Tom nodded his understanding of the daunting logistics of the operation. ‘You got the CVR?’
‘It gives us nothing. The pilots never knew what hit them.’ He touched a key and Tom heard the voice of a dead man passing the time of day.
‘… Jean. So I’m thinking, what’s the point of even going then?’
‘Too right,’ said the co-pilot.
‘You want to trim that a little?’
Tom listened to the tiny sounds that meant the co-pilot was adjusting the trim. The black box – the one that held the computerized records of every technical change in the plane – would tell them exactly what he’d done at that point. Whether it had made any difference.
‘So we didn’t go.’
‘You didn’t miss any—’
The voices were steamrollered by a huge, indeterminate noise. A mechanical roar – a cacophony too loud and confused to be interpreted by mere ears. Then, frantic but faint, as if they were already far from life, the pilots’ last words …
‘Oh fuck—’
‘Jesus. I—’
And then nothing.
However many times he listened to those recordings, they would never fail to affect Tom. What was most shocking about them was their very mundanity, the complete lack of foreknowledge in the pilots’ conversations, in their voices. Until the bad thing happened, there was just … ordinary life. He’d listened to hundreds of hours of cockpit voice-recorder sound and had never heard a flight-crew member say, ‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ or ‘We’re all dead.’ Even when they knew it was past sensible, the pilots always kept trying, fighting, hoping. He’d never heard one take his mind off trying to pull out of a terminal dive to shout, ‘Tell Ruby I love her!’ Or ‘The safe deposit key’s in my sock drawer!’
Tom understood it. If the billion-to-one recovery manoeuvre paid off, then Ruby would only want to get married, and a new hiding place would have to be found for the key. It was human nature: men liked to keep their options open even as they plummeted towards oblivion at 500 m.p.h.
But, just once, he wished he could hear something astonishing on one of those goddamned tapes. Something that gave a clue to an awareness of the fact that a portal was opening up between life and death – between one reality and another.
‘My God – it’s full of stars!’ The line from 2001: A Space Odyssey was his fantasy CVR benchmark, but all he ever got was ‘Shit’, ‘Fuck’ and the ubiquitous ‘Pull up! Pull up!’
It was an undignified way to die. Confused, terrified – and with your always-useless last words recorded for the posterity of the inquiry room and transcribed in brutal black-and-white for The Orange County Shopper or Channel 2 Tampa’s Top-of-the-Hour News.
He realized Munro was staring at him and wondered what he’d missed. Munro repeated his question: ‘So what do you want to do, Tom?’
The guy was giving him a choice?
Tom felt the eyes of the other three investigators boring into him, no doubt just as amazed. He felt gratitude swelling inside him, like a brittle old seed dropped into water. ‘Anything you want. Just tell me what you need.’ He was astonished to find that he meant it. He owed Munro for this. Big-time. Sure, Munro thought he was the one repaying a debt, but Tom knew that, although he’d passed on the bolt via Pete, he could never have done what Munro was doing for him right now: treating him with respect, instead of like a rookie.
Munro nodded thoughtfully, swivelling slightly in his chair. Then he yanked open a drawer and took out a scuffed wallet. He peeled off two hundred dollars and handed it to Tom. ‘For starters, you can go back into Glenpool and get yourself some raingear. Come in and start fresh tomorrow.’
Tom took the money silently. He sincerely hoped Lenny Munro was going to punch him in the face next, or he was in serious danger of getting all misty.
‘When we find the fan disc, that’ll be the time you’ll really come into your own. But until then, just do what you think would be most useful. Let me know what it is so I know where you are if I need you.’
Tom nodded again, not trusting his voice, unable to look Munro in the eyes. Instead he fixed his gaze on the little red triangles. Some poor bastard would be out there now, trying to add to that map. Finding the bodies was the shit detail in air-crash investigation. Picking up arms, peeling scalps off asphalt, checking random shoes to see if they still contained feet.
Once, near Milwaukee, he’d stepped on an eyeball.
Tagging-bagging-and-flagging was an exhausting, soul-destroying attempt to identify flesh that used to be people. All enhanced by the constant reminder that some day, somewhere, someone was going to be picking your teeth off the freeway, pulling your flaking body from under the pier, covering their nose over your fetid, piss-soaked, bed-ridden corpse.
Tom looked Lenny Munro square in the face. He wanted to apologize for calling him a cocksucker. But what he said was: ‘I’ll look for bodies.’
*
The Holiday Inn had a laundry service. Tom stripped off everything he was wearing, bundled it up with every other item of clothing in his bag, and called for it to be taken away. When the maid came to his door, he paid for the full express service, including pressing, even though it was only for jeans and T-shirts. He asked what she could do with his All Stars, which were covered with mud, and she seemed quite confident about them, so he let her have those too. If there was a fire now, he thought, he’d have to escape in his new galoshes.
