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“That’s nice.”
“It’s downright stupid, if you ask me.”
She felt herself bristling at his attitude, but tamped it down. She needed this idiot to repair the plane. She also needed to use his radio or phone or something to let her buyer know she would be late. Although after this he might not want the jet at all. She smothered a sigh. “What about the mountain? It looks like a volcanic cone.”
“It is.”
“Active?”
“That’s the story.”
Gloom began to settle over her. Could it get any worse? “How active?”
“It shrugs from time to time. Been awhile since the last eruption, though. Maybe five hundred years.”
“How often is it supposed to erupt?”
He suddenly grinned at her over the countertop. “Getting nervous, Sticks?”
“Absolutely not!” She had the worst urge to bean him with his cigar. Purposefully irritating, that was what he was. “Do you ever light that thing?”
He took the cigar from his mouth and studied it. “Why would I want to do something that stupid?”
“Then what is it doing in your mouth?”
He grinned again as he looked at her. “I have this oral fixation.”
To her horror, she blushed beet red. Quickly she looked away, out the window, hoping the last bit of red light would hide the blush.
“I’m going to bed,” she announced, rising quickly and putting her mug on the counter.
“Good idea,” he agreed. “You want to get some sleep before the storm hits.”
That froze her in her tracks. “Can we check the weather?”
“Sure. I’ve got a feed.”
She was relieved to hear it. At least this godforsaken airport had moved that far into the twenty-first century.
He turned behind the counter and flipped a dial. Soon a mechanized voice was reading the forecast. Then he flipped another switch and a fax machine began to print out a weather map.
Interested, as all aviators were interested in the weather, Hannah forgot her embarrassment and leaned over the counter, listening and watching.
“Tropical Storm Hannah has developed wind speeds in excess of sixty-five miles per hour. The storm has stalled at its current location and appears to be strengthening, with the barometer steadily falling….”
“Hell,” Buck said. Moments later he ripped the fax off the machine and stood up, putting it on the counter so they could both look at it. Their heads came close to knocking.
“Cripes,” he said, “look at those isobars. It’s tightening up.”
“Do you have an earlier map?”
He turned and pulled a sheet of paper off a shelf. “Here, see?”
Indeed the lines that measured barometric pressure were drawing closer together, around a circle that could swiftly become the eye of a hurricane.
“It doesn’t look good,” she said reluctantly.
“No, it doesn’t.” He took the cigar from his mouth and tossed it in the trashcan. “If she’d just kept moving, we’d have had a tropical storm. No big deal except for the casino. But if she stalls out there long enough, she could become a real beast.”
Hannah nodded and met his blue eyes. “I don’t like this.”
“Me neither. You might be here awhile, Sticks.”
“Is this place safe?”
“I built it to be. I didn’t want to lose everything every couple of years.”
“Well,” she said hopefully, “maybe even if it becomes a hurricane it won’t go past Category One.”
“We can hope.” He sighed. “Come on, I’ll walk you out to your plane. I forgot you don’t know your way around.”
The late evening was perfectly still, and growing darker by the second. The land had not yet cooled below the temperature of the surrounding water, so nothing moved. Later there would be a breeze, but right now the night was quiet and balmy. The air, full of moisture, felt soft to the skin. Hannah thought prosaically that in a climate like this, there’d be no need for moisturizers.
Buck opened the door to the hangar, letting her pass through first. He’d left a light on near the computer, so the cavernous space wasn’t completely dark. The printer was still humming, although the computer had gone into screensaver mode. Reaching out, he threw the switch that turned on the lights above Hannah’s plane. Then he went to look at the progress on the schematics.
He moved the mouse, and the progress bar appeared. “Nineteen percent. This is unreal.”
Hannah looked at the long stream of paper that was folding up on the floor. “No kidding. That’s my fuel system?”
“One and the same. And that’s less than twenty percent. We’re going to have our work cut out for us unless we find something obvious.”
“Well, it had to be some place the fuel could leak from fast. I didn’t have a whole lot of time.”
He nodded. “We’ll find it. In the meantime…”
“Yeah, get some sleep. You’ll wake me if things start to get worse?”
“Sure, why not? Worrying is a useful thing to do.”
She scowled at him. “I don’t want to worry. I want to enjoy the storm.”
“Enjoy?” He looked at her like she was crazy. “You’re kidding.”
“I love storms. Always have. I’d like to be awake for this one.”
“Well, if it decides to move this way,” he said almost sarcastically, “I doubt you’ll miss it.”
She cocked her head and put her hands on her hips. “Were you born a boor?” Then with a toss of her long red hair, she strode away through the dimly lit hangar to her plane.
“Wait a minute,” he called after her. “You have to lock the bar on the inside of this door after I leave.”
Annoyed that her high-dudgeon exit had been interrupted, she stomped back to him. He went to the door and pointed to a lever. “Throw this to the right. The bar will lock in place. Even Buster won’t be able to get in.”
Then he was gone, leaving her to fume. She threw the lever, glad to lock him out, then started back to her plane.
Not even Buster would be able to get in? All of a sudden she felt creeped-out. Why would he even mention it? Did that alligator actually sometimes come into this hangar?
Nervously she looked around as she hurried toward her plane. It was a relief to ascend the stairs, then pull them up behind her. Alone at last, she tumbled onto the bed in the tail without even pulling off her flight suit.
