ever. He was wearing beat-up work shorts and boots with tube socks that showed off his oddly skinny legs, and his white T-shirt, smeared with hydraulic fluid, was stretched tight across his cannonball belly. “Kiss me before my girlfriend comes back,” was printed on the front of the shirt.

  “You read the Sun today?” Larry asked with a mouth full of cookies, his beard collecting black crumbs.

  “That rag? Not in a long time.”

  Larry was among a dwindling number of local residents who subscribed to the Rancho Bonita Sun. Once owned by a respected media conglomerate, the newspaper had been acquired in the 1990s by a mean-spirited divorcée whose software-pioneering ex-husband was reputed to have called the court- mandated, record-setting terms of their split, “The best billion dollars I ever spent.” The new publisher soon canned most of the Sun’s veteran journalists as insubordinate before turning the paper into an embarrassing showcase of puffery, promoting society events and business grand openings, and as an editorial mouthpiece for her elitist, often xenophobic views. Rarely was local news covered objectively, if it was covered at all.

  “Then you haven’t heard,” Larry said.

  “Heard what?”

  “About Roy Hollister.”

  “What about him?”

  “Looks like the cops identified the guy who shot him.”

  I was tempted to say, “Why should I care?” but I didn’t.

  The murder of Roy Hollister and his wife, Toni, nearly two months earlier had been the talk of the town for weeks in Rancho Bonita, where violent crime is rare, but I didn’t exactly choke up over the news. As far as I was concerned, Hollister was a first-class dirtbag, even if he was a fellow pilot. We’d crossed paths a few times on the tarmac as he was climbing in or out of his Piper Malibu, before he moved up to a Cessna Citation and started parking on the high-rent side of the field, where half of Hollywood kept its executive jets. Wearing those ten-gallon hats and safari jackets and cowboy boots crafted from elephant skin, in Rancho Bonita of all places? Who the hell did he think he was? I would’ve disliked him if for no other reason than the fact that he became rich killing animals and calling it sport. That he was so consistently arrogant only reinforced my disdain. Hollister had always reminded me in a weird way of one of those avowed, so-called white supremacists. You know the type: out of shape, out of touch, and out of their minds, who crawl out occasionally from under their rocks to spout their malevolent screed. How could anyone so overtly pathetic be so full of himself?

  Larry, on the other hand, considered Hollister something of a friend. He’d worked on Hollister’s Malibu a time or two and had been paid promptly, which is a big deal in Larry’s book. Hollister had once even taken him on an antelope hunt in Wyoming. With his vision, Larry couldn’t hit the ground if he fell off a step stool, but he appreciated the invitation, regardless. The two hadn’t spoken in some time, yet when word spread that the infamous safari leader and his wife had been murdered at their mansion on exclusive Madera Lane, blue collar Larry grieved as if he’d lost a true buddy.

  “People didn’t understand Roy,” he said, grabbing another fistful of Oreos. “He was always real good to me, which is more than I can say about my wife.”

  I realized they’d been friends, but I coul
dn’t help myself. “Hollister got paid to kill helpless animals, Larry. He called himself the ‘King of the Big Five.’ Do you know what the Big Five is?”

  “No.”

  “Elephant, rhino, Cape buffalo, leopard, and lion. Maybe he was nice to you, Larry, but if the guy would’ve had his way, there would’ve been no Noah’s ark.”

  “You’re wrong, Logan. Hollister was a conservationist. Most of those animals were old or sick. They would’ve died anyway. And, besides, he wasn’t doing hardly any of the hunting himself. He got paid to charter safaris. He made hotel arrangements, bought the beer, made sure his clients were happy. It’s called earning a healthy living, which is something you might want to think about, amigo.”

  Again I formed words in my head that I knew I could never utter. How could I tell Larry that after having spent nearly a decade stalking rabid human beings around the globe in the name of national security, I couldn’t stomach hunting of any kind? How could I tell him what it was like to see the animal-like fear in the eyes of men who knew they were about to die, and to see that same look over and over again, up close and personal, month after month? How could I tell him what it felt like to see those eyes staring down at me from the ceiling, night after sleepless night?

