by Meg Cabot
Lou stared, transfixed with fear, at the heavyset man seated in front of her, pointing a gun so nonchalantly at Jack Townsend’s heart. It wasn’t until something compelled her to shift her gaze slightly to the right that she noticed that Jack was staring, too…only not at his would-be assassin. No, Jack was staring at her.
And for the first time in the six years that she’d known Jack Townsend, Lou really felt that that penetrating gaze of his was actually seeing her…seeing her as something other than the crazy screenwriter who wouldn’t let him change her lines…really seeing her, and in some way she could not discern, urging her to….
Well, to do something. Only what? What was she supposed to do? Get the guy in a headlock? Oh, yeah, that would work.
“Oh, God,” Jack cried, breaking eye contact with her, and, to her very great alarm, suddenly rolling his head against the back of his seat. “Oh, God, I can’t believe this is happening!”
Lou, startled, spent only a second or two wondering what he was doing. Jack could be a jerk, certainly, but he was no coward. He hadn’t even been afraid to do that stunt she’d thought up for Copkiller II, the one with the eels and the cement mixer….
Then, suddenly, she knew. She knew exactly what Jack was doing. Act two, scene five of Copkiller III. Was it possible that Sam had not seen the movie? If so, he was the only man in his demographic—between forty-five and sixty, resident of the northwestern quarter of the United States—to have missed it.
But apparently he had missed it, since, taken aback, Sam stammered, “Now, Mr. Townsend. Don’t be like that—”
“For the love of God, man,” Jack cried, and reached out to grasp the pilot by the shoulder. “Don’t do it. Don’t throw your life away, living as a wanted felon, always on the run.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Sam sputtered. “Wait just a second….”
Lou, meanwhile, had thrown herself onto the floor, just as Pete Logan’s hapless partner, Dan Gardner, was always forced to do, when Logan got up to his theatrical antics. Lou had no idea what she hoped to find on the floor of the aircraft, but the R-44 was small, and storage space seemed to her to be at a minimum. If she were going to store something—something that might, in a pinch, serve as a weapon—it would be under the seats.
Underneath her seat, Lou saw a box marked “Emergency Use Only.” Well, this was certainly an emergency, if she’d ever encountered one before. Scrambling to pull the box towards her, she prayed Jack would keep the man occupied while she dug through it.
“What kind of life is that?” Jack demanded. “Always looking over one shoulder, just one step ahead of the law—”
“The law can’t get me in Mexico,” Sam said. “And I don’t reckon, once I’m on those pearly white beaches, I’m going to be doing much lookin’ over my shoulder—”
“Think about it, Sam,” Jack assured him. “Don’t you think they’ll extradite you, if they find you? I am an international celebrity. The entire world is going to mourn my demise, and cry out for justice.”
Lou, on her hands and knees, looked up to roll her eyes at this. Could he be more of an actor?
“But they can’t get me,” Sam said, truculently, “once I’m safe in Mexico.”
The lid pried from the top of the box, Lou uttered a prayer of private thanks. She had found exactly what she’d been looking for. After carefully loading and hefting it—it was surprisingly heavy—she pointed it at the back of Sam’s head, and cried, “Freeze, dirtbag!” just as Rebecca had, in Copkiller III.
Only when Sam didn’t freeze, and Lou continued to hear in her headset, “I mean, look, I’m not proud of this, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” did Lou realize she hadn’t spoken into the mike.
“Sam,” she said, this time speaking into the mike, and holding the mouth of the flare gun level with his temple. “Put the gun down. Now.”
Jack, she noticed, had taken one look at her, and gone gray beneath his razor stubble. Well, what else had he expected her to do? It wasn’t like she had much of a choice. It was the flare gun or nothing, thanks. She ignored him.
“Wh-what?” Sam looked confused. Clearly, he was not used to having flare guns waved in his face. “What are you doing?”
“I am going to put a flare through your skull,” Lou informed him in a voice she imagined was quite steady— like Dirty Harry’s in The Enforcer—“if you don’t put the gun down.”
