“I’ll try to pull up alongside her so you can get off a shot,” she told me. “You’d best roll down that window.” I was in the process of doing so when Twink groaned, “Crap. Not these guys!”
Instead of looking at the moving Piper, she was now staring into the rearview mirror. I turned and glanced over my shoulder. Behind us two maintenance men, both dressed in signature orange jumpsuits, were pounding after us, waving wildly at the Travelall, and, as it turned out, yelling, too. Through my now-open window, I could hear them frantically ordering us to stop, but we didn’t. Twink, with her jaw set, jammed the Travelall’s gas pedal to the floor, and off we went. We were blasting along now, but we were still traveling on that damned hypotenuse, and the Piper was headed in a straight beeline for the runway. We were never going to be able to come up alongside the aircraft in a position that would give me a clear shot at the tires. That wasn't going to happen.
Then, without a word of warning, Twink jerked the steering wheel hard to the left. I hadn’t had time to fasten my seat belt when I’d jumped into the vehicle. Now the abrupt change in direction pitched me forward almost face-first into the windshield. By the time I got my new bearings, I saw that Shelley was still traveling on her straight line, but now so were we. After speeding across an expanse of ice-dotted tarmac, Twink jerked the wheel sharply to the right and then brought the Travelall to an abrupt halt at the edge of the runway directly in front of the Piper’s nose.
We stopped, the Piper stopped, and there we sat, head to head, for a long tense moment. Our vehicle’s glowing headlights gave us a clear view of Shelley Adams’s anger-distorted face staring at us from behind the aircraft’s windshield. I leaned out my window, took aim with the rifle. I fired off a single shot without coming anywhere close to the rubber on that critical front tire.
“Can’t you do any better than that?” Twink demanded.
Just then the maintenance men caught up to us and started pounding on the Travelall’s side panels and windows. Shelley must have expected the orange men to carry the day. At that point she put the Piper in gear and nosed to the right as if preparing to go around us.
The problem is, neither Shelley nor the maintenance men were blessed with a full understanding of exactly who Twinkle Winkleman was. As the plane moved, so did the Travelall. By the time Shelley maneuvered the Piper around so it was once again facing the runway, we were right there, too, directly in front of the idling aircraft and blocking its path.
Years ago I had the opportunity to watch some sheepdog trials at an outdoor event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and that’s exactly how Twink behaved that night, like one of those cagey sheepdogs. The trials were held in an open field, with those low-to-the-ground, black-and-white border collies darting this way and that, instantly cutting off any straying sheep and forcing them back to where they belonged. Each of Shelley’s attempts to go around us was easily countered by Twink because, as it turns out, on the ground automobiles are far more maneuverable than aircraft.
I finally leaned out my open window again and yelled at the nearest orange man, “That woman’s a suspected killer!” I shouted, pointing in Shelley’s direction. “Cops are en route, but if we don’t stop her now, she’s going to get away.”
Fortunately, the man got the message. “Okay,” he called back. “Hold up a minute.”
The Piper and the Travelall were once again stalled in a face-to-face standoff. Just then the two maintenance men charged past us. When they did, I noticed that each of them was carrying what I recognized to be a pair of aircraft chocks. It took them bare seconds to shove the chocks in place, leaving the Piper immobilized. As a chorus of sirens blared in the background, I knew right then that Shelley Loveday Adams was toast. Within a matter of minutes and after all these years, Christopher Danielson’s murderer would finally be in police custody.
At that moment I was tempted to lean over and give Twinkle Winkleman a kiss out of sheer gratitude. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t. She was so wound up on adrenaline right then that if she’d punched me in the chops, she would have knocked me out cold.
Chapter 32
Once the squad cars arrived, I walked over to the plane while Twink remained with the Travelall. As the scene bustled with sworn officers, I was once again relegated to fifth-wheel status, just as I had been earlier in the day at Red Bolger’s garage. That was only to be expected. I watched from the sidelines as Marvin Price led a handcuffed and obviously furious Shelley Adams out of the Piper, placed her in the back of his waiting Interceptor, and closed the car door behind her. Only then, for the first time since his arrival, did Marvin acknowledge my presence. He came over to where I was standing with his hand outstretched and a triumphant grin on his face.
“We got her, Beau,” he said as we shook.
“Was she armed?” I asked.
“No, unless you consider the plane to be a deadly weapon.”
With the ghosts of 9/11 still in our heads, we both knew that using an aircraft to murder innocent people was an all-too-real possibility.
“At least not this time,” I replied.
“But without you and Ms. Winkleman here, there’s a good chance Shelley would have gotten away clean. Where is Twink, by the way?”
“Over there,” I said, nodding toward the Travelall. “The airport authorities are giving her hell big time about crashing through the gate.”
“I’ll leave Shelley to cool her heels for a while,” Marvin said. “Let’s go see if we can bail Twink out of hot water with the feds. They tend to take a very dim view of people busting their way onto airfields.”
When we fought our way through the crowd of people encircling the Travelall, I spotted a truculent Twink, arms folded stubbornly across her chest, standing guard next to her beloved vehicle’s left front fender, which had suffered some damage during its close encounter with the security gate. I surmised that the raised blade of the snowplow had tossed some of the flying debris in that direction. Knowing Twink, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised to find she had a spare fender lashed to the Travelall’s roof along with the rest of her vast collection of spare parts.
As we arrived on the scene, Twink was being berated by a towering, finger-pointing black man who turned out to be the airport manager—a guy by the name of Conrad Jones. Homer being Homer, Marvin and Conrad were on a first-name basis.
“Hey, Connie,” Marvin said, edging his way between them. “Don’t be giving her so much grief. Responding units were on their way, but if Ms. Winkleman here hadn’t acted in a timely fashion, our homicide suspect would have made good on her getaway.”