America West Airport did not look its fancy name. It was a runway, a small wooden office building, and two hangars. A beat-up Bee Gee stood gathering cobwebs in one of them and on the runway another plane equally as battered but whose make she didn't know. She feared they both needed a lot of work. The whole place looked to her like it had been built as a set for a cheap movie that had never gotten made.
Now why would my good friend Red Olafson do a thing like this to me?, Barbara wondered, parking in front of the office building and getting out of her car.
A red-faced balding man, short and stocky and about fifty, wearing mechanics' dirty overalls and worn cowboy boots, came slowly out of the office building. He approached her skeptically, a skinny old dog of uncertain parentage following arthritically and just as skeptically at his heels.
"Want a ride up?" he asked, sleepy-eyed and yawning, checking his fly. It was open, so he zipped it up in front of her. "Five bucks for five minutes."
She almost gagged on the smell of beer as he spoke, and figured his red face was more from drinking than the sun.
Barbara said no thanks and he lowered his price to four dollars for seven minutes.
She said no thanks again and opened her purse cautiously, like she would hold a winning poker hand among card sharps, and handed him the letter.
After reading it and thinking a long minute, he remembered.
"Oh, yeah. Red wrote me about you. Hell of a guy, Red. Could almost drink me under the table. Almost."
She didn't doubt it, even from six feet away.
"Name's Russ Oberman, in case he didn't tell you. See by his letter you're Barbara Markey. Tell you what. Let's get out of the sun and sit inside by the fan with a cold beer. We can talk about it."
The fan and anything cold sounded good to Barbara. But she wondered what they could talk about. Certainly not a job for her. The airport didn't look like it could support its owner's dog, a Heinz 57 mix with a gray muzzle. It had walked stiff as Frankenstein, then plopped down beside its master onto the hot gravel and closed its eyes while they had talked. When they began walking to the office, the dog got up as if with great effort and followed them in.
Barbara wasn't a dog or cat person, just a horse person, but felt sorry for the old campaigner and scratched its head.