Low Pressure

Chapter 17

The state senator’s plane was already on the tarmac when Dent and Bellamy arrived at the airfield.

Gall took one look at Dent’s battered face and scowled. “Who the hell did that?”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“Not what I asked.”

“I’m going to call Olivia. Excuse me.” Bellamy went into the hangar and took out her cell phone.

Dent motioned toward the airplane. “Decent of him to make it available to us. Last night and today.”

“I told you, he wants you to get used to it. He called early this morning, wanting to know how you liked her. Says he hopes you’ll become so enamored with flying it you’ll go to work for him.” He clamped down on his cigar. “ ’Course if he could see you now, he might change his mind.”

“Not now, Gall.”

Dent bypassed him as he made his way into the hangar and went over to his own airplane. “How’re the repairs coming?”

“Replacement parts are ordered. Some were promised by the end of the week. Others will take longer to get.”

Dent gave the wing of his airplane a pat, then went over to the computer table and sat down. “Have you checked out the airport in Marshall?”

“Its got two runways. One’s five thousand feet. Plenty long enough.”

As he and Bellamy left Haymaker’s house, Dent had placed a call to Gall, asking him if the senator’s airplane was still available and, if so, to get it ready for flight. He’d also asked him to look into the county-owned airport in east Texas, three hundred miles from Austin.

While he methodically went through his preflight routine, Bellamy was pacing the concrete floor of the hangar, her cell phone to her ear. He wondered who she was talking to. Her conversations with Olivia never lasted that long.

After filing his flight plan, he signaled to Bellamy that they were good to go. She ended her call and went into the hangar’s restroom, although the head on the two-million-dollar airplane was much nicer. She’d probably be too modest to use it during flight, though.

Dent, hoping to smooth things over with Gall after being so brusque with him earlier, approached the workbench where the older man was tinkering with a piece of machinery. “Thanks for helping out on such short notice.”

Gall just looked at him, waiting for an explanation for the sudden trip, which Dent felt he deserved.

“From Marshall, we’re driving on to Caddo Lake. It’s near—”

“I know where it’s at.” Gall gave his cigar an agitated workout. “Going fishing?”

“In a manner of speaking. Detective Moody, now retired, lives on the lake. He’s agreed to see us. And I don’t want any flack from you about it.”

Gall stopped chomping his cigar, removed it from his mouth, and pitched it toward a trash can, which he missed by a foot. “Flack,” he said with disgust. “How ’bout me giving you some common sense? Something you seem to have a shortage of these days. In fact, you haven’t acted like you have a lick of it since you got attached to that lady, who belongs to a family that damn near ruined your life. You show up this morning looking like Rocky. You’re on your way to see a man who you once vowed to kill. You’re packing. And I’m not supposed to give you flack?”

“How’d you know I was carrying a piece?”

“I didn’t. Till now. Jesus! You’re taking a pistol to a meeting with Moody?”

“Will you calm down? I’m not going to shoot him. We’re just going to talk to the man. He’s no threat to me anymore. He’s old, in bad health, reportedly on his last leg.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I have my sources.”

“He’s got his sources,” he muttered. He hitched his chin toward the wounds on Dent’s face. “Who beat you up?”

“The redneck I warned you about.” He gave Gall an abbreviated account of the attack.

“Did he cut you bad?”

“It’s okay.”

“You see a doctor?”

“Bellamy took care of it.”

“Oh, and she’s qualified to do that, I guess.”

“It wasn’t that bad, Gall. I swear.”

“You report it to the police?”

Dent shook his head. “We were afraid it would make the news. Bad enough that Van Durbin staked out my apartment last night, and he didn’t even know about the knife fight.”

“Van Durbin see her there with you?”

“He got pictures.”

If Gall’s scowl was any indication, nothing Dent told him had won his approval. “Back to the redneck—he have a name?”

“I think it might be Ray Strickland, Allen’s brother. But that’s only a guess.”

“Why would he come after you?”

“Retribution, maybe.” Dent raised one shoulder in a shrug. “That’s the best Bellamy and I could come up with.”

“Bellamy and you.” He snorted an expletive that Dent hadn’t heard since leaving the military. “Dent, why are you doing this?”

“I told you why.”

