He climbed out, snapped his fingers at Taos, and walked over to where his crew lounged around their fire.
“Howdy, handsome,” Lilla said—more to Taos than to him.
He’d found Lilla in Denver some eighteen months back. She wasn’t exactly part of the show, since he would hardly risk her out on the wings or in a parachute, even if it ever dawned on her to volunteer. But it was handy to have an extra person to drive Rick’s car, which he insisted on dragging around from stop to stop. More important, she was as pretty as they came, in a bouncy, sloe-eyed way. Her job was to ride in the front cockpit, waving and smiling, when they buzzed the towns for customers. Then later on, she’d hold the sign, take admissions, and convince folks that if she could survive in that rattling flying contraption, it must be safe.
She pushed up from her seat on a blanket, knee-walked over to Taos, and hauled him halfway into her lap. He licked the underside of her chin, and she leaned back, giggling. “You missed all the fun. We’ve already had a dance and an arm wrestling match.”
“Which you won, I hope.”
She looked confused. “I just watched and cheered. But Rick almost won.”
On the other side of the fire, Rick Holmes balanced a tin plate of boiled potatoes and cornbread on one knee. “The reprobate cheated.” He rubbed his right biceps.
“Sure he did,” Hitch said. “Only way you could have lost. Now where’s Earl?”
“Why?” Rick narrowed his eyes. “You haven’t already demolished that new Hisso, have you? I heard it protesting when you flew over.”
“Ran into a little difficulty.” If you could call a hail of bodies little.
“I warned you not to take it out at night.”
“Gimme a break. I could fly our whole routine blindfolded, much less on a moon-bright night. Had to make sure everything was running smooth before you try that high-altitude jump for Livingstone.”
Rick looked him in the eye. “If you mean you would also probably have demolished the engine at high noon, that’s no doubt true.”
Rick was a bit of a dapper dude, in his pressed pants and embroidered suspenders. He’d greased his dark hair back, widening his forehead in comparison to his chin.
He smirked at Lilla across the fire. “Too much power for our esteemed employer.”
She glanced at Hitch, eyebrows up. She’d never been too fluent in sarcasm.
Hitch gave his head a shake. “Where’s Earl anyway? Crazy stuff just happened.”
“Oh, indeed,” Rick said. “Please tell me it involved discovering a pirate’s buried cache. Because the only bit of news I would be interested in right now is that I’m about to receive the wages you’ve been promising for the last six months.”
Lilla clucked. “Did you forget, darling? He’s told us over and over we’re all going to get paid after we win this show.”
“And if we fail to win the show? Then what?” Again, he directed a flat gaze at Hitch. “The skills I bring to this show are already worth twice what I’m supposed to be receiving in remuneration.”
Hitch stopped looking around for his mechanic and turned to face Rick down. “We’re going to win this one.”
“Certainly. Win with two planes, one parachute, no wing walkers, and a demolished engine. Once again, your business acumen astounds me.”
Hitch swallowed a growl. “How many times we going to have to go over this?”
“Yes, please, don’t fight,” Lilla said. “It’s all right. We trust Hitch, don’t we, darling?”
“Don’t we though.”
“If he says everything’s going to be fine, I know it’s true.” She dazzled Hitch with one of her smiles. “Right?”
Sometimes he blessed her for her blind faith. Other times, it turned his stomach inside out with panic. Lord knew owning his own circus was all he thought about when he was lying awake at night, staring up at the underside of his plane’s wing. Part of his reason for wanting that was so he’d be able to take care of his people. These days, they were just about the only family that would claim him, and he would do whatever he had to do to keep them afloat.
But sometimes the knowledge that they were all depending on him clenched inside of him and made him want to whistle to Taos, jump back into the Jenny, and take off into the blue yonder all by himself. He needed their help if he was going to build a circus like Livingstone’s, but the more people he had to take care of, the less free this life of his started feeling.
He made himself nod to her. “Never starved yet, have we?”
Rick clanked his plate onto the ground. “It’s been a narrow margin.” He rose from his crouch and brushed past Hitch. “If we don’t finish choreographing this sensational new act before the colonel arrives, we’re routed even if Earl is able to repair that wreck of yours again.”
Hitch watched him go.
“It’s all right.” Lilla retrieved Rick’s plate and offered it to Hitch. They couldn’t afford to let the food go to waste right now. “Rick’s upset because he says we don’t have enough money to get married yet.”
To that, Hitch could only grunt. Lilla, bless her loyal heart, hadn’t been gifted with the most capacious of upstairs accommodations. Still, he hadn’t known how truly cramped they were until she’d fallen for Rick.
Rick flew the other Jenny and did parachute drops. He’d been with Hitch for almost a year, which was almost a year too long for anybody to have to deal with an ego that outsized.
The whole thing had worked—barely, but it had worked—until a competition last month in Oklahoma when Rick had announced, in front of half a dozen other pilots, that he’d been the first man to do a successful handkerchief pickup. That, of course, was downright hogwash. The trick—of flying low over a pole and using a hook attached to the bottom wing to snag a handkerchief off the top—had been around a whole lot longer than Rick Holmes.
Without thinking, Hitch had snorted a laugh and called the lie for the malarkey it was. Rick had gotten about as red in the face as it was possible to get without exploding every single one of his blood vessels. He’d stomped off without another word—but Hitch had been hearing about it ever since. Rick wasn’t about to leave without getting paid, and Hitch couldn’t fire him until he had the money, but that day was coming and they both knew it.
For now though, he still needed Rick. Good pilots were hard to find these days, much less jumpers skilled enough to pull off this high-altitude stunt they were planning for the competition.
Behind him, footsteps crunched through the grass. “Well, how’d she fly? Like a dream?”
Hitch turned around. “You’re not going to believe what happened up there.”
Beneath the upturned brim of his baseball cap, Earl Harper grinned. “Won’t I though? How about that speed? Didn’t I tell you? We more than doubled the horsepower. You should be getting ninety miles an hour, maybe a climb rate of five hundred feet per minute.” He smacked his hands together. “And with that reinforced frame I gave her, you know she’ll take a whole lot of beating. Hot dog, boy. They’re going to have a hard time trouncing us this week.”
“About that…”
The shadow of a day’s worth of black whiskers froze around Earl’s grin. “About what?” He glanced at Lilla.
She turned to sit primly, knees bent, eyes studiously on the fire.
Earl looked back at Hitch. “You busted it? Tell me you haven’t already busted that beautiful, brand-new Hispano-Suiza?”
This was where it got tricky. Hitch paid for the planes. Hitch flew the planes. But once Earl got under the hood of anything with oil running through its veins, he thought it belonged to him.