Crash Into You (4 page)

If her sweet baby sister
were really gone, she wouldn’t know what she would do.  Tears wet her cheeks in the darkness.   Rob rubbed her back, trying to soothe her. It was going to be the longest night of her life.

Four

Guy Theriot was the first NTSB investigator at the scene of United
134, but based on the number of other rent-a-cars and vehicles with portable police lights popped on the roofs jammed along the tiny fire road on the crest of the mountain, he wasn’t the first government representative.  FBI and FAA were already out in force, their dark silhouettes thrown against the silvery dawn sky.  Overhead, news helicopters from some place big enough to afford them, Billings or Idaho Falls, circled like giant insects.  The thwap of their rotors mixed with the occasional crackle of a police radio in the cold, still air.

He
smelled the crash before he saw it.  Plumes of jet fuel wafted over the mountaintop.   Post-crash fires were extremely common; it didn’t bode well for survivors.   

He
walked past a cluster of FBI agents in their blue windbreakers and spotted some FAA guys already climbing through the wreckage, collecting evidence.  The fuselage was broken in two pieces.   The front half was mostly intact, but the back end was crushed into a billion pieces.   Debris was spread over a large area; he could make out the glint of a turbine in the sunlight in the distance.  One wing was partly intact, it’s internal wiring spilling out the broken end.  Some of the blue seats were still in neat rows. 

It was bad.  He didn’t want to rule out the possibility of survivors because he’d seen some crazy things in his day, but this did not look good.  Numerous b
ody tarps were laid out in a small clearing, attesting to the massive casualties.  Some investigators claimed to be completely indifferent to the destruction of human bodies but Theriot wasn’t one of them.  He looked away.

He recognized Kevin White,
Supervisory Special Agent of the FBI from the Salt Lake City field office. A straight-arrow kind of agent, Kevin was the kind of agent who made people happy to pay taxes.   He seemed competent and trustworthy.  Theriot had found him easy to work with the few times their paths crossed.  

“The co-pilot made it out.  He’s at
Memorial Hospital in Sweetwater,” White said.

             
“Holy shit,” Theriot muttered, looking again at the smoldering wreckage. “I’ll have to talk to him as soon as he’s able.”

             
“The paramedics said it didn’t look good.  He was really touch and go.”

             
“I believe it.”

             
Theriot sauntered across the field to the intact part of the fuselage, getting his first up close look at the damage.  In all the chaos, he noticed something odd.  Confetti.   His first impression was that confetti had rained down over the crash site, like someone had thrown a party on the wreckage.  

             
Theriot reached down and picked up one of the pieces of confetti.

It was a hundred dollar bill.

Five

Mark Spanner sprinted the last quarter mile of his run.   His legs flew over the rocky terrain of the mountain, kicking up dirt as his lungs burned from the cold morning air. 
He’d come back to Montana for the silence, and now that he had it, he ran to escape it.    All the wide open space invited images he’d rather forget,  memories he’d tried to leave in Afghanistan.

             
So he ran.  Worked, often.   Drank occasionally, though that kind of oblivion with all the collateral damage wasn’t his favorite form of escape.  

             
He was grateful for the challenge of the unforgiving terrain typical of the Bitterroot foothills; it forced his concentration, distilled the world to his footfalls and the pounding of his heart.  He blasted across the steep rocky cliffs, leaping over fallen trees and giant puddles of mud as he ran.   As he rounded a steep switchback, Spanner Ranch came into view.  The sprawling greystone house was nestled in a valley, where a snaking blue-gray river creek flowed year round, fed from high-mountain snowmelt.   In the paddock, a small palomino filly that had been born this spring was trotting on her spindly legs, leaping and playing while her mother peacefully grazed nearby.

Spanner Ranch had been the family seat
for two hundred years.  The Spanner family had founded the oil business in Montana; they drilled the first well in the state and Spanner Oil now accounted for over forty percent of the total oil produced in Montana.  

The family later bred Galloway cattle, but over the decades, the sons began to leave Montana and the agricultural heritage had bled out of the line.   By the time Mark Spanner inherited the homestead, it was a stunning
swath of land along the Madison River, sixty miles west of Whitefish, producing nothing.  Mark leased some acreage to a family for their cows to graze, and he was boarding the horses as a favor to another friend.  He had to admit, he had grown fond of that little filly.  But it was no longer a working ranch.  

             
Two summers ago, Mark tore down the old buildings and built a spacious, modern house of stone and wood and glass on the property.   It was a comfortable, secluded sanctuary, which was why he had moved here for the foreseeable future.   He needed to think.  He needed to figure out what to do with his life after Afghanistan and the scandals in Washington D.C. 

             
He flew down the last fifty meters of the mountain and began sprinting for the house.  

             
As he crossed an imaginary finish line, he slowed to a walk.   The wind whipped his face; he felt the change of the seasons in the air.   It was almost Labor Day and he still had no idea what he was doing with his life.

He walked to the paddock and let
himself inside.  The pony looked at him like she couldn’t decide whether he was a playmate or predator.  She walked over cautiously, stretching her neck and flaring her nostrils, but didn’t object when he reached out to pet her shoulder. She needed a jacket.  She was only two months old, and the weather was turning; these high mountain mornings were frosty and cold. 

