guns, but Grant knew they wouldn’t run beneath the spinning blades. One of the men leveled his gun and aimed at the front of the helicopter. In the next instant Mr. Danny shouted something and the ship leaped into the air. As Grant tumbled out of his seat, he saw treetops sweep past the window, and then the moon, shining high and white through a break in the clouds. He only wished his mom were there to see it.
Danny had flown in crazy conditions before, but never with a gun jammed into his gut. The pistol wasn’t the same one Shields had aimed at Laurel; this one was a nickel-plated automatic.
The chopper hurtled eastward at fifteen hundred feet, the house already far behind. Danny wondered what kind of response Sheriff Ellis was mounting to this new development. He’d started calling over the radio only seconds after they lifted off, but Shields had shut off everything but the interphone circuit.
“Where are we going?” Danny asked, as casually as he could. “Havana?”
“Upriver,” Warren said tersely. “Thirty miles. Vidalia, Louisiana. Take us up to two thousand feet.”
Danny turned north and started ascending. Vidalia was a town of five thousand mostly working-class people who lived on the floodplain across the river from the great bluff at Natchez. “Why Vidalia?”
Warren tilted his head backward. “We’re dropping Grant off at Laurel’s mother’s house.”
“I see. So this trip’s just for you and me?”
Warren didn’t answer.
Danny had a lot of experience flying at night, but almost always with the aid of night-vision goggles, and in a much more powerful chopper. Flying the Bell 206 through mountains of storm clouds was a completely different thing. He wasn’t afraid, but he was concentrating hard enough that the gun against his side kept surprising him. Blue-white flashes of lightning illuminated the towering cloudscape, and he could hear Grant’s cries of awe despite the fact that the boy wasn’t wearing a headset.
Danny couldn’t see much on the near-lightless land below, but the rivers and lakes he used as landmarks gleamed like black mirrors as the chopper raced over them. The Buffalo River, Lake Mary, the Homochitto River, and then the Mississippi, curving east toward Natchez.
“Did I hear you say we’re going to Gram’s?” Grant yelled, moving forward and setting his chin on the tight seam between Danny’s and Warren’s shoulders.
Warren concealed the gun beneath his bloody shirttail and slid the headset off of his right ear. “That’s right, Son.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“Home.”
Danny kept his face expressionless.
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. Those men weren’t there for her. You’ll see her soon. Get back into a seat and fasten your harness.”
“What about you? Your shoulder’s bleeding bad.”
“I’m fine,” Warren said, touching his shirt, which was now matted against his wounded shoulder.
“Wow!” Grant cried. They had crossed over the bluff at Natchez, and the land fell precipitously away. Two hundred feet below the old city, the lights on a long string of barges winked up at them. “Cool,” the boy said. “They have two bridges here.”
“Get into a harness, Son!”
“Okay, okay.” Grant’s head vanished.
“You don’t know Laurel’s okay,” Danny said softly. “You didn’t even check.”
Warren grimaced. “Shut up.”
“What?” asked Grant. “What are y’all saying up there?”
“Nothing, Son. Look for landmarks down there. Can you see the riverboat casinos?”
While Grant searched the broad black river, Warren said, “Laurel’s mother lives just off Carter Street, the main drag. Right behind the levee. Maybe you know that already.”
“No.”
Danny started descending after he passed over the two great bridges spanning the river. There was only one brightly lit road in Vidalia, the highway leading westward across Louisiana. The section that ran through the town was called Carter Street. Danny found it easily, and soon he made out the grassy hump of the levee, running at right angles to the highway.
“That’s it,” said Warren, pointing down at a small house with an older Lincoln Continental parked on the street in front of it.
“Where do you want me to land?”
“Street’s fine. There’s no traffic.”
The neighbors began opening their doors and windows as the chopper dipped under two hundred feet. By the time it landed in the middle of their street, a crowd had gathered in the rain, thinking they were witnessing either a crash or an invasion.
“I see Gram!” Grant shouted. “She’s standing on the porch!”
“Jump out and run to her, Son.”
Grant’s head reappeared above the junction of shoulders. “What about you?”
Warren seemed unable to find his voice. Danny leaned forward and saw tears in the doctor’s eyes. “Major Danny and I have to help the police do something,” Shields croaked. “But Mom will be here soon.”
“Are you sure? What’s wrong, Dad?”
Warren covered his eyes with his left hand, but his right still gripped the gun. Danny wondered if Shields would really shoot him in front of the boy. On balance, Danny figured he would.
“I’ve just got a headache,” Shields said. “I stayed awake too long. You need to go, Son. You take care of your mother, all right?”
Grant stared at his father in confusion. “Till you get back, you mean?”
“That’s right. Go on, now. We’re late already.”
Grant turned to Danny, his eyes dark with foreboding. “Mr. Danny…?”
“Do what your father told you. It’ll be all right.”
“Go!” Warren snapped.
Grant seemed on the verge of tears. Danny’s heart went out to the boy, but then Grant fell back on his loyalty to the man he trusted above all others. He nodded to his father and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of Mom.” Then he climbed out of the chopper and ran toward a small, gray-haired woman standing on the porch of the little house with the Lincoln out front.
“I’m sorry,” Warren said almost inaudibly.
“You owe that boy every second you have on this earth,” Danny said. “I know you hate my guts, but you need to stop this suicide trip and get your family back together.”
People in the crowd were venturing toward the helicopter. Shields stabbed the gun into Danny’s side. “Get us airborne.”
“Where are we going?”
“Heaven. How does that sound?”
“I don’t believe in it. And neither do you.”
Shields’s eyes shone with something like madness. “Valhalla, then. Isn’t that where heroes go when they die?”
“Only if they die in battle.”
An ironic chuckle. “Well, then. That’s where we’re going.”
Danny didn’t know if it was better to die on the ground or in the air. But one thing he did know: in the air, he had a chance to live, because he would have control of the aircraft. A passenger bent on both homicide and suicide complicated matters, but that was better than the bullet he would get for refusing to take off.
He pulled up on the collective, touched the cyclic, and lifted the Bell over the streetlights, swinging gracefully back toward the bridges. There was no real advantage in flying over Natchez, but something was pulling him to the Mississippi side of the river.
