'As if nothing had happened?'Ĭraig cried out and his eyelids fluttered. 'Do you have to be so rough?' Laurel asked sharply.īob looked at him, dazed and unbelieving. 'You're Laurel, right?'Īre you sure? a voice whispered, and Laurel shut it up at once. Nick pressed his makeshift napkin compress against Craig Toomy's headwound and looked up at her. Craig uttered a pained grunt and shut up. He drove a short, hard kick into Craig's ribs. Then Nick did something that shocked all of them, even those who had seen the Englishman twist Craig's nose like the handle of a bathtub faucet. 'Start again, mate, and I'll stave them in,' Nick said grimly. 'It turned out all right, Dinah.' Then she looked out at the empty terminal and her own words mocked her. Bob Jenkins stepped away from him the moment he began to move, even though the revolver was now safely tucked into the waistband of Brian Engle's pants, and Laurel did the same, pulling Dinah with her. He put the center of it in his mouth, clamping his teeth on it to keep it from unwinding, and used his hands to flip Craig over like a human omelette.Ĭraig groaned and waved his hands feebly. He took one of them and spun it quickly and expertly into a rope. Be careful what you pray for, because you just might get it. Something she had read years ago suddenly popped into Laurel's mind. And here she was, proving Tolkien right - she had stepped out of her own door last evening, just the same as always, and look where she had ended up: a strange and dreary version of Fantasyland. Well, she had wanted to have an adventure, just one adventure, before middle-age settled in for keeps. All the same, she was here with him now, in this weird situation. And, of course, she doubted very much if men like Mr Hopewell even read the lonely-hearts magazines, let alone placed ads in their personals columns. She thought she would have written him a kind but rather impersonal note Thank you for your reply and your picture, Mr Hopewell, but I somehow don't think we would be right for each other - and gone on looking for a man like Darren. Would she have been on Flight 29 tonight if the photos had shown Nick Hopewell's dark-blue eyes instead of Darren's mild brown ones? She didn't think so. But sometimes you found yourself in one of those tiresome situations where the truth could no longer be avoided, and Laurel reckoned the truth to be this: she had chosen Darren Crosby because his pictures and letters had told her he wasn't much different from the placid boys and men she had been dating ever since she was fifteen or so, boys and men who would learn quickly to wipe their feet on the mat before they came in on rainy nights, boys and men who would grab a towel and help with the dishes without being asked, boys and men who would let you go if you told them to do it in a sharp enough tone of voice. She had boarded Flight 29 telling herself that this was her great adventure, her one extravagant tango with romance - an impulsive transcontinental dash into the arms of the tall, dark stranger. 'You had just got to the part about Flight 29 being like the Mary Celeste. He might have been an interested lecture-goer instead of a man sitting on a table in a deserted airport restaurant with his feet planted beside a bound man lying in a pool of his own blood.
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