Final Payment

Chapter Twelve

Jerry Turner’s plane waited on the tarmac beside the fuel pump island. The aircraft looked a good deal smaller out of its hangar. Bergin had fussed over the Cessna, including taking the time to drain any suspect fuel from the wing tanks and refill them with fresh avgas.

Bergin stood under the left wing, one hand resting on the strut. “All set?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” she replied, and clambered inside.

“All the way across to the right seat,” Bergin said.

“Odd that there’s no door on the passenger side,” Estelle said, feeling claustrophobic immediately. As she strapped herself into the cramped confines of the Cessna, she felt a surge of adrenaline. Had the killer strapped himself into this same seat, in command of the situation? Or had he curled up in the back with the others, smelling their sweat, their excitement, eventually their fear?

She turned and looked back through the empty cabin, trying to picture how the three people had squeezed some comfort out of the cramped quarters, with nothing but the flat aluminum floor to sit on. Only the two front seats remained-Turner had taken out the other four when he and Jim Bergin had flown the new beacon back to Posadas.

And not a scrap of luggage-not even a plastic bag filled with underwear and socks to use as a pillow.

Her position suggested one small answer, even as Bergin climbed into the left seat. If the killer had ridden up front, as she was doing right now, he would have had two choices when the aircraft stopped-squeeze into the back between the two front seats or wait for the pilot to exit the plane, allowing the killer to follow.

The other choice was simple enough: the killer had piloted the airplane. Perhaps the father had ridden in the right seat up front, leaving only the woman and her son to make do in back.

“You thought about the route you want to take?” Bergin asked. He held a small flashlight and scanned a printed checklist clipped to an aluminum thigh-board.

“I don’t think it matters,” Estelle said. “We’re betting that the victims came into the country from the south-nothing else makes sense to me. Whether they flew across to the east, over by María, or through Regál…we have no way of knowing. What doesn’t make sense is thinking that they came in right over the top of the mountains.” Looking through the freshly polished windshield, she could not see the San Cristóbals, but she knew they loomed ahead to the southwest, a long dark lump of rock waiting to reach out and grab aluminum.

Bergin held both hands out to form the shape of a football. He lifted his right. “Regál’s at one end of the mountains.” He lifted his left hand. “María’s at the other. You want to try west?”

“That’ll work.”

He nodded and returned to his preflight chores. As an afterthought, he said, “And the mountains don’t matter, Estelle. Not with this airplane. She’s got the power to handle anything, even loaded on top. If they wanted to come straight in over the mountains and then drop down, well…that’s easy enough. A lot of folks don’t understand mountains. As long as you don’t fly into one, it don’t matter a whole hell of a lot how high they are, or how rugged. To an airplane that can easily top sixteen, eighteen thousand feet, a ten-thousand-foot mountain doesn’t amount to a thing.”

He finished the first portion of the list, scanned the dashboard again, and then started the engine, coaxing it gently to life. The big six-cylinder shook the entire airframe until it settled into quiet idle. Bergin relaxed the brakes and let the plane move away from the fuel island. As they rolled down the taxiway, he continued his checklist, glancing ahead now and then to make sure some night beast wasn’t standing in the middle of the taxiway. As they neared the turnaround donut at the east end, he turned and glanced at Estelle. His voice through the headset was relaxed.

“You want me to use the runway lights? We turn ’em on with the mike,” and he held up the handset. “But I don’t think someone comin’ in with a stolen plane would do that. He sure as hell didn’t have lights at the gas company’s strip.”

“Whatever you think is best,” she said.

He laughed, the crackle of the radio making his voice sound metallic and artificial. “What I think is best is to be home and curled around a nice glass of bourbon.”

“Afterward,” Estelle said.

“Yeah, sure.” He completed the run-up, the plane shaking against its brakes, watching the rpm’s carefully as he checked each magneto and cycled the propeller three times. Finally satisfied that the engine would behave itself, he toggled the mike button on the control yoke. “Posadas Unicom, Cessna niner two Hotel is taking two seven. Lights inoperative.” The words shot out into the electronic airways, and Bergin waited for a moment, the Cessna parked perpendicular to the active runway. “He wouldn’t have done that, either,” he said after a minute. “You all set?”

