Big Trouble

"Nah," said Unger. "Looks like he just changed his mind." Unger almost said something else then, something along the lines of, You got a weird passenger back there, but decided not to. He'd seen weird people get on planes before; South Florida was full of weird people. This guy was definitely carrying drugs or some damn thing. But Unger viewed that as somebody else's problem. It was late, time to get to drinking, and besides, he didn't know this flight crew, a couple of young guys who'd just been hired to replace a couple of other young guys who'd gotten fed up with Air Impact! and quit. Unger, stepping away from the plane, gave the pilot a thumbs-up sign.

twelve

35:08

Puggy was trotting away from the Air Impact! gate area, trying to decide what to do. His main thought was to get away from the crazy man with the gun, to just keep going, get out of the crowded, scary, alien airport. But he was also thinking about the girl back there. She was scared to death of the crazy man, Puggy could see that, and he could also see that she was right to be scared to death of him. Puggy thought he should tell somebody about her. But who? Puggy didn't like cops—he'd had bad experiences with cops—but he wished there was one right here that he could tell about the girl.

 Ahead, he a saw a counter with two agents, a young man and an older woman, standing behind it, counting pieces of paper, doing the final paperwork on a Miami-to-Philadelphia flight that had been delayed nearly three hours. He hesitated, then went up to the counter. The young man looked up.

"Yes?" he said, not pleasantly.

"Um," said Puggy. "There's ... I need to ... "

"I'm sorry," said the young man, who was clearly not sorry, "this flight is closed. No seats, OK?"

"No, there's a guy down there," said Puggy, gesturing back toward the Air Impact! area. "He has this girl."

"Sir," said the woman agent, even less pleasantly than the man. "We have to get this flight out of here right now, OK? So whatever it is, we don't have time for it."

"He's makin' her go," said Puggy. "He has a ... "

"We don't have time for it right now, sir," said the man, and he went back to counting pieces of paper, and so did the woman, both of them shaking their heads at how rude people could be.

34:02

"So what's the plan?" said Baker. "We get in there and sound the alarm?" The rental car was weaving through traffic on the airport Departures ramp.

"Negative," said Greer. "Like I said, the more people know, the more likely we have people getting killed. So we keep it quiet unless we absolutely have to."

"So how're we supposed to find them?" asked Baker.

"We find them because, number one, they're gonna be moving slow, schlepping that suitcase," said Greer. "Number two, what I know about these scuzzballs from our friend back at the Jolly Jackal, they are not gifted in the brains department. Plus they got hostages. They are definitely gonna stand out in the crowd."

"I dunno," said Baker. "This airport, it can be hard to stand out."

33:34

In front of the Delta counter, two police officers were trying to revive Daphne's owner. He had resisted efforts by officers to pry him off the dog-owning widow, and finally one of them had clubbed him with a heavy-duty four-cell flashlight, rendering him, for the moment, unconscious. This was bad, because the police needed him to subdue Daphne, who had abandoned her fruitless efforts to get at Pinky and Enid and let go of the pet transporter. She was now surveying the rapidly growing mob of gawkers, thinking whatever it is that large, hungry snakes think.

The police had a problem. Obviously, they could not allow this creature to remain loose in the airport. Just as obviously, they could not risk trying to shoot it with all these civilians around. That meant that somebody had to capture it, but its owner was currently out cold, and none of the police officers present wanted any part of trying to apprehend Daphne manually. As one of them put it, "What're you gonna do? Slap handcuffs on it?"

And so, for the moment, it was a standoff. On the one side stood the police, trying to hold back the crowd; on the other side stood, or, more accurately, coiled, Daphne. An officer had radioed headquarters to request that an animal-control unit be dispatched to the airport immediately, but he had just been informed that the closest such unit was tied up with a major traffic jam on Le Jeune, involving goats.

33:17

"Where are the police?" Anna was asking, her voice right on the edge of hysterical. "How can there not be any police ? "

"We'll find some," Eliot said. "There have to be some around here." But he was wondering, too. There were always police here.

Eliot and Anna were trotting through the crowd a few steps behind Matt, with Niña bringing up the rear. Their search was becoming more desperate by the second as they realized how many people were in the airport, how many concourses, how many gates.