Relentless by Brian Garfield

bit of dollar roulette and two-dollar blackjack and not losing more than he could handle. He could feel the tension draining out of him as if a drainplug had been pulled. He started going over to the Nevada side and casually dating the recently freed divorcees who were always in the casinos dying for a man, any man, with no promises demanded and no questions asked.
    But he was still putting Carla’s face on every woman he slept with. There was no cure for that malaise.
    He’d gone back to work toward the end of June and he’d been flying the old DC-6B up to Portland on a cargo job for a paper mill when he’d flown into a high-tension cable.
    There was no excuse for it. The day had been a little misty with drizzling rain but he was flying into a first-class airport on the beams and the visibility was good enough to see the ground from seven or eight hundred feet. The aircraft was in good working order and the copilot had gone through the landing checklist with him without a hitch. But the voice of the girl on the headset, giving him his landing instructions, had reminded him of Carla’s voice and he was seeing Carla’s face in his mind when he should have been watching the earth come up, and the copilot had been working flaps and undercarriage instead of watching the runway, and Walker had lost too much altitude too fast and clipped the power line with the starboard wheel. It had thrown the plane around through a ten-degree arc and she had hit the ground on the port wingtip and spun as if the wingtip were a pivot. The gear had collapsed under her, the props had broken against the concrete, the fuselage had spun with the port wing snapping off at its root and the plane ending up on the grass in half a dozen pieces.
    He’d sat in the overturned pilot’s seat, hanging by his seat belt, not feeling a thing, hearing the meatwagon sirens and the wail of tires and the spouting foam of the fire hoses, and then the crash crews had pried the plane open and climbed inside to drag him and the copilot outside. In the ambulance they’d tested him for breaks and concussion but all he had was a few cuts and bruises. The copilot had a gash on his head from the control wheel and for twelve hours he’d been on the critical list, and Walker had waited in the hospital; but the copilot had pulled through, so there was no manslaughter charge against him.
    The downed power line had cut electricity in two factories and four hundred houses and a shopping center. The community was incensed, the insurance company was outraged, and when the government had pulled Walker’s license Or-Cal had kicked him out of the firm. They agreed to charge off the demolished airplane against Walker’s invested capital. They lost money on it but they were willing to do that to get rid of him.
    It put him on the street without even a tin cup. He had no money and no pilot’s license; anyhow the wreck had made it impossible for him to get a job anywhere in the country in any company that had anything to do with airplanes. They didn’t even want him around airports selling tickets.
    The fraternity of airmen had a primitive pride. They didn’t want him around because he was a reminder: It could happen to any of us. Walker’s crash had cost Or-Cal half its contracts and the fraternity couldn’t afford even a hint that this kind of man might be tolerated by them: pilots were always suspect, and partly because of their arrogance they were watched eagerly by groundlings for evidence of recklessness. If it had been only hard luck he might have been protected and supported by his own kind—you rarely heard of a pilot on welfare—but when it was more than hard luck, when it was your own inexcusable stupid failure, there was no room for you because you-had disgraced the fraternity.
    He was bitter, there was no way not to be. But he couldn’t blame them. He had been one of them and he understood.
    And now at