Fletch, Too

The two men sitting in the tent staring up at Fletch through the dim light of the kerosene lamp said nothing.

“Do you speak Portuguese?” Fletch asked the man with the thinning, combed hair, pencil moustache.

“What do you mean?” asked Walter Fletcher.

Fletch stood just inside the open tent flap. Behind him, rain poured with a steady roar.

“I saw you,” Fletch said. “At the airport. In the men’s room.”

“Oh, my God!” Carr sat forward in his camp chair. “Say it isn’t so.”

On the box beside Carr, next to the kerosene lamp, next to the whiskey bottle, were the pottery shard and the Roman coin.

Walter Fletcher stared full-eyed at Fletch. He put his whiskey glass on the box. He resettled himself in his chair.

Ankles crossed, boot heels in the mud, hands folded in his lap, for a long moment Walter Fletcher studied Fletch’s face.

Slack-jawed, Carr was staring at Walter Fletcher.

For only a second, Walter Fletcher glanced at Carr.

Then he looked at Fletch, for another long moment.

“Well.” Abruptly, Walter Fletcher stood up. His boots were flat in the mud. He patted down the pockets of his safari jacket. Using both hands, he smoothed back his hair from his temples.

Chin up, not looking into Fletch’s face, he brushed by Fletch. He walked out of the tent into the storm.

“Where is he going?” Fletch asked.

“Nowhere he can go.” Carr remained hunched over in his camp chair. “What a box of rocks. All this time, you’ve been thinking the murderer at the airport could have been Walter Fletcher.”

Fletch shrugged. “The murderer was a local who came to meet someone at the airport … whom he did not meet.”

“Don’t you think you’d better sit down?”

“Jesus, Carr!”

“What now?”

Fletch had heard an airplane engine ignite. Carr had not.

They both heard the roar of the engine as gasoline was pushed into it.

Carr jumped up.

Together, Fletch and Carr stood outside the tent looking through the heavy rain in the dawn across the campsite at the yellow airplane with green swooshes. The cockpit lights went off. The wing and tail lights were on.

The airplane was turning around over the rough, wet ground. Wings rocking, it skittered around Carr’s plane and jounced onto the landing track.

“A plane that light can’t take off in this heavy rain,” Fletch shouted. “Can it?”

The glass in Carr’s hand had a centimeter of rainwater in it already.

Carr said, “I wouldn’t try it.”

The airplane almost made it. It splashed and swayed down the track. Its engine roared through the sound of the rain. Throwing water behind it, it lifted off the track. It rose against the tree line. For a moment it looked as if it were above the treetops.

The left wing dipped. The plane fell.

The plane’s left wing cracked against the top of a tree. The treetop shook. The tip of the wing fell into the woods. As if pivoting, engine roaring, the plane swung left around the top of the tree.

Then only the undercarriage of the tail of the airplane was visible against the sky.

From the woods was not a crash, but a thud.

Instantly, flame was visible through the undergrowth.

Carr thrust his glass into Fletch’s hand.

“I’ll go. You’re in no condition—”

Carr ran splashing through the rain.

“The flames. Carr—”

Fletch threw the glass aside. He ran, tripping over the wet ground, slipping in the mud.

Fletch hadn’t gotten far when he fell, facedown in the mud. He tried to get up, quickly. His head felt cement. Pain shot from his right shoulder. Weak from his days of fever, his arms and legs flailed the mud uselessly.

He lay stomach on the ground a moment, his right cheek, ear in the mud, just breathing.

He watched air bubbles in the mud break open.