Fly Me Read online

  “This is such an amazing story. This is exactly what I need.”

  She’s reverting—her feet clasped to the floor, her mouth open but words quiet. She feels the frigid paralysis at the edges.

  “I can do this story instead,” he continues. “Sell them this as a swap for Jim Jones. This giant ring, and you’re the key to bringing it all down.”

  “I’m telling you this in confidence. This isn’t for a magazine.”

  “Look,” he says, “you said it yourself—Billy told you the cops won’t do anything, that this guy Honeywell has them on payroll or whatever. So you can’t go to them. You need an independent party to investigate, to publish and to draw the attention of federal agents or whoever to get everybody all at once.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m implicated. Billy’s implicated.”

  “I don’t know about Billy, but you’d be protected. You’re a confidential source. I’d protect you from everything. It’s journalistic privilege. It’s Deep Throat.” He’s projected himself forward to a place in the future she refuses to go herself—when the story’s on newsstands, and the culprits are in cuffs, and Mike Singer’s on the Sunday news programs blocking out the details of the sting, launching a career, upgrading his apartment in New York.

  “This isn’t Watergate. This isn’t fun. I just need to get out of this flight tomorrow. I can’t go. And I need to figure out an alternative.”

  “This is what I do,” he says. “This is the thing I can do. You give me all the information—all the people involved, the big web, and we trace it all the way from Colombia to New York, with everybody in between.”

  “Billy would go to jail.”

  “Billy would likely be arrested. But so would everybody else you’re caught up with, everybody who’s threatening you. Who’s making you do things you don’t want to do. That’s your out, by the way: if you’re not bullshitting me and you’ve been trying to stop and you’ve been forced to do this against your will all along—whether that’s true or not, that should be the story, and that’ll get you doubly off. It’ll be an explosion. It’ll be a bomb. And we’d just have to be careful about it. To make sure you don’t suffer any collateral damage. Or that I don’t suffer any collateral damage. I’d have to be careful. It’s a tricky piece, it’s tricky material.”

  It is a colossal mistake—she shouldn’t have mentioned it. She’s already lost her grasp of this thing, has felt it slip, right there in the room, into Mike’s control. He’s referring to it as his own. Not even as people and actions and consequences. It’s already moved in his mind to “material.” Meat to be butchered and seasoned and grilled into its most delicious state of existence. She’s misjudged him, and if she doesn’t speak up now, he’ll have it sold to Rolling Stone before she leaves the house.

  “I don’t want that,” she says. “I can’t have you do it. I can’t sell Billy out like that and I can’t sell myself out like that.”

  “Suzy, don’t be thick. You’d be protecting yourself. And you said it, not me: Billy was the one who brought you into this mess, who’s kept you on the line. Acting like he’s had your best interest in mind, while he’s really just been using you for his own ends. To save his own ass. To make his boss happy. You owe him nothing. This is a potentially enormous piece.”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything. I should’ve kept it to myself and figured it out on my own. This isn’t your ‘piece.’ This is my life.”

  “Well,” Mike says, running a hand through his hair the wrong way again, “I can’t do anything about it now. It’s out there. You gave me the information. On background. I can’t do this without quoting you, without having you on the record, but now that I know, I’m gonna have to report it out anyway. It’s my duty.”

  “What are you talking about? This holier-than-thou bullshit. Are you listening to yourself right now? I’m telling you you’re not gonna do anything with it. It was a mistake to think you might have some practical advice without making this about you and your career.”

  “You’ve been running cocaine back and forth to the East Coast! On multiple occasions. That’s a federal crime. This isn’t some petty stewardess infraction of Grand Pacific alcohol policy. Drug trafficking is a massively serious broken law, and the people behind it are threatening to fucking kill you. Why are you protecting them?”

  “I don’t need your help. Just leave it alone.”

  “I can’t do that. Now that I know, I’d be aiding and abetting if I didn’t do or say something. I could go to the cops now, but that’s not powerful. Cops aren’t powerful. Rolling Stone is powerful. My piece was supposed to run next month. If they’re into it, I can make it a clean swap. Crash the reporting, crash the story. Get it all done and out there by early April. I’m gonna do it with or without your help. I really hope you’re on board. We can make this as important a thing as has ever been published about drugs on the West Coast. About coke in California. About the end of the sixties and the dawn of the current moment. I can’t imagine how far up this goes—how tall and how wide. I’m giving you an opportunity to be part of something huge.”

  She’s never seen him accelerate like this. This must be what he was like in the very beginning, in the bars in the Village when Grace first met him, hustling for assignments that actually got assigned. When Mike had something to believe in, something to maybe do well. She hates him for it.

  “I’ll deny it all. It’ll never get past your editors. The magazine would never publish it without the primary source.”

  “I’m a good enough reporter to run it down everywhere else.”

  “Do you really want to fight me on this? Do you really know what I’m capable of?” She doesn’t know what it means, but she knows why she’s said it. She’s farther out than before. The pebbles are slipping over the edge, down through the brush along the cliff face, into the chop of the Santa Monica Bay. She’s run out of space, she’s run out of continent.