“Sure.”

“Then let’s boogie,” Bergin said. He fed in power and the Cessna trundled out onto the asphalt runway. Estelle rested her feet lightly on the pedals, feeling them work. The landing lights in the Cessna’s left wing picked up the white centerlines, and the thrust pushed Estelle back in her seat as Bergin firewalled the throttle. In a thousand feet or less, the vibration of wheels against pavement ceased and Estelle felt an odd surge of disorientation as the landing light halo on the asphalt disappeared. They thundered up into the night, and as they turned south, she saw the spread of village lights off to the left.

“It makes a good landmark,” Bergin said. He reached forward with his right hand and popped a circuit breaker, dousing the plane’s dash lights, plunging them into complete darkness. His left hand held the yoke back, keeping the Cessna in a steep, spiral climb. “You want to be scanning for moving lights, things that aren’t stars,” he said. “Red light on the right, green on the left. There’s not a lot of traffic out here, but there’s some-and it ain’t all legal.”

After a minute, the nose sank as Bergin pulled back on the power and spun the trim wheel. Receding behind them, the mat of lights that was the village spread thin and frayed around the edges, and Estelle strained to see the dark outline of the mountains to the south. “How high are we?”

“About fifteen hundred feet.” He rested a hand on the dash cowl, pointing off to the right, over toward the Torrance Ranch to the northwest. Headlights inched across the desert, then abruptly disappeared. “See that vehicle? A turn, a tree, go behind a barn-it don’t take much to hide lights,” he said. “Not when you have a picture this big. It’ll take your eyes a while to get used to it. Just relax and drink it all in.”

A set of lights appeared far out to the southwest, just a pinprick through the trees.

“That’s comin’ over Regál Pass,” Bergin said.

“And it’s unlikely that he could see us,” Estelle said.

“Especially if I turned out the nav strobes,” Bergin said. He looked over at Estelle. “But I ain’t about to do that. They don’t bother us none. But chances are good your flyboy had his off. Flyin’ dark.”

She leaned forward, staring into what first looked like an endless void. But as her eyes adjusted, she could make out the smooth shadow that marked the mountains against the sky. Here and there, a single faint light marked a ranch or vehicle. “You have to know where you are,” she said. “Are we on someone’s radar now?”

“We might be. Get a little higher, and we might show up on the screen at Cruces. Other than that, someone would have to be lookin’. And contrary to popular belief, they aren’t always. One thing’s for sure-whoever did this knew the country.” He relaxed back, eyes still scanning the heavens. “There’s three ways to fly at night. One is to know the country. Or you can trust your instruments-and this plane’s equipment isn’t adequate for IFR. Or you can be damn fool lucky.”

“Can you fly west to about Encinal? That would put us past the mountain. Then turn around and come back to the strip.”

“We can do that.” Bergin pointed again. “If you look northwest, way out, you can see that faint wash of light? That’s Lordsburg. And stare right through the spinner, you’ll catch the glint of the state highway heading down to the pass at Regál. We got just enough moon that it picks up on the shine of the asphalt.”

“That’s how he found the gas company’s airstrip, then.”

“Helps. But he had to know it was there, Estelle. He had to. For one thing, no matter what direction you approach the runway, you got the village lights in your eyes. It ain’t much, but it’s enough to kill a lot of your night vision and be a distraction.”

A surge of air bumped the airplane upward, and then just as smoothly let it back down, like riding a small boat over a large smooth wave. Bergin paralleled the San Cristóbals, staying as far south of State Highway 56 as he could and still keep an obvious margin of safety between the plane and the sawtoothed mountain ridge. Estelle picked out the single small light of the Broken Spur Saloon, and knew that just a mile or so farther down the highway, County Road 14 came in from the north.

“If he flew around the west end of the mountain, he’s got a pretty good valley there. He could stay low, out of anybody’s radar,” Bergin said.

“How low?” Estelle asked.

