The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [63]
The radio spluttered. “You listening to me, Annie? Go ahead.”
“Roger. Departing VFR westbound. Over.”
Why in God’s name had she insisted on going to St. Louis in the King of the Sky? Even if Rafael Rook (whoever he was) was right that Jack Peregrine was dying and that seeing Annie was his dying wish, why should Jack Peregrine get his dying wish? Clark and Sam, far more deserving, had had many wishes that had never come true. Why should she respond to a request for help, or unearned forgiveness, or whatever he wanted this plane for? Why, against all reason, including her own (she knew far better than Clark and Sam the danger in the sky tonight), had she felt (as undeniably as she felt hunger or cold) that whatever it took so she could have this talk with her father, she would do it? That if it took her flying a rattling thirty-one-year-old Piper Warrior into a storm that had caused the cancellation of all commercial flights, she could fly it. She would just head west-northwest, 290 degrees, and slip around the weather system, and fly herself to St. Louis. She would do it because, as the odd Rafael Rook had predicted, she could not take it or leave it.
D. K.’s voice rumbled. “Wind sixteen. Down to fourteen, ten. Okay, Annie, ain’t no mountain high enough. Go!”
Halfway down the runway, she eased slightly off the throttle, pressed her face against the dirty window, her eye on the windsock under the light on the hangar roof.
“Baby, what the fuck you doing? Left rudder, full throttle, full throttle.”
“D. K.! Stop mothering me!”
She watched the sock flick backwards, fall, quickly fill again, unfurling full and straight, pointing away. Oddly she suddenly remembered a rainy night, when she’d sat next to her father at the steering wheel of his red Mustang in the predawn quiet of some big city intersection. There was a soft rain so shiny black on the streets that they’d lost their boundaries; buildings shimmered in black pools broken by splashes of traffic. There was a fat man in the backseat of the car. Her father was betting this man that he could drive thirty blocks hitting green lights without ever having to stop for a red one.
In the Warrior now, all these years later, it was as if she could feel her father’s leaning over her, rubbing his face softly in her hair and whispering, “Darlin’, the readiness is all.” The car jumped forward. She could hear her laugh joining his as block after rainy block flew by, green, and green, and green.
Annie went fast to full throttle. Lightning pulsed in the clouds, silhouetting the wall of trees. She let the wind take the plane as if a giant had lifted it in the palm of a hand and moved her over the treetops. With a tip of one bright wing shaking leaves from the tallest maple, she left home behind her.
D. K. Destin’s voice crackled in her ears. “Mustang Annie, who do you owe?”
“Baby, it’s you…” Annie saw a far-off jet approaching from the southeast. “Hey, you got something coming in. Private jet? Over.”
“Fuck, yeah! Hot spot tonight. Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide, go ahead.”
“Love you, D. K., over and out.”
Chapter 19
Honor among Lovers
Shortly after the little Warrior soared away, a huge roaring noise suddenly shook the hangar at Destin Airworks and a white jet landed and taxied back to not far from where Sam and Clark were still standing beneath the overhang. The jet’s bold insignia Hopper Inc. glistened in the big yellow arc light. Brad Hopper leaped out of the cockpit in a crouch, tenting a briefcase over his head against the rain.
He ran up to Sam and Clark, said “Aw, shit!” and cupped his hands to look out at the black sky. “Was that Annie? Did she just fly out of here?”
Clark yelled above the noise of the still-humming jet. “I swear, we really postponed the birthday party. We’re not having it without you.”
“We told you it was canceled, Brad!” Sam hugged him.
The handsome young