Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [47]
“You’re doing well for yourself,” I said.
“Wait till you see the plane.”
It turned out to be one of those baby jets, with a custom cabin designed for luxury, not space utilization.
“Yours?” I asked, as I settled in next to him.
“Right!” He laughed. “It belongs to the studio. That’s my job, flying very important people around to very important places.”
“And you can just …?”
“Borrow it? Sure. They bought this sucker in the glory days, back in the late eighties, when money was gushing. Today, the smart boys rent—like time-shares: use it when they need it, pay by the hour. But this one’s all theirs. Nobody pays attention. They wouldn’t know what a flight log was. And they never check on fuel and maintenance. Only risk is if one of the big shots gets a sudden whim, decides he needs to go to Vegas or something.”
“That’d cost you your job.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, unconcerned.
“Recognize it?” Byron asked, banking low over a string-of-jewels city.
“No.”
“Seattle.”
“Not Portland?”
“You come up from L.A., you come down from Seattle, see?”
“But how far is …?”
“Couple of hours. Don’t worry, I got you covered.”
“These things hard to drive?” I asked Byron.
“Not really, so long as you know the limitations. A stretch limo’s just a regular sedan with a reinforced section let into the chassis. You’re adding a ton—no exaggeration—to the unsprung weight, so you’ve got a major inertia problem. A car like this, it won’t pull a lot of g’s on a skidpad, and the stopping distances are much longer than normal. But you stay within its envelope, it’s no problem.”
“This belong to the studio, too?”
“Yep. Seattle was the closest place to Portland where the studio has a presence.”
“You’re fobbing it off, but I know you’ve got to be risking your job, Byron.”
“For borrowing their toys? I’ve been with the studio a long time. Piloted the planes, drove the cars. I’ve seen a lot, and never said a word. No, I wouldn’t guess they’d try to move me out.”
“You ever borrow their stuff before?”
“All the time. I was deeply involved with a man in Denver for a long while. Flew up to see him a lot.”
“It still has to be a risk. I appreciate it.”
“Burke, listen to me, okay? I’ve got a good memory. I’m a man. I pay my debts.”
“Fair enough.”
“You think they hired a black queer just because he could fly a plane?”
“Yeah, I did. The way I figured, it’s just like it was over there: anyone who didn’t want to fly with a certain pilot, they didn’t like his color or his … anything, they could stay on the fucking ground.”
“They were going to leave me on that fucking ground, Burke.”
“Not because of anything about you. They were in a panic, trying to be hard guys, cut their losses.”
“Maybe you’re right. But it doesn’t matter. Dead is dead. If I hadn’t gotten on that plane, it would have been a slow death on the ground.”
“Yeah, well …”
“Anyway,” he said, expertly sliding the huge limo around a slow-moving pickup truck, “you never answered my question, so I’ll answer it for you. They hired me for what is euphemistically called ‘executive protection.’ You understand what I’m telling you?”
“You’re a bodyguard, too?”
“Licensed to carry,” he said, pulling the lapel away from his jacket with his left hand to show me the shoulder holster. “And to clean up the messes they make.”
“So they’re not going to fire you.”
“They’re not going to fire me,” he confirmed, voice soft. “I know where the bodies are buried.” Meaning: he’d buried some of them himself.
“I got it,” I told him.
“And I figure,” he went on as if I hadn’t spoken, “whatever it is you’re doing, you can tell me as much about it as you want. Or nothing, if that’s what you want. But if what you want is cover, I can’t think of a better one than this. Anyone runs these plates, they come right back to the studio. You look … I don’t have the words for it, exactly. Not exactly cool or hip or anything like that, but edgy enough so it’d work, no problem. Truth is, all you have to say is that you’re in the business, with a studio