“Look at you, huh?” Gannon said, finally letting him go. “You weren’t kidding about working out, were you? You’re a monster. You’re like hugging a soda machine.”

“Dad, I can’t begin to thank you for all of this,” his son said, looking out at the concourse. “I mean, look at us. We’re actually doing this!”

“No worries. You just rest that sweet arm,” Gannon said, patting it gently.

“Just you wait, Dad. You won’t believe your eyes. When do we leave here, by the way? At seven?”

“Yeah, a quarter after. It’s a Delta flight. Gate whatever it is over there,” Gannon said, pointing at a cluster of seats to the right. “We go to Atlanta first and should get in to Phoenix around midnight. I couldn’t get a direct flight.”

“No problem, Dad. Are you kidding me? Direct flight. I’d take a Megabus. I’d just about given up and then here we are right out of the blue.”

“Yep, it’s right out of the blue all right,” Gannon said, hiding a smile as he took another pull of his beer.

When Declan left to hit the head, Gannon saw that the gate was filling up with people, so he strolled over to check that their flight was still on time. Declan was already sitting at the bar with two more fresh beers by the time he arrived back.

“Hey, Dad, look,” he said, pointing at the TV above the bar. “They’re talking about your neck of the woods.”

Gannon looked up. A cable news channel was playing. On the screen was a petite blonde female reporter with the sparkling blue Caribbean behind her. Gannon’s eyes went wide as he read the caption beneath her.

Plane Crash in the Bahamas, it said along the bottom of the screen.

Gannon waved over the bartender.

“Could you turn that up, please?”

“What’s up? Did you hear about this?” Declan asked him.

“A little,” Gannon said, straining to listen.

“…fifteen nautical miles off the coast of the Bahamian island known as Little Abaco when the US Coast Guard out on long-range patrol out of Miami Beach came upon it.”

Golly tamale, here we go, Gannon thought, holding his breath as they showed footage of a coast guard cutter.

“The plane, a Cessna Denali seen here,” the reporter continued as they showed a stock photo of a prop plane, “is a seven-passenger single-engine turboprop with an impeccable service record and a range of eighteen hundred miles.”

Gannon’s mouth dropped open.

A Cessna what? A little turboprop? he thought. What the hell were they talking about? It was no prop plane. It was a jet. It was a huge corporate Gulfstream 550 jet.

Were they talking about another crash? he thought, completely confused.

“The plane belonged to this couple,” the reporter said as the screen changed to show a skinny curly-haired white guy and a pretty East Indian woman.

“Ben and Chandra Tholberg of Miami, Florida.”

Who the hell were they? Gannon thought, even more stunned.