Both Ends of the Night Page 7

  They say soloing is the greatest high you can experience. And it is.

  Half past noon, by the clock behind the counter. I’d give Selby ten minutes more, then grab a burger and head back to Sacramento—

  I spotted him through the window: a short, compact man with closely clipped white hair, wearing his old regulation leather jacket, attire that during his term of service—and now—set the elite naval aviators apart from the ranks. Behind him trailed a student of no more than twenty, shoulders slumped, face drawn and weary. Selby took the steps two at a time, breezed through the door, and caught it just before it swung back at the younger man. Over his shoulder he said, “You’re not gonna cut it, kid, unless you break those bad habits. And pulling back on the yoke when you’re scared is the worst bonehead habit you can get into. Boneyard habit—it’ll kill you.”

  The student didn’t say anything, just took the rental log up to the counter to pay. I watched, sympathy for him quickly translating to anger at Selby.

  Not that the instructor was wrong in principle; what the student had been doing could cause a fatal accident. When you’re a novice flier and you get scared, you’re usually scared because you think the plane is going down. So if the plane’s going down, your instinctive reaction is to pull back, raise the nose, make it go up. Logical and natural, if you look at it from a layman’s point of view. However, pulling back too much can also stall the wing, and if that lift goes out from under it at a low altitude—such as on take off or landing—you’re heading for the ground too fast to correct for the error.

  Once a flight instructor observes such a habit forming, he or she should point it out calmly, rationally, and nonabusively. The way Matty pointed it out to me. And with no references to “boneyard habits.”

  Selby started for the desk, either to heap more abuse on his student or to check the schedule sheet. I stood up and stepped into his path. For a moment he didn’t recognize me; then his eyes narrowed and his mouth turned down sourly. “Ms. McCone,” he said, “I hear from Cuda that you’ve got one very handsome Citabria over in the tie-downs.”

  “Yes, I do, Mr. Selby.” I extended my hand.

  The instructor looked at it as if I were offering him my garbage. Then he noticed his student heading for the door. “Hey,” he called, “did you schedule for next week?”

  “… I don’t know if I can make it. I’ll call you.”

  The young man was around us and at the door before Selby added, “Hey, I haven’t signed your logbook!”

  “Looks like you just lost a student,” I said.

  He glared at me, deeply ingrained lines of displeasure distorting his otherwise regular features. He would, I thought, have been attractive had he not projected such malcontent—malcontent that had been honed to a fine edge since I’d last seen him. With some surprise I realized that Selby’s testiness and unreasoning gender bias were merely the froth on a cauldron of steadily simmering rage.

  He said, “You here to rag on me, McCone?”

  I shook my head.

  “What, then? You won’t find your friend, Ms. Wildress, on the premises. She’s up in Sacramento at an air show, playing the famous aviatrix.”

  I decided to meet his thinly concealed anger head on. “Does that bother you?”

  A tic rippled the skin below his right eye, and he pushed his lips out, making a flatulent sound. “Why should it?”

  “Well, for somebody who’s not bothered, you sure do sound pissed off.”

  “What bothers me—or in your unladylike jargon, what pisses me off—is people like you cluttering up this waiting room. If you’re not here to meet Wildress or rent one of our aircraft, why don’t you clear out—”

  “And why don’t you and I declare a truce?”

  He had been leaning aggressively toward me, about to get in my face. Now he drew back. “Huh?”

  “A truce, Mr. Selby. You’ve never done anything to me; I’ve never done anything to you. Well, I admit my language was rough, and my remark about your student was tactless. And I apologize.”

  Selby was used to Matty’s barbs, and since he associated me with her, he’d expected more of the same. My apology further threw him off stride, and when I added, “Do you have some free time?” he became completely confused.

  “Uh…” He consulted his watch. “Uh, my next lesson isn’t till two.”

  “I’ll buy you lunch, then.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to pick your brains.”

  “About what?”

  “John Seabrook.”

