“Are you mad at me?”

Savannah shook her head.

“You seem mad.”

“You were doing what you had to do. I’ll get over it — but not if you don’t turn off that awful song.”

I turned off the radio.

“Thanks for picking me up.”

“Of course.”

More silence.

“We’ll get the license tomorrow,” I said, “assuming you still want to.”

Savannah glanced over and gave me a smirk.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

She almost smiled.

I reached across the seats of our rented Yukon and caressed her silken neck.

“So, what did you find up there? Anything?”

“An airplane.”

“Really? Just like you said.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Anybody alive?”

“The plane had been up there a long time.”

I debated filling in the blanks for her. About the skeletal dead pilot. About the mysteriously empty crate. About the dead young man we’d met at the airport the day before. But what purpose, I asked myself, would any of that have served, beyond unnerving the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with? We’d flown up to Lake Tahoe to get remarried. Tomorrow, we would. Nothing other than that mattered much in my opinion, not even a murder.

“Were there bodies?”

I looked out the window and didn’t say anything.

“I’m just curious, Logan. You don’t have to say if you don’t want to.”

“Yeah. There were bodies.”

We rounded a curve doing fifty-five in a forty-five mph zone. A highway patrol cruiser was sitting on the shoulder of the road. Savannah braked, glancing down at the speedometer, then up anxiously in her rearview mirror as we passed by the cruiser. The cop didn’t stop us, though. Savannah said it was an omen of good things to come. I attributed it to blind luck. But that’s just me. I turned the radio back on to the same country-western station. The song that was playing, near as I could discern, was, “I’m Not Married, But the Wife Is.”

Savannah, a native Texan who was not keen on the music she was subjected to as a child, groaned. “What in heaven’s name are we listening to?” She reached down and changed stations: a smorgasbord of hip-hop, top-forty, Spanish language, then this:

“… said the wreckage was discovered below Voodoo Ridge, in a remote, mountainous area of the El Dorado National Forest, about eight miles west of South Lake Tahoe. There were no survivors. Officials said they believe the plane may have been missing for several years. Sources familiar with the investigation, meanwhile, told KKOH News that sheriff’s authorities are treating the crash site as an active crime scene. Meanwhile, in the nation’s capital today, congressional Republican leaders accused the White House of—”

I switched stations.

Savannah glanced over at me with a quizzical look on her face. “The plane’s been missing for ‘several years,’ but they’re treating it as an ‘active crime scene?’ That seems rather strange, doesn’t it?”

“Somewhat.”

She knew I was holding back.

As Savannah slowed and turned into Tranquility House’s small guest-parking area, I could see that the door of our bungalow was cracked open.

“That’s weird,” Savannah said. “I know I locked it before I went to get you.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, Logan, I’m sure.”

I told her to wait inside the car, got out, and approached the bungalow.

Among operators tasked with breaching a targeted structure, the first man through the door is known by various monikers. The Point Man. The Bullet Catcher. The Meat Shield. The guy voted Most Likely to Succumb. You never know who or what’s waiting for you on the other side. A task for the faint of heart it’s not. When you’re unarmed and there’s only one of you, as I was, the task can be especially daunting. I could’ve waited out whoever was inside, assuming anyone was, but waiting was never my style. That left two tactical options: storm in or sneak in. I opted for the latter, if only because it was the less confrontational way to go and thus, philosophically, more Buddhist-like.

I pressed my back against the wood siding of the adjacent wall. With my right arm extended, I slowly pushed open the door a few inches, careful to keep clear of the gap and the door itself, where a shooter was likely to fire if his intention was to stop me from coming in. The hinges were well-oiled. They didn’t squeak. Nobody shot at me.

Had I still been with Alpha, serving as the point man in a standard, five-man entry team stacked up outside the door, I would’ve waited for the last guy in the stack to squeeze the shoulder of the guy ahead of him, indicating he was ready for action. That “ready” signal would have been passed up the train until the guy behind me squeezed my shoulder, telling me we were all good to go. Then we would’ve gone. With my submachine gun or short-barrel shotgun raised to my shoulder and ready to fire, I would’ve moved to my left, sweeping the room and my field of fire from left to right. The man directly behind me would’ve entered, shifted to my right, and scanned from right to left. We would’ve stayed a foot away from any walls because bullets tend to ricochet within six to eight inches of walls. And we would’ve put multiple hollow-point rounds into the vital organs and skulls of anyone remotely threatening. But, like I said, it was just me, and I was without the comforts of a good gun.

I waited a few seconds, exhaled slowly, and walked in.

The bed had been made. Things tidied up. Nothing looked amiss. Nobody was there. That’s what I thought initially. Then, from inside the bathroom, I heard a male voice mutter, “Mmmm. Oh, yeah.” I moved quietly and peaked around the corner:

Preston Kavitch, the son of our B&B hosts, Johnny and Gwen, was standing at the pedestal sink, in front of the antique, gilt-framed mirror. He was stroking his crotch with his right hand and caressing his left cheek with a pair of Savannah’s black lace panties.

“Hey there, sport.”

Startled, he stumbled backward and fell into the claw-footed tub.

“I was just—”

“—Just what? Doing your best Pee Wee Herman imitation?”

“Actually, I was…” Preston cleared his throat. His eyes darted in every direction but mine. “I was changing the light bulb over the sink. It went out. Your lady told my mother it was out before she left to go wherever. I’m in charge of maintenance. It’s what I do. Only I couldn’t find a sixty watt, so I had to get a seventy-five watt, which’ll be bright, but that’s OK. Not that big a difference between sixty and seventy-five. Uses more energy, but whatever.”

His nervous eye movement and his manic elaboration of insignificant, irrelevant details, instead of sticking to the topic at hand — namely, him being a pervert — more than confirmed my suspicions that Preston Kavitch was exactly that.

“Please don’t tell my parents, OK?”

“Why wouldn’t I tell them?”

Preston had to think about that one for a second. “Because I’m really a nice guy?”

“Nice guys don’t go round sniffing their guests’ underwear, Preston.”

“I wasn’t sniffing. I was… appreciating.”

“Hand ’em over, Preston.”

He handed me the panties. Then he started crying.

“They’ll kick me out of the house if you tell ’em,” he said, crocodile tears flowing, still sitting in the tub with his legs hanging awkwardly over the edge. “I got nowhere else to go. Please, it won’t happen again. I swear it.”

There was a time when I would’ve ignored his begging and made a point to teach him a proverbial lesson he’d never forget, one that might’ve involved the spilling of blood and a broken bone or two. Back then, I didn’t feel sorry for many people, including those who got down on their knees and begged me for their lives. I steeled myself against their pleas; they got what was coming to them. But then I started getting older, and maybe, more or less, a little wiser.