Falls Like Lightning by Shawn Grady

Author:Shawn Grady
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-03T14:57:11+00:00

CHAPTER

22

Bo wandered down a narrow hall and out into the waning hues of daylight, along the tarmac, past dormant aircraft.

He thought he’d learned to read people better. It saved him plenty of times growing up. Now it wasn’t just himself he was worried about. That made the situation unbearable.

He sat on a bench outside of the airport wall. A bird’s nest perched at a corner alcove of the building, small chicks stretching their sinewy necks up on occasion, squeaking for their mother.

Images of violence from the night before shot through his mind. He looked away and swallowed.

Lightning burst. A new sheet of evening draped over the sky, mauve with fading blues. Distant thunder rumbled. A cloud-to-cloud burst of white shot out and vanished. Bo started walking again, and soon he stood outside the metal door to Jumper 41’s hangar. His stomach tightened like a wrung-out towel.

He didn’t like the sound of Sippi and Rapunzel’s conversation. It wouldn’t hurt to inspect and double check the equipment and the aircraft and—

Muted voices carried through the door.

Bo held his breath and inclined his ear. He stared at the steel door handle, waiting for it to move. The voices rose, then hushed, then continued again. He pressed his earlobe against the dusty metal door.

He heard the buzzing sound of the ceiling-hung halogen lights. A fan blew. And then the voices again, the words recognizable, the inflections distinct—Caleb and Cleese.

“And I’m telling you that he ain’t the kind of spotter to stay on the plane—no matter what.” Caleb’s voice.

“How can you know?”

“Because, he jumps with Adams. The Warren Adams. Besides, they’ve got an incident spotter now.”

“A what?”

“I know. What timing, huh?”

“So he gets taken out too.”

“You act like it’s nothing.” There was a pause. Bo looked over the empty tarmac. Caleb’s voice picked up. “Folks are buying the burnover. We’re not being investigated. Conditions are extreme, and everyone knows accidental death goes with the territory. But we show up again without our spotter, saying some ‘accidental’ tree knocked him off a cliff or some bull like that, you think anybody’s going to believe us? We’ll go to prison, Cleese. For a long, long time.”

“I can handle the joint.”

“You’re not getting it.”

“You’re saying we buy him off?”

“I don’t think he’ll be game.”

“Everybody can be bought.”

“Can’t take that chance. An accident is still the only way. But it has to look like an impartial accident, one that could’ve killed us all.”

“I’m already ahead of you on that, Cay. I had Sippi wire up a couple special surprises.”

“Can Sippi work with the kind of precision we need?”

“Guess we’ll find out.”

Caleb cursed. Bo heard footsteps, like pacing.

Cleese said, “We’ll need it to coincide with the drop point we’re aiming for. When our new spotter’s in the cockpit, navigating, I’ll slice his chutes.

“If everything goes well, we should have the following forty-eight hours of impassable fire weather to serve as smoke screen. They shouldn’t even be able to get a rescue helicopter close until after we’ve liberated the gold.”

The footsteps grew louder.

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