  An odd flicker appeared in his blue eyes. “Seabrook, huh? And you’re a private cop. She finally wise up and decide to get the goods on him?”

  I smiled.

  “About time the broad caught on.”

  “Mr. Selby, you’re just the man I want to talk with.”

  “What makes you think he’s hiding something?” I asked in response to Selby’s initial series of nonspecific pronouncements about John Seabrook.

  He crushed a cellophane-wrapped packet of saltines, opened it, and dumped the crumbs into his chili. Then he added Tabasco, ketchup, and black pepper, tasted it, and nodded his approval. “Okay,” he said, his mouth full, “let’s see what you think of this. Over there on Hartmann Road”—he motioned to the north end of the field—“there’s a paved turnaround. Was supposed to be the entrance to a housing development that never got off the ground.”

  “I know where you mean.”

  “About a year and a half ago, in July, I started seeing this truck parked there. Once or twice a week. Was a guy in it—Seabrook.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Watching the planes take off and land. He’d sit there for maybe an hour or two. Just watching.”

  “You’re sure it was Seabrook?”

  “Sure I’m sure. I got to pass by there on my way home, so I made it my business to check the guy out.”

  “Why?”

  “He looked suspicious.”

  “Suspicious, because he was watching the planes? A lot of people do that.” As if to prove my point, a Mooney Ranger took off just then; reflexively, my eyes were drawn to it.

  Selby was looking at it too. “Well, you can’t be too careful.” He speared a french fry from the side dish he’d ordered, dipped it in the chili, and popped it into his mouth. “It was Seabrook, all right, and he kept it up all summer and into the fall. The next thing I know, he’s seeing Matty. Now he’s got an excuse to watch the planes from the diner.”

  “Mr. Selby, that’s what people do here.”

  “Yeah, my point exactly. They drive over here, have lunch, and watch. They don’t lurk across the road in their truck; they don’t need to take up with some woman pilot as an excuse to come in here, sit down, order, and watch.”

  “I really doubt Seabrook started seeing Matty as an excuse to have a Seven Niner burger.”

  “Then why didn’t he ever come in before?”

  “Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he was on a diet.”

  “McCone, if you’re not gonna take me seriously—”

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  “Okay. After a while I start wondering about the guy. Matty tells everybody he doesn’t like to fly, won’t go up with her. But what kind of guy will sit watching the planes for hours every week, when he doesn’t like to fly?”

  “Bob Cuda.”

  Selby snorted and waved his hand in dismissal. “Cuda’s a case of arrested development. I’m talking normal guy.”

  Who’s normal? I thought. You? Me? But he did have a point. “I take it you decided to investigate.”

  “You bet I did. You can’t be too careful.”

  “Why? Surely you weren’t looking out for Matty’s sake.”

  “Hell, no. That broad can take care of herself. I was looking out for airport security.”

  “What, you thought Seabrook was maybe preparing to launch a terrorist attack on Los Alegres Municipal Airport?”

  He scowled. “Okay, McCone, you’re f
rom the big city, fly in and out of SFO or Oakland now, you think we’re small potatoes. But you look around here, this is an affluent community. Stick your nose into the hangars, check out the tie-downs, and you’ll see millions of bucks’ worth of aircraft. That plane of Matty’s alone cost over a quarter of a mil, and that classic collection in Hangar C—well, I don’t even want to guesstimate what that would go for.”

  “You’re right; I wasn’t thinking.”

  Somewhat mollified, Selby looked at my plate. “You going to eat that pickle?”

  “Take it.”

  “There’re other considerations besides the safety of the aircraft,” he went on, brandishing the dill spear at me and then crunching. “We’ve seen a number of modified twinengines through here in the past few years—modified to carry cargo. Makes you wonder what they’re transporting.”

  “Drugs or other contraband?”

  “Could be. And a guy who’s watching them land and take off, a guy who doesn’t look like the law… well, it makes you wonder some more.”

  “So you kept an eye on Seabrook, and…?”

