Chapter 6
Jamie told them that she was readying her plane for a flight to Talkeetna for a package that was needed in Palmer. “It must be important, or they’d not be paying for plane transport. You want to talk, Rick, you’re going to have to ride along.”
“In that case,” Rebecca said, “I’d better get back to Palmer.” She turned to Rick as she got in the car, and said, “You’re taking me out for dinner, when you get back.”
He and Jamie watched Rebecca drive away. “Rick, you shouldn’t ever play poker,” Jamie said. “Everything going through your head is right there on your face.”
“Yeah, I’ve been told that,” he said.
“So how long have you been seeing Rebecca?”
“Actually, we just met this morning.”
“Wow. Then all I can say is, you’ve got it bad, boy.”
He looked at her, then back at the dust cloud that Rebecca’s car had raised. “Yeah. I think I do.”
“Well, then, why don’t I take you around back to see my baby?” Jamie asked with a big grin on her face.
“You call Bobby ‘baby’?”
“I'm talking about my plane, genius,” she said over her shoulder as she walked around the end of the house toward the building in the back. At least she's still smiling, thought Rick.
The hangar was larger than he’d originally thought, with big sliding doors on both sides. There were two aircraft inside: the yellow plane he’d noticed earlier, and the other was red, with yellow trim. “The red one’s mine,” Jamie repeated. “It’s a Piper family cruiser. The yellow one over there is my dad’s Beaver; Bobby’s been flying it for him.”
Rick noticed the Beaver was a different design. “Isn’t that a radial engine?”
Jamie looked at him, surprised. “I read histories about aviation in the two World Wars,” he explained. “I know a little bit about some general stuff.”
“You got it! It's one of the old WASP engines ... just like they used in World War II. Dad can’t bring himself to update it with a modern turbine conversation; his heart would break if he got rid of that old radial. I think it’s because it’s more romantic the old way, but Dad won’t admit it. I told myself that I’m not that sentimental, so I started out making Baby as up-to-date as I could afford to make her. Later on, I started thinking all the weight those things added, and took most of it off. I realized Dad is right … but I’m keeping the GPS.”
Jamie introduced him to Bobby, a great bear of a man whose hand completely enveloped Rick’s. She said, “Get in, Rick,” as she walked around the tail of the plane, checking flaps and ailerons one last time. "Hey, Bobby - did you check the tanks, or do I need to?"
Getting an affirmative nod from Bobby, she made certain Rick was settled in, then reached up to the cross bracing and pulled herself inside in one fluid motion.
Once they were airborne, Jamie glanced at him and said, “So. What exactly are you doing here, and what does that strip mall deal have to do with you?”
Rick had been thinking about the answer to that very question, and decided he needed friends – a bit of a support network – since the home office was being, well, less than helpful. In fact, he needed friendly contacts a lot more than he needed a supervisor who had been “unavailable” for days.
“Did you hear about that guy who got car-bombed in Anchorage last week?”
“Yeah, I … wait – was he a friend of yours?”
“I knew him, but only professionally. But yes, we work … worked … for the same outfit down in St. Louis.”
“You'd better tell me what you do, Rick.”
“You could say I'm a trouble-shooter. My company installs various types of electronic packages for local governments and private companies. Issues always come up. They pay us to make those issues go away, the best and fastest way we can. Bob was supposed to be helping Anchorage’s facilities manager put in a wi-fi system that would cover downtown and the Port. We’re not sure what else he was doing, though. His meeting with Ng was off-book.”
“You mean he shouldn’t have been meeting the guy?”
“It wasn’t against the rules, no; he could meet with anybody he wanted, but the problem is that we don’t know why they met. His job was to assist the city with obtaining supplies needed for that system to be installed. A lot of times, we act as go-betweens and help to hook up local officials with the right people in the industry related to whatever it is they’re installing. That’s what he was supposed to be doing.”
“So you don’t know what his business with Ricky Ng was, exactly?”
“There’s the problem. Ng’s involvement in the local real estate market just might have included owning a site downtown where a package needed to be installed, but no way Bob would have been involved in that discussion. That’s something for the locals to work out. So I have no idea why he’d have needed to get together with the Ngs.”
