‘Looks like maybe it was a blade off.’
That changed the expression on Halo’s face.
‘Are you involved in the investigation?’
‘Hell, no. Just looked at the pictures online. Seems to me like the fuselage split just fore of the wing.’
‘Like the Pride of Maine.’
‘Like the Pride of Maine,’ agreed Tom. ‘It might be nothing.’
Halo nodded slowly. ‘But it’s something.’
Tom shrugged. He wasn’t making any promises – not based on viewing a couple of crash-scene pix on the goddamned Internet. But something in his gut had stirred and bothered him enough that, after he’d got over the ostrich races, he’d continued thinking about what it might be. Like many of his best moments, it had come while he was asleep, nudging him awake at 3.02 a.m. so he could suffer in its grip until dawn. It was a tenuous link. Same kind of plane; the fuselage parting in the same kind of place. But Tom knew that instinct played a bigger part in investigations than anybody ever cared to admit. Sure, it always had to be supported by the evidence, but it was instinct that told him where to look for that evidence; what that evidence might mean when he found it.
If he didn’t trust his instinct, he’d never have mentioned the South African plane.
‘So you’ll help.’
‘Shit.’ Tom was irritated with Halo for trying to make him commit right out in the open like that.
‘You will, right? You said to Vee—’
‘Christ, leave me alone, will you?’ Tom shoved open the door and slammed it behind him. It still didn’t break.
Tom ignored Halo and pulled out his phone, coming round the Mustang to stand by the hood of his own car.
Halo sighed and reached into the glove box; he held up a hose clip. ‘Man, I’m not sure you’d even be any help. You know what brings down a 737 but you can’t fix your own car?’
Tom recognized the clip that had previously held the fuel line to the Buick’s carburettor. ‘Sonofabitch.’ He flipped his phone shut and snatched the clip from Halo.
‘You have my number.’ Halo waved and drove carefully away.
7
TOM FELT THE time had come to talk to Pete LaBello but he didn’t know what to say to him on the phone, so – in a rare piece of forward-thinking – he caught the earliest flight he could to DC.
He hated to fly. Unlike most professionals in the field, familiarity had bred in him not contempt for the mundanity of air travel but a doom-laden feeling that every flight he took shortened the odds of his plane going down.
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.
