San Juan Capistrano, California
July 1, 1989
Jake pulled his BMW into the circular driveway in front of Matt's house. A uniformed valet, hired especially for the occasion of Matt's get-out-of-jail party, rushed over and opened the passenger door, allowing Helen to step out. Once she was out, he made a dash to Jake's door but Jake beat him to the punch, getting out on his own before he could get there. The valet seemed a bit disappointed by this, as if etiquette as he understood it had been broken.
"How are you doing tonight, Mr. Kingsley?" the valet enquired.
"I'm hanging in here," Jake told him.
"Very good, sir. I like your car."
"Take good care of it for me, huh?" Jake responded. "I'd hate to see what Matt would do to you if you scratched a guest's car."
"I'll treat it like it was my own," the valet promised. He got behind the wheel, closed the door, and a moment later, he was gone.
They started toward the front door of the mansion. Even from sixty feet away, through solid walls and windows of double-pane glass, Jake could hear the thumping of bass from Matt's stereo system, could hear the babble of dozens of semi-drunken conversations. Matt had promised the party of the year for the occasion of his release from jail and it seemed like he was delivering it.
The door was opened by a uniformed butler (not Charles, the normal butler; he had other duties tonight) and Helen and Jake were escorted through the house and into the main entertainment room, the source of the music and the conversations. Jake saw well over sixty people down here, all dressed in the most casual wear possible, per the invitation's specification. He saw Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirts, blue jeans, light summer dresses, tank tops, and tube tops. Jake himself was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and his favorite Corona T-shirt. Helen was sporting denim shorts, sandals, and a pink spaghetti strap top that showed a lot of cleavage.
The butler picked up a microphone that was mounted on a stand on a small podium just inside the room. He clicked it on and a slight hum emitted from a speaker next to the podium. At the sound, the conversation level decreased and many of the guests turned to look.
"May I present," the butler said formally, "Jake Kingsley, lead singer of the band Intemperance, and his guest for the evening, Helen Brody, pilot and certified flight instructor."
"Wassup, everyone?" Jake said with a wave. A few wassups were thrown back at him and the conversation level picked right back up.
Jake and Helen waded into the room, an environment thick with cigarette and marijuana smoke and the odor of alcoholic beverages. Several of Matt's courtesy bowls — the very objects that had almost sent him to a real prison on drug trafficking charges — were open and in use at several of the tables.
Jake knew most of the people present at the party, at least on a passing basis. There were veteran members of Intemperance's road crew, friends of Matt's from the various clubs he patronized, a few musicians (including Matt's bud from Cabo San Lucas, Sammy Hagar) — and a gaggle of porn actresses who were friends of Kim. There were also a dozen or so people that Jake recognized as counselors and other staff members from GGCI, Matt's home away from home these past four and a half weeks.
Jake greeted those who crossed his path as he made his way to the back of the room. He shook a few hands, received a few hugs, and he and Helen were even propositioned for a threesome by one of the porn stars. Finally, they made their way to Matt, who was standing near the sound system, smoking a cigarette and drinking from a large glass of beer. Standing on one side of him was Kim, who was dressed in Daisy Duke shorts and a brief halter top that hid little of her artificially enhanced charms. On Matt's other side was Laurie Jenkins, the kitchen staff member and waitress from GGCI whom Matt had promised a threesome with he and Kim at the party tonight. Laurie was in a short denim skirt that showed off her best feature — her legs — very well.
"Jake," Matt said, shaking his hand. "Glad you could make it, brother."
"Wouldn't miss it for the world," Jake told him.
Matt greeted Helen with a hug and a comment about how nice her titties looked in that top.
"Thanks, Matt," she said. "I wore it with you in mind."
Kim gave both Helen and Jake a hug of her own and then introduced Laurie to Helen, calling her a "very special guest." Laurie blushed deeply with embarrassment and arousal.
"Are the rest of the guys here?" Jake asked Matt.
"Yep," Matt said. "You were the last one. Coop and Nerdly are in the kitchen making some sort of fruit punch. Freakboy is around somewhere — probably up in my bedroom sniffin' my fuckin' underwear. And Darren is out in the back, talking to one of Kim's porno actress friends."
"We prefer the term, 'adult film star'," Kim said lightly.
"Oh yeah," Matt said. "Sorry, babe."
"Hey, Matt!" one of the GGCI people shouted from across the room. "This keg is running dry! You got another one ready to go?"
"Does Gumby have a rubber dick?" Matt yelled back. He turned to Jake and Helen. "I'd better go take care of this keg situation. See you in a few."
"Right," said Jake. "We'll go get a drink."
They walked across the room to the bar, where two smartly uniformed bartenders were on duty. Jake ordered his usual, a rum and coke. Helen ordered a plain diet coke. Since that night when they'd watched Brainwash in Boston, Helen had not touched so much as a drop of alcohol. The hangover she'd suffered as a result of that night had laid her low for two days and had even lingered to some degree for a third. The very idea of drinking was still enough to make her queasy. The smell of booze was enough to make her gag. If Jake had been drinking, she would not kiss him until he brushed his teeth.
In many ways, Helen was not the same as she'd been before the trip to Boston. She didn't laugh as much, wasn't quite as affectionate as she'd once been, and she definitely had not gotten over her fear of commercial aviation.
"Never again," she'd told him on multiple occasions since their 747 had touched down at LAX. "I am never getting on an airliner again as long as live."
"That's kind of a rash statement," Jake had tried to explain to her. "What about when we need to go somewhere?"
"If I can't get there in my own plane, I'm not going," she said stubbornly. "I lived through one fuck-up by those incompetent airline mechanics. I'm not putting my life in their hands again."
The fuck-up she was referring to was the preliminary cause report that had been issued the week before regarding the incident on their DC-10 (an incident which had only been reported as a blurb in the Boston newspaper the next day). Though the full and official report was still months in the future, the findings so far indicated that a simple maintenance oversight had been responsible for the loss of the number three engine. One of the mechanics who had done a routine maintenance regiment on that engine the day before the flight had apparently installed a fuel control diaphragm backwards, resulting in nearly five times a much fuel entering the combustion chamber as the engine was designed to handle. This influx of fuel had caused the explosion and fire and resulted in what the NTSB politely and euphemistically termed "a loss of function of the engine".
"You see that?" Helen asked when she read the report, her voice once again flirting with hysteria. "Some numbnuts mechanic, probably stoned out of his mind, put one little piece in backwards and it almost brought us down."
"We didn't almost go down," Jake tried to remind her. "They put the fire out within a few seconds and we had two other engines to fall back on."
"What if that engine had gone out just as we were doing that post-takeoff bank to clear the residential area?" Helen asked. "What would have happened then?"
Jake did have to admit that she had somewhat of a point there. They were both now enrolled in the multi-engine and pressurization modules at a Los Angeles flight school and both had learned that such noise abatement turns immediately after takeoff were considered to be the most dangerous threats to an airliner these days. The problem was that the aircraft was still moving at a comparatively slow rate of speed — less than eighty knots above stall speed, generally — and putting it into a twenty degree bank at such a speed decreased the stall speed even more. If a fully loaded jetliner were to lose an engine in the middle of such a turn — something that their flight had missed doing by less than a minute — there was a good chance that the pilot would not be able to recover in time and the aircraft would "collide with terrain" as the NTSB reports liked to say. It was true that such an incident was not as likely in a DC-10, which had three engines, than it was in a 737, with only two, but it was not, by any means, outside the realm of reasonable possibility.