The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [80]
“St. Louis. Malpy, look!”
As Annie reached for her radio mike, abruptly, the propeller noise changed, then the Piper Warrior engine missed, spluttered. The warning lights came on and stayed on, the engine lost thrust and a sudden air pocket dropped the plane down through the pitch-black night.
The frame of the King rattled loudly, its wings jerking back and forth at a tilt, spilling Annie’s thermos of coffee. Gauges on the instrument panel quivered. The yoke shook in its socket. A small compartment door slapped open and closed. Malpy began to shriek, scrabbling at Annie’s arm to be picked up. “Okay, okay,” she told the dog. “Just take it easy.” She corrected but it was hard to keep the plane flying level again.
“Malpy, we’re in trouble.”
The exasperated air traffic controller at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport lost his temper when Annie described engine trouble and requested emergency landing priority. What the crap was she doing up there in that single-engine Piper in this weather anyhow? He snarled that it was a madhouse down here at STL and unless she was in a death spiral, she would just have to get in line. And whoever the Lt. D. K. Destin was who had called him with her ETA from Destin Airworks, in bumblefuck Emerald, North Carolina, wherever the shit that was, that man had the foulest mouth ever heard in this control room…Okay okay, just hang on. Circle. Keep circling.
She went into a holding pattern. To calm Malpy as she waited for further instructions from the air traffic control tower, she hummed, “Meet me in St. Louis, Louis, meet me at the fair…”
A memory of her father softly singing that song floated up from some long ago highway drive. “We will dance the hoochie koochie…” What in the world was ‘the hoochie koochie’? And why had he sung that particular song so often? What did St. Louis mean to him? Why did he want the Piper Warrior brought there after all these years?
As a child she had been always questioning everything, uncertain of Jack Peregrine, checking a compass that couldn’t hold true north. But with Sam and Clark, she’d found her bearings. And now, horribly, her father had brought that disorientation back into her life. Was his asking her to meet him in St. Louis just one more scam of his? Wasn’t it likely that his “I’m dying” was just the setup of another swindle?
When Trevor had scanned the FBI database for her father’s name, he’d found “John Peregrine” under “Confidence Men.” Jack was an “artist” of con art, that’s all. He tricked the gullible and greedy into handing over what money they had for an impossible means of making more.
Make another circle, the ATC radioed her.
Maybe this was some inheritance scheme of her dad’s to get Pilgrim’s Rest away from Sam. Or maybe he needed Annie’s help with a big con that somehow involved an airplane, a con of the sort that had made up her bedtime stories as a child. She’d heard dozens: How he planned to pass himself off as the illegitimate son of the current king of Spain, Juan Carlos I. How he planned to use her photographic memory to access data (like a human keystroke logger), in order to work out the biggest wire-transfer bank heist in history. How he planned to seed a gold mine in the mountain wilderness of Colorado or plant a fake Chagall in Boca Raton. How he planned to sell shares in a cure for aging, shares in the future, in possibility. All the stories were versions of the Queen of the Sea. Con art.
Her father had told Annie with reverence that the showman P. T. Barnum had once glued fish tails to monkeys and persuaded the public they were mermaids. That the swindler Count Victor Lustig (who worked the card tables on Atlantic crossings with Nicky Arnstein) had sold the Eiffel Tower to a reputable Parisian scrap iron dealer. That a larcenous midwesterner named Oscar Hartzell had made sane Americans believe they were descended from Sir Francis Drake and that the Drake millions still sitting in the Bank of England could be theirs. Seventy thousand of them had given