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.
"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."
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.
"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 Nina 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.
They came to a security checkpoint, where at least two hundred people were waiting in two lines to pass through the metal detectors into the flight concourse. Matt, Anna, and Eliot separated and moved up and down the lines, scanning the faces. No luck. They had just started moving down the main concourse again when they heard Nina cry out. They turned and saw Nina running back toward the checkpoint, calling a name that sounded like "Pogey." Matt was the first to see where she was going.
"It's the little guy!" he shouted. "With the beard! From the house! The guy who carried the suitcase!"
Anna and Eliot saw Puggy then, on the other side of the security checkpoint, trotting toward Nina, a look of wonder on his face.
"Matt," said Eliot, "go find the lady cop. We'll stay here with this guy. Run." But Matt was already sprinting through the crowd.
"You said Delta, right?" asked the driver.
"Delta," said Henry.
Henry and Leonard were in a U-Drive-It Rental Car shuttle bus approaching the main terminal. They had flagged down the bus — actually, they had stepped in front of it, forcing it to stop — on the airport access road, after abandoning their rental car and hiking through the mass of stopped traffic on Le Jeune. The bus driver had at first been reluctant to open the door, but Henry had persuaded him by pressing a twenty-dollar bill against the windshield.
Henry and Leonard were hot and sweaty and not in a good mood. Every minute or so, Leonard shook his head and announced to the other bus passengers, who were carefully not looking at him, "Fuckin' goats." Henry, though more restrained, was also fed up with this frustrating, nonproductive trip. He'd decided that once they got their boarding passes for the Newark flight, he was going to call his Penultimate contact and tell him that, sorry, but they could find somebody else to kill Arthur Herk, because he, personally, was never coming back to this insane city, where every time you try to execute somebody in a careful, professional manner, another shooter shows up, or the police show up, or a dog attacks you, or some maniac jumps on you out of a tree.
"Delta," the driver said, stopping the courtesy bus and opening the door.
Henry and Leonard got off, with Leonard pausing to tell the bus driver, by way of a farewell, "Fuckin' goats."
As the bus pulled away, Henry and Leonard looked through the automatic glass doors to the terminal. It was packed with people, some of them running. From somewhere inside came the sound of a woman screaming.
"Now what?" said Henry.
"Whatever it is," said Leonard, "it can't be any worse than goats."
"C'mon," said Snake. "C'mon, let's fuckin' go, here." He was talking mainly to himself, but the postal retirees, sitting four rows ahead, in the front of the Air Impact! plane, could hear him, and they did not approve of his language.
In the cockpit, separated from the cabin by a half-open black curtain, the newly hired Air Impact! pilots were going through their preflight checklist. They looked to Snake to be, based on zit count, maybe seventeen years old, although in fact they were both twenty-three. Their names were Justin Hobert and Frank Teeterman, Jr., and they had been close friends since elementary school, when they'd discovered that they both passionately loved airplanes. They had taken a lot of shit in junior high for continuing to build model airplanes when all their friends had become interested in titty mags.
Justin and Frank had remained single-mindedly obsessed with aviation, and their social lives had suffered. But they felt that it had all been worth it, because, after years of lessons and study, they had become commercial pilots, and tonight they were going to fly together professionally for their very first time. They could not believe their good fortune; most airlines made you fly for years with more experienced pilots. Sure, the pay at Air Impact! was not great — $14,200 a year — but the important thing was, they were flying. They were wearing new pilot shirts and new pilot pants, and they were in command.