“Exoneration. Once and for all. Okay, I get it. But what? The shit your life is in isn’t deep enough? You need this to top it off?” He gave Dent no time to defend his actions. “You could get yourself killed. What good will vindication do you if you’re dead? As for her, do you think she’d want to partner with you if she knew—”

“She knows.”

Gall, shocked silent by Bellamy’s declaration, turned quickly to find her standing behind him.

“I know he was in the state park, quarreling with Susan shortly before she was killed. I saw them. My memory of it came back last night during a heated argument.”

Gall swallowed noisily and for once seemed at a loss for words. “Well…”

She smiled and even reached out and laid her hand on the sleeve of his coveralls. “I know you lied in order to protect Dent. Your secret is safe.”

“You’re not going to tell Moody?”

“I’m more interested in hearing what he has to tell us.”

“Speaking of which,” Dent said, “if we don’t get there soon, he may change his mind and refuse to see us.”

They went outside, but before they boarded, Dent drew Gall aside. “This redneck guy, whoever he is, means business, Gall. Watch your back.”

“Don’t worry about me, Ace.”

“I’m not. I’m worried about me.”

“How so?”

“I plan to hurt him for what he’s done to Bellamy and me. But if he hurts you, I’ll have to kill him.”

“Who were you talking to for so long?”

Bellamy had accepted Dent’s invitation to sit in the cockpit, and, despite her complaint about the discomfort of the headphones, she’d put them on and plugged in so they could communicate.

Staring at the horizon, she released a weary sigh. “Dexter. My agent. He had left twenty or more voice-mail messages, the last one threatening to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge if I didn’t return his call. So I did.”

“And?”

“He’d seen Van Durbin’s column yesterday. It’s created renewed hype. He thinks I should reenter the arena and ramp up the publicity. I said no. The book has already climbed two spots on the best-seller list without my having to do anything. Dexter says that with just a little media coverage, it could go higher, stay longer. The movie deal would get sweeter. Et cetera. I said no. Again. Emphatically.”

“Will they be dragging the East River for his body?”

She laughed. “When I left New York, he threatened to jump from the Empire State Building. He hasn’t yet.”

He exchanged several transmissions with air-traffic controllers when they were passed from one’s airspace to another. The cockpit controls were as alien to her as the surface of Neptune.

When he was free again to talk to her, she asked, “How did you ever learn what everything is for?”

“I learned it because I have a very healthy respect for gravity. The ground is always there, trying to pull you down. It’s the most important thing to keep in mind.”

“Why are crashes usually attributed to pilot error?”

“Because they make the last mistake, and it’s hard for them to defend themselves or explain their actions if they’re dead.”

“That’s terribly unfair, isn’t it?”

“Can be, yeah. Pilots aren’t infallible. They screw up. But typically a crash is caused by a series of mistakes or mishaps. They stack up, and that’s what the cockpit crew is left to deal with. Have you ever heard of the Swiss cheese model?”

“I think so, but refresh me.”

“In order for a catastrophic event, such as a plane crash, to occur, a sequence of events precedes it. Think of these separate factors as slices of Swiss cheese lined up one behind the other. If any one of the holes in them doesn’t align with the others, the series of events is changed or curtailed, and a catastrophe is prevented.”

“But if all the holes line up—”

“The door is open for disaster.”

“The pilot’s mistake is the hole in the last slice of cheese.”

He nodded. “Say an airplane mechanic has a fight with his nagging wife, goes out and gets drunk, and is hungover at work the following day. During a preflight check, the first officer—co-pilot—spills his coffee over an electronic panel, which could result in its shorting out.

“He reports it, this mechanic is called to come and replace it. He doesn’t feel good to start with, now he’s working under pressure, knowing that the clock is ticking, and that everyone on board is disgruntled over the holdup. To make matters worse, the weather is deteriorating, and they want to get this bird out of there before the worst of it moves in, stranding passengers and crew for hours longer.

“The panel is replaced. The mechanic signs off on it. The captain and co-pilot are aware of the storms, but, between them, they’ve threaded a needle like that many times. They taxi, the tower clears them for takeoff, they check the radar one last time, and off they go.

“At about a thousand feet, they encounter some heavy turbulence. In an effort to get them out of it, the ATC instructs them to turn left. The captain responds. But as the plane goes into the turn, it gets struck by lightning, which in reality doesn’t cause an accident, but it can make things hairy.

