Flat Spin (28 page)

“My old man said something that night I went to see him,” Arlo’s son said, “something I didn’t tell the cops.”

I waited.

“He said a friend of his got killed. Some guy he used to work with.”

“I need a name, Micah.”

“He didn’t say a name. The guy was from Arizona somewhere. That’s all he said.”

“Did your father mention anybody named Bondarenko?”

“No.”

“What about a guy named Pavel Tarasov?”

“He didn’t talk names, OK? Just that some friend got killed. He said he couldn’t give me any money because he had to pay for a plane ticket to the funeral. But, see, what I’m saying is, if his friend gets killed, then he gets killed, it ain’t me doing ’em both, you know what I’m saying? It’s more like a, you know, one of those things. What do you call it?”

“A conspiracy.”

“A conspiracy. Exactly.”

I told him I’d talk to the police and see what I could do.

It was hard for Micah Echevarria to say thank you. He did anyway.

S
EVENTEEN

I
washed out the petrified Tuna Feast in gravy that Kiddiot refused to eat while I was away and refilled his dish with Chicken Feast in gravy, the last can of cat food I had in the house. I knew he wouldn’t eat that, either. I wish I could say that his refusing to eat, like other cats, was his way of punishing me for my having left him alone, but I knew him better than that. I was barely a blip on Kiddiot’s feline radar. He watched me refill his water bowl, flicked his tail a couple of times, and left.

Buzz was working on a plate of lasagna when I phoned him at his home in suburban Maryland. He excused himself from the dinner table and took the call outside.

“This better be important,” he said. “I’m freezing my ass off out here. My goddamn testicles have shrunk up so much, they’re now ovaries.”

I asked him if he’d heard of any other former members of Alpha aside from Echevarria who had died in recent months under mysterious circumstances. I told him what Micah Echevarria had said about his father planning to attend the funeral in Arizona. Buzz drew a blank.

“Could’ve been the funeral of somebody he knew before he went to Alpha,” Buzz said.

“Possibly.”

Buzz said he’d call around and see what he could find out. His teeth were chattering audibly. I urged him to go back inside before he froze to death. He asked me what the weather was like in California. I told him he didn’t want to know.

“It’s, like, fifty below zero out here,” Buzz said. “My next door neighbor’s a vice cop. He said the hookers downtown are charging twenty bucks just to blow on your hands.”

I
needed cat food and craved a cold beer. Not drinking anymore totally sucked.

Kang was on duty behind the register at his grocery store, as he always was, arms folded, as they always were. “Some cop came in the other day,” he said. “He ask a lot of questions. Says you bad mo’fo’. I tell him get lost. Logan good guy.”

“You’re the man, Kang.”

I pulled a bottle of cream soda from the freezer, set it on the counter, and fetched a half-dozen cans of cat food off a shelf in the back, not bothering to check which flavors. Kang uncapped my soda with an opener tethered to the counter by a shoestring and loaded the cat food in a plastic bag.

“So what you do, anyhow,” he said, “kill somebody?”

“If I did, they deserved it.”

I handed him twenty bucks and sipped my soda while he rang up the purchase. He handed me my change.

“LA cop right. You one bad mo’fo’,” Kang said, then slipped a Slim Jim into the bag, on the house, “but you still Kang number one customer.”

“Rock on.”

We slapped a high-five. I grabbed my bag. As I turned to go, a good-looking blonde who wasn’t watching where she was going ran into me. I bear-hugged her to break her fall.

“Any landing you can walk away from,” I said.

A smile of recognition replaced Charise MacInerny’s startled expression.

“Cordell Logan, what are you doing here?” She looped her arms around my waist and hugged me back. She was wearing tan cargo shorts and a pink tank top and smelled like lilacs.

“I live right around the corner,” I said. “What’s your excuse?”

She said she and her fiancé, Louis, were going on a picnic when Louis realized he’d run out of smokes. “I’m trying to get him to stop,” Charise said, “but you know how pig-headed lawyers can be. So I said
I’d
buy him a pack of cigarettes—low tar. Better than nothing, right?”

“Next best thing to quitting.”

Louis was slouched in his Lamborghini parked across the street, stereo bass thumping to some rap tune, watching us from behind his Ray-Bans. Mr. Cool. The same guy I’d seen waiting outside the airport for her the week before. I waved howdy. Louis just stared. I wondered how long their relationship would last.

“Been flying lately?” Charise said.

“Every chance I get. My soul is in the sky.”

Charise cocked her head like a poodle trying to comprehend what you said to it.

“Shakespeare,” I said, “
Midsummer Night’s Dream
.”

“Right. Of course. Shakespeare.” Charise nodded like she got it. “I
love
Shakespeare. Especially in that one movie he was in with Gwyneth Paltrow.”

I nearly said something caustic but didn’t. Call it maturity.

“Me, too, Charise.”

I asked her if she’d found any new recreational activities in lieu of flying that sparked her passion. She said she was getting a tummy tuck.

“I wouldn’t have the stomach for that,” I said.

