“Man, ” Cat groaned as he slowly came to. “Why’d you fucking hit me, man?”
“You tell your fucking driver when he needs to go somewhere, I’m flying and you can park your dangerous motherfucking ass in back, ” Macovich angrily said. The near-disasters of the morning were compounded by his throbbing hangover and bad memories of Hooter’s dissing him in Freckles and then refusing to have sex with him on the couch when she drove him back to his mother’s cluttered single-bedroom house.
“Man, we gotta go to the race tomorrow night, ” Cat said as he rubbed his head.
“Yeah, well, the guv’ner got to get there, too, ” Macovich said as he flipped switches to the off position. “So I’m gonna have to fly you dudes in shifts, ’cause I got no choice about it. I can’t just tell the guv that he’s gonna have to go by car. ”
“What’chu talking about?” Cat hotly replied. “Look at all them helicopters. ”
He stared at the fleet of shiny new helicopters inside the hangar.
“We don’t care which one you fly us in, as long as it cost as much as this one, ” Cat said.
Macovich figured the NASCAR pit crew had an important, powerful image to maintain, and puzzled what to do. He supposed he could recruit Andy to fly the First Family in a smaller but equally luxurious 407, which would leave Macovich free to transport the thus-far anonymous NASCAR driver and his pit crew in appropriate style for a handsome price that would enable Macovich to get his own apartment so the women he picked up would feel more comfortable about having sex with him. He would just lie to the governor and say the 430 was in for maintenance, assuming the governor even noticed.
“Uh, helicopter Sierra-Papa? You got company?” the Coast Guard pilot tried again as he choppered at a hundred and seventy knots toward the Richmond skyline.
“Sierra-Papa. Who’s trying to contact?” The breathless voice came back, and the Coast Guard pilots glanced at each other and nodded, which was their way of signaling that it was no bloody wonder state police pilots were always quitting.
Stories had made the aviation rounds, and the accepted version was that no one wanted to fly for the state police because the First Lady was always trying to matchmake her ugly daughters with the pilots who flew the First Family to dinner and shopping. Well, maybe not. Most likely it was because the entire state police department had gone whacko ever since it had been taken over by the woman superintendent the Coast Guard needed to contact about two fugitives.
“We’re a Coast Guard HH-sixty, ” the pilot radioed back. “Have two subjects on board and need a state police contact. Uh, the situation’s sensitive. You got a freq for the superintendent?”
It’s just like a movie!” Windy Brees exclaimed as she blew through Hammer’s door a minute later and excitedly informed her and Andy that a Coast Guard helicopter had just picked up the kidnapped dentist and his harmonica-playing abductor. “They’re in a helicopter and had to lift them up in this huge basket with waves crashing everywhere and the wind storming, just like in The Perfect Howl! Did you see that with Keanu Clooney? Oh, if only he were older!”
“All right, all right, ” Hammer said. “See if you can get the Coast Guard back on the air so we can talk to them. ”
Hammer swivelled her chair around to the radio on the table behind her desk as Andy switched to 125. 0, a rather generic frequency shared by small airports and often not very busy.
“Tell them we’re on one-twenty-five-nothing, ” Andy told the secretary.
Soon enough, they had the Coast Guard pilots on the air.
“This is the state police, ” Andy said into the microphone. “Are you on crew only?”
“Roger, ” was the comeback.
“Roger, ” Andy said. “Can you relay the circumstances?”
“Roger. We spotted two subjects in a boat and brought them on board. Appears they were fishing in the crab sanctuary and ran out of gas. They fired flares at our aircraft, and a post SAR boarding showed they were not in compliance. No fire extinguishers or life jackets. “