“So now, the plane is in a steep left bank, flying in turbulence, trying to climb out of heavy rain and hail, at night, because the flight was delayed on account of the panel replacement. When…” He paused for dramatic effect and glanced over at her.

“When the fire warning for the left engine sounds and lights up red. The captain reacts immediately and does exactly what he’s been trained and conditioned to do for years on a 727. He pulls the fire warning lever, instantly shutting down that engine.

“What he doesn’t know is that he’s responded to a false warning. It sounded because it had grounded out after the coffee was spilled on it, which went unnoticed by both pilots and the mechanic. The turbulence, or the lightning strike, something, caused it to go off at that critical moment. The captain’s quick action to correct an emergency, which didn’t exist, actually created one.

“Remember, the plane was already in a left turn. Well, you never turn into a dead engine because the opposite one accelerates the plane into an even steeper turn. Wings quickly go vertical. Nose goes down. The airplane is doomed. Everyone onboard dies.

“But who do you blame for the crash? The captain made the last mistake. But you could also blame the clumsy first officer who spilled his coffee, or the mechanic who failed to notice that the fire warning had been damaged along with the panel he’d replaced. You could blame his wife for being a nag and driving him to drink the night before, making him feel like dog shit and not nearly as sharp as he normally would have been. You could take the blame all the way up to God for the crappy weather and that particular bolt of lightning.

“The sequence of events proved disastrous, but if only one of the contributing factors had been taken out of the equation, it might never have happened.” He paused and gave a shrug. “That’s a simplistic, layman’s explanation, but you get the gist of it.”

Bellamy hesitated, then asked, “What happened on Flight 343?”

He turned his head and looked at her for several beats. “I just told you.”

The gravel road wound through the thick grove of cypress trees and dead-ended in front of Dale’s cabin. He heard their car approaching long before it appeared.

He couldn’t explain, even to himself, why he had listened to Haymaker’s earnest pitch that he agree to see them. He should have hung up on him, should never have answered his call in the first place. But he found himself listening, and there was some logic to what his friend had said.

When Haymaker finished his spiel, which ended with his telling Dale that an interview might do his mind and body good, Dale surprised himself by asking Haymaker to hand the phone over to Bellamy.

They wasted no time on an exchange of phony pleasantries. She asked him the name of the nearest regional airport, and when he told her, she asked if he’d be there to meet her.

“No. Rent a car. Got a pencil?” After giving her directions from the airport to his place, he said, “Come alone.”

“Dent Carter will be with me.”

“I’ll only talk to you.”

“Dent will be with me.”

She was unbending, and he could have used that condition to scotch the whole thing. But he figured that if Dent meant to kill him, as he’d once threatened to, he wouldn’t do it with her as a witness.

As of this moment, they were the only two people on the planet who knew his whereabouts, and that in itself filled him with misgiving. But it was too late now to change his mind. With a crunch of gravel, the car rolled to a stop.

Moody watched from his sagging porch as they alighted, she with more alacrity and eagerness than Dent, who’d been driving. Dale figured that behind his Ray-Bans the boy’s—the man’s—eyes were cutting like razors. Hostility radiated off him like mist off a bog.

Bellamy was less guarded. She came up the steps as though not noticing how dilapidated they were and extended her hand to him without a qualm. He shook hands.

“Thank you for agreeing to see us.”

He bobbed his chin once but kept an alert watch on Dent, who took the steps up onto the porch in a measured tread. They eyed each other like the adversaries they were.

Bellamy brushed a mosquito off her arm. “Maybe we should go inside,” she said. Dale turned and opened the screened door, whose squeak seemed abnormally loud. In fact all Dale’s senses had grown more acute since their arrival. He realized how lazy he’d become now that he no longer had to depend on his wits and constant awareness of his surroundings, which, while a cop, had been second nature to him.

Dale gauged the gashes and bruises on Dent’s face to be no older than a day, if that. It spoke to Dent’s character that he was unselfconscious of them. He’d been a tough bastard at eighteen. Maturity hadn’t softened him one iota. Which made Dale all the more cautious. Being that he was soft and inflated where Dent was hard and honed, he would lose in a fight. In a clean fight, anyway.

