“Why not?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Bad sign.”
“Or a lucky break for you.”
“You know my golden rule, Gall. Never again will I fly for anybody except me. I for damn sure won’t be a rich guy’s chauffeur. He’d probably want to put me in some dumb cap and uniform.”
“You don’t have to sign on for the rest of your miserable life. Just till your airplane is fixed. And you haven’t even heard the best part.”
“What’s the best part?”
“In the interim, for a reasonable percentage of every charter, he’ll let you use his King Air. What do you think of that?”
Dent gnawed the inside of his cheek. “How reasonable a percentage?”
“I took a stab at twelve. He said okay. Prob’ly could have got him to agree to ten. The money doesn’t matter to him. He wants his plane ‘broken in’ by a good pilot.”
The deal was better than reasonable, especially considering how much Dent could charge per hour to charter an airplane of that caliber. But he resisted the temptation. “I’d be at his beck and call. And at the whim of his wife and bratty kids. I’d probably have to fly a yapping lap dog, too.”
“I didn’t say it’d be perfect,” Gall grumbled. “But you could keep eating.”
Dent loathed the prospect of having a boss, of taking orders, of having his time, his life, governed by somebody else. But Bellamy’s two-point-five grand wouldn’t last long. He could tighten his belt, literally, and skip a few meals, but he had to keep making payments on his loan or he’d lose his airplane to the bank.
“We’ll talk about it when I get back,” he said. “Soon as we set down at Austin-Bergstrom, I’ll come straight out.”
“I’ll be here. Unlike some people I know, I don’t go winging off without telling anybody.”
Dent ignored that, and, at any other time, he would simply have hung up. But he had more to talk to Gall about. “This columnist, Rocky Van Durbin, he’s a snake. He didn’t know who I was this morning, but he will by now, and he’ll be all over that. If he comes nosing around—”
“I’ll kick his Yankee ass.”
Dent actually grinned, not doubting for a moment that Gall would, and that he would enjoy it. But his grin was short-lived because he needed to stress the importance of his next warning. “Listen to me, Gall. Are you listening? This is serious.” He described the pickup truck he’d seen earlier. “I got a bad vibe. Could be nothing. But—”
“But you trust your instincts, and so do I.”
“You haven’t seen a truck like that around your place or near the airfield, have you?”
“No.”
“You swear?”
“Why would I lie?”
“Mule-headedness. Misplaced pride. Sheer meanness. Shall I go on?”
“I haven’t seen a truck like that. Swear.”
“Okay, but keep your eyes peeled. Promise?”
“I’ll promise, if you’ll tell me something.”
“What?”
“What are you doing with her?”
“For crying out loud, Gall, how many times do I have to say it?”