The Timer Game. Susan Smith Arnout

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ move in the opposite path. He dances west,’ Don Jose rumbled. ‘Toward death.’

      ‘No!’ Maria cried. Her voice was unexpected and shrill. The men froze. It was not seemly to behave this way, even over the dying of a child. ‘No. She is my daughter, too. I will not. I will not. She will go in.’

      Arturo took a step toward his wife but Don Jose held up a gnarled hand, stopping him.

      ‘Hekka’s on the UNOS list. Maybe there will be a regular donor heart for her,’ Mac offered. ‘Arizona and California are both AREA 5 on the UNOS transplant map so that means you can stay at the Center while you wait.’

      Not reminding them that because of specific immunity problems, doctors had pegged Hekka’s chances at finding a compatible heart at less than 15 percent. Only saying, ‘If she stays here, they say she doesn’t have a chance.’

      They waited. The camera whirred.

      ‘Very well. Hekka goes to the Center with me,’ Don Jose said finally. ‘I shall be her guardian. But this heart-in-a-box, it will not save her.’

      Great video, Mac thought, and felt equal parts shame and euphoria.

      Pete and Aaron dropped him off at La Cholla Airpark northwest of Tucson near the Tortolita Mountains. The pair kept driving toward Tucson International, where they’d catch the same commercial flight that would carry Hekka and her grandfather back to San Diego.

      The office was a modular building, sided in stucco and framed by a cement walkway larded with stepping-stones. An acacia and two bristly mesquite trees offered slight shade. Even this early, the smell of heat rising from the cement mingled with the faint scent of sage.

      The pilot, Jeb Shattuck, punched in a code at the French doors and pushed them open. He was wearing black Doc Martens and his hair under his trademark Sacramento Kings hat was turning gray.

      ‘There’s a computer in the pilots’ lounge, if you need to go online before we leave. I’ll be outside.’

      Mac nodded and stepped inside. He drank coffee out of his thermos as Jeb went through the checklist on the Cirrus. The room had lavender-gray carpeting and two sofas littered with aviation magazines. A bulletin board to the left of a small office was crammed with ads for planes, spaces to lease, and tie-down information.

      Mac went to the window and looked out past a row of corrugated metal hangars and shadeports. It was just after four in the morning and the sky held the faint pearl color that came an hour before dawn, suffusing the mountains in pink. A light rain fell. In the distance, tidy homes sat amid a vast desert landscape, and horses drowsed along a corral fence.

      Jeb was squatting under the plane with what looked like a shot glass and metal straw, poking the straw up into the underside of the plane, taking a fuel sample. He was based out of Sacramento but Mac always used him for trips when he could pry money out of his expense account. Jeb routinely flew media stars who wanted a low profile, and sometimes celebrity pilots whose insurance policies insisted on the presence of a second pilot on board. Mac had heard he flew with Angelina Jolie, but he’d never hear it from Jeb. And Mac liked that, how discreet and trustworthy Jeb was, and how unswayed by star power. Liked the man.

      Jeb held the cup up to the light and checked for contaminants, discarding the thimble of fuel in a quick toss onto the tarmac that left a faint streak of shine. He half waved and mimed checking his watch. He held up five fingers. Mac nodded and turned away from the window.

      He knew from experience Jeb still needed to check the control surfaces, making certain the safety wires were secure, tweak the wheel pants to see if they moved, eyeball the static port, a quarter-sized metal piece flush on each side of the sleek white body, to ensure that the pin-sized hole at the center wasn’t blocked. More checks than that, but that was enough to know he had five minutes at least.

      He walked to the computer desk and found the mouse amid a stack of papers. He drank the rest of his coffee and sat down, fingers clicking over the keys, looking for breaking news stories, an occupational curse.

      He found a Web stream of a local news station out of Tucson, anchored by a stocky man with darkly handsome features and a much younger woman wearing a crisp suit. The female anchor, hair stiff with gel, was introducing a piece out of San Diego. Mac had seen a flash the night before. Something about a California senator’s son being shot in a meth bust gone bad.

      He turned up the sound. He knew that part of San Diego, Ocean Beach – a funky hippie holdout with bead shops and tattooed panhandlers usually accompanied by pit bulls. He saw her darting out of a squad car into a jostling thicket of reporters and felt his throat close.

      Grace Descanso.

      Grace. Her hair was shorter than he remembered. But her face still held a curious mix of intelligence and warmth and a kind of raw sexuality, the kind no woman could manufacture. It came from some molten liquid place deep inside.

      It had been over five years since Guatemala, and yet he instantly felt the roiling emotions he’d experienced standing next to her in that makeshift shed assisting her as she doctored, felt the remembered cautious optimism, the laughing connection, and then the quiet certainty, born of hope and fostered in every act of kindness, every molecule of her hard, clean presence, that they belonged together then and always, that neither time nor space nor act of God could separate them.

      That she was the woman he was willing to die for.

      Die for, perhaps, but not give up the story for.

      And so it is, and was, and always shall be, amen.

      His career was not a cold thing. It was a sinuous presence, alive, a shape-shifter, luring him always with the next seductive thing just over the horizon, the eternal quest to get to the bottom of things, to get it right.

      For a brief moment he’d been certain he could have it all.

      She was the one who got away. She was his great What If.

      They’d been in a dangerous spot and he’d left her there; he knew it was dangerous and he’d left her there, to meet whatever fate was hers while he went into the next country, and then the next, dogging a lead that melted into lies, that changed form, that became a breathless and sensational story that faded away into a yellow dawn, leaving him stunned and awake for the first time in months, with a bitter taste of fear and regret in his mouth. And afraid for her, for what he’d done. For what he had not.

      He’d come back for her then and she was gone and there was nothing but scorched earth, and she’d stayed gone for the longest time and to be honest, It wasn’t all bad, his work murmured, She was a distraction, an inconvenience, a minor character in the play of your life.

      And now there she was like some apparition, standing there with her head tucked, rushing away from the cameras into a waiting car.

      He watched the piece straight through and turned it off.

      Jeb poked his head inside the door. ‘Ready?’

      Mac nodded.

      Jeb zipped up his leather jacket. ‘We might get whapped around a little up there. Expect some turbulence.’

      Mac already knew that.

       СКАЧАТЬ