  I’d shared with him once how I had transferred to Air Force Intelligence after it was determined that my football-damaged, reconstructed knee could no longer withstand the rigors of combat flying. What I hadn’t told him was how I had ultimately been assigned to a highly classified, direct action unit called Alpha that, before being disbanded by secret presidential decree, had neutralized suspected militants wherever we found them. I had been sworn to take the unit’s secrets with me to the grave. I wasn’t about to give up any of them now, or the fact that I still occasionally dabbled in that world. I leaned closer to the fan and let it blow on my face.

  “So who shot the Hollisters?”

  “Dino Birch,” Larry said.

  “Who’s Dino Birch?”

  “That nutty animal rights guy. You have no clue what’s going on around town, do you, Logan?” He tossed the morning’s newspaper on my desk, grabbed another fistful of Oreos, and headed for the door, grimacing on bad knees. “Oh, by the way, you’re late on this month’s rent.”

  “Check’s in the mail, Larry.”

  “Like I haven’t heard that before.”

  I was down to five cookies. Their creamy filling was melting in the heat. I unscrewed each one, scraping the frosting with my front teeth, and read the front page.

  Quoting unnamed sources, the Sun reported that Birch’s arrest was imminent. He’d been the Rancho Bonita Police Department’s prime, if only, suspect all along. According to the paper, Birch had served in the army as a sniper and a scout-dog handler, first in Afghanistan and later in the Horn of Africa, before being honorably discharged and picking up a bachelor’s degree in animal behavior from the University of California at Davis. Soon afterward, he opened a nonprofit in Rancho Bonita called “HEAT”—Helping Endangered Animals Thrive. His one-man organization, supported by a meager stream of donations from like-minded individuals across the country, had established a reputation for its particularly strident, in-your-face defense of endangered species. In Tokyo, Birch had been detained for a few weeks after hurling cream pies at Japanese officials attending an international whaling summit. In Russia, he’d threatened the owners of a traveling circus accused of mistreating their dancing bears. Closer to home, Birch’s name had surfaced in the 2015 disappearance of a Bay Area pharmaceuticals researcher who’d been conducting lab experiments of some sort on monkeys when he went missing. The researcher’s body was never found. San Jose police had briefly questioned Birch, the paper said, before concluding that he was not involved in the disappearance.

  The article detailed Roy Hollister’s rise from a poor kid growing up in the cotton fields of California’s San Joaquin Valley to a multimillionaire living in a mansion with an unobstructed ocean view, all thanks to his fascination with firearms. A photo of Hollister that accompanied the story, taken from his website, showed a ruddy, heavyset man garbed in a safari jacket and cowboy hat, posing proudly beside the lion he’d just shot with a scoped hunting rifle.

  Toni Hollister’s photo revealed a petite, blue-eyed blonde with a winning smile, wearing a flowing, cherry red dress with ruffles, like a flamenco dancer’s. Her hair was pinned up and she was clutching a red lace fan in her right hand. The caption said the photo had been taken the year before during Old Conquistador Days, Rancho Bonita’s annual tribute to its colonial Spanish heritage. Toni was described in the article as universally liked, a charming and outgoing woman happy to write a five- or six-figure check for even the most obscure local charity. Eighteen years his junior, she’d met the twice-divorced Roy in 2007 while scraping plaque from his teeth and married him three weeks later. They honeymooned in Zimbabwe where, at his instruction, she shot a kudu. It was the first and last time she ever fired a gun, according to friends quoted in the story. Hunting sickened her, but she genuinely loved Roy and put aside whatever issues she had with the way he made his money. “His good qualities,” she reportedly told acquaintances, “outweighed his bad.”

  Had Dino Birch shot the Hollisters in defense of defenseless animals? That certainly seemed plausible, but frankly, I was more concerned at that moment with eating my remaining Oreos before they melted.

  The day, as it turned out, would only get hotter.

