Читать книгу Longleaf - Roger Reid - Страница 9

Mom thinks I’m crazy; Dad’s sure of it. I have to hand it to them, though they respected what I said I saw and took me right up to the first police officer they spotted after we got off the plane. She listened with one hand resting on her gun and then looked at my parents as if to say, “Is this kid crazy or what?” Instead, she said, “Anybody else on the plane see it?”

Mom and Dad shook their heads.

“Wait here,” said the officer.

She left us standing. “Wait here,” that’s all she had to say, and I don’t think anyone of the three of us moved an inch. Was it the badge? Was it the uniform? Was it the gun? What is it about a cop that makes people, most people, do exactly as they are told? I don’t know, and the truth is I wasn’t thinking about it then.

I was thinking about three guys—yeah, I figured they were guys—pushing a “vehicle” into a lake somewhere in Florida.

She wasn’t gone long. She returned with the pilot, the co-pilot and my friend the flight attendant.

She said, “This young man witnessed a possible crime in progress, and perhaps you can help us determine where we need to start looking.”

“You, sir,” she said to the flight attendant, “did you note the time when the young man created a disturbance on the airplane?”

Maybe it was the badge, maybe it was the uniform, maybe it was the gun: the flight attendant swallowed hard before he answered, “No, ma’am.”

The pilot spoke up, “How long after I called for flight attendants to prepare for landing?” he asked.

“A minute, maybe two . . . or three,” replied the flight attendant.

“At three hundred miles an hour, a minute or two or three covers a lot of ground,” said the pilot.

“Actually,” said my dad, “it was a minute and a half.”

Okay, at this point I need to say that my dad is a little weird. If he says “a minute and a half” he means one minute and thirty seconds. He does not mean one minute and twenty-five seconds. He does not mean one minute and thirty-five seconds. He means one minute and thirty seconds. I’ve seen it all my life, and I still don’t know how he does it. It must have something to do with the fact that he is an astronomer. Somehow, someway, he’s just tapped into whatever it is that makes time go by as the world turns around in space.

“A minute and a half?” asked the policewoman.

“Ninety seconds,” said my dad.

“And you know this how?” said the policewoman.

My dad shrugged his shoulders. He doesn’t know how he does it either.

“He’s an astronomer,” I said.

The pilot seemed to think that was a good enough explanation. “That would put us somewhere over south Alabama,” he said.

“Somewhere?” asked the policewoman.

“Probably about fifty miles to the northeast of here,” said the pilot. “Lots of pine trees up there.”

“Longleaf pine,” said my mom.