Sam turned to look at her, an expression of indignation on his face. “You ain’t going to shoot me,” he said, as if this were something Lou ought to know perfectly well.
“Yes, I will,” Lou assured him. “I most certainly will. You bet I will.”
Oh, damn, Lou thought to herself, wincing. Three times. Three times she’d said it. People who stated something three times were invariably lying, her father had always told her. But maybe Sam, who was clearly on the opposite side of the law than Frank Calabrese had never heard this….
Or maybe he had. He was still staring at her. His eyes, she could not help noticing, were blue, just like Jack Townsend’s. But Sam’s were a different sort of blue—a paler, inferior blue, without that dark rim separating the iris from the white part, that dark rim that had made so many fans of “STAT” sit up and take notice of the tall, brooding Dr. Rourke….
“You ain’t going to shoot me,” Sam said, again, as reasonably as if he were speaking to a child. “You ain’t going to shoot nobody. You ain’t got it in you.”
Lou blinked at him. He was right, of course. She wasn’t going to shoot him…or anyone else, for that matter. Her father had been a New York City cop for forty years, and he had never once shot anyone. All four of her brothers were employed by various law enforcement agencies, and none of them had ever shot anyone, either. Oh, they’d drawn their weapons, plenty of times, but when it came to pulling the trigger, not one of them had ever been in a situation where deadly force had been necessary….
Except for Nick, who’d once had to shoot a rottweiler that wouldn’t let emergency rescue workers near her wounded owner. But he’d used a rubber bullet, and the dog had recovered nicely, though she had not much appreciated the many visits Nick had paid to her sickbed.
Lou’s grip on the flare gun wavered a little. “All right,” she said, her voice now sounding, to her own ears, less like Clint’s and more, unfortunately, like Sally Field’s. “All right, well, maybe I won’t shoot you in the head, but I could certainly shoot you in the leg, and that’s bound to hurt—”
Sam shook his head.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “you shoot me, and this thing’ll go down, understand? Like a stone.”
Lou flinched. Oh, God, she hadn’t thought of that. Her grip on the heavy metal gun wavered even more….
“I don’t think so,” Jack Townsend said, in his deep, even voice. Lou wasn’t the only one who glanced at him in astonishment. Sam was open-mouthed, too. They’d both seemed to have forgotten the existence of a third party in the cabin, so intense had been their own exchange.
“I’ve flown R-44s before, you see,” Jack went on, conversationally.
Lou, in spite of herself, was surprised. “You have?”
“Sure,” Jack said, with a shrug of those broad, heavy shoulders of his. “In Berger’s Spy Time. You might remember it. Grossed sixty-five million domestic its first week out.”
Lou nearly dropped the gun. Not only would Jeffrey Berger—who’d had the unmitigated gall to reject Hindenburg after Lou’s agent had sent him a copy of the first draft—never allow one of his actors to do his own stunts, such as operate a heavy piece of machinery like an R-44, but Spy Time had grossed nowhere near that much total, let alone in its first week.
But the look Jack shot her reminded her to keep her mind on the task at hand, and accordingly, she pressed the flare gun more closely to the side of the pilot’s head.
“Okay,” she said. “See? We’ll be just fine without you. So drop the gun.”
Sam, who was evidently aware of neither Jeffrey
Berger’s conservative direction nor Spy Time’s dismal box office receipts, heaved a sigh and, to Lou’s very great surprise, handed the .38 to Jack.
Apparently remembering everything he had learned on the sets of the Copkiller movies, Jack held the revolver in both hands, his index finger to one side of the trigger to keep from accidentally pulling it before he had to.
“All right,” he said, in a much different tone of voice than the one in which he’d asked Sam, for the love of God, to think about what he was doing. Now he sounded calm. Deadly calm. Lou felt a chill, Jack Townsend sounded so calm.
Or maybe the chill was because they were still hurtling through the arctic air at an enormous speed with the safety catches of a number of dangerous weapons released.
“Now,” Jack went on, coolly. “Turn this bird around.”
