The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [85]
The woman in the pink sweatshirt knocked into Annie as she strode out of a Starbucks and headed into the terminal walkway. She was talking on her cell phone, telling someone to hurry because their flight was leaving. Her cheaply dyed hair was pulled back in a ponytail that she kept yanking. “Hey, watch where you’re going!” Annie called after her.
The woman turned back and frowned, yelled, “Sorry,” hurried on.
Annie set down her travel bag, which barked sharply.
Across the corridor the handsome man in the blue T-shirt laughed.
Frustrated, Annie yelled at him. “What are you laughing at?!”
He smiled and called back, “I see a beautiful woman in the midnight hour, it makes me happy.”
“Give me a break.” Annie slammed back through the doors into the Admirals Club, but her heart pounded and to her astonishment, she realized that the jolt came from the compliment the strange young man in the blue shirt had paid her.
Trying to shake off the effect of the remark, she hit Incoming on her phone, reaching the number from which her father had just now called her. A gravel-voiced woman answered immediately with the phrase, “Baggage Claim.” When Annie asked who she was, she said that she was a security attendant at the St. Louis Airport’s East Terminal. Annie advised her to keep a closer eye on her desk phone and hung up.
So her father had been leaving the airport from baggage claim only five minutes ago. Should she run around looking for him in this huge space? Should she call the police on him? Or should she follow his instructions, go to Miami, and assume she would meet him there?
Everything in Annie had been trained to commit to go. But it would take more than a day to fly to the southern tip of Florida in the little Piper Warrior, even if she could find somebody here at STL who could quickly repair or replace its engine. She thought about letting her father, and so her mother, disappear out of her life again. She thought about forgetting this mysterious panel in the King with the courier case inside that she was supposed to deliver to this mysterious Raffy Rook. She could find herself a nice motel here at the airport and get some needed sleep. In the morning she could fly home to Emerald one way or the other and have her birthday party at Pilgrim’s Rest and in general go back to her life without Jack Peregrine in it.
Walking fast as she hurried to a decision, she found herself on the lower level of the main terminal, where she passed a large five-paneled mural on the wall. The mural was titled, “Black Americans in Flight.” Studying the group portrait, she felt disappointed on D. K. Destin’s behalf. He would have loved being one of the pilots depicted there. There could have been a picture of D. K. holding his unconscious navigator up out of the China Sea, clinging to the wreckage of their attack bomber’s fuselage, waiting for rescue for all those hours. She thought of how D. K. hadn’t let his crewmate slip into the sea, how (as Rafael Rook would have said), he had found that he couldn’t take it or leave it.
All of a sudden Annie’s old childhood nightmare curiously came back to her, her dream of flying the little red plane, her father tilting away to the horizon, the woman on the ship in the ocean waves, arms raised as if calling for help.
Now it was her father who was like the woman on the ship in her dream. It was her father who was calling, “Help me, Annie.”
And she couldn’t take it or leave it.
***
Trevor was asleep when Annie phoned him.
Good for her, making it to St. Louis in that storm, he said sleepily. Good for her. Get some rest. Call him in the morning.
“I need your help.” She asked Trevor to check one more thing for her tonight. “Please!”
“I’m trying to sleep here.”
“Come on,” she urged. “Why are you even in bed at this hour? It’s a holiday.”
“It’s almost 1 a.m. You’re going to seriously owe me,” he warned.
“Absolutely. That Burgundy you’re always talking about? Romanée-Conti, 1980? It’s yours.”
“Are you crazy? It’s five thousand dollars a