  “Well, I didn’t want to get too close to him, maybe tip him off. It would’ve looked funny, seeing as Matty and I haven’t ever been on the best of terms. So I just watched and listened. McCone, do you know the difference between a wet oil sump and a dry oil sump?”

  “No.”

  “Not many people besides mechanics do. It’s not really important, now that they’ve solved the problem of wet sumps icing up. Basically, it’s just an engine design feature. But Seabrook knew that Continental engines have wet sumps. I heard him talking about it with Steve, the head mechanic.”

  “So he knows engines. Is that a crime?”

  Selby ignored the question. “When you’re taking off behind a larger plane, where should you start your roll in order to avoid wake turbulence?”

  “From the same point or before it did.”

  “And rotate it?”

  “Before the larger plane’s takeoff point.”

  “How many hours did you have before you learned that?”

  “Ten? Twelve? I don’t know.”

  “Well, Seabrook knew that with zip hours.”

  “You heard him talking with…?”

  “Mark Casazza, about an iffy takeoff one of Mark’s students made behind a Citation.”

  “Huh.”

  “There was other stuff, all of it pretty damn revealing.”

  “I see what you’re getting at. So you eavesdropped”—Selby frowned, and I corrected myself—“you listened for how long?”

  “About six months all told, every chance I got. Kept notes, too. Then about three weeks ago I decided old John and I should have a conversation.”

  “About?”

  “You going to eat the other half of that burger?”

  I’d planned to, but in the interest of sustaining our fragile rapport, I passed my plate to him. “About what?” I repeated.

  “The weather.”

  “The weather?”

  “Best subject I could think of that wouldn’t put him on his guard. He was already wary of me—Matty must’ve told him she hates my guts. So I bitched to him about having to cancel my lessons the day before on account of the low ceiling, said I hoped I’d get through all of them that day before it came down again. And Seabrook said I’d probably manage if I planned to stay in the pattern, since there was still four hundred feet of leeway, and the ceiling seemed pretty static.”

  “So what did you take that to mean?”

  “Let me refresh your memory about the landing pattern here. The clouds were right at the top of the hills—”

  “Two thousand feet.”

  “And the pattern altitude is—”

  “Eleven hundred.”

  “Two thousand minus eleven hundred is nine hundred.”

  “Minus the legal five hundred below the cloud cover equals four hundred.”

  Selby smiled triumphantly. “The guy not only knew the FAA requirements for VFR, he knew the height of those hills and our pattern altitude.”

  I considered. “Couldn’t he have remembered that from talking with Matty?”

  “He isn’t a flier, doesn’t like to fly. Why would it’ve come up? And even if it did, why would he have remembered it? Or been able to compute it that easily?”

  “You’re right. Why? Unless—”

  “There’s more. From there I steered our discussion to that crash over on Sonoma Mountain last month. You read about that?”

  “Uh-huh.” The longer I fly, the more I find myself reading newspaper accounts of crashes—not to scare myself, but for assurance that they were caused by some pilot error that I myself hopefully never would make.

  “Well,” Selby went on, “I worked the ELT into that, and damned if Seabrook didn’t know that it transmitted on 121.5.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “He corrected me when I said it was 121.7. I covered by saying I’d mixed it up with our unicom here—122.7.”

  I stirred the cubes in my iced tea with the straw, thinking that one over. Very few people who don’t fly know about the ELT—emergency locator transmitter—a radio device that the FAA requires on aircraft, and that is triggered by impact to send distress signals on both civilian and military frequencies.

  I said, “It transmits on a universal emergency frequency; he could’ve known about that if, say, he’d worked around ships.”

  “Maybe, but given the other things I picked up on…”

  “So you’re telling me John Seabrook is a pilot.”

  Selby nodded. “The way I figure it, for some reason our boy doesn’t want Matty or anybody else to know. But he is, and he loves flying. Why else would he sit across the road watching the planes week after week, month after month? Then he takes up with Matty, and he can hang around here all he wants, absorbing—what is it you city folks call it?—the ambience. But hanging around an airport—hell, living with a pilot—he gets careless. He lets things slip that give him away to anybody who’s really listening. He lets a lot of things slip.”