  TWO

  When you’re trapped in a heat wave, and when your truck, your residence, and place of work all lack air conditioning, you’ll find any excuse to hang out anywhere that does have AC—typically movie theaters and restaurants. My dilemma was that it was probably too early for a matinee, and I had no appetite after downing so many cookies. I drove instead to the one place with Arctic-like temperatures where I knew I could linger as long as I wanted—my favorite mecca of shameless consumerism, Costco. Much of Rancho Bonita seemed to have had the same idea. The warehouse was mobbed.

  I navigated my empty cart through aisles clogged with shoppers with their own empty carts who, like me, appeared relieved to be out of the heat. I paused to read the small print on items I had no intention of buying. A $328 electric letter opener? A two-gallon jar of imported Spanish olives? Seriously?

  I decided to head over to pet supplies and was thinking about buying Kiddiot a new cat bed, not that he deserved one, when I literally ran into Eric Ivory—or, rather, he ran into me. His cart was so overloaded with stuff, he couldn’t see where he was going.

  “Oops. Sorry, man.”

  “No worries.”

  Ivory recognized me and smiled. “Hey, what are you doing here, Logan?”

  “Pretending to shop.”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” he said, glancing at my cart and grinning.

  We shook hands.

  Good-looking in a beefy, weathered ex-jock sort of way, with a raspy voice that sounded like two rocks grinding together, Ivory owned and operated “Immaculate Wings,” a one-man, mobile aircraft-cleaning service. From as far south as Oxnard and north to San Luis Obispo, he would drive to the airport where your bird was parked and, for a few hundred dollars up to several thousand, wash and wax until it shined. I’d see him once in a while around the Rancho Bonita Airport, but I could never afford what he charged. Even if I could’ve, there was little he could’ve done to spruce up my plane. The Ruptured Duck’s paint was so sun-faded in spots, I would’ve worried about melanoma had the skin not been made of aluminum.

  I nodded toward Ivory’s shopping cart, filled with cases of red wine, T-bone steaks, and enough fresh crab legs to feed a football team. “Business must be good.”

  “I got no complaints,” he said, chewing on his ever-present toothpick. “Business was booming, until poor old Roy Hollister had to go and get himself shot. You see the paper this morning, that animal rights guy? Dude sounds like a complete nut job.”

  “I read the story, but I don’t understand,” I said. �
��You’re saying your business was good until Hollister got shot?”

  “Roy was a steady gig. I used to service their Citation every week, top to bottom, whether it needed it or not. Disinfectant, steam clean the carpets, the whole nine yards. Let me put it this way: he had some issues with germs, OK? Not a lot of people knew that about him. He could be a real jerk sometimes. But Toni, man, she was a sweetheart. Beautiful lady. Always incredibly nice to me, to everybody. We got to be pretty tight there for a while. A real shame, them getting killed that way. That kind of stuff happens down in LA, not here.”

  “True.”

  “I’m just glad they found the guy who did it. I heard on the radio they were planning to make an arrest today or tomorrow.”

  A slender Latina in spike heels and skinny jeans pushed a flat cart past us piled high with cartons of fresh vegetables and fifty-pound bags of rice.

  “Well, anyway,” Ivory said, focused on her well-formed backside. “Hey, you don’t need your plane cleaned, do you, Logan? I’ll give you a great deal. Make that crate looking good as new. I do cars too. Even ratty old pickups like yours.”

  “Tell you what: I’ll call you after I’ve made my first million.”

  “You do that.”

  We shook hands again.

  “Good seeing you, Logan. You take care of yourself.”

  “You as well, Eric.”

  As I pushed on, down the aisle, he hollered after me, “Hey, you know how to make a million bucks in general aviation, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “start with two million.”

  Ivory grinned.

  AFTER PAYING for an eight-pack of toothbrushes because I felt like I had to buy something for having loitered as long as I had in Costco’s air-conditioned splendor, I caught a German film with subtitles downtown at Rancho Bonita’s only art house movie theater, and only because it was air-conditioned. After that, I grabbed dinner at the air-conditioned International House of Pancakes on California Street. I couldn’t decide which left a worse taste in my mouth, a comedic biopic exploring the little-known humorous side of Franz Kafka or IHOP’s fried chicken. I was home by 1900 hours.