Charise smiled. “Well, anyway, it was just so great seeing you again, Cordell.”

“Take care, Charise.”

A goodbye hug and I was out the door, heading home. When I looked back, her boyfriend was engaged in a heated conversation on his cell phone, no doubt negotiating some outrageously exorbitant fee—more money than I’ll probably ever earn in my life.

With apologies to the Buddha, I wanted to slap his lawyerly ass.

I
was in bed that night, on my stomach, trying to sleep—hard to do with a tomcat on your back giving himself a bath—when the phone rang and startled us both. I rolled one way. Kiddiot, who’d dug his claws reflexively into my skin at the sound of the phone, rolled the other.

“You malicious pelt. What did I ever do to you?”

He hopped off the bed onto the floor and stretched like he couldn’t have cared less, head down, butt high, flexing his front paws. Blood trickled down my back. I could’ve sworn in the darkness that he was laughing at me. The phone was still ringing. The digital clock on the nightstand read 3:02 a.m.

“Hello?”

“I can’t sleep,” Savannah said.

“You and my stupid cat.” I wondered how early the Humane Society drop-off window opened in the morning.

“I just wanted to say I was sorry,” she said. “I know you were only concerned about my safety. You weren’t trying to be a control freak. I overreacted.”

I was tired and bleeding and in no mood to placate my former wife at three in the morning.

“Anything else?”

It was hardly the magnanimous response she had anticipated.

“Yeah, there’s something else. I need my car back.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“What do you mean, you’ll see what you can do? What kind of crap is that? I let you borrow my car, you self-centered jerk, and now you refuse to give it back?”

“I said I’d see what I could do.”

“I want it back, Logan. Today. This afternoon. Or I’m calling the police and reporting it stolen.”

“Gee, I’m glad we could have this little chat, Savannah. Thanks for calling. Always a pleasure talking to you.”

The line went dead.

I got up, switched on the light over my bathroom sink and angled my back facing the mirror. There were three, two inchlong gouges on my left shoulder where Kiddiot had nailed me. I unrolled eight inches of toilet paper, wiped off the wounds as best I could, killed the light, and laid back down on my stomach so the blood wouldn’t stain the sheet. I was still awake three hours later when the first gauzy rays of morning sun came stealing through the gingham curtain shading the garage door window.

I showered, inspected Kiddiot’s food bowl to make sure he still had plenty not to eat, then drove to the airport to check on the welfare of my airplane. Planes are like boats. As many bad things can happen to them standing still as moving. Not this time. Except for several large birds that had used the
Duck
as an outhouse, all was well. I fired up the engine, contacted ground control without having to smack the audio panel to get the radios to work, and received clearance to taxi to the wash rack on the other side of the field.

After I hosed off all the guano, I taxied back to Larry’s hangar. Larry was sitting cross-legged on the tarmac outside, fixing the nose gear on a Glasair III. He was flashing an inordinate amount of butt crack, even for Larry. The back of his T-shirt said, “My life is a very complicated drinking game.”

I shut down the
Duck
’s engine and got out.

“Nice ride,” Larry said, nodding toward Savannah’s Jaguar parked in the lot. “Nice ride.”

“A loaner. Ex-wife’s car.”

“Your ex drives a Jag? Brother, you screwed the pooch. Sugar mama with that kind of bread, you don’t throw back.”

“Wasn’t me that bid
adieu
.”

I cinched the
Duck
’s tie-down ropes.

“FYI, some guy came by looking for you this morning,” Larry said. “A real dick. Starts yelling at me from the other side of the security fence, ‘Where’s Logan?’ I tell him, ‘What do I look like, his babysitter?’ He tells me to eat shit and stalks off.”

“Was he driving a Honda?”

“Didn’t see his car.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Dark hair, dark skin. Thirty. Jeans. Sunglasses. Could’ve been Mexican. Hard to tell.”

“You just described more than half the male population of California, Larry.”

“What you want me to do, Logan, take a picture next time I see him?”

“Might help.”

“The guy looked pissed, that’s what I remember.”

“Probably one of my many satisfied former students.”

“Not this guy. I’d watch my back, Logan. He didn’t seem quite right in the head. Just my gut.”

“Of which you do happen to have a generous supply, Larry.”

Larry flipped me off. I took it as a loving gesture.

T
he red light was blinking on my office answering machine. Six new messages. Four were hang-ups from a “private caller” with a blocked number. The fifth message was from Buzz asking me to call him back on his cell. The last call, less than an hour old, was from Eugen Dragomir. The five grand from his father had arrived. The kid said he wanted to drop off the money and start flying as soon as possible. Given his obvious eagerness to get in the air and monopolize my oh-so-busy schedule, I decided it might be prudent to take care of ancillary matters first. I called Buzz. He was in his basement, he said, enjoying the warmth of a new space heater. The spy who’d come in from the cold. Literally.

“The Amish make ‘em—the cabinets, not the heaters. The heaters, the gooks make,” Buzz said. “Anyway, the fucking thing cranks out about a billion BTU’s. It’s like goddamn Miami Beach down here.”