“I’m scared, Mommy!”
“Turn back!” the woman in the back shouts. That sets the kid to wailing again.
Megan glances in the mirror at the kid’s tear-stained face and his mother’s enormous, panicked eyes, then tunes them out while she studies the airspeed and altitude indicators: 2,800 feet; sixty-eight knots? Already? What the hell was the sink rate of this damned plane? Megan tries to work out her next steps, but nothing comes to mind. She squeezes her eyes shut and fights to control the rapid, shallow breathing that presages one of her panic attacks. How the hell had she gotten herself into this mess? Flying was fun but she hadn’t bargained on a morning like this. Her uncle greasing the palm of a pliable flight instructor had seemed like an inspired move when she struggled a bit to master the 210N rating qualifications, but it wasn’t looking like such a good idea at the moment. Sure, she can fly well enough, but this is a bit more than she can handle with her limited experience—especially while severely hungover.
Fragments of her training finally float into her mind. She takes a deep, cleansing breath and lets it out slowly, taking stock of the situation and tapping the tips of her French-manicured fingernails on the edge of the wheel as she thinks. The first thing she needs to do is get the damned plane headed back toward Chicago. She’s only what—two miles offshore? Maybe three?
“Miss?” the man in the back ventures. “Maybe we should radio for assistance?”
The radio can’t help them now. It’s up to her. “I’ve been gathering my thoughts,” she tells Grandpa in a bid to shut him up. Her eyes drift across the instrument panel. Fifty-eight knots, 2,200 feet? What the hell is going on? They weren’t going anywhere if she kept losing height and speed at this rate. The altimeter drops to 2,100 feet, and another knot bleeds off their airspeed in the time it takes her to process the thought. Should she radio for help? And look like an ass? No.
“Turning back now,” she mutters over her shoulder as she banks the Cessna into a tight 180-degree left turn to get back to safety. If the damned plane isn’t going to fly, she needs to get closer to shore before she sets it down in the water. She’ll be okay then—she was on swim team in high school.
“Miss!”
“Mommy!”
Megan doesn’t register the panicked chaos in the back seat as the wing loses lift and her aircraft drops nose first out of the turn. She’s now fully absorbed in her own horror as the surface of Lake Michigan fills the windscreen of the plummeting Cessna.
Fuel starvation? Megan wonders as she finally starts to make sense out of what’s happening. No fuel reaching the engine would explain things. Did I bleed the tanks? She doesn’t remember, but she suddenly realizes that she didn’t feather the prop after it shut down. That’s what bothered her when she was looking at the blades. With the flat surface square against the wind instead of turned edge on, they’d been acting like a speed break. Then she notices the Gear Down indicator light glowing green by her right knee and the landing-gear handle locked in the down position. She even forgot to raise the landing gear after taking off. No wonder the damned plane was sinking like a stone when it should have been gliding. Her final mistake was not using the rudder to make a longer, flat turn back to shore to preserve lift under the wing.
Megan adds her own screams to those coming from the backseat. She pins the wheel to her chest in a futile bid to defy the laws of gravity for the thirty seconds it takes the Windy City Sky Tours September eighth morning flight to complete its death dive. As they plunge into the cold depths of Lake Michigan, Megan finds the silence she’s been craving over the final fifteen minutes of her young life.
Chapter Two
“Damn it!” I mutter as I lose yet another game of computer solitaire in my executive office at the oh-so-very prestigious law firm of Brooks and Valenti, a fifty/fifty partnership I own with Penelope Brooks. I think more than a few people familiar with the firm refer to us as Brooks and Dum; maybe they think we’re the country-and-western duo Brooks and Dunn? Whatever. I roll my faux leather executive chair across the bruised tile floor toward my office door, a classic wooden one with a frosted glass insert. A cheesy fake brass plaque glued on the outside surface announces that this is the office of one Tony Valenti, Partner.
“Any sign of my one o’clock?” I shout to our receptionist/legal assistant/paralegal/office mother, Joan Brooks. She’s Penelope’s mother, a homey former Midwestern farmwife with a biting sense of humor she generally keeps hidden behind a taciturn demeanor.
Joan shakes her head and scowls at me. “Decorum, young man! This is a law office.”
That’s right. Shouting is frowned upon in the hallowed halls of Brooks and Valenti.
“What she said!” Penelope hollers from the slightly larger executive suite beside mine. Her office is twelve feet by twelve feet. Mine is twelve feet by eleven feet, six inches… and yes, I have measured. Her office is also quieter, not sharing a common wall with the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant next door.
I roll my chair back to my naturally distressed oak desk to start a new game.
We’re not really the two-bit, low-rent law firm we appear to be in our current premises. We’re on day sixty-three in our temporary 1960s-era strip-mall digs while a contractor completes renovations on our permanent offices in a slightly more upscale heritage building a few blocks away in downtown Cedar Heights, a small suburb tucked just beyond the southwest corner of Chicago. Low rent is the point of being shoehorned into this dump.
