Up Close and Dangerous by Linda Howard Read Free Book Online

him. Get out of the seat. That’s what she needed to do. With her left hand she fumbled for the seat belt, popped the clasp open. When the belt released, her lower body rolled off the seat and dropped with a painful thud that made her groan again, but she was still tangled in the shoulder strap. She struggled free of it, and managed to get to her knees.
    No wonder her right arm had felt as if something was cutting into it: something was. A triangular shard of metal protruded from her triceps. Feeling irrationally insulted by the injury, she jerked the shard out and threw it away, then scrambled forward until she could reach Justice. The angle at which the plane was resting made balance difficult even if she hadn’t been woozy and dealing with her own aches and injuries, but she braced her right foot against the side of the plane and hauled herself up so she could reach the scant space between the two pilots’ seats.
    Oh, God, there was so much blood. Was he dead? He’d fought so hard to bring the plane down at a survivable angle, she couldn’t bear it if he’d saved her life and died in the attempt. Her hand shaking, she reached out and touched his neck, but her body was too outraged by the abuse it had taken to stop trembling and she couldn’t tell if he had a pulse or not. “You can’t be dead,” she whispered desperately, holding her hand under his nose to see if she could feel his breath. She thought she did, and stared hard at his chest. Finally she saw the up-and-down movement, and the relief that swamped her was so acute she almost burst into tears.
    He was still alive, but unconscious, and injured. What should she do? Should she move him? What if he had spinal injuries? But what if she did nothing, and he bled to death?
    She leaned her aching head against the side of his seat, just for a moment. Think, Bailey! she commanded herself. She had to do something. She had to deal with what she knew was wrong with him, not what might be wrong, and she knew for a fact he was losing a lot of blood. So, first things first: stop the bleeding.
    She looked up, searching for something to hold on to while she clambered forward into the cockpit, but nothing, literally, was there. The left wing and most of the fuselage on that side were just gone, ripped away as if a giant can opener had opened up the aircraft. There was nothing to grasp except the razor-sharp edges of mangled metal. Part of a broken tree limb stuck through the gaping hole.
    There was nothing else to use, so she gripped the top edge of Justice’s seat and pulled herself up, slithering between what was left of the roof and the top of the copilot’s seat. The best position she could get in was a crouch, with her feet braced against the right door. “Justice,” she said, because she’d read somewhere that unconscious people sometimes could still hear and respond a little to their names. Whether or not that was true, she didn’t know, but what could it hurt?
    “Justice!” she said again, more insistently, as she grasped his shoulders and tried to pull him upright. It was like pulling on a log. His head lolled to the side, blood dripping from his nose and chin.
    Pulling on him wasn’t going to work. His seat belt was holding him in place, but she was working against gravity. She needed to release the belt and get him out of the seat, try to get him out of the plane.
    Like she had, he would fall out of the seat as soon as the belt was released, but it was a small plane; the distance was a couple of feet, at best. Still, the fuselage had been crushed inward on the copilot’s side, and a tree branch had punctured all the way through the metal skin like a wooden stake through a vampire’s heart. The sharp end of the tree branch was angled toward the back, rather than pointing upward, but she didn’t want to take the chance he might be impaled, so she looked around for something to put over the branch.
    The first thing she thought of was her tote bag, but