Enough was enough.
CHAPTER FOUR
HANNAH AWOKE in the morning to find herself eyeball-to-eyeball with a huge pair of reptilian eyes. For a few seconds, she was absolutely certain she was imagining them. Then the hair stood up on the back of her neck.
The alligator seemed to be grinning at her, his mouth hanging open. She froze as still as a statue, hoping he would think she was dead, not sure if that would work for an alligator, wondering how the heck he’d gotten on her plane, wondering how the heck she was going to get off her plane.
Then the alligator lifted his head and let out a deep, inhuman roar that seemed to bounce off the walls of the small cabin and shake her eardrums so hard it hurt.
Oh, Lord, was that a threat? Did alligators roar before they attacked? She felt the most childish urge to pull the covers over her head and convince herself she was hallucinating this.
Despite her best efforts not to move, a whimper escaped her and she pulled back. But, to her amazement, the gator didn’t leap at her in attack. No.
Buster looked wounded.
She shook her head, convinced her eyes were deceiving her, but nothing changed. The alligator looked hangdog. Hurt.
“Buster?” she said cautiously.
The gator’s head came up, and he eyed her with something that seemed like hope.
Astounded, Hannah considered the possibility that this relic of the dinosaur era had learned something about human behavior. What other kind of behavior would he know, never having had another alligator to talk to?
Cripes, she was losing her mind. Reptilian brains didn’t have emotions.
Did they?
Slowly, taking care not to startle the beast by moving too quickly, she pushed back the blanket she had pulled over herself sometime during the night. Buster watched, but made no move.
Slowly, she stood on the bed, which had replaced a row of seats against the rear bulkhead, wondering if she could leap across him to the aisle before he could turn in the confined space.
The option failed to excite her. She’d never been any good at the long jump, never mind jumping from a dead start.
Buster cocked his head, watching her from one eye, then let out another deafening roar. At once she rediscovered her ability to jump…backward. Pressed against the rear bulkhead, she studied her nemesis while wondering what it would feel like to be devoured alive. Not pleasant, certainly.
But once again Buster looked hurt, as if her moving away was not what he wanted. Well, of course he didn’t want it. The farther away she was, the harder she would be to catch and eat.
Then he did something she would have thought impossible, something that nearly curdled the blood in her veins. He reared up and got his front legs on the bed.
“Oh, God!” The prayerful words escaped her lips, and all thought of not being able to jump disappeared in a wash of adrenaline. Before she had another coherent thought, she ran across the bed and leapt over the gator, reaching the floor—and his tail—in a flash. She kept running up the aisle toward the door, hoping the hydraulics would open the hatch before Buster caught up.
Another roar followed her, this one almost a groan. She could hear scraping as scaly skin began to slide around on the industrial carpeting.
She slammed her hand on the emergency button and watched the hatch begin to lower. Hurry! Hurry!
The sound of scraping alligator skin was growing closer. Afraid to wait any longer, the instant the stairs were halfway lowered, she climbed out onto them and then jumped.
Her ankles stung as her feet hit the concrete floor. She wanted to keep running, but now that she was no longer confined, she couldn’t help but turn curiously to see what happened.
Moments later, Buster’s head appeared in the hatch. If an alligator could have sad puppy-dog eyes, this one did. The sound that escaped him now was nothing like his earlier roar. It was, she thought wildly, the alligator equivalent of a whimper.
Hardly reassured, she backed up. Lumbering as if stairs were unfamiliar, Buster began to descend the now fully opened gangway.
Hannah backed up. Swiftly. If she had an ounce of common sense, she’d flee at once from this hangar and send that annoying Buck Shanahan in here to deal with Buster.
Which, she decided, much as it might wound her pride, she was going to do.
Then she remembered from countless TV shows that alligators could move very fast. Faster than one might think.
That did it. She turned and ran for the door, her feet barely touching the floor. Behind her, scaly scrapes followed quickly. Buster apparently had no intention of letting her out of his sight.
She reached the door, but of course it was barred. She worked the lever as quickly as she could with sweaty palms, and at last managed to throw it back. She could hear Buster right behind her, but she refused to look back. That would only waste valuable escape time.
With a mighty shove, she pushed the door outward and darted through it.
The heat and humidity of the tropical morning felt like a punch in the face. She hardly noticed it as another growl propelled her away from the hangar, toward the office. As she ran, she vaguely noticed that the clouds had come no closer, but appeared darker than yesterday. Heat waves shimmered above the runway in the heavy air.
And scales still scraped behind her.
All of a sudden, Buck Shanahan appeared around the corner of the office. He was dressed in the same khaki as yesterday, though the clothing looked fresher.
“What the hell—?”
She ran right past him, saying, “Get rid of that prehistoric beast. Now!”
It didn’t help to hear his laugh as she flew toward the office door. Once inside the air-conditioned building, she collapsed on a chair and put her head between her knees, feeling as if she were on the edge of fainting…or vomiting, either of which would embarrass her to death.
Closing her eyes, she clung to self-control.
A few moments later, Buck sauntered into the office and closed the door behind him.
“Did you kill him?” she demanded.
“Hell, no. He’s an island icon. They’d lynch me.”
She lifted her head and waited a moment for the world to stop swimming in the adrenaline sea. “He was on my plane! He tried to get on my bed! And he was roaring at me….”
“Roaring?”
