by Fritz Galt
She remembered some funny words of advice from a dorky, Cambridge-educated accountant at a pub in Hong Kong. He was clumsily trying to hit on her and was impervious to her sarcastic rebuffs. He stated, rather proudly, that geeks made the best lovers as they were so grateful to any woman that would have them, they would perform incredible feats in the sack to pleasure their partners.
Was this “geek love,” then? She reached for Earl’s glasses, but her movement stirred him.
“Wo ai ni,” he said softly. He loved her.
“Oh, I love it when you try to speak Chinese.” She kissed his chest and neck. “Say something else.”
“May zai nar?” Where was May?
“Oh, shut up.” She suddenly felt cold all over. “I don’t want to talk about her now.”
He looked up, nearly cross-eyed he was so close to her. She felt her eyes smarting. She loved May, and yet May brought attention to the worst of her situation.
“It’s because of Liang, isn’t it?” Earl said.
She sighed and rolled onto her back. “They’re lovers. Always have been since school days.”
“School days? Like what kind of school? Elementary school?”
“No. Flight school.”
He let out a low, slow whistle. “Tom Cruise. Kelly McGillis. Top Gun.”
“What are you mumbling about?”
Then his eyes seemed to click into place. “You love him, too. Don’t you?”
She couldn’t hide her tears any longer. She had once fallen for Liang. Why must the past still cloud her sentiments? In the past she had been able to prevent Liang or any man from seeing her emotional side. Was she now starting to lose it, to go soft?
“I loved him once.” Her voice was choked with sobs. “Before ambition ruined him.”
“And you like May.”
She nodded, unable to continue.
“It looks like you’re facing an impossible situation.” He gently took her slender fingers in hand.
At the selfless tone in his voice, she found someone she could at last commiserate with. She lifted her forehead onto his chest and let herself go.
Daylight was peeking through the living room curtains at Cheno’s house. Brad pulled his bruised and mangled body off the carpet and looked around.
It was a good thing that he couldn’t remember where he was. That way, the police or the mad Chinese throwback or his stepfather for that matter wouldn’t find him.
The specter of Professor Richter barging through the front door seemed too horrible to contemplate. Brad despised him, but could he stand up to the abusive man with the cockamamie theories?
Brad would never understand why his stepfather would cling to the crazy idea of man originating in North America. It was just not realistic. But perhaps Richter understood the American public better than he did. The average American was hopelessly under-equipped to evaluate the most fundamental parts of the theory. Heck, there were still plenty of his fellow countrymen who thought the earth and all the life upon it were no more than four thousand years old.
What was better: to be right or to be accepted?
He tore himself away from his philosophizing and sequestered himself in the bathroom.
He dragged a razor around his face and then took a good hard look at his reflection in the mirror. Twenty-five years old, and all he had to show for his seven years of higher education was a black eye. A graduation mortarboard would never sit upon his head. He would never hold a classroom of students spellbound again. That much was clear. The mind behind his boyishly handsome features would always remain just that, forever stuck in boyhood. His bronzed shoulders, well, they looked mature. But who was he trying to fool?
He flexed his sore knee, his back, and his sore shoulder. They felt surprisingly resilient. Perhaps he had absorbed more of Cheno’s wonder smoke that night than he realized, as it must have helped to take away the swelling.
But he had to plan his next move. And the best way to figure out where he was going was to see where he had been.
And there was only one place he could do that. He needed a look at that helicopter crash site.
He returned to his room and grabbed his iPod from his backpack. Within minutes, he was galumphing outside the house. Ouch, that was a little too ambitious. A gentle walk would suffice and maybe he could work out the sore spots.
Cheno’s house overlooked the beginning of desert flatlands, a seabed during the Late Cretaceous period. He would go for a swim with the cacti.
He dialed his iPod to Jimmy Buffett.
Let the rat race run.
Roll around in the sun.
Leave me alone,
I’ve got a license to chill….
An hour later, Brad was walking along a secondary road when he noticed little red flags protruding from the rocky soil. They clustered around a spot thirty meters off the road.
He had arrived upon the site where May’s helicopter had crashed the previous afternoon. And the aircraft still lay there, shattered from the impact and gutted by fire.
It was clear from the flags that an NTSB team had already been there. In addition to the flags that marked scattered debris, yellow tape closed off the area of impact. Aside from the flags and tape, nothing looked disturbed from its condition just after the crash.
The team of experts had sifted through the wreckage and gone. Now it was Brad’s turn to troll for a few clues that might put Liang Jiaxi behind bars.
With long strides and careful to avoid stepping on evidence, he approached the wreck with the expert eye of an anthropologist examining a dig.
If he could demonstrate that the crash was Liang’s handiwork, it would more than exonerate him. Liang may try to escape to China, but Brad would see to it that he would never set foot in the USA again. And with Liang out of the way, May would be free to live with him in America.
He laughed at himself. All digs began with such high hopes and wild expectations. After several minutes among the rocks, he felt his fervor dissipating. At last he receded from the scene and let the site speak to him.
During his intense concentration, he was only barely conscious of a white Lexus sedan that slowly cruised by. Behind its darkened windows, the driver seemed to scan the crash site. Then he quietly glided past and went further down the road.