Lou was glad she wasn’t looking down the barrel of that magnum. Or into Jack Townsend’s blue eyes, which had grown, as they regarded the pilot, as cold as the floor upon which she knelt. If Jack Townsend had ever looked at Greta like that, Lou could totally understand the woman leaving him for Barry, whose meanest gaze wouldn’t have frightened a kindergartner.
Sam apparently agreed with her, since he said, with a slight moan, “Oh my God. What have I done? What have I done?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jack said. “Just fly the plane.”
“They’re going to kill me,” Sam was intoning in a high-pitched whine. “I show up in Myra, they’re going to kill me, don’t you see?”
“Just fly the plane,” Jack said, again.
That was when Lou, gazing through the wide windshield, saw something that caused her to cry out. Only because she was too shocked to remember to speak into her mike, no one heard her.
“Now you just keep flying,” Jack was saying, in a soothing voice, “nice and easy, and I’ll put in a good word for you—”
“Geese!” Lou cried, this time into the mike, and pointing straight ahead.
But it was too late. They’d been flying so low, thanks to Sam’s cockpit nervous breakdown, that they were in the thick of the flock before anyone could do anything.
And when one of the birds slammed into the windshield in an explosion of blood and feathers, the force of the impact was enough to throw Lou, still kneeling on the floor, forward, until her forehead connected solidly with the metal frame on the back of the pilot’s seat. The blow, which made her see stars, also caused her to lose her hold on the flare gun.
Which fell with a clatter to the floor of the aircraft, and promptly went off, causing her to see a completely different set of stars.
In the shower of sparks and smoke that followed, Lou had time to think, gaggle. Not flock. A gaggle of geese was what they’d run into. Gaggle of geese. Flock of…
Seagulls.
“Look out!” she heard Jack Townsend yell. He didn’t need to speak into the mike. He’d yelled with enough volume to be heard above the heavy whomp-whomp-whomp of the propeller blades overhead, and the sizzle of the flare as it bounced from wall to wall until settling, with a terrific burst of flames, into the control panel in front of them.
“Oh, Jesus,” Sam, the pilot, shrieked, as he threw up his arms to protect his face from the cascade of sparks. “Oh, Jesus!”
Flock of seagulls, Lou, who was thrown back into her seat, had time to think. Barry had always loved them, had all their CDs. That’s what that box had been full of, the one he’d been holding that day he’d accused her of having grown so cynical. Flock of Seagulls CDs. And panflute music. Barry had always had a thing for pan-flute music.
Jack Townsend’s face loomed in front of her, silhouetted by the smoke and flames behind him. “Put your seat belt on, ”he yelled. Lou, staring at him, did as he asked, but she couldn’t help thinking that really, Jack Townsend thought mighty highly of himself. Who did he think he was, anyway? Some kind of movie star?
This thought caused her no end of amusement. At least until, through the smoke that was rapidly filling the small cabin, she saw something hurtling towards the windshield that caused her throat to close up.
And that something was the ground.
6
And then she was surrounded by seagulls. White, fluffy seagulls, their feathers pressing all around her, like angels’ wings.
Only not exactly like angels’ wings. Because angels were supposed to be kind, heavenly creatures.
These angels, on the other hand, were sitting on her. They were suffocating her. Hurting her. Burning her.
Lou opened her eyes.
She was lying in the snow. Snow, not feathers, was what was burning her. Not burning her, really, but it did not feel very comfortable, lying in the snow. Her head hurt. Really hurt, in a way it hadn’t hurt since the morning after Barry had left with all his CDs, and she, never a very practiced drinker, had consumed the whole of a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream, along with a box of peanut brittle a neighbor kid, raising money for his school band, had sold her.
Wincing painfully against the harsh white glare of the snow and, above it, the vast expanse of equally white Alaskan sky, she rose to her elbows….
And instantly wished she had not. Not because of the pain that shot through her skull—although that was excruciating—but because a few dozen yards away, its nose embedded deeply into the snow, and its rotor blades askew, lay the smoking wreckage of the helicopter.
