But maybe that was precisely it. He was too neat, too plain. He looked like one of those blend-into-the-woodwork, plain-looking neat guys from one of those Discovery Channel shows where women ended up floating in the Everglades after the first date.

“What was that?” she said as she pulled her blue camo utility cap down tighter over her dark brown pulled-back hair.

“What division are you in?” he said.

“Office of Naval Safety,” she said, tugging at her matching blue camo blouse to make it as baggy as possible.

As usual, she’d changed immediately into her navy blue utility working uniform and boots when she’d gotten the call. She actually had to gun it back to her apartment up in Ensley to change and to grab her gear. She’d only just gotten back in time to hitch this cargo flight out of Pensacola Naval Air Station, where she was based.

“Naval Safety?” the pilot said, glancing at his instruments then back at her.

“I know. It makes us sound like hall monitors,” she said. “We’re basically the NTSB but for the military. We investigate aviation mishaps.”

“Ah, a toe tagger,” he said with a nod. “That’s wild. You must have seen some real freaky stuff.”

Ruby smiled back politely.

She’d been backup for plenty of accidents in the four years she’d worked at Safety but had only been on-site to two real ones. The biggest was an air force cargo plane that had gone down in upstate New York the year before.

It was a NATO base resupply plane coming back from an overseas deployment somewhere. It needed to refuel in Canada, and there had been some screwup with the liters-to-gallons ratio. They’d also eventually surmised that the gas tank low-level alarm never went off due to a burnt-out transducer.

She remembered finding the black box herself on the bank of a frozen creek in Chittenango State Park near Syracuse. She most definitely remembered the pilots’ screams from it. Both pilots and the 140-million-dollar aircraft had been completely obliterated on impact.

“You like it?” the pilot said.

She glanced out at the lights of Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport coming at them hard and fast in the aircraft’s windshield.

“It’s a job,” she said.

That wasn’t true. Ruby loved it. The engineering, the math, the detective work, the excitement. Not being chained to a desk.

Well, at least usually, she thought, squinting down at the floor.

For the first time in her professional life, she had been actually disappointed when her boss had called her in for a job.

It was because of her sister. Her little sister, Lori, was due any minute to give birth to her second child. When Ruby’s phone rang two hours before, she’d actually been hanging out at Lori’s place in Lake Charlene waiting for her water to break so she could drive her to the hospital.

It had been Ruby’s hope to ride out her last night of being on call into her upcoming leave. She’d been pretty much banking on it actually. With Lori’s husband, Mitch, in the marine corps on active deployment in the Middle East, there was no way Ruby wanted Lori, her only sibling, to have to give birth alone.