Brad’s fingers twitched like a divining rod. He wiped the sweat off his forehead so that it didn’t fall on the ground and contaminate the evidence.
Most flags were clustered within the marked perimeter and petered out immediately beyond. He decided to circle the perimeter and work his way outward, searching for anything that the investigators may have overlooked.
There was a shard of glass from the windscreen, twisted struts from the landing gear. The investigators had missed a bent bolt that was torn from a sheet of metal.
How had he survived the crash?
He replayed the sequence of events in his mind.
May had just shown him Rappel Rock where she had seen him climbing. She was concentrating on flying when she had swung the helicopter sharply to the left and gained elevation.
Then she jerked the collective again, this time to the right. They tilted downward in another evasive maneuver.
Then a huge black chopper had appeared dead ahead. But they had not been blown out of the sky. In fact, there had been no sound of a rocket launch or machine gun fire and no sensation of being hit.
The next time he had looked up, the chopper was gone yet May continued to struggle with the controls. Someone had tampered with their aircraft before they even left the airport.
He closed his eyes and tried to forget the sensation of falling in a tailspin to the unforgiving ground.
Yeah, they had hit. Hard. He was still strapped in when they landed, and May had pulled him from the wreckage. Still, there were no flames or smoke before impact or even after crashing.
Nevertheless, she had saved his life. By pulling him to a ditch, they avoided the ensuing explosion, likely the gas tank se
t ablaze by contact with the hot engine.
Soon thereafter, debris rained down on them and black smoke billowed from the wreckage.
The mysterious attacker seemed to be erased from the sky. Even the sound of its engine was long gone.
May’s chopper had been booby-trapped. What he couldn’t understand were Liang’s intentions. Did he want to kill May or not? Perhaps the sabotage was just another message, a warning not meant to be fatal. In any event, he wouldn’t find any trace of bullets or fragments of a rocket shell.
Then something stood out in the soil far from the last red flag. It was a rounded orange object, burnt and distorted out of its original cylindrical shape.
His mind shot back to a geology class he had been teaching. He frequently held a seminar on field experiments where he would set off small tremors so that seismographs could search for oil.
He stooped over the orange object. It was a plastic detonator cap. How had the team missed it? Either they were sloppy, or maybe such a thing was just too far outside of their experience. Regardless, someone had set off the mechanical failure by remote control. That made sense. The assailant could trigger it when and where he wanted without appearing to have instigated the attack.
Liang had set off the detonation from his own helicopter, most likely a Black Hawk from the airbase. Then he had flown away without being associated with the crash. The only remaining explanations for investigators would be pilot error or mechanical malfunction leading to catastrophic failure.
The existence of the detonator cap threw all that in doubt.
He picked up the orange cap, not unlike a plastic bottle top, and stood up. He would carry it back to town for Investigator Sullivan to study. Sure he was removing evidence and contaminating the site, but he had no time to lose.
He broke into a grotesque trot for the secondary road and back to Tucson.
Halfway up the two-lane that led over a seldom-used pass, he came upon a filling station.
It was his first opportunity to call May and Jade and tell them that he had incontrovertible proof that Liang was responsible for the chopper crash. It was also a chance to learn what Earl had found out from his night at the girls’ apartment, if Jade hadn’t slit his buddy’s throat.
He still couldn’t believe that she would have given a murder weapon to Liang in order to frame him. Suppose she was the one who killed the colonel? He’d better call Earl’s cell phone and make sure he was okay.
At the gas station, a bearded old fellow stuffed into mechanic’s overalls sat slouched in the shade. He was the lone operator on duty, maybe even the owner.
“I need to use your phone,” Brad said, out of breath from his run. “It’s an emergency.”
He could see himself through the man’s eyes. He was a disheveled punk in a ratty old shirt and jeans that were soaked in sweat and blood from the pair of crashes he had barely survived. Okay, so he looked like a street person or drug addict. “Hey, man. An emergency is an emergency.”
“We’ve got a pay phone along that wall past the candy rack,” the man said coolly.
Fine. He’d use the pay phone.
He started walking around the candy rack when the air hoses dinged the bell. The same white Lexus that had been tailing him at the crash site was pulling up to a gas pump. The attendant hauled himself to his feet to service the car.
Inside the gas station, Brad snatched the receiver off the wall. He didn’t have a quarter on him. He tried to remember the number on his calling card. Oh, yeah. He remembered it.
He punched in his card access number and PIN and then Earl’s cell number.
But the phone didn’t connect directly. Instead, an operator came on the line. “This is your communications expeditor. Your card has expired. Would you like to use a different card?”
Oh this was just great. “Expired? How? Like my credit’s no longer good?”
“No, sir. Your card has run out of money. Would you like to take this opportunity to add more time to your card?”
“Fine. Give me a hundred minutes.”
“What credit card would you like to charge this to?”
“Uh, make it my student VISA account.” He hoped it was still valid. He recited the VISA number by heart.
“I’m sorry, sir, but that card shows insufficient funds for one hundred minutes. Would you like me to take the maximum allowable?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“That will be for six minutes,” the operator said cheerily, and let the call go through.
