“Oh God. Add one oral fixation.”
“You know what, Dessa? I got news for you: Everything can be sexualized. Everything. Even meat loaf, apparently.”
“I bet you like your toast burnt, too.”
“Like a slice of charcoal. But didn’t you get the regulation about rookies not being allowed to profile veteran agents?”
Both their heads turned when the first drops of rain began tapping at the other side of the picture window at the front of the Soup Spoon Café.
Leppo said, “Oh great.”
Odessa checked her phone. The weather app radar showed a mass of precipitation in shades of jade and mint approaching Newark like a cloud of toxic gas. She turned it around so that Leppo could see. Her umbrella happened to be locked next to the Remington 870 twelve-gauge shotgun inside the trunk of their car, parked half a block up the street.
“Jersey rain,” said Leppo, unfolding his napkin. “Like hosing down a dog. Everything gets wet, nothing gets clean.”
Odessa smiled at yet another “Leppo-ism,” looking outside as more drops strafed the window. The few people outside moved more quickly now, with a blurry sense of urgency.
Things speeding up.
At the very same moment Leppo was asking about meat loaf (as later chronologies would bear out), a dozen miles north of Newark, Evan Aronson was on hold with his health insurance provider, listening to soft 1970s rock while waiting to question a surcharge for a recent emergency room visit. At his ten-year Rutgers reunion a few weeks before, Evan had torn his left biceps during a re-creation of his Greek brothers’ traditional late-night porta-potty leap, as he attempted to catch his former fraternity house roommate, Brad “Boomer” Bordonsky, despite Boomer having packed on a solid thirty pounds since graduation.
While enduring another one of Styx’s greatest hits, Evan looked up from his desk in the Charter Airliners office at Teterboro Airport and watched as a late-model Beechcraft Baron G58 taxied out of the nearby private aviation hangar. The pilot, tall and in his fifties, climbed out of the cockpit of the million-dollar twin-engine piston aircraft. The man wore gray track pants, a long-sleeved pullover, and sandals. He disappeared back inside the hangar, leaving the aircraft engines running outside. A hangar attendant exchanged a few words with him and then moved away.
Moments later, the pilot returned holding a very large wrench.
Pilots, but especially owner-pilots, do not perform their own aircraft repairs. Not with the plane’s twin three-hundred-horsepower engines still on, propellers rotating faster than the eye can track. Evan stood out of his chair to get a better look at the pilot, standing there with his left arm in a sling, his right arm holding the telephone receiver, connected by a cord to the base on his desk due to airport radio frequency regulations.
Under the whine of the turbine, Evan heard a loud pop—and a simultaneous crunch.
He heard it again, struggling now to see the pilot, who was apparently working behind the Beechcraft’s fuselage. The tall man came around to the near wing, and Evan watched as he swung the large wrench at the running lamp—popping the seal on impact, crunching the red plastic casing, pieces of which fell to the tarmac as the lightbulb went dark.
Evan gasped audibly, so obscene was this act of violence against an aircraft worth millions of dollars. Evan stretched the phone cord to full length, the soft ballad “Lady” providing a weird counterpoint to the sight of a plane owner vandalizing his own property.
These high-end private jets were both babied like pampered pets and rigorously maintained like race cars. What this man was doing was tantamount to putting out the eyes of a champion racehorse with a screwdriver.
This couldn’t be an owner at all, Evan decided. Someone was causing thousands of dollars of damage to this aircraft…and perhaps stealing it.
“Mr. Aronson, I have your file in front of me…” came the insurance representative’s voice—but Evan had to drop the receiver, letting it clatter against the floor, its cord recoiling to the desk. He rushed out the office door straight into the needle-sharp drops of cold rain, looking left and right, hoping someone else was seeing this and could help him.
The tall man finished with the last lightbulb, the aircraft now cloaked in darkness. A small emergency light backlit the scene.
“HEY!” yelled Evan, waving his one good arm. He jogged a few steps toward the scene, yelling “HEY!” a few more times, both at the tall man and in either direction, hoping to rouse somebody with two working arms.
A hangar attendant approached the pilot, trying to stop him. Three downward wrench blows caved in the right side of the attendant’s head—the attack lasting only seconds. The attendant collapsed on the ground, rattled by death spasms.
The pilot crouched and went to work on the rest of the skull, like a caveman finishing his kill.
Evan froze. His mind could not process such violent terror.
The pilot tossed the wrench to the side with a great clanking and walked perilously close to the left propeller, rounding it, climbing up onto the wing, settling inside the glass cockpit.
The aircraft jerked forward and started rolling.
The only light in the plane was that of the cockpit avionics, a cool green-blue LCD Garmin G1000 display. Evan thought it lit the pilot’s face like an alien’s.
He was transfixed by the dead look in the man’s eyes.
Mechanically, the man reached for something in the cockpit beneath Evan’s line of sight. Suddenly there was an explosion of sound and flame, shattering the right-side window. Rounds from the AK-47 semiautomatic rifle ripped into Evan’s body like hot nails, buckling his knees, his body collapsing, his head smacking the tarmac, knocking him instantly unconscious.
As the darkened Beechcraft turned toward the taxiway, Evan bled to death peacefully.
Odessa had the steak salad. No onions, because she didn’t want the taste in her mouth all night. She ordered coffee because it was the middle of their shift and that is what FBI agents drink.
“Did you know,” Leppo said after the server left, “there is more trace amount of human feces on menus than anywhere else inside a restaurant?”
Odessa brought a tiny tube of hand sanitizer out of her bag, setting it upon the table as though she were attacking on a chessboard.
Leppo liked her, she could tell. He had a grown daughter of his own, so he projected and understood. He liked taking her under his wing. There were no assigned partners in the FBI. He wanted to show her the ropes, teach her “the right way” to do things. And she wanted to learn.
“My pop sold kitchen supplies everywhere in the five boroughs for thirty years until his pump gave out,” he said. “And he always said—and this might be the most important lesson I can teach you as a third-year agent—that the hallmark of a clean restaurant is its bathroom. If the bathroom is hygienic, orderly, and well maintained, you can be assured the food prep area is safe, too. Know why?”
She had a guess, but it was better to let him pontificate.
“Because the same underpaid Chilean or Salvadoran immigrant who cleans the restrooms also cleans the kitchen. The entire food service industry—and you could make an argument for civilization itself—hinges on the performance of these frontline workers.”
Odessa said, “Immigrants, they get the job done.”