Gasping, she started to climb to her feet. What she’d intended to do, she was never afterwards certain. What little she knew of first aid she had garnered entirely from her many seasons of faithful “STAT ” viewing. She had never even been a Girl Scout, much less a lifeguard. Still, she had seen Dr. Paul Rourke perform CPR on dozens of unconscious crash victims—most memorably the fifth-season premiere which had featured the overturned high school fan bus—and she was confident she could do as good a job, if not better.
Her rush to aid her fellow crash victims was halted, however, and not just by the sudden increase of pain in her skull, or the fact that her vision, from her sudden burst of activity, began to swim. No, the hand that clamped down over her wrist, with a grip like iron, also had something to do with it.
Dragging her gaze from the crumpled wreckage of the helicopter, Lou found herself looking into the eyes of the owner of that hand. Jack Townsend’s coolly uncompromising, ice-chip blue eyes. The eyes for which directors all over Hollywood were willing to shell out fifteen million dollars a film.
So he was not lying amidst all that charred and smoking metal after all. It looked as if she was not going to have to pull him, unconscious, from the crash site. In fact, it was beginning to look a little as if the opposite had happened: that he, in fact, had saved her.
A part of her, it had to be admitted, felt faintly dismayed by this. Was it really true? Did she really have to owe her life now to the man who had not only cruelly rejected one of her best friends, but had made the asinine phrase “I need a bigger gun” into household words?
“Where do you think you’re going?” he wanted to know. His voice—that deep, even voice, nearly always tinged with sarcasm and which was also part of that fifteen-million-dollar package—sounded oddly muffled to Lou. That was when she realized it was snowing. Lightly, but steadily. Flakes were settling into Jack Townsend’s hair, already flecked with white, to the dismay of colorists throughout LA. Things always sounded muffled, Lou had noticed, when it was snowing. Even the voices of professional actors who’d trained at the Yale School of Drama.
Lou gestured lamely at the smoldering heap that had once been a helicopter. “Is he…is he…?”
“Not yet,” Jack said. “He’s over there.” He pointed at a heap of plaid lying a few feet away, beneath a tall, snow-covered pine tree. “Alive. Unfortunately.” And then he let go of her wrist.
Released from his supportive grip, Lou sank like a stone back down into the snow. Whoa. She probably should not have gotten up so fast. She’d crumpled like Pinocchio without his strings, before he became a real boy. And pro
bably, she thought to herself, about as gracefully, too.
Jack looked down at her. “Hey,” he said, the usual irony in his tone replaced with something that Lou, in her dazed state, almost mistook for concern. “Are you all right?”
“Oh,” Lou said, reaching up to brush away the tears that had suddenly appeared, from out of nowhere, in her eyes. “Sure. Sure. I’m just fine.” She was not sure which dismayed her more, the fact that she was stranded in the wilderness with Jack Townsend, or the fact that she was crying in front of him. “I’m just peachy. I’m totally used to having guns pointed at me by hired hit men, and then crash-landing in the woods in the middle of the frozen tundra. Happens to me all the time.”
Jack’s tone went from concerned back to coolly ironic in a second. “This isn’t tundra,” he informed her. “We’re in the mountains. Tundra is flat.”
“Whatever,” Lou said. She couldn’t believe this was happening. She really couldn’t. “It’s just…”Her gaze slid over to the unconscious Sam. “Is he hurt badly?”
Jack shrugged his broad shoulders. “Bump on the head, is all I can see. Not as big as yours, but still pretty impressive looking.”
Lou reached up and felt, defensively, along her forehead. Oh, yes. There it was. An egg-shaped swelling just beneath her hairline. How attractive. Not, of course, that she cared how she looked in front of Jack Townsend.
“So that’s it?” she asked, tracing the outline of the bump, but studying the pilot, where he lay a few yards away. “You’re not going to try to…I don’t know. Resuscitate him?”
“Hey,” Jack said, spreading his hands wide. She noticed he’d slipped on a pair of leather gloves. “I’m not a real doctor. I just played one on TV.”
She grimaced at him. “You know what I mean. Shouldn’t we…I don’t know. Do something for him?”
“Why?” Jack asked, that fifteen-million-dollar voice suddenly hard. “He was going to kill us, remember?”