“How’s the weather in Bangalore?”
But she didn’t hear him.
He looked up just as a dapper oriental fellow brushed past him and continued on to the john. Come to think of it, he needed to take a mean tinkle himself, but there were emergencies, and there were emergencies.
Eventually the phone at Jade’s condo picked up. “Wei?” a male voice answered.
Holy cripes. A Chinese guy. Maybe Liang hadn’t left the country after all and was still hiding out in the girl’s apartment. He must be holding Earl captive.
Brad lowered his voice and tried to impersonate the first person he could think of. “Ah, this is Inspector Sullivan of the NBA,” he growled. “I’m looking for—”
“Sullivan works for the NTSB, not the NBA, good buddy.”
“Skeeter! What’s with answering the phone in Chinese? Can you talk? Are you safe?”
“Snug as a bug. I gotta say, ‘Thanks for the matchmaking.’ You’re gooooood.”
“Huh?” Brad said. “What are you talking about?”
Earl laughed. “Oh, I don’t kiss and tell. But I’ll say this: Jade couldn’t hurt a fly.”
“That’s comforting to know. But that’s an entirely subjective opinion, of course.”
“A man knows these things.”
“Oh, so we are a ‘man’ now?”’
“I are a man!”
From the restroom behind Brad, the well-dressed man was affixing a spongy cover to what looked like a microphone.
In case the guy was about to do what Brad suddenly suspected, namely eavesdrop on his conversation, he lowered his voice to a minimum. “Are you really okay? Did she drug you? Is she holding a gun to your head? Just try to work a coded message casually into the conversation.”
“Super-calloused fragile mystic plagued with halitosis,” Earl said with a Gandhi-like accent.
“That’s it!” Brad screamed into the mouthpiece. “I’m gonna call Sullivan and get the feds over to rescue you. Just hang tight, buddy!”
“Hey, ya knucklehead. Jade isn’t even here now…” Earl started to reply.
Brad dropped the receiver and fumbled through his pockets for Sullivan’s business card. He had used up half of his six minutes already. The contents of his front pocket spilled out onto the floor. He fell to his hands and knees to find it.
Just then a crack formed on the front window. The glass splintered into a thousand pieces and fell to the floor.
“Hey, your window just broke!” he shouted outside. Must have been a minor earthquake, but he hadn’t felt a thing.
The receiver swung back and forth over his head as he searched in vain through damp wads of phone messages and other miscellanea such as his iPod, a gauze pad and medical tape that had held his IV in place, and May’s letter that Sullivan had given him.
He gathered up his things and rose to leave. Through what was once the front window, he spotted a fire engine-red motorcycle rounding a bend in the road and head straight for the gas station. An eye-catchingly curvaceous rider dressed in an all-black leather jumpsuit with black helmet and darkened visor was driving the bike.
Sure was turning into a busy place all of a sudden.
The attendant glanced up at the motorcycle just in time to see it fishtail toward him.
“Yikes!” the guy cried, and started to scramble for cover back in the station.
The rider stopped the bike and, in one smooth motion, whipped out a snub-nosed Uzi from beneath the opened fla
p of the pleasantly bulging jumpsuit and produced a hail of fire that strafed the front of the building.
A row of bullets led past Brad and up to the bathroom entrance. It chipped off parts of the counter, behind which the attendant had dived for cover.
Brad instinctively ducked behind the candy rack. Somebody sure had it in for the poor attendant, although he was kind of a dickmeister for making him use the pay phone.
Even so, the least a good citizen should do was to get a description of the assailant. Before the motorcycle assassin could get away, Brad hoovered up his papers and iPod and stepped warily around the candy rack to the open door. All he caught was the tailpipe of the motorcycle and the Lexus pulling away from the gas pump in hot pursuit.
Yeah, you’d better run, he thought, gripping his iPod tightly.
He tiptoed over broken glass back into the station. The attendant’s beard trembled visibly as he lay blubbering behind the counter, most of which had been sheared off in the hailstorm of bullets. Miraculously, the old slouch was unhurt.
Brad had to avoid a trickle of some dark substance that oozed out of the restroom. “Hey, need a clean-up on Aisle Four.”
Otherwise, things seemed to be in order. Nothing on fire. He’d better make a graceful exit before the cops showed up.
“Hey, man. Thanks for use of the phone,” he said sarcastically and turned on his heels.
That lucky bastard must sure hang out with the wrong crowd.
Chapter 12
Failing to find Sullivan’s business card, Brad finally arrived at May and Jade’s place two-and-a-half hours later.
Earl was long-since up and dressed and was washing the breakfast dishes when Brad suddenly burst through the unlocked kitchen door at the back of the condo.
Earl appeared to jump out of his skin. “Oh, it’s you. Don’t you knock?”
“Aren’t you in danger?”
Earl looked around at the intact kitchen and patted his chest. “All seems to be in order.”
“Man, I hustled all the way. Darn bus never showed up. Where are the girls?”
“Jade’s doing her cool-down and stretch. Said she just had a real workout on her bike.” Earl tilted his head toward the living room.