  A lot of slips—or maybe just one too many.

  Six

  McCone! Over here!”

  I turned at the sound of Hy’s voice but couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from. The day had turned clear and surprisingly warm, bringing out a huge crowd for the air show. People were still streaming through the gate from the parking area, many of them lugging coolers, blankets, and folding chairs. Others lined up at the food stands, overflowed the bleacher seats, pushed up against the low metal barriers around the field. Still others milled around in the striped tent, where a pilot shop was hawking its wares, or admired a display of homebuilts put on by the local experimental aircraft association.

  Sweat beaded my forehead, and I felt trapped inside my overly heavy sweater; I ran the back of my arm over my face, then used it as a visor as I searched for Hy. The smell of Mexican food from a nearby catering truck combined with the heat to make my stomach queasy; I wished I hadn’t let Gray Selby eat most of my lunch. Hy called my name again. I pivoted, and a small girl ran into me, dribbling ice cream on my foot.

  A roar rose from the spectators. Cokes and hot dogs momentarily forgotten, they tilted their heads back and shaded their eyes as they watched the blue Bücker Jungmeister whose owner I’d talked with earlier sketch lines of smoke against the sky. The red chevron design on its top wings was easy to see because it was flying upside down.

  “And there he goes, folks,” the announcer said over the loudspeaker, “a perfect Cuban eight!”

  Finally I spotted Hy shouldering his way around a film crew from KXTV News. He grabbed my hand and led me toward the barricade, asking, “What the hell took you so long?”

  “Traffic—both at Sacramento Metro and on I-Five. When’s Matty flying?”

  “She’s next up.”

  When we got to the front row of spectators, a Spandex-clad young woman moved aside and allowed us to squeeze in next to
her. Hy said, “Thanks for saving our place.”

  I leaned forward, my hands braced on the top rail of the barricade, and peered at the taxiway. Matty’s clean-limbed monoplane waited at the hold line, ready to turn onto the runway once the biplane finished its routine and landed.

  I said, “I wanted to get back in time to wish her luck.”

  “And she wanted to see you. Here—she left you this.” He took the yellow-and-red scarf she’d worn earlier from his pocket. “You’re to wave it, so she’ll know you arrived safely.”

  “That’s Matty—always concerned about the other guy.” I took the scarf and put my foot on the middle horizontal of the barricade; Hy boosted me up and I waved it vigorously. Matty’s hand extended through the plane’s open canopy, waggling two fingers in a victory sign. Then it disappeared and the canopy closed.

  Hy eased me down, and I tied the scarf around my neck. “How’s she doing?”

  “She’s been flying high on her own for hours. I tell you, McCone, the adrenaline level around here is infectious.”

  I could feel it in his hands and body; feel it rising within me, too.

  The announcer said, “And now—the hammerhead.”

  I looked up at the biplane; its pilot was ruddering over at the top of a hammerhead turn, going into a steep accelerating dive, white smoke trailing. My stomach lurched as if I were in the cockpit with him.

  Hy squeezed my shoulders. I leaned back against him, watching the pilot begin his recovery, only hundreds of feet above the runway. Hy asked, “Did you find out anything in Los Alegres?”

  “Yes—and Matty’s not going to like it.” My eyes still tracking the blue plane, I related my conversations with Mick, Bob Cuda, and Gray Selby.

  “What a guy, that Seabrook,” Hy said when I finished. “The bastard lied to her. Deserted her and his own kid. Left them in an indefensible position. McCone, we’ve got to help them.”

  “We will.”

  “You sound so confident.”

  I shrugged. “It’s the first step toward being confident.”

  “Watch this, folks!”

  The crowd noise intensified as the blue plane began a fast lateral roll at the top of a loop. “Jesus,” I said to Hy, “what’s he doing?”