‘That’s a 350ER – ER for extended range. Two thousand two hundred nautical miles, plus reserve. He also carried an internal bladder in case of headwinds. The leg from LAX to Hawaii was right on the aircraft’s range.’
‘So fuel was going to be tight.’
‘Randy’s problem wasn’t going to be fuel, it was boredom. The King Air’s no jet. He was in the air a lotta hours.’
I had nowhere to go, but then I wasn’t an experienced aircraft accident investigator. The flight had originated on US soil, which meant the NTSB would be putting this one under its microscope.
Morrow made a huffing sound, an ironic smile on his lips. ‘What’s up?’ I asked him.
‘I was going to send someone else. Randy wanted the job, practically begged me for it. Said he’d never been to Australia before.’
Alabama bit a knuckle.
‘How many hops did he have to make?’ I asked.
‘Quite a few. He was going to do it over an eight- to ten-day period, depending on the weather. Flying conditions were good, by the way.’
‘Did he have a co-pilot?’
‘No, flew solo.’
‘Long solo flight.’
‘Randy had the option of taking a co-pilot, but he chose to go it alone. As I said, boredom was going to be an issue.’
‘Any idea what might have happened?’
Morrow shook his head. ‘None whatsoever.’
Alabama had recovered a little composure. I stopped asking questions so that she could ask a few of her own.
Morrow beat her to it. ‘So you’re OSI?’ he said, my card in his fingers.
I nodded.
‘Local? From Nellis?’
‘No, out from DC.’
‘Randy was a civilian – no longer Air Force. Are you on this official-like?’
‘No. Just a friend of the family’s. Have the authorities told you what happens next?’
Morrow dropped my card in his folder. ‘They said all we can do is wait, see what the search turns up.’
‘I know Randy’s alive,’ said Alabama. ‘I can feel it.’
Morrow gave her a pitying smile. ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ he said, clearly not a believer in Alabama’s instincts.
‘I’d
know
if Randy was gone,’ she said, bolder this time, assured by her own conviction. ‘Is there a chance he could have had some trouble and put down near an island somewhere?’
‘I guess anything’s possible, but . . .’ The look he gave us said there was more chance of relieving Sleeping Beauty out in reception of her jackpot.
‘What about the plane’s electronic locator beacon?’ I asked.
‘It had one. As far as I know, it didn’t light up.’
‘Isn’t that unusual?’
He shrugged. ‘ELBs are electronic gadgets – they can fail like any other electronic gadget. There’ll be an investigation. All we can do is wait and see.’
I leaned down, picked up the ice chest and put it on the table. Time to let Randy’s boss know that there might be more to the disappearance of his aircraft than he or the authorities thought.
‘What you got there?’ Morrow asked, half a smile lifting part of his face.
‘Several days after your King Air departed LAX, Ms Thornton here received this.’ I opened the chest and turned it around.
Morrow leaned forward and peered inside. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he exclaimed, that tan of his appearing more like badly applied makeup as the blood drained from his cheeks.
‘This is what brought me to Vegas,’ I said. ‘After we leave your office, we’re taking it to the metro PD. If you look carefully, you can see an Air Force Academy ring on its pinky that we believe belonged to Randy. The package also came with a greeting card asking for a ransom in exchange for Randy’s life.’
Morrow sat back in his seat, mouth open and probably dry. ‘Jesus,’ he repeated, whispering it the second time around. The guy was in a state of shock. Perhaps giving him a peek at Thing was a little on the melodramatic side, but he had to know that there might be another angle being played here. ‘Is that Randy’s . . . you know . . . his . . .’ Morrow asked, voice cracking.
‘His hand?’ I said. ‘No, but you can see the problem, right? Alabama here was understandably concerned when she received this home delivery, but reassured because, one, this wasn’t Randy’s hand and, two, he was supposedly flying a plane to Australia. But now the place she thought he was safely tucked away in – your King Air – has disappeared.’
Morrow’s face had gone a splotchy white.
‘Are you okay, sir?’ I asked. I didn’t want the guy having a heart attack.
‘If Sweetwater’s not in that plane, the . . . the damn insurance company won’t pay out,’ Morrow stuttered under his breath, the full force of the implications suddenly hitting him in his wallet.
And those who say you shouldn’t prejudge just don’t know shit from ice cream.
*
I called ahead and asked Detective Sergeant Ike Bozey to meet Alabama and me at the desk sergeant’s area and escort us through. I wasn’t keen on getting searched. I could warn the guy at the x-ray station that there was an amputated human hand on my person, but police I had no connection with were likely to get jumpy about this and I had no desire to be forced onto the floor at the point of a quivering Glock.
