Steven Havill - Final Payment

“Do you normally leave your key in the airplane, sir?”

“You know, I do….” Turner hesitated. “Stupid, huh?”

“Yep,” Sheriff Torrez said, and his one-word utterance jerked Turner around as if he had forgotten that Bob Torrez was standing nearby.

“But see, I look at it this way,” he said. “The hangar’s locked. Always locked. I make sure of that. It’s a steel building with a dead bolt on the access door, there, and steel lock bolts on the main door. I figure that if someone is going to go to the trouble of breaking in to steal my airplane, then what the hell. They’re going to take her whether there’s a key in the ignition or not. Airplane’s just about the easiest thing next to a power lawn mower to hot-wire.”

“Uh huh,” Estelle said, keeping her tone neutral.

“And what the hell. Jim, your Citabria?” he called to Bergin, who stood just outside the open hangar door. “That doesn’t even have an ignition key, does it? Just a couple of switches.”

“True.” Bergin sounded noncommittal.

“What’s the second key on the ring for, sir?”

“Well, now I’m going to sound even stupider,” Turner said. “That’s an extra door key.”

“You mean for the hangar?”

“Yes. Well, hell. That way I know where it is.”

“I see,” Estelle said, managing to keep the amusement out of her voice. People routinely did dumb things, but that never seemed to lessen the umbrage when their habits caught up with them.

“Well, now…” Turner started to say, then bit it off.

Estelle added the dangling keys to the list of photographs that she wanted Linda Real to inventory.

“What’s all that tell you?” Turner asked. “Are you able to do anything with that grass sample?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Estelle said. “Grass is sort of a ubiquitous thing, you know. And the red dust on the propeller? I wish we had a magic computer where we could feed a sample into a program and it would instantly locate where in the world it came from-but that’s still Hollywood sci-fi.”

“The grass caught in the wheel skirt could tell you something, couldn’t it?” Turner persisted.

“I suppose it could, if it turned out that it was a rare, endangered species that grows only on a small peninsula in the Yucatán.”

“What you’re saying is that we may never figure this out,” Turner said.

“Been known to happen,” Torrez said. “Just for fun,” he continued to Estelle, “let’s go over the inside with black light when you’re all done lookin’ for hairs and fibers and all that shit.”

“What’s that do?” Turner asked.

“Shows some interesting things,” Torrez said, and let it go at that.

“Body fluids show up,” Estelle added for Turner’s benefit.

The possibilities of that weren’t lost on the aircraft owner. “Well, yuck,” he said with a grimace. He’d grimace even more if he knew about the family of corpses currently reposing in the basement morgue at Posadas General, she thought.

“Let me ask you something, sir,” Estelle said. “How long could this airplane have been missing without you noticing?” When he didn’t answer immediately, she added, “From the last time you closed and locked the door to right now.”

“Well, like I said-I guess when Jim and I flew down to Cruces. That was last month sometime.”

“Early in the month,” Bergin said. “Today’s the ninth of May. That’s a month.”

“I guess so,” Turner said. “About a month.”

“Ay,” Estelle whispered to herself. “That’s quite a window of opportunity. All these nice flat surfaces can gather a lot of dust in a month.”

“Could. But what’s on that prop isn’t something that sifted down from the ceiling in here,” Turner said doggedly.

“Eleven hours of flight time in a month.” She leaned inside again, examining the instrument panel. “Which one of these is the Hobbs?”

Turner reached across the seat and tapped a small, black-ringed clock. “Right there. Hobbs meter gives true time, and the tach records engine hours.”

“They’re not the same thing, then?”

“Ah, no,” Turner said indulgently. “They’re not the same.”

“You have a record of what the Hobbs read when you flew last time?”

“Sure. The logs are in the pocket behind the seat. Lemme come around.”

Estelle pulled back and let Turner rummage. He flipped open a black book and leafed through the pages. “When we came back from Cruces, and that was on April fourteenth, the Hobbs read 2134.6 hours. And now, it reads…” He paused as he squinted at the dial. “It looks like 2145.9. That’s-” and he looked upward as he did the math in his head “-a little more than eleven hours.”

“How far could you fly in that time?” Torrez asked. “Or half that time. You gotta come back.”

“To keep it simple,” Bergin explained, “a hundred and forty miles an hour gets you seven hundred miles in five hours. But that’s not counting fuel stops or anything like that.”

“Seven hundred.”

“That’s right. Hell of a ways from here to Los Angeles, or Dallas, or Denver. Or a hell of a ways into Mexico.”

“And back,” Estelle added.

“You have any ideas?” Turner said, looking first at Estelle and then at Torrez.

“A couple or three,” Torrez said. “It wasn’t just pleasure flyin’.”

“We could be looking at five trips of two hours each, more or less. Or three trips, or whatever,” Bergin said.

“Yep.” Torrez nodded. “Interesting that they went to the trouble of bringin’ the airplane back when they were done.”

“Pretty darn thoughtful,” Bergin said.

“Oh, yeah,” Torrez grunted. He turned to Estelle. “You ready to have Linda go over it? Then we can let the dog out.”

Turner looked even more uncomfortable. “You think somebody used my plane to run drugs, or what?”

“We’ll find out,” Torrez said.

Sebastian stood beside the airplane, his leash hanging relaxed from the State Police officer’s hand, tongue lolling and eyes looking expectantly from human to human. Neither luck nor his phenomenally precise nose had located any trace of the fragrant little red ball with which he had been so meticulously trained.

Estelle knew that it often came as a surprise to drug dealers that the dogs didn’t know hashish from hot dogs, or blood from grape juice. Find the source of the smell for which they had been trained, whether it was the real thing or the essence smeared on a rubber ball, and win a treat. It was as simple as that.

The trick was keeping distractions to a minimum. As soon as he had been released from the backseat of the State Police car, Sebastian had caught sight of Bob Torrez. The dog did a little dance, uttering a girlish yelp of greeting.

“He loves you, Bobby.” Lieutenant Adams laughed. Aloof with other human beings except his handler, Sebastian went to pieces with Bob Torrez-no one, including the sheriff himself, knew why.

Socializing turned to work in short order. Keeping Sebastian on short leash, Lieutenant Adams led him into the hangar. For the next ten minutes, he guided the dog’s efforts, covering the perimeter, the exterior of the plane, and finally the inside.

Tail wagging furiously, Sebastian leaped through the large door of the aft baggage compartment, eager to please. No matter how thoroughly he thrust his nuzzle into dark corners, even wedging his wet nose into the seat pockets, he found nothing.

After several attempts, Adams led the dog out of the hangar, where he collected a single pat on the head from Sheriff Torrez.

“Nothing,” Adams said. “Absolutely nothing. If this aircraft has been hauling freight, it wasn’t coke or grass or any of that shit.” He looked approvingly at Turner, as if somehow the cell phone salesman’s reputation had been at stake.