But that was the old me. Before I regrew that thing priests call a conscience and the Buddha calls enlightenment. Don’t get me wrong. The new me still needed the money as much as the old me. Even more so. There comes a point in life, however, when you realize it’s not always about the bucks. It’s only about the bucks most of the time.

“Well, Charise, there are always sailing lessons.”

“Sailing lessons? Are you kidding? I get seasick in the Jacuzzi.”

She touched up her lips with one of those liquid lipstick pen things, making sure the coverage was perfect with a dab of her manicured pinkie finger, then shed her headset and brushed out her gilded cougar mane.

I steered the Duck into an open tie-down spot along taxiway Bravo in front of Premier Aviation, one of two fixed-base operations on the field catering to mostly rich, corporate flyers. I turned off the avionics master switch and leaned the mixture until the engine sputtered and quit. After we got out of the airplane, I braced the nose wheel with a pair of black rubber chocks sitting on the tarmac.

Charise handed me her logbook without a word. I wrote down the date, the aircraft type, the plane’s tail number, the total time we’d flown that day (1.2 hours), the amount of instruction she’d received (1.2 hours), and the number of touch-and-go’s we’d made (7). In the “Remarks and Endorsements” section I nearly wrote, “Came perilously close to buying the farm,” but instead put, “Practiced emergency procedures.”Then, for grins, I jotted, “We’ll always have Paris.”

The old me might’ve suggested we go grab an umbrella drink on the beach after sharing so harrowing a near-death experience. Maybe we would’ve ended up at her place or, God forbid, mine. I was no Brad Pitt, but I was no Meatloaf, either. I still owned my own hair and all my teeth. The plumbing still worked just fine, thank you very much. I was a solid six-one and 190 pounds, a mere five pounds more than I’d been back in the day, snagging footballs for the Air Force Academy and studying Sartre, a rare Humanities major on a campus thick with geeky aeronautical engineers. But, like I said, that was the old me. I signed the entry and handed her back her logbook.

“Well,” I said, “at least it wasn’t boring.”

“You can say that again.”

“At least it wasn’t boring.”

She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. It beat a firm handshake any day of the week.

“Take care of yourself, Logan.”

“Don’t go changing, Charise.”

I watched her glide into the parking lot where a tall, tanned man in his late thirties was leaning against a silver Lamborghini Diablo convertible, smoking a cigarette. He wore a dark-colored suit with a crisp white dress shirt and a rep necktie striped blue and gold, cinched way too tight. His dark hair matched the gloss of his wingtips. His eyes were cloaked behind a pair of cool guy Ray-Bans.

A personal injury attorney. Had to be. There has to be more puke-inducing ways to earn a living than chasing ambulances, I thought to myself, though none came readily to mind.

He flicked away his smoke as Charise approached. She showed him what I’d written in her logbook. He nodded like he almost cared, then flashed me a stony smile as he held open the passenger door for her on his $200,000 road rocket. After she was comfortably settled in, he gingerly closed the door, then hustled around to the driver’s side, glancing my way to make sure I was still watching. He hopped in, fired up the Lamborghini and roared out onto Mayfield Place, grinding the transmission as he upshifted. Charise never looked back.

Oh, well.

I took my time tying down the Duck. Over at the commercial terminal, a turboprop taxied in and disgorged its passengers. High overhead, a turkey vulture wheeled unsteadily in the morning air. Two black SUVs drove onto the ramp and parked beside a Dassault Falcon 7X. A large, middle-age woman in sweat pants, who looked very much like Rancho Bonita’s most famous resident, the star of a wildly successful TV talk show and publishing empire, stepped out of the lead SUV. She chatted up one of her personal assistants while others transferred a queen’s procession of designer luggage onto the jet.

I wanted to yell, “You go, girl!” but somehow restrained myself.

Had I been able to afford my own personal assistant, I might’ve checked in to see what was next on my busy schedule. Truth was, I needed no reminder to know that I had nothing going the rest of the day. Or the rest of the week, for that matter. I was fresh out of students, with no immediate prospect of any new ones. If I were a religious man, which I’m not, at least not in a conventional sense, I would’ve prayed that my monthly retirement check from Uncle Sugar was waiting in my mailbox when I got home. A breakfast burrito loomed large on my radar, then maybe a nap.

The last thing on my mind was murder.

It was not yet nine a.m. and already eighty degrees when I walked in off the flight line that morning. Weird weather for early November if you live in North Dakota. Not so weird for the central coast of California.

Inside Larry Kropf ’s cavernous hangar, where Marine mechanics once toiled over gull-winged Corsair fighters destined for war in the Pacific, it was dank and cool. The place smelled of grease and history. Larry was balanced on a step stool, leaning precariously into the engine compartment of a V-tail Beech. All I could see of him were his elbows and the north end of his ass crack, peeking out the back of his low-riding, navy blue work pants.

“Somebody’s in your office,” he said without looking up. “Been there awhile.”

“Did they bring balloons?”

“Say again?”

“Publishers Clearing House. I’m a Super Prize finalist. This could be it, Larry. My ship has docked at last.”

Larry hitched up his pants and descended the stool gingerly, grimacing with each painful step while pushing his Buddy Holly glasses back up his nose with a finger thick as a Wisconsin brat. He was a wide man with furry forearms and a Grizzly Adams beard dense enough to hide small animals. His nose was flat and veined, tenderized by one too many bar fights and far too much tequila. Stretched across his cannonball belly was an oil-smeared gray T-shirt that said, “Guns Don’t Kill People, Postal Workers Do.”

“Didn’t see no balloons,” he said, rummaging through the drawers of a rolling tool chest stationed beside the Beechcraft’s wing.

“No balloons? Then screw ’em. I was gonna subscribe to Cat Fancy, up my chances of winning, but they can forget about it now.”

“Good. Then maybe you can finally pay me that back rent you owe me.”

“I’ll get you your money, Larry, as soon as I can. You know I’m good for it.”

“Only thing I know is, you haven’t paid me a dime in two months, Logan. Not to mention that spot weld I done on your exhaust stack and that’s been, what, four months?”

“Three months. But who’s counting, right?”

“I got bills to pay, too, OK?” Larry said. “I got a knee needs replacing. I got a kid needs braces. Five grand to get her teeth fixed so when she turns sixteen, I can stay up all night debating whether to take a shotgun to her pimply little prom date after he brings her home four hours late, or de-ball him with a pair of channel locks.”

“You know, Larry, I’m no psychotherapist, but I believe those would be called issues.”

“What about the fucking money you owe me, Logan? What about those issues?” He grabbed a socket wrench from the tool cabinet and climbed back up the step stool, pissed and in pain. “You know, Logan, I used to think you were a funny guy. You obviously think you’re a funny guy. But your bullshit’s getting pretty goddamn old. You’re a grown-ass man. Stiffing honest people. You should be ashamed of yourself.”