Page 46 of The Woman in 3B
The engine finally roared to life, loud despite the headset that covered my ears.
Anissa turned to me. “Are you ready for this?”
Her smile was disarming. I couldn’t image anyone refusing her. How the hell hadIrefused her?
I nodded and placed my nervous hands in my lap, worried I might inadvertently touch something I wasn’t supposed to. “Ready.”
The plane slowly rolled forward and Anissa guided the plane in the direction of the runway. We bumped along the paved surface; the blacktop looked freshly laid, but I felt every small dip and bump. The propeller spun lazily against the horizon. I could see the individual blades, so I knew it couldn’t be moving that fast.
“Why is the propeller spinning so slowly?” It felt like I was shouting. The volume of the engine and the headset were a little disorienting.
“Because we’re not flying yet,” came her common sense response.
I tried to breathe normally. I could do this. I’d been on hundreds, maybe even thousands, of planes before. Sure, they’d been big enough to carry two hundred people instead of two, but flying was flying, right? Or at least that’s what I tried to convince myself.
We paused at the end of the long runway and Anissa turned the plane around. The engine grew louder and the prop began to spin faster.
“Is that better?” she asked.
I swallowed hard and stared straight ahead, but I managed to nod.
“Don’t worry, Alice,” came her reassuring words. “I’m good at this.”
She fiddled purposely with a few more knobs and switches on the control panel. When she pulled on the throttle, the engine roared impossibly loud. We finally began to move forward again, first at a slow creep and then with incremental bursts of speed.
A quiet—or at least I hoped it was quiet—gasp escaped my mouth when the front of the plane lifted off the ground. The rear wheels followed suit and the ground fell away. As we made our initial ascent, the plane tilted to one side and then the other before finally leveling out.
I exhaled noisily and the sound of my breath echoed in my ears.
“We made it!” Anissa cheered. She removed her hands from the yoke and shook them around. “Look, ma! No hands!”
I slapped her shoulder. “Stop messing around!” I hissed.
Her head tucked into her raised shoulders and she had enough sense to look sorry. “Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll behave.”
I peered out my window and looked straight down. We weren’t so high that I couldn’t make out highways and the shape of various buildings and parks. “How high up are we?”
Anissa pointed at one of the circular gauges. “10,000 feet. But don’t even think about joining the Mile High Club. I’ve got too much work to do over here.”
I snapped my eyes in her direction. There was no way Anissa could have known about the bingo card and its challenges. I tried to laugh at what I was sure she’d meant as a joke, but it sounded more like a choking noise.
“So, uh, where are we going?” I asked.
“I’m on the lam.” She contorted her voice into a strange, old-timey accent. “We’re making a run for the Canadian border.”
I stared at the instrument panel, but it was all Greek to me. I thought I might have recognized a wind speed gauge and maybe a speedometer, but nothing looked obviously like a compass to tell me where we were going. The giant blue lake beneath us, however, said due north.
I was confident she was only teasing me, and yet, I really didn’t know this woman. I’d had sex with her, sure, but what did I really know about Anissa Khoury?
I sat a little easier in my seat when I remembered that Kent technically knew where I was—not specifically in a Cessna 172S somewhere above Lake Huron—but he’d been the one to procure Anissa’s home address for me. When I didn’t show up for work the next day and they discovered my empty apartment, the next place they’d look would be Anissa’s house.
“Are you okay over there?” Anissa’s voice in my ears snapped me out of theDatelineepisode I was silently scripting.
I forced a grin in her general direction. “Everything’s great.”
“I’m not stealing you away from something, am I?”
Stealing. She was stealing me.
