hombres, you’re now one of the flying dead!’”
“Good God.”
“There are things even I wouldn’t say. But I’ve said ‘one of the engines is indicating improperly.’ And we landed just fine. Honestly, it was just another day. Besides all the paperwork. There’s so much paperwork if even the tiniest detail—”
“No one in their right mind would consider engine failure a tiny detail. What other emergencies have you dealt with?”
“You really want to hear?”
“Of course I do. How often have you listened to one of my macabre murder stories?”
“Yeah, but those are fun. Horrible, but fun.”
“Exactly.”
“Remember when I told you I’d seen people have heart attacks on planes twice, once when I was captain? Well, the other time was a year before I made captain. We had an engine fail and a heart attack on board. Unrelated, but I was wondering if we were gonna be in the middle of a Michael Crichton–style cascade of events. Jurassic Park on a Plane or something just as nightmarish.”
“So a millions-to-one event has happened to you in the air … twice.”
“It’s not the mechanical malfunctions that are rare, just the medical emergencies. Ugh, I said ‘just,’ like medical emergencies are no biggie. Anyway, Captain Vang did the ‘engine indicating improperly’ speech and we were cleared for an emergency landing. In Daytona, ugh.”
“Clearly the worst part of the ordeal.”
“Tell me. So Captain Vang’s got it all under control, which is exactly what I would have expected because he was awesome—he’s retired now, and if anyone earned a peaceful retirement, it’s him. He got in touch with ground medical services, and we knew there’d be an ambulance waiting when we touched down. So he asked me to go back in case the flight attendants needed another pair of hands—this was before we flew with defib machines, so CPR was manual. And as you probably know, that’s quite a workout.
“So I go back and I relieve one of the flight attendants for a couple of minutes, and this poor little kid is crying because her dad’s going into cardiac arrest right in front of her, and nobody can calm her down, so I did what I always do—”
“Took refuge in inappropriate humor?”
“Gosh, however did you guess? Anyway, the guy actually comes around, we give him oxygen, he’s coherent enough to give his kid a thumbs-up, I talk to her for a couple more minutes and explained that we had the best medical care all lined up for him and he’d be whisked to the hospital—in Daytona, but you know what they say about beggars and choosers—and then I went back to the cockpit to give Vang a sitrep and we landed and the guy turned out fine. And his kid, this adorable little strawberry blonde, just gloms onto me when we’re all finally on the tarmac and starts asking what classes you have to take to be a pilot, and I eventually peeled her off me and helped her and her mom into the car the airline provided for them, and away they went.”
“Remarkable.”
“It was a busy morning,” she agreed. “And I guess we’d better get back to ours.”
They got out of Tom’s van and headed into the funeral home, their idea to kill time while setting up the Becka intervention (“We think you might be in league with a killer, and it’s affected our lives in the following ways…”). They might not get any closer to finding Dennis, but it was better than waiting around for the next awful thing to be set in motion.
* * *
“Hello again, Ava.”
Blinking in the sudden gloom—damn, it was sunny outside—Ava didn’t immediately place him until he came closer.
“Hi, Pete. This—” She started to introduce Tom, who was inexplicably facedown on the carpet before she could finish with “… is my lover, or he will be when I devirginize him.”
Taser, she thought, staring. Pete was holding a dull black electroshock weapon little bigger than his hand, from which he’d fired two electrodes and their conductors. Both were now trapped beneath Tom, who had gone over like he’d fallen off a cliff. He was waiting for me. But he didn’t count on Tom. And, out loud: “Oh, shit.”
“Well put,” Pete agreed.
Forty-Five
“Wh-wh-why-what-wh-”
“Articulate as ever,” Pete said with a thin smile. “Just like when we were in high school.”
“We weren’t in school together, you cock!”
“Yes, we were!” This in a high-pitched scream that was almost as shocking as watching Tom succumb to fifty thousand volts. She didn’t dare look down at him; she needed