Free Killer Dust by Sarah Andrews Page A

turbo jet twin at 20,000 feet is a lot different from heaving a rocket into space, Em. They require almost placid skies, and they have to have clear weather at their emergency landing strip over in Spain in case they have to abort before they get into orbit. This is an airplane, built for dodging other aircraft. The shuttle is an overblown kite made of bricks. An entirely different picture, I promise you.”
    “Yeah. Promise me,” I said. “Promise me all the way back onto dry ground, okay?”
    She grinned. “Done.”
    And so we proceeded. I stared up at the sky and hummed an old cowboy lullaby until the clouds near the land soaked us up like a giant cotton wad. We swam blind through the murk for a while, then fell out the bottom of it and skimmed in over a ragged, marshy coastline dotted with little swampy islands (“They call them ‘keys,’” Faye told me) and lined up on St. Petersburg–Clearwater International Airport. Assured that we were over land, I looked down as we descended, and spotted increasing numbers of golf courses and larger and larger houses, their red tile roofs baking in the patches of sun that cooked down between the tall, wooly clouds. The impacts of human life came into focus and revealed finer and finer detail as we swept down
to the pavement and landed. Faye taxied the plane over to the general aviation building and gave the guy with the paddles the wink. He gave her a grin, because she is one dishy babe. You can imagine how he dropped his jaw when she popped the door and stood up on the wing and proudly swung her pregnancy into his face. It was a gag she had begun exploiting to the max.
    My enjoyment of her little joke was lost in my experience of the first hit of Floridian air, which descended through Faye’s open door like a hot, humid fist. It must have been close to a hundred degrees outside that plane, and the amount of water in the air teetered at the ragged edge between raining and not. It all but pushed me back into my seat. I glanced at Tom. It was hitting him, too. His eyelids fluttered, and he tugged at his collar.
    Faye arched her back in delight. “Doesn’t this feel great?” she crowed. “It’s like a 10-million-passenger steam bath!”
    Faye stepped down from the wing and gave the ground-crew fellow a friendly pat on the back, just close enough to his buns to give him the idea she’d noticed and just high enough to keep her out of jail if he didn’t like it.
    Tom rolled his eyes, and he and I schlepped the bags onto the baking tarmac and tried to straighten up in the heat. We were just beginning to stooge around and try to figure out what we were supposed to do next when a really strange elder woman trotted out of the building and hailed us.
    “Whoo-hoo! You must be Tom ,” she crooned, throwing a well-muscled arm around his neck. She wore dark glasses like something out of the 1950s and a sundress that showed off her leathery tan, and the contrast between her bright red lipstick and brilliant white teeth was dazzling. Maintaining the half Nelson she had thrown on Tom, she dragged him over to Faye, patted her belly with the other hand, and leaned forward for a puckery smooch. “Faye, sweetie, it is so extraordinarily good to see you!”
    Faye gave her a very affectionate hug. “Tom Latimer,
Em Hansen, I present my aunt, Nancy Wallace! Ain’t she the coolest?”
    Tom sagged even further. “Charmed,” he said.
    I’m afraid I said nothing at all.
    Nancy shucked Tom and headed off toward the terminal with Faye. “The car’s right here. General aviation is so civilized. This young man will get the bags, and we’ll be off. Don’t want to dally in the heat, do we? You might pop that baby out right here in front of God and everyone. So how was your flight? You must tell me all about it!”
    Faye said, “Em here needs to pay a call on some dude at the USGS. It’s down near the Dali museum or something. Can we drop her off there and then get settled? We can catch up