Killing Suki Flood by Rob Leininger

Author:Rob Leininger [Leininger, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

19

The Lear jet banked left, bleeding off altitude. Frank Limosin peered out the window at the Sierra Nevadas. Even in mid-July, the higher peaks were still capped with snow. The sun dropped behind the mountains as the plane went down, backlighting the reddish-umber haze of forest fires burning in the west. The plane banked right as Castledyne held the tiny jet in a descending turn, flaps down.

Houses below, a vast shopping mall, roads crawling with toy cars, then a field of scraggly weeds, a gray blur of concrete and the plane was down, rolling past a green-glassed flight operations tower that rippled in the desert heat.

They halted on an apron in front of a low building with a sign that read RENO FLYING SERVICE on the front.

The local time was 8:22 P.M. They’d crossed a time zone, gained an hour chasing the sun.

Castledyne came through the cockpit door and cranked open the fuselage hatch while the copilot made last-minute additions to the flight log. Castledyne stepped out into the heat and Frank followed. The two men hiked fifty yards to the building as a sleek National Guard F-4, vaguely sharklike in appearance, thundered down the runway.

The night staff at Reno Flying Service stared curiously at Frank. He could only hope that his too-memorable face hadn’t made the news up here, although his face had been changed some by Jersey’s boots, a plus he hadn’t counted on. It didn’t seem likely that a truck robbery in L.A. would stir up a lot of interest in Reno, but you never knew. Six hundred grand was a lot of money. Maybe he was already a folk hero somewhere, pictures of his face plastered all over. During the flight Frank had done what he could with his face, which wasn’t much. His left eye was still caught in a puffy wink, and his white-stubbled cheeks gave him the look of an aging derelict. The Lear jet was an inexplicable contradiction.

“Mr. Wiley?” Frank turned. A secretary in a green dress was standing behind a counter, frowning. “There’s a taxi waiting outside for you, sir.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Frank shook Castledyne’s hand. “Good service, thanks.”

“Anytime.”

Frank went outside. A Whittlesea cab was in the parking lot, engine running. He opened the front door, got in next to a middle-aged woman with drab brown hair, a mustache, big bulky breasts on a heavy frame. “You Wiley?” she asked.

“Yeah. Okay if I sit up front like this?”

“Suit yourself.”

Her name was Shirley Budd. Her eyes fixed briefly on his face. She decided she’d seen worse. “Okay, where to?”

“You got a place in town where lawyers hang out? What I mean is—”

“Lawyers, huh? You lookin’ to get divorced?”

“No, what I want—”

“Can’t say you look a whole lot like a legal corporation yourself. You aren’t are ya?”

“No.”

“Good. Board of Trade’d be the place to go, if it wasn’t Sunday, an’ late.”

“What’s that?”

“Mouthpiece hangout. Fancy-ass waterin’ hole.”

“What I want,” he said, “is to go to where lawyers have offices. Someplace with old refurbished houses, two or three stories, lots of rooms.

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