Tailspin(95)
“They’re fine.” One of the sleeves was still bedeviling him.
“Stop fighting with that. If you won’t lie down, at least sit down.”
“Why are you nagging me?”
“Why are you acting like an ass?”
He stopped wrestling with the shirt and threw it down. “Because it would be a shame to ruin a really great fuck with stupid and pointless conversation.”
She held his stare for a moment, then rolled to her other side and tucked the covers beneath her chin. “If our cop hasn’t left within an hour, I’ll take my chances and sneak out. You’ll enjoy that. You’ll be free of me.”
He muttered a curse. Then, “It was my mom.”
She turned toward him. “What?”
“That’s who you overhead me talking to.”
Brynn came up on her elbows.
He maintained an arrogant stance, as though spoiling for a fight. “Anything else you want to ask?”
“Where does she live?”
“Outside Austin. On a lakefront lot. Dad has a bass boat and goes fishing almost every day. He’s a cliché. Bores you blind with stories about the big ones that got away.”
“How was their Thanksgiving?”
“Good. Except for my newest nephew. He’s teething.”
“How old is he?”
“I don’t know, Brynn. I’ve never seen him.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t say anything, just gnawed the inside of his cheek. He went to the window and peeped out again, but she thought that was an excuse to turn away from her.
“Why don’t you go home?” she asked.
“I never know what my schedule is going to be.”
“Does your mother fall for that excuse?”
He came back around, his eyes angry, so she knew she’d struck a chord. However, rather than demur, she pressed. “What causes you to twitch in your sleep, Rye?”
“Twitch?”
“Yesterday morning in the cabin, while we napped, several times you woke me up, jerking, talking unintelligibly.”
“Sorry. You should have nudged me.”
“What disturbs your sleep? And why can’t you land? That is, land and stay for any length of time.”
“I’d rather be in the air.”
“So you’ve said. You love flying. It’s an obsession. It’s ingrained.” She paused and looked at him meaningfully. “It’s also your escape. From what?”
He checked his wristwatch, then placed his hands on his hips. “Are we done yet?”
“Jake told me you were a legend.”
“Vlad the Impaler was a legend. Ted Bundy.”
Refusing to buy into the act of indifference he was staging, she persisted. “Jake’s a liar? You didn’t fly into the worst of the shit?”
“Stories get exaggerated. They take on a life of their own.”
“True. But they have some substance.”
“Believe as much or as little as you want to.”
“I believe you could fly for anybody. So why do you fly for Dash-It-All and the like?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing. But there’s little prestige.”
“Screw prestige. I like my kind of flying.”
“Why?”
“Because most of the time, I can fly alone.”
“Why do you prefer that?”
He bent down closer to her so she wouldn’t miss his point. “I don’t have to talk to anybody.”
“About what happened over there?”
“Over where?”
She just looked at him, and she outlasted him.
He rubbed the back of his neck and tilted his head from side to side, popping the vertebrae. But that didn’t relieve the strain. Still vexed, he opened the mini bar, took out a beer, and carried it over to an easy chair near the window. He looked outside and swore softly, indicating to her that the police car was still there.
He plopped down, yanked the pull tab, took a drink from the can. “You want to hear a nice bedtime story? Too bad. This ain’t it.”
She sat up and raised her knees, wrapping her arms around them.
He began with an air of boredom. “This is the story about the pilot of a C-12. Know what that is?”
“Obviously an airplane.”
“Military version of a King Air. They’re used for personnel and cargo transport, troop support, rescue, surveillance. They serve variable purposes, depending on which branch of the military is using them, and what for. A C-12 can be the food truck. An ambulance. Sometimes a hearse.”
He studied the can of beer in his hand, took a drink from it. “Anyway, that particular day, two C-12s were to fly a squadron of fighter pilots, plus their commanding officer, and some support personnel, out of Bagram. They’d been there for a couple of days, attending a briefing on where some badass Taliban who needed taking out were hiding up in the Nuristan province. We were flying them back to their base.
“Wasn’t the worst of shit by any means. Duck soup, really. Scheduled to take off at sixteen hundred, but as happens in military life, the commander’s meeting ran long, things got pushed back, so I thought I’d get some sleep while we were waiting.