manufacturer. (“This strap is very sturdy and makes for an excellent murder weapon…”)
My hearing returning, I turned my attention to the injured iffrit in the back seat.
“Adam, man, you fucked up…” he whined, prone on the seat and looking up at me.
I pulled him out of the car and dropped him unceremoniously onto the smoking hood. He yelped in pain.
“Did I?” I asked. “Tell me how.”
Wincing from the broken arm I had dropped him on, he said, “Whatta ya gonna do now? You don’t even know where to go!”
“Let me worry about that. Did you really see her?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The red-haired woman. You said in Boston that you’d seen her.”
“Oh her… of course I did…”
He was lying. I held the gun to his head to emphasize my feelings regarding his veracity.
“Okay, okay!” he cried. “I needed an excuse to be there, all right? Plus, you get even more shit-faced than usual every time you think about her, and I figured that’d make you stay put until they came to take you away. But I tried to warn you!”
“Warn me? When?”
“I told you to stay away from her.”
“That’s not a warning.”
“Best I could come up with and still get paid.”
Iffrit logic.
“You described her eyes to me,” I said. “How did you know what color her eyes were?”
“What?” he laughed. “You told me that yourself, you stupid prick. Jesus, do you have any idea how much you talk about yourself when you’re drunk? You act like this whole immortality gig is one big fucking secret, and then you go tell anybody who’ll buy you a bottle. Half the fucking western world knows your deal by now. Are you really surprised at all this shit?”
I almost pulled the trigger, mainly out of spite. He was right though. I hadn’t been careful for a very long time. It used to be it wasn’t a big deal to spout off in a tavern somewhere, because odds were, nobody of consequence would be within earshot. But, it also used to be true, that a boat trip across the Mediterranean would be an effective way to disappear and that it was possible to change your name just by deciding to call yourself something different. The world had changed, and I’d lost track again. Eventually something like this was bound to happen.
“Okay.” I slipped the gun into my bag. “You can live.”
“Geez, thanks,” he muttered. I started to walk away, toward the air field.
“Hey, Adam,” Jerry called out after me.
“What?”
“Why’re you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“The girl. You were already done with her. Why do you even care?”
I smiled. “Because I’m the hero.”
Chapter 22
I followed the snow-covered dirt path the rest of the way to the airfield. It wasn’t much of a walk. Had I waited another thirty seconds to pounce upon my driver, it might have been too late. One does not want to get into a life-or-death struggle in a careening minivan on a landing strip with multiple witnesses and multiple gas-filled and grounded airplanes for targets. This much I have learned.
Actually, the multiple witness part was something I just made up. It turned out this was a very small airfield, clearly privately owned, with a total of three airplanes standing in front of a hangar that looked barely large enough to accommodate two and a single plowed runway. (I would love to tell you what kind of planes they were, but I’m only just past the “man was not meant to fly, Mr. Wright” phase.) So rather than there being a gaggle of potential witnesses, there was exactly one.
Sitting in a Jeep next to the building was what I at first took to be a smallish man with short hair in a bulky flight jacket, but who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a normal-sized woman. She had flight jockey-type mirrored sunglasses on. As she was facing me, I could only assume she was also watching while I made my way close enough to hold a decent conversation.
“Hello,” I said.
“Good morning,” she answered, unmoving.
The hangar behind her was attached to a small, windowed office. I could see a radio inside and gathered that if one wanted to take off from this airfield, one must first radio in one’s intentions using this. (I learned this by watching movies, so who knows if it was true. Sounded good though.) The door was padlocked and on the door was written the legend “Patti’s Chartered Flights.” I made an inferential leap.
“You must be Patti,” I said.
She nodded. “You must be my twelve-fifteen.”
“I must be.”
“Except,” she went on, “You can’t possibly be my twelve-fifteen.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Because I was contracted to take two men.”
“The other guy couldn’t make it,” I said.
“Uh-huh.” She looked over my shoulder at the road I’d just emerged from. “Must have been a long walk from the highway.”
“I like walking. Very healthy.”
“It’s thirty degrees out, there’s snow on the ground, and you have no coat.”
“Well, sure,” I agreed, “it’s a little chilly.”
Patti repositioned herself uneasily in the Jeep. I wasn’t winning her over with my world-class charm. “Sounded like there was some kind of accident up the road there,” she said. “Should I call an ambulance? Or just skip on ahead and phone the police?”
“That depends,” I said. “What’s your position on guns?”
“Pardon me?”
“Let’s say I have a handgun in my bag here. Would you take my word for it, or do I have to pull it out and show it to you?”
She thought about it. “Honestly, I think you’d have to show it to me.”
“All right.” I produced the gun from the bag. “Do you need for me to point it at you, too, or shall we just proceed to the next step?”
She stared at the gun for a few seconds. “No, that’s fine. What can I do for you?”
“You were chartered to take two men?”
“Yeah.”
