Heat (28 page)

A
t dawn Jesse was yawning, trying to stay awake. He had expended so much adrenaline in the past few hours that he had precious little to get him through the remainder of the flight. He did an instrument scan to keep himself awake. They had a nice, twenty-knot quartering wind, he thought, since the ground speed on the GPS was that much faster than their airspeed, as shown on the gauge.

They were an hour out of Salt Lake City, and they had fuel for another two hours and twenty minutes of flight. They were in good shape. The only thing that worried him now was a thick layer of clouds about a thousand feet under them. He hoped that would break up before Salt Lake City, because he had no idea how to fly an instrument approach. He checked the back seat; the girls were still sound asleep.

Jenny stirred and opened her eyes. She was turned toward him, a blanket over her, and she pushed it away to have room to stretch.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Okay, I think. I seem to have gotten some sleep.” She reached over to kiss him on the neck.

As Jenny pulled back from him he smiled at her, and he saw her eyes widen. She put her headset on.

“What's the matter?” he asked.

She pointed past him. “Look,” she said.

He swiveled in his seat and looked out the left side of the airplane. There, a mile and a half or two miles away, was a bright red shape.

“It's an airplane,” Jenny said.

“You're right; I guess we're not alone up here, even at this hour of the day.”

“What kind is it?” she asked, and she sounded worried.

Jesse squinted at the shape. “Low-winged, looks like a Piper.” He looked back at her.

“Jack Gene has a Piper Commanche,” she said. “And it's red.”

Now the conversation about airplanes between Coldwater and the Reverend Packard came back to Jesse: Packard had the King Air, and Coldwater had said he owned a Commanche. Something else came back; in the big hangar at St. Clair, the airplane immediately behind the Cessna had been a red Piper. He looked back at the airplane, but the sun was now peeping above the clouds, and it blinded him.

Had the occupants of the Piper seen them? Certainly, the Cessna, given its position in relation to the sun, would be easy to see. Certainly, too, if Coldwater and Casey were in the Piper, they had figured out where he was going. Salt Lake City was certainly the logical airport, if the Cessna was heading south.

“It's Jack Gene, I know it,” Jenny said. “What can we do?”

Jesse unfolded the chart in his lap. There were other airports he could head to, but they were smaller towns, without easy air connections to the coast. His eye fell on the southern tip of Nevada. Quickly, he
picked up the airport directory and looked up Las Vegas. There were three airports; Las Vegas International, for scheduled service, North Las Vegas, which looked like the place where corporate jets might go, and one other: Henderson Sky Harbor. Sky Harbor was smaller than the other two, and a little farther from the city; its only services were fuel and rental cars. Jesse dialed the identifier, L15, into the GPS and pushed the button twice. They were three hundred and twenty-one miles from Sky Harbor, Las Vegas. He tuned the course into the autopilot, and the airplane turned right, then settled down on the new course. Jesse waited until the ground speed settled down, then checked the time to the airport. The new course did not take as much advantage from the wind: two hours and thirty-one minutes. He looked at the fuel computer for their remaining flying time: two hours and sixteen minutes.

“Oh, shit,” Jesse muttered to himself.

“What did you say?”

“I said, we're going to Las Vegas,” he said, reducing rpm's by a couple of hundred. He watched the fuel computer recalculate: they now had two hours and twenty minutes of flying time.

“Is everything all right?” Jenny asked.

“Everything's fine,” Jesse lied. On their present heading they would cross one of the emptiest deserts in the United States, and Jesse didn't want to think about being on foot out there. He switched the GPS to its calculator mode; there was some sort of wind speed function in there somewhere; he was sure he had read about it. He found what he thought was the right function; he entered his true airspeed and heading, and the computer showed the winds to be twenty-three knots from 300 degrees. If the wind stayed where it was, they would run out of fuel eleven minutes from the airport; if the wind moved toward the west, ahead of them,
they would run out of fuel over an empty desert; if the wind moved to the north, behind them, they might make the airport. Jesse decided to gamble.

