Part 1 The Dash to New York
THE DASH TO
NEW YORK
– From: The Crusades by Theodore Coyne
Airspace over WEST VIRGINIA
21 December, 1030 hours
My sleek private jet shot over the eastern United States in a dead-straight line toward New York City.
It flew in a desperate hurry.
Indeed, since we’d taken off from Houston at 7 a.m. local time, our plane had been given priority clearance over all airspace between Texas and New York.
My presence in Manhattan had been demanded at the highest levels.
Of course, the jet wasn’t actually mine.
It belonged to the FBI.
The aircraft was a Gulfstream G550 which, in a world of expensive private jets is a very expensive private jet.
It costs $61.5 million brand new and is very popular with -billionaires. Mark Cuban, Larry Page and Oprah Winfrey have all owned G550s at various times. (A Google search revealed that the FBI didn’t truly own my plane; it leased it from the Bank of Utah which is a little weird.)
The G550 has a maximum speed of Mach 0.89 which makes it one of the faster private jets in the world.
But speed doesn’t come cheap.
A flight in a G550 from Houston to New York will burn $7,000 worth of fuel.
Given that a similar flight on a commercial airline costs $291 and will only take maybe an hour longer—with most of that due to airport security—this might all seem like a lot of money and effort for the FBI to expend conveying me and my team to New York City.
But there was a crisis at hand.
A billionaire was missing.
And not just any billionaire.
The richest man in the world.
The phone call had woken me at 6:09 a.m., interrupting a vivid dream I was having about a giant zombie kitten rampaging through downtown Los Angeles.
I have strange dreams.
Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. I do that sometimes.
If you haven’t met me before, I’m Sam Speedman.
I’m a private detective based in Houston.
I’m 38 years old and 5 foot 7 (a little short).
I weigh 160 pounds (skinny).
I wear thick glasses (near-sighted). I’ve also been called a ‘four-eyed’ something 124 times in my life—four-eyed freak, four-eyed fuck, four-eyed weirdo—usually by people who are upset with me for being too direct. (It’s happened six times in the last year alone.)
I have degrees in pure mathematics and industrial chemistry from Rice University and a doctorate in Criminology (so technically I’m Doctor Speedman, but I never correct anyone who calls me Mister Speedman).
If I’m being totally honest with you, I have to admit I’m a little quirky (Heidi says this about me often; Dr Lucy says I’m ‘just different from everyone else’).
Either way, I’m on the autism spectrum, which I like to think helps me with my job—great attention to detail—but sometimes it makes things difficult when I have to interact with other human beings (see above, re: being too direct).
I’m working on it (see above, re: Dr Lucy, my therapist).
Like a lot of people on the spectrum, I find comfort in routine.
For instance, whenever I’m in Houston, I always eat lunch at the Hooters off Kirby Drive near my office and always at twelve noon. This is mainly because (a) the food there is very reliable—it’s cooked exactly the same every time—and (b) the waitresses are nice to me.
(Millie-Mae is my ‘regular’ waitress and she calls me handsome even though I’m not objectively handsome at all.
Another waitress, Darla, calls me darlin’ and she helps me out with clothing tips because as she once said, ‘Darlin’, you may be smarter than all of Wikipedia combined, but you ain’t got no God-dang fashion sense at all. ’
Having said that, my lunch routine is actually in danger.
Following recent bankruptcy issues, the Hooters corporation is transitioning all of its restaurants from a company model to a franchise model.
Millie-Mae was telling me that unless our Hooters found a franchisee willing to stump up $4.
1 million in refitting and franchise fees by the end of January, the restaurant would have to close.
This is very troubling to me, not only because of my extreme preference for consistently cooked food but for the waitresses. They’re sweet and they work hard and I don’t want them to lose their jobs.)
But I digress.
Anyway, most of the time, my job as a private detective entails catching unfaithful husbands in the act. That’s my bread and butter.
Corporate gigs for insurance companies are also fairly common. Less regularly I find extortionists (seriously, please tell your kids not to make sex tapes) and on rare occasions, even a serial killer or two.
And a little over a year ago, while searching for a woman who’d been missing for seven years, I uncovered a vast conspiracy among some wealthy families in the South.
You might’ve heard about that case.
It was all over the news.
In any event, I enjoy my job because usually it involves solving puzzles and I like solving puzzles.
