He heard a clanging near the top of the storage tank and looked up. A hard-hatted man was waving at him. ‘Your phone’s ringing!’
‘Well, how ’bout you answer it and set off what’s left of the gas fumes in here?’
The man almost did just that, before he realized Tom was being sarcastic. Then he looked sheepish and disappeared, clattering down the iron ladder in what Tom could tell were not rubber-soled safety shoes.
The phone was still ringing fifteen minutes later when Tom clambered out of Storage Tank Nine. He could hear it all the way across the site. Tom never set his cell phone to voicemail – he hated returning calls and figured if people really wanted to speak to him they’d call back – but whoever this was had just hung on, listening to the phone ring.
‘Patrick.’
‘Hey, Mr Patrick. It’s Halo Jackson.’
‘Who?’
‘Halo Jackson. From LAX?’
Tom’s mind clicked back to a skinny black man in a blue blanket and was immediately wary. That job was done. The findings had been made public. Blame had been assigned. Why was Halo Jackson calling him now? ‘I remember.’
Now that Halo had eventually got him on the line, he was apparently at a loss for what to say. Tom resisted the temptation to say, ‘What can I do for you?’ It implied that he might be prepared to do something for somebody, and he hated that kind of commitment. The silence stretched between them so long and tight that it became uncomfortable.
‘What can I do for you?’
Dammit!
‘I called you for a second opinion.’
‘On what?’
‘On what caused that 737 blade off.’
Tom hesitated. ‘Mr Jackson, I don’t even have a first opinion. I was just first-on-scene there. That really doesn’t involve any investigation. It just means preserving the evidence as early as possible for the Go Team. You’d need to speak to the lead investigator.’
‘I already did. That Munro guy? No offence, but he seems kinda like an idiot to me.’
Tom tried not to laugh, and warmed to Halo Jackson for the second time. He wasn’t about to volunteer to help him, but he certainly welcomed any anecdotal evidence against Lenny Munro. ‘In what way?’
‘In the way that means he’s wrong. His report was all wrong. He said a cigarette pack got caught in the engine but that’s bullshit.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I know cos Chris Stern din’t smoke. He just kept one cigarette – not a pack – in his top pocket. He’d take it out now and then and have, like, a fake drag, then put it away and button his pocket down again. I saw him do it a million times.’
‘Isn’t it possible—’
‘No. It ain’t possible.’
Mentally, Tom rolled his eyes. He wasn’t getting into this. ‘You know, Mr Jackson, if you have any complaints you really need to be talking to the people in DC.’
‘I already did. And the other team members.’
This surprised Tom. Jackson was a pretty persistent guy. ‘So Munro didn’t listen and DC didn’t listen?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And I’m your last port of call.’
‘That’s right.’
Tom was stung. He didn’t want this man bothering him but, hell, if he was going to be bothered, he wanted it to be as a priority, not a last resort. The last vestige of his professional persona blew away like mist. ‘Why do you give a shit?’
‘He was my friend.’
‘So? Being your friend doesn’t mean he can’t be careless. He shouldn’t have been smoking.’
‘He wasn’t. He was giving up,’ Halo countered, with spirit.
‘Listen, I saw a cigarette myself – on the floor right next to his body.’
‘You see a pack?’
‘Could have disintegrated in the turbine,’ said Tom.
‘Not if it was in his pocket.’
‘Listen,’ Tom said impatiently. ‘The guy was smoking. It’s highly likely the cigarette was in a pack and just as likely the pack could have been sucked in. It wasn’t found on his body.’
‘You saw his body, Mr Patrick.’
Tom hesitated. He knew what Halo Jackson meant – Chris Stern’s body had been severed mid-torso. The pocket of his coveralls was sliced in two. Who knew whether the cigarette and/or pack had spilled from it before or after the Pride of Maine had become a spectacular death machine? Lenny Munro’s probable cause relied on circumstantial evidence, but then, this wasn’t an exact science.
