a row on the apron nearby. Some of them, I guessed, were there for the weekend, some for the night, since the control tower closed at ten o’clock. There were chocks under their wheels and traffic cones around each one denoting the circle of safety.
“Let’s take a look inside, Elwood,” I said.
Sawyer turned to look at me. He had bloodshot basset-hound eyes with big saggy pouches beneath them.
“Woody,” he said. He was correcting me, not trying to be friends.
“Okay. Woody.”
“There’s nothing to see. They cleaned it out.” In his right hand he clutched one of those aluminum clipboards in a hinged box, the kind that truck drivers and cops always carry around.
“Mind if I take a look anyway? I’ve never seen the inside of a cargo plane.”
“Mr. Keller—”
“Heller.”
“Mr. Keller, we didn’t hire you, and I don’t have time to play tour guide, so why don’t you go back to interviewing the ground crew while I try to figure out how someone managed to smuggle three truckloads of freight out of this airport without anyone noticing?”
He turned to walk back to the terminal, and I said, “Woody, look. I’m not here to make you look bad. We both want the same thing—to find the missing cargo. I might be able to help. Two heads are better than one, and all that.”
He kept walking. “Uh-huh. Well, that’s real thoughtful, but I’m kinda busy right now.”
“Okay. So . . . Mind if I use your name?” I said.
He stopped, didn’t turn around. “For what?”
“My client’s going to ask for a name. The guy at Traverse Development can be a vindictive son of a bitch.” Actually, I didn’t even know who at Traverse had hired my firm.
Woody didn’t move.
“You know how these guys work,” I said. “When I tell my client how Argon Express wasn’t interested in any outside assistance, he’s going to ask me for a name. Maybe he’ll admire your independent spirit—that go-it-alone thing. Then again, maybe he’ll just get pissed off so bad that they’ll just stop doing business with you guys. No big deal to them. Then word gets around. Like maybe you guys were covering something up, right? Maybe there’s the threat of a huge lawsuit. Pretty soon, Argon Express goes belly-up. And all because of you.”
Woody still wasn’t moving, but I could see his shoulders start to slump. The back of his yellow slicker was streaked with oil and grime.
“But between you and me, Woody, I gotta admire you for having the guts to tell Traverse Development where to get off. Not too many people have the balls to do that.”
Woody turned around slowly. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone blink so slowly and with such obvious hostility. He headed toward the plane, and I followed close behind.
THERE WAS a hydraulic hum, and the big cargo door came open like the lift gate on a suburban minivan. Woody was standing in the belly of the plane. He gestured me inside with a weary flip of his hand.
He must have switched on an auxiliary power unit because the lights inside the plane were on, a series of naked bulbs in wire cages mounted on the ceiling. The interior was cavernous. You could see the rails where the rows of seats used to be. Just a black floor marked with red lines where the huge cargo containers were supposed to go, only there were no containers here. White windowless walls lined with some kind of papery white material.
I whistled. Totally bare. “The plane was full when it flew in?”
“Mmm-hmm. Twelve igloos.”
“ ‘Igloos’ are the containers, right?”
He walked over to the open cargo door. The rain was thrumming against the plane’s aluminum skin. “Look for yourself.”
A crew was loading another Argon cargo jet right next to us. They worked in that unhurried, efficient manner of a team that had done this a thousand times before. A couple of guys were pushing an immense container, eight or ten feet high and shaped like a child’s drawing of a house, from the back of a truck onto the steel elevator platform of a K-loader. I counted seven guys. Two to push the igloo off the truck, two more to roll it onto the plane, another one to operate the K-loader. Two more guys whose main job seemed to be holding aluminum clipboards and shouting orders. The next jet down, another white Boeing but not one of theirs, was being refueled.
“No way you could get twelve containers off this plane without a crew