‘Hey, Cooper,’ said Bozey in a voice full of gravel. ‘Good to meet you. And this is Alabama, right?’
Alabama waved.
‘Coming through,’ said the detective sergeant, beckoning at us to come past the usual search procedures. ‘These people are my guests,’ he announced loudly.
‘On your head be it, Bozey,’ the desk sergeant called out, making a note.
‘Get a dick in your ear, fatso,’ Bozey replied loudly. The sergeant he was referring to was on the skinny side of scrawny, his neck filling his shirt like a straw fills a glass.
‘Fuck you,’ came back at him.
In an aside, Bozey said, ‘He’s married to my sister . . . Makes for an interesting Thanksgiving.’
Alabama and I fell in behind the detective sergeant, a former light-heavyweight boxer who walked like one. The guy also came with a heavy New York accent and buzz-cut brown hair, tending to gray. A wide scar was clearly visible meandering over the crown of his skull. He’d taken a bullet there that, according to Arlen, had exposed a part of his brain. It happened the day he took on five thugs attempting to sexually assault a fifteen-year-old girl in broad daylight, after dragging her into a back alleyway. One of the perps had fired a .38 at Bozey, the slug digging out a piece of his skull, but the guy had kept on fighting, even madder. Three of the five perps ran off after Bozey had knocked the other two out cold. When the cops turned up they found him sitting on one of the alleged attackers, trying to fit the pieces of bone back into the hole in his own head. When Bozey finally got out of hospital, he joined New York’s finest, only to quit a couple of years later to move west with his sister. Vegas was the place he decided to put down roots, after she met and married – the desk sergeant, I assumed – and Bozey joined the force again.
We rounded the corner. ‘Arlen said I should lend you every assistance. So, here I am, lending.’ We came around another corner and this time the hallway broadened into open-plan office space populated by a mixture of uniformed and plainclothes police. The sound of computer keyboard clatter dominated, punctuated by several phones that rang and rang and rang.
‘How do you know Arlen?’ I asked him.
‘Can’t say,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘’Cause it happened here in Vegas, and there are rules.’
‘I’ll ask him.’
‘Won’t do you no good.’
We arrived at a cubicle-sized space that reminded me of my office at Andrews: gray partitions and one entire face covered with papers and photos and sticky notes and maps, some of them hand-drawn. It felt like home.
‘I hear you work at Bally’s,’ Bozey said to Alabama.
‘That’s right,’ she told him as he pulled in a chair for her to sit on.
‘That’s a good clean show.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘And that’s a damn shame,’ he said, giving her a grin full of mischief. He cleared his throat and took a seat. ‘Now, what can I do for you folks?’
‘Arlen told you nothing?’ I asked.
‘Not a word, except that you was family.’
‘That mean you’re gonna start calling me names?’ I asked.
He grinned. ‘Maybe.’
‘Okay, well, Alabama received this in a FedEx box,’ I said, handing over the ice chest.
‘Do I want to know what’s in here before I lift the lid?’ he asked.
‘It’s a body part,’ I warned him.
Bozey opened it, took a peek inside, sucked his lips into a seam and raised an eyebrow. ‘Right,’ he said.
‘There’s a note.’ I took the letter, now protected in a clear plastic ziplock, from the Bally’s bag and passed it to him.
‘When did this arrive?’ he asked, reading it through the plastic.
‘Getting on for six days ago,’ I said.
‘That’s not helpful. Six days lost, fourteen to go, according to this. Why not bring it in sooner?’
‘I was scared,’ Alabama admitted. ‘If I contacted the police and the kidnappers found out . . .’
‘Doll, these people don’t want you contacting the police because
they’re
scared. They’re scared there’ll be no payday; they’re scared their asses will get stomped on by law enforcement; they’re scared they’ll spend the best part of the rest of their lives eating someone else’s dick in Club Fed . . . Sorry, just don’t get me started.’
‘Any other hot buttons we should know about?’ I said.
‘I’ll tell you after you push ’em. Has any further contact been made?’
‘No,’ said Alabama. ‘And this is not Randy’s hand.’
I took it from there and filled Bozey in on what we knew – that perhaps the ring was the boyfriend’s and that, at the time his kidnappers claimed they were sawing pieces off him, he was supposedly flying a plane to Australia. I then told him the news we’d received last night: that Randy’s plane had gone missing and was now presumed crashed in the Pacific, somewhere between the Solomon Islands and Darwin.
‘Could be an elaborate con gone wrong,’ the detective concluded without hesitation. ‘What’s the ransom?’
‘Fifteen million,’ I said.
