by Meg Cabot
“For your information—” Lou jerked her head back to get a better look at him and instantly regretted the action as pain flooded her head. She could not help letting out a groan.
Jack was still grinning at her from the cot, his long, lean body looking perfectly relaxed. Somehow, even though he, like her, was still fully clothed, he managed to give off the impression of being naked. Lou didn’t know how he did it, but there it was.
And he seemed supremely indifferent to what she thought of him, naked or clothed.
“You know, I thought girls like you had gone the way of Pop Rocks,” he said.
Lou, furious with herself, bent down and picked up her purse, which she immediately began to rifle through.
“Yeah?” she said, into the depths of her bag. “Well, I’ve got news for you. We still exist, and guys like you make us mad as hell.” Her fingers seized on the object she’d been looking for, and she gave a sigh of relief.
Jack, over on the cot, looked interested, and not in the least offended. “Guys like me? Really? What’d we do?”
Lou pried open the lid to the aspirin bottle and shook out three tablets. “As if you didn’t know,” she said darkly, then looked around the room for something to wash the pills down with. All she found was the bottle of Cutty, now only a third full. The mere sight of it caused the vise around her skull to tighten.
“You shouldn’t take those on an empty stomach,” Jack remarked from the cot. He’d twined his hands beneath his head and was watching her with as much fascination as if she were an exhibit at the zoo: The only female on the planet who’d ever woken up in Jack Townsend’s arms and hadn’t been happy about it. “Eat some of those crackers, or something.”
“Thanks, Ma,” Lou said and popped all three tablets into her mouth, swallowed, and retched a little at the bitter taste.
“Hey, as someone who’s been there, I’m just giving you a word of advice.” Jack might have been lounging poolside, he looked so relaxed. His brain wasn’t cracking in two, clearly. “Or you could try a little hair of the dog.”
Lou winced. “No way.”
“Suit yourself.” Now Jack stood, swinging up off the cot as easily as if he’d been exiting a limo, or sliding out from behind a table at Spago. He was so tall that the top of his head nearly brushed the ceiling of the ranger station. Lou wondered why she hadn’t noticed this the night before. Also why she had never seemed to notice how Jack filled a room. Really. It was uncanny. He seemed to consume the space, as if he owned it and everything around him.
“Well, the snow stopped, anyway,” he said, as he glanced out one of the dirty-paned windows. “What do you say we try to make our way back to the helicopter? They’ll have gotten people out looking for us by now.”
Lou, who didn’t fancy having a stomachache to go with her headache, had surreptitiously begun to nibble on some of the leftover crackers, as he’d suggested. It was amazing to her how good something like a simple saltine could taste, and how much better they were making her feel. Why, she thought to herself, in some amazement, the two of them had survived a night in the Alaskan wilderness. No one would have believed it, but it was true. They might actually make it out of this thing alive.
“Okay,” Lou said. She picked up her computer bag and shouldered it, along with her purse. Whether it was the saltines or the aspirin, she was feeling better every minute. There was no reason to mention to Jack that he’d slept with one hand clamped over one of her breasts. No reason anybody in the world needed to know that but her. Things were going to be okay. Things were going to be fine.
At least, that’s what she’d been thinking right up until they both heard the whine of a snowmobile engine outside.
Jack, who’d been just about to lift the trapdoor to the ladder leading to the ground, looked up sharply, meeting her gaze.
“You hear that?” he asked softly.
Lou nodded. The storm outside having ebbed, it was eerily quiet beyond the four walls of their shelter. The sound of the snowmobile engine seemed loud as thunder.
“Maybe,” Lou ventured, “it’s people out looking for us.”
“I’m sure it is,” Jack responded. “But are they the good guys, or more of old Sam’s pals?”
Lou swallowed, not so much because of what Jack had said but because the sound of the snowmobile’s engine, which had been growing louder and louder, suddenly ceased altogether.
