What Could Go Wrong? (10 page)

Eddie spoke in a whisper. “I feel like a great big bird—a hawk or an eagle—is stuck in my chest, trying to get out. It . . . hurts.”

“Mine, too,” I whispered back.

Charlie didn't pay any attention to us. He
was looking around, and then he said in a slightly louder than normal voice, “We'll have a long ride to Aunt Molly's. Maybe we better make a pit stop before she shows up, okay? We'll get the check on the way out.”

I started to remind him I'd used the rest room just before the plane landed, and then I realized that what he'd said hadn't been intended for us. It had been intended to carry to the men on the other side of that flimsy divider.

I swiveled my head around so fast it hurt. What was he talking about? What did he intend to do?

“The rest rooms are back there,” he said. “Right next to the kitchen. Meet you at the cash register in a few minutes.”

The rest rooms wouldn't have any outside windows to escape through, I thought. But I slid out of my chair and went with the boys, hoping Charlie had a genuine idea to get us out of here without The Enemy right on our heels. I couldn't tell to look at Charlie how
he
felt, but it was obvious Eddie was just as scared as I was.

We entered the narrow corridor opening
beneath the sign for the rest rooms, Charlie leading the way, and then I saw it.

There was a doorway opening into the kitchen from that hallway, too.

A fat man in a white apron and a little hat looked up, startled, when Charlie led the way into the kitchen.

“No admittance back here,” he said. He had a big cast-iron frying pan in his hand, and it looked to me like a good way to enforce his rules if he wanted to.

“There a back door out of here? Into a different corridor than the one in from the restaurant?” Charlie asked urgently. He was carrying the bill the waiter had left with our desserts, and there were two twenty-dollar bills on top of it, all the cash he had. “Somebody's after us—not the cops or anything like that, some pretty bad dudes—and we don't want them to see us leave. You can keep the change, whatever's over the amount of the bill.”

I saw suspicion in the man's face, and then he looked at the money and checked the total on the bill. It only took him a second or two to make up his mind.

“Employees entrance back there,” he said, gesturing with a thumb. “All the way back, and to your left.”

Charlie grinned. “Thanks. And don't tell them we came through here, okay?”

“Not unless they're security officers,” the man agreed, waving us through.

I ran after Charlie, hearing Eddie behind me, past a long table where startled employees stopped making their salads and fancy-looking dishes, past a redheaded boy assembling hamburgers, letting the smells of grilling meat and onions out after us into a narrow hallway. Charlie hesitated only a moment, chose the left, and we listened to our own running feet slapping the tiled floor, heard our own gasping breaths.

When we reached a blank door at the end of the hall, Charlie shoved through it, looked in both directions, and led the way out into one of the broader passageways where a few uniformed airline employees were coming and going, paying no attention to us.

“Where are we going?” Eddie panted.

“I don't know yet,” Charlie admitted. “I'm
not sure if those guys followed us into that restaurant or if it was just a coincidence, but until we
do
know, I'd rather we had a chance to work out a plan.”

“A plan, yes, we need a plan,” Eddie puffed. He didn't sound as if he ran as much as Charlie and I did, though we were breathing kind of heavily, too, after pelting away from those men in the restaurant. “Where do we go to do this planning?”

“Somewhere with more people than this place,” I suggested strongly. “Maybe somewhere there are security guards around.”

“I think they keep moving, mostly.”

“Okay. Let's find one and follow along within sight of him,” I said. “So if we yell he'll hear us and come to our rescue.”

I couldn't help glancing back over my shoulder as we followed after a couple of flight attendants pulling their suitcases on little wheels, in case the door we had come through opened and The Enemy followed us; but by the time we came to one of the main halls there was no sign of pursuit.

We slowed our pace to a more normal one
but kept a sharp eye out in all directions. “Where the heck are we?” I asked. “I'm sure turned around.”

“If we keep going this way, we should come out about where we got off the plane,” Charlie said.

