‘Why?’

‘I shouldn’t have pushed you. I know your job’s important to you.’ She opened the door and he joined her, putting a hand on the curve of her hip, holding her there.

‘You’re important to me, Ness.’

She looked away from him, and then at the floor. ‘Am I?’

Tom knew he shouldn’t say too much. No promises. No false expectations. He’d learned that anything he said when he had a hard-on was liable to come back to bite him in the ass.

Instead he took the safe option of bending to kiss her neck where it met her shoulder. The skin was flawless and soft and, for a fleeting moment, his blood tried to struggle into a U-turn to head south once more. He broke the contact, and let go of her.

She didn’t move away from him immediately, which he figured was a good sign. Then she gave him a small, hurt smile over her shoulder, and hurried to her Lotus. He shut the door before she drove away, not wanting to indulge in the domesticity of waving her off.

*

With his NTSB badge number, Tom was quickly able to establish contact with the American Airlines family liaison team. ‘I have two names I want to check off the record,’ he told the flustered woman, who identified herself as Sandy Arbright. ‘Candice Holmes and Carlo Alienti.’

‘Hold, please,’ said Sandy, but didn’t put him on hold so he could hear her huffing and puffing through paperwork, then checking with colleagues about seat allocations. He got the impression that Sandy was more confused than he was about the crash.

‘I don’t see … umm … I don’t see those names, sir.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Umm …’ Apparently Sandy was not sure.

‘How are you spelling Candy?’

‘Not Candy. Candice – C-A-N-D-I-C-E Holmes. That’s H-O-L-M-E-S.’

That meant Lucia was Lucia Holmes, he thought idly. Unless she came from one of those fucked-up families where all the kids had different fathers and a dumb mother. But something told him not.

‘Oh, Holmes!’ said Sandy, pronouncing the l as if Tom was an idiot to have missed it. He bit his lip. He knew how these things worked. Sometimes you had to be nice to stupid people, which he found almost impossible. But, for Lucia’s sake, he refrained from telling Sandy to fuck off back to blowing her boss between trips to the water-cooler, and agreed: ‘Holmes. Yes.’

More rustling. More whispering. If Tom had been a panic-stricken, terrified, potentially bereaved relative he’d have driven to AA corporate HQ and personally shot Sandy’s dopey head clean off her shoulders.

‘Er, yes, I do have a Candice Holmes listed. Savannah to LA.’

Or not, thought Tom. Savannah to a field in Buttfuck, Oklahoma, at five hundred miles an hour.

He kept that feeling out of his voice when he asked after the boyfriend. Sandy, who had been thrown by Holmes, was beside herself with Alienti, especially as Tom was not a hundred per cent sure how to spell it.

‘We have an Allen. A Marjorie Allen from Pittsburgh.’

Tom clenched his jaw as Sandy went through the passenger list as if it was a Sears catalogue.

‘Oh, and a Jennifer-Jo Bonetti. That’s Italian. Are you sure that’s not it?’

‘Alienti. Carlo Alienti. A man.’

‘A man,’ mused Sandy, and Tom almost screamed as he realized he’d just given her carte blanche to re-examine every man’s name as a possible match for the boyfriend.

‘Was he sitting in 22C?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’

Sandy turned from dumb to frosty in one swift second. ‘There’s no need for attitude, sir. I’m just doing my job.’

‘Well, do it better.’

There was a gasp of outrage and Sandy apparently turned to a colleague to complain about Tom. There was a muffled response – and then the unmistakable sound of her hanging up on him.

‘Fuck!’

Tom hurled his phone against the wall – and wished he hadn’t, even as it left his hand. He heard a crack as it hit and bounced across the floor in two pieces.

‘Shit. Fuck. Asshole!’

His neighbour banged on the wall and he yelled, ‘Up yours, Shaeffer!’ at the stucco as he examined the phone.

He’d killed it.

*

Tom removed the Sim card and slipped it into his pocket. From his landline, he called the Sawmill in Santa Ana, without any great hope that they’d give him Lucia’s number. He told them it was NTSB business but the woman on the phone sounded mightily bored by his so-called business, Lucia’s alleged dead sister, and any further attempts he would ever make to wangle one of her dancers’ personal numbers out of her. In some underused recess of reason in his mind, Tom couldn’t blame her, but that didn’t stop him swearing as he slammed the phone down and grabbed his car keys.

He stopped at the door and went back to put on his NTSB jacket, cap and badge. They gave him the right to demand information from multi-national corporations and government agencies. Fucked if he was going to let a sleazy strip joint off the hook.

Tom came off the Garden Grove freeway on Euclid and headed south. He took a left onto the road bordered by strip malls that became progressively more downmarket. Ralph’s was a beacon of corporate success surrounded by a hundred Thai cafés, copy shops and pawnbrokers. He passed the Motel 6, which looked even sadder in daylight than it did in the dark, and swung into the parking lot of the Sawmill. It was at the back of the club – a clever ploy so that the men who went there were hidden from the road when they got out of their cars.

Tom noticed a dark blue ’67 Thunderbird pull into the lot behind him. He tugged on his cap, checked his ID and got out of the Buick.

Swift, strong hands on his upper arms propelled him forward, making him stumble even while they held him up.

‘Hey!’ He tried to dig his heels into the pitted surface, but the two men who had him were strong and professional.

Even given the circumstances, Tom couldn’t bring himself to yell, ‘Help,’ but he did yell, ‘Fuck!’ very loudly as he tried to twist away, and felt the side of his face explode in pain as something hit him. He didn’t pass out but it took all the fight out of him in a second, and he could only stagger and drag between the men as they cuffed his hands behind him, then hurled him roughly into the trunk of the Thunderbird and slammed the lid.

23

RIDING IN THE trunk of a car was bad in lots of ways that Tom had never imagined it would be. For a start, it stank of gas, a smell that Tom had always quite liked, as he had those of dog food and garlic. But he’d tried dog food and it tasted like boiled garbage, and garlic was only okay in your food, not in anyone else’s. In this concentration, when he couldn’t just walk away, the smell of gas made him feel sick and dizzy. Although that sock in the jaw hadn’t helped, he was pretty sure.

Tom felt around with his hands and feet and touched a plastic gas can behind his back. Great. He managed to manoeuvre it down to his feet, but the smell was barely less pervasive.

Then there was the comfort factor. Until you took the up holstered seat out of a car and lay down with only a strip of thin felt between you and bare metal, you couldn’t really appreciate how rough the ride was. He couldn’t get comfortable. There was a lump right in the middle of the trunk which could have been the bolt holding the spare tyre, and he didn’t have enough room to move away from it completely. He could feel it now, digging into his hip.

Without visual warnings of sudden turns and stops so he could brace himself, he was rolled back and forth like a pebble in a can, now with the top of his head pressed against the side of the car as they swung left, then thrown forward against the seat-backs as the driver braked, and banged against the lumpy metal of the lock and tail-light housings.

To distract himself, Tom tried to concentrate on where they were going – like people did in movies – but soon gave up. Who gave a shit anyway? He’d find out where they were taking him when they got there.