Then Lou heard a sound more terrifying than anything she had ever heard in her life: the scrape of a boot on the rungs of the ladder leading to their shelter.
Jack wrapped his fingers around the handle to the trapdoor, then whispered to her, “The gun.”
Lou nodded, and, her heart in her throat, drew the .38 out of her pocket. A single glance into the chamber, however, had her hissing, “There’s only one bullet left!”
Jack, grim-faced, signaled for her to move behind him. “I’ll take him,” he whispered. “If it’s one of them.”
Lou did not like the sound of this at all. She didn’t move from where she stood, directly in front of the trapdoor.
“He’ll have a gun,” she said, sotto voce.
“I don’t care if he’s got a flamethrower,” Jack hissed. “Get the hell out of the way—”
But whoever was below the trapdoor was already pushing on it quietly, as if he didn’t want to disturb whoever was inside. Lou doubted such caution was on account of fear of spiders. She held the revolver the way her dad had taught her, with both hands, the left cupping the right, and aimed for the center of the trapdoor, ignoring Jack, who looked mad enough to spit nails.
It was probably a Mountie, after all. Or whoever it was that came to rescue stranded people in this part of the world. But if it wasn’t…if it wasn’t….
When the trapdoor had opened enough for Lou to see who was pushing it up, she saw at once that this was no Mountie. It was a man in a black ski mask and a camouflage ski parka, trimmed around the collar with what looked like coyote fur. He might almost have passed for a member of the National Guard if it hadn’t been for the.44 magnum, drawn and ready, in his right hand.
The eyes Lou could see burning from the holes in the black wool were blue. Their gaze swept the interior of the ranger station, coming to a halt at her boots, then traveling upwards, until they widened at the sight of the .38.
Instead of yelling, “Police, drop the gun,” or even, “I’m here to help you,” the man in the ski mask fumbled with his own sidearm, trying to hold up the trapdoor and prepare to fire at the same time….
He never had the chance. Jack, perhaps seeing from Lou’s expression that their morning caller was foe, not friend, gave the trapdoor a vicious shove, cracking Ski Mask in the skull with the heavy wood panel and sending him plummeting back down to the ground below.
Impressed, Lou lowered the .38.
“Good one,” she said to Jack.
“You know,” he replied, “I think that’s the first nice thing you’ve ever said to me.” Then he yanked the trapdoor open again, peered down, and started climbing.
Lou climbed down after him, a little amazed at the change in the landscape all the snow the night before had effected. It had been snowy before, but now there was three feet of white covering everything, whereas before there’d only been two. When her feet finally touched ground, she sunk nearly mid-thigh into the snow.
Ski Mask lay a few feet away, one of his legs tilted at an ominous angle.
“Damn,” Jack said, looking down at him.
Lou could see the breath coming from the unconscious man’s nostrils frosting up in the frigid air.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You didn’t kill him. He’s just out.”
“Like a light,” Jack said, grimly. “That’s the problem. There were a couple things I wanted to ask him.”
“I doubt he’d have talked,” Lou said. “Unless you applied…pressure. And sorry, Jack, but you don’t strike me as the pressure type.”
“You’d be surprised,” Jack s
aid, enigmatically. Then he leaned down to extricate the .44 from the unconscious man’s hand. “Here,” he said, passing it to Lou. “Add this to your arsenal.”
Lou took the pistol, checked the safety, then wordlessly dropped it into her pocket, along with the .38. She watched as Jack reached out and pulled the ski mask from their would-be assassin’s face.
“Recognize him?” he asked her, his breath instantly freezing as it came out.
Lou looked down at the inoffensive-looking, middle-aged white man. Both of his cheeks were pink with the cold. “No,” she said. “Should I?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said, with a shrug. “I don’t recognize him either.” Kneeling in the snow beside the, he looked up at her and asked simply, “Why would a bunch of people I don’t even know want me dead?”
Lou looked up sharply. “I don’t know,” she said. “But we better not waste time sitting around and thinking about it. Do you hear that?”
