Hot Start

by David Freed

  “You’re right,” I said, walking back toward her, “maybe I do. So here’s the deal. I can’t tell you what it is, but if it amounts to anything, you’ll be the first reporter I call. You’ll be the only reporter I call. Just please stop following me. Deal?”

  She wiped her eyes with one hand and aimed a classically obscene gesture at me with the other.

  “Go to hell, Logan.”

  The Buddha said there are four types of friends: the helper; the friend who endures in good times and bad; the mentor; and the compassionate friend. I wasn’t any of those for Danika Quinn. Watching her walk to her car, I wondered if I’d ever been a true friend to anyone.

  “Hello, Logan. Don’t turn around.”

  A man with a raspy voice was standing behind me, pressing something hard into the small of my back. I knew who he was without looking. Eric Ivory.

  “Hello, Eric. I see you survived Costco. Not everyone does, you know. People go missing in that place all the time. They usually find ’em in the refrigerated section, frozen solid, like chicken breasts.”

  “Shut up.”

  I let him frisk me. He found the revolver wedged in my belt.

  “You’re no flight instructor,” he said, tucking it into his waistband.

  “I’ve had a few of my students tell me the same thing.”

  Ivory nudged me from behind. “We’re walking to your truck.”

  “Not until you show me your gun.”

  “What does it matter? Now I got your gun.”

  “It matters, Eric, because if you got the jump on me with one of those pretend-gun-finger-in-the-pocket kind of deals, you’re gonna be drinking your next meal out of a straw. If it is a real gun and not your finger, well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. You’re still going to be drinking your next meal out of a straw—assuming I let you live.”

  He was right about one thing. Whether he’d been packing real heat or faking it really didn’t matter one way or the other. He could’ve been humping a loaded bazooka and he still was going down. Call me cocky, but as we used to say in Colorado, it ain’t bragging if you can do it.

  “I’d just like to know, for my own peace of mind, that I wasn’t so dumb as to get jumped by a knucklehead with a banana.”

  Eric Ivory took a couple of steps back and flashed a chrome, .45 semiautomatic, keeping the pistol close to his belly and angled away from the courthouse so no passersby could see it. I had to admire his taste in weaponry. Everybody these days carries a 9-millimeter. Nothing wrong with that. A 9-millimeter will definitely kill the body. But a .45 will kill the soul.

  “You’re making a mistake, Eric. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll hand me that gun.”

  He jabbed with the barrel. “You’re the one making a mistake if you don’t start moving.”

  Never get in the vehicle. Your chances of escaping a kidnapping in one piece are much greater if you resist before the attempted abduction becomes an actual one. That lesson was drilled into me during escape and evasion training when I was in the air force and, later, with Alpha. A smarter man would’ve heeded the lesson, but I wanted Ivory to explain why he’d killed the Hollisters. I couldn’t do that very well if I killed him too fast.

  “You’re gonna get in first, driver’s side, nice and easy,” he said. “You try anything, I swear I’ll shoot you.”

  “It’s your hanging, chief.”

  He didn’t make me hand over the keys, which would’ve stopped me from potentially making a move and driving off before he could get in. He didn’t maintain a minimum three feet of separation between us, which would’ve given him a chance to react had I turned suddenly to attack him. Walking as close behind me as he was also would have surely drawn attention had a sheriff’s cruiser pulled into the jail parking lot at that moment, but we were alone. He waited for me to climb in, then hustled around the front of the truck and jumped in on the passenger side. For an expert airplane detailer, Eric Ivory made one lousy kidnapper.

  “Where to?”

  “Take a right,” he said.

  I exited the lot and turned onto the frontage road paralleling the freeway. I had thought I might catch sight of Danika Quinn still following me, but she’d heeded my request to leave me alone. It was just as well.

  “Get on the highway,” Ivory commanded, the muzzle of his pistol pointed at my ribs.

  Ahead was an onramp. I got on the northbound 101.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll know when we get there.”

  “What do you intend to do with me when we do get there?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just want to talk.”

  Talk. Right. And if you believe that . . .

  He was fidgety and clearly anxious. One second, he’d be eyeing me; the next, he was glancing out the back window, or down at his phone, then back at me. I could’ve taken him anytime I wanted. We passed a road sign that said, “San Francisco, 220 miles.”

  “What did you do in the National Guard?”

  He looked surprised. “How’d you know I was in the guard?”

  “I know plenty of things about you, Eric.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Like, Toni Hollister left you 125 large in her will, and you shot her so you wouldn’t have to wait around too long for it. You shot her husband too, because you didn’t want him claiming community property and screwing up the money.”

  Ivory almost laughed. “You got it all figured out, don’t you?”

  “Not quite. I’m wondering why would a class act like Toni leave a dirtbag like you a single dime?”

  “Toni loved me. And I loved her.”

  “You were sleeping together?”

  “It wasn’t like that. We were friends. She’d tell me things. About her and Roy, how he abused her, how she just wanted somebody to hold her once in a while. She could never do nothing right. He beat her when he got to drinking. She was miserable. Asked him for a divorce, but he wouldn’t let her go. She wanted to kill herself. She’d tried a couple of times and got scared. She begged me to do it for her. I kept telling her no, but she said it was her only way out.”

