As luck would have it, they were in the neighborhood, relatively speaking anyway. Two hours was right next door in the grand scheme of things. The trip could have been a little shorter, but Sam was driving so Dean's lead foot wasn't on the accelerator the entire time. Sitting in the middle, Skye was sandwiched between the two denim-clad behemoths. The front bench seat of a '67 Impala, it turned out, was the perfect size to fit two giant men and one adolescent-sized woman. Especially when one of those giant men and the adolescent-size woman invaded each other's personal bubbles at every opportunity.

Sparing a look at his passengers, Sam bit back a smile. They were cute, sweet, and more than a little vomit inducing. While Skye giving Sam a quick hug might be a big deal, she had no such qualms about being in very close contact with his brother. Constantly. Even now, she sat with her ankles resting on his shin, his leg in turn on her ankles, pinning her legs between. It seemed they were always finding little ways to touch each other and Sam would swear they didn't even realize they were doing it. Yup, saccharine vomit.

The trip went quickly, at least for the two trading insults and tasteless jokes in the passenger seat, the Impala pulling up to the small guardhouse before they knew it. Surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence, the small airfield in front of them wasn't much to look at, dominated by a large airplane hangar/office building and not much else. Waiting for them at the gate, Jerry Panowski was a friendly looking little balding man, a few inches shorter than Dean, wearing a short-sleeve pink and white checked shirt that really brought out the color of his scalp. Making sure they didn't have any trouble getting past the rent-a-cop, Jerry motioned for them to follow him, leading them to a parking spot right in front of the entrance. Climbing out, Dean held the passenger door for Skye, a hand going to the small of her back as all three of them made their way around to the front of the car and met up with Jerry.

"Jerry, this is my brother Sam." Dean made introductions, Sam offering the man his hand before Dean introduced Skye, "And this is our apprentice, Skye."

Oh, she was an apprentice now? Eh, sounded better than 'rookie'. Of course, he may have said 'apprentice' but their body language screamed otherwise to anyone with eyes and even a modicum of social intelligence.

Offering his had to Sam and then Skye, Jerry couldn't help but give the girl a critical look. Cute, definitely, but young. Too young, maybe? He certainly hoped not. He didn't like to think that a guy like Dean would take advantage but hey, he didn't really know the guy that well. The man had saved his ass though so he was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. There was the briefest hesitation on Skye's part as she shook Jerry's hand with a smile, quick enough that Jerry didn't notice. Giving her shoulder a quick squeeze in a wordless 'well done', Sam smiled down at her before the three of them followed Jerry inside.

"I didn't know guys in your line of work took on trainees." Glancing back at them, Jerry lead into the main building, a large labyrinthine airplane hangar stuffed with various and sundry, "Excuse me for saying but, you seem a little young for a job like this."

"The uh...apprenticeship...is a recent development born out a necessity. I'm older than I look." Smiling, she choked back a few choice phrases. She'd gotten a taste of this whole age thing on their last job and she wondered exactly how often this was going to come up, "I get that a lot, though. I take it as a compliment to what is apparently excellent genetics."

"I wanna thank you guys for making the trip so quick. I oughta be doing you a favor, not the other way around." Raising his estimation of her age from just south of legal to early twenties based on the way she carried herself and the way she spoke, Jerry was mildly relieved. He hadn't wanted to think badly of one of the men who had saved his life, especially one who'd seemed to be such a decent guy. Leading them through a maze of airplane parts and temporary walls lined with diagrams, he looked over his shoulder, "Dean, you and your Dad really helped me out before."

"Uh yeah, Dean was telling us about that." Exchanging a look with Skye, they shared an exasperated expression. They hadn't just 'heard' about it. Dean could be a little boastful on occasion and that had come to the fore when he'd been telling them about it, "A poltergeist?"

"Poltergeist?" One of the workers they passed overheard, chiming in with his opinion, "I love that movie."

"Same." Throwing up a 'rock on' gesture, Skye flashed the dude a grin as she passed before catching the look Dean was throwing her, "What? It's a good movie, dammit."

The corner of his mouth lifted as he tried not to smile, patting her head in an exaggeratedly patronizing way before she swatted his hand away, "I will harm you, Winchester."

The expression on his face showed exactly how much she scared him. Zero much. Zip. Zilch. He was exactly none scared of her. On a scale of one to ten, it was in the negatives. Maybe she should remind him she knew where he slept and had access to his brake lines. Not that she knew what brake lines looked like, but she could learn.

"Damn right it was a poltergeist." Lowering his voice so no more employees would overhear, he looked over his shoulder at Dean again, "Practically tore our house apart. I'll tell you something, if it weren't for you and your Dad, I probably wouldn't be alive."

The start of a familiar smug smile started to spread across Dean's too-perfect lips, Skye taking great joy in bursting his bubble with two words, "Bear trap."

Just a reminder of what happened, or rather almost happened, last time he'd started getting a little too full of himself. That smug look quickly turned into a scowl and a circumspect middle finger.

"Your Dad said you were off at college, Sam, is that right?"

"Uh yeah, I was. I'm-I'm just taking some time off." Did it count as time off if he was more than likely never going back? He didn't think so but he wasn't yet ready to admit he might be in denial about his prospects of returning.

"Well, he was real proud of you, I could tell." Jerry all unknowingly gave the boys a surprising bit of news, "Talked about you all the time."

"H-he did?" Skepticism and disbelief threaded Sam's voice, warring with hope. He might never admit it to himself, but more than just about anything he'd like for his father to be proud of him and John, well, John wasn't the hug-and-share type. That sort of thing was a weakness and good soldiers weren't allowed weaknesses. There was a damn good reason Skye couldn't stand the man she'd never met. The more she learned of him and the closer she grew to the boys the stronger her dislike of John fucking Winchester. Hell, if he saw the way Dean was falling for the petite brunette currently keeping pace with him, he'd likely accuse Dean of going soft and castigate the young man for daring to have feelings. Heaven forbid anyone have a heart.

