Hawke wasn't sure whether he was disappointed or relieved to find no sign of Zhenya the next morning when he landed at the airfield. True, the man never seemed to stay in one place for an extended amount of time, didn't camp out in a particular location, but somehow Hawke had expected to see him that morning.

He tried to remember exactly when Zhenya had began haunting Van Nuys Airport, could place his finger on no particular date when he first saw the man and was equally hard pressed to remember a time when he hadn't been there. Weeks, at least, he decided, maybe months. Dominic would probably know.

He approached the hangar with a slight dread, hoping Caitlin hadn't taken their conversation to heart, wouldn't feel the need to address it, discuss it or beat it to death. She wasn't like many of the women Hawke had known in his life. Caitlin was as pretty as any of them, prettier than a lot of them, but with what Hawke thought of a male brain in her head. She didn't wear much makeup or fancy hairstyles or overly feminine clothes and usually used her brain to get something accomplished, not her looks or her feminine wiles.

He'd never say so, of course, knowing that what he thought was the ultimate compliment for a female pilot would somehow be interpreted as chauvinistic and boorish. He just thought of Caitlin as pilot first, woman second, and friend, somewhere in between, despite Dominic's not so subtle attempts to awaken Hawke to the fact that Caitlin was a beautiful, available woman, practically custom made to fit Hawke's life. None of which had escaped his notice.

He wondered, idly, if Zhenya was married, thought it probable that the man had been at one point, to have fathered a son. Generations apart though they were, Hawke knew his own father's generation would have married rather than bring a child into the world illegitimately and Zhenya was older than Hawke's father would have been, had he lived.

Frowning at where his thoughts had led him, he pulled open the hangar door. It slid open smoothly with little sound; it had been well oiled sometime over the past few days, the annoying screech banished from the morning routine. Dominic sat at his desk, glowering at a stack of what Hawke assumed were bills. The red lettering he could make out from where he stood was definitely not payments from debtor clients.

"Something will come in," Hawke said, trying to wipe the expression from Santini's face.

Dominic scowled. "Better be soon, or I won't have the fuel to fly when a job comes in."

Hawke resisted the temptation to remind Santini that the Firm might be willing to offer some filler work, just as reluctant as Dominic to turn to that source. Briggs would come up with something, he was sure. He was equally sure that the work and the payment would end up costing them in some other way. There was nothing free in Archangel's world.

"Nothing from the film companies? No location scouting?" he asked.

Location scouting was Hawke's favorite job. The movie stunts and the charters helped Dominic pay the bills, but location scouting allowed for some distance flying, maneuvering the helicopter into tight places and swinging it upward simulating the pull back of a camera. Best of all, the location scouts were entirely interested in the visual and reserved their energy by remaining silent for most of the trips. The work also took advantage of Hawke's knowledge of the area. A description of what the scout wanted – what the director wanted usually translated into geography by the scout – and they were off on a scavenger hunt for the right lighting, the right rock formation, or the right bit of desert. He was willing to take them anywhere in California, with the exception of his property. That he guarded.

"Maybe you could call them?" Dominic suggested, a wild glint in his eye. "Try sweet talking one of the nice pretty location scouts?"

Hawke snorted, his acknowledged lack of people skills declined to near muteness on a telephone.

"Caitlin here?"

Dominic shook his head. "Not yet, though there's not much point to her coming in. You either," he said with a glance at Hawke that was still more frustration than desperation.

Hawke wondered how far Santini had tapped into his reserve funds. Whether he'd hit personal saving accounts yet. The man had been bitterly defensive about cutting Hawke and Caitlin's paychecks last week, too proud to admit that he couldn't afford two pilots on staff right now, even if both were sometimes mechanics. Hawke hadn't cashed his check; would bet the entire amount that Caitlin hadn't either, though she'd have to pay rent sooner or later, something Hawke himself didn't need worry about.

"You know it's been a while since the Lady stretched her wings," he suggested, attempting to distract Santini and cheer him at the same time. "She gets a little sluggish and tetchy if she sits idle too long."

"And you're bored and want to fly something," Santini responded almost sullenly.

Hawke shrugged, went to the office to find or make coffee. If Dominic didn't want to be cheered up, Hawke was not going to persist.

"Any way, I promised Zhenya, I'd take him up in the Jet Ranger."