But back to the phone call that woke me up at 6:09 a.m.
It was the FBI on the phone.
‘It’s an emergency, sir,’ the agent at the other end of the line said. ‘You gotta be in New York by noon, local time. A pool car with a police escort is en route to you as we speak and a jet is waiting for you on the tarmac at Houston Hobby.’
‘What’s going on?’ I said, sitting up in bed and rubbing my eyes. ‘Why do you need me?’
‘The billionaire Aristotle King and some of his children have been kidnapped.’
I knew who Aristotle King was.
Everyone did.
He was the richest guy in the world. And also one of the most famous; a playboy-tech-genius-oligarch.
‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ I said, ‘but why me? I mean, you’re the FBI. This is literally what you guys do.’
(I have mixed feelings about the FBI. I once applied for a job there and they rejected me because of my lack of interpersonal skills.)
‘The kidnapper was very clear, sir. He’s challenged five of the best detectives in America to try and find Mr King and his kids. He named you as one of those detectives and if you don’t come to Mr King’s apartment in New York City by noon sharp, he’ll kill King and the children.’
That brought me fully awake.
One of the best detectives in America?
I looked at the modest bedroom around me.
Plain wallpaper, neat desk, bookshelf dominated by science fiction and detective novels, and framed posters of my three favourite movies: Aliens, The Dark Knight and Searching for Bobby Fischer.
It didn’t strike me as the abode of any kind of great detective.
The agent went on.
‘Sir, as you’ll no doubt be aware, Mr King is a donor to the President and the President has ordered the Bureau to pull out all the stops.’
I took this all in.
I didn’t care that the kidnap victim was a billionaire or the richest guy on the planet or that he could call the President of the United States at any time.
It was the part about the kids that got me.
Whoever had done this had taken his children and that just wasn’t right.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Just one more thing. I need you to send cars for my two colleagues as well. I want them to come with me.’
I’d never flown in a private jet before.
I must admit the whole experience was very nice.
First, you have a lot of space.
Depending on the cabin configuration, a Gulfstream G550 can hold up to nineteen passengers and there were only three of us on this one: Heidi, Bill and me.
(Note 1: There were also two FBI agents escorting us, but there was still plenty of room.)
(Note 2: I forgot to mention them before, but for those of you who haven’t met them, Heidi and Bill are my business partners at the detective agency: Heidi Spunkmeyer and Bill Brewster.
Heidi is a 25-year-old goth emo Jewish lesbian who likes professional wrestling. She has pink hair and many facial piercings. She thinks I drive way too slowly while I think she drives way too fast. She gets speeding tickets often.
Bill is a Black ex–US Army investigator now in his seventies.
He’d been living in hiding for thirty years when I’d found him during that Southern case; I kind of endangered his life by doing so, but then I solved the case and asked him to join my detective agency and he did and he says he really likes being back in the world again and not having to ‘live in the shadows’ so I figure we’re sort of even.)
(Subnote 1 to Note 2: If you want to know what they’ve been up to since last time, earlier this year Heidi went to WrestleMania in Vegas. ‘The single greatest fucking weekend of my life!’ as she put it.
Lately Heidi’s become active on the fundraising committee of a charity called SafeNewHomeUSA which gives money and lodging to women who flee abusive relationships.
When they flee their abusive spouses, these women often have no money, no place to live and no rental history so they can’t get a lease.
Sadly, we see this a lot in our business.
Heidi got Bill and me to donate to the charity on its recent fundraising drive.
Heidi is a very kind and socially minded person even if she is a terrible driver.
As for Bill, he still drinks 114-proof wheated bourbon and lately he’s been binge-watching Matlock, the old version starring Andy Griffith, not the new one with Kathy Bates. He’s very set in his ways as Dr Lucy puts it.)
Anyway, the three of us sat in enormous swivelling individual leather chairs and there were whole tables on which we could put our laptops and backpacks.
(Of course, I’d brought along my trusty Maxpedition backpack.
Usually, it held the various tools of my trade: concealed Sig Sauer P226 pistol, handcuffs, laptop, compact aerial drones, prepaid phones, extra ammo clips and sultanas for snacking, but I’d had to remove a few of those items for this trip.
For one thing, I had to take out my gun. The state of New York bans the carrying of concealed firearms, so I was going there unarmed.