‘And you don’t got it,’ he remarked, looking at Alabama.
‘On what we make at Showgirls?’
Bozey shrugged. ‘Honestly? Not a lot of what you’re saying makes much sense to me. But until something else turns up, I can see pretty clearly that you do have one small problem.’
‘To go with the big ones,’ I said.
‘Yeah. As far as we know, this hand could have come from a university cadaver. My problem is, well, I can’t see where the crime has been committed – nothing I can investigate, anyway.’
‘I figured as much,’ I said.
‘Then how can I be of assistance?’
‘CSI – forensics. Put the hand through the wringer. It might turn up something to go on. There’s also the note.’ I motioned at the Bally’s bag. ‘And in here is most of the original packaging everything came in.’
The sergeant rubbed his chin. ‘I don’t know . . . Vegas is a pretty busy port of call, forensically speaking, and we don’t have a lot of those kinds of resources to splash around here.’
‘Oh, sure you do,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen the TV show.’
A
labama said she was tired so, as there was nothing more we could move on, I drove her home to Summerlin with a promise to call if anything else turned up, then took myself back to my hotel for a swim.
It was maybe a hundred and ten in the shade down in the pool area, the place surrounded by glass buildings focusing the sun’s rays like a magnifying glass picking out bugs. In the pool it was virtually standing room only, packed with college kids come to Vegas to get drunk, get laid, lose all their money and go home with sunburn, a hangover and a misspelled tattoo across their backs – the usual.
A loud alcohol-fueled bikini contest was coming to a conclusion, the music and the bar pumping, as I wandered around the crowded sunbaking area in search of an empty sun lounge. A leggy black college kid was showing the crowd her moves, egged on by the DJ. The masses in the pool applauded when she gave her hips a workout. And when she turned, bent over and wiggled her money-maker at the audience, it rewarded her with waves of hoots and applause. Up next, a large white woman in a high-cut green one-piece costume with deep scallops out of the sides, her ample upper thighs the shape of ice-cream cones and just as dimpled. She didn’t seem to care though, and moved as dirty as any woman I’ve ever seen, which seduced roars of approval from the spectators. A woman in her early twenties won the contest when her tiny gold bikini top suffered a wardrobe malfunction, something I firmly believe everyone except network executives appreciates.
I circumnavigated the pool area twice before finding a sun lounge in the process of being vacated. A woman in a Bally’s shorts-and-tee ensemble came and took my drink order, while I waited for a heavily tattooed jock to pack up and leave. It had been a while since my bare skin received a dose of sun, and I had a bunch of reasonably new scars that were still pink, so I figured I had maybe half an hour before I got second-degree burns. I stripped off my top and rolled it into a headrest then lay face down. The sun’s heat immediately went to work on my back and I exhaled loudly, feeling relaxed, on vacation at last.
I’d only drifted off to sleep for maybe five minutes when a cold shock between the shoulder blades woke me with a start. I looked up, ready to get all indignant, and saw that it was Sugar. She was standing beside me, her shadow across my face, the sun a corona behind her head, a cheeky smile on her lips. A Heineken, my Heineken I supposed, hung from her hand and swung beside her leg. She held it out to me. ‘This yours, I think.’
‘Thanks.’ I rolled onto my side, propped my head on my hand. Her bikini was a knitted orange number. It didn’t hide much, and what it did I’d pretty much seen already. She wore heels, slip-ons, which made her look taller and maybe just a little hotter, if that were possible. A multicolored canvas satchel hung casually off a shoulder.
‘You bin banged up some, ain’t you.’ She leaned a little toward me, peering at my body over the top of her Ray-Ban Aviators. ‘You bin in a car accident o’ somethin’?’
Or something probably covered it best. The last few years had left their marks – several bullet wounds and nicks, a little shrapnel mauling here and there, some barbed-wire tears, a few stitches. I could remember when, where and how I’d received each and every one, but that was a private litany I wasn’t prepared to share poolside. ‘Yep,’ I said, keeping it loose.
‘Hey, is ’Bama okay? I heard Randy’s in some kinda trouble.’
‘You’ve got a lot of interest in Alabama and Randy.’
She smiled. ‘You jealous?’
I parried her smile with one of my own. My beer was looking neglected, so I took a moment to give it some attention. Sugar began digging around inside her bag. ‘The sun gonna turn you into a crawfish. You want some cream on?’
I thought about saying no, but only for the nanosecond it took to change my mind. ‘Thanks,’ I said and rolled onto my stomach.
‘Move over a little.’
