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“The airplane stays up because it doesn’t have time to fall.” — Orville Wright
Sam
When I got home from the Thigpen arrest Saturday at eight thirty in the morning, the smell of dirty socks and stale Cheetos reminded me it was cleaning day. I made a pot of furnace-hot coffee and got busy cleaning. Guns first, then the house. Grit clogged the LAR’s action.
“I’ll get you for that, Reyes.” Maybe I would find a harmless rat snake—they looked a lot like cottonmouths—and drop it in his car.
I motored through the day on autopilot, doing laundry and watching college basketball on TV, trying to ignore my drooping eyelids. At seven in the evening, I gave up the fight, took a shower, and hit the sack.
At that point somewhere between awake and asleep, when the mind drifts on fluffy clouds floating over oceans of nonsense, reacting to something as mundane as a ringing phone could seem more difficult than teaching a giraffe geometry. The first call went to voicemail before I figured out the ringtone wasn’t part of a musical dance routine by trained squirrels. I found my cell on the bedside table and squinted at the display just as it rang again.
“’Lo?”
“Cable, it’s Marshall. Were you asleep?” Captain Marshall, my boss in the Rangers, was as old as dinosaur bones and twice as hard.
“Um, no.”
“Good. I need your ass down here Monday morning.”
“Here? Austin?”
“No, I mean Mars. What the hell you think I mean? I’ve got a job needs doin’, and you’re the lucky bastard gets to do it. Or will be, once the paperwork gets done.”
“A job?”
Marshall huffed. “Wake up, boy. They caught the skank what killed the cop in Dallas. You’re going to Cally-for-nye-ay to bring her back.”
California? I stopped myself from saying it out loud in the nick of time. “Isn’t that a job for the DPD?”
“Would be, but the gal’s parents are making noises that the cop she killed was bent. Her old man’s a congressman, and he’s got enough pull to get people to pay attention. The Dallas DA is gonna put through paperwork to have us do the exterdiction.”
Extradition? Another question I wisely kept to myself. “Why Austin? Why can’t I fly out of DFW?”
“We’re usin’ the company plane.”
Oh, hell no. The Rangers had come into possession of a twin-engine Cessna by confiscation of drug profits in a recent bust. Some bright bulb in the governor’s office, or maybe in the Department of Public Safety hierarchy, had thought we could use it in our crime-fighting arsenal. They convinced an ex-military vet and current DPS trooper to be the official pilot, and shazam! The Rangers became an airborne force.
I hated the damn rickety plastic-and-fiberglass flying coffin. It rattled like a Number Two washtub full of marbles and shook worse than a crack addict in rehab. “Jesus, boss, what did I ever do to you?”
“Cowboy up, Cable. I don’t got time for your whiny shit. Get your ass down here Monday morning. Comprende?”
“Si.” I hung up and tossed the phone into the pile of sheets beside me. Why me?
Because a black cat the size of a German shepherd crossed your path—that’s why.
I flopped back in bed and went back to sleep... after muting my phone.
~~~
Jade
JADE STONE OFFICIALLY became property of the California Department of Corrections at five o’clock Saturday evening. She’d endured arrest and handcuffing, transport to the southern division of the San Diego Police Department, and a long wait in an interview room. The interrogation lasted long enough for Jade to invoke her right to silence and request an attorney.
Then came the call to her parents in Mississippi. She explained her side of the story, and after her mom had cried herself dry and her father had yelled and cussed awhile, they agreed to find her a California lawyer.
Her intake jailer, Martinez, was a heavyset Latina with a single eyebrow sprawled across her forehead. “Oh, the gals in lockup gonna like you, mi hermosa.”
The other deputy in the room, a washing machine-sized black woman with Hamilton on her name badge, laughed. “Maybe she play for the other team. She might like the attention. You gay?”
“No... What? No!” Jade straightened and struggled into the orange jumpsuit they’d handed her. “I’m not...”
“Oh, look at her turn red. I done think you embarrassed the girl, Amelia.”
Hamilton escorted her to the cell, passing row after row of hard-eyed women, some lounging on their bunks, others with their hands draped through the bars. After a glance, Jade kept her eyes on the floor. The place smelled of Pine-Sol and sweat, mixed with a faint odor of human waste—both literal and figurative.
Hamilton stopped in the middle of the row of cages and spoke into her shoulder mic. The door buzzed and clanked open. Inside, a purple-haired black woman with a scarred cheek said, “Whoo, look at de angel down from heaven. What dey getchu fo? Stealin’ de cookie money?”
“Behave yourself, Clarice,” Hamilton said. “Angel here’s in for killing a cop.”
“Holy Mary, Mothah’a Gawd.” Clarice swung her legs off the top bunk and slid to the floor. “C’mon in here, child. I won’t bite ya.”
Jade stepped into the cell and twitched when the door clanged shut behind her. Even though she’d been expecting it, the finality of that sound jolted her. Her nose tingled like it did before she started crying, so Jade willed her eyes to stay dry and took a deep, fluttery breath.
“Sleep tight, ladies.” Hamilton waddled away, stopping now and again to exchange words with other inmates.
“Don’t you mind her.” Clarice put an arm around Jade’s shoulders and guided her to the bottom bunk. “Sit a spell and get yo wind back. This yo first time?”
“To be in jail? Yes.”
“Don’t you worry none; jail ain’t like prison. Down here we don’ got the queen bitches tryin’a fuck you in da shower and whatnot. You go to full-time prison, you gots to watch out, or dey be rubbin’ pussies on you mornin’, noon, and night.”