He showered, then threw himself onto the bed and slept almost instantly.
He woke from a nightmare on a sweat-soaked shout, still naked, and was so disoriented that he looked around for Ronaldo Suarez, before remembering that a lot of muddied water had passed under the bridge since the giant detective had watched him sleep in another motel room a thousand miles away.
Tom lay on his back and blinked at the illuminated face of his watch. It was nine p.m. in LA. His nakedness reminded him of how vulnerable he’d felt in the barn.
A soft knock on the door made him flinch and rise quickly from the bed. He peered warily through the spyhole and saw the maid with his clothes. As he opened the door, he remembered he was naked and grabbed one of his galoshes to cover himself. The girl blushed and Tom patted his ass before he remembered he didn’t have his jeans on; he had to back away from the door to get a tip off the dressing-table, despite her stammered protest that it really didn’t matter, that it was her fault for coming back so late but she knew ‘you din’t have no other clothes to put on, sir’.
Tom finally managed to tip her without committing an arrestable offence but it was a close thing.
When she’d hurried away, he buried his face in his clean clothes, wondering when last he’d felt and smelt so clean. It made him think of a fresh start, and all the pleasure leaked from the feeling.
He didn’t want a fresh start: he just wished he’d done better with the start he’d already made.
*
The rain had only got worse and Tom was glad he hadn’t skimped on the raingear. What had seemed needlessly bulky when he’d pulled it on four hours ago now seemed like the most sensible purchase he’d ever made.
Even though the trees gave him some cover, rain plopped loudly onto his breathable Gore-Tex hood and the peak of the cap he wore under it. The strip of woodland was untended and overgrown, and Tom wondered what the hell it was doing between the acres of corn all around. He used a light metal pole to prod about in the stands of whippy new hazel and tired old thorns between the patchy yellow grass that was slowly sinking into the fresh, unaccustomed mud.
He had bags, tags and flags in the pack slung over his shoulders, but all he’d found so far was a paperback of The Da Vinci Code, open and face-down in the mud. He’d flagged it anyway, in case prints matched a passenger, and moved on, treading carefully, his eyes sweeping slowly around, up and down, adjusting to the dull light seeping through the canopy, and readjusting to the darkness of the undergrowth, as he criss-crossed the strip with a grinding patience that made him want to throw down the pole and run around shouting.
In the next hour, he found two seat cushions, a twist of metal and rubber he recognized as cabin window framing and, sitting atop an old stump, like a mythical woodland offering, a single-serving utensil bag containing plastic knife, spork, salt, pepper, sugar, paper napkin and toothpick. Tom didn’t know what time it was – peeling back the layers of waterproofing was too much hassle just to look at his watch – but he figured it was a sign to have lunch. He squatted on the trunk of a downed tree and did just that, opening the utensil bag with his teeth so he could use the salt on the tasteless gas-station sandwich he’d bought, which turned to mush in the rain faster than he could eat it.
The afternoon passed in the same excruciatingly slow way. He added a suitcase to his list of booty, tan leather, with a businessman’s array of shaving kit and carefully filed paperwork inside. He found a child’s T-shirt with ‘Princess’ on it in glitter; he found seven mini-cans of Coke and one of 7-Up; he found a hand and part of a forearm. The forearm had freckles and pale, curly hair on it, and a twenty-four-hour Swatch was still strapped to the wrist. Tom noticed that it was almost five p.m. The light would be going soon; he’d come back tomorrow. He photographed the arm, making sure that the watch could be easily identified, then sealed it carefully inside a bag to prevent predation, flagged it and entered its location on the GPS.
As he stood up, he caught a flash of red between the trees.
With anticipation rising in him as the red thing grew in his obstructed vision, Tom dropped into a gully, jumped what had become a little stream, and slipped and slithered up the other muddy side. He skidded near the top of the bank and scraped his injured leg against a root. ‘Fuck!’ The pain flared. He gripped a branch and stood on one leg for a long second, doubled over, panting at the dirt.
He straightened up slowly and stopped dead, his harsh breaths frozen in his chest.
In a small clearing, four people were sitting in a block of airline seats.
As if in a dream, Tom moved towards them – no longer aware of the rain or the mud – hearing only the ticking of his pulse in his ears.
They looked so alive.
That was impossible. Wasn’t it? They had to be dead. And yet there they were, each sitting upright, the one closest to him in a red sweatshirt. From that angle – behind them – they looked as if they were waiting for the in-flight movie to start.
Tom reached the seats, his heart bumping so wildly in his chest that it made the strip of Oklahoma trees into a jungle filled with warring natives.