“They’re not customers?”
“They’re not in the customer database, anyway; that’s one of the first things I checked. But what I’ve learned about Mr. Ng and his business dealings …” his voice trailed off.
Jamie looked troubled. “You mean maybe he wanted some kind of electronics for a reason that wasn’t so good?”
“That’s a distinct possibility. Problem is, I don’t know what or why. But I will.”
* * * * *
As they neared the village of Talkeetna, Jamie pointed out Rick’s window. “Look down there, along the river.”
Rick saw a tower, but as they flew closer, he realized it was a house. He’d seen houses, in many locations, where a homeowner near a scenic view had added a cupola as a lookout, often with visibility in all directions. But this one was different: it appeared to be a one-story home with a tower made of ten consecutive cupolas or sheds, stacked vertically, reaching 40 or 50 feet in height.
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen!” he said. “What’s up with that?”
“We call it the Talkeetna Tower,” she said. “I guess he wanted a really good view. Seriously, though, it’s got wires all over it, and antenna poles just below the roofline, and another one on top.”
“But don’t you guys get a lot of earthquakes up here? What keeps it from falling right over?”
“I don’t know, Rick, but you couldn’t pay me to go up in that thing,” Jamie answered.
Rick looked around the interior of her 50-year-old plane, made out of steel pipe, plywood and fabric, with exposed cables waggling back and forth over her head … and chose the better part of valor.
“I understand,” was all he said.
* * * * *
A half-hour later, package safely aboard, they were back in the air. After climbing to altitude, Jamie said, “You’ll never guess who this box is for.”
“No. Not ..." he began.
“It’s addressed to Mr. Ng himself.”
Rick read from the shipping label, “Fujita Electronic Systems, San Francisco.”
“Does that mean anything to you?”
“Yes. They sell remote controls for automated systems and things that use long-range wireless links.”
“Well, he must be in a BIG hurry for whatever this is. There’s a car waiting in Palmer for this box … and whatever it is, he’s paying a bundle for it. This ain’t the cheapest way to move a package, when there are roads. Out in the Bush, sure, but we’ve got the highway here.”
Rick rubbed his face. “I don’t know what the rush is, either, but do I know one thing: Fujita’s wireless controls could easily be modified to set off the bomb that killed Bob, if somebody knew what they were doing.”
Jamie looked at Rick with eyebrows raised. “Do you realize what you’re saying?” she asked.
“Yeah, I do, but I'm only saying it to you. Let's get back to what happened when you and the other owners wouldn’t sell the strip mall to Mr. Ng.”
“He got really upset, and told us that we’d regret not dealing with him. We tried to make him understand that there was a previous offer on the table. And it was for more money than Ng was offering, too.”
Rick thought for a moment. “So how long after that meeting did the mall catch on fire?”
“It was just a few days, really. Less than a week.”
“Rebecca said that the fire department ruled it was arson, right?”
“Absolutely. The thing was, there was no evidence that Ng had been anywhere near the place. No witnesses, either. People would have talked about that.”
“So you would band together against an Outsider in a case like that?”
“Well, duh. If anyone had seen a stranger near the place, folks would still be talking about it. But that’s not the whole story. See, a couple days after the fire, our partner in the deal ran into Ng’s realtor, in Anchorage. The agent was sympathetic about the ‘bad luck’ as he called it, and said that Mr. Ng was still interested in the land.”
“And?”
“His offer was ridiculously low; maybe half what the lot is worth. If he thought we’d jump on that just to get rid of it, then he was disappointed.”
“So what happened to the land?”
Jamie sighed, just loudly enough to be heard over the intercom. “He kept coming back for awhile, with a slightly better offer each time, but never enough. We finally sold it to a local guy for close to the asking price.”
“Have any of you heard anything else from Mr. Ng, since then?” Rick asked.
She shook her head. “We see his agent from time to time. That guy’s pretty big in the local commercial market, but he never mentions Ng to us.”
“Funny thing is,” she went on, “while Ng never actually said anything specific, every one of us partners felt threatened. It was vague, but we all felt creepy, after. We knew we’d been threatened, but … we just couldn’t say exactly how.”
To be continued ...
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