“Don’t ma’am me…” I stared at his chest until my eyes focused enough to read his name badge. “Steve. Is that your name? Steve. Don’t ma’am me, Captain Steve. I just need to know our rate of descent. Humor me, Captain Steve. I work for the police department. You don’t want me to go to the six o’clock news after a murder’s been discovered and tell them all about how the airline wouldn’t lift a finger to help the woman who died.”
I didn’t know why I bothered. The woman was probably dead by now. Still, Captain Steve blanched and looked back over his shoulder at his instruments. I retrieved my hand and smiled at him. He blanched again. I guess my smile wasn’t any better than my hair or eyes just now.
“Hurry,” I said. “Once the sun comes up the streetlights will go off and I don’t know if I’ll be able to find her then.”
I left my luggage in the airport and climbed into a cab, trying to work out the triangulation of height, speed and distance. “Drive,” I said, without looking up.
“Where to, lady?”
“I don’t know. Northwest.”
“The airline? It’s just a couple feet down the term—”
“To the northwest,” I snarled. The cabby gave me an unfriendly look and drove. “Do you have a map?” I demanded a minute later.
“What for?”
“So I can figure out where we’re going.”
He turned around and stared at me.
“Watch the road!” I braced myself for impact. Somehow—without looking—he twitched the steering wheel and avoided the collision. I collapsed back into the seat, wide-eyed. “Map?” I asked, somewhat more politely.
“Yeah, here.” He threw a city guide into my lap. I thumbed it open to find the airport.
Airplanes go fast. I realize this isn’t a revelation to stun the world, but it was a little distressing to realize how far we’d flown in five minutes, and how long it would take to drive that. “All right, we’re going northwest of the lake.” I remembered seeing its off-colored shadow making a black mark below the plane as we’d left the subdivision behind. “Somewhere in Aurora.”
“Think? That ain’t such a good neighborhood, lady. You sure you wanna go there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m trying to find somebody who’s in trouble.”
The cabby eyed me in the rearview. “That’s the right place to look.”
I glared at him through my eyebrows. He smiled, a thin I’ve-seen-it-all grin that didn’t really have any humor in it. He had gray eyes under equally gray, bushy eyebrows. He had a thick neck and looked like he’d be at home chewing on a stogie. I asked if he had a cigarette. He turned around and looked at me again.
“Those things’ll kill you, lady.”
His voice was rough and deep like a lifetime smoker’s. Surprise showed on my face and he gave me another soulless smile, reflected in the mirror. “My wife died of emphysema three years ago on our forty-eighth wedding anniversary. You want a smoke, kid, find it somewhere else.”
Sometimes I wonder if I have a big old neon sign stamped on my forehead, flashing Asshole. I retaliated with stunning wit: “I’m not a kid.”
Gray eyes darted to the mirror again, and back to the road. “You’re what, twenty-six?”
Nobody ever guessed my age right. Since I was eleven, people have misguessed my age anywhere from three to seven years in one direction or the other. I felt my jaw drop.
“It’s a gift,” the cabby said. “A totally useless gift. I can tell how old people are.”
I blinked at him.
“Great way to get good tips,” he went on. “I go into this long explanation of how I always get ages right, and then I lie. Works like a charm.”
“So why’d you guess my age right?” The question came out of my mouth without consulting my brain first. I didn’t want to have a conversation with the cabby.
“Never met anybody who didn’t want to be in their twenties, so what’s the point? Why you going out there, lady? Lotta trouble out that way, and you don’t look like the type.”
I glanced sideways at the window. A faint reflection looked back at me. He was right. I looked tired, hopeless and worn-out, but not like trouble. “Looks can be deceiving.” His eyes slid off the rearview mirror like he was too polite to disbelieve aloud. “It’s somebody else who’s in trouble,” I said. “I saw her from the plane.”
He twisted around yet again. “You’re trying to rescue somebody you saw from an airplane?”
“Yeah.” I flinched as he twitched the steering wheel to keep in our lane, again without looking. “What do you do, use the Force?”
He glanced at the road and shrugged before turning around again. “So, what, you’ve got a hero complex? How the hell are you gonna find one dame you saw from the air?”
“I passed a couple basic math classes in college,” I muttered. “Look, I got the approximate height and speed we were traveling from the pilot, so figuring out the distance wasn’t that hard. I mean, adjusting for the change in speed is kind of a pain in the ass, but—” I set my teeth together to keep myself from rattling on. It was a moment before I was sure I had enough control over my brain to continue without babbling. “Someplace in that vicinity there’s a modern church on a street with only one amber streetlight. If I can find it before the lights go out—”
“Then you’ll be the first one on a murder scene. You’re nuts, lady. You must be desperate for thrills.”
“Like it could possibly be any of your business,” I snapped.
“Touchy, too. Pretty girl like you oughta be on her way home to her sweetie, not chasin—”
“I don’t have one.” I admit it. I snarled again.
“With your personality, I can’t figure why not, lady.”
I leaned forward and rubbed my eyes with my fingertips, elbows on my knees. The knot of unpleasantness in my stomach felt like it was trying to push its way out through my sternum, pressuring me to act whether I liked it or not. The idea that it would go away if I could just find the woman was settled into my bones, logic be damned. “Haven’t you ever just really felt like you had to do something?”
“Sure. I felt like I really had to marry my old lady when she got knocked up.”
I was in a cab with Plato. His depth overwhelmed me. I lifted my head enough to stare over the back of the seat at his shoulder. He grinned. He had good teeth, clean and white and strong, like he hadn’t ever smoked. They were probably false.
“Never felt like I had to go chasing down some dame I saw from an airplane, nope. Guess I figured I had enough troubles of my own without adding on somebody else’s.”
I leaned against the window, eyes closed. “Maybe I’ve got enough that I need somebody else’s to make the load seem lighter.”
I could feel his gaze on me in the rearview mirror again. Then he grunted, a sort of satisfied noise. “All right, lady. Let’s go find your corpse.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I glowered out the window. I wouldn’t have been so annoyed if I’d felt more confident myself. The cabby—whose name was Gary, according to the posted driver’s license, and whose seventy-third birthday