Dave Barry - Big trouble

It was now ten minutes before the scheduled departure, and Unger was thinking about closing the door, when Puggy, lugging the suitcase, entered the waiting area, followed closely by Snake and Jenny, followed by Eddie. They moved in a tight, strange-looking little clot over to Unger. Snake handed Unger the tickets.

"Ah," said Unger. "The John Smiths."

Snake gave Unger a don't-fuck-with-me stare. Unger responded with an I-don't-give-a-shit shrug. His feeling was, whoever these people were, they were soon going to be not his problem. He gestured toward the doorway.

"Plane's downstairs," he said.

The clot went down the stairs, with Unger closing the door behind them and following them out to the tarmac. He gestured toward the plane, where the retired couples, complaining loudly about not getting any help, were ascending the narrow fold-down stairway at the rear of the plane, slowly and laboriously, as though it were the last fifty feet of the Everest summit.

Unger followed Snake's clot to the plane. When they reached it, he reached for the suitcase, telling Puggy, "I'll take that."

Snake grabbed Unger's arm. "It goes onna plane," he said.

"I'm gonna put it on the plane," said Unger. "You get it back in Freeport."

"I mean it rides with us," said Snake.

"Can't," said Unger. "Too big. FAA regulations."

Snake reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a wad of bills, and handed them to Unger.

"Lemme give you a hand with that suitcase," Unger said. As Snake watched him closely, he grabbed the suitcase — damn, this thing was heavy — and manhandled it to the folding stairs. He was a strong man, but he just barely got it to the top. He left it just inside the doorway opening.

Panting, Unger came back down the stairs. He looked past Snake, toward the terminal.

"Where's your friend going?" he asked.

Snake whirled. Puggy, who had been right next to him, was gone. Snake looked back toward the terminal and saw the stocky shape disappearing through the doorway.

"Motherfucker," said Snake, furious, squeezing Jenny's arm so hard that she cried out. "That punk motherFUCKER." He spun back to Unger.

"When's this plane leave?" he said.

"You wanna go back and get your friend?" asked Unger.

"No, I want this fuckin' plane to leave right now," said Snake.

"It'll leave soon's you get on and the pilots finish the preflight," Unger said. "Five, ten minutes."

"Get on," Snake said to Eddie. Eddie was looking back to where Puggy had disappeared.

"Snake," said Eddie, "I don't think this is…»

"I said get on the plane," said Snake, using his sweatshirt-gun to prod Eddie exactly the way he had been prodding Puggy. Eddie turned slowly away from the terminal and trudged up the stairs. Snake shoved Jenny up after him. They had to step over the suitcase to get into the aisle.

Unger walked around to the front and signaled to the pilot to slide open his side windshield panel. When the pilot did so, Unger said, "You're set to go."

"What about the guy who ran back to the terminal?" asked the pilot. "He forget something?"

"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.

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.

"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?»