I wriggled across and she sat beside me on the sun lounge. Looking under my arm I saw her knitted bikini bottom wedged against my hip. Seconds later I heard the splodge of the lotion squirting from the bottle, and a cold wetness on my back. I smelled piña colada. Her hands went to work immediately, moving the lotion around in circles.
‘Must have been some car accident,’ she said as her fingers slid over a knot of scar tissue on my shoulder blade where a 9mm slug had left in a hurry. Little Coop woke up, stretched out, and wondered if some piña colada might possibly be coming his way too.
‘A few of the girls are sayin’ somethin’ came for ’Bama in a FedEx box.’
‘Really,’ I said, adding nothing.
‘A body part – Randy’s.’
‘I don’t think—’
‘His penis.’
That one caught me off guard. I twisted around and looked at her. ‘I can promise you that nothing cut from Randy has been received by Alabama, unless she took delivery of it within the last two hours and she’s neglected to tell me about it.’
‘Is that the truth? ’Cause somethin’ came for her, somethin’ sick. One of the girls caught a glimpse of it. ’Bama’s upset an’ then you arrive, a secret agent . . .’
‘
Special
agent – I’m just a cop.’
‘Okay, but you a cop that’s come all the way from Washington.’
‘Just a friend of the family lending a hand.’ I allowed myself a smirk at that, and went back to getting myself sun-blocked.
‘Sure you are.’
‘That’s the truth.’ Interesting how rumors grow. Maybe the super fertilizer on this one had been what one of the girls had caught sight of – perhaps one of Thing’s fingers.
‘Were you gonna call me?’ she asked, changing tack.
‘Haven’t had the time to give it much thought.’
Sugar responded to this nonchalance by giving me a stinging slap on the back of the leg. ‘Then I would have called
you
.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why would you have called me?’ That was a genuine question. Sugar played in a different league table. I was still wondering why she gave me her phone number in the first place. Why would a woman like this be interested in a lowly paid public servant from out of town with a busted nose and a cheap room in a three-star hotel? Come to think of it, why was she giving me the current poolside attention? ‘A little down to the left,’ I told her, milking it before she realized she could have her pick of half a dozen jocks in the vicinity leering at her.
‘I like you. You’re a real man.’
‘Like Randy.’
Her hands hesitated. ‘Yeah, like Randy.’
‘Have you ever had sex with Randy?’
Another hesitation. ‘The
questions
you ask. Now, I’m gonna put some cream on your legs,’ she said, kneading my shoulders. ‘You gonna fry, you.’
‘Have you?’ I persisted. ‘How about with Alabama?’
Slap number two.
I gave my shoulders the barest of shrugs. A few seconds later I heard the bottle squirt and felt the cold wetness of the lotion on the back of my legs. Her hands went to work, working it around, the amplitude of movement quickly taking in ankle to upper thigh. Little Coop was close to panting. I tried not to think about it, bending my thoughts in another direction. There was some kind of triangle between Alabama, Randy and Sugar which Alabama readily admitted to. She found the Cajun woman attractive, an attraction that seemed to be mutual. Somehow Randy was also involved, but on what level? Where did he fit into it? ‘Why are you so interested in Randy?’ I asked her.
It took her a few moments to find an answer. ‘’Cause he’s dangerous an’, for me, danger is an aphrodisiac. I like fast cars, motorcycles, speedboats – anything with an engine. I like men and I like men who like women. There ain’t nothin’ wrong with that, is there?’
The brains of the operation in my shorts was applauding. ‘Did you know Randy when he was in the Air Force?’ I asked.
‘No. I wasn’t workin’ in Vegas then.’
‘But you’ve met him plenty of times since he left the Air Force.’
‘Sometimes, not so many. He has an interestin’ job, flyin’ airplanes all round the world.’
‘And planes have
very big engines
,’ I said.
‘Yes they do,’ she giggled. ‘Maybe that’s why I’m interested in him.’
‘How do you pay your mechanic when you get your car engine serviced?’
Slap number three, though it was more playful than the first two. ‘All these scars are tellin’ me you’re dangerous too. I was right about you, wasn’ I? You know, I think I like scars now.’
I’d have happily done without them and the things that had left them on my skin.
‘
Phew!
All this work is makin’ me hot,’ she continued. ‘I’m gonna swim. You wanna come?’
‘Won’t swimming wash the cream off?’
