Dave Barry - Big trouble

On the night that Snake and his party walked in with a nuclear bomb, the airport was even more chaotic than usual. There was bad weather in Chicago, which of course meant that virtually every flight in the western hemisphere, including space shuttle launches, had been delayed. And now some airlines were noticing a problem getting clearance for outgoing flights to push back, although the control tower was not saying why. Most airline ticket counters had sprouted long lines of pissed-off passengers shoving to get to the counter so they could argue fruitlessly with pissed-off airline employees. Police had already been summoned to arrest one returning cruise passenger who had threatened a ticket agent with his souvenir stick.

Eddie came through the airport door first, followed by Puggy, lugging the suitcase, and then Snake, who had one hand under the sweatshirt and the other holding Jenny's arm. Like Eddie and Puggy, Snake had never been inside MIA before, and for a moment, when he saw the roiling mob, he thought about turning and running. But then he squeezed his gun, his wand, and the moment passed. He was not going back to scamming dimes.

"Where we goin'?" asked Eddie, staring at the airport scene. He had never felt less like he belonged somewhere, and Eddie was the kind of person who never felt he belonged anywhere.

"That way," said Snake, pointing, pretty much randomly, toward a line of ticket counters. He jabbed the barrel of the sweatshirt-swathed gun into Puggy's back and said, "You stay close, punk. You don't go one step farther away from me'n you are now."

They moved slowly through the crowd — first Eddie, then Puggy lugging the suitcase, followed closely by Snake, who limped next to Jenny, who shuffled her feet and stared ahead, zombie-like. The first airline they came to had a name Snake did not understand and a sign listing departures for cities that Snake had never heard of; everyone at the counter was talking in Spanish. Snake jerked his head to indicate to Eddie that he should move ahead. They went past a half dozen more airlines that Snake found incomprehensible, then came to a small counter with a half dozen people waiting in line for a lone agent. Over the counter was an orange sign that said:

Snake felt a good-vibe jolt. The Bahamas! He motioned Eddie to get in line. They shuffled forward, Snake keeping his grip on Jenny and periodically letting Puggy feel the gun in his back. In ten minutes, they were standing in front of the agent.

The agent was a single mom named Sheila who had been on duty for fourteen hours without a break, because two of her three coworkers had quit that very day. Air Impact! had trouble keeping employees because its paychecks were behind schedule as often as its flights, which was quite often. Air Impact! was owned by two brothers from North Miami Beach who had done well in the pest-control business and had hatched the plan of starting an airline so that they would have a legitimate business excuse to fly to the Bahamas and gamble and have sex with women who were not technically their wives. The airline was in its second year, and the brothers were spending more and more time in the Bahamas and less and less time on business details such as payroll and schedules and hiring competent personnel.

The Federal Aviation Administration had begun to take a special interest in Air Impact! after receiving an unusually high number of passenger complaints about flight delays and cancellations. Eyebrows had also been raised two weeks earlier when an Air Impact! flight from Miami to Nassau, flown by pilots with questionable credentials, had in fact landed in Key West, which even non-aviators noted was several hundred miles in the diametrically opposite direction. Rumor had it that the FAA was about to shut Air Impact! down, and morale was very low among the employees who had not already quit. Nobody's morale was any lower than Sheila's; aside from having been on her feet for what seemed like forever dealing with unhappy customers, she had just received a call from the baby-sitter she could barely afford telling her that her two-year-old daughter was throwing up, this coming on top of the call from the mechanic telling her that her 1987 Taurus, which always needed something, needed major transmission work.

Had Sheila been in a state of higher morale, she probably would have cared enough to be suspicious of the quartet now standing at the counter — a zoned-out young woman with three scuzzy-looking men. But Sheila had long since passed the point of giving a shit.

"Yes?" she said to Snake.

"We need four tickets to the Bahamas, one-way, next flight you got," said Snake.

"Nassau or Freeport?" she asked.

Snake frowned. "The Bahamas," he said.

"Nassau and Freeport are in the Bahamas," said Sheila, mentally adding you moron.

Snake thought about it.

"Freeport," he said. He liked the sound of it.

"There's a ten-ten flight," said Sheila, checking her watch, which said nine-fifteen. "Four one-way tickets is" — she tapped the computer keyboard — "three hundred sixty dollars."

Snake let go of Jenny for a moment while he dug his free hand into his pocket He pulled out the fat wad of bills he'd taken from Arthur Herk at the house. He set it on the counter, in front of Sheila, and, one-handed, started counting off twenties out loud… "twenty, forty, sixty… " At 120, his brain fogged up — he'd always struggled with arithmetic — and he had to start again. He did this twice, said "fuck," and pushed the wad off the counter, scattering bills across Sheila's keyboard.

"Take it outta there," he said.

Sheila gathered up the wad, feeling the heft of it, this big bunch of money being carried around by this guy who didn't even know how to count it. Sheila peeled off $360. Then, after glancing at Snake, who was looking around nervously, she peeled off another $480, which was what she needed to get her transmission fixed, and then another $140, which was roughly what she owed the baby-sitter for the past week. She put the rest of the wad back on the counter. Snake looked at it. He almost said something, but he didn't want any trouble here. Plus he figured he had plenty of money left. Plus a suitcase full of drugs. Maybe emeralds.

"I need the names of the passengers," said Sheila, tapping on her terminal.

Snake hesitated, then said, "John Smith."

Sheila looked up for a second, then went back to tapping.

"And the other passengers?" she said.

"John Smith," said Snake.

Sheila looked up again, at Eddie, Puggy, Snake, and Jenny. "You're all John Smith?" she asked.

"Everybody," said Snake

"I need to see photo IDs," said Sheila.

Snake grabbed a handful of bills and dropped them on her keyboard.

"Here you go," he said.

Sheila looked at the bills. It looked to be at least two hundred.

"OK, then, Mr. Smith," she said.

Monica, leaning on the horn, swerved the Kia past a car-rental courtesy shuttle on the airport access road.

"OK, listen," she said. "We're looking for the police car. You see it, you yell, OK?"

"OK," said Matt and Eliot. Anna was quiet. Nina was praying.

"Once we see the car," said Monica — who was thinking, Jesus, I hope we see the car — "if they're not in it, we go into the terminal and we look for them. There will be police officers at the airport to help us. It's gonna be OK, Mrs. Herk."

In the back, Anna said nothing.

Monica gunned the Kia up the ramp under the Departures sign. They were approaching the terminal building now, Monica, Matt, and Eliot scanning the mass of cars ahead. It was Matt who saw the cruiser in the unfinished garage.

"Over there," he said, pointing.