  “I’m gonna fight you if you’re gonna fight me,” he says. “I’m gonna do it. This is too important. This is the story of your life and it’s the story of my life. This is what we need.”

  It’s quiet, a cease-fire. Mike swallows hard and his Adam’s apple elevates in his throat.

  “Please don’t do it.”

  “I’m gonna do it.”

  She shakes her head with her eyes cast down and then moves to the door.

  “You know,” he says, approaching carefully. “I always thought you and I were the better fit.”

  She can’t believe he’s just said it, but he takes her silence to mean: Say more.

  “Didn’t you? I mean, it only made sense. It was never destined to work the way she and I had it going. It was a fight I was willing to fight for a while.”

  “Stop. Seriously.” She says it too quietly toward the door.

  “I always thought it’d be you and me who made it, who’d get to do things together. Here’s a chance. This project. Another project. You can come to New York, even. It just makes sense, Suz.”

  She opens the door and the light rushes in, desperate.

  “Just think about it,” he says. “This is for you. This is to protect you.”

  She takes a straight line to the sand. She’s back down near the beach, and the birds’ Sunday-school session is letting out. At the hard crash of a heavyweight wave, the gulls engage in a little conversation and then, at dismissal, take flight.

  That night, before Billy comes over, she does some of her favorite things. She skates along the Strand, to Howlers and back. She devours a Number One from El Guincho. After dinner, even though it’s not late, it’s dark and the Strand is the chessboard she and Grace rode over on Christmas. It wasn’t the last time she saw her sister, but Suzy knows she’ll always remember it as having been the last. Chasing her sister’s butt and back wheel north along the California coast. At home she waits in the armchair near the door, waits in silence in the lamplight, and in her mind she rides that ride with her sister, pushing the
pedals, the long low-gear glide of their matching strand cruisers.

  She hears him coming up the stairs. She checks the clock on the wall—he’s on time to the minute. She stands at the door with her hands out.

  “Can I come in?”

  She doesn’t say anything but steps aside. He looks around the room, uncomfortable seeming in the low light.

  “Just put it on the floor,” she says. And after hesitating, trying to read her seriousness, he reaches into his backpack and puts a package, the usual package, on the floor. But then he reaches inside and pulls out another, and then a third. Triple load.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “It’s not my call.”

  “How do you have so little sway over this?”

  “I work for them, they tell me what to do.”

  “I can’t take all three. My bag barely fit those last time without any clothes. It was a same-day turnaround.”

  “Want a bigger bag?” he says.

  “They’re completely fucking with me. They’re trying to get me caught.”

  “They would never try to get you caught.”

  “I can’t do three.”

  “This is the last one. They really agreed this time—they told me so.”

  “I’m gonna get caught on the very last one.”

  “It’s gonna be as easy as usual. Someone’s gonna meet you in the terminal. Typical handoff.”

  “Girl or guy? Who is this person?”

  “Local girl. She’ll have a lei on, looking like hospitality.”

  “So bathroom thing.”

  “Whatever she wants. She’ll have the money. But yeah, probably bathroom thing.”

  Suzy shakes her head, a little disbelieving.

  “This is really it,” he says. “After this, we’re out.”

  “What do you mean we’re out?”

  “I’m out, too. I told them today.”

  “Jesus Christ, now you’re really gonna get me in trouble. What are you fucking thinking?”

  “I’m gonna do what you said. I’m gonna try something new. I’m gonna apply to college and everything.”

  “You couldn’t have waited a month? They’re gonna take it out on me. They’re gonna punish me for you.”

  “I know I have no ground to stand on, not really, at least. But you have to understand, I’ve worked with these guys for a while. They haven’t always been easy, but they’ve never done anything self-sabotaging. It would destroy them if something bad happened to you, at least in another state. They don’t have the same pull.”

  She has nowhere to go. She hates him for it.

  “I don’t have a choice, then,” she says. “No options—again.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know this is what it would be. But it’s the last one.”

  “You put me in this position.”

  “You took it the rest of the way.”

  “If this is really it,” Suzy says, “if it’s really the last one, then we have no reason to talk after this.”

  “I hope you don’t mean that. I hope you don’t feel that way for real.”

  “This was all there was. I’ve got other things here, other things to do now.”

  “Sela’s small.”

  “Not as small as you think,” she says. “And especially not for an outsider. I found you when I wanted to and I can get rid of you just the same.”

  “I hope you don’t mean it.”

  “Please leave.”

  At the door he says, “See you when you get back, at least.”

  And she says: “Nope—I’ll give them the money myself.”

  In the morning she skates. It’s the only thing she can do about the nerves. She picks up speed until the trucks wobble. Down at the southern edge of town, near Howlers, she skids through a sand slick and ends up tumbling into a thatch of ice plant. She splits open her knee and skates back home with blood running down to the top of her foot, dried by the offshore. She checks the clock on the pier as she passes it, moving north. She should leave in an hour, call the cab as soon as she gets home.

  When she passes through the door, she spots the three packages in the center of the room, untouched from last night. She hasn’t decided what to do with them. She either takes them or she doesn’t, and both lead to bad things. She’s staring out the window at the ocean when the phone rings—the airline, maybe. She picks up on the second ring and catches the speaker exhaling deeply. She can tell Mike’s voice through his breath.

