The Brad West Files Read online

  Brad could hear permission granted over his headphones, and the rotor blades began to whirl in earnest. Soon, with a strong vertical push against the seat of his pants, they were airborne.

  “WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?” he shouted into the mouthpiece.

  Suddenly, she cringed and her hand slipped off the collective to whip off her headphones. The chopper lurched forward and dragged its landing gear across the grass.

  She reached back down and fought for control. The bird was at a cockeyed angle to the ground, and landing seemed all but impossible. Changing her approach to the problem, she gently fed in the gas to full throttle and eased the collective forward.

  They swung higher, safely clearing all obstacles on the ground.

  “Oops, sorry.” She rolled her eyes.

  “No, I apologize,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have shouted into the mike like that.”

  “What did you say?” she asked, and put her headset back on.

  “You just keep your eye out the window,” he said. He should clam up, or he’d cause another accident.

  Besides that, now that they were in the air, conversation seemed superfluous. She guided them calmly over the constantly changing terrain. The municipal airport slipped away beneath them, and they headed out over the suburbs. Those soon disappeared as she steered the bird toward the desert.

  Ten minutes into the flight, his stomach began to swim. He recalled his steak and potato lunch and imagined seeing it again on his lap.

  At one thousand feet, the details below were still clear. Then he spotted a stranded vehicle in a ravine. It was his wrecked pickup truck. He looked at his pilot for confirmation, but she gave none.

  Five minutes later, the helicopter zoomed over a mountainous area. He took a double take when he recognized the very rock that he and Earl had climbed just the day before.

  “Hey, I almost got killed down there yesterday,” he said into the headset’s mouthpiece. “Some idiots from Davis were out buzzing innocent people in their Black Hawks.”

  She scanned the cliff. “That is most funny, because we did a practice run here this time yesterday.”

  “Holy cannoli. That was you!”

  She shot him a look of surprise, then dropped her eyes. “I must beg apologies. But truly, I was only following my point man.”

  So those weren’t U.S. military scum who had tried to suck him off the cliff the day before. They were Chinese. Somehow that didn’t make him feel any better, especially as he had grown attached to one of the pilots.

  Suddenly, she banked the helicopter with a sharp turn to the left and gained elevation. The maneuver threw him against his Plexiglas door. There she went again.

  Then he checked her expression, partially hidden by her headphones. She wasn’t looking at him. Instead, she squinted and checked out her window.

  Something was up, and it wasn’t just them.

  Again, she jerked the collective, this time to the right. She dipped the nose downward, and he felt his steak and potatoes reach the back of his throat.

  “What’s going on?” he finally yelped.

  At that instant, a huge shadow filled the windscreen. It was another helicopter, having appeared out of nowhere. Brad ducked instinctively and put out his hands in front of him. A moment later, he was still alive. Nothing seemed to have happened to the chopper.

  He opened his eyes and the helicopter was gone. All he saw was a blur of mountains and sky. He glanced at his pilot, who was struggling with both hands on the stick.

  Then he felt the sensation of falling and spinning. If they were going to die, he needed some final connection with her. “I still don’t know your name,” he yelled.

  Could she even hear him over all the noise? He grabbed at anything in the cockpit to relieve the sickening vertigo. It didn’t help.

  Then there was a crunch of metal as the chopper made impact with the ground. The muscles in his back seized up, and dust flew in at them from all sides.

  Several seconds later, the dust had settled enough for Brad to see. He rolled his eyes from side to side. He had room to move, but didn’t see the need. Through the broken glass, he made out numerous pieces of sheered plastic and twisted metal. His flying Rolls Royce sure had a big booboo.

  His disaster-prone pilot coughed and shoved her door open. She lurched around the helicopter and yanked his door open. He was completely disoriented and felt her hands grab for him, practically tearing the sleeve off his shirt in the process. Man, he definitely had to get a new shirt. She was desperate to drag him out of the cockpit and away from the wreckage.

  “Come. We must go now!” she screamed.

  “I can’t move my legs.”

