“Smart move,” Hale said. I probably should not have been surprised to hear him sound like a toady.
“Why don’t you two go ahead and take the baby on the plane. I think the casket’s the last thing we need to load.”
Crap. They really were getting on the plane. And I had to make my decision right now about whether I was going to try to sneak on the plane with them and continue this insane plan.
Or if I was going to let them fly away with Baby Paige.
Neither option sounded great. The letting them fly away idea was a self-serving move, designed to save my own skin.
It was exactly the kind of cold-blooded behavior one would expect from a snake.
And it a kind of behavior I had spent my entire life training myself to avoid.
No. I need to go with them.
I just needed to figure out how.
Chapter 5
Okay. They were taking Paige and fleeing the country entirely. If I didn’t go with them, they would almost certainly disappear forever.
They were taking a casket with a dead body—and who knew what else—using it as an excuse of some sort to bypass normal entry ports? Something about getting past customs, anyway.
Everyone had moved away from the casket, but the top lid was still open.
A shudder rippled down my entire body at the thought of what I was about to do next. The irony didn’t escape me, either. Many people, if not most, would shudder at the thought of sharing an enclosed space with a snake. Still, I had enough human socialization to be anxious about getting stuck in a casket with a dead woman.
That’s when I figured out why the casket was open in the first place.
“Hey, Ron,” I heard Phil call out. “You have your package ready for Abuela?”
They were going to use her to smuggle something.
Okay. Then they definitely would be opening the casket again.
I had one chance.
First taking a quick glance out from behind the wheel well to make sure no one was watching, I practically launched myself over to the gurney, muscling my way up into the casket. I pulled my back half up behind me as quickly as I could, working to ignore the fact that I was sliding down the dead body of a woman who was probably someone’s Abuela, even if she wasn’t Phil’s.
The inside of the coffin smelled of death and chemicals. And something else I couldn’t quite place.
When I heard footsteps approaching, I stopped trying to figure it out and went back to getting to a good hiding spot.
I had just enough time to get all the way to the bottom of the casket and coil up as tightly as I could, shoving most of my body under the satin coverings, when a shadow passed over the open top half.
“Hey, boss. I’m tucking this under her, okay? Right here at the top.”
“That’s fine,” Phil answered.
A hand dropped down into the casket holding a brown-paper-wrapped package. Lifting up Abuela’s shoulders, he placed the package beneath the body, then tucked her back down into place.
Drugs? I wondered.
Maybe, though it seemed like kind of a small package for going out in a flight. Not necessarily the amount they would need to tuck away into a dead body.
Under a dead body, I reminded myself sternly. Under.
Then the lid was closing, and I was encased in darkness.
God, I hope there is a way out of here once it’s all closed up.
Soon enough, the gurney was rolling again, and I had another fear to replace that one.
What if they put me in an unpressurized cargo hold?
Couldn’t that cause problems in animals?
I really had not thought this through. I definitely needed to spend more time thinking and much less time acting. If I didn’t, I would never survive my career as a counselor.
For that matter, I needed to be very careful right now, or I wouldn’t survive my first week as a fully licensed counselor.
I needn’t have worried about the cargo hold, though, as I soon heard people talking outside the casket.
“Why is he bringing that in here?” Lori asked.
“Boss doesn’t like having his merchandise out of his sight if he can help it,” Ron replied. “Makes him nervous. And believe me, none of us want to see him get twitchy.”
It sounded to me like he stressed the word twitchy as if he were making a subtle commentary on Lori’s state. But if he was, I guessed Lori missed it. It didn’t seem to me that a woman who peed herself and went on to board an international flight was the kind of person who really focused on the details.
At about the same time I had that thought, I realized there was some light filtering in through the cracks around the edges of the casket.
Looks like Boss Phil cheaped out on the casket, too. Maybe he’s worried about leaving it alone in the cargo hold to fall apart and spill his merchandise.
At least if it fell to pieces up here among the passengers, there would be plenty of people to retrieve the goods for him. Immediately.
Lori grumbled a little more, but soon the roaring of the engine drowned her out. Then we were taking off, the swoop of the aircraft into the air leaving me for several seconds with a rolling stomach and head.
I should have settled down for the flight, however long it was likely to take. But I couldn’t quit thinking about the fact that I’d be settling in with a human corpse. Oddly enough, I’d been more comfortable in a running engine.
To distract myself, I decided to try to figure out what was inside that package Ron had hidden away beneath Abuela.
Of course, that would mean actually getting under Abuela’s body to figure out what was going on. It wasn’t ideal—but I had gotten bored with hiding