Jack tilted his head. Like her, he was hatless. The wind, gentle compared to the wind from the day before, but still just as cold, tugged at his dark hair.
“Snowmobiles,” he said grimly. “Coming this way.”
“They could be on our side,” Lou said, but without much optimism.
“Until I see a shiny silver badge, I’m not trusting anybody.” Jack wrapped a hand around Lou’s upper arm. “Come on. At least this time we’ve got a ride.”
She let him lead her over to the snowmobile Ski Mask had abandoned.
“You ever operate one of these things before?” she asked, skeptically.
“Sure,” Jack said, swinging a leg over the seat. “We used to winter in Aspen when I was a kid.”
“Oh,” Lou said drolly. “You used to winter in Aspen. Of course. How stupid of me. And where did you summer? The vineyard?”
He started the engine, looking back at her over one broad shoulder. “The cape,” he said. “You coming, or you want to stay here and make snide comments about my privileged upbringing?”
She eyed the wide black seat. There was room enough for two, but it would be a snug fit. Thankfully, there were handlebars along the back of the seat, so at least she’d have something besides Jack Townsend to hold onto. Jack Townsend, who a half-hour before had had his arms wrapped around her more firmly than she’d ever been held by anyone in her life.
Behind her, the sound of approaching snowmobiles was louder than ever. They were getting closer, whoever they were.
“Lou,” Jack said impatiently. “Come on.”
Well, what choice did she have? Get on the back of a snowmobile with Jack Townsend, or risk getting a bullet in the head.
She was probably, she mused, the only woman in America who’d hesitate over a decision like this.
But she didn’t hesitate for long. That’s because a bullet went winging past her, missing her shoulder by inches before plummeting into the snow a few yards away.
Like something propelled from a rocket launcher, Lou leaped onto the seat behind Jack, forgetting all about the handlebars on the back of the snowmobile. Instead, she twined her arms around the closest thing available—Jack—and screamed, “Go! Go!” at the top of her lungs.
Jack didn’t seem to need any further urging. A second later, they were tearing down the mountainside, the wind ripping at their hair and cheeks, and bullets flying over their heads.
13
Thanks to Lou Calabrese’s dislike for him, Jack had found himself in all sorts of situations while portraying the hapless Detective Pete Logan. There was the time in Copkiller II when he had been forced to wrestle a giant python in a mudpit in Belize. It had been a real python, too. A friendly one. His trainers called him Skippy.
Still, friendly or not, after several takes with Skippy, Jack had developed a profound dislike for snakes. He could not even see them on television anymore without hastily reaching for the remote control.
Then there’d been that time in Copkiller III when he had been forced to dive into freezing cold, choppy ocean water while having whaling harpoons launched at him. They hadn’t been real whaling harpoons, of course. And the harpoons hadn’t been what bothered him, really. It had been the temperature of the water, coupled with his state of undress—Pete had, as usual, managed to lose his pants—that Jack had found dismaying.
Lou had argued that the scene was necessary to his character’s ultimate epiphany in the third act. The director had believed her, of course. Jack had gamely leaped into the water for take after take. The film had ended up making a hundred mil its first week out.
Then had come Copkiller IV. Copkiller IV, where Logan had to fling himself—stark naked, of course—into a snowdrift. Otherwise, Lou insisted, the thematic arc made no sense.
And Tim Lord believed her.
But not even Academy Award–winning screenwriter Lou Calabrese, Jack was convinced, could have cooked up something like the situation in which he currently found himself, barreling down a mountainside on a Ski-Doo with no idea where he was going, and bullets flying at his head.
He did have one thing to be thankful for, however: At least this time he had his clothes on.
His instinct, of course, had been to go up. Up was the direction in which the wreck of the R-44 lay. They had stumbled downhill in order to get away from that first wave of pursuers.
