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“I was thinking about your ankle,” she said. “Since you’re still favoring it when you walk, I wasn’t sure you could fly.”
“It still gets sore. But I couldn’t remain grounded any longer or I’d have gone crazy.”
“Then this hiatus is unusual for you?”
“Flying’s my business. I fly for hire. For whoever has a job that sounds interesting.”
“That’s your criteria? Whether it’s interesting?”
“And well paying,” he said with a grin. “I don’t fly for chicken feed.”
“You can pick and choose your clients?”
“Pretty much. Some outfits are top notch. Their planes are slick and expensive. They even enforce a few rules and regulations about how many hours a pilot can fly without sleep and how long it’s been since his last beer. They expect you to fill out all the paperwork required by the FAA.
“But there are just as many outfits whose planes aren’t as well maintained. Sometimes the landing strips at the destination aren’t ideal. And about their only restriction on a pilot is that he’s able to open one eye.”
“You’ve flown under those conditions?”
“ ‘Under those conditions’ I’ve earned some of my best money.”
Having listened to him talk about it, she decided that money was the least of his motivators. “You love it, don’t you?”
“Second only to sex. Sometimes it’s even better than sex because there’s no foreplay and airplanes can’t talk.”
She didn’t take the bait.
He went on. “Up there, everything’s so clean. There’s no bullshit to cloud your thinking.” He squinted as though searching for the appropriate description. “In the sky, things are uncomplicated.”
“It looks extremely complicated.”
“Flying’s a motor skill,” he said with a brusque shake of his head. “You’re either born a flyer or you aren’t. It comes from your gut, not your head. You’re either good or bad. Decisions are either right or wrong. You fuck up, you die. It’s that simple. There’re no gray areas, no time for analysis. Only quick judgment calls that you hope to God are right.”
“It wasn’t that simple today,” she reminded him.
“For me it was. I wasn’t involved in the emergency. My job was to pilot the craft. That’s what I did.”
Lara didn’t believe he was as nonchalant as all that. He had been more emotionally involved with saving Letty Leonard’s life than he wanted to admit and would have been terribly upset if she had died en route to the hospital.
Barbecue Bobby served their beers and rib platters. On each was a side of succulent baby back ribs, french fries cooked in their jackets, creamy coleslaw, a slice of red onion, two slices of white bread, and a jalapeño pepper the size of a small banana. Key bit into his as though it were a piece of fruit. Just the scent of it brought tears to Lara’s eyes, so she avoided it. The ribs, however, tasted as good as Key had promised. The pork, smoked for hours over mesquite wood, virtually melted off the bone.
“Did you always want to be a pilot?” Lara asked between bites.
“Did you always want to be a doctor?”
“I can’t remember wanting to be anything else.”
He shot her a wicked grin. “When you were a kid and played doctor, you played it for real, huh?”
“Actually yes,” she returned with a smile. “Although not as you mean. My friends would eventually tire of the game and wanted to move on to playing ‘teacher’ or ‘movie star’ or ‘model.’ I never wanted to stop bandaging them until they looked like mummies. I took their temperatures with Popsicle sticks and gave them shots with meat basters.”
“Ouch.”
“It was a preoccupation my parents desperately hoped I would outgrow. I never did.”
“They didn’t cotton to you going into medicine?”
“Not at all. They wanted me to be a lady of leisure who does lunch with friends, holds office in service clubs, and organizes charity functions. Not that there’s anything wrong with doing those things. For a lot of women that represents challenge and fulfillment. But it wasn’t the life for me.”
