“I know where there’s a flophouse downtown,” Larry said, his head still buried in the Mooney’s engine compartment. “Put my in-laws up there last time they were in town. It’s clean and cheap. They even have Magic Fingers.”

Walker’s wife gave a quizzical look. “Magic Fingers?”

“You stick a quarter in a machine,” I said, “and the bed vibrates your fillings while you tell yourself it feels like a real massage.”

She smiled and took my hand firmly. “You saved our lives today. How can we ever repay you?”

A few methods came readily to mind. Amply proportioned in all the right places, Mrs. Walker was dressed in black silk slacks, glossy black pumps with high heels, and a scoop-neck, long-sleeved knit top that matched the honeyed hue of her shoulder-length tresses. She wore a small fortune in gold along with the air of an exceptionally attractive, middle-age woman long accustomed to men drooling over her.

“It was my pleasure, Mrs. Walker,” I said, reminding myself she was married and that part of me wished I still was. “I was just happy to help.”

“Call me Crissy, please.”

Larry yanked his head out of the Mooney’s engine compartment like it was on fire. He scrunched up his veined, bulbous nose and gaped at her through the half-inch-thick lenses of his Buddy Holly glasses.

“Crissy Walker? Playmate of the Year? That Crissy Walker?”

The smile drained from her face. “You must have me confused with someone else.”

“C’mon, I know it’s you. It is you, isn’t it?”

She exhaled. “I haven’t been that Crissy Walker in over twenty years.”

“I knew it.” Larry squealed like a kid come Christmas morning, which would’ve sounded cute had he actually been a kid. Not so cute coming from a guy who looks like the “before” picture in a Lap-Band infomercial. He wiped his greasy paw on his T-shirt, then offered it to her. “I’m a huge fan,” he said. “I used to look at your photo spread all the time. Sometimes three, four times a day.”

“Way too much information, Larry,” I said.

Crissy shook his hand tepidly.

Truth be told, I’d spent a little time myself admiring Crissy Walker’s pictures back in the day. We all did, my fellow Air Force Academy cadets and I. Who could blame us? There she was, stretched out on the wing of a B-17, wearing nothing more than a World War II bomber pilot’s cap and a smoldering, come-fly-with-me smile. The years had done little to diminish her emerald-eyed sensuality. But unlike my lascivious friend Larry, I was less awed by the former centerfold than I was by her husband. For the first time I could ever remember, I was truly starstruck.

“You’re Hub Walker,” I said.

He shrugged and smiled, embarrassed at being recognized.

“Reckon I am.”

I resisted the urge to squeal myself. Not because Walker was a big deal in film or on TV — why the world slathers adoration on mostly short, insecure people who stand in front of cameras pretending to be taller, self-assured people is beyond me. No, the reason I went weak in the knees was because in aviation circles, Hub Walker was nothing short of a living legend.

He was a natural pilot — talented enough to have flown with the Air Force’s Thunderbirds demonstration team. In Vietnam, he’d been a forward air controller, a Southern country boy piloting unarmed O-2 Skymasters at low level over the jungle canopy to purposely draw enemy fire, then directing fighter-bombers in to attack. Twice he’d been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery. In 1972, he’d intentionally crash-landed in a rice paddy to protect a Navy pilot who’d been shot down. Though badly wounded himself, Walker held off an entire NVA platoon for nearly an hour with nothing more than a German Luger pistol his father, a World War I doughboy, had given him. For his pluck, Hub Walker received the Medal of Honor.

Ceremonial jobs with defense contractors soon followed. He got paid big bucks to attend cocktail soirées and play golf with Congressional power brokers. He also grew addicted to prescription painkillers. Guilt-ridden at having survived combat when so many of his squadron mates hadn’t, he married his psychotherapist, who would die during labor less than a year later giving birth to their only child, a girl Walker named Ruth. A few years later, during a Memorial Day barbecue at the Playboy Mansion honoring America’s fighting men and women, he met Crissy.

As I remembered it, she’d grown up Appalachian poor, the tomboy daughter of a veteran Air Force mechanic who’d instilled in her an appreciation of how airplanes worked, and a love of the outdoors. But with the visage of an angel and a body like vice itself, Crissy’s ambitions extended far beyond the humble hollers of her roots. She’d attended beauty college for awhile, dropped out to work as a flight attendant, and ended up posing au naturel on the pages of America’s most popular monthly men’s publication.

Walker would later thank Crissy for helping him beat his drug addiction and rescuing him from thoughts of suicide. She, in turn, would credit Walker for giving her life true purpose. Being the loving, supportive wife of a national icon was more than she ever could have hoped for growing up. They eloped to Las Vegas a month after meeting.

Their fairy-tale romance was profiled in magazines from People to Flying. I remembered reading one especially breathless article in Cosmopolitan between missions in our ready room outside Dammam during Desert Storm. The piece was headlined, “The Hero and the Hottie: A High-Altitude Love Story.” It made the rounds among my fellow sex-starved fighter jocks as quickly as Crissy Walker’s centerfold when I was at the Academy, where those of us on the football team voted her “Most Likely to Make You Feel Funny in Your Jockstrap.”

Larry dug a felt-tip pen out of his own pants, lifted his T-shirt, and asked her to autograph his massive gut.

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” she said.

“I’d never kid about what could be the greatest moment of my life.”

“Your wife might not think it’s so great,” I said.

“Mind your own business, Logan. Besides, Doreen’ll never know. She hasn’t seen me in the buff with the lights on for years. She has a heart condition. The shock would probably kill her.”

“I don’t sign body parts,” Crissy said.

“What if I knocked a hundred bucks off that replacement vacuum pump?”

“No.”

“OK. One-fifty. I gotta at least cover my costs.”

“No. And no means no. Not at any price. You got that?” She stormed past us, into the restroom of Larry’s hangar, and slammed the door shut.

Walker shrugged apologetically. “My wife gets a tad embarrassed over some of the decisions she made in her younger days. I’m happy to pay full price for the pump.”

“Suit yourself.”

A dejected Larry stuffed the pen in his pocket and went back to work on Hub Walker’s Mooney.

That night, over dinner on his dime, Walker insisted on telling me about how his daughter had been murdered, then offered me work that made me wish in hindsight I’d been born rich.

Crissy Walker was in a fish mood. I recommended a cozy seafood place called Hooked at the far end of the municipal wharf where I always ordered the grilled wild sea bass with salsa fresco and a whisper of cilantro. Walker and his wife both went with steamed crab legs. From our table, the street lights onshore were gauzy starbursts, refracted in the mist that had settled thick and damp over the Rancho Bonita waterfront.

“Ask anybody,” Walker said, downing his third Jack Daniel’s and signaling the waiter for another. “My daughter was a knockout. Smart as a whip, too. Second in her class at Annapolis.”

He pulled out his wallet and pulled out a picture of an athletic-looking brunette with strikingly blue eyes. She was wearing Navy whites and flanked by eight other cadets identically dressed, all grinning into the camera and holding hand-lettered signs that said, “Beat Army!” They all looked like they had their whole lives ahead of them, but none more so than Walker’s daughter, Ruth. He was right. She was a knockout.