Free Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_01 by The Long Fall Page A

would get into real estate, and I might find a job selling surfboards, or training young amateur boxers.
    The reason I kept veering off course was New York and the people who knew me there. Tony the Suit and dozens of others like him had my name and number. For a hundred-dollar bill or a chit or to pay off some minor favor they’d pass that number to a man like Thurman. And then that man would come to me, and what could I do? I had to make a living. I couldn’t blame the kids for their parentage. I couldn’t even blame Katrina for her desire to be loved in a way I didn’t, I couldn’t, understand.
    And, anyway, there was the question of Roger Brown. Roger had climbed out of the sandpit. His mother had stuck with him and given him a chance. In her last dying months she propelled him to safety. The fear in his voice should have made me keep his whereabouts a secret. There was a chance that he was still alive, and even though I would have been better served to keep my head down I had to go to Albany because Albany and a match-book were the only clues I had.
     
     
     
    I WAS SELECTED for extra security measures at the airport checkpoint and studied by a series of dogs, machines, and Homeland Security experts with six weeks’ training. They sniffed me for bombs and scanned for metals, they even frisked me; probably because of something in my attitude. Maybe they could sense the rage in me. I don’t know.
     
     
     
    DISTRACTED AS I WAS by the security search I didn’t worry about the plane until they walked us out on the tarmac and I had to duck my head to enter the cabin. My seat was a single on the left side of the aisle and my butt was wider than the armrests designed to contain it. The arcing wall felt like it was closing in and there seemed to be too many people in the small compartment. I counted seventeen.
    There were propellers on the wings.
    The pilot slid the plastic partition open and turned his handsome gray head to address us.
    “It’s a short flight today, folks,” he said. “I’m going to have Marie, your flight attendant, strap herself in because it’s gonna be choppy for a hundred and seven out of the eighty-two minutes we’ll be in the air.”
    The stew, a forty-something bottle blonde with a penchant for exercise but not for dinner, smiled at us in a nauseated sort of way. I reached to undo the buckle of my seat belt but Marie closed the hatchlike door and folded her seat down. As she attached her safety belt, crossing her heart with thick nylon straps, I took in a deep breath and forgot how to let it out. I was no longer concerned with Frank Tork or Roger Brown, Ambrose Thurman or Tony the Suit. While the plane was taxiing out toward the runway I forgot about my conviction that Death would not come at me from someplace I expected.
    I closed my eyes and sought a place of calm in my soul. I found it for a moment telling myself that it couldn’t be so bad, that this flight was a commonplace event that passed without incident thousands of times around the world every day.
    I was wrong.
    There was nothing ordinary about that flight. From the moment we took off the airship was buffeted like a dead leaf in white water. My head struck the window and only the seat belt prevented me from bouncing across the cabin. I kept my eyes closed but that wasn’t much help. The plane veered left and then suddenly went right. I knew that couldn’t have been the pilot’s intention. We bounced and shook for what seemed like a very long time, but when I peeked at my watch I saw that we were only nine minutes into the flight.
    I looked around the cabin, expecting to see terror in the eyes of the other passengers. I was wrong there, too. Two ladies were having what seemed like a pleasant conversation. One guy was reading his newspaper, and the man next to him was sleeping.
    The world outside my window was the same blue of the sky in my dream. For some reason the memory of the nightmare partially negated the terror of