‘It’s waterproof, silly.’ She stood, slipped out of her heels, dropped her sunglasses onto her bag, and took a few steps to the side of the pool. Several guys dangling their legs in the water nudged their buddies and motioned at her. The bikini pageant would have been no contest with Sugar in the line-up. Her ass was generous but tight and rode high on long, straight athletic legs. Her waist was also incredibly narrow but her shoulders were wide and strong. She turned sideways and beckoned me to hurry up. Her breasts, firm and buoyant, did likewise. It was going to be potentially embarrassing getting into the pool, Little Coop having turned my trunks into a teepee. But I sat up anyway and wriggled down to the end of the chair, saving at least one step out in the open, and giving myself the opportunity to get Mr Embarrassing down below better organized. I stood, walked quickly to the pool and jumped in, going under immediately and putting in a few strokes. The water was tepid, but still refreshing. When I came up I scoped around for Sugar, but she’d disappeared. I swam underwater to the edge, turned, spread my arms wide, gripped the side of the pool and leaned back against it.
I was slippery due to all the lotion, but I wasn’t complaining. And Sugar would find me. I put my head back, closed my eyes and enjoyed the heat of the sun on my face.
‘Where’d you get to?’ I heard Sugar say.
I put my head down and opened my eyes. She had her back to me and was speaking over her shoulder, wading slowly closer in reverse, entering my personal space. Before I knew what I was doing I lowered an arm and put it around her waist, and stroked my hand against her flat stomach. She immediately pressed in closer, took my hand and guided it down inside her bikini bottom. She then squeezed my fingers into the lips of her vulva and pressed them up against her clitoris, which was hard and distended, her lips slippery and warm.
She put her head back on my shoulder and whispered, ‘Oh, you’ve found it. Have you ever done it in public?’
There were people all around us. ‘Not this public.’
As I said this, her free hand worked its way inside my shorts and found what it was looking for. She held me between her fingers and began sliding them up and down the length of my shaft, stopping occasionally to rub the head with her forefinger. She was right about the sunburn lotion being waterproof.
‘Try not to make it too obvious, handsome,’ she said in my ear as she moved against my fingers, which she was holding inside her.
I swallowed and tried not to squeak.
A college girl up on her boyfriend’s shoulders glanced across at me. I gave her a smile, trying to look like I hadn’t just been busted with my hand in the cookie jar. Or whatever. Did she know what was going on? She leaned down and said something to her mount and he threw his head back and laughed.
Sugar’s breathing quickened and I heard her moan, her lips against my ear. I felt her body shudder and go rigid suddenly. She crossed her legs, which forced my fingers up hard against her pelvic bone.
When she relaxed a little I said, ‘That was quick,’ and tried not to gasp as she did that thing again with her forefinger.
‘My body is good to me,’ she said dreamily, her head resting on my shoulder. ‘I can sneeze at will, too.’ She murmured, ‘Let me know when you’re gonna come.’
With her own needs taken care of, Sugar put a little more concentrated effort into the operation behind her back. The DJ over at the bar goosed the volume on a new Fiddy Cent number and most of the folks in the pool started bumping and grinding, covering my own movement, which was becoming a little involuntary. I tapped on her shoulder, and said urgently, ‘Letting you know . . .’
‘I thought so. A woman can tell.’
Sugar put in a few more strokes before turning and sliding below the surface of the water. She took me in her mouth and cupped my aching balls as things began to pump. I felt the action of her tongue as she swallowed a couple of times before letting me go, the water against my skin suddenly cooler than her mouth, and my eyes rolled back in my head.
Sugar surfaced slowly, a smile on her lips as she stroked the skin behind my balls. She wiped the water from her eyes and then kissed me on the mouth, her breath smelling vaguely of coconut and starch.
‘A protein shake,’ she giggled, then ran her tongue around her lips and added, ‘There’s lunch taken care of.’
‘How’d you even manage that under water?’
‘Practice. An’ . . .’ She pinched her nose between thumb and forefinger to demonstrate the secret.
‘Cooper,’ I heard a voice say behind me. ‘That you?’
Sugar shifted her focus, smiled her dreamy smile and said, ‘Hi, ’Bama. Hey, why don’t you come on in, join the fun. There’s always room for one more. We can order some drinks, have us a party.’
‘Hello, Sugar.’
Shit, Alabama . . .
I felt a pang of guilt about what had just happened. I turned and the woman was standing behind me looking kinda . . . was it angry? Disappointed? How long had she been there? What had she seen? Did I really care? I knew how she felt about Sugar so, yeah, maybe I did care.
‘You mind if Mr Cooper and I talk in private for just a minute?’ Alabama asked Sugar, a firm no-nonsense tone in her voice.
‘Sure, why not? You look nice, ’Bama.’
She did. Her hair was up in a ponytail and she wore a floral-pattern cotton sundress, the hemline riding somewhere up around Canada. White sandals were on her tan feet, the straps lined with rhinestones – what else.