For the second night in a row, he found himself searching through a bar for someone. Nick had suggested this would be the likely place to find the NTSB investigator after hours. “Now that this is a homicide investigation, the FBI takes over. The crash investigators are pulling up stakes and getting the hell out of Dodge,” Nick had said.
But they wouldn’t be leaving soon. The last commercial flight out of Butte had left more than an hour ago.
Unlike Butte’s many neighborhood bars, Shoestring Annie’s catered to the city’s contingent of overnight out-of-towners. The Copper Baron’s clientele consisted mostly of business people who disdained all that Butte had to offer, and looked to fly in and fly out as soon as possible. Such folks were hardly the type most Buttians wanted to drink with, even in a bar named after one of Butte’s legendary street characters.
Known for her tirades at the tightfisted, Shoestring Annie had sold shoelaces on the streets of Butte in its heyday. Grown men, including police officers, were known to avoid the corner where Annie sold her wares for fear of her outbursts.
The bar’s walls were covered with news photographs of Annie and other street characters from Butte’s past, their legends a testament to the color of the city’s glory days. The atmosphere was sufficiently quaint to attract at least an initial visit by most of the hotel’s patrons. Even on this Tuesday night, many of the oak tables and chairs were filled. Unlike most of the uptown bars, this one on the flat, as locals called the area on the valley floor, encouraged its patrons to sit down to have a conversation.
Chance scanned the crowd, looking for the truly out of place, and settled on a table with three men, two in their mid-fifties, with closely trimmed haircuts and not a pair of blue jeans or cowboy boots among them.
This was no time to be reticent, Chance knew. He walked over to the table to introduce himself to the trio as a representative of the local press. Immediately he realized he had hit pay dirt.
The senior of the three, at least in age, was the National Transportation Safety Board investigator, Martin Zlokovic. With a broad grin, he introduced the two men seated with him, FBI agents. Roy Perryman, an expressionless man dressed in a suit and tie and sporting a crew cut, shook hands more out of politeness than interest. The other agent, who was closer to Chance’s age, had a steely gaze and a handshake to match. Perryman lost no time explaining that they were from the Helena FBI Field Office, and that was all they could say to the press.
“I was just looking for comments about Lowell Austin’s murder. We haven’t had any infamous criminals in these parts since the Unabomber. Thought you might like to assure the public about their safety.”
Perryman shook his head, encouraged Chance to check with the sheriff’s office, and then excused himself and his partner, leaving their Diet Cokes behind.
Zlokovic continued to sip his drink. “Forgive my colleagues. They’re shy. Besides, they’re making an early start in the morning,” he said with a grin. He was clearly amused by the FBI’s sudden departure.
“Can I get you another one of those?” Chance said and gestured to what looked like a vodka tonic. Zlokovic nodded. “Why not. I’m flying out later tomorrow.”
Chance liked Zlokovic, who was obviously more relaxed than the FBI agents. “So does that mean your job’s over?”
“Just delayed. The FBI Evidence Team likes to handle their own investigation. When they’re done, the whole shebang will get trucked to Seattle, and we’ll examine the wreckage there. We still need to find out exactly why the plane crashed.”
“I’m mostly interested in who else was in the plane, particularly if it turns out to be someone local. Don’t suppose you saw anything that might lead to the identification of the other passengers?”
Zlokovic smiled again and deflected the question. “You from around here?”
“Mostly,” Chance said and drank from the Moose Drool he had ordered. “I can’t technically call myself a Butte rat since I wasn’t born here, but I been around off and on since I was a kid. Why do you ask?”
Zlokovic shrugged. “No particular reason. I’ve never been here before. The old buildings uptown remind me of old San Francisco, not exactly what you expect in Montana. And I hear you have a Serbian Orthodox Church.”
Chance thought about the agent’s last name, smiled, and nodded. “You Bohunk?”
“A 120-gallon barrel of wine and cabbage is aging in my garage even as we speak.” The agent’s laugh sounded like a hyena with a head cold. “Born in Chicago.”
