Shirley Murphy - The Cat, the Devil, and Lee Fontana

But that would be exactly Falon’s way: hit them when they were happiest—out of sadism, out of a hunger for Becky that she had never encouraged and that, for all these years, could have festered, could have left Falon waiting for just the right moment, the cruelest moment. But was fate—certainly not the good Lord himself—so cruel that Falon’s evil would at last be allowed to destroy them?

25

The plane burst out of the clouds with a buzzing roar banking directly over Lee, it dropped straight at him, its shadow swallowed him, then the dark silhouette swept on by, raking the field below the lowering plane; at the far end of the rough, unplowed land the yellow Stearman touched down. Wheels kicking up dust, it swung around and circled back toward him, its propeller ticking over slowly as the plane taxied. Lee stepped aside as it rolled up to him. The front cockpit was empty. In the rear cockpit, young Mark Triple pushed back his goggles, but didn’t kill the engine. “Hop in, Fontana.”

Reaching for the struts, Lee made the long step up onto the wingwalk. Pausing, he looked down into the open metal hopper where Mark had bolted in a makeshift seat for him. Not much to hold him in there, only that little leather strap screwed into the sides of the plane. He glanced back at Mark.

“Climb on in, it’s safe as a baby carriage.” Leaning forward, Mark handed him a pair of goggles. “They’ll keep the bugs out of your eyes. Make sure your seat belt’s fastened.”

Warily Lee stepped in, groping for the seat belt. He got the ends together, pulled the belt so tight he nearly cut himself in half. He wasn’t half settled when the engine roared again and they were moving, Lee gripping the sides of the hopper hard, the ground racing by in a brown blur. He was lifted, weightless, as the tail came up, then a belly-grabbing leap, forcing him to hang on tighter than he had ever clung to a bucking cayuse. Ahead, a flock of birds exploded away in panic. Looking gingerly over the side, he hung on with both hands as the plane banked, tipping sideways. They swept low over the rusty tin roofs of the packing sheds, not a soul stirring in the ranch yard. In the paddock, Lucita’s spotted mare crowded nervously against the rail fence, staring up at the rising plane. In Lucita and Jake’s yard Lee glimpsed a tiny flash of white, Lucita’s little Madonna. Then they were out over the green fields, the melons and vegetables, the cotton and alfalfa broken by irrigation ditches thin as snakes, then the sharp line where the green stopped and the pale desert stretched away to the low Chuckawalla Mountains, brown and barren and wind carved. He’d feel more secure if he were riding behind Mark instead of up here in front where he felt like he should have control but didn’t—but hell, if this bird took a dive he wouldn’t know what to do anyway.

Forcing himself to settle back, he concentrated on the panorama below, so different than what you could ever see from the ground. He told himself this was a good feeling, floating high above the earth with nothing to hold him up there, and he tried to set his mind on the job ahead, patting the traveler’s check folder in his shirt pocket, making sure it was safe. He’d never pulled a scam like this one. The excitement of it made his stomach twitch, but also made him smile. Yesterday he’d skipped lunch, borrowed Jake’s pickup and headed for town, first for his post office box—and his birth certificate was there waiting for him. Smiling, he’d headed for the Department of Motor Vehicles where he applied for a driver’s license in the name of James Dawson, hoping to hell the clerk hadn’t known Dawson. Hoping the DMV wouldn’t check past the P.O. address, wouldn’t start digging around in the birth certificates. There must be a lot of Dawsons in the world, but he had to have some kind of ID. He told the clerk he was a mining consultant moving down from San Francisco, would be doing some work for Placer Mining Company. Said he hadn’t had a driver’s license in years because the last company he worked for furnished a driver, he said that when he was in the city he preferred to take the cable car or walk. He’d had to take a driver’s test, a piece of cake on the open desert roads, and he had aced the written test.

Fifteen minutes after he received his temporary license he had returned to the post office, parking around on the next street out of sight. Entering the lobby, standing in line before the window with the temporary cardboard sign reading BANKING BUSINESS, he was encouraged by the long line. A busy teller, hurrying through her transactions, was just what he wanted. A teller making quick decisions wouldn’t want to linger over unnecessary questions. When his turn came he gave the young redhead a grandfatherly smile, asked her for seven hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, in hundred-dollar denominations. He had stood admiring the young smooth look of her as she recorded the check numbers in the customer’s transaction folder, which was printed with the logo of the bank. He told her conversationally that he was on his way to San Francisco. She said she loved San Francisco, that the fee would be two dollars, and she had counted out the traveler’s checks to put into the folder. As he reached to his hip pocket, he picked up the folder. He dug convincingly in his pocket for his billfold, then looked surprised, looked up at her, frowning. “Oh, shaw. I’m sorry, miss. I left my wallet in the car.”

She smiled at him understandingly, and paper-clipped the checks together, glancing past him at the long line of customers. “That’s all right, sir. I’ll hold them until you get back. Just come to the window, you needn’t stand in that long line again.”

The customer behind him pushed impatiently closer as Lee slipped away pocketing the folder, leaving the young clerk cashing a paycheck.

Outside the post office, moving away around the corner out of sight of the post office windows, he swung into the truck and left, heading back for the ranch, the empty folder safe in his Levi’s pocket. That had been yesterday. Now he was on his way to complete the rest of the transaction.

His stomach dropped as the plane lifted higher yet, to clear the rising mountains, and he tried to ease more comfortably into the sense of flight, into the sudden lift, the speed, the throb of the engines. The wind scoured his face, sharp and cold. Below him the deep, dry washes dropping down from the mountains and across the desert floor looked ancient. Washes that during a heavy rain would belch out enough water to flood the whole desert, flood the highway deep and fast enough to overturn a car and drown an unwary driver. Maybe, Lee thought, every place in the world had its own kind of downside, unexpected and treacherous. Soon they were over San Bernardino, sailing smoothly over miles of orange and avocado groves, the lines of trees as straight as if drawn by a ruler. A few small farms, fenced pastures where horses and cattle grazed, a few small towns surrounded by green hills—and then the square grids of L.A. streets, neighborhoods of little boxy houses, and the main thoroughfares choked with traffic. Blue ocean beyond to his left, rivulets of white waves rolling in, and to his right the Hollywood Hills rose up, their pelt of green trees broken by the occasional glimpse of a mansion roof or the blue square of a swimming pool. This was the moneyed Neverland he’d read about, a place he’d never have reason to visit. Beyond the Hollywood Hills, forested mountains towered up, wild enough, by their look, to lose a man back among their rough ridges and gullies, wild enough to hide a man where the feds might never find him.

Lee eased down in his seat as Mark banked and circled, approaching the L.A. airport, the mountains swinging so close to Lee he caught his breath and clutched the seat hard again, staring straight out at what he thought was his last sight of this earth before they crashed into a thrusting peak, and died.