  “You must get out,” she said, and began to tug him by the arm. It felt as though she were separating his shoulder from its socket as she somehow pulled him from his seat, over the door jam, and across the rocky soil. How could someone so tiny exert so much force?

  “Ahh!” The pain in his shoulder was excruciating. “Okay, okay. I think my legs are fine now.”

  A few seconds later, a shockwave sent them reeling forward into a ditch. Fire had finally reached the fuel tank and ignited the gas. It created an explosion that rocked the earth under their feet. Pieces of metal shot out from the helicopter’s engine and body, and a black mushroom cloud billowed upward. They covered their heads as debris rained down from the sky.

  Brad opened his eyes a minute later. Remaining pieces of the helicopter crackled in the fire. His executioner cum guardian angel reached over to him and kissed him passionately. “It is May. My name is May,” she said urgently between kisses.

  He couldn’t seem to lift his head up or make his lips pucker to return the favor. Instead, he lay on the rocks staring up at the sky as the last traces of the fireball drifted away in a slight wind.

  She deftly undid his belt buckle with one hand and caressed his chest from under his shirt with the other. He heard a loud rush like a waterfall ringing in his ears and felt like he was either going to pass out or climax.

  Great galloping gonads, he knew he should have packed some protection before leaving the house that day, or at least a condom.

  Then he lost all consciousness.

  Chapter 9

  Dusk was settling over the valley, but things were far from peaceful. Earl screeched his Honda Civic to a halt in the hospital visitor’s parking lot and dashed inside. The nurse on duty punched Brad’s name into the computer and came up with the room number.

  “Much obliged, ma’am,” he said, and ran down the hallway to his friend’s room.

  Brad lay alone with his head bandaged and an IV tube protruding from the back of his left hand.

  “Hey Skeeter. Wassup?” Brad managed to gurgle.

  “Oh, man. I heard about the crackup and rushed right over to see for myself.”

  “Yeah. Had me another little accident,” he responded weakly.

  “Hope our exotic Miss S & M was worth it.”

  “You kidding? She gives new meaning to the phrase ‘all banged up.’”

  Brad suddenly twitched under his sheets and produced a guttural cough, which Earl took as a sign of impending system failure.

  “Oh man, it hurts to laugh,” Brad wheezed. “Guess I’ve been so doped up, I didn’t really know I was in the hospital until a few minutes ago. You didn’t see May on your way in, did you?”

  “Wow. I’m impressed. On a first name basis now, are we?”

  “Possibly,” Brad said. “Still not quite sure if I was dreaming it or not. I’m pretty sure I let her get to first base, however.”

  “Congrats,” Earl said. It was encouraging that Brad still had his sense of humor. “I only hope that someday a girl will want to feel me up, shortly after trying to kill me for the second time.”

  He circled closer to inspect the damaged goods.

  “And, in answer to your question,” Earl went on. “I don’t know squat about the girl, if she’s in the hospital or not. They didn’t say a thing
about anyone else when they called me. And what’s really scary is I seem to be the closest thing to available ‘next of kin’ that you’ve got.”

  “You can pick your friends…” Brad said slowly.

  “But you can’t pick your friend’s nose,” Earl responded according to ritual. He patted Brad’s sheet. “So, are you going to live or what? I’m not going to be stuck with that beanbag chair forever, am I?”

  “Just go try and hide your true feelings, you old softie,” Brad groaned. “Oh, where’s a nurse with some hard drugs when you need one?”

  There was a lone guest chair next to Brad’s headboard, so Earl eased into it and cracked his knuckles. “Okay, ya crack-head, spill it. Give me the blow by blow of your latest fiasco.”

  “Well, ya see, it was like this,” Brad began. “May took me up in a helicopter—which could possibly be construed as a slight error in judgment on my part. Anyway, so there we were, flying over the exact same place we’d been rock climbing yesterday.”

  “Cripes. Why would she go there?”

  “She must have been one of those two demonic pilots that buzzed us on the rock.”

