Tom asked for a seat fewer than seven rows from the wing exit. The Southwest Airlines attendant – whose badge read ‘Gary Holstein’ – raised a plucked eyebrow and looked into Tom’s face with a suggestive smile. ‘You a safety-first kinda guy?’
Tom nodded briefly, but the attendant appraised him over the counter and obviously thought he was worth a follow-up. He leaned forward conspiratorially as he held out Tom’s boarding pass. ‘Not as much fun that way.’
Tom glanced behind him to make sure they couldn’t be overheard. He put his elbows on the counter, casually getting closer to the man, who gazed into Tom’s green eyes with an expression that said he couldn’t believe his luck at this turn for the intimate.
Tom’s voice was soft, almost tender: ‘Well, call me picky, but I think having a seventy-five per cent chance of getting out of a downed plane seems like a lot more fun than being trampled unconscious, then flash-fried to a carbon shell.’
It took a moment for Gary Holstein to register that what Tom was saying was not about sex. When it did, his face drained of a little colour and all its cockiness. Tom took the ticket from his slack hand. ‘Thanks, Gary.’
On the plane, Tom counted the seats to the exit. He was four rows back. He closed his eyes and visualized getting out in the dark. Then he visualized getting out in the dark while crawling on the floor and holding his breath.
‘You okay?’
He opened his eyes and turned to the woman beside him. A nice-looking woman in her forties, with short brown hair and hoop earrings. ‘I’m fine.’
The woman patted his hand reassuringly. ‘Fear of flying?’
It was the oldest cliché in the book, but Tom said it anyway: ‘No, of crashing.’
She smiled as if he’d said he was scared of the Loch Ness Monster.
He took the safety card from the seat pocket in front of him and checked the brace position for his seat. Most people didn’t even know there were different brace positions for different seats.
‘Oh, I never read those dumb things,’ said the woman. ‘I mean, if the plane goes down, what good’s that going to do you?’
Tom could have told her that it might make the difference between life and death; that 95 per cent of plane crashes were potentially survivable; and that, if you remained conscious and mobile when one of those planes hit land or water, it was these small things – these dumb things – that improved your chances of getting out. And getting out was what it was all about. He’d put flags beside enough bodies in the past eleven years to know that getting out meant everything to survival. He’d put flags next to bodies burned up in their seats because they’d forgotten the lap-belt was not a car seatbelt and, in their panic, had clawed frantically at their hips for the release; bodies that had collapsed in the doorway, choked by the toxic fumes just inches from fresh air, because they were eight rows away from the exit, not seven; drowned, bloated bodies in inflated life preservers – passengers who’d panicked and pulled the string before getting out of the jet, and who’d been pinned to the ceiling like bugs as the cabin filled with water.
He could have told her. There had been a time when he would have told her. When he’d started the job he used to tell people, hoping to help. But he’d soon realized they didn’t want to hear the horror stories. They wanted to eat their peanuts and believe it would never happen to them.
So he just smiled at the woman in the hoop earrings and watched the safety demonstration intently while everyone around him read their newspapers.
*
The United States passed beneath Tom in a vast brown and green patchwork quilt until Kentucky popped into view, all dark woods and brilliant grass, like an emerald in dirt. Thirty-five thousand feet up was as close as he’d ever been to Kentucky, but he could never fly over it without thinking of Fort Knox – and then of the billions of dollars’ worth of horseflesh standing in the bluegrass paddocks below him, with only a bit of creosoted post-and-rail between them and any man with a rope halter who cared to take his chances.
Gold was cold and garish. But Galileo, Tapit, Frankel? Living, breathing poker chips in a high-stakes game played across the world by men and women with nerves of whip-steel.
Tom never bet on the horses, but he was in awe of the stud industry. Poker was a game of odds, but breeding was a seemingly impossible shot in the dark. A heady voodoo of parenting and progeny, genetics and eugenics, nature and nurture to produce the über-horse, whose heart and mind and legs and lungs made it a winning machine and – even more lucratively – a template from which more winning machines might be reliably churned out. The odds made him dizzy. Even when the breeder’s work had been done to perfection, the rare talent might be sent to a trainer who didn’t understand that the horse needed bar shoes behind, or a sheep for company, or to be stabled next to this filly or that colt to give of his best. And even if he did, then this precious gem, having been cut to a pinpoint of brilliance, could be ridden by the world’s greatest jockey and not care for the smell of his aftershave, or the way he fiddled with the reins, or how the grandstand at Keeneland looked in the afternoon sun, or the feel of grass instead of dirt, or the shadow of the winning post as he came up the stretch.
A million and one things had to go right – and each at the right time. Miracle odds. It made getting lucky six times to win a poker tournament seem a ridiculously simple task, and – as always – by the time they were over Lexington and the truly great farms, Tom felt both poverty-stricken and inadequate.
Thank God, Kentucky passed quickly and he could rebuild his self-esteem over West Virginia, as the dirt-poor coal-mining towns passed miserably below.
*
‘Tom!’ Pete’s PA, Kitty Rees, was obviously surprised to see him – and not in a good way, Tom thought, when he saw her face.
He liked Kitty. She’d been with Pete since joining at the age of twenty-two, ten years before, and she and Tom had sort of grown into their jobs together. They’d even fooled around once after getting drunk at the only office Christmas party he’d ever attended. It hadn’t been much – her hand up his shirt, his hand high on her thigh, and an exchange of alcohol-flavoured saliva, Rolling Rock and white rum. He always thought of Kitty when he tasted rum, but that was the only legacy of a long-gone incident. For a while they’d been sheepish around each other, then Tom had snapped out of it and helped her do the same. ‘What the hell, Kitty?’ he’d told her. ‘No one’s going to blame you for being unable to resist me.’ They’d both laughed and gone back to being friends.
But now she didn’t seem happy to see him.
‘Don’t worry, Kitty, I’m not here to make a scene.’
‘I didn’t think you—’
‘Yeah, you did.’
She hesitated, then admitted, ‘Yeah, I did.’
They smiled.
‘Pete in?’
By way of an answer, Kitty got up and tapped lightly on his door before opening it and speaking quietly. Tom noticed she’d put on a little weight, but it suited her. She turned round and caught him looking. ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You think I look fat?’
‘I think you look sexy as hell.’
She gave a mock-frown. ‘You’re so going to get sued one of these days.’
‘Or laid, I’m hoping.’
Kitty smiled. She didn’t look like she was about to call any lawyers. ‘Go on in.’ As he passed her she looked at him properly for the first time and said accusingly, ‘You lost weight?’
‘God’s a man, Kitty. Suck it up.’
She punched his arm.
Pete got up as Tom came in, and shook his hand.
‘Hi, Pete.’
‘Good to see you, Tom.’
Silence.
It had been months since they’d seen each other. Anyone else, and Pete would have expected some mild chit-chat – ‘How are you, Pete?’; ‘How’s Ann?’; ‘How long to retirement now, Pete?’ He sighed and knew that Tom Patrick was not the man to make those enquiries.
He indicated a chair and Tom threw himself into it. The silence stretched between them. Pete felt irritation rising. He knew he’d have to kick things off, even if it was Tom who’d flown all the way across the country to see him. The guy didn’t have a socially adept bone in his lanky body.
‘What’s up, Tom?’
Tom ran his hand nervously up the back of his neck and Pete knew it was coming – whatever Tom Patrick couldn’t say on the phone. As usual, once he decided to get in the pool, Tom went straight off the high board …
‘That LAX cargo plane. You happy with Munro’s findings?’