“Stick around,” Chance said. “I can line up a tour of the church for you tomorrow. You gotta see the murals they just had done.” Phade Dragonovich’s mom, who was a member of the Circle of Serbian Mothers, had told him all about the muralists who had come from Czechoslovakia. She liked to stop by the office usually with sarma or povitica. Naturally, Mrs. Draganovich had been enamored with Chance and his appetite for her baking. “Butte’s not like anywhere else in the state,” Chance said. “Miners made her what she is and she’s proud of it—Irish, Norwegian, Finn, Serbian, Cornish, grit and all.”
“Wish I’d known sooner. Maybe I’ll come back on my own time.”
Chance couldn’t tell what, if any, information he might get from Zlokovic, but at least he had him warmed up to the town. “You surprised somebody tried to land a plane uptown?”
Zlokovic smiled again. “That what you think happened?” he said in a voice that suggested he drew pleasure from listening to people’s theories about what was his job to figure out.
“I saw it in the air just before it went down. I was at the top of Park Street, so I had the long view, but that’s what it looked like to me.”
“Aha, a witness,” Zlokovic said and raised his glass in a toast. “Now I can talk to you.”
“I also saw the body in the plane,” Chance continued. “It looked like somebody had tried to make it seem like the dead guy was the pilot. Which, once you know who the guy is, is downright stupid. No way, a guy who’s been in prison for twenty years can walk out and then fly a plane. Not this guy anyway.”
“Probably some drug deal gone wrong,” Zlokovic said. “That’s usually the reason these size planes get stolen, if in fact that’s what happened. That I don’t know so much about, but lots of things can go wrong with a plane, and I know about all of them,” Zlokovic said with a grin, ready to school Chance on the dangers of flying.
Chance nodded and then added. “I think I understand. I fly a Cessna 152. But I saw those skid marks on the street. I think something went wrong with the people in the plane, and that caused a problem for the pilot. He lost altitude for some reason and had to ditch it.”
“You think maybe?” Zlokovic said, his voice softer as the vodka began to relax him.
Chance shrugged. “You’re the expert. Plus, you’ve seen the controls and the instruments. Air speed and angle of descent would tell you something, wouldn’t it?”
Zlokovic hunched over his drink. “You’re a pilot. You know about CFITs, right?”
Chance nodded. “Controlled flight into terrain” was official language for a flying accident where a perfectly operational plane flies into an object or the ground. In this case, the object was a house.
“About half the small-plane accidents we investigate, the plane worked fine but the pilot’s situational awareness was compromised, like he lost visual contact with the ground for some reason, and bam, into a side of a mountain or the treetops. But we can’t know for sure about this one until we find out if the plane or its engine malfunctioned.”
Chance couldn’t help thinking, for easily the tenth time, about what the pilot’s last seconds must have been like—trying not to panic, to figure out what was happening and what to do. That kind of concentration was to be envied.
“I don’t know what brought the plane down, but the pilot did his damnedest to land the sucker,” Zlokovic said. “Might have managed it too, but he must have hit something in the street. That took him into the lot and the house.
Either by luck or design, the back wheel hooked into a roll of chain-link fence. Like a fighter landing on an aircraft carrier, the drag minimized the impact. If I was you, I’d be looking for somebody with a serious case of whiplash.”
“Which brings me back to my original question,” Chance said with a smile. “You see anything inside the plane that might give an idea about who else was in it?”
“Oh, no,” Zlokovic said with a sly grin. “You better talk to the boys from Helena about that. They don’t like it when information from their investigation gets leaked. They’ll kick my Serbian butt all the way back to Seattle. Besides, your cops took plenty of photos. They can tell you what was there.” He whispered this last little gem as he stood up.
“So something was there?” Chance asked.
Zlokovic patted Chance’s shoulder. “You didn’t hear it from me.”
* * *
Mesa slipped out of her grandmother’s house around 10 p.m. Careful to close the back door gently, she felt like a teenager again. Crossing Excelsior Street, she looked back at the dark sitting room at the front of the house and relaxed.
