Different Circles

“Oh, si,” she said. “Señor Gomez let us know to expect you. May I just see your ... how you say ... your identificacion?”

“Por supuesto que si,” Jake replied, pretty much exhausting his supply of Spanish phrases for this encounter. He pulled out his passport, flipped it open to the picture, and handed it to her.

She looked at it carefully for a moment, reading the name and then looking at the photograph and then looking at his face. “Your hair much shorter in picture,” she told him. “And you had bigote.” She pointed to the mustache that Jake had sported at the time of that photo.

“It was a phase I went through,” he explained.

She nodded and then handed the passport back to him. “Even though you look different, I still recognize you. I hear your music on la radio all the time. You are muy talentoso.”

“Gracias,” Jake told her.

She reached into a drawer and removed a key that had a label on it with Jake’s name. She slid it across to him. “Senor Gomez’s hangar is numero dos ocho uno. He asks that you return the key when you remove the plane from the hangar for the final time.”

“Will do,” Jake promised. “We’re just going to look at it today. We’ll take it out of there tomorrow.”

“Muy bien,” she replied.

The walk to the hangar took about ten minutes. Both of them were a little breathless from the thin air by the time they got there. Jake inserted the key in the handle of the large door and turned it, causing the mechanism to click. He turned the handle and then pushed up on the door. It was well lubricated and slid up easily and quietly. Inside the hangar was the Cessna Citation that belonged to Señor Gomez and the Avanti that now officially belonged to the Kingsleys. Jake found the light switch on the wall inside the door and turned it on.

“Oh wow,” Laura said, taking it in for the first time. She had seen pictures of it, of course, but this was the first time she had actually laid her actual eyeballs on the actual aircraft.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Jake asked, admiring it much the same way he admired Laura’s naked body when she emerged from her shower.

“For four point seven-five million dollars, it had better be freakin’ beautiful,” she said slyly. As promised, she made a point to reference that amount whenever she could.

He let the remark go, as he normally did.

Jake opened up the main entrance on the left side of the plane, just aft of the cockpit, by punching a five-digit code into the locking mechanism and then manipulating the handle. They stepped inside and took in the layout.

“Okay,” Laura said as she looked at the plush seats, the reasonably wide aisle between them, the small bar, and the couch, “this really is pretty nice.”

“It should be for four point seven-five million, huh?” Jake asked her.

“Right,” she said.

“Why don’t you check out the bathroom,” he suggested next. “After all, that’s what got us into this whole deal.”

She walked to the very back of the plane and opened the narrow door, revealing a tiny, cramped room with a ceiling so low that even she could not stand up straight in it. The only thing in the room was a small airline toilet, a roll of toilet paper, and a flush button. Jake was doubtful that he personally would even be able to accomplish a sit-down in there with the door closed (even if he would have dared perform such an act in flight without another qualified pilot to take the controls), it was that cramped. Laura, as petite as she was, would still have her legs touching the walls on both sides.

“It’s a little bit small,” she said doubtfully.

“What were you expecting?” he asked. “A luxury shitter with a shower and enclosed bath?”

“Kind of,” she said.

“Will it be better than peeing in the female urinal?”

“Well ... yeah, it would have to be,” she admitted.

“There you go then,” he said.

While she continued to peruse the bathroom and the sink/bar combo outside of it, Jake made his way back forward and took a look at the darkened cockpit. He was very nervous about tomorrow’s flight, much more nervous than he had ever been at the thought of taking to the air before. True, he had taken the two-week course at the Piaggio facility in Greenville, South Carolina to acquire his type-rating for the aircraft and had now logged twenty-two hours of flight time behind the controls of the same model and year as this one, including eleven takeoffs and landings and twenty-seven touch and goes, but he had had an instructor with him for all of those hours. And now, his official type rating in hand, he was planning to take off from an airfield that sat 8390 feet above sea level—two thousand feet higher than Jake had ever taken off from before—and then fly across a South American border to a major international airport located in a valley surrounded by steep mountain peaks, with no one but himself to rely on. Was this really a good idea? Would it not be a better idea to just hire someone to ferry the aircraft back to California for him?