He searched his memory for discussions with his first flying instructor about airplanes. What sort of range did a Piper Commanche have? As much as a Cessna 182? More? Less? Jesse prayed that it had less range.

As he thought about this, he looked out the right side of the airplane. There, a mile or so away and slightly behind them, sat the red Piper. Jesse pored over the chart again. There was an airport called Morman Mesa, fifty or seventy-five miles northeast of Las Vegas. If, when he reached Morman Mesa, the fuel computer and the GPS told him he still didn't have enough fuel for Las Vegas, he could land there.

But it was a small place, and it could be a dead end for him. He leafed through the airport directory until he found Morman Mesa: there was a two-thousand foot dirt strip there, with fuel by prior arrangement, whatever that meant. Probably, you had to have an appointment with somebody. No rental cars. He did
not
want to land at Morman Mesa.

Jesse got the aircraft operator's manual out and read about fuel. The wings held thirty-eight gallons of usable fuel each, for a total of seventy-six.
Usable fuel
. There were another two gallons on each side that the FAA considered unusable, because it could not be depended upon, especially if the aircraft was maneuvering, as in a landing.

 

An hour and quarter passed. The red Piper remained a mile off their right wing. Slowly, tentatively, the wind swung to the north. Jesse recalculated the windspeed every five minutes. The Cessna's ground speed inched up six knots. A comparison of the GPS and
the fuel computer showed forty-four minutes of flying time left and forty-two minutes of fuel. Morman Mesa was looming ahead, and if Jesse was going to land there he had to make the decision now. He looked over at the Piper. “You first,” he said.

As if the pilot had heard him, the red airplane began a descent. Jesse laughed aloud. “He doesn't have the fuel for Las Vegas,” he said to Jenny. “He has to land at a jerkwater airport and try to find somebody to sell him fuel. Once we're in Vegas, he'd need an army of cops to find us.”

Jesse consulted the GPS and the fuel computer again. Either of them could be wrong, he knew; his first instructor had told him often enough
never
to rely entirely on electronic equipment. He had made his decision. Sky Harbor, Las Vegas, even if it had to be on unusable fuel.

With thirty minutes of flying time showing on the fuel computer a light began to flash. “Low fuel,” it said, over and over. Jesse couldn't find a way to turn the thing off.

F
ifty miles out of Las Vegas, Jesse tuned in the unicom frequency for the airport. “Sky Harbor Unicom,” he said, “This is November one, two, three Tango Foxtrot. Do you read?” Nothing. He repeated the transmission until, twenty miles out, he got an answer.

“Aircraft calling Sky Harbor,” a voice with a thick foreign accent said.

“Sky Harbor, this is November one, two, three Tango Foxtrot. My name is Smith; I'm landing in fifteen minutes; can you arrange a rent-a-car for me?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Smith,” the voice said. “The active runway is three-six.”

Jenny had not noticed the blinking “low fuel” light, and Jesse saw no need to mention it to her. He began to get ready for his landing. He had descended to thirty-five hundred feet and reduced power when he spotted the airport at twelve o'clock. His instruments said he had four minutes to the airport and three minutes of fuel. He was approaching from the north, so in order to land on runway three-six he
would have to fly around the airport and turn back to the north. The hell with runway three-six, he thought. I'm approaching from the north, and I'm going straight in to one-eight. He got on the radio. “Sky Harbor traffic, Sky Harbor traffic, this is November one, two, three, Tango Foxtrot. I am short of fuel, and I am straight in for runway one-eight.”

A voice came back, “Tango Foxtrot, this is Whiskey Romeo; the active runway is three-six, and I'm already on base.”

Jesse had the runway in sight now. “Whiskey Romeo and all Sky Harbor traffic, Tango Foxtrot is on a three-mile final for three-six and short of fuel. I say again, short of fuel. I'm landing on one-eight, so get the hell out of my way.”

There was a brief silence. “This is Whiskey Romeo; one-eight is all yours.”