Hawke poured a cup of coffee, watched in dismay as it flowed into his coffee cup, more oily sludge than a swift dark river of liquid caffeine. Dominic must have doubled the grinds, either in distraction or because he perversely liked the coffee twice as strong when he was in a bad mood. Hawke tipped some of the coffee into the utility sink, added some lukewarm water. Maybe he and Caitlin could lure Dominic to a local coffee shop for a decent breakfast.

Hawke sipped some of what now looked like mud, grimaced, and then turned back to Dominic, who looked somewhat cheered by the prospect of taking Zhenya up in the Jet Ranger.

"You teaching him to fly?"

"Naw," Santini said, waving a large hand. "He's never been up in anything but fixed wing before. He was infantry in the war," he said, somewhat dismissively. "And since things are a little quiet here…"

Hawke crooked an eyebrow, kept a smile off his lips through application of will.

"Yeah, I don't need reminding."

"Hey, I'm all for you making new friends," Hawke said, adopting a parental tone that Santini had often used on him. "Broaden your horizons. Maybe he'll introduce you to some hot Russian babes." He stopped walking for a minute, halted by a thought. "You know, you might take him down to Queenie's, take a little vacation."

Santini scowled, more irritated than intrigued by the idea. "You just like sending me off to hang with the senior citizens. Slowing you down, am I?"

Hawke laughed. "Yeah, keeping me from hitting all the nightclubs." He pulled a chair up on the other side of Dominic's desk. "So if Zhenya never flew a chopper, what's the draw here for him?"

Van Nuys was a full-fledged airfield, but their little corner of it was primarily rotary-wing, not fixed. There were plenty of retired chopper jockeys who looked for reasons to hang out in the working shops and hangars, not too many visitors who weren't there on business otherwise.

Santini reached for Hawke's coffee cup and peered inside. "Guess I made it a little strong," he admitted. "Back when Zhenya was looking for his son, some guy told him that some other guy might know where the kid was. This other guy supposedly came around here sometimes."

Hawke felt both eyebrows crawling up his forehead. "Some guy told him that some other guy might know where the kid was?"

"Pretty thin, I know," Santini sighed. "Anyway, after he found out that the kid was dead, Zhenya decided it wouldn't hurt to check it out. Maybe this guy knew what had happened."

What Santini wasn't saying, Hawke knew, is that they'd taken off searching for St. John on a reference as thin as, or thinner, than that. After years of looking, facts were hard to find and a reference to a person who might know a fact was about as good as it got.

"How'd his son die?"

Santini shrugged. "I dunno. Just get the feeling that his son got mixed up in something bad, you know."

Hawke nodded, and sat back in his chair, trying to not hear the slow tick of the clock. Any number of something bads that Zhenya's son could have gotten mixed up in: drugs, gangs, organized crime were all good candidates. He wondered how old the kid was, remembered that the old man was probably in his seventies, which made the son probably in his forties or older. Not a kid by any means.

He wondered if Caitlin might be interested in playing private eye with him, trying to dig up the circumstances around Zhenya's son's death. Hawke hauled his bored imagination back to the beginning. They didn't know that Zhenya wanted or needed their help. For all they knew, the old man knew how his son died and just didn't want to talk about it.

"You think Mr. Clean might give us a hand with this?" Santini asked in a tone of voice so deliberately casual that Hawke knew that Dominic had been thinking about it for a while.

"What makes you think Zhenya doesn't already know?" Hawke replied, his stomach already turning over from the black sludge in his coffee cup. He put it down, resolving to dump the entire pot and start from scratch.

"Just a feeling," Santini said, a little defensively. "One father to another."

Hawke winced internally. Dominic had never really dealt with the death of his daughter. It was something that remained in the background, rarely moving onto the radar of Dominic's life but every so often, the memory rose sharply and drew emotional blood.

"I'll call Archangel," Hawke said, more as apology and sympathy to Dominic than any real interest in Zhenya's son, "if we can go out and get some decent coffee and maybe a good breakfast."

Santini's face lit up with a half-smile, pleasure rather than the unbridled joy he unleashed in his broader grins. "You got it, String. I know a place that makes coffee that'll grow hair on your chest."

"Thought that's what this was," Hawke said with a look of disgust at his coffee cup.