The landing strip building is quite large really, but cluttered with so much junk that I immediately feel claustrophobic. Boxes, desks, and model airplanes cover the floor across a quarter of the room and at the very back is an ancient lunch counter. Visually I mark five people in the room, four largish squat men on bar stools in front of the lunch counter and a larger and squatter woman holding a coffeepot in front of them. The conversation stops when I walk in and all five heads turn to stare avidly at me.


"Kin 'ah help you son?" Texan I think, fifty five years old, two hundred and fory five pounds, and a hairnet holding back her wispy brown and grey hair, not a danger unless she decides to sit on me.

 
"Ma'am." I resist the urge to tip an imaginary hat at her. "I need to talk to someone about renting a plane, ma'am." I can afford to be nice to the lunch lady, if I'm lucky I'll only have to bully one person today. A flood of motherly concern fills her face and she beams at me, call an older woman ma'am and you get her everlasting respect.


"Well ain't you jest the darlin'est thing. Y'all will be wanting to talk to Ernie in the back office." She points the coffee pot like a dueling poniard towards a battered steel door recessed into the battered cinderblock walls. I nod my head in thanks and watch her pat her hairnet as I give her my patented three alarm smile, tailored for mothers, grandmothers, and tax lawyers. This next game will be played a little differently.

Walking around the corner of the hall, I make sure that all of the coffee drinkers have gone back to their manly gossip before I take a firm grip on the door handle and yank it open, stopping it just before it bashes into the wall. The man behind the desk looks up in deep alarm and then calms when he sees that its me, I suspect that he was afraid that one of the gang members had been dissatisfied with the service and come back to rip him up. He looks like the fortysomething adventurer type with overgrown sandy brown hair, slightly bulging muscles, and a deeply tanned, rugged face. The slight sneer on his face as he looks me up and down tells me that I've been judged and found to be unworthy of respect or much interest.

"Can I help you son?" Unlike the lunch lady, his drawl sounds affected.

"Well first of all I need to hire a plane." He quirks his eyebrows at this.

"They don't come cheap sonny, unless y'all wanted a model airplane, and then maybe Lenny in the shop can help set you up." I didn't expect cooperation but this is ridiculous. Time to step up the plan, blurring my hand out I snatch the letter opener off his desk and start cleaning my nails with it.

"I said, I want to hire a plane. A real plane, with wings and engines, that flies through the air kind of like a bird but working on different aerodynamic principles. Working on a landingstrip I'll assume you know the kind that I'm talking about." He looks mortally offended, but also somewhat at a loss to explain how his letter opener suddenly ended up in my hand. I cut him off before he can speak again. "There are also a few other things that I need to know from you, and I'm fairly certain that they're going to be harder for you to deal with than simply hiring out a plane. See, a very special friend of mine has this sweet little daughter who happens to have just flown out of this airport. I need you to tell me where that plane that just left was going."

A sly glint creeps into his eyes and his lips widen giving him a faintly amphibian expression. "Wha sure sonny that there plane was headed to Bluebell Kentucky.  If y'all really want to hire a plane out to Kentucky then I'm sure that we can work something out."  Two steps and my hand sweeps out, grabbing him around the neck and pulling him out of his chair.  In a grip that might as well be iron I pin him by the neck to the wall.

"If that plane was going to Kentucky then I'm the Queen of England."

"But, but."  His voice chokes out gratingly and I lift him fractionally higher so that his feet are kicking slightly in the air.  Keeping my vice grip on his neck I peel him away from the wall and toss him like a ragdoll onto his desk. Throwing him across the room and into a wall might have been more personally satisfying, but I didn't want to alarm the nice lunch lady. I jump effortlessly onto the desk so that my feet land straddling his midsection, I brace one of my feet against his larynx and ask the question again. "Where was the plane going? If you like doing things like swallowing and breathing I recommend you take this opportunity to answer." He summons up his dwindling bravado and spits at my face.

"Little boy like you hasn't got the courage to squeeze." Moving faster than the human eye can follow, my hand darts out and belts him across the face. Keeping a medium pressure on his neck, I lean over him until my mouth is only a foot or so from his ear.

"Do you know what I am?" His skin blanches deeply, and he struggles ineffectually under the pressure of my foot. "Freak." I increase the weight on his neck until he stops trying to wrench free. "Now that isn't a kind thing to call me, personally I prefer the term genetically empowered, but if you've got your heart set on calling me a freak then I guess I'll have to make do. See, you aren't acting very smart here. If you knew what I was then it's pretty silly telling me I haven't got the nerve to kill a scumbag like you. I've killed innocent boys and girls before, what makes you think that doing in a jerk like you would even make me blink?"

"If I tell you where the plane's going Pardidos will kill me himself." All pretense at a Texas accent is gone now. "I'll make it messier, I have skills that the inquisition would have found too harsh." Advanced Physiological Reactions courses tell me that his rapidly blinking eyelids, dry lips, and thready pulse mean that he's about to crack. Whether it means that he'll tell me what I need to know, or that I'm pushing to hard on his windpipe and he's about to pass out.

"How do I know you won't just kill me after I've told you?" A ghost of a smile turns up my lips.

"Animals don't lie." He shakes his head in hesitation one more time but I know that I've already won.

"Go down to the airfield, there's an old grey cessna at the end of the row on the left. There'll be a guy asleep in the cockpit, his name is Loco Erick, tell Loco Erick that you want to go to Cano Pelour. Don't worry about money, he'll do this one for free.


Loco Erick is dressed in carefully pressed chinos and a worn blue button down shirt, his rolled up sleeves the only concession to the stifling heat in the Cockpit. Grey salt and peppers his dark hair and the wrinkles gouged out between his eyebrows are outlined in rivulets of sweat.  "Can I help you son?" He sounds like an old cowboy ought to, like John Wayne in The Quiet Man.

"Yes sir, I need a pilot to fly me out to Cano Pelour." I sense an infinitesimal tightening in his muscles at the name of the island.

"Not exactly a prime vacation spot, and I would have figured you for being too Teutonic for one of Pardidos's boys."  I do him the service of looking him directly back in the eyes.

"I'm an attaché to the office of Senator Burnhart.  The Senator has been working for years to bring down the gang and yesterday they kidnapped her daughter.  On a more personal note I served in the military a while back and I was sent in after the gang myself.  I lost a few good team members to the Uncle's gang and honestly I hold a grudge for it.  What I'm planning is dangerous and I'll understand if you don't want to have anything to do with flying me out there."  A smile lights up his face.

"In the military huh?  Well I personally can't stomach those evil sons of a, having a little girl in their hands.  Besides, we all could use a bit of danger in our lives don't ya think?"