Fatal Error

47

Salton City, California

The Salton City Pay and Tote was jammed with customers buying drinks, sandwiches, chips, snacks, and gas for their journeys home. Ali waited in line. When she turned over her stack of documents to be faxed, the harassed clerk shook her head.

“All of these? Can’t you see I’m busy? This is going to take time.”

Ali took a twenty from her purse and laid it on the counter. “That’s for you,” she said. “I’ll pay for the faxes separately.”

“Okay,” the clerk said. “Just a minute.”

It took more than a minute-lots more. The machine was balky. The first three attempts, it cut off after sending only three pages, and each time the clerk started it, she came back to the cash register to help the next person in line.

While Ali waited, she used her iPhone to scroll through her e-mail account.

During Ali’s years in California, as the wife of network executive Paul Grayson in a spare-no-expense era, she had made use of his company’s corporate jet connections on numerous occasions. Once the network started cutting costs and shedding “nonessential” personnel, the corporate jets as well as their pilots had been jettisoned at about the same time Ali had been kicked off the air.

The pilots, most of them former military, were a good bunch of guys. Somehow a few of them had banded together with some other pilots, pooled their resources, and purchased a couple of the network’s stable of secondhand jets. They had used those aircraft to start their own charter service. In turbulent financial times and against all odds, they had started You-Go Aviation and were somehow succeeding at being the low-priced spread in California’s once-thriving private jet business.

Ali wasn’t sure how her e-mail address had been added to You-Go’s customer mailing list, but she received frequent updates advertising their various specials, one of which was $1,995 an hour all in for charters flying anywhere in California, Arizona, and Nevada. Ali remembered from reading their corporate literature that from You-Go’s home base in Fresno, most flights could be done with a mere six hours’ notice where most other companies required a full twenty-four. When Ali dialed their operations center, she was hoping to take a big chunk out of the six.

The young woman who took Ali’s call sounded dubious when she asked to be put through to Allen Knox, one of You-Go’s cofounders and a pilot Ali had known well back in the old days.

“I’m sorry,” the call center clerk named Amelia told Ali. “Mr. Knox is our CEO. He doesn’t involve himself in day-to-day flight arrangements.”

“This is urgent,” Ali said. “My name is Ali Reynolds. Please give him this number.”

“Today’s a holiday. I may not be able to reach him, and even if I do, I can’t guarantee he’ll call you back.”

“Just give him the number,” Ali said. “He’ll call.”

And he did, less than five minutes later-just as Ali was paying off the faxing bill and reassembling her stack of paper.

“Hey, Ali,” Allen said. “Good to hear from you after all this time. What’s going on?”

“I’m involved in a possible kidnapping situation,” she said, fudging a little. “In order to maintain the chain of evidence, I need to get a homicide cop from Grass Valley to Palm Springs ASAP. How fast can you get someone from there to Jackie Cochran?”

“Today?”

“Yes, today.”

“How many passengers?”

“One.”

“Luggage?”

“He’ll most likely be traveling light.”

“All right, Nevada County Air Park is a pretty short runway. Hold on. Let me see if we have a CJ1 available.”

He put her on hold and was gone for some time. While she waited, Ali finished sorting and clipping her papers and bought herself a bag of chips. She needed something to soak up those many cups of Flossie Haywood’s Folgers.

“You’re in luck,” Allen said brightly. “Our new CJ1+ just put down here in Fresno. The pilot’s still here, so we don’t even have to call him out. He can refuel, file a flight plan, and be in Grass Valley in about an hour and a half. With ten minutes or so on the ground in Grass Valley, we should be able to have your guy on the ground in Palm Springs, about an hour and a half after that. So we’re talking three hours give or take. Will that work for you?”

“That works.”

“Let me put you back on the line with Amelia, then. She can take the passenger information and your credit card, give you the tail number and the address of Airpark Aviation, the FBO we use in Grass Valley. You haven’t flown with us since we became You-Go, have you?”

“Nope,” Ali said. “This is a first.”

“Well, I certainly hope it’s not the last,” Allen said. “Welcome aboard.”

Amelia worked her way through the details in a no-nonsense fashion. Once they were ironed out, Ali called Gil back, on his cell phone.

“Are you at your office yet?” she asked.

“No, I’m still at the house. I just got out of the shower. I’ll be heading out in a few minutes.”

“You might want to pack a bag,” Ali said. “You need to be at Airpark Aviation at the Grass Valley airport in about an hour. I’m sending a plane to pick you up.”

“A plane?” Gil asked. “You mean like a Cherokee or a Piper or something-one of those little outfits?”

“It’ll be a CJ1,” she told him. “A jet-definitely not a Piper.”

“Do you mind telling me where I’m going?”

“Jackie Cochran Airport outside of Palm Springs. I’ll pick you up there. Once you read the background material, you’ll understand.”

“Great.”

“One more thing,” Ali added.

“What’s that?”

“I’m assuming you’re armed. Don’t worry. Flying private, you’ll be able to wear your weapon on board with no problem. Just be sure you show up with government-issued photo ID. And if you happen to have a couple of Kevlar vests lying around, you might want to bring them along. One for you and one for me. I wear a size large.”

“You want me to bring vests?” Gil asked. “I thought the purpose of this trip was to dig up evidence with shovels. You think someone is going to be taking potshots at us?”

“You never can tell,” Ali said. “Better to have vests and not need them than the other way around.”

She hung up on Gil before he could say anything more, then she redialed High Noon. “What now?” Stuart Ramey asked when he picked up.

“Don’t you ever take any time off?”

“Not so you’d notice.”

“I need more phone info,” she said.

Stuart laughed. “I guess it pays to be the boss’s girlfriend. I was just talking to B. He said I should give you whatever you want.”

“Cell phone numbers,” she said. “For people named Mark and Ermina Blaylock.”

“The people who used to live in La Jolla but who now live in Salton City.”

“The very ones,” Ali said.

“Okay. I’ll call you back when I get something.”

Ali looked at her watch. Given the holiday traffic, she estimated it would take an hour to make it from Salton City to the airport. She had flown in and out of Jackie Cochran on occasion. The general aviation terminal there would have a place where she could work while she waited for Detective Morris to arrive.

The terminal had something else that was high on Ali’s current list of priorities-decent restrooms. After swilling down all those cups of coffee, restrooms were more than a priority, they were an absolute necessity.