Eddie wasn't sure about that. “Do we want to go there? Will they look for us there?”

“I should think they might look for us down in the baggage area. Even if they don't know what luggage we had checked through, that's where the cabs and the buses come, and where anybody picking us up would probably plan to meet us.”

“Then let's stay away from the baggage area.” I stopped for a minute to rest my flight bag on a chair. “My arms are falling off. If we're going to run all over this terminal, maybe we ought to stick our stuff into one of those lockers and pick it up after Aunt Molly gets here. We could maybe outrun those guys if we weren't carrying so much junk.”

Charlie looked thoughtfully at the bag I'd put down. “Maybe we could set a trap for them.”

“Oh, sure, ambush 'em,” Eddie approved.
“Surround 'em, like we're a whole posse. Hold 'em until the cops come. Only we still don't have any proof they attacked Mrs. Basker, do we?”

Charlie seemed not to hear. “Let's go back to the waiting area where we came in. There it is, right up ahead. And then we can try a couple of things. Gracie's flight bag was identical to Mrs. Basker's, wasn't it? So maybe there's a chance that's what they're after. Maybe they think whatever was supposed to be in Mrs. Basker's bag got into Gracie's by mistake.”

“Nothing got into my bag by mistake,” I protested.

“No, but
they
don't know that. You were talking to the old lady, and you watched her stuff for her. In fact I think there was a short time when both your bags sat side by side. Either one of you could have picked up the wrong one.”

“Look and see, Gracie,” Eddie said. “Maybe you
did
pick up the wrong one.”

“No, I didn't. See?” I unzipped it. “There's my candy bars, and my book, and the case for my toothbrush.”

“I think I'm coming up with a plan,” Charlie said.

There was something about the little smile that was forming on his face that made me uneasy. “What?”

“You know how they stake out a goat in the jungle when they want the tiger to come in so they can capture it? How they use a helpless animal as bait?”

I made a choking sound. “Why are you looking at
me
?”

“Because you're the one with the blue flight bag like Mrs. Basker's. If they think maybe those bags got mixed up—”

“They can't,” I interrupted. “They searched hers, remember? I think they'd know an old lady's underwear from a kid's. Besides, my book and the candy bars would give them a clue if they opened mine.”

“True. But maybe they think she got confused and put whatever it is they want into
your
bag by mistake. So they want to search yours.”

Indignation made me scowl. “So what are you proposing? If you think I'm going to be a sacrificial goat, Charlie, you're mistaken!
Nobody is staking me out to be slaughtered!”

“Of course not, Gracie! If I let you get kidnapped or anything like that, your dad would never let us within miles of each other again, ever. But it's got to be you, because they already know you're the one with the blue bag.”

He sure wasn't making me any less apprehensive. “
What's
got to be me?”

“The bait. That's only a figure of speech; I don't expect anything to happen to you.”

“What if your plan doesn't work out so
they
know they aren't supposed to make anything happen to me?” I demanded. “Forget it, Charlie!
I'm not going to act as bait!
If you don't stop talking crazy I'm going to tell Dad what you wanted me to do, and he'll probably see that you get locked up!”

“You don't even know what my plan is, yet,” Charlie said, in that way he had of making everything sound reasonable even when you'd have to be a lunatic to go along with it.

“Yeah, Gracie, at least listen to his idea,” Eddie said.

I glared at him. “That's easy for
you
to say. He's not talking about using
you
for bait.”

“Gracie,” Charlie said, kindly and with infinite patience, “nothing would happen to you. You'd be perfectly safe.”

“Oh? Now that we're out of sight of those two thugs they're not dangerous anymore, is that it?”

“They're probably dangerous,” Charlie conceded in a more normal voice. “But that doesn't mean they can do anything to you. Listen to my idea, anyway, will you?”