             
Mark jogged to the barn and turned on the overhead lights.   Though he had a row of seven box stalls, only two contained horses.  He had boarded them side-by-side, in stalls heaped with clean straw bedding over a rubber mat to protect their feet from the cold concrete floor.  

             
“Hello Bess, hello Millie,” he said as he wandered over to the tack room to fetch the filly’s blanket.

             
Bess whinnied in response.  They were eager to get out and play as well, but he didn’t want to get the filly to get overwhelmed just yet.  The palominos, owned by Joanna Wells, stared at him as if to remind him that daylight was wasting and they didn’t appreciate being cooped up.   Joanna had gone to Boise for the birth of her daughter’s first child, and asked if he could board her horses.   She’d offered him money and he’d laughed it off, refusing payment.  He had room, and he enjoyed working with horses. 

             
He walked back into the brilliant sunshine and approached the filly, then buckled the blanket over her.   She didn’t seem to mind as she cantered away, her tiny hooves flashing.  He wanted to name her, but didn’t think it was his place.  

             
May, his twelve-week old Siberian puppy, was waiting for him in the house.   She too was eager to get outside, but she gamely followed him to the kitchen where Mark halved some apples and carrots to be served with the horses’ regular oats and hay.  He carried a burlap sack of the fruit-and-veggie mix back to the barn, May running ahead.

             
He had barely entered the barn when he heard May let out a strange whimpering whine.  “What’s wrong, May?” he said aloud as he offered Bess an apple.  The horse daintily took it from his palm and began to gnaw.

             
Suddenly May let out a loud, high-pitched howl as if she were in pain.   Mark had never heard her make that kind of sound before.  He put down the food on the large pine worktable and walked down the long hallway paved with bricks.  At the end of the walkway was a T intersection.  To the right was a ladder that led up to the hayloft.  To the left was a little wasted space, where Mark kept some bales of hay and straw for the horses.    It was there, in the dimly lit corner that May was quivering with every cell aware, vibrating with urgency.  In the stacked hay, barely covered by a horse blanket, was a woman.  A girl.

             
A shock of long, chocolate brown hair was tangled in the lighter colored hay, her face in profile, facing away from him.  She was lying very still in what looked like an unnaturally stiff position.  

             
Dreading what he might see upon closer inspection, Mark approached. Her skin was ever so slightly bluish, but that might be a trick of the weird barn light.  Very pale, in any case.  He gently pressed two fingers to her carotid artery and was relieved – and frankly surprised – that she had a shallow, rapid pulse.   Classic symptom of shock.

             
She suddenly turned her head and opened her eyes.  Green irises, ringed with yellow.   The left eye was wreathed by a nasty purple bruise, and the swollen flesh beneath was yellow, which meant she’d gotten it over twenty-four hours ago.   The bottom crescent of that eye was full of blood.

             
Her cheekbone might be broken.  Sometimes with significant eye wounds like that, the orbital socket would break and crack the cheekbone, then the broken capillaries and vessels would leak blood into the eyes.

             
“Are you okay?” he asked and knelt down beside her.

             
She made a little squeaking sound as tears began to glisten in her red-rimmed eyes.  Her lids fluttered closed.  He noticed then that she also had a goose egg knot on her temple.

             
“My name is Mark,” he said.  “I’m a doctor. I’m going to get you some help.”

             
She tried to shake her head but she winced, and then whimpered a little bit from the pain.  Small tears trickled down her temples.   She lifted her hand to brush away the tears, and he noticed that her wrist and the back of her hand were nearly black with bruising.

             
“Is anyone else here?” he asked, looking around.

             
She shook her head almost imperceptibly. 

             
“Is your neck injured?”

             
“Don’t know,” she rasped in a tiny voice.  “Bruised, I think.”

             
“What’s your name?”

             
She pinched her lips together as if she were in pain.  “Um… Lauren.”

             
“Okay Lauren, are you able to move?  Is anything broken?”

             
“Don’t think so.”

             
“You’re obviously in a lot of pain.   I’m going to pick you up very carefully.  Then I am going to take you to a hospital.”

             
At the mention of a hospital, her eyes widened.   “No, please,” she whispered in a labored rasp in a way that made him think she might have a collapsed lung. She began to try and push herself out of the hay, wincing as she did. 

             
“Whoa,” Mark said, easing her back.  “Relax.  I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

             
“I’m fine,” she said, her jaw clenched.  “No hospital.  Please.”

             
You are not fine.
“Okay,” Mark said to calm her down.

             
Her lips compressed into a line of pain.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to … I’m sorry.”

             
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” he replied soothingly.   “Were you in a car accident?”

             
The girl cast her eyes away.

             
Trauma affected people in weird ways; Mark knew that from first-hand experience.   Not willing to cause her any more pain, he dropped that line of questioning.  “I won’t take you to the hospital unless you’re in danger of dying or something is broken.”

             
“Promise,” she whispered.

             
Mark didn’t make promises about anything.  He was certainly in no mood to make one now when he was focused on saving her life.  But she was very frightened and whatever happened to her had caused significant trauma.  His first priority was to keep her calm.  “I promise,” he said.   “I’m going to pick you up and take you to my house so I can examine you.  It’s not far.”

             
Standing over her, he slid his arms under her knees and under her back and lifted her. A little noise of glancing pain escaped her lips as he lifted her, but she settled her head against his chest quietly and shut her eyes.  She was like a little bird in his arms, weighing nothing.