It had been after eight by his watch when Lou had wakened him so roughly, though you wouldn’t have known it by the position of the sun in the sky, since all there had been overhead was a sort of grayish haze. Surely by now search and rescue teams would have located the wreckage, and would be combing it in droves, looking for some hint as to where Jack and Lou had disappeared to.
But evidently Ski Mask’s cronies had realized this, since they’d fanned out and, using some very convincing gun-fire, had encouraged Jack to go down, towards who knows what, instead of up, towards safety and potential rescue.
If he got out of this alive, was all Jack could think—as he dodged trees and the occasional boulder, tears streaming down the sides of his face thanks to the cold, his ears so numb with the chill that he thought they might fall off—he was never doing another movie again. That was it. It was over. He was retiring. The cinematic career of Jack Townsend was at an end.
It had been a good career, overall, he thought. He’d enjoyed his stint as Dr. Rourke on “STAT.” And the Copkiller series had given him both fiscal solvency and ample opportunity to exercise his skills as an actor. Lou might have written the scene in which his character had been strung up and beaten with bamboo poles out of some perverse attempt to humiliate him for the whole I need a bigger gun thing, but the scene had enabled Jack to show that he was capable of a wide range of human emotion, which had led to his landing roles in less well known but more critically acclaimed films.
And Hamlet had been funded entirely with Copkiller revenue. Jack had enough saved to start his own production company if he decided not to leave the business entirely. He could be like an American Kenneth Branagh, making movies of the lesser-known Shakespeare plays. Maybe even some Ibsen or Shaw. They’d be shown only in art houses in urban areas, but that was fine with him. It would give him more time to spend on the ranch….
Yes, he’d had a fine career. He had certainly accomplished more than his father, exasperated by his only child’s seeming inability to stick to any one thing, had ever expected.
Although Jack highly doubted his father would be very impressed if he could see him now, fleeing deadly assassins on the back of a Ski-Doo…a scene that was not part of some Lou Calabrese script but was actually a reality.
Zigzagging through the trees at a velocity that no one should travel over such terrain, it occurred to Jack that they could just as easily be killed careening into something as they could from any one of the bullets flying in their direction. Somehow, however, he’d have preferred to die that way—by crashing—than as the result of being shot. He didn’t know who these assholes thought they were, or why they were shooting at him, but he wasn’t goin
g to give them the satisfaction of getting what they wanted. Not if he could help it.
He hoped Lou felt the same. She had her arms wrapped so tightly around his waist that he could barely breathe.
She wasn’t, however, cowering back there like any other woman of his acquaintance would have been. Instead, she was shouting what he could only assume were driving instructions into his ear.
Fortunately the Ski-Doo’s engine was so loud that he couldn’t hear a word she was saying.
He could see her pointing, however. Every once in a while she risked letting go of him to point in a direction which she seemed to think he should take. How she could possibly have any idea where they were going, being as unfamiliar with Alaska as he was, he couldn’t imagine. But clearly, Lou Calabrese was a woman who didn’t like feeling as if she weren’t in control at all times. The look on her face when she’d realized he’d joined her on that cot in the night had been priceless. Well, what had she expected, anyway? That he was going to sleep on the floor?
Besides, there’d been plenty of room for two. He didn’t know what she’d been so bent out of shape about—
“Look out!”
He heard her this time, loud and clear. In spite of the fact that Ski Mask had evidently not kept his snowmobile in tip-top condition, as the engine was as loud as a jet’s, he could still hear Lou.
What he could not do was see what it was that she was pointing at. At least until they’d hit it—a rocky outcrop ping, half-hidden beneath the deep snow—and gone sailing through the air.
“Oh my God,” he heard Lou say, very distinctly—probably because her face was so close to his ear, “if you end up getting us killed, Townsend, you are going to be so—”
The Ski-Doo landed, with a jaw-snapping thump that he felt all up and down his spine. It was all Jack could do to maintain control of the vehicle as it skidded through a drift, kicking up plumes of snow eight feet into the air.