Page 3 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

“I did,” the captain said and smacked his lips in satisfaction. “Or, rather, Daddy did when he was up there for a convention back in the eighties.”

The air traffic controller broke into their conversation. “American eight-three-nine, turn southeast fifteen degrees. Descend to two thousand.”

“Looking for that river,” Carpenter said.

“Affirmative.”

He fed the instruction into the onboard computer and watched gauges as the aircraft followed his commands. “God, I love this. When I started flying this route, you had to come in manual to make sure you didn’t hit the Fourteenth Street Bridge. It freaked you out. Now you couldn’t hit it if you tried.”

As the captain caught sight of the river and lowered the landing gear, Waters said, “You going to make a pilgrimage to this Chicago rib mecca soon?”

Carpenter groaned. “Would that I could, but the great Leon’s is no more. My favorite was his rib tips. He’d smoke them and then chop them up into two-inch chunks with a cleaver and dump them in a paper bucket with his sauce, fries, and two pieces of Bunny Bread right there in front of you. Best ribs ever.”

“Leon die or give up?”

“Heart attack, I think. It’s why now I just sample good ribs occasionally. Otherwise, you end up like Leon, and my old man and I have too much fun to look forward to for that.”

“Fun in Boise?” Emma said skeptically.

“I’m telling you, Idaho’s a beautiful place. You should see it sometime.”

The lights of Washington, DC, and Northern Virginia were brilliant as the plane descended. He could see the bridge and the runway five miles away.

“You deserve it, Harry,” his copilot said. “How many years you put in?”

“Twenty-six in the saddle, eight in the air force before that,” he said. “Honestly, Emma, I kind of hate flying now. Can’t wait to get in my Chevy Trail Boss with Terri and the dogs and light out for Idaho and a better life.”

They crossed over the bridge, their landing lights illuminating the north end of the park. As Carpenter was scanning readouts and looking at the runway, he caught the impression of a vehicle at the far end of the empty parking lot. Something hot, orange, and pulsing came ripping out of the vehicle right at them.

Carpenter had flown combat missions in Kuwait. He knew they were machine-gun tracers even before the heavy .50-caliber bullets began to rake the jet.

“Sorry, Terri,” he said to his wife before the cockpit wind-shield blew out.

CHAPTER 4

DAVIS WATCHED THE FIRSTtracers and bullets find and chew up the jet’s left wing and engine and then saw a rain of 180 .50-caliber armor-piercing bullets smash into the nose, the cockpit, and the forward landing gear.

The plane stuttered in the air, still under computer control and still in full descent as it passed over the parking lot, the van, and the now empty machine gun. The jet wobbled and drifted right, crossing the backwater of the Potomac. The rear gear touched down, and for an instant Davis thought he’d failed, that the jet would land and that he’d had zero impact.

But then the right wing dipped wildly. Sparks flew like thousands of Roman candles when the wing smashed down onto the tarmac, causing the jet’s back end to skid violently. The wing broke off entirely, and the fuselage and other wing went tomahawking down the runway.

On the next big impact, the second wing came off. A forward section of the fuselage, including the cockpit, broke away and flew off the runway.

On the third impact, the remaining jet fuel exploded, shredding what was left of American Airlines Flight 839. The wreckage finally came to a stop far down the runway. Flames belched into the night sky.

Davis felt zero regret for murdering however many people he had just killed.

God, I hate Floridians,he thought as he thumbed his phone’s screen again.Old fat-ass do-nothings in wheelchairs. Serves them right that they were the first ones to get what they all deserve. Every single one of them.

When Davis heard sirens and saw the red flash of fire trucks speeding onto the runway toward the burning mass, he calmly gave his phone and the laptop a final order. Seven hundred yards away, the van blew apart.

Davis biked north. He’d stop when he was two or three miles up the path, pull the chip from the burner phone, break it, throw both items in the river, and move on to safer surroundings.

CHAPTER 5

JOHN SAMPSON AND Iwere inside a brick apartment building in Southeast Washington, DC, near the border with Fairmount Heights, Maryland, so we didn’t hear the machine-gun fire.

But we sure heard the dull thud and roar of the explosion that followed.

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