‘Hmm. Sleepy.’
She held out her hand to him and he made the effort to take it, holding it under his own on his thigh.
‘Did you bring the birthday present?’
He nodded, his eyes starting to close.
‘Did you call your dad about the crane thing?’
‘Bulldozer.’
‘What?’
‘Bulldozer,’ he said slowly. ‘Not crane.’
‘Big yellow thing with wheels?’
Carlo grinned and nodded again, almost imperceptibly, with his eyes now shut. Candice thought for the millionth time how handsome he was. They’d been together for three years, so she figured if that feeling hadn’t worn off by now, it was never going to. As she often did in a crowded place, she looked around her at the dozens of other men on the flight and decided, as she almost always did, that Carlo was the best-looking guy in the room. Her Carlo.
She felt his hand loosen on hers and his breathing deepen as the plane’s engines started to whine in rising anticipation.
She slid her hand from under his and sighed. Six hours alone, six hours away from Carlo, stretched before her. She didn’t mind him taking the Valium: he was a bad flier and preferred to sit the whole experience out. She appreciated that he was coming with her to LA on a family thing. The least she could do was let him get drugged up to the eyeballs.
As the thrust pushed her back into the seat, Candice smiled. She loved that feeling of power all around her just as much as Carlo hated it. She pulled a book out of the seat pocket in front of her. The book she should have been reading was Stone Cold: The Geology of the Antarctic and South Georgia, but she’d snuck Little Women on board in a fit of feminine nostalgia, and now she flipped to the bookmark. Candice hated turning down pages: she’d been brought up better than that. If she didn’t have a bookmark, she’d use a piece of thread or a scrap of paper. When she’d first met Carlo, she’d thought they couldn’t be compatible because she’d found him using a piece of chewed gum as a bookmark. She’d even talked it through with her mother, who had sighed and told her nobody was perfect and ‘At least Carlo’s reading, Candice. Lots of men don’t!’ Candice smiled to herself at the memory. Carlo still used gum in his own books but never in hers, and that was good enough for her.
She mentally snuggled down to enjoy four sisters whose lives had precisely nothing in common with her own.
They were over Oklahoma – and Amy was drawing pages and pages of noses – when Candice’s world came apart with shocking speed and utter finality.
There was a sound like a locomotive hitting the inside of a tunnel wall and Little Women was ripped from her hands just as the air was ripped from her lungs and for a second she was staring not at the heads of the passengers in front of her but at the whole Earth, lit softly by dawn, spread out below her as if she were an astronaut on re-entry.
She registered wonder at the view, and horror at the view.
Her last conscious thought was that she hoped Carlo was strapped in. Then she and seventy-seven others plummeted the rest of the twenty-seven thousand feet in burning cold oblivion.
22
BECAUSE HE WAS at the airport, Tom called Halo as soon as he disembarked from the DC flight. Halo took a break and came over from Hangar Four.
They met at a coffee shop on the concourse. Tom had an espresso in a private toast to Lowell Dexter. Halo surprised him by ordering something with a lot of whipped cream on it, most of which transferred itself to his top lip at the first sip and stayed there.
Tom brought him up to speed on what had happened in South Africa.
Halo’s eyes widened, and Tom realized his reaction was appropriate. Some serious shit had gone down in the Karoo. He’d been a little distracted by his injury and by sheer horniness, and this was the first time he’d recounted the full events in sequence to a third party.
‘How can there not be an investigation into the fire?’ Halo was as outraged as Tom had been, but now, with time and resignation dulling his anger, Tom rubbed his face tiredly.
‘It would be pointless. Their idea of forensics is to sweep all the evidence up with a dustpan and brush. CSI Timbuk-fucking-tu.’
Halo looked sombre. ‘You should light a candle for them or something.’
Tom’s head jerked in surprise. ‘What?’
‘For Pam and the others. In their memory.’
‘Light a candle for six people who died in a fire?’ Tom snorted. ‘And I thought I was sick!’
Halo hadn’t thought of that. He felt stupid. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘Not really.’
Halo heard dismissal in his tone and shut up about the candle. ‘So, what’s next?’
‘You get cheap flights, right?’
‘Cheap enough.’
‘Want to get me one to Texas?’
‘What’s in Texas?’ Halo asked suspiciously.
‘Oil. Beef. WAE.’
‘The engine plant?’
‘Thought I’d see them about the batch number. Take a look at their papering systems.’
Halo nodded and sipped and Tom enjoyed the fact that he had a proper whipped-cream Fu Manchu going. How could he not feel that?
