Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

There was no damage to the little Cessna – so the owner never found out about the joyride. In fact the only fallout from the incident was the whipping she got from her mother because the principal at the Lee School had reported Percey’d been in yet another fight and had punched Susan Beth Halworth in the nose and fled after fifth period.

“I had to get away,” Percey explained to Bell. “They were picking on me. I think they were calling me ‘troll.’ I got called that a lot.”

“Kids can be cruel,” Bell said. “I’d tan my boys’ hides, they ever did anything like – Wait, how old were you?”

“Thirteen.”

“Can you do that? I mean, don’t you need to be eighteen to fly?”

“Sixteen.”

“Oh. Then… how’d it work that you were flyin’?”

“They never caught me,” Percey said. “That’s how it worked.”

“Oh.”

She and Roland Bell were sitting in her room in the safe house. He’d refilled her flask with Wild Turkey – a bread-and-butter present from a mob informant who’d lived here for five weeks – and they were sitting on a green couch, the squelch mercifully turned down on his walkie-talkie. Percey sat back, Bell forward – his posture due not to the uncomfortable furniture but to his extraordinary mindfulness. His eye would catch the motion of a fly zipping past the door, a breath of air pushing a curtain, and his hand would stray to one of the two large guns he carried.

At his prompting she continued the story of her flying career. She got her student pilot certificate at age sixteen, her private pilot certificate a year later, and at eighteen she had her commercial ticket.

To her parents’ horror, she fled the tobacco business circuit (Father didn’t work for a “company” but for a “grower,” though it was a $6 billion corporation to everyone else) and went for her engineering degree. (“Dropping out of UVA was the first sensible thing she’s done,” her mother pointed out to Percey’s father, the only time the girl could remember her mother taking her side. The woman had added, “It’ll be easier to find a husband at Virginia Tech.” Meaning the boys won’t have such high standards.)

But it wasn’t parties or boys or sororities she was interested in. It was one thing and one thing only. Aircraft. Every day that it was physically and financially possible, she flew. She got her flight instructor’s cert and started teaching. She didn’t like the job particularly but she persisted for a very savvy reason: the hours you spent flight-instructing went in your logbook as pilot-in-command time. Which would look good on the résumé when she went knocking on airline doors.

After graduation she began the life of an unemployed pilot. Lessons, air shows, joyrides, an occasional left-hand seat assignment for a delivery service or small charter company. Air taxis, seaplanes, crop dusting, even stunts, flying old Stearman and Curtis Jenny biplanes on Sunday afternoons at roadside carnivals.

“It was tough, real tough,” she said to Roland Bell. “Maybe like getting started in law enforcement.”

“Not a world of difference, I’d guess. I was running speed traps and overseeing crossing-guard detail as sheriff of Hoggston. We had three consecutive years with no homicides, even accidental. Then I started moving up – got a job as a deputy with the county, working Highway Patrol. But that was mostly picking folk outa moonshine wrecks. So I went back to UNC for a criminology/sociology degree. Then I moved to Winston-Salem and got myself a gold shield.”

“A what?”

“Detective. Course, I got beat up twice and shot at three times before my first review… Hey, be careful what you ask for; you may get it. You ever hear that?”

“But you were doing what you wanted.”

“I was that. You know, my aunt who raised me’d always say, ‘You walk the direction God points you.’ Think there’s something to that. I’m keen to know, how’d you start your own company?”

“Ed – my husband – and Ron Talbot and I did that. About seven, eight years ago. But I had a stopover first.”

“How’s that?”

“I enlisted.”

“No fooling?”

“Yep. I was desperate to fly and nobody was hiring. See, before you can get a job with a big charter or an airline you have to be rated on the kind of planes they fly. And in order to get rated you’ve got to pay for training and simulator time – out of your own pocket. Can cost you ten thousand bucks to get a ticket to fly a big jet. I was stuck flying props ’cause I couldn’t afford any training. Then it occurred to me: I could enlist and get paid to fly the sexiest aircraft on earth. So I signed up. Navy.”

“Why them?”

“Carriers. Thought it’d be fun to land on a moving runway.”

Bell winced. She cocked her eyebrow and he explained. “In case you didn’t guess, I’m not a huge fan of your business.”

“You don’t like pilots?”

“Oh, no, don’t mean that. It’s flying I don’t like.”

“You’d rather be shot at than go flying?”

Without consideration, he nodded emphatically, then asked, “You see combat?”

“Sure did. Las Vegas.”

He frowned.

“Nineteen ninety-one. The Hilton Hotel. Third floor.”

“Combat? I don’t get it.”

Percey asked, “You ever hear about Tailhook?”

“Oh, wasn’t that the navy convention or something? Where a bunch of male pilots got all drunk and attacked some women? You were there?”

“Got groped and pinched with the best of ’em. Decked one lieutenant and broke the finger of another, though I’m sorry to say he was too drunk to feel the pain till the next day.” She sipped some more bourbon.

“Was it as bad as they said?”

After a moment she said, “You’re used to expecting some North Korean or some Iranian in a MiG to drop out of the sun and lock on. But when the people supposed to be on your side do it, well, it really throws you. Makes you feel dirty, betrayed.”

“What happened?”

“Aw, kind of a mess,” she muttered. “I wouldn’t roll over. I named names and put some folks out of business. Some pilots, but some high-up folks too. That didn’t sit well in the briefing room. As you can imagine.”

Monkey skills or no monkey skills, you don’t fly with wingmen you don’t trust. “So I left. It was all right. I’d had fun with the ’Cats, fun flying sorties. But it was time to leave. I’d met Ed and we’d decided to open up this charter. I kissed and made up with Daddy – sort of – and he lent me most of the money for the Company.” She shrugged. “Which I paid back at prime plus three, never late a day on a payment. The son of a gun…”

This brought back a dozen memories of Ed. Helping her negotiate the loan. Shopping together for aircraft at the skeptical leasing companies. Renting hangar space. Arguing as they struggled to fix a nav-com panel at three in the morning, trying to get ready for a 6a.m. flight. The images hurt as bad as her ferocious migraines. Trying to deflect her thoughts, she asked, “So what brings you to parts north?”

“Wife’s family’s up here. On Long Island.”

“You gave up North Carolina for in-laws?” Percey nearly made a comment about how’d his wife lasso him into that but was glad she hadn’t. Bell ’s hazel eyes easily held hers as he said, “Beth was pretty sick. Passed away nineteen months ago.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. They had Sloan-Kettering up here and her folks and sister too. The fact is I needed some help with the kids. I’m fine pitching the football and making chili but they need other stuff than that. Like, I shrunk most of their sweaters first time I dried ’em. That sort of thing. I wasn’t averse to a move anyway. Wanted to show the kids there’s more to life than silos and harvesters.”