Over the runway numbers, Jesse began to breathe normally again. He taxied toward a row of tied-down airplanes and spotted a space between two other Cessnas. Camouflage, he thought. He turned into the space and stopped. As he reached for the mixture control to stop the engine, it stopped itself. The airplane was out of fuel.

“Okay, everybody, out of the airplane!” he cried.

Jenny woke the girls and, carrying their luggage, they walked to the terminal. Jesse kept a particularly tight grip on the plastic bag.

He persuaded the man at the counter to accept a five hundred-dollar cash deposit in lieu of a credit card, and a hundred-dollar bill for himself, in lieu of a driver's license. Jesse explained that he had left his wallet at home.

The car was filthy; it appeared never to have been washed, the ashtrays were full and it had eighty thousand miles on the speedometer, but Jesse loved it. No one would give it a second glance. On the drive into town, a
happy thought occurred to him: they were in the one city in the United States where no one would bat an eye at the sight of large numbers of one-hundred-dollar bills.

 

They drove down the main drag, blinking in the desert sunlight and agog at all the neon. Jesse picked the biggest, gaudiest hotel he could see and pulled into the driveway.

“Checking in, sir?” a doorman asked.

“You bet.” Jesse handed him the keys. “Take everything in the trunk, please.” The man began removing their bags. “I'll carry this one,” Jesse said, taking the plastic bag from him. As they were about to enter the hotel, there was a huge roar behind them. They turned and stood, transfixed, as a man-made volcano erupted before their eyes. “Only in America,” Jesse said to the sleepy girls.

Jesse presented himself at the front desk. “I'd like a two-bedroom suite, something very nice,” he said to the desk clerk.

The young man typed a few strokes on his computer keyboard. “I'm afraid we don't have anything at all, sir,” he said, eyeing the rough-looking man in the sheepskin coat with the hillbilly accent.

Jesse placed the plastic bag on the counter, counted out ten banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills and stacked them on the counter. “And I'd like a hundred one-thousand-dollar chips,” he said.

A sharp-eyed older man in an expensive suit practically elbowed the clerk out of the way. “Good morning, Mr….?”

“Churchill,” Jesse said. “W. S. Churchill.”

The man scribbled out a receipt for Jesse's money, then hit a bell on the desk. A bellhop materialized. “Take the Churchill family up to the Frank Sinatra suite,” he said to the man, then turned back to Jesse.
“Your accommodations and all your food and drink will be compliments of the house, Mr. Churchill. May I send your chips up to your suite?”

“Thank you, yes,” Jesse said. They followed the bellman toward the elevators.

Jenny tugged at Jesse's sleeve. “Did that man mean everything is
free
?”

“Sweetheart, when you can afford to buy it, you often don't have to,” Jesse replied.

“I don't understand this place at all,” Jenny muttered as they got onto the elevator.

 

The following morning, they breakfasted
en famille
on their rooftop terrace. The living room was filled with boxes and tissue paper and luggage from their shopping, and there were one hundred and twelve one-thousand-dollar chips on the coffee table. Jesse had been down nineteen thousand dollars at one point, but he had come out ahead.

Jesse was transfixed by the
New York Times
. The story began on page one and was continued inside on two full pages. The explosion at St. Clair was being compared to Mount St. Helen. Troops were in charge of the town, hundreds of people were being questioned at the church and, in spite of sporadic gunfights, casualties were light, and there had been only two deaths, the guards on the mountaintop. Jack Gene Coldwater and his principal lieutenants were presumed dead in the explosion. He'd have to do something about that.

Jesse got up from the table and found the plastic bag. He emptied all the money into a new plastic briefcase, then took the papers from Coldwater's safe and spread them out on the coffee table. Jesse became short of breath. The documents were bank statements from all over the world, and, at a rough calculation, the balances totaled something over fifty million dollars in
Coldwater's accounts alone. Letters from the various banks contained the secret numbers for all the accounts—Coldwater, Casey and Ruger's.