  “So you obliged her, being the compassionate, caring human being you are—and conveniently picked up a nice payday for your services in the process.”

  “She felt sorry for me. Said I deserved more money and how Roy didn’t deserve any. How she didn’t want him to have any cuz of who he was, and what he did. To her. To all those animals. Trust me, I did the woman a favor. Hell, I did the world a favor. Shooting an elephant for so-called sport. Can you imagine?”

  I complimented his efforts to frame Dino Birch. “That must’ve taken some planning,” I said. He seemed not to grasp that I was playing with him.

  “Yeah, well,” Ivory said with a self-satisfied grin, “what can I say? It just sort of came to me. I was going through my wallet the next day looking for my Costco card and found the business card he gave me when I was trying to buy the Firebird. I’m like, ‘The animal rights guy goes after the big game hunter? Damn, that’d be perfect.’ So I went back up the hill the next night and just kind of threw it down on the ground up there. Rancho Bonita PD’s not exactly Scotland Yard, but I figured they’d find it eventually.”

  “You don’t feel bad for Birch, making him the fall guy?”

  “A little, maybe. What can I say? The cost of doing business, you know?”

  The stunning part of his admission was that Ivory actually believed he’d done the world and Toni Hollister a solid by shooting her and Roy to death. What amazed me most was how normal he looked saying it. Human evolution has erred in so many ways. We have tailbones but no tails, backbones not built to walk upright, functionless fingernails, not claws. Why, I wondered, did criminally insane but otherwise benign-appearing individuals like Eric Ivory not sprout horns or cloven hooves, some visual clue to afford the rest of us fair warning?

  “Now I’m gonna ask you a question,” Ivory said.

  “Shoot—but not really.”


  “How did you know it was me?”

  “The murder weapon,” I said, bluffing.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “The cops, they found the rifle.”

  Ivory smiled. “Now I know you’re bullshitting me. It wasn’t my rifle. It was Roy’s. He never missed it. He had dozens of rifles. Toni made me take it when I was over at the house one day, waxing their cars. After I shot them, I drove over to Conejos Beach and tossed it off the pier.”

  “The guard teach you to shoot like that?”

  “The guard?” He laughed. “Hell, no. I fixed helicopters in the guard. Only time I ever qualified on a weapon was in basic. I hunted a lot when I was a kid.”

  “I’m sure the National Rifle Association would be darned proud.”

  “I know how you figured out it was me,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “When we were at Costco, when you saw that tire. You got this weird look on your face. I was like, ‘Damn, he knows.’ I figured maybe you were onto me after you asked me those questions up at the airport, like did I know whether Toni was having an affair. So I popped off a couple rounds outside your place. I kept thinking you might get smart and back off. I was wrong.”

  “I’m happy we could have this little chat,” I said. “Saves me a ton of work, having to explain everything to the police afterward.”

  “You didn’t really think you’re getting out of this alive, did you?”

  “I was hoping we could make a deal.”

  He returned my smile. “A deal? Seriously?”

  “You put that hog leg away and maybe I’ll let you live. That way, you can explain everything to the police yourself.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Ivory said, lying.

  The northern fringes of Rancho Bonita faded in my rearview mirror. Traffic thinned. There was no moon. To my left was the Pacific Ocean, a vast and foreboding expanse of black; to the right, rolling hills rising toward the foothills of the coastal mountains.

  “Get off at the next exit,” Ivory said.

  Down some remote arroyo was where I figured he intended to shoot me. He knew I wouldn’t make a move until then, not while he had his .45 trained at my gut, and certainly not while we were doing seventy miles an hour on the freeway. In combat you attack your enemy when and where he least expects it. The same rules apply inside the passenger cabin of a Toyota Tacoma.

  I jacked the steering wheel hard left and smashed down on the brake pedal at the same time, bringing the truck to a screeching, swerving stop facing in the opposite direction, in the far left lane. Caught by surprise and off-balance, Ivory was slammed forward and to his right. He ricocheted off the passenger door, then into the dashboard. As he bounced, I groped under my seat for the can of spray paint I’d used on the Duck, intending to blind him with a liberal blast of white, semigloss enamel. The only problem was that in slamming on the brakes, the can had rolled out of reach.

  So much for Plan A.

  Plan B, unfortunately for Ivory, was not nearly so humane. It took no more than two seconds, if that, to carry out.

  He pivoted his upper body toward me, bringing the .45 to bear with the hammer back, right index finger on the trigger. I thrust my left forearm upward and easily knocked his gun hand aside. I don’t recall hearing the pistol discharge but I do remember the whistling sound the bullet made as it missed the side of my skull by an inch, if that, before exploding the driver’s side window.

  There would be no second shot.

