Burbank Airport is the setting for two linked stages of Doc’s attempt to divert the Golden Fang after Bigfoot leaves twenty kilos of heroin in Doc’s trunk. The airport’s phone booth and baggage counter turn a public transport hub into a makeshift operations room: Doc recruits help by radio telephone, then sends a decoy carton away as checked baggage. The scene’s practical improvisation also ties the airport to the novel’s wider landscape of roads, development, and contested land in Los Angeles.

A stop in Doc’s escape plan

After discovering the heroin, Doc keeps to surface streets and stops at a shopping mall, where he divides the load between two similar cardboard cartons. One contains the drugs; the other is filled with garbage sacks and renovation debris. He drives to Burbank Airport and parks near a phone booth, carrying out the next part of his plan while trying to keep the heroin itself out of sight.

The phone booth and the call to Tito

Doc spends most of a roll of quarters trying to reach the two-way radio in Tito’s limousine through a mobile operator. The airport’s noise and unreliable connection make the call an ordeal: jet takeoffs and landings interrupt, reception fades, and Doc must find more quarters. The call eventually produces practical help. Tito arranges for Adolfo to arrive within half an hour with another car, giving Doc a way to proceed with the next stage.

The decoy flight

While waiting to execute that stage, Doc smokes Hawaiian weed and takes the carton containing rubbish to the Kahuna Airlines counter. Using a dubious credit card he had once accepted in lieu of a fee, he buys a ticket to Honolulu and checks the decoy carton as baggage. The real heroin remains in the other box; the one sent through the airport is trash, intended to draw scrutiny away from the drugs and consume the Golden Fang’s time in airline bureaucracy. Doc’s plan depends not on making the danger disappear, but on giving his pursuers the wrong object to follow.

Place in a landscape of land and movement

The airport episode belongs to a novel in which movement across Los Angeles is inseparable from the transformation of its land. Channel View Estates, advertised as “A Michael Wolfmann Concept,” occupies ground where a neighborhood has been displaced; elsewhere, Aunt Reet’s knowledge of property reaches from the desert to the sea, and the history of development is linked to communities forced from their homes. Against that large-scale remaking of space, Burbank Airport offers Doc a brief tactical use of the systems that move people and parcels through the region. Its flights, phone connections, tickets, and baggage procedures become tools in a desperate, deliberately makeshift effort to stay ahead of the conspiracy around him.