“What did you do to get locked up, Clarice?”
“Me? I cut dis stupid Mexican, wanted his money back affa I done my bidness wid him.”
“Bidness?”
“Y’know, bidness.” Clarice made a gesture with her hand in front of her mouth.
“You’re a...”
“A ho. Das right, you can say it. A damn good one, too, even at sixty-two year old. Why I can still suck a peel off a potato when I want.”
Jade laughed.
“Now,” Clarice said, “I can find you a job in a heartbeat, you wanna come work wit’ me. Men be paying you a million dollahs a night, get somma yo pussy, girl.”
Seven hours later, listening to Clarice snore, Jade stared at the underside of the top bunk. She tried to let her mind drift free and finally achieved a zoned-out state of no thought, where she could float along the current and not consider the future or contemplate the present.
Somebody coughed, and a toilet flushed, jarring her back to reality—locked in a cage. Ten feet by ten feet of concrete and steel.
How did I get here? What decision put me on the path to wind up in jail? Do I have a character defect, or could I have made better life choices? Maybe if she’d turned down the invitation to go out with the handsome and chiseled—and corrupt—Dallas Police detective Tommy Grace. Or should she go all the way back to the offer to join Cleburn & Harris? Maybe that was the turning point. Or going to law school?
Jade sighed and rolled over. The thin blanket did little to warm her, and she shivered. Voices carried from somewhere faraway, too distant to make out the words. Other jail sounds—metallic clangs, coughs, grunts, and sneezes—scratched her raw nerves with dirty fingernails.
She would be tried for killing a cop. There wouldn’t be any parole. No plea deals that would get her off. She would be in jail for a long time. Unless the other guys on Bartlett’s crew got to her first—then she would be dead. Bartlett would kill her faster than he could slice a drive off the tee.
Don’t go down without a fight, honey, she heard her daddy’s voice say.
“Damn right I won’t,” she whispered. There was still a way out. She just had to quit feeling sorry for herself and find it.
~~~
Sam
BY MONDAY AFTERNOON, I had all the extradition paperwork in my leather satchel, and I followed my GPS out to Austin Executive Airport on the northeast side of town. When Captain Marshall sent me off, he’d said, “They want this gal something fierce up ’ere in Dallas. You fetch her back quick, hear?”
“You never explained why I’m getting this assignment.”
“’Cause I want it done right.” Marshall fixed me with his Clint Eastwood stare. “I know I can count on you to get ’er done without fuckin’ around. And speakin’ of your pecker, don’t ever be alone with this woman, y’hear? She cries rape, and that’s all she wrote for your career.”
“Wonderful.”
I found Marlon Boggs, DPS trooper turned DPS pilot, doing a walk-around of the airplane we were supposed to fly to California and back. Boggs was about my age and had an upper body big enough to bench press the damn plane. Still, the aircraft didn’t look big enough to make Waco, let alone cross three states, with mountains and stuff in between. It had a long nose cone, five round portholes along the side, and twin engines with three-bladed props, and it stood on three wheels—one under the nose and two under the wings.
Shaking Boggs’s hand, I asked, “Who made your plane? Revell?”
“Huh?” As if sensing my skepticism about his toy, he launched into a lecture about the airworthiness of the Cessna 421C, but he shut up when I raised a palm.
“Never mind, Marlon. Just refrain from a vertical deployment of the aircraft into the turf, and we’ll both be happy.”
A handsome black man with a bald head and a powerful upper body, Boggs came off as serious as funeral director and as earnest as a Jehovah’s Witness.
“Don’t worry, Ranger Cable. This aircraft is as safe as your grandma’s Buick.”
I handed him my duffel. “Mama Cable drives a 1963 Chevy Stepside powered by a 283 V-8, three on the stick, with Jesus Christ riding shotgun. We call ahead when she gets a notion to go to town so the county cops can clear the road of the innocent.”
Boggs opened a clamshell door in the middle of the plane and folded out a three-rung ladder. I ducked into the fuselage and navigated between two pairs of seats—one set facing aft, one forward. Then I squeezed into the co-pilot’s seat, which had more room than I expected. Even so, I racked the seat back and vowed not to touch any of the knobs, switches, dials, gauges, levers, or cupholders in my immediate vicinity.
Boggs put on earmuffs, poked this, twisted that, and pulled something else. Within minutes, we were taxiing onto the runway. He said arcane words into his microphone and jabbed what I assumed was the throttle, because we went from piddling along to zipping down the runway. The airplane vibrated and rattled its way into the air, at which point the ride didn’t smooth out much at all. Marlon got it pointed west, leveled out, and engaged what I assumed was the autopilot.
“You want to take her, Ranger?”
“What? Fly the plane?” I shuddered. “Not on your life.”
Boggs bared his teeth in a huge grin. “This is fun, huh?”
“Fun. Yeah. Listen, you even know where California is?”
He frowned. “Of course. Plus we have GPS and other navigational equipment. We’ll have no problem reaching San Diego. The 421C has a range of fourteen hundred eighty-seven nautical miles. We will not need to refuel—”
“Stop! Just land before you see the ocean, okay.”
I pulled out the documents on my soon-to-be prisoner and ignored Boggs’s serious expression. Flipping open the file, I commenced to learn about this Jane Dillinger of Dallas wanted by the DPD for murder of her cop boyfriend, Thomas Paul Grace.
The Cessna shuddered through a rough pocket of air, and my ass pinched up a chunk of seat. It was going to be a long damn flight.