Kill Me by Stephen White Page A

at the FBO — Fixed Base Operator; think airplane service station, but with a clean bathroom — that had fueled the plane. Patience isn’t one of my long suits, so I paid one of the line guys, a kid, twenty bucks to wrestle the car cover into place on the Toyota, a task that seemed to me like trying to force a cantaloupe into a condom.
    Mary had spent the day antiquing north of Boulder and a few of her finds were strapped into seats in the back of the plane.
    She came back into the cabin when I came on board, but she didn’t ask what I’d been up to. She never did. Trace, the copilot, stayed up front doing preflight checks.
    The flight over to Montrose was uneventful.
    Little that happened those days felt uneventful, so a smooth flight over the Divide was a wonder.

    Facts are crap.
    Is that true?

SIXTEEN

    I wasn’t aware there was going to be an interim meeting in the enrollment process, but I was summoned back to New York three weeks to the day after I made the initial payments to Death Angel, Inc. As I had been instructed during the first call I’d received on that mobile phone I’d been told to buy, I’d dutifully sent the required funds in a shotgun pattern to multiple offshore destinations, the money going to a wide variety of charitable fronts.
    My favorite was the 225K I “donated” to the ever so ironically named Youth in Asia Foundation.
    It was in Singapore.
    Yeah, and I was on the moon.
    My assistant, LaBelle, handled the transfers for me. She handled the details and the paperwork related to everything important in my life, both business and personal. I could tell she had questions about what I was doing with all that money, even opened her mouth once to ask me about it.
    I held up an open hand and said, “Don’t go there, LaBelle. This one’s a state secret. Okay?”
    She shook her head once. That was her statement of underlying disapproval. She nodded twice. That was her assent to my caution. I knew that would be that.
    LaBelle was my rock.
    The “eligibility assessment” had been completely transparent. I assumed it was ongoing, but I never noticed a thing. None of the people who typically act as the pillars that support the temples of the wealthy — my accountant, my attorney, my bankers, my financial advisors, my business partners — ever called me late at night to clue me in that someone was checking up on me or my affairs.
    Jimmy Lee never pulled me aside and asked me how things were going in New York.
    The Death Angels were as discreet as advertised.
    The second time that my private mobile phone rang — okay, it actually vibrated — the caller was inviting me to make a return visit to New York City. The caller was a woman.
    The voice sounded familiar. I asked, “With whom am I speaking?”
    My question caused the woman to stumble for a split second, but not to fall. She continued to spell out the details of the “invitation.” I tried small talk, and I even made an allusion to the Town Car heading downtown on Park Avenue. My flirtations were rebuffed, or more correctly, ignored. The call was all business.
    Of course I wondered whether I’d been speaking with the woman with the traveling fingers, the one from the backseat of the Town Car.

    Mary flew me to New York the night before the meeting. The copilot that day was a temp named Andre who’d flown with us before, but wasn’t interested in our gig on a permanent basis. It was too bad; we both liked him. I asked Mary to do a couple of things for me in the city the next day. She asked if I minded if she visited her cousin in Brooklyn when she was done. I assured her I didn’t.
    I checked into a park-view room at the Four Seasons on 57th Street. I could have afforded an immense suite with a view of the park — hell, if I liquidated some things I could have made a respectable offer to buy the whole damn hotel — but I chose a standard room with a view of the park. I like luxurious hotel rooms but I don’t like big hotel rooms.