Page 18 of Working for the Heiress

"I'm coming, Conrad."

Her eyes flashed in defiance and I realized I just told a superior what to do in her own company.

I went down the hall ahead of her. I did it on purpose, to put distance between us before we hit the conference room, to give my body the thirty seconds it needed to remember its business. I heard her boots behind me. The hardware-store boots. Boots she would walk into a storm in.

The conference room was already full. Diaz at the front by the whiteboard, marker in hand, the corkboard map of the regional airspace pinned with three red flags where our machines and our staff were located. Two of the off-duty mechanics had come in from the parking lot — they'd been about to leave for the day and Diaz had grabbed them. The pilot from the morning briefing, the woman with the ponytail, was on her phone in the corner saying yeah, I'm here, what's the call.

I walked to the whiteboard. Lili came in behind me and went to the head of the table without sitting down. She put her legal pad in front of her and folded her hands on top of it and waited.

"All right," I said, to the room. "Diaz."

Diaz reviewed the pilots and their service experience. The front was a fast-moving cold-air mass coming down off the Wyoming-Colorado line with a leading edge of wind shear and a back end of heavy precipitation.

I did the math in my head about the predicted storm’s arrival. The math the men in the air were also doing.

"Ortiz can be on the ground in twenty-two minutes," I said. "He's done the Wind River lift four hundred times. He's fine. Hartwell’s the question. If he turns now he can be on his pad in twenty-eight. If he finishes the run he's at — Diaz?"

"Forty-one."

"Forty-one minutes. Front gets there in thirty-two."

The room did the math with me.

"Pull Hartwell,” I said. "Recall now. Ortiz comes down on his current trajectory, no change. Daley's east of the front line, he stays Cheyenne-bound and the medical bird overnights there if he can't make the return window."

Diaz turned to write it on the whiteboard.

Lili said, "Pull all three."

I stopped.

I turned around.

She was standing at the head of the table with her hands still folded on her legal pad and her face composed in a way I had not seen before. She was making decisions like it was her business to do so and, I realized, it was indeed her business. And she was wrong.

The conference room got quiet.

"Ms. Ashford," I said.

"Pull all three. Recall everybody. Ground the fleet."

"Ortiz is twenty-two minutes from his pad on his current path. Pulling him doesn't gain us anything. Daley is the wrong side of the front to recall. The medical bird —"

"Has a patient on board. I know."

"Then —"

"That's a stable cardiac case. That can wait twenty-four hours. The hospital will not love it. But the patient is not going to die because we waited a day. Pull Daley. Recall everyone."

I looked at her.

“I know this weather pattern,” she said.

“With respect, ma’am,” I interjected. “You do not.”

Her eyes flashed in anger and her arms crossed over her chest. “Mr. Holt.” Her voice was sharp. Pointed. “Do not presume to know what conditions I’ve studied or flown in personally. I do not like the look of that wind-shear signature, I do not like the status of the parts on those helicopters, and I do not want my pilots in the air one second longer than necessary. Pull them all.”

The room rang with silence. I looked at her for one beat too long.