She could have driven her grandmother’s intrepid Trail Blazer, a vehicle that could and did go everywhere. But Mesa couldn’t bring herself to ask to borrow it. She didn’t want to have to come up with answers for Nan’s inevitable questions about their night out.
Dinner had gone well, even if doubling with a couple of grandparents didn’t seem like the most auspicious beginning. Shane had good-naturedly agreed on that front. They had adjourned to the porch when it was time to say goodnight, leaving Nana and Phillip Northey in the parlor. Shane joked about how he didn’t want to cramp anybody’s style.
For a moment, she had actually thought about kissing him. He had been so accommodating. But it was barely nine-thirty, though why that made a difference, she couldn’t say. Instead, he saved them from the awkward moment by extending a generic invitation to have coffee, and she had agreed to an undetermined get-together in the next week. Then his grandfather appeared for the ride home.
Maybe it was because she had ignored all her hormones in an attempt to resist Hardy’s clandestine invitation to meet later at the Hoist House. He had stopped by their table at the Derby and greeted Nana. He knew the Northeys too, apparently. At least Shane’s “In town for long?” implied they knew of each other’s existence.
On the way out of the restaurant, Mesa realized she had forgotten her sunglasses. Had that been subconscious? When she went back inside, Hardy appeared at the door as she left and invited her to come to the Hoist House later. He wanted to catch up.
Catch up with what, she wondered, as she walked along Silver Street. Where he left off four years ago in Big Sky? Think again.
Hardy was the king of the conquest. No woman would ever catch up to him. Mesa now had the perspective to see that. She had smiled at him, said nothing, and then spent the next two hours losing her resolve.
Resolve that had been hard-won. Her predilection for “bad boys” had blossomed not long after she left high school and Butte. Her alma mater, Damascus College, had attracted more than its fair share of anti-establishment, rebellious students. Their desire to test the system at every turn beguiled her. Her military-base upbringing had produced a meticulous child who knew the rules, but now she began to bend them. When she returned home for the summer, Hardy Jacobs’ rough and tumble ways seemed irresistible.
Ten years later, she now understood Hardy’s antics and where they led. She no longer had expectations of him, and she wanted to test herself. Like the recovering addict, she wanted to prove to herself that she could go to the well but not drink.
Hugging her arms to her chest to stay warm, she reached Galena Street and walked toward the Hoist House on Montana. She had forgotten about the eighty-degree days and forty-degree nights in September in the Rockies. At least she could count on Hardy to give her a ride home, if necessary. Then, she chastised herself as she fantasized about not needing a ride home at all.
The blue neon sign outlining a gallows frame beamed over the Hoist House’s entrance. The door opened, and two women too scantily dressed for the cool night air walked out into Montana Street. Music and laughter trailed after them.
Mesa walked into the bar moments later, surprised by the amount of people out on a Tuesday night. The off-key crooning of some forty-year-old singing “Brown-Eyed Girl” explained everything. Karaoke night, a phenomenon she felt was overrated, and which she knew Hardy had no patience for either, had reached the uptown bars. Butte miners must be rolling over in their graves, she thought.
At the far end of the bar, she saw Hardy in all his glory. He wore a long-sleeved tee shirt with a Head Case cycling helmet logo and a pair of convertible hiking pants that could be made into shorts by unzipping them at the knees. The blue shirt highlighted his eyes.
Without even trying, he was a walking advertisement for mountain sports, or at least the lifestyle associated with them. The irony was that Hardy never seemed to care about clothes. Whatever he wore hid his taut, muscular physique, about which he was otherwise totally unconscious even when naked.
His lack of fashion sense didn’t bother the many women he attracted, as was the case this evening. He leaned on the bar talking to the bartender and another woman, younger and blonde. Mesa felt a twinge of jealousy, which she hated. It signaled that some part of her, however small, still clung to the adolescent notion that Hardy should long for her company and hers alone.
She considered heading to the bathroom, then making an unobtrusive exit. He could go to hell.
