Tom strode into the bright sunshine, the California heat a shock to his air-conditioned skin. ‘Yeah, Pete, what do you want?’
‘Hey! How’d you know it was me?’
Tom sighed. Unless it was about planes, Pete LaBello was a Luddite. He’d only just mastered faxes; cell phones were all Star Trek to him. ‘Your name comes up on the thing. What’s up?’
‘You at the Bicycle Club?’
Tom deferred answering his boss for the five seconds it took him to make it out of the parking lot and into the honesty zone.
‘No.’
‘Good. Go Team’s about to leave for LAX – got a 737 blade off on the ground. Thought you might like to be first on the scene as you’re right there.’
‘I’m not on the Go Team.’
Hesitation.
Embarrassment for sure.
Pity, maybe?
‘No. Munro’s leading.’
Tom let it go. He was still out in the cold, but this was a small indication that a thaw might be on its way. He’d have to swallow his pride and start from the ass-end up if he wanted to stay in his job. And – despite everything – Tom did want to stay in his job. It was the only damned thing he’d ever been any good at. Not just good. Damn good. A helluva lot better than Lenny Munro could ever dream of being.
‘Tom?’
‘I’m here.’
‘You got your flyaway with you, right?’
‘Always.’
‘Well, if you don’t mind doing the donkey work for Lenny …’
Pete tried to make it a joke but Tom couldn’t humour him – it was still too raw. Pete must’ve heard that in his silence because he went on, ‘Three dead. They’re engineers. I thought it’d suit you.’
Tom felt the unintentional sting of the words before he answered, ‘I owe you one.’
‘Nah!’
He could almost hear Pete wave away the debt with his generous Italian hands.
He hung up and stood in the unrelenting LA sun, frowning. Pete was kind but transparent.
They’re engineers.
Tom knew what his boss had been saying. That he wasn’t good with civilians.
*
Tom Patrick wasn’t good with civilians. That was why Pete LaBello hadn’t called him last night when a Jetstream 31 had gone down in Nevada with seven passengers on board – including a woman flying to see her oilman boyfriend with their six-year-old daughter along for the ride.
But engineers weren’t civilians, they were industry, so Tom’s investigative powers – which were held in some esteem throughout the National Transportation Safety Board, despite his recent history – would be invaluable. And unsullied by his second and more infamous characteristic: his monumental lack of tact.
Six months ago, Tom Patrick had been lead on a Learjet emergency landing during which a New York stockbroker got his neck snapped. At a press conference, in the full glare of the publicity that only the death of rich people brings, he had bluntly told the hysterical widow – who was demanding the pilot’s head – to ‘Hold your horses, ma’am.’ He’d already established, un officially, that her husband had not been wearing a seatbelt on touchdown due to a combination of bravado, belligerence and Bell’s whisky. And – breaking all NTSB protocols – he’d told her that right there and then. Live. On air.
He had been immediately suspended – and his replacement had taken another two months to make the same version of events a matter of official record. The hysterical widow – still stinging from her halogen humiliation – had tried her best to sue the department for a hundred million dollars. She’d lost, of course, but a rich and humiliated woman’s best is usually pretty damn good, and can take a lot of money to beat off. After three months, Tom was quietly reinstated by the back door – on probation and half-pay.
In NTSB terms, the back door was – fittingly – pipelines. For three months and fourteen days, he had been investigating pipeline leaks and fires across the continental United States. Pete hated like hell to lose him from planes, but jumping the gun on probable cause was a cardinal sin at the NTSB – and jumping it on live TV while bad-mouthing a dead millionaire to his grieving widow was always going to mean more than a slap on the wrist for Tom Patrick.
The Learjet was only his most high-profile foot-in-mouth incident. Just from Pete’s personal memory – and at fifty-nine his memory was not even that great – he could recall Tom being quoted variously saying that passengers in a stricken 727 were now ‘in little tiny chunks all over the Gulf of Mexico’; that the pilot of a wounded DC10 had saved the lives of all those on board through ‘brute force and ignorance’; and that a frozen-solid teenaged stowaway who’d dropped out with the landing gear over Casper, Wyoming, had killed a couple in their Ford Taurus ‘like a big meat popsicle’.
Pete LaBello was ten months from his gold watch. He and Ann were going to spend their declining years in Vermont and fully expected to live out their retirement in the same unspectacular way they had hitherto achieved in their respective careers. His time at the NTSB and hers teaching high-school physics were unspoiled by drama or particular distinction, and that was the way they liked it.
Pete liked Tom Patrick – he really did. But Tom didn’t make even that easy, and the closer to the watch he got, the more wary he was about putting Tom back on planes. At the same time, he knew he couldn’t continue indefinitely to waste him on pipelines when they so badly needed his expertise elsewhere. Which was why, when the report came in from LAX shortly after the Jetstream went down, Pete figured sending Tom Patrick north across LA instead of east to Nevada would make the fewest possible waves.
Pete LaBello was wrong.
*
Tom stood on the apron outside Hangar Six and looked around in awe. He’d been with the NTSB for eleven years, but the scale of plane accidents still left him humbled. And this one hadn’t even fallen out of the sky or ploughed through a city. This was minor. And yet there was barely a piece of flesh or metal left in the wake of the number-two engine that hadn’t been wrecked, ruined or wrapped around another piece of flesh or metal somewhere else.
The plane had been wheeled out of the hangar for an engine run, and had been turned at forty-five degrees to it so the turbulence wouldn’t blast the hangar clear into the Pacific Ocean.
He became aware of the huddle of men behind him, waiting for him to say or do something. The airport manager, Duncan Hancock, cleared his throat very slightly. Off to his left, the paramedics who hadn’t taken the injured to hospital were waiting to take the dead to the morgue. He recognized the looks on their faces: even though he’d shown his ID and it had been checked with DC by a doubtful assistant, they still thought it unlikely that someone who looked the way he did was about to undertake an official investigation into a vending-machine malfunction, let alone this.
He knew he should have gone home first and got what the manual called ‘appropriate clothing’ – but what the hell? Lenny Munro and the rest of the team would be here in an hour or two and things would be taken away from him again. Every minute was precious to him, so he was wearing the same tattered jeans and Hollywood Park Casino T-shirt he’d played poker in for the past thirteen hours. He had his ‘appropriate’ NTSB cap, and that would have to satisfy their sartorial suspicions.
