The strip here was level and flat, she felt the wheels touching, hit the brakes, lowered the flaps, and rolled along the beach to a full stop some twenty yards from where she’d seen the headlights. She cut the engine. The night was still. Immediately, she took the forty-five from the flap pocket of her jump suit.
She waited inside the cockpit, in the dark.
Kept waiting.
In the Gulf, she’d packed a forty-five automatic in a holster at her waist, case she got shot down, a distinct possibility. Lots of unfriendly people down there, waiting to get their hands on an American pilot, well, who could blame them? A female pilot, no less. Cassandra Jean Ridley, Lieutenant, U.S. Army, 714-56-32, that’s all she was obliged to tell them. Didn’t even have to say she was with the 101st Airborne. Here, she didn’t knowwho’d be waiting for her. But she knew she had a hundred and fifty thousand coming for delivering this last suitcase. Money like that, a girl couldn’t be too careful.
The rap on the window startled her.
She slid it back, right hand tight around the walnut grip of the Browning in her lap. She had to pee. First thing you did when you got back to base was rush to barracks to pee. The male pilots just unzipped and pissed right where they’d landed.
“Welcome to Arizona,” someone said.
Cheerful voice, the speaker nothing more than a blur in the dark. Two other men with him. She did not loosen her grip on the automatic. She was waiting for the single word that would tell her these were the people expecting the shipment. Buried any which way in whatever sentence they chose to use. But until she heard it, she sat right where she was with the gun in her hand and her finger inside the trigger guard.
“Nice night,” one of the men said.
Try again, sweetheart.
“Hasn’t been much rain.”
Rain.
Bingo.
“Who’s got my money?” she asked.
“Where’s the suitcase?”
She released the door lever, climbed out onto the wing, and dropped to the ground, the gun dangling lazily, familiarly at her side.
“You won’t need that,” one of the men said.
“Gee, I hope not,” she answered.
The desert air was a bit chilly. She wished she had on her flight jacket. One of the men was carrying a small leather case the size of a laptop. He placed it on the rim of the door, snapped it open. Another man turned on a penlight. She was looking at a lot of U.S. currency.
“A hundred and fifty thousand,” one of the men said. “Final payment. As agreed.”
“Where’s the suitcase?” another man said.
“Mind if I count it first?” Cass said.
“Why don’t we all just sit out here in the open till Customs spots us?” the third man said.
“Count it out for me,” Cass said.
“Count it out for her,” the first man said.
He was the one with the cheerful voice. He sounded a trifle impatient now, but she didn’t give a damnhow he sounded. One thing she’d learned in the Army was you didn’t back off. Not on the ground, not in the air. So far all the risk these guys had taken was to sit here in Shit Wallow, Arizona, waiting for her. She was the one carrying the cargo, she was the one whostill had the cargo sitting in a planeshe’d rented. So go right ahead, she thought,get impatient. That’smy money you’re treating so casually there.
The one who’d mentioned Customs slipped the thick rubber band from one of the packets and looped it over his wrist. There was a small tattoo on the back of his left hand. Some kind of bird, looked like a hawk, wings spread wide, claws gripping a fish. He spread the bills to show her there weren’t any pieces of newspaper cut to size in the bundle. Then he began counting them out loud, one by one, “… five, six, seven,” Cass holding the gun, watching, listening, “eight, nine, ten, a thousand. One, two, three, four …”
On and on. There were fifty bills in the packet, all of them hundred-dollar bills. When he counted out the last bill, he rubber-banded the stack again, and dropped it back into the leather case. There were thirty packets of bills in all, each of them about three-quarters of an inch thick. It took the man less than fifteen minutes to count them all out. He snapped the lid on the case shut, and handed it to the first man, who folded his arms across it and held it against his chest like a schoolgirl carrying books. She suddenly thought of Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Borden had got away with killing her father and her stepmother and where, coincidentally, Cassandra Jean Ridley had spent the first fifteen years of her life, my how the time did fly. What am I doinghere? she wondered.
“The suitcase,” he said.
Cass climbed back into the plane and pulled out the suitcase from where she’d stowed it. She carried it out again in her left hand, the gun in her right, still hanging loose. She was thinking they could shoot her dead the minute she dropped to the ground again, grab the suitcase full of dope, she was sure it was, ride off into the night with the dopeand the money they’d so patiently counted out for her.
It didn’t happen.
She revved up the engine again, the little leather case with $150,000 sitting on the seat beside her, another ten grand in the flap pocket of her jump suit. Tonight I’ll be back in the big bad city, she thought. Her heart was pounding as fiercely as it had over the sands of Iraq.
HANUKKAH WOULD START at sundown today, the twenty-first day of December. Will didn’t much care. He
