Sandra Brown - Low Pressure

From the lobby phone, he called their room. When Bellamy answered, he asked if she wanted to join him in the restaurant. “Or would you rather me have them box up something and eat in the room?”

“I’d prefer that.”

“Need me to come up and wash your back?”

She hung up on him.

He had his hands full when she opened the door to him twenty minutes later, fully clothed, but her hair still damp and smelling of shampoo. “What’s all this?”

“Vending machine toothbrushes. And paste,” he added with emphasis. “Two cheeseburgers, two fries, two beers for me, one split of white wine for you. We’ll toss for the peach cobbler. That was the last of it.”

While she spread their dinner on the round table, he took a quick shower, returning to the main room dressed but without his damp boots.

Bellamy seemed to be as hungry as he was, and they ate quickly, deciding to save the cobbler for later. He carried his second beer over to the bed, rolled the pillow into a ball, and supported his head on it as he stretched out on his back.

“This is cozy.” He patted the space beside him. “It could get cozier.”

“Cut it out, Dent. I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“Sleeping was last night’s agenda. Not what I had in mind for tonight.”

With a decisive punch, she muted the TV. Then, curling up in the easy chair, she put her hands palm to palm and slid them between her knees as though to warm them. But it was also a slightly protective gesture, which should have alerted him to what was coming.

“What Moody said—”

He interrupted her with a long, drawn-out groan. “Talk about a mood kill.”

“What he said about you living with what nearly happened.”

“But didn’t.”

“Still, it can’t be easy to know how close you came to—”

“Taking out a hundred and thirty-seven people?” Watching her down the length of the bottle, he took another drink of beer, then set it on the nightstand and came off the bed, all in one motion. “Thanks a lot. I’ve now officially lost my buzz.” He moved to the dresser and leaned into the mirror above it to inspect the cuts on his face.

“Why did you voluntarily leave the airline after the incident?”

“Too bad it’s not Halloween. I could trick-or-treat.”

“Why won’t you talk about it?”

“I wouldn’t even need a mask.”

“It might help if you opened up about it.”

“Bad as these bruises look, I may still have them come Halloween.”

“Dent?”

“ What? ” He came around so quickly she actually recoiled.

But she didn’t give up and go away. “Why won’t you talk about it?”

“Why are you so damn curious? Morbid fascination? Are you one of those people who goes online to watch videos of plane crashes, people jumping off buildings, multi-car pile-ups?”

“Don’t do that.”

“What am I doing?”

“Slamming the door. Getting defensive. Is that how you were with the investigators?”

“No, we all became chums. Christmas cards. Birthday greetings. They name their babies after me.”

She frowned. “You told me that the only way you can relate to a woman is sexually.”

“All evidence to the contrary.”

“This is your chance to relate to one, to me, in another way.”

“That way is no fun. No fucking fun.”

He returned to the bedside table, picked up the bottle of beer, and took a swallow from it. As far as he was concerned the conversation was over. But Bellamy continued to watch him with those damn soulful eyes that pulled him in and under, and, before he’d even planned it, he asked, “What do you want to know?”

“You were the co-pilot?”

“Yes.”

“You spilled your coffee?”

“Isn’t that what I told you?”

“The mechanic, replacing the electrical panel—”

“All true.”

“The weather?”

“Also a factor, but not severe enough to ground us.”

“But when you were on takeoff—”

“The most critical time of any flight.”

“—you were instructed to turn left to avoid a thunderstorm.”

“Which was the right call.”

“Lightning struck the plane.”

“Popping several circuit breakers, including one that controlled the CVR. Cockpit voice recorder. Which wasn’t relevant until later.”

“A fire warning came on for the left engine, but there wasn’t a fire.”

“Just like I told you. False warning.”

“But the captain shut down the left engine.”

“Correct.”

“That’s what he did.”

“Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“I flew the frigging airplane!”

His shout was followed by an abrupt, charged silence. Bellamy sat upright. He cursed himself and moved back to the bed, where he sat down on the end of it and pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets. He kept them there for a minute or more, then slowly lowered his hands and looked over at her.

“The captain didn’t like me, and the feeling was mutual. He was a totally by-the-book kind of guy, and that kind of pilot. He regarded me as a misfit who didn’t fit the image and didn’t deserve to wear the uniform. In a best-case scenario, we wouldn’t have been scheduled to fly together. But we were. That was the hole in the first slice of Swiss cheese.”

He stopped to collect his thoughts, to relive that instant in time when he realized that the captain had made an egregious error. “I told you earlier that he reacted as he’d been trained to do on a 727. The thing was, that’s not what we were flying. We were flying an MD80. He’d been trained on the 80, of course, but his upgrade had been recent. When the event occurred, an older reflex kicked in. He reacted to the fire warning without checking the instruments for secondary indications of a fire. Oil temp. Oil pressure. EGT. Exhaust gas temperature.

“I instantly checked the gauges. Nothing said fire or damage. I realized the goddamn warning was false. By now we’re in a steep left bank, and our airspeed is decreasing. The right engine is pushing the airplane further to the left. The nose is dropping, right wing is tipping up. The airplane wants to roll over.”

“That’s what you reacted to.”

“Yeah. I jammed the right rudder to try to bring it out of the turn. I pulled back on the yoke to try to bring the nose up and get the craft level, while bringing it back to the right to straighten it up. And it all had to be done immediately and simultaneously. There wasn’t time to think about it or talk it over. There were no options.

“Now this took seconds. Seconds . During that time, he and I are yelling at each other. He was shouting at me that it was his aircraft, and I was telling him that what I was doing had to be done. We’re shouting over each other. It was a damned good thing that CVR circuit breaker had popped. That saved us both some embarrassment later on.

“Anyway, I managed to pull us out of it. He stopped yelling. In eight, no more than ten, seconds, he’d pieced it together, realized his error and how close it had brought us to a catastrophe. He even thanked me, I think. At that point, we were both awfully busy.

“Passengers were screaming. The flight attendants were trying to restore calm. We had no way of knowing the extent of the injuries or damage to the cabins. We were still flying in moderate to severe turbulence on one engine.

“I asked him if he wanted to restart that left engine, since apparently nothing was wrong with it. He opted to leave it off. He took control again and we returned to the airport. Disaster averted.”

He stared at the pattern in the carpet between his feet. “No one died, but a lot of people were injured when we pitched. One was a baby that was in his mother’s lap, not strapped in. Lawsuits were filed, and the airline paid out millions to settle.” He looked over at Bellamy and said with a bitterness that went bone deep, “You know the rest. It made big news.”