Vixen 03 Part 6

"I should have cooked the Rocky Mountain oysters a little longer, though. They were a bit on the rare side. Didn't you think so, Lee?"

"Tasted okay to me."

"Rocky Mountain oysters?" asked Pitt.

"Yes, you know," said Maxine. "The fried bull t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es."

"You did say 't.e.s.t.i.c.l.es.' "

"Lee insists I serve them at least two times a week."

"Beats h.e.l.l out of meat loaf," Lee said, suddenly laughing.

"That's not all it beats h.e.l.l out of," Pitt murmured, looking down at his stomach, wondering if the Rafertys stocked Alka-Seltzer, and sorry now he'd skipped the fishing.

At three o'clock in the morning Pitt was wide awake. As he lay in bed with Loren snuggled against him and stared through the picture windows at the silhouetted mountains, his mind was throwing images inside his skull like a kaleidoscope. The last piece of what had turned out to be a perfectly credible puzzle refused to fit in its slot. The sky was beginning to lighten in the east when Pitt eased out of bed, pulled on a pair of shorts, and quietly stepped outside.

Loren's old Jeep was sitting in the driveway. He reached in, took a flashlight from the glove compartment, and entered the garage. He pulled the drop cloth aside and studied the oxygen tank. Its shape was cylindrical, measuring, Pitt guessed, slightly more than one yard in length by eighteen inches in diameter. Its surface was scratched and dented, but it was the condition of the fittings that attracted his interest. After several minutes he turned his attention to the nose gear.

The twin wheels were joined by a common axle that was attached at their hubs like the head of a T to the center shaft. The tires were doughnut shaped and their treads relatively unworn. They stood roughly three feet high and, amazingly, still contained air.

The garage door creaked. Pitt turned and watched Loren peek into the darkened cavern. Heshinedthelightonher. She was wearing only a blue nylon peignoir. Her hair was tousled and her face reflected a mixture of fear and uncertainty.

"Is that you, Dirk?"

"No," he said, smiling in the dark. "It's your friendly mountain milkman."

She heaved a sigh of relief, came forward, and gripped his arm for security. "A comedian you're not. What are you doing down here, anyway?"

"Something bugged me about these things." He pointed the beam of light at the aircraft fragments. "Now I know what it was."

Loren stood and shivered in that dirty, dusty garage beneath the silent cabin. "You're making a big deal over nothing," she murmured. "You said it yourself: the Rafertys had a logical explanation for how this useless junk got here. Dad probably picked it up at some salvage yard."

'Tm not so sure," Pitt said.

"He was always buying up old sc.r.a.p," she argued. "Look around you; the place is full of his weird, half-finished inventions."

"Half finished, yes. But at least he built something from the other trash. The oxygen tank and the nose gear he never touched. Why?"

"Nothing mysterious about that. Dad most likely was killed before he got around to them."

"Possibly."

"That's settled, then," she said firmly. "Let's get back to bed before I freeze to death."

"Sorry, I'm not through here yet."

"What's left to see?"

"Call it a pebble in the shoe of logic," he said. "Look here, at the fittings on the tank."

She leaned over his shoulder. "They're broken. What did you expect?"

"If this was removed from an obsolete aircraft at a salvage yard, the mounting brackets and the fittings to the lines would have been disconnected with wrenches or cut with either a torch or heavy shears. These were twisted and wrenched apart by great force. Same goes for the nose gear. The strut was bent and severed just below the hydraulic shock absorber. Strange thing, though: the break did not happen all at once. You can see that most of the ragged edge is weathered and corroded, while a small section at the top still has a new look to it. Seems as if the main damage and the final break occurred years apart."

"So what does all that prove?"

"Nothing earth shattering. But it does indicate that these pieces did not come from an aircraft-salvage yard or a surplus store."

"Now are you satisfied?"

"Not entirely." He easily lifted the oxygen tank, carried it outside, and deposited it in the Jeep. "I can't manage the nose gear by myself. You'll have to give me a hand."

"What are you up to?"

"You said we were driving down the mountains into Denver for a shopping spree."

"So?"

"So while you're buying out the town, I'll haul this stuff over to Stapleton Airport and find somebody who can identify the aircraft it came from."

"Pitt," she said, "you're not a Sherlock Holmes. Why go to all this trouble?"

"Something to do. I'm bored. You've got your congressional mail to keep you busy. I'm tired of talking to trees all day."

"You have my undivided attention nights."

"Man cannot live by s.e.x alone."

She watched in mute fascination as he scrounged two long boards and propped them on the lowered tailgate of the Jeep.

"Ready?" he asked.

"I'm not exactly dressed for the occasion," she said, a chill in her voice and goose b.u.mps on her skin.

"Then take off that thing so you won't get it dirty."

As if in a dream, she hung her peignoir on a nail, mystified as to why women instinctively indulge men in their juvenile idiosyncrasies. Then the two of them-Pitt in his shorts, Congresswoman Loren Smith in the nude-heaved and grunted the dusty nose gear up the makeshift ramp into the back of the Jeep.

While Pitt chained up the tailgate, Loren stood in the dawn's early light and gazed down at the dirt and grease smudged across her thighs and stomach and wondered what it was that possessed her to take a mad lover.

Harvey Dolan, princ.i.p.al maintenance inspector for the Air Carrier District Office of the FAA, lifted his gla.s.ses to the light and, detecting no

smears, clamped them on a pyramid-shaped nose.

"Found them in the mountains, you say?"

"About thirty miles northwest of Leadville, in the Sawatch range," Pitt answered. He had to speak loudly to be heard above the roar of the forklift that was carrying the nose gear and oxygen tank from the Jeep through the huge, yawning door of the FA A inspection hangar.