Bob sounds pissed. “You don’t give up, do you? Anybody can charter a flight, but why would he? His father’s company has a King Air 350. Take you anywhere in North America, at altitude and in style.”

Shane smiles, winks at me, as if we’ve just won something special. “A King, huh? Pricey.”

Bob snorts. “Not compared with a Lear, it ain’t.”

“Couple of million though, right?”

“More.”

“And you know it’s out there in the hangar because there’s no flight plan on file.”

Bob looks like he wants to spit. His color has improved and he’s stopped rubbing his chest. Maybe the bad spell has passed.

“Exactly right,” he says, jutting out his chin.

Shane nods, satisfied. “Mr. Cody, here’s the deal. Show us the King, we’ll get out of your hair.”

“I’m not showing you anything, mister.”

“Fine. Then give me the tail number, I’ll check it out myself.”

Shane doesn’t say anything, but something tells me he wants me to chime in, make myself heard.

“Please?” I ask him. “It could be really important.”

Five minutes later we’re approaching the hangar, one of three in this particular row. Condos for airplanes. Sort of like really wide storage units, with big roll-down doors. In the end poor Mr. Cody more or less surrendered, handed Shane the keys to the lockup. According to Cody, each unit can hold two aircraft, with openings on either side of the corrugated steel buildings, but Edwin Manning’s corporate airplane has a hangar all to itself.

“You think they took off in daddy’s plane, got in trouble somewhere else?” I ask.

“Working theory,” Shane says, fitting the key in the appropriately numbered door. “Subject to change.”

Inside the hangar our footsteps echo against the metal sides of the building. It’s so dim and darkly shadowed that I can’t see much of anything until Shane finds a switch and trips the overhead lights.

“Surprise, surprise,” he says.

The hangar is empty.

“What do we do now?” I ask.

Behind us the door swings open, shifting the light. Before I can turn, a ragged, high-pitched voice says, “Keep your hands where I can see ‘em.”

Standing behind us is a hefty, big-bellied man in a baggy black tracksuit. He has a shaved head, a boxer’s flattened nose, puffy eyelids and scar-thickened lips. In his hand is a shiny black gun.

26. The Man From Wonderbra

My first mugging was in Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue, to be exact. About four months after Kelly was born, my mother decided I needed a day off. A chance, she said, to be a grown-up for a little while, on my own. Bless her, she gave me a hundred dollars and told me to take the train into the city, have lunch at the Museum of Modern Art—they had a great little Italian café she loved—and buy myself something pretty.

“Window-shop on Fifth Avenue,” she said. “I mean really look. There might be something there for you.”

A hundred dollars was a lot for my mother, but I thought it would go further at, say, Macy’s, than some upscale boutique, and since part of me was still a bratty seventeen-year-old, I said so.

“I don’t mean to buy,” she told me, squeezing my hands. “To learn from. Look and learn.”

Look and learn.

Truer words and all that. The only class I’d ever really excelled in was home ec, and that was because of sewing. Having watched my mother stitch my little dresses together, and most of her own clothing, as well, I knew how the machine worked, wasn’t afraid of the flashing needle, and that put me ahead of the other girls. Plus I was interested in how clothes were designed and cut out and assembled.

So there I was, looking and learning, and loving every minute of it. I was a grown-up in the big city, studying retail fashion. Not just style and quality of the clothing, but how it was presented. The design and execution of the window display, the whole look of the thing. I wasn’t taking notes, but my eyes were soaking it all in and my brain was thinking, why does Mom want me to do this, what does she have in mind? It was intriguing, exciting. It might, just might, be a clue about what I should do, how I might live. And that, of course, is when I got mugged.

I had my best leather bag securely slung over my shoulder and around my neck, right hand on the strap. I didn’t see the gang of boys coming, but they saw me, and the biggest of them snaked his arm through the strap—he never stopped moving—and the next thing I was being carried down Fifth Avenue by five or six boys. White boys with low-rider attitudes, laughing and cackling and being so outrageously boisterous that my muffled shouts went nowhere. It must have looked like I was part of the gang, if you didn’t happen to notice that my feet weren’t connected to the sidewalk.

They carried me for most of one block, worked the strap free of my neck, yanked my hair so hard it felt like they’d torn my scalp, and then dumped me on the sidewalk, scraped and bleeding from both knees. Bag gone, money gone, day ruined. All in broad daylight, with hundreds of pedestrians within arm’s reach, every last one of them looking away, studiously avoiding the noxious teen spirit.

Without the fare to get home, and barely enough for a phone call, Mom had to pack up Kelly, come into the city and rescue me. Found me angry and red eyed in Penn Station, cursing Manhattan. Could happen anywhere, she said, comforting me. Don’t blame it on the city and don’t let it get you down. That was her other mantra. Don’t let it get you down, baby doll. A constant refrain to herself as well as me, and it got us through a lot. My father leaving, me dropping out of school to have a baby, me getting my GED, me eventually graduating from the Long Island Fashion Institute, me getting my first real job.

A whole lot of me, and not much Mom. That was her gift, of course, the road she willingly took from the moment I finally confessed to the pregnancy I’d been hiding and denying for months.

Secrets.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, right. The man with the shiny black gun. My second mugging. Guy with a gun, he must want my handbag, right?

“You and your boyfriend, stop right there,” he demands, in a voice that seems a little too high and scratchy for his bulk. “Keep your hands where I can see ‘em.”

His oddly protuberant eyes are darting between me and Shane, like he’s playing eenie-meenie in his head. Is it a thyroid condition does that to the eyeballs? Or high blood pressure? Anyhow, he has eyes like boiled eggs and his close-shaved skull looks like a chunk of hard, lumpy wax glistening under the overhead lights. A drop of sweat congeals at the tip of his flattened nose. An ugly-looking customer for sure, but what bothers me even more than the gun—is it real or a toy, how would I know the difference?—what really bothers me is this: the man is very, very nervous.

“Listen real careful,” says the egg man, pausing to wipe the sweat from his nose with his free hand. “Stay away from Edwin Manning. Stay away from his home, his family, his business, his airplanes, everything to do with him. Stay away, you’ll be okay. Don’t stay away, bad things’ll happen. Capiche?”

“Understood,” says Shane, sounding utterly reasonable. “You happen to know where the King Air was headed?”

The man’s forehead furrows. Beads of sweat seep from his forehead, making his egg-shaped eyes blink even more rapidly. “The what? I told you—shut up!”

“The Beechcraft that’s supposed to be in this hangar. Where’d it go? We’re assuming Seth was at the controls. He never bothered to file a fight plan, why was that?”

The man with the gun looks confused, unsure of how to respond, and he looks at me with a beleaguered expression, as if he wants me to intervene, stop all these complicated questions.

In that moment, as his buggy eyes shift, Shane glides in front of me, blocking my view.