  “Man, this is getting better and better. Please do continue, my indestructible friend.” He reached forward and patted Brad kindly on the top of his head.

  “Ouch! Cut it out. It hurts there, too.”

  At that point, a robust, middle-aged nurse entered the room. “So we’re finally awake, are we?” She proceeded to check Brad’s pulse and his IV.

  “Oh, yeah,” Brad said. “But I sure could use a mug of your finest painkiller right now.”

  “You don’t need me for that,” she said, and handed him a cord with a button on it to self-administer his own meds. “This button will release a small dose of Demerol into the IV, but it’s limited to no more than once every fifteen minutes. You are going to get really good at judging time,” she said with a chuckle. “Now, I’d better tell the resident on duty that you’ve regained consciousness.”

  She also showed him his buzzer and told him to ring the nurse’s station if he needed anything.

  “He could use a place to stay and some nice mature, nurturing female to take care of him once he gets out of here,” Earl hollered after her.

  Brad sent him his best “get burned” look through a swollen eye, then activated his Demerol drip.

  “Okay, shutting up now,” Earl said.

  Just then, a tall and angular man with short-cropped dark hair and lean, chiseled features entered. He was dressed in a plain business suit and had a small, but dashing, mustache that didn’t quite fit his brusque demeanor.

  He reached out to shake Earl’s hand, his gray eyes level and cool.

  “I’m Investigator Igor Sullivan with the regional office of the National Transportation Safety Board, the NTSB.”

  “Hello, Inspector Igor.” Earl rose and saluted instead. “I’m Lemming of the BDA, and this is my colleague, Chief Inspector Lookout of the Yard. So let’s get to the bottom of this, Igor, do we drink vodka or Irish whisky?”

  Unfazed by Earl’s teasing, the man walked to the foot of Brad’s bed and took a moment to size him up. “I’ll need to collect some information from you regarding your accident, if you feel up to it.”

  It was more of a request than a question.

  This should be good. Earl reclined in the chair once more to watch.

  “Just to verify,” Sullivan continued. “You weren’t piloting the Bell Jet Ranger in question, were you?”

  “No. I cannot tell a lie,” Brad slurred through his medication as it began to take effect. “I indeed don’t know how to fly a hell-oh-copper. Though I probably could have landed it just as well. Ha!”

  “Hmm. That is fortunate, as you’re not on the national helicopter pilot registry,” Sullivan noted. “And it appears that the pilot not only destroyed a piece of costly leased equipment, but also left the scene of the accident.”

  “Wha— She split?” Brad said in his stupor. He looked shocked and crestfallen, like a little boy not finding the toy he wanted on Christmas morning.

  Sullivan pulled a handheld Personal Digital Assistant from his shirt pocket. “Yu May Hua. Chinese national. Last known address: Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, where she’s a pilot trainee.”

  “What’s a Chinese citizen doing in the U.S. Air Force?” Earl asked.

  “She’s a pilot in the Chinese Air Force on an officer exchange program,” Sullivan said.

  “Ping-pong diplomacy doesn’t cut it anymore?” Earl asked gravely.

  “Tell me. Just what do you know about Yu May Hua?” Sullivan said, again ignoring Earl.

  Brad leaned back on his pillow and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “She has bee-YOOT-iful eyes.”

  Sullivan cleared his throat, then continued. “Did you know, for instance, that her father is a prominent anthropologist in China?”

  Earl scratched his head. How coincidental was that?

  Brad struggled to sit up in bed. “No kidding? That’s terrific. I love antho-prologists.”

  The odds of two people in the same rarified field being connected in that bizarre way seemed astronomically slim. Had May purposely sought Brad out? Earl reflected back on how the two had met at the Grill. The kung fu kick could hardly be intended as a means of introduction. No, Brad had been the instigator in that whack job of a relationship.

  But how had that Igor guy made the connection between them so quickly?

  “You should know something about her,” the investigator went on. “After all, you were intimate with her.”

  “Wha-chew-talkin-bout?” Brad asked, focusing on the man with his one good eye.