Bergin’s electronic chuckle crackled in her headphones. “Two feet? Ten feet? You got one set of power transmission lines that runs east-west down there, and that’s it. It’s marked on the nav chart. Other than that, the tallest thing is a runty juniper. And those dirt roads show up pretty well at night, too. Good landmarks. See,” and he shifted a little in his seat, fingers resting feather-light on the control yoke. “Most folks think it’s a hair-raising, dangerous thing to fly low. But I gotta tell you-low ain’t what kills you. It’s hittin’ things that ruins your day. Trees, barns, stock tanks, trains…even power poles. The truth is, you can leave a nice trail down a dirt road, flyin’ so low that your tires suck dust. Don’t hurt, as long as you don’t catch a post, or a tree, or a power pole. You got to pay attention. No trick to it.” He adjusted his position in the seat. “Crop dusters do it on a daily basis. When they kill themselves, it’s almost always from hitting something they should have avoided. Like the ground.” His chuckle sounded like static in the headphones.

“In fact,” he added, “you get down low enough, and you have a good cushion of compressed air between the wings and the ground. That’s called ground effect, and you can make it work for you.”

“So he could avoid being spotted on the radar.”

Bergin grunted in disdain. “’Course he could. That’s one of the great myths, that radar sees all. Radar is good-if it’s turned on, and if someone is looking. But it can’t see through mountains, and it can’t bend around corners and peek down valleys.”

In a moment, Estelle saw a faint twinkle to the southwest, the lights of three or four ranch houses that marked Encinal, a tiny settlement near the far west end of the San Cristóbals, well out of Posadas County. Farther to the northwest, the spread of Lordsburg’s lights had grown, and she could see the necklace of traffic on the interstate.

“For what it’s worth, my guess is that they came around the mountains,” Bergin said. He pointed toward Encinal. “Come up the valley there, and you’re out of sight. You got just the one power line to remember, and a road to follow.” He turned in a quick, sharp bank southward toward the mountain, flying directly toward Regál Pass until Estelle felt the slight sag of air flowing over the peak. Bergin turned then, and cut the power, letting the Cessna sink in a graceful turn back around to the north, away from the mountain.

“I’m going to take us down to about five hundred feet,” he said. “That’s low enough to give you the impression.”

“How high do you think he was?”

“A lot lower than that. He was. Not us.”

Twisting in her seat, Estelle searched the darkness off to the northeast until she once again found the two sodium vapor lights in the parking lot of the Broken Spur Saloon. A faint mark that might have been the gas company’s runway stood out only because it was perfectly straight and defined in a dark world of smooth, dark shapes. A couple of miles north, two faint lights marked what would be Herb Torrance’s ranch.

She held up her cell phone. “Can I use this in here?”

Bergin nodded. “You won’t hear diddly, but knock yourself out. They’ll hear you okay.” She slipped off the headset, blocked her opposite ear, and held her cell phone tight to her head after dialing. Torrez’s response was difficult to hear on any phone, but this was all but impossible. She spoke loudly and slowly, hoping he could hear her.

“Bobby, we’re southwest of your position, and we’ll be heading in.” He said something she couldn’t understand, and she added, “Not a single flashlight,” although she knew that the sheriff didn’t need the reminder. “No headlights.”

“Got it,” he said, and this time she could hear him clearly.

They banked sharply, turning back toward the northeast. Bergin backed off the throttle again, and the sensation of the ton of aluminum sinking out of the sky was unsettling. “He would have wanted to land headed toward the west,” he said. “The other way, the village lights on the horizon are in his eyes. That’d be tricky as hell. I don’t feel like bein’ tricky. And most of the time, winds would have been in his favor, coming out of the west.”

After a moment, the flaps spooled down and the plane humped as if someone had pushed it in the belly. “You see the runway?” he asked. Estelle stretched up, trying to see over the high dash. “Right there.”

If she imagined hard enough, she could see the ghost of moon- and starlight on asphalt, and what she thought might be the white roof of a vehicle pulled off into the grass.

“When we line up on the runway, Posadas will be behind us,” Bergin said.

They were so low that as they banked north on the base leg to the runway, Estelle could count four vehicles in the saloon’s parking lot.

“They would have heard it,” she said to herself, but Bergin’s voice popped in her earpiece.

