She crooked her little finger at me again, to make sure I knew she meant it.
“I’m sorry it’s giving you trouble,” I told her, my disappointment giving way to sympathy. “Seems like that’s gotten worse again. You need to go back to the doctor?” She’d had outpatient surgery a year or so ago, to remove a uterine fibroid—a knot of benign tissue—and her cramps and bleeding had lessened afterward. For a while.
“I think it’s just menopause, letting me know it’s headed my way,” she said. “Now turn out the light and spoon me.” She rolled over and snuggled against me. Switching off the light, I wrapped an arm tightly across her chest. Her breathing slowed and deepened, her body twitching as she sank into sleep. As my own breathing found the same cadence as hers, I made a silent wish for her—one last anniversary toast, Walker style: I toast you sleep well and feel better tomorrow.
Brown Field Municipal Airport
San Diego, California
Twin shafts of light—one green, the other white—sliced the hazy night in opposite directions, like luminous blades, as the airport beacon turned with blind, unblinking constancy.
Poised at the western end of the runway was a small twin-engine jet, its airframe quivering like a living creature: like a racehorse trembling in a starting gate, its entire existence—bloodline and breeding and birth and indeed every moment prior to this one—mere preamble and prelude to the impending instant of release and freedom, of exultant headlong hurtling.
Within the indigo glow of the cockpit, the pilot, his face ghostly in the glow of gauges and screens, worked his way down the takeoff checklist, item by item: engine instruments, check; fuel, full; altimeter, set; radio frequency, 128.25; flaps, ten degrees; flight controls—rudder, ailerons, elevator—free, clear, and correct. Satisfied, he throttled back the engines. He did not hurry; he could take all the time he needed or wanted—hell, he could take a three-hour nap right here on the active runway, if he pleased, with no risk of being disturbed. The control tower had closed for the night at seven, and at the moment—a moment shortly after midnight—the dawn’s early light, and the first stirrings of human and aircraft activity, were still hours away. And by then he would be long gone.
Finished with the checklist, he tucked it into a slot in the center console and sighted down the runway, an eight-thousand-foot ribbon of black, outlined by jewel-like orange lights, which seemed to converge and merge at the far end. It was pure coincidence, but it was nonetheless an interesting and apt coincidence, that Mexico, too—specifically, the quarter of Tijuana known as Libertad, “Liberty”—lay almost exactly eight thousand feet away as well: a mile and a half due south of him; less than thirty seconds away, if he banked hard right immediately after takeoff. Not that he would, though; a half mile off, he’d be banking left: toward the northeast, and Vegas.
He folded the paper copy of the flight plan he’d phoned in an hour before—“visual flight direct to Las Vegas”—then took one last look at the sectional chart, the detailed aviation map for Southern California. The map’s green and tan landforms were splashed with yellow splotches, which denoted cities; in addition, the area above and around the yellow splotch of San Diego was overlaid with a crazed cross-hatching of blue lines—a tangle of arcs and angles, rhomboids and trapezoids and skewed chevrons, like the webwork of some deranged spider, one of those given LSD during a Cold War CIA experiment. The lines represented a 3-D maze in the sky—borders and boundaries and NO TRESPASSING zones in the air above San Diego. Surrounded by U.S. Navy and Marine Corps airfields nearby—Miramar, North Island, Imperial Beach—the city’s airspace was the most complex in the nation, exponentially more intricate than L.A.’s or New York’s. Blessedly, though, Brown Field—a sleepy municipal airport whose traffic was mostly single-engine private planes, plus a few bizjets and charter aircraft—lay just beyond the navigational nightmare; just outside the edges of the tangled web. Consequently a pilot could get in and out of Brown Field with little hassle and no red tape: no queue, no clearances, and no control-tower bureaucrats, at least not at night or on weekends.
It was time. With his right thumb he pressed a red button on the jet’s U-shaped control yoke. “Brown traffic,” he radioed to the empty night sky, “Citation Alpha Romeo One is rolling on runway eight. Departing the pattern to the northeast.” Grasping the twin throttle levers with his left hand, he pushed them all the way forward. The engines spooled up again and the plane’s racehorse tremble resumed, intensifying as the turbines reached full power, the brakes barely able to keep the craft in check. Then, easing the pressure on the brake pedals, he unleashed the shuddering beast. Forward it sprang, with gathering speed and single-minded purpose and a double-throated roar of joy.