It occurred to Jesse that he was now rich beyond his wildest dreams. If he wanted that. He thought about it for a while, then he put the documents in an envelope, along with the recorder he had worn, and scribbled an address. He picked up the phone and asked the hotel manager to come to his suite.

When the doorbell rang he cinched his new silk robe around his waist and went to answer it. The manager stood at the door. “Good morning, Mr. Churchill. You wished to see me?”

“Yes, please come in,” Jesse replied.

The man removed an envelope from his breast pocket. “Incidentally, here are the air tickets to Los Angeles you requested.”

“Thank you.” Jesse had made Tokyo reservations from Los Angeles in their new name at a travel agent's. “Please have a seat.” The two men sat in chairs on opposite sides of the coffee table.

“What else can I do for you, Mr. Churchill?” the manager asked.

Jesse set a plastic briefcase on the coffee table beside his chips. “I have a hundred and twelve thousand dollars in chips to cash in, and inside this case is another one million, four hundred thousand dollars in cash, all quite legal, I assure you. I probably shouldn't be carrying around this much cash, and I would like your advice as to what sorts of negotiable instruments I could exchange it for.”

“Will you be traveling abroad?” the man asked.

“Possibly.”

“I would suggest either gold certificates or bearer bonds,” the manager said. “Either can be negotiated at any large bank in the world in a matter of hours, and I could arrange either for you by lunchtime.”

Jesse scooped the chips into a large ashtray and handed them to the manager, along with the briefcase. “A million and a half in bearer bonds will do very nicely,” he said. “I'm sure there will be some fees and commissions involved; the extra twelve thousand in chips should cover that.”

“Oh, much more than cover it,” the manager said.

“See that anything left over goes to your favorite charity,” Jesse said.

“Thank you, sir,” the man said, writing out a receipt for the funds. “Will there be anything else?”

Jesse held out his parking check. “Would you see that this rent-a-car is returned to Sky Harbor airport as soon as possible. There's a five-hundred-dollar cash deposit there; that can go to charity, too. And may we have your limousine for the airport at two o'clock?”

“Of course.”

“One other thing.” He handed the manager the large envelope containing Coldwater's banking documents. “I want to send a friend this package, and I don't want him to know where it came from; sort of a little joke.”

“I understand,” the manager said. “Perhaps I could forward it through our New York office.”

“Excellent. Could you Federal Express it to them and have them take it to a FedEx office there and resend it?”

“Of course.” The manager looked at the envelope and repeated the address. “Mr. Kipling Fuller, Nashua Building Products, 1010 Parkway, College Park, Maryland.”

“That's it. And I think that's all you can do for me.”

The manager stood. “May I say what a great pleasure it has been having you and your family as guests in our hotel? We hope you'll come back soon and often.”

“Thank you very much. You may be sure that when we are in Las Vegas we will always stay with you.”

 

At two o'clock, the Churchill family departed the hotel in the longest limousine Jesse had ever seen, even in Miami. Outside the terminal, Jesse dropped a paper bag containing his pistol in a trash can. The luggage was checked at the curb and the skycap handed Jesse his baggage tickets.

“Gate three, sir; you have thirty-five minutes before your flight.”

Jesse gave the man twenty dollars and followed his family to the departure lounge. He had been there for ten minutes when a uniformed airline employee approached.

“Excuse me, Mr. Churchill, there's a problem with a piece of your luggage; could you follow me, please?”

“What sort of problem?” Jesse asked.

“They didn't say, but it should only take a moment.”

Jesse turned to Jenny. “I'll be right back, but in any case, you get on that plane, you hear?” He handed her the briefcase containing the bearer bonds. “Take care of this.”

She nodded.

Jesse got up and followed the man across the lounge and down a flight of stairs. “Down at the end, there,” the man said, pausing at the bottom of the stairs and pointing at a door a hundred feet away.

“Thanks,” Jesse said. He walked through the area, where baggage was being moved to and from airplanes, then came to a door marked, “M. Quentin, Baggage Manager.”

 

Jesse stepped into the office. A man seated at a desk looked up.

“Hello, Jesse,” Coldwater said.