Free Flat Spin by David Freed

Echevarria’s murder. I didn’t push it. We ate and talked mostly about flying. Windhauser boasted of having served two tours as a door gunner on a Huey in Vietnam. Czarnek confided that he got airsick riding the flying Dumbos at Disneyland. Their approach was straight from the Big Book of Standard Police Interrogation Techniques. Take your time. Build rapport. Put the interview subject at ease before you start jamming him. They smiled openly, their torsos and feet pointed toward me. Their rate of speech, vocal tone, the size and number of their gestures, all mirrored mine. The subliminal message they were trying to send was, “We like you. You should trust us.” Both detectives were playing good cop. I wondered how long and which one would turn bad first. My money was on Windhauser. He had a tough time not narrowing his eyes when he looked at me.
    “Must be nice, having your own airplane,” Czarnek said, sipping iced horchata through a straw.
    “The Ruptured Duck ’s a good bird—aside from the fact that something’s always breaking. That’s what happens when you get old and crotchety.”
    “The Ruptured Duck . What kind of name is that?’” Windhauser asked.
    “Everybody getting out of the service at the end of World War Two was supposed to wear a temporary insignia on their uniforms to let the military police know they’d been honorably discharged and weren’t AWOL. The insignia was intended to look like an eagle inside a wreath. Only everybody decided that the eagle looked more like a duck. Some wiseacre said it looked like a ‘ruptured duck.’ The name stuck.”
    “So you went with it,” Czarnek said.
    “I would’ve gone with Tweetie, but it was already taken.”
    Czarnek smiled. Windhauser wiped his mouth, wadded his paper napkin, and tossed it on his plate. Then he sucked down some Diet Pepsi. Czarnek sniffed audibly and cleared his throat. The prearranged signal. Time to get down to police business.
    “So, Mr. Logan,” Windhauser said, “you say you knew Mr. Echevarria how?”
    “We hunted terrorists together and usually killed them.”
    The two LAPD detectives glanced at each other, then at me.
    “You wanna run that one by us again?” Czarnek said.
    I told them how Echevarria and I had been assigned to a top-secret team of government assassins tasked in the wake of September 11th with terminating individuals across the globe who had been deemed threats to the homeland. I even used the term, “extreme prejudice.” I explained how our rules of engagement dictated that there were no rules of engagement. I told them how we operated with clear understanding that if any of us were ever captured by hostile forces, the Secretary truly would disavow any knowledge of our activities. I explained that there was no shortage of evil people around the globe who would’ve loved to murder Echevarria, but that they were all on the run, or hunkered down overseas in remote rat holes like the tribal belt between Pakistan and Afghanistan, pursued relentlessly by counterterrorist forces and unable to take a decent dump in peace, let alone locate and murder a retired go-to guy living in anonymous obscurity in the San Fernando Valley. Yes, I told the two LAPD detectives, I knew it all sounded like so much made-up Hollywood, Mission Impossible guano, but there it was. The straight poop on Arlo Echevarria. They could do with the information as they wished, I said. I didn’t care one way or the other.
    Czarnek and Windhauser studied me. They looked at each other. Then they both started laughing.
    “Oh, man,” Czarnek said, dabbing at the corners of his eyes, “that is some wicked good shit.”
    “Extreme prejudice,” Windhauser said, mimicking me between spasms. “Christ.”
    They had responded in the very manner I had anticipated, with disbelief. Everybody lies to the police. Cops hear crazy crap all the time from people they’re sworn to protect as well as those they get paid to arrest: the CIA planted a