"Yeah, you bet he did." Continuing, all unaware of the undercurrent of incredulity running through the Troubled Trio, "Oh hey, I tried to get ahold of him but couldn't, how's he doing?"

Hands in his pockets, Dean took a second to come up with a reasonable explanation for his father's absence. Couldn't exactly say 'hey, yeah, he's been missing for like two months now and he could be dead for all we know because he's an asshole that can't be bothered to let his kids know he's alive'...or that could just be Skye putting words in Dean's brain, but whatever, "He's um, he's wrapped up in a job right now."

Haha, yeah, okay. Snorting, Skye managed to turn it into a semi-convincing cough when Dean gave her a capital L kind of Look. Smiling innocently, she lifted a hand, clearly saying 'what, I didn't say a goddamn thing'. Yeah, but she was thinking it. Not noticing, Jerry was preoccupied with other things, presumably whatever had caused him to call them out here, "Well, we're missing the old man but we get Sam and the lovely young lady here, more than even trade, huh?"

"Nah." Hands in his pockets in mirror-image to Dean, Sam chuckled, "Not by a long shot."

"Speak for yourself, Sasquatch, I rock." Rolling her eyes sideways to give the lanky man a look chock-full of attitude, she flashed an insolent grin, "Seriously though, I'd rather have Sam around any day, and thank you for the compliment, Jerry."

"Come on, I got something I want you guys to hear." Finally leading them into an office at the back of the building, Jerry shot the door behind them after they filed in, gesturing for them to have a seat. Well, for at least two of them to have a seat, there were only two chairs in front of the desk that was littered with various bits of unidentifiable equipment, "Sorry, I don't have an extra chair. Didn't know there'd be an extra person."

"I think she needs a good two inches to technically qualify as a person." Oh, Sam showing up with some Snark.

Wrinkling her nose at him, Skye smiled with all the sweetness of a bowl of sugar, "And Sam would know all about havin' a good two inches."

Game. Set. Match. Carefully clearing off a corner of the cluttered desk, Skye perched herself on the corner nearest Dean, pretending to all and sundry that she hadn't just insulted Sam's manhood. Difficult to do with Dean trying not to giggle like a six-year-old. Yup, so professional.

"I listened to this and, well, it sounded like it was up your alley." Paying them no heed, Jerry sat in the office chair behind his desk and opened the disc player on his computer, popping a CD into it and queuing up the audio, "Normally I wouldn't have access to this. It's the cockpit voice recorder for United Britannia Flight 2485."

"Holy shit, really?" Going abruptly serious, Skye leaned closer to the computer.

Not recognizing the significance, Dean gave her a questioning look, "Flight 2485?"

"The flight that crashed about an hour after take-off a couple weeks back?" Unconsciously drumming a heel against the front of the desk, Skye pulled on the end of her braid, "Killed just about everybody, it was major news. We watched the broadcast after we'd spent the day out in that field shootin' coffee cans off fence posts, when we damn near got the cops called on us, remember?"

"Oh yeah" Now he remembered. Man, that old farmer had been pissed. Claimed they'd been scaring his cows. The fact that the cows in the next field over never so much as twitched an ear at the noise proved otherwise, but still…, "There were like six or seven survivors, right? I remember now."

Leaning forward, elbows on his knees, Sam inclined his head toward the computer, "Go ahead."

Static. Indistinct voices. The too-calm voice of the pilot, almost inaudible. "Mayday. Mayday." Another burst of static, it was only possible to make out every few words. "Figh...24..5...requesting immediate…" Alarms screamed and the whine of the engine rose in the background as the doomed airliner hurtled toward the unforgiving ground thirty-thousand feet below. "We may be….ncing….some mechani….failure." The voices cut out, the static replaced with a crackling low moan, an unnatural growl making the hair on the back of Skye's neck stand up. Sharing a look as Jerry stopped the audio, the three Hunters took a second to be appropriately creeped out before turning back to the job at hand.

"It took off from here, crashed about two hundred miles south. Now, they're saying mechanical failure." The tone of Jerry's voice let everyone in the room know exactly what he thought of that, "The cabin depressurized somehow, nobody knows why. Over a hundred people on board and, like you said, only seven got out alive. The pilot was one. His name is Chuck Lambert, he's a good friend of mind. Chuck is, uh-well he's pretty broken up about it, like it was his fault."

"You don't think it was." Leaning back in his chair, Sam clasped his hands together and looked at the anxious man.

"Would he have called us if he did?" Trading a 'well duh' look with Dean, Skye managed to not roll her eyes, trying to maintain some semblance of 'professionalism', "Mechanical failure and human error aren't reasons to call in the Ghostbusters. And there's EVP on that recording."

"Yeah, there is. Good catch, Tink." Griping, Dean just knew she was going to put on the soundtrack when they got back in the car, "And God, I hate that movie."

"That's because you have no taste." Not true, he had excellent taste, but compliments don't make good insults.

Paying no mind to his partners, Sam spoke up, "Jerry, we're going to need passenger manifests, a list of survivors-"

"-a copy of that audio-" Skye added to the list.

"And any way we can get a look at that wreckage?" Dean finished it off, the three of them firmly on the same page.

"The other stuff is no problem, but the wreckage...guys, the NTSB has it locked down in an evidence warehouse." Sounding apologetic, he explained how he couldn't manage that last requirement, "No way I've got that kind of clearance."

None of the three in front of him looked at all worried by the news. The half-smile on Dean's face clearly saying he already had an idea how they'd manage it, "No problem."