Emily Locke 01 - Final Approach

don’t admit first anythings. It means they have to buy beer for everyone else.
    He put an arm around her. “That’s what I thought. Looks like you’re buying tonight, beautiful.”
    At least he made her smile.
    I was too bothered by the line twists to smile. I’d packed the rig myself and I don’t pack messes. I had the sudden, horrible feeling someone had tampered with it.
    It wouldn’t have been difficult to do. After all, if I could get into the loft overnight, anyone could. I thought about Craig’s strange behavior in the office the night before and shuddered. He was staff, and a rigger. He could go in the loft and open a rig in full view of anyone and no one would give it a passing thought. I berated myself for not locking the gear in my car.
    Whoever messed with my gear had to know why I was there. But how could that be? And why not sabotage my reserve too?
    I decided it might be a stall tactic. I’d be tied up for a while, awaiting another repack. Maybe I was closer to a discovery than I thought. Maybe someone was buying time.

Chapter Fifteen
    Everyone flocked to Donna. She’d been unlucky enough to have her first malfunction on a day the drop zone was thick with curious on-lookers. I scanned faces in the crowd gathered around her and watched as she good-naturedly answered all the questions. Donna’s cutaway bothered me far more than it bothered her.
    I lifted my rig, lighter without the main, from the back of Rick’s truck and headed for the loft to find Billy. Yellow nylon from the deployed reserve overflowed from my arms and hung down to my knees.
    Marie was last to leave the office to check on Donna. When the door swung behind her, I caught it with my foot and managed to squeeze inside before any fabric got pinched in the door. Instead of Billy, Craig was in the loft, hunched over the workbench, dialing his cell phone. I stepped backward, out of sight, and listened.
    “Monday morning at two,” he said quietly. “I’ll be in touch.” Then his phone snapped closed.
    Silently, I placed my gear on the office floor and slunk away, wondering what I’d overheard. Maybe Richard could help make sense of it. My own phone was in my tent, and I went to get it. Scud stopped me in the hangar.
    “Guess who’s in ground school,” he said. “The diva from this morning. Remember? The one with the sexy boots?” He laughed like he couldn’t imagine what Jeannie had been thinking.
    I smiled to myself and walked on to my tent. I knew exactly what she’d been thinking:
Screw you, Emily.
I’d chosen as my best friend the only woman in the world willing to jump from a plane for spite.
    “Touché,” I muttered, and slipped inside my tent. Hearing no one else around, I dialed Richard.
    I started with Craig’s mysterious four-second phone call and worked backward through Donna’s malfunction and then to my midnight search. I was almost to the part about how Craig caught me when Richard interrupted.
    “Did you say flight logs?”
    I pictured the notebooks in the workbench drawer. “They looked like flight logs.”
    “Did you read them?”
    “It was too dark.”
    “I’d like to know what was in those logs. Might have something to do with that pilot.”
    During my pilfering, I’d neglected to study the most obvious items I’d found. What was wrong with me?
    “I’ll handle it.” If I had to steal them, copy them, or sneak in and memorize them, I’d get the information from the logs. Richard didn’t have to ask. It was my mistake. I owed this to Casey.
    We said goodbye and I returned to the office to take care of my gear. I found the main, crudely folded, laying along the wall of the carpeted packing area and figured Rick had moved it from the truck for me. I scooped it up and returned to the loft, feeling better prepared to face Craig.
    Who, it turned out, had company.
    Billy and two people I hadn’t met were with him, standing beside a collection of disassembled gear, inspecting pieces and nodding and pointing. Craig pulled a block of folded fabric from a box. As soon as it was free, it separated and expanded like a gas. Layers of beautiful crisp nylon, all shades of purple, cascaded over the bench.
    It looked like the riggers were about to assemble a new parachute system. I figured the likely owner was the tan and athletic man hovering near the crisp, new canopy. A woman behind him slipped her arms around his waist and kissed the back of his shoulder, her blond hair gently falling down her