  “They wheeled you in here with a condom still on your male appendage.”

  Earl jumped to his feet. “This is certainly an embarrassing development for my friend here. And I feel I must ask on his behalf, was it soiled?”

  “Won’t know that until we get the results back from the lab. But I can tell you, it was red,” Sullivan said.

  “Red like ‘cherry-flavor’ red?” Earl wanted to know.

  “Red with blood,” the investigator said. “We’re typing it now.”

  “Blood!” Brad bellowed. “That belongs on the inside! So what happened to May? Where is she now?”

  “We were hoping you might tell us,” Sullivan said. “She’s gone AWOL. She never returned to her room at the barracks.”

  Earl wondered if he should mention the condo she and her friend, the one probably named Jade, shared off base. He looked at Brad, but the poor guy seemed so hopelessly messed-up and in love with the girl that he wasn’t ready to sic the Feds on her just yet.

  “How long I been passed out?” Brad asked.

  “Going on five hours, according to the paramedic’s record,” Sullivan said.

  Brad lay back down and sighed. “Her psycho minder didn’t find her.”

  The investigator consulted his PDA. “That would be Liang Jiaxi. Chinese national. Also a pilot trainee at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.”

  “Hey,” Brad said, noticing the device. “Just what else you got in there?”

  “Careful, buddy boy,” Earl said. “He could show you, but then he’d have to kill you.”

  “Hey, whas about the other chopter that tried to shoot us down?”

  “Another chopper?” Sullivan said. “Washington’s gonna love this. Even so, Liang’s gone now as well. He shipped out already.”

  “Hey, so looks like you’ve got your lead,” Earl said. “Brad’s off the hook.” Then he speculated, “Maybe that’s how they get their jollies. She picks up strange guys, he tries to whack ’em, then they have terrific make-up sex.”

  “Interesting analysis. I’ll be sure to notify the head of the profiling department of that theory.” Sullivan keyed in a note.

  Then he pulled out a plastic bag with an envelope inside. The stamps had a Chinese painting depicting an exotic yellow-breasted bird.

  “There was something else stuffed in your pants,” he
explained. “We pulled this from your pocket and took the liberty of checking it out.”

  “Whas it say?” Brad asked.

  “It’s a letter in Chinese. I thought maybe you might want it.”

  Brad took the plastic bag.

  “I understand your friend here reads Chinese,” Sullivan said, pointing to Earl.

  “Uh, only the classics for Cultural Anthropology,” Earl said. “How did you know?”

  Sullivan ignored the question and made ready to leave. “There’s not much else to do at the moment. But I don’t want you to leave the hospital or do anything before contacting me on my cell.” He jotted down his number on cards for each of them and departed just as abruptly as he had arrived.

  He certainly did his homework, Earl had to admit. Why would his area of study be of interest to an NTSB investigator?

  “Pray, let us recap,” he suggested after Sullivan had left the room.

  He pulled his chair closer to the bed.

  “Hmm, let’s see. You meet a chick in a bar who high-fives you with her foot in your sternum, nearly gets you both killed in an act of road rage because of her over-dutiful party hack minder. Later, you go for a highly sensible helicopter ride with the aforementioned girl, who also happens to be in the Chinese Air Force. You get attacked again, presumably by the same possessed, though highly-mobile individual, total a chopper and almost yourself, and yet somehow manage to have nasty, blood-infused intercourse next to the flaming wreckage, lapse into a coma for half a day, and wake up in the hospital with only fond memories. Meanwhile, the girl of your dreams flees the country back to China with her loyal party dog. Did I miss anything?”

  “Yeah, the part where I strangle you with this tubing,” Brad slurred, and clumsily wrapped some clear hospital tubing between his two hands.

  “Ahhhhh. Cath-a-ter,” Brad whined, slowly unraveling the tubing back in its original position.

  “But wait,” Earl said. “There’s one puzzle piece unaccounted for: where’s May’s very close girlfriend and confidant, Jade?”