Page 1 of Working for the Heiress

Conrad

I always arrived before dawn.

When I took this job in Forge Creek two years ago, I started keeping hours that don’t belong to anyone but me. The crew rolls in at six, the office staff at seven. I got to work every day at five to work on the birds in peace.

Lilianne Ashford was due to arrive at nine, which probably meant eleven if she was like all the other rich assholes who don’t value other people’s time. We’d been getting corporate emails for weeks.

Regional Operations Manager. Effective the eighteenth. I knew one thing for sure. The owner’s daughter was barely out of college and about to be in way over her pampered head. She must have been someone’s favor…someone’s headache at home sent out here to become someone else’s problem.

I had a few hours before that someone was me.

A helicopter was up on jacks in bay two, cowling off, and I was elbow-deep in the engine compartment with a flashlight in my mouth and a torque wrench on the bench at my hip. Number three engine had been running rough on the last run — not bad, not a grounding issue, just a tick that nobody else had heard but that had sat in my ear for forty-eight hours like a splinter. That morning, I was determined to find it.

The hangar smelled like cold concrete and old grease and the coffee I'd brought from home. Outside, the Colorado dark was squeezing the mountains the way it did in October, with the feel of snow coming a few days out. I could feel it the way I always felt a fight coming in a bar.

I worked on the engine, tamping down any thoughts of Ashford and his daughter. My hands knew what they were doing without me having to involve my head very much. It took those cracked, greasy paws about twenty minutes to find the problem.

A loose union on a fuel line, just a hairline suggestion of a split, the kind of thing that would have shaken itself worse before it broke and given somebody a chance to land. I tightened it. I checked the torque twice. I made a note in my own log — the personal one I kept in my back pocket, a duplicate from the company log, but one fully under my control — and I closed the cowling, then I stood there with my hand on the warm metal for a second longer than I needed to.

I didn't think about West Virginia.

I'd gotten good at not thinking about my old life.

Not about Wolf, who’d flown the bird I’d kept in the air. Not about Atlas, who’d operated on dying people by flashlight while the mountain came apart around us. The mudslide killed twenty-three people that night. The helicopter crash didn’t have to be part of the count.

The crew started rolling in earlier than usual, which meant they were eager to size up the big boss’s daughter. Diaz came in first, with two gas-station coffees and a face that suggested he hadn't slept. He set one of the coffees on the workbench beside me without asking.

"Holt." He nodded at the Bell. "She fly?"

"She'll fly."

"You find the thing?"

“Sure did.”

He grunted, satisfied, and moved off toward bay one. Diaz didn't talk more than he had to and never had. It was one of the things I liked about him. I knew he worked a second job to make ends meet, and I also knew we were lucky to have him and his instincts for these complex machines.

The rest of the crew came in over the next twenty minutes, in pairs and singles. I kept my head down and let the small talk happen around me. I'd already heard the thing they were speculating about. I'd heard it in three separate emails and one phone call from Denver and a voice mail from the regional director that had used the phrase opportunity for the Colorado division twice in ninety seconds.

The Ashford heiress was coming.

I'd built a picture of her without meaning to. Pampered. Polished. Bored. I'd seen it before, in different uniforms — the boss's son in WV, who'd lasted four months and crashed a company truck before they'd quietly moved him to a desk. People like that didn't last in a hangar. Three months. Maybe less if someone got hurt. Then she'd be gone and I'd still be here, and the work would still be the work.

I told myself this while I cleaned my hands on a rag that had stopped being clean sometime in the spring.

A fancy car came in at twenty after eight. Earlier than I thought, I’d give her that.

Of course, the engine was wrong for Forge Creek. Nobody made their way up here without a V8, and she might as well have been puttering her way up here in a golf cart. She pulled up close to the hangar doors instead of parking out by the office, which was a choice.

I didn't look up. I had the cowling open on bay one's bird now, going through Diaz's pre-flight with him, and I was not going to perform a welcome for somebody who wasn’t going to stay.

The driver's door shut and I heard heels on concrete.

Not work boots. Not the steel-toes everybody on this site wore because they value their feet. Heels. The sound of them came through the open hangar door, and every head in the bay turned toward it before I did.

I looked up and time stopped.

She stood in the doorway with the sun behind her, and for a second — maybe two — she didn't see me. She was looking for the office, looking for somebody official. Her coat was too good for this town, but not right for the work.