“Fishing. I’ll give you his GPS coordinates once you’re airborne.”
Danny didn’t want to spend his afternoon searching the river for some lost fisherman when Laurel might need him. But there were only two chopper pilots, and if Jim Redmond was out of town, then Danny had no way out of the duty. “Roger that,” he said in a tone of surrender. “Call me back in ten minutes with the coordinates.”
“What’s the emergency?” asked Marilyn.
“Our illustrious sheriff wants a chopper ride back from Lake St. John. He’s tired of fishing.”
“Are you serious?”
“Nah,” said Danny, getting to his feet. “It’s probably somebody lost on the water. Unless one of the sheriff’s campaign contributors sprained an ankle wakeboarding.”
Marilyn laughed. “That sounds like the Billy Ray Ellis I remember from high school.”
“You’re not that old, I know.”
She winked. “I was a ninth-grader when Billy Ray was a senior. He was the cat’s meow back then. Big football star, all the girls after him. Of course, it was mostly white boys then. Different game.”
“You’d better believe it.”
“I think it’s safe to say Billy was elected sheriff on his high school rep and his status in the Baptist church,” Marilyn said in an arch tone.
“Politics. The same everywhere. He’s okay, actually. I’ve known a lot worse in ranking uniforms.”
The lawyer nodded thoughtfully. “We should do this more.”
“I agree.”
“If you’d hire me, we could.”
Danny’s smile faded. “I’m thinking about it.”
By the time Danny reached the hangar, the mechanics had rolled out the Sheriff’s Department helicopter and prepped her for flight. She was a Bell 206B, eight years old but still in good shape. White with blue and gold stripes, and a big gold star painted on the fuselage. The machines he’d flown in the air force were five times this size and infinitely more sophisticated, but the Bell handled well in the air, a kite compared to the massive predators he once flew. A Pave Low IV could carry twenty-four fully equipped commandos into battle; the Bell 206 had two seats up front and room for one passenger and a stretcher in back. Not much else.
“How goes it, Danny boy?” called Dick Burleigh, the silver-haired chief mechanic. “Ready to crank and bank?”
Burleigh had served as crew chief on a Huey with the First Air Cav in Vietnam. After surviving the Ia Drang and A Shau valleys, he’d moved to Baton Rouge and serviced news choppers for thirty years. At sixtysomething, Burleigh decided to retire to Athens Point, where he started filling in at the airport for kicks. Pretty soon, he was running the maintenance department. For Danny he was a godsend.
“You tell me, Dick,” he said. “How’s she running?”
“Hot as a preacher’s daughter.”
Danny laughed and shook hands with Burleigh, then nodded to a blond kid in coveralls trailing behind him. “Let’s forget about those beers, huh, guys?”
Burleigh smiled. “Long as you’re okay to fly, Major.”
Danny gave the old crew chief a salute. “My inviolable rule is, don’t drink and fly. However, one night in the Caribbean, I had to go up and chase down a Bolivian drug boat with half a bottle of tequila in me. Long story, but we knocked down ninety keys of marching powder that night.”
“You get to keep any of it?” asked the kid, his eyes twinkling.
Danny chuckled. “Nah. But there were reports of confiscated reefer weighing in a little light after some of those takedowns. MPs never got to the bottom of it, either.”
“You take her easy, Major,” said Burleigh, his smile gone. “Wind’s getting up, and you got thunderheads blowing in from the northwest.”
“That’s the way I’m headed, too.”
“Maybe the sheriff ought to drive back to town. He could make it in the time it takes you to fly both ways.”
The mechanic winked and opened the Bell’s door. Danny climbed into the right seat, fastened his harness, cinched it tight, and hit the starter. Then he put on his headset and ran the preflight checklist. He didn’t miss having to put on his helmet, night-vision goggles, body armor, or any of the other gear required to fly the Pave Low. Compared to his military flying, this was like barnstorming in the 1920s.
When the main rotor system hit 360 rpm, Danny felt the chopper reach neutral buoyancy. He pulled up on the collective, which put the Bell into a low hover. After trimming the ship with his left foot pedal, he lightly touched the cyclic and tilted the rotor disk forward. A few moments later, the bird gained translational lift and launched herself into the sky.
At that moment, Danny’s cell phone vibrated. He applied friction to the collective and let go long enough to grab the phone from his pocket, assuming that Laurel had finally texted him back. To his surprise, he found himself holding his legitimate phone instead. The Bell drifted a little as he flipped it open. The new message was from the Sheriff’s Department dispatcher. There were only four words in the text box:
CODE BLACK/THIRD DEGREE.
Danny’s ass puckered as he stared at the coded message.
Code Black meant a hostage situation.
Third Degree meant loss of life.
With visions of Columbine and Virginia Tech in his head, he twisted the throttle, pushed the chopper to 122 knots, and stormed toward the thunderheads rolling down from the northwest.
Kyle Auster was dead.
Laurel saw his body lying on the hall floor when she followed Warren down the stairs with Beth in her arms. She buried her daughter’s face between her breasts, then looked over the rail. Kyle lay faceup with his eyes open, as still as a human body could be. His absurd shirt was hiked up to his nipples; Warren must have done that while working on him. How strange, she thought, to shoot a man and then immediately try to save him. Despite Warren’s two shots, she saw only one wound, at the midline, above Auster’s navel but below his heart. Dark blood covered his pale belly, matting the hair that so many gullible women had lain against in adultery.
“Did you call 911?” she asked from the landing.
Warren had already reached the ground floor. “No point.”
“He died before you came upstairs?”
“No, but he was slipping away fast. I think the bullet hit his spine. He couldn’t move his legs. It must have clipped his descending aorta as well, because he seemed to be bleeding out internally.”
“What a shot you are,” she said bitterly.
Warren was looking down at the body. “He shot first. You saw it.”
“Such a waste. I can’t…I guess I can’t really believe it.”
“Mommy, I can’t breathe,” Beth said.
Laurel turned her daughter’s head but kept her facing away from the rail. Beth hadn’t spoken since the events on the roof; she only sucked her thumb and lay glassy-eyed against Laurel’s chest.
“Cover him up with something,” Laurel said.
“You do it. Let me have Beth.”
“You’re not touching this child.”
Warren looked up, his jaw set hard. “Don’t think anything has changed. Kyle is dead because of a choice he made. Every choice has consequences. Yours included.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? God? Get over yourself! You just shot a man. This insanity is
“Come downstairs. Into the kitchen.”
Laurel shielded Beth’s eyes and walked down to the foyer, then followed Warren to the kitchen. Beth was a lot heavier than she’d been only a year ago. Laurel’s back and shoulders were already aching. While Warren stared out the kitchen window, she took a glass down from the cabinet.