  I gripped his gun hand and twisted in a counterclockwise motion, snapping his wrist and the index finger that was trapped inside the pistol’s trigger guard. Ivory screamed out in agony, but only for an instant, as I drove the stiffened fingers of my right hand like a knife blade into the sinew and soft flesh below his Adam’s apple, the way I’d been trained, and ripped out his larynx.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Rancho Bonita Police Department is too small to have its own search and rescue team, but the county sheriff’s department has one. Sheriff’s scuba divers would find the rifle used to murder the Hollisters exactly where Eric Ivory told me he’d heaved it into the ocean—a 7.62-millimeter, bolt-action Winchester with a top-of-the-line Hensold tactical scope. The rifle had been legally registered in Roy Hollister’s name.

  At my request and to my great relief, authorities managed to keep my own name out of news reports detailing Ivory’s death and the subsequent freeing from custody of animal rights activist Dino Birch. I’m a simple flight instructor trying to keep a small business afloat. Ripping out somebody’s throat, whether he deserved it or not? I didn’t need that kind of exposure.

  Rancho Bonita’s mustachioed police chief, Art Bermudez, who some say could be Tom Selleck’s doppelganger, though I’ve never seen the resemblance, held a press conference two days after Ivory’s death and credited his own detectives’ “dedication and dogged, old-fashioned police work” for having refocused and broken open the Hollister investigation after arresting Birch. The chief, who’d learned all about how to manipulate the news media as an assistant police chief in Los Angeles before taking the job as Rancho Bonita’s top cop, told reporters straight-faced that Ivory feared he was about to be arrested and had taken his own life rather than face justice. Reporter Danika Quinn questioned that version of events. She said she’d heard rumors to the effect that Ivory had died after some sort of confrontation with a private citizen—an assertion that Bermudez adamantly denied.

  “I’ve asked for a copy of Ivory’s autopsy report under the Public Records Act,” Danika told me a couple of weeks later at the airport, where she showed up unannounced when I didn’t return repeated messages she’d left on my voice mail. “They have to show it to me. I won’t let up until they do.”

  I sat back in my falling-apart swivel chair in my window-less office in Larry’s hangar, feet propped up and hands behind my head, and smiled.

  “Whatever you say, Danika.”

  She sat down on the corner of the desk, crossing her legs, and showed me plenty of thigh. “C’mon, Logan, you know there’s more to this whole story than the police are letting on. I’m tired of getting jerked around. You were there that night Ivory died, weren’t you?”

  “Good seeing you again, Danika,” I said. “You take care of yourself.”

  “Just tell me the truth.”

  “There’s no such thing. Only shades of gray. You live long enough, you’ll find that out.”

  “What the hell is that, Logan? Another one of your little Buddhist sayings?”

  “Nope. That one’s all me.”

  She called about a month later, wanting me to sit for an on-camera interview. She’d become convinced that the official autopsy report, which showed that Ivory had died from a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound to the throat, had been doctored. I claimed to know nothing about anything and turned her down. Not long afterward, Danika Quinn landed her dream job as a network correspondent and moved to New York. A writer from The Voice, Rancho Bonita’s local alternative weekly paper, called a couple of weeks later and left a message on my machine, saying he was working on a story about the Hollisters and requesting that I call him back. I didn’t. Media interest in the case soon petered out and died, which was fine by me. I was perfectly pleased being old news.

  Gil Carlisle, my former father-in-law, offered to write me a big fat check for helping exonerate his nephew, Birch, but I couldn’t conscionably take his money. Consider it a debt partially repaid, I told him, and suggested he spring for a big gala party instead on the anniversary of Savannah’s death. She would’ve enjoyed that, I said, laughter rather than tears. Carlisle said he’d give it some thought. Maybe he followed through and held that party. I can’t really say. I was never invited, regardless.

  After resigning from office, a disgraced former Congressman Pierce Walton left Rancho Bonita and resettled in Washington as a lobbyist. From what I heard, his wife and children didn’t relocate with him.

  Dino Birc
h apparently decided that animal rights activism wasn’t for him and soon left town too. I have no idea where he ended up or what he’s doing today.

  Mrs. Schmulowitz recovered fully from surgery. She got kicked out of rehab for Rollerblading down the halls despite repeated warnings from the nursing staff, and was only too happy to return home, where Kiddiot lavished her with five uninterrupted minutes of sandpaper-like kitty kisses while ignoring me completely.

  “I’ve come to accept the reality that my cat hates me.”

  “Don’t take it personally, bubby,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “It’s the corned beef.”

  The corned beef. If only cats were that simple. If only life and death were.

  Alicia Rosario got a promotion and got involved with someone else. She called and said she thought it best we not see each other again. I didn’t ask who the guy was. It didn’t matter. We both knew the writing had been on the wall a long time. We traded good-byes like adults, with a civil detachment, and wished each other well. I stared at the phone for a long time after she hung up, thinking she might call back, but she never did.

  I went flying after that. I always go flying.

  Larry had replaced the Ruptured Duck’s broken windscreen and deemed the plane airworthy once more. I took off and climbed as high as a Cessna 172 will go. The day was free of haze, the view unobstructed. From more than two miles above the California coast, with jade earth off my left wingtip and gunmetal sea off my right, riding air as smooth as velveteen, I could see nearly to infinity. What lay beyond that I could not begin to know, but I was eager to find out.