Lynne Heitman - First Class Killing

“You areso management.” He peeked past me to check the cabin-empty-and lowered his voice anyway. “You need to be perfect today, Alexandra, and so far you’re not off to a good start.”

The urgency in his tone seemed to convey far more concern than was warranted by my headache. “Why perfect? What’s going on?”

Again with a quick look over my shoulder. Nothing back there but a long, empty tube. “There’s a ghost rider on this trip.”

“What’s a ghost-is that a check rider?”

“Undercover check rider is what that is. We don’t know if she’s in first or coach or what she looks like, and they might have put her on to watch you, so-” He pushed the mask toward my face. “It’s up to you. Break a rule or lose your job.”

This time, I checked for the captain myself, but he had taken a newspaper in with him. I grabbed the mask. This day was getting worse by the minute. “How do you know about this?”

“Oxygen? It’s an old trick. Everybody knows-”

“How do you know about the check rider?”

“I told you. I still have connections from my management days. Hurry up before he comes back. Put it over your nose and mouth and breathe, just like the PA says.”

I held the mask to my face and filled my lungs with pure oxygen. It made me dizzy.

“Again.” Tristan had moved outside the cockpit door and closer to the lavatory so he could listen for the captain’s progress. “Keep going. Take as much as you can.”

I got in at least six good draws before we heard the toilet whoosh. Tristan shook his hand at me, motioning me to put the mask back. When I dropped it on the floor, he shifted, waited, and timed his move so that he was directly in front of the lav, hips forward. When the captain swung the door open, there was contact.

“Owww.” Tristan grabbed his crotch and doubled over, providing enough of a distraction for me to get organized. “Oh,shit, that hurt.”

“Didn’t see you there, guy. Sorry.” The captain shuffled around in the aisle, trying to get by, trying not to look closely at the injury he had inflicted. “You should put some ice on that, buddy.”

I slipped out of the cockpit and met Tristan in the galley, where he was crumpled over with his hand over his mouth.

“Tristan, oh, my God. Are you all right?” I straightened him up, expecting his face to be purple. But when I saw his eyes, I reached back and closed the curtain behind me. His hand was over his mouth to cover the sound of his laughter.

“You scared me to death.” I took a deep breath and longed for more pure oxygen. He looked at my face and tried to hold back the merriment that was clearly present in his eyes.

“What? What is so funny? Because I have to tell you, I’m not finding much comical about this day so far.”

The dam gave way, and peals of hysterical laughter burst forth. “You should…you should…have seen yourself. You looked like a crack fiend inhaling your first hit of the day. When that toilet flushed, your eyes gothuge.”

I tried to keep from laughing. I didn’t want to encourage him. He was, after all, laughing at me. But then he made his hand into a surrogate mask, clapped it over his nose and mouth, and showed me a look of wide-eyed alarm, all the while snorting ravenously and loudly sucking down the make-believe oxygen. He looked insane, and I felt ridiculous, and then I realized how absurd the whole situation was and felt a smile sneak up, then a laugh bubble over. I made the mistake of making eye contact with him, and pretty soon it was a full-blown, rolling giggle fest-as soon as one wave stopped, we’d look at each other and the next would begin. We leaned over and bumped shoulders and held our sides and tried to calm down and couldn’t. I was out of control, and somewhere in the back of my swollen, hungover, throbbing brain, I thought it wasn’t such a bad place to be.

I found a cocktail napkin, wiped my face, and counted it as a stroke of good luck that I hadn’t had time to apply makeup. I tried to breathe deeply and make sure not to look at Tristan, who was also coming back to earth.

“Feeling better now?” he asked.

My back creaked, and my joints needed oiling, and my head would probably explode once we reached cruising altitude. But I had to get through this day. The oxygen helped a lot. Laughing helped more.

“Thank you,” I said, “for everything.”

Tristan put his arm around me and gave my shoulders a squeeze. “Go comb your hair. You look like shit.”

BY THE TIMEICROSSED THE THRESHOLD AND slouched into my apartment in Boston that evening, I had been in constant motion for nearly twelve hours straight, much of that on an airplane doing six hundred knots from one end of the country to the other.

I dropped my bags in the middle of my living room, collapsed onto the couch, and let my head loll back onto the soft cushions. My apartment building was alive and noisy at that time of the evening. The heavy door downstairs swung open and slammed shut with dependable frequency as my neighbors came home from work. Next door, the baby cried, and I could smell the onions cooking in someone’s dinner. I sat with my eyes closed, luxuriated in the deeply tranquil state of being still.

I had managed to get through the flight by maintaining a single-minded focus on not dropping, burning, melting, or breaking anything. But the brain at rest is fertile ground, and as I sat there, memories from the day and night before began to bubble up and come back in a flood of odd details. A palm beside the pool with one brown frond. A white napkin with a dark wet ring soaked into it from where the glass had been. My glass? The taste of tequila still on my tongue like a thick paste. Margaritas first, then shots while I was dancing. I couldn’t remember going to bed.

But I remembered Angel.

I remembered the way she had looked at me and touched me and made clear that she took what she wanted.Do you want to be close to me? Those words whispered in my ear felt as if they were still there and would always be there, tattooed across my consciousness.

Then there was Jamie. The look on his face when he had seen my uniform, or at least recognized it for what it meant. Watching him as he walked away from me and never looked back. Most of all, the dull ache in my heart that I managed, like the pain in my chronically sore hamstring, simply to ignore. Or live with. Tristan was right. I needed my brother in my life. I needed to call him.

But first I needed to talk to Harvey, and before I talked to Harvey, I wanted to check out my prize. I booted up the computer and shuffled straight over to the A drive, where the disk containing the purloined data was still seated. When I pulled up the directory, it appeared that I had two files on the disk. I clicked on the one with last night’s guest list.

When it popped up, I smiled. All the names were there. They weren’t encoded or garbled or self-erasing, which I decided to count as a big plus. Included on the invitation list were not only names and addresses, almost all from the West Coast, but in many cases e-mail addresses as well. Mr. Bouncer did not seem to have been as meticulous in getting the women’s information as the men’s. The gender was predominantly male, and places of business were frequently included. The list included two hundred names, which didn’t seem like so much in the harsh light of day. I tried the next file.

I didn’t know if I had copied it from the laptop or if it had already been on the disk, but it was large and helpfully labeled “Master List.” The data in the master list were set up like the invitation list, with all the same information, but there were a couple of additional dimensions to the way these data were organized. I read the column headings, and as I began to appreciate what I had stumbled upon and what I could do with it, my brain function stirred awake.