The Hollow Ones(5)

“Shit,” said Leppo. He forked a huge chunk of meat loaf into his mouth while plucking his napkin from his lap. Odessa knew that her coffee would have to wait. It was always better to get moving first, rather than being called upon to respond. Odessa quickly visited the ladies’ room, as experience had taught her, while Leppo went to the front cashier with his credit card.

Leppo was already outside in the rain with a free real estate circular tented over his head when Odessa hit the door. At a break in the headlights, they crossed the street under the cold rain, skirting a gutter puddle and striding north toward their unmarked silver Chevy Impala.

With the falling rain and the automobile tires whisking along the wet asphalt beside them, Odessa did not hear the airplane’s twin engines until they were almost immediately over her head. The dark plane knifed through the stringy rain, wings pitched slightly to one side, the underbelly of the fuselage passing not two hundred feet above them.

It was there, and then it was gone. Unreal.

“Jesus,” said Leppo.

Odessa stopped so fast, Leppo bumped into her from behind.

Sirens replaced the fading roar of the plane’s engines. A cruiser went screaming past them into the cross street as Odessa slid into the driver’s seat of the Impala.

Leppo was already on his phone, talking to somebody at Claremont. The top six floors of the Claremont Tower overlooked Newark from the shore of the narrow brown Passaic River.

“Where to?” Odessa asked him, watching more blue lights plow through the spit.

“Don’t bother trying to follow it,” said Leppo, pointing her left at the intersection. Back to Claremont, then.

Leppo punched the phone audio through the Bluetooth of the automobile dash. “Davey, we were on dinner, we just saw it, what’s the word?”

“Terror bid,” said Davey. “They’ve scrambled jets from Otis.”

“Otis air base,” said Leppo, incredulous. “To do what? Shoot it down over Hoboken?”

“If that’s what it takes. He’s been back and forth across the Hudson, stunting, doing fly-bys, shooting up the city.”

“Give me what you got on the ‘he.’”

Odessa pulled over for another police cruiser, which went blasting past, going the opposite direction they were.

“Plane is reg’d to the CEO of Stow-Away Corporation. That’s a rental storage facility company, those big, boxy orange buildings. Suspected stolen, though. We have one dead on the ground at Teterboro, an airport worker. Hold on, Walt—”

The audio went muffled as Davey put his hand over the microphone, calling out to another agent nearby. Odessa and Leppo looked at each other.

“Stow-Away,” she said, feeling a dark ping in her chest.

Leppo nodded. “Not good.”

The CEO of Stow-Away, a man named Isaac Meerson, was a major donor to the New Jersey Republican Party…and a close friend of the governor of New Jersey, and Cary Peters.

“Can’t be,” said Leppo.

“What can’t be?” said Davey, coming back on the line.

“Stow-Away is getting pulled into the Peters corruption case Hardwicke and I have been working. Any description of the hijacker?”

“The pilot? No. I’ll check.”

Odessa was at a red light. The wipers worked frantically, making the traffic light look like it was flashing. “What should we do?”

“I don’t know,” said Leppo. “Can’t be related to us. Right?”

“Peters has been depressed and basically off the grid,” said Odessa. “There was that thing about the wife in the paper yesterday—”

“Her filing for divorce? No surprise there, though.”

“No,” said Odessa. “Still…”

Odessa knew Leppo well enough to sense that he was keying in on Peters now. “Stealing a plane? That’s way outside his profile.”

“He had taken flying lessons,” she said. “Remember? Stopped short of getting his license due to anxiety attacks. That was all on his background.”

Leppo nodded. He didn’t know what to do. He said, “Shit shit shit shit shit.”

Davey’s voice came back again. “Okay, I’ve got nothing on the hijacker yet.”

“Forget about that, Davey,” said Leppo. “What’s the plane’s last known position?”

“Northwest from Newark,” he said. “Over Glen Ridge. That’s the latest I got. Hey, Walt, I gotta go—”

“Go, yeah,” said Leppo, killing the call.

“Heading toward Montclair,” said Odessa. It was all happening so fast. “Do you think…?”

Leppo finished her thought. “He would crash an airplane into his own house?”

Odessa said, “It’s not going to be his house for very long. His wife’s house.”

Leppo nodded. It was decided. “Light it up.”

Odessa reached under the center console, flipping the switch that activated the Impala’s grille lights, blue and red, front and rear. She punched the gas and started weaving through traffic toward the nearby town of Montclair.



The aerial distraction caused multiple automobile accidents on the streets below, the worst being a seven-car pileup on the Garden State Parkway that snarled northbound traffic in a hopeless gridlock.