Emily Locke 01 - Final Approach

young and exuberant to be mixed up with anything dark and sinister like kidnapping. Her attentive eyes and infectious laugh gave the impression she was a people-pleaser. She smoothed a wayward ringlet into her ponytail and told us she’d find our fourth. The Cessna wouldn’t go anywhere without a full load of four. Otherwise, Rick and Marie wouldn’t make money.
    While we waited, Beth lit a cigarette, then tossed her lighter onto the picnic table where it landed next to an open issue of
Blue Skies Magazine
. The magazine’s pages lifted in the slight breeze, and I was about to pick it up and read the latest news when Linda returned with Scud shuffling behind her.
    “Sweetheart!” I said.
    Beth took a drag off her Newport and turned her head to exhale.
    Scud’s legs were still in his jumpsuit, which was now only partially zipped. He’d taken his arms out of the suit and tied its sleeves around his waist like a jacket. He wore a faded No Fear shirt underneath.
    “Wouldn’t miss this,” he said, ogling the three of us in turn.
    “We’re on a twenty minute call,” Linda said. “Let’s dirt dive.”
    We practiced the dive on the ground, rehearsing maneuvers we’d try in the air. Each time I took someone’s arm or leg gripper, I had the uneasy feeling I might be hanging on to somebody involved with the abduction. And each time one of them joked or smiled, I switched to feeling like a nitwit for suspecting decent people. How did the pros tell good guys from bad?
    I spotted two men I didn’t recognize near the Coke machine. They watched us line up at the Cessna. One was a heavyset red-haired man who wore a Harley-Davidson bandana and held a camera helmet under an arm. The other popped the lid on a can of Mountain Dew. His face was wide at the top and narrow near his chin, and his too-thin mustache reminded me of rodent whiskers. Both were in their late twenties.
    I smiled at them. The cameraman nodded back. Rat Man didn’t acknowledge me.
    I climbed into the plane and Scud followed close behind. He gave two hard slaps on the back of my container and said, “That’s gonna weigh the whole plane down.”
    “Shut up.”
    “I love it,” he said. “She already sounds like a wife.”
    ***
    We got eight points, or made eight separate formations, on that dive before breaking off at twenty-five hundred feet. Considering Scud was on the dive and none of us women had weight vests, I thought we did a decent job matching fall rates. At break-off, Scud held onto my wrist a beat longer than he should have. He snuck a kiss pass. Before turning and flying away to open his parachute, he kissed me. If the girls noticed, I thought we might get flack for it on the ground. Then I realized any girl who jumped with that clown got kissed.
    My ride under the Manta was pathetic. A lightweight jumper like me was nothing under its huge surface area. I buried my right toggle, pulling it fully down to my hip, even wrapping some steering line around my hand to get more pull—a maneuver that would have put me into an aggressive spiral under my Sabre—but the Manta only responded with a slow, flat turn to the right. I gazed toward the Gulf of Mexico only a few miles away, and remembered my student jumps under a Manta. Huge parachutes didn’t bother me then. I was too excited about skydiving to notice how slow they were.
    Back then, I was in college. My boyfriend broke up with me because I spent more weekends at the DZ than I spent with him. I figured it was better in the end; any man who understood me would take the whole package, parachute and all. The summer I graduated, Jack signed for the whole package.
    When Annette came along, I quit. It was bad enough missing time with her while I was working. I wouldn’t miss our weekends too. That was five years ago. Last year, I finally started jumping again. Missing my husband and daughter, I’d returned to my surrogate family at the drop zone.
    A gust pushed me forward and snapped me back to what I was doing—setting up to land. The Manta was docile when I turned into the wind. Once there, I got almost no forward penetration. Slowly, I sank toward the grassy landing field. I missed the higher speed, swooping landings I got with my own gear. When I touched down, I scooped what seemed like acres of canopy nylon into a bundle and made my way toward the hangar.
    The cameraman I’d seen earlier loafed at the picnic table with his buddy, smoking. They held their cigarettes away from my