Bellamy was prettier in person than on television. Her eyes had more depth, her skin a softness that studio cameras couldn’t capture. She also smelled good, like flowers. Dale felt a pang of yearning to touch a woman, which he hadn’t had the pleasure of doing for several months now. It had been years since he’d had the pleasure without having to pay for it.

Loneliness, even if self-imposed, tasted metallic. Like the blue steel barrel of a pistol.

Once inside, Dent peeled off his aviator sunglasses and slid them into his shirt pocket. Dale said, “You can relieve yourself of the handgun, too. Just set it there on the table.”

Dent didn’t ask how he knew he was carrying. Dale supposed he realized the pointlessness of the question. A former cop would know. Dent reached behind his back and pulled the pistol from the holster attached to his belt.

“After you, Moody.” He motioned down at Dale’s left hand in which he’d kept the .357 palmed and held against his thigh.

When he hesitated, Bellamy said, “Please.”

He looked down into her large, expressive eyes, which were perhaps the only feature reminiscent of the girl she’d been, then he met Dent’s level stare. Neither relented, exactly, but they moved simultaneously and set their weapons on the TV tray already crowded with Dale’s bottle of whiskey, his pack of cigarettes, lighter, and ashtray.

Since he didn’t have an extra chair, he said, “You can sit on the bed, I guess.”

He could have saved himself the trouble of making it up in advance of their arrival. The bedspread was something he’d found in a garage sale. It didn’t quite cover the stained top sheet. Beneath its ragged hem, the exposed springs screeched when his guests sat down on the foot of the bed.

Dale held up the bottle of Jack by its neck. “Drink?” They shook their heads. “Mind if I do?” But he didn’t wait for their go-ahead before pouring himself three fingers’ worth. He took a swig, then set the glass down so he could light a cigarette, and after taking a long pull on it, he sat down in his armchair—another castoff—and gave them his undivided attention.

Bellamy glanced at Dent, and when he said nothing, she nodded toward the copy of her book that Dale had left on the top of his television set. “Did you read it?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you think of it?”

“You want a review? You’re a good writer.”

“Did I accurately capture the events as you remember them?”

“More or less.”

Dent shifted his position, making the bed rock. “That’s no answer. We didn’t come all this way for you to be cute.”

Dale took a shot of whiskey. “What did you come here for?”

Bellamy leaned toward him. “I want you to tell me that you believe with all your heart that Allen Strickland was guilty.”

He held her pleading gaze for as long as he could stand it, then looked down and studied the burning tip of his cigarette.

“Maybe he still thinks I killed her.”

Dale, knowing Dent had said that just to goad him, fired back. “I thought, and still think, that you were capable of it.”

“You could always apply a screwdriver to my eye again, see if I confess this time.”

The girl admonished him just by softly speaking his name.

But being reminded of the strong-arm, illegal tactics he’d used to interrogate Dent caused Dale’s gut to clench. “I didn’t believe for a single minute the alibi you and your sidekick came up with.”

“We went flying that day.”

“I’m sure you did. What I couldn’t prove was what time you came back.”

“It was in Gall’s log.”

“Log, my ass. He could’ve written any damn time in his log. Do you think I’m stupid?”

“No, I think you’re clever. Clever enough to tell Rupe Collier that he couldn’t build a solid case against me. That’s when you two decided that Allen Strickland might be the surer bet on getting a conviction.”

Dale shot to his feet so quickly he nearly upset the TV tray. He saved the bottle of whiskey first, grabbing it before it could topple over. Then he crushed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. He could feel their eyes like red-hot pokers on his back as he moved to the screened door and stared sightlessly at what had been his unchanging view for far too long.

And suddenly he realized how very tired he was, and not only of the view. He was so damn weary, body and soul. Sick to death, literally, of it all. Just—as kids these days said—over it. He was almost a score of years too late to try to make things right. But he had one last shot at redemption and decided then and there to take it.

“I was eating lunch at one of those good Mex’can places on the east side of town. Haymaker called to tell me that Allen Strickland had been killed in the prison yard that morning. Stabbed in the back three times before he hit the ground. Each stab had punctured an organ. He was dead in under a minute. Seems he’d gotten in with a bad group—”

He paused and looked over his shoulder at them. “You gotta admit he was a slick, hustling type. In the pen, he affiliated with a gang of like minds.” He faced forward again. “The murder was blamed on gang warfare within the prison, although no one was ever brought up on charges.

