Rod Lindsey, Storyteller

 

Skyshooter, an Ezra Hooten Novel by Rod Lindsey



 



It was early Saturday morning the week before Thanksgiving.  Cloudy.  Cold and wet when the plane from Seattle to Mazatlan took off three hours ago.  Sipping his fifth coffee refill, black, Air Marshal Ezra Hooten was feeling somewhat überamped on caffeine.  His pulse had quickened a bit, and he was beginning to feel a little fidgety.

            Truthfully, Hoot was always a bit fidgety on a flight.  At sixty-three years-old and six-feet, four-inches tall, he was physically as well as mentally uncomfortable on a plane. 

            His ears popped again – a normal function, Hoot knew, eardrums constantly equalizing pressure lost or gained from altitude changes, but knowing what caused it didn’t keep him from feeling as if his head had become caught in the jaws of a vice upon takeoff, the vice ever tightening since. 

And the relentless sound! – the neverending background roar of massive twin jet engines mounted under wings just outside the aircraft’s thin-skinned fuselage, engines large enough to swallow entire automobiles without choking laboring to move a full load of eager passengers across a vast distance with mind-numbing speed – that roar was both amplified and contained by the pressure in Hoot's ears until it felt as if the very core nugget of his concentration was about to crack.