So I listened to Charlie's idea, the way I'd been doing all my life. Like the time we went up on the barn roof together, and the time we took a shortcut through Grandpa's woods and fell into the abandoned root cellar and couldn't get out until they sent a search party after us at dusk, and the time when we were just little kids when he talked me into hiding with him in an abandoned freezer and we nearly suffocated before Wayne found us and got us out.

“Gracie,” Charlie asked, “are you listening?”

“I was thinking,” I told him, “about the times you nearly got someone killed.”

“How could I get you killed this time? In one of the busiest airports in the country, with
security guards all over the place? See, there's another one right now.”

I had a sudden unpleasant thought. Security guards weren't quite like real cops, were they? The ones in Portland had said they'd turn the case over to the police, once they'd called for help for Mrs. Basker to be taken to the hospital. What if they didn't know what to do in a genuine emergency?

“You're not listening again. What's the matter? Don't you trust me?”

For a minute I didn't answer that. I looked full into his face, saw the curling dark red hair, the sprinkle of freckles I'd always thought so charming, the candid blue eyes, and I didn't know the answer. Did I trust Charlie? My favorite cousin, with whom I'd always had so much fun?

Charlie, who my dad thought would get somebody killed someday with his pranks?

This wasn't a prank, though. This was deadly serious, I thought, and then wished I hadn't thought
deadly.
It sounded so ominous. But we were stuck in this big airport until Aunt Molly came, and those awful men
had
hurt Mrs. Basker and tried to rob her, and they didn't deserve to get away with it.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me your plan.”

Charlie is very good at explaining things. He works out details in his head very quickly. Eddie nodded a little at every one of them, but then Eddie wasn't the one who was going to be the goat.

“That's just a figure of speech,” Charlie said when I expressed my uneasiness with it. “It's so simple, Gracie, and there's no more danger than just running around the way we've been doing. You understand that all you have to do is sit there and wait, don't you? Give them a chance to grab your flight bag, if that's what they want?”

“But what if they really do it? What about my toothbrush, and my other stuff that's in the bag?”

“We can take it out and store it in one of those lockers if you want to.”

“But if it's empty anybody would know as soon as he picked it up.”

“Okay. We can stuff something into it to give it some weight. Buy something cheap from the gift shop—”

“There isn't anything cheap in the gift shop.”

“Well, look, I don't care if I lose the junk in
my
flight bag. We'll go around a corner where we're sure nobody is watching, and we'll trade what's in my bag for what's in yours. Then if they actually steal your bag, it'll be my stuff that's missing. Only it won't be missing for long, naturally, because we'll leave identification in your bag so the security men can tell they stole it when they catch them and get it back. See?”

I saw. I didn't like it a lot, but I understood. And I didn't have any better ideas. “All right,” I said reluctantly. “But you guys better not really leave me alone.”

“Of course not. We'll do just what I said, hide where we can watch you and call for the security guards when those guys come near you.”

“I don't want to sit in
that
row of seats, though,” I said, indicating the ones he'd told me would be the right place for the stakeout. “Why can't I sit with my back against the wall, like the cops do in movies, so I can see what's going on? I hate the idea of someone sneaking up behind me!”

“But that's just the point, Gracie. They
have
to be able to sneak up behind you, or they won't try to steal your bag. Remember, put it down beside your chair, a little behind you, so it'll be easy for them to grab. And if you sense someone there, don't look around and scare them off. Let them take the bag. That'll give us evidence that they've done something wrong when we call in the security people. Then they can investigate and we'll tell them about Mrs. Basker, and maybe there will be some evidence to connect them with
that
crime that the police wouldn't even look into if we didn't catch them stealing your bag.”

I didn't know if it sounded logical or not. He must have read that in my face, because Charlie added the clincher. “You don't want them to get away with what they did to Mrs. Basker, do you?”

And that's why a few minutes later I was sitting alone in a row of seats at one of the nearly deserted departure areas, my flight bag flung carelessly beside my chair, with all the little hairs prickling on the back of my neck as I waited for The Enemy to find me.