It was a beautiful day for flying, with bright blue sky, few clouds, a light onshore wind at eight knots, and visibility of well over twenty miles. The bright blue of the Pacific Ocean contrasted with the brown sand and scrub of the coastal hills and the green of the inland landscape. Jake looked at his navigation display for a moment, compared his position to the visual references outside, and concluded he was now free of the Class C.
“All right,” he told his wife with a smile. “It’s time to go down, baby.”
“I love going down,” she replied with a giggle.
He throttled down and pushed the nose forward a bit, letting their altitude drop at a rate of a thousand feet per minute—a fairly steep dive for this particular aircraft. He pulled out of the descent at twelve hundred feet, the lowest he could legally fly here, and then engaged the flaps to fifteen degrees and throttled up until they were traveling at a mere one hundred knots above the waves a hundred yards offshore. He used his yoke and rudder to follow the meanderings of the coastline so he could maintain that distance.
“There it is,” Jake said a minute later.
The dunes to their right gave way to the elevated plateau of their lot. The house was almost finished now. From the outside, it looked as if it was finished. It was a single-story structure that sat back from the cliffside by forty feet. It was painted light gray with forest green trim, roofed in plain cement tiles, and was the very definition of unpretentious. In fact, one would hardly notice it was there at all unless one was paying attention; and one would probably be unimpressed even if one did notice it. And that was exactly the way Jake liked it. The inside of the structure, however, contained more than eight thousand square feet of living space, including a huge master bedroom, a smaller master bedroom for guests, four secondary bedrooms, six bathrooms, an entertainment room that looked out over the ocean, and a soundproofed music composition room. A separate structure of eighteen hundred square feet would serve as the servant’s quarters.
“It looks like we could move in today if we wanted to,” Laura said as they passed by it.
“Another four weeks,” Jake said. He could see a crew of workers installing the redwood deck on the ocean side of the house. And though he could not see them, he knew that inside the house there were craftsmen hard at work installing cabinetry. Next week, the granite kitchen island and the bathroom tiles would be installed. The week after that, the appliances would begin to arrive.
“I can’t wait,” Laura said with enthusiasm. “It’ll be so nice to hear the ocean every night, to wake up every morning and have coffee out on the deck, to not have a bunch of snooty neighbors turning their noses up at us.”
“I couldn’t have said it better, hon,” Jake told her, reaching out to caress her cheek.
The house slowly disappeared behind them. Jake took a look around outside, scanned his instruments once more, and then throttled up his engines once again. As they started to climb, he retracted the flaps so they could put on the speed.
“Thanks for taking me by it,” Laura said, putting her hand on his leg and giving it a squeeze. “I’m all excited now.”
“Me too,” he said. “I can’t wait for Elsa to see it. Maybe I should take a day to fly her out for a tour when we get back.”
“That’s a good idea,” she said. “She seems to be getting a little nervous about the move as the day gets closer.”
Jake nodded. He had noticed this as well. Jake’s plan was to put his current home on the market as soon as the move was made and buy a luxury condo somewhere in downtown LA for those times (he hoped they would be few) when had to stay in the city. Elsa had agreed to move to Oceano with him and remain his housekeeper, but it had been a hard decision for her. Her family lived in Orange County, including her beloved grandchildren, and the driving time between she and they would be three and a half hours minimum, assuming good traffic conditions (and that was quite an assumption in southern California). Not an arduous trek by any means, but not a trip to the grocery store either. Jake finally convinced her by sweetening the pot a bit. He gave her a significant raise in salary and bought her a brand-new Toyota Four-Runner. He also promised that any members of her family were welcome to stay in the new home whenever they wanted and for as long as they wanted.
“I think that once she gets a tour of the place,” Jake said, “once she sees the new kitchen, sees the guest house that will be all hers, smells and hears the ocean just outside, she’ll start to feel better about leaving LA.”
“I bet you’re right,” Laura said. “And Gerald and Delilah will be home from school next week. Maybe they can come with us?”
“Sure,” Jake said, nodding. “I think that’s a great idea. I’ll run it by her when we get home.”
Jake continued his climb until he reached seventy-five hundred feet. He checked in with the local ATC and punched up his autopilot to take over navigation of the route he had programmed. He then asked LA Center to initiate flight following.
Once everything was copacetic, Laura began to move her hand a little higher on his leg, up toward the junction.
“How about a blowjob?” she asked him.
“We’ve tried it in here before,” he reminded her. “There’s not enough room between my yoke and my stick.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, frowning. “Well ... how about a handjob then?”
He nodded. “That sounds good. There’s some Kleenex packs in the seat pocket.”
A limousine took them from Hayward Executive Airport in the east bay to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco where Gordon—or G-Spot Records LLC, the label he owned—had booked them a suite. Gordon and Neesh were in the suite next door. The rest of the musicians and the sound team all had their own rooms a few floors below.
Their suite was on the top floor of the hotel and enjoyed a panoramic view of the bay, including the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island. Jake had been in accommodations such as this often enough that he was hardly impressed anymore. Laura, on the other hand, had not and she spent a few minutes gawking at everything.
After settling in, Jake gave G a call to let him know they had arrived. G suggested that they meet in the hotel’s Club Lounge for a few drinks and an early dinner.
“Sounds good,” Jake told him. “Meet you there.”
The Club Lounge was a rather swanky place and, even though Jake and Laura and G and Neesh were well dressed when they entered, they caused more than a few raised eyebrows, disapproving looks, and whispered comments as they were seated near the picture window. Jake’s long hair and G and Neesh’s African-American appearance were not common sights to the tighty-whitey businessmen in suits who inhabited the place. All were aware of this and ignored it, except for G, who made a point of saying, “What up, homey?” to one particularly tight looking whitey they passed. The man did not return the greeting but immediately found something else to look at.
The staff in the lounge, by contrast, treated the quartet with nothing but politeness and servility. They ordered drinks—a martini for Jake, single malt scotch for G, a ninety-dollar bottle of chardonnay from the Napa Valley for the ladies—and then perused the appetizer menu while they waited for them.
“How about some escargot?” Neesh suggested.
“You wanna eat some fuckin’ snails, girl, you go right ahead,” her fiancé told her. “Just don’t be kissing on me until after you brush your teeth.”
“I’m up for some of this goose liver pate,” Jake said.
“Oooh, that sounds good,” Laura agreed.