But Hardy had spotted her and motioned her to join him and his growing harem. When she didn’t react, he even got up from his stool and met her halfway. He embraced her, his arms pulling her close and, surprisingly, held on for that extra moment as if he had been waiting weeks to see her.
He introduced her to the other two women, both of whom were from Butte. The foursome then played Butte’s version of six degrees of separation to figure out how they were all connected.
The bartender was Tyler Fitzgerald’s sister, Colleen. The blonde worked as a nurse and knew Rose Ducharme from her recent stay at the cardiac unit of the hospital. They all read the Mining City Messenger. Mesa would have hummed “It’s a Small World After All,” except she feared that someone might hand her the karaoke mike.
Instead, someone else began singing a throaty rendition of Otis Redding’s arrangement of “Down in the Valley.” Mesa found a table and watched Hardy, still walking gingerly on his left foot, bring her an Amstel Light while he clung to his usual Bud.
Hardy had a notoriously tough constitution. In high school, he had played the entire last quarter of the state football championship with a crack in his collarbone. Call it hard-headedness or strong will, his reluctance to quit cemented his reputation. It had also cost him a baseball scholarship when he re-injured himself. “How’s the leg?” she asked.
“Inconvenient as hell,” he said and sat down.
She wondered how long he would be in Butte with ski season just three months away. “Nothing serious, I hope.”
“Nope, bumps and bruises with a twist,” he said with a sarcastic chuckle.
She’d seen enough of Western resort towns like Moab, Jackson Hole, and Durango, not to mention the ski towns. Recreational Mecca’s with a transient population, they got old eventually for someone like Hardy, who knew what it meant to have roots. “Life in Moab getting you down?”
He cocked his head to the side before he answered. “Business was slow. Decided I might as well come home.” Then he added, “Maybe see you.”
She laughed out loud and tried not to feel embarrassed—as if he actually meant it.
Hardy was even cool when he sipped his beer, putting the bottle to the left side of his mouth when he drank. “Speaking of limping home, what brought you back to town? I was afraid we had lost you to the big city forever.”
Normally, Mesa would not let a crack like that one go, bu
t Hardy said it in such a subdued, offhanded way, as if he had something else on his mind. “Don’t get excited,” she said. “It’s not permanent. I’m helping with the paper until my grandmother gets back in the saddle, as they say.”
“I thought maybe you came back for Shane since he got dumped.”
“Jesus, Hardy. Invite a girl out and give her a hard time, why don’t you?” She flicked a beer cap on the table toward him.
“I’m just teasing,” he said and snatched up the beer cap and handed it back to her gently as a peace offering. “Although I was surprised to see you with him. That’s all.”
Mesa was taken aback to hear Hardy express what sounded like a genuine feeling. She was used to his Butte-boy toughness. She leaned her arms on the table and looked at him. “Hardy, I’ve gotten all of two postcards from you in four years. Why would you suddenly care who I have dinner with?”
“Well, it’s not like you didn’t know where I was or how to get in touch with me.” He sounded like a ten-year-old in trouble on the playground. “When was the last time I heard from you?”
“Okay,” she said and pushed back her chair. “I can see this was a bad idea. Thanks for the drink. I’m out of here.” She didn’t relish the idea of walking home in the cold, but she was not in the mood to trade any more barbs with Hardy.
“Wait, wait. I’m sorry. Truce. Honest, I won’t say another word. I mean, I just thought we could talk about old times. Please, don’t go.”
Now she was curious. Hardy never pleaded for anything, especially from a woman—not his style. She pulled her chair back toward the table. “Hardy, what’s up? You don’t seem like your usual self.”
He sighed, and then slumped back in his chair, his resignation as halting as the karaoke singer in the background. Finally, he spoke. “I been going through a rough patch. Looks like my so-called career in Moab is going bust.”
Mesa was stunned. Hardy’s life as a slick-rock biker guide, leading convoys of bicycling tourists through Arches National Park and other local cycling attractions, had meant he could cling to some part of his image as an athlete, not to mention that it was a ticket out of Butte.
“My dad and my brother are at me to come to work with them. Maybe it’s time.”