  “Oh good,” he says. “I was hoping you hadn’t left for the airport yet.”

  “But I’m going now.”

  “Just…one quick thing: I talked to my editor last night and they’re in. They want me to report it, they want me to write it. It’s not a guarantee, but they want me to pursue it. I’m gonna do it with or without you, but it’d sure be a lot easier and a lot better if you were on board. To set out the full story again with as much detail as you can recall. To open up the doors and connect the dots. I think this could be a really—”

  She hangs up on him. It’s happening. He’ll have trouble getting enough, especially on the tight deadline. But he’s desperate enough to carry it through without her blessing. It’s the break he needs. And he’ll ruin her to get it.

  She pulls her suitcase from the bedroom and loads the packages into its base. She covers them with an overnight’s worth of skirts (two), blouses (two), jeans (one), sandals (one pair), and an extra bra. She changes into her uniform in the bathroom—hose, skirt, shirt, jacket, hat. She pins her hair to her hat. She applies her lipstick and mascara. She’s as pale as ever, but her hair’s glowing redder. Aquamarine uniform and a halo of orange. The cab honks from the curb. There’s no room left in her bag, but a thought occurs to her and she unpacks it all and quickly starts again. There’s something else she’s decided to take, and she folds it flat against the base of her bag.

  The cab is laying on the horn as she passes through the door. She waves to him for his patience. She turns and takes a long look at the view, the gradient: sky, water, sand. It’s a thin strip from here, but it’s not really what she sees, if she’s honest with herself. She knows it’s there, off in the distance, through the rest of the visual noise. But what’s here in the foreground, bothering the view, is something else entirely. The power lines. The stacks of the oil refinery. A dead pigeon, on the roof of her downhill neighbor, that hasn’t budged since she moved in. She looks north and sees an airplane taking off, the blue and white of Pan Am. Heading west without a banked turn, meaning somewhere way out there, any number of places.

  They put her on a Honolulu flight when she said she wanted to visit the site of the crash. It goes just as Billy said it would. Their touch is light throughout, too. No scrutiny at operations. No extra requests from the flight leader in precheck. They give her business class, which means she’s closer to her carry-on. It’s a long flight in the going direction, fighting the wind the whole way. But when they arrive, it’s still midafternoon. A low sun skittering in off the water on landing.

  Grand Pacific arranges a puddle jumper to Maui, to Ka’anapali, so that she can get to the spot before sunset. Her connection’s in thirty minutes and she’s on keen lookout for the point person. She takes a seat in the gate area, pretends to fix something with her pumps. There are local-looking women in leis at each gate, none glancing her way. It’s been only a few minutes, but it feels like an hour. Her departure gate is just across the concourse. They’re already beginning to board. She walks quickly to the Grand Pacific lounge, hoping to draw attention to anyone who might be searching for her. She sticks outside the lounge, and the women she worked the flight with smile sweetly as they pass through the sliding glass doors.

  Fifteen minutes until her flight leaves. The woman working the desk cuts into the PA system and announces a final boarding call, with a specific appeal to Ms. Suzy Whitman. She’s out of time. It’s never happened before. This is exactly the sort of complication she worried she might be walking into. She waits ano
ther minute near the lounge. And then the voice again, an urgency: “Ms. Suzy Whitman, this is the last and final boarding call for Two Eight Eight to Ka’anapali.”

  She can’t miss this. She can’t blow off the cover for the trip. The thought slaps her—that she’s regarding the short flight to Maui as a ploy rather than as an opportunity to receive her sister at the site of her death. She can’t dump it, she can’t stash it—she has to bring it with her.

  The woman at the desk is in the blue-and-yellow plumeria-print dress of the airline. Suzy hands over her boarding pass. The woman has a soft, round face, straight hair, a center part. She has the cheeks of a child, the sort of puff that seals off her eyes as she smiles.

  “Fantastic. Now the only other thing I need is a quick look in your bag.”

  Suzy’s heart stutters. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know, just a routine check, nothing major.”

  Suzy considers fleeing. But the woman looks harmless. It’s probably just protocol in Hawaii. The packages are disguised anyway, as carefully as ever—just flour for cookies. Suzy hands over her bag.

  The woman disappears behind the desk, kneels so that Suzy can’t see her. And before long she pops back up and hands Suzy her bag. It’s lighter.

  The woman holds her left hand out, ushering Suzy aboard. She smiles without opening her mouth. Just cheeks pressuring her eyes into a squint.

  Suzy clicks down the stairs to the runway, but just before she moves through the door to the tarmac, she stops and unzips her bag. Fifteen pounds of cocaine missing, but in its place an envelope that’s three times thicker than usual. Hospitality, she thinks. No lei, but a dress with plumerias.

  Suzy feels light as her bag as she takes her seat—a small plane, one-by-two, six rows. She has a single on the starboard side of the plane. She didn’t sleep much the night before and she certainly didn’t sleep on the ride over. But for the forty minutes between takeoff and landing, Suzy drifts, her head pressed against the plastic window, warm from the tropical sun.