“You do that, there’s nothing to stop us from shooting.” Phil’s eyes went completely flat again. He was definitely the snake in this situation—at least as far as traditional depictions of serpents went.
“Don’t lie to me,” I said. “We both know you don’t want to hit a fuselage and cause an explosion.”
He simply shrugged. I guessed we were going to have to see who blinked first.
I raised my eyebrows at Ron.
A pained expression crossed his face. “Boss, she fucking scares me. Even more than you do.”
Phil shook his head slowly. “You gotta make the call that’s right for you, Ron. By there will definitely be repercussions if you get the cash and take it to her.”
“And if you don’t get the cash and bring it to me, there will be an entirely different set of repercussions,” I added.
My stomach clenched, and I couldn’t tell if it was the diamonds—I tried not to think about what they might do to my digestive system as either a snake or a human—or if it was the sudden realization that I was actually going head-to-head against a drug smuggler.
I had grown up with scientists. Calm, rational people, who rarely even took Tylenol. And they had been too worried about what medication for humans might do to someone with my physiology, so they had never given me even that much.
Drug dealers were out of my realm of experience. Everything I knew about them I got from television and movies.
And yet here I was, explaining to one smuggler that if he didn’t go up against his boss, he was going to suffer.
This is not the kind of counselor I intended to be.
But this was where I was. Stuck in an airplane with a bunch of drug dealers. I glanced over at Paige’s parents. And a couple of drug users, too. And I was about to get into a battle over a bunch of cash stuffed in the dead woman’s chest.
My mind kept going off on ridiculous tangents. I kept thinking that I would rather the money be in a pirate’s chest. I shook my head at myself. I knew enough about psychology to know why I was doing that. It was an attempt to distract myself from trauma.
I couldn’t help but notice that Ron was spending his time looking warily back and forth between me and Phil. What would I do if he decided to follow Phil’s orders instead of mine?
Could I really throw someone out the plane? I wondered.
I seemed to recall reading once that it wasn’t all that easy to open the bulkhead door midflight. Something about people who opened it getting sucked out of the airplane. It wasn’t a good idea in general, I was sure.
Ron inhaled deeply as if to steel himself against what he had to do next. Then he turned to the men in the cabin and spoke in that rapid-fire Spanish of his. Suddenly, all the Spanish-speaking men who didn’t speak English well enough to follow along—which was, apparently, all three of them—looked horrified.
Phil kept talking, gesturing with the Bowie knife.
One of the men took a step forward—the one who had fallen to his knees in front of me. He was shaking his head, waving his hands, and speaking so quickly that I couldn’t understand anything he said—until he came to the words Santa Muerte.
Great. This conversation had something to do with the death saint.
I still didn’t have a really good sense of how Santa Muerte fit into Catholic iconography. But I knew she was connected the snake, and several of the people on the plane connected the snake to me, for obvious reasons. So in a sense, she was my patron saint, too.
“What are they saying?” I asked.
Phil chuckled. “They’re refusing to cut open Abuela because it would desecrate the body and that would anger Santa Muerte.”
“Even when I told them that you wanted it done, they refused.” Ron shook his head. “I may never be able to get them to help out.”
“Do they really have to help at all?” I waved one hand at the open casket. “You can handle her, right?”
From the other side of me, Phil snorted. “Yeah, it’s not like she’s going to fight back.”
Ron shot him an irritated look. “I thought you didn’t want this?”
The boss drug-runner shrugged. “I just don’t want you to give the money to her. It’s fine with me if you go ahead and remove it from the old broad’s chest.”
I rolled my eyes. “Quit stalling and get the money out.”
Turns out it was the wrong order to give.
Chapter 11
As soon as Ron moved toward the casket, all hell broke loose.
The man who’d complained about desecrating the body shifted his knife—the one he’d picked up again at some point—to the opposite hand and drew a gun.
Apparently, he really didn’t speak English, because he obviously missed the byplay earlier about not wanting to explode the plane. When he leveled the muzzle at Ron, almost everyone else in the plane drew a weapon, too, and the sides were instantly drawn.
But those lines also seemed a little fuzzy. Because the only person pointing a gun at me was Phil.
And of course, I didn’t have a gun to draw on anyone.
Even Hale had gotten in on the gun-drawing game. But he wasn’t sure who to point at, either. He wavered between me and Ron for a second, before settling on Ron.
Ron didn’t draw a gun at all. Apparently, he realized it was a bad idea to shoot inside a plane.
As my gaze flickered from one gun-wielding bad guy to the next, I frantically tried to come up with something to say or do that would defuse the situation.
At that moment, the plane began to descend.
I risked a glance out a window. We seem to be floating over miles and
