Wyoming
“Rat bastard,” Griff said to himself when he stepped back out on the tarmac and saw Lance’s Escalade was no longer parked by his plane.
He climbed up into the Cirrus, started the engine, and called for his clearance to Minneapolis. There was only a short delay after the run-up for his release from ATC until he was rolling down Runway 16. Tower handed him off to Departure Control who handed him off to Chicago Center. Thirty minutes later, Griff canceled his IFR flight plan.
“Squawk twelve hundred. Frequency change approved. Good day,” said the voice from Chicago Center over the radio.
With the blessing of Air Traffic Control, Griff turned west towards Laramie, Wyoming. He settled at twenty-five hundred feet and let the North American continent rise up slowly until the Cirrus was clipping along at 175 knots, three hundred feet over western Nebraska prairies.
Griff could not shake the image of Helena’s passively aggressive visage—practiced, no doubt, but still stunningly effective overlaid on her Cosmo magazine cover beauty—as well as the firmly feminine curves of a body barely contained or concealed by the second skin of that red dress. Or…the brief, deliberate brush of her breasts against his arms and teasing hint of Ralph Lauren Perfume Notorious as she breezed by on her way to the limo.
God damn it.
Just over the Wyoming border, a herd of pronghorn antelope to the south caught Griff’s eye. He banked hard left and dove on the herd, sending them loping off in an amorphous brown flock. Chandelling to the north, he circled to watch them pinball across the plains, then turned back to the west…and involuntarily back to thoughts of Helena.
A half-hour later, Griff called Cowboy Aviation at Laramie Regional Airport on UNICOM to have his Aeronca Chief pulled out of the hangar. After landing, he parked next to it, tossed in his duffel bag and instructed the line boy to top off the fuel tanks in the Cirrus before putting it in the hangar. Ten minutes later, he was on his way to the ranch, north of I80 and not quite halfway to Rawlins.
The day was fading, but he made it home while it was still light, touching down on his grass strip just before sunset with enough time to hangar the Chief and get out on his back deck to watch the daylight die behind the Medicine Bow Mountains with a single malt scotch in his hand. He replayed his skirmish with Helena in the pilot lounge at Chicago Exec yet again.
The family ranch and adjacent Bureau of Land Management leases near Rock Creek once grazed several thousand head of cattle. When he inherited the land, Griff sold down the herd to five hundred or so but kept the leases as well as the small crew of Cheyenne and Arapaho ranch hands, basically three families who had worked with the Crowes seemingly since the end of the Great Indian Wars, preferring to cowboy rather than sit idly on the reservation. During downtime, between “missions” for Lance and his ilk, Griff rode and worked with his crew as much as he could, whenever tending to the business demands of running a ranching operation would allow.
It was three days later when Griff got a call from “Bones,” the Laramie Airport Manager. “Hey, Griff, you got a package delivered here.”
“I didn’t order anything. Sure it’s for me?”
“That’s what the waybill says.”
“Can you have FedEx bring it up to the ranch for me? Might be a week before I’m back that way.”
“Well…”
Griff waited. When he got no answer, he asked, “Problem?”
“It’s kind of big. Too big for UPS or regular FedEx. A freight company delivered it.”
“What the hell?”
“I’d kind of like to get it out of the offices, here. It takes up a lot of room.”
“Can you put it in the hangar? I’ll be down tomorrow in the Chief.”
The next day, Griff taxied up to his hangar in the tiny taildragger. Inside, a wooden crate six feet wide by four feet tall by two feet deep stood in the spot where the Chief usually parked. The paperwork said it was shipped from the Pacifica Art Gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It was now the most expensive item in the hangar.
Just then, Griff’s cell phone rang. “Yeah.”
“Who is this Bones guy? And why is he signing for my painting?”
“Hello, Helena. How are you?”
“Really? Chit-chat?”
“How did you get my cell phone number—don’t tell me. Lance. But my hangar address?”
“Silly man, I just had my fly boys look up the N-number of your cute little plane in the FAA database.”
“So…does this mean we have an understanding?”
“No. But maybe we should discuss it some more. I’ll text you details.”
Griff’s phone went dead.
A moment later, it dinged with a text message: “KSKX. For dinner this Saturday.”
He wanted to ask, Why Taos, New Mexico? But he decided not to tempt fate. He texted back, “Your treat?”
A smirking yellow emoji face appeared on his phone with a ding.
Griff called Lance’s direct dial line at the firm.
“Well, hello there, stranger,” Hannah, Lance’s Administrative Assistant, answered cheerfully with just a hint of southern drawl. “I missed you last week. Why didn’t you come calling?”
He often wondered why Lance tempted himself with the gorgeous blonde parked so close at hand, but his friend claimed she was great at her job and melted the hearts and wallets of clients with her Alabama charm. Griff counted himself lucky that he wasn’t married to the boss’s daughter. “Just a quick visit. Passing through. Next time?”
“You better…” Hannah let out a huff of faux indignation. “Lance has a client in his office right now, can he get back to you?”
“Just a message. Could you please tell him that I found that old drop cloth he was looking for?”
“Now, Griff, not a fan of Mr. Pollack’s work?”
“It would clash with my decor.”
“Well, I will certainly let him know.”
“And I’ll need a shipping address for Sun Valley.”
“Of course. I will get that for you.”
“Thanks.”
“And, Griff, if you let me know the next time y’all will be in town, I’ll bake you a pecan pie.”
“I’d like that.”
“I know you will. You surely seemed to last time.”
***~~~***