“Anyway, I left my plate of food on the table, went outside, and threw up. Hard. Till I was completely empty, and then I kept on retching. Because the last I saw of Allen Strickland, he was being escorted from the courtroom after his sentencing. He turned to where I was seated in the gallery, looked me straight in the eye, and said, ‘I didn’t kill her. God is my witness.’

“Now, I’ve heard hundreds of guilty men and women swear on God and all the angels that they’re innocent. But I believed Allen Strickland. So, no, Ms. Price, I don’t believe with all my heart that he was guilty of killing your sister. I never did.”

He remained as he was for as long as it took him to take a deep breath and release it slowly. Surprisingly, he didn’t feel as washed clean, as sanctified, as he thought he might after making that admission, and realized that he’d been naive to think it would be that easy.

He turned back into the room and, resuming his seat, picked up the glass and drained it of the liquor. The two people sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bed were watchful.

She was the first to speak. “If you didn’t believe in his guilt, how… why…”

“How and why did I get the grand jury to indict, and a jury to convict? I could reel off a dozen good reasons, but the main one? We had to get the egg off our faces.”

“We?” Dent said.

“Rupe and me.”

“So he’s tarnished, too?”

Dale chuckled over Bellamy’s quaint term for corrupt. “You could say. Anyhow, we’d gone public with one prime suspect.” He looked at Dent. “But you had an alibi. We didn’t believe it, but we couldn’t crack it. That’s when Allen Strickland started looking like a winning prospect.

“We were desperate to make good our promise to the Lystons, the PD, everybody, that we’d produce the culprit and bring him to justice. We couldn’t let this big, juicy case get away from us.

“Here we had us a prominent family’s daughter slain at the company barbecue, during the worst storm in half a century. The girl was pretty, she was rich, she’d been found stripped of her panties. And you gotta hand it to Rupe, he’s a showman. He baited the sex hook every time he gave the media a sound bite.

“You know,” he continued thoughtfully, “I think he was actually glad we never found her underwear, because that kept the public dwelling on it. Had her panties been the murder weapon? Where were they now? Would they be found? It was like a damn soap opera. Tune in tomorrow for the next episode.”

He dragged his hands down his face. “At one point, Rupe even suggested we plant a pair of underwear to be ‘found’ by a rookie cop, someone unassuming, so it would look convincing. We’d have to show them to your parents for identification. They would deny they were Susan’s, of course, but it still wouldn’t look good for the guy who’d been found with them. It would make him look like a collector.”

“You were actually going to plant false evidence on Allen Strickland’s property?” Bellamy asked.

Dale’s gaze slid involuntarily toward Dent. “This was early in the investigation.”

Dent stared at him for several beats, and when the implication sank in, he shook his head with disbelief. “Christ.”

He stood up and began to prowl the room as though looking for something or someone to hit. Dale thought he might be the target, but Dent moved to a window, where he propped his shoulder on the frame and stared out over the desultory waters of the lake. Dale noted that there was a spot of dried blood on his shirt about waist level.

Before he could ask about it, Bellamy said, “I didn’t like him.”

“Who?”

“Rupe Collier. I didn’t like him when he talked to my parents during the trial, assuring them that he was going to send Susan’s killer to jail for a long time. Then, when I was researching my book, I called him and asked for an interview. I made several appointments with him, all of which he canceled at the last minute. I suppose he ran out of excuses because I was finally allowed ten minutes of his time. He was—”

“You don’t have to tell me how he was,” Dale said. “I know all too well.” He flexed the fingers of his right hand. The knuckles were bruised and sore from their contact with Rupe’s teeth, but he enjoyed the discomfort and only wished he’d struck the grinning son of a bitch even harder. “He told you squat, right?”

“He was wishy-washy and vague,” she said. “Finally he told me that he’d forgotten the details of the case, and that instead of talking to him, I might try coaxing the police department into showing me the case file.”

Dale tipped his chin, his question implicit.

“I tried,” she said. “Unfortunately, the file had gone missing.”

“That’s right.”

“You knew?”

“Rupe’s too ambitious and too good at covering his ass to have let that file survive,” he said. Then he pulled himself up out of his chair. “And I’m too good at covering my own ass not to have made a copy of everything.”