Chapter 110
I WAS PULLING out of our underground lot when Justine darted out of the elevator, ran in front of my car, and slapped the hood.
“Jack. Wait.”
I opened my door and got out. “Christ, I could have hit you.”
“Mo-bot just got a call from a hospital in Las Vegas. Val’s been in some kind of accident. I don’t know what, Jack. Was she working on something for us?”
“Get in. Hurry.”
Justine was pale as she worked the phone, cajoling, pleading, arguing, but all she got from the hospital was that Valerie Kenney was in the ICU.
I wove around clotted traffic, passed in no-passing lanes as if I had flashers and sirens, was close to panic as I sped toward Santa Monica Airport, all the while wondering what had happened to Val, whipping myself for letting her take on an undercover job before she was ready.
Please God, let her survive.
Mercifully, we didn’t get pulled over, and when we got to Santa Monica AP, my plane was waiting for me on the tarmac, gassed up and ready to go. Justine’s legs were shaking as I helped her into the copilot’s seat. Justine is afraid of heights—and of flights in small planes. I thought she might be sick before we got into the air.
I climbed into my seat and reassured her over the roar of the engine.
“The Cessna 172 is an extremely stable aircraft,” I said, “very forgiving, even to a beginner. Plus, I know what I’m doing, as you know.”
“Let’s go, okay?” she said.
She buckled up. I gave her a pair of headphones, then I concentrated on my aircraft.
The sky was dark but with decent visibility. I went through my checklist, and once we were cleared for takeoff, I made sure my compass and directional gyro were aligned to the heading of the runway, then departed with a bit of a right crosswind.
I focused on the airspeed indicator, and while keeping the airplane running straight down the runway, I waited for it to reach the critical speed of about sixty before putting a little back pressure on the control yoke. As the spinning propeller exerted a leftward force on the airplane, I pushed in a bit of the right rudder.
Then I flew the runway heading until I was given vectors to proceed on course toward Atlantic Terminal, one of the private hangars at McCarran International, an hour and fifty minutes away.
The Cessna climbed out at a fairly standard five hundred feet per minute, and once we were at five thousand feet, I leveled out the plane and got us into cruise mode.
Los Angeles was lit up below us. The cars on the roads and freeways looked like a mechanical representation of a human circulatory system. Civilization glowed. After we cleared the suburban sprawl outside of LA, the vast desert was absolutely black.
We flew in a clear, starlit sky, and finally, my lovely, profoundly loyal, and very brave friend Justine relaxed. When we were about fifteen miles from McCarran, I began pulling the power back to 2,100 rpm, which set up a nice three- to four-hundred-foot-per-minute descent to the airfield.
Ten minutes later, we were taxiing toward the hangar, the hotels on the Strip looming in the background. When we were safely at a stop, I helped a very shaky Dr. Smith to the ground.
I hugged her.
She clung to me, and then, holding hands, we trotted toward the Atlantic Terminal and the hired car waiting to take us to the hospital.