“Not necessarily,” he said. The engine was idling, the prop windmilling as they settled. “We ain’t stealth, but it don’t make much noise when it’s not pullin’ power. And if the wind’s right…” In a few seconds, he added, “That’s pretty good,” and the Cessna banked left again, lining on its final approach. The strip looked ridiculously tiny through the windscreen, still indistinct and ghostly. Her stomach rose as the flaps hung low, two aluminum barn doors rattling gently in the airstream.

The approach seemed terribly steep, and Estelle glanced across at Bergin. His left hand held the yoke firmly, his right resting almost nonchalantly on the throttle. “It’s all visual,” he said, as if sensing his passenger’s unease, and Estelle tensed, wishing he’d narrate some other time. “If you turn on the instrument lights, you lose your night vision.”

He reached out and flipped a switch, and the shaft of the landing light lanced ahead from the left wing. The air was so smooth that it felt as if they hung suspended and motionless while the dirt county road approached at dizzying speed, rushing up to meet them. Only at the last moment did the rusted wire of the fence catch the light, and then they were over it and settling onto the pavement. The tires kicked dust and Bergin pulled the throttle to the stops, holding the front wheel off the tarmac as long as he could, using the big, flat wings and flaps for drag.

“Lots of room,” he said with satisfaction. The landing lights picked up asphalt and, along the edge, prairie vegetation, but nothing else.

“Can you swing around right at the end of the runway?”

“Going to have to.” Bergin laughed. “This boat don’t have reverse.” He swung wide to the right as the end of the strip approached, and Estelle could see the yellow crime scene ribbon. “You say when,” he said. “You want me to drop a wheel off, too?” He had been amused earlier at Estelle’s description of the maneuver.

“Yes.” She slipped off the headphones again and keyed the cell phone. “Bobby? Have someone mark the tire marks for us.” Bergin slowed the Cessna to a slow walk, and they saw Eddie Mitchell appear out of the darkness, pointing with both hands toward the cast print.

“We need to miss that, Jim,” she said. “Maybe you can swing around this side of it a bit.”

“Prop wash is going to blow sand,” he said. “Will that hurt anything?”

“I don’t think so.”

As they started their turn, Bergin shrugged. “He didn’t have any reason to drop off a wheel,” he said. “Runway is plenty wide, and this old bird will turn on a dime and hand you lots of change. With differential brakes, you can just pivot around one of the mains.”

That was evidently the case, since Bergin had to relax his turn considerably to run off the pavement on the opposite side of the runway.

“Maybe something distracted him,” he said. “You want me to stop?”

“Yes,” she said, and the plane jerked a little, the right wheel off in the sandy gravel beside the macadam. “He let them out while he was parked off the strip.” Her hand groped for a good handle as Bergin pulled the throttle back, the engine idling with a deep-throated burble. She paused, remembering that she had no passenger door. If the killer had been riding in the right front seat, he would have had to slip into the back-a contortionist’s maneuver if there ever was one-or wait for the pilot to deplane. If the killer was the pilot, he would have to leave the airplane untended while he got out and did his business.

She twisted in her seat and tried to look out the back. The Cessna’s small, sloping rear windows provided little visibility. Anyone deplaning would have done so into the darkness, with nothing other than their personal flashlights-if they had them. None had been found. There were no parked cars, with headlights to guide the arrivals. In all likelihood, she realized, the three victims had been herded like sheep, around the rear of the airplane, out beyond the end of the runway.

The prop ticked to a stop as the engine died, and Bergin set the plane’s parking brake.

“My side,” he reminded Estelle. “Take your time.” He slid out and Estelle followed, impressed with how awkward the whole process was.

Had the pilot not been involved, he might have remained with the Cessna, the engine running, unable to see what was happening behind his airplane. Estelle stood just aft of the wing. How many in the plane, then? Three victims, one pilot. A minimum of four. Maybe five. Perhaps even six.

Estelle turned at the sound of boots crunching on gravel. Sheriff Torrez appeared out of the darkness.

“Well?” he asked.

She moved away from the plane, toward the tail. “Why here, Bobby?” She reached out and rested a hand on the Cessna’s horizontal stabilizer. “We need to find out the answer to that.”