Up Close and Dangerous (9 page)

“I’ll try.”

She opened the sealed square containing two generic ibuprofen tablets, and slipped one between his lips. She saw his jaw working a little as he maneuvered the pill around, worked up some saliva, and swallowed. She gave him the other pill; he repeated the process, then said, “Mission accomplished.”

“Good. Now for the food.” Tearing open the candy bar wrapper, she pinched off a small piece of the Snickers bar and held it to his lips. Obediently he took it in his mouth and began to chew.

“Snickers,” he said, identifying the taste.

“You got it. Normally I take my chocolate straight, but I thought the peanuts were a good idea, for the protein, so I brought Snickers. Smart, don’t you think?”

“Works for me.”

She waited a minute, to see if the chocolate made him sick. She was on unfamiliar ground here, so she didn’t know if he was likely to start vomiting or not. She did know that, after donating blood at the Red Cross, the donors were given something to drink to help replace their lost liquid, and some crackers or cookies to stave off shock. With the Snickers, she figured she had half of the bases covered.

After a few minutes she gave him another bite of candy. “I wish I had something to numb your scalp and forehead,” she murmured. “Even teething gel for babies would be better than nothing, but the first-aid kit doesn’t seem to be geared toward babies.”

He chewed, swallowed, and said, “Ice.”

The first-aid kit did have one of those instant ice packs, but she was hesitant to use it. “I don’t know. If you weren’t already a little shocky, if the cold wasn’t already a problem, I wouldn’t worry. But an ice pack on your head will cool you all over, and I don’t want to do that.” She chewed on her lip a moment, thinking. “On the other hand, pain causes a shock to the system, too. If the effect’s going to be the same, why make you go through the pain?”

“I vote for less pain.”

She got the ice pack from the kit, read the directions, and began kneading the plastic tube. The pack wasn’t large enough to cover the entire cut, but if she positioned it just right she could get it over most of the swelling, and over the scalp where the laceration was deepest. When the pack was so cold she could barely stand to hold it, she cut some gauze from the roll and covered the cut with a single layer, then gently placed the ice pack on top of the gauze.

He sucked in his breath at the cold. She imagined it made his head hurt like blue blazes, but he didn’t complain.

“While that’s doing its thing, I’m going to clean some of this dried blood off you. Bet you’d like to open your eyes, huh?”

She kept up a running commentary as she opened a pack of her premoistened, aloe-treated wipes, extracted one, and set to work around his eyes. Dried blood, she discovered, wasn’t easy to remove. A washcloth, with its rougher surface, would have worked better. Blood was caked in his eyebrows and eyelashes, two areas where she couldn’t scrub; she didn’t want to cause the cut to begin bleeding again so she had to be gentle around his eyebrows, and she couldn’t scrub around his eyes even if he hadn’t been cut. So she swabbed away, and when the towelette was completely red, she put it aside and got a fresh wipe.

When she glanced back at him, the new wipe in her hand, his eyes were slitted open and he was watching her. The pale bluish-gray color of his irises was startling in contrast with the darkness of his lashes.

“Well, hello. Long time no see,” she said.

Another of those faint smiles quirked his mouth. Slowly, as if moving his eyes hurt, he looked around as much as he could while lying flat on his back and not moving his head at all. When he looked past her and saw the mangled plane, his eyes widened a little and he said, “Holy shit.”

“Yeah, I know.” She definitely agreed with the sentiment. The fact that they were alive and all in one piece, though not completely without damage, was a bit startling when compared to the structural hit the plane had taken. She handled the shock by not looking at the big picture, instead focusing on the details of survival and the tasks ahead of her. Details, by definition, were little things. She could handle the little things, one by one.

Gradually she worked her way down his face, behind and in his ears, down his neck, over his shoulders and chest. Even his arms and hands were bloody. She kept him covered as much as possible, uncovering one section at a time and re-covering it as soon as she had it clean. His pants were bloody, too, but they could wait until he could manage for himself, she thought. The first layer of clothes she’d laid over him were already stained; the blood had dried, and there was nothing she could do about that. She did need to get his feet clean and in dry socks, though, to ward off frostbite.

Moving down to the bottom of the heap, she folded the clothes back, worked his bloody shoes and socks off, and as quickly as possible cleaned and dried his feet. Cleansed of the rusty stains, they were white with cold. Bracing herself against the shock, she raised the hems of her multiple shirts and shifted forward so his feet were against her stomach. They were so cold she shuddered at the contact but didn’t jerk away. She began chafing his toes through the layers of cloth. “Can you feel this?”

“Oh, yeah.” There was a deep note in his voice, a sort of subtle purr; he sounded like a tiger getting a massage.

It took her a second, but then she realized his cold toes were tucked against her breasts—her bare breasts. There was no help for it because his feet were big, probably size elevens or even larger, and she couldn’t make her torso any longer, so, logically, his toes were going to be on her breasts. She swatted his leg. “Behave,” she said sharply, “or I’ll let you get frostbite.”

“You aren’t wearing a bra,” he said, instead of responding to what she’d said—or maybe that was his response, as if the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra was excuse enough for the fact that he was wiggling his toes, just a little.

“It got wet when I was dragging you out of the plane, through the snow, so I took it off.” She kept her tone severe.

He got the inference that she was braless only because of what she had done to rescue him, and he winced a little. “Okay, okay. But, damn, bare tits. You can’t blame me.”

“Want to bet?” It occurred to her that the icy, unfriendly Captain Justice wouldn’t normally be talking this way to her, that he almost certainly had a concussion and was woozy and in pain. She couldn’t see him being roguish and plainspoken, but from the moment he’d regained consciousness his language had been as informal as if he were talking to another man. It said something, she thought, that a concussion had improved his personality. “And I don’t like the word ‘tits.’”

“Boobs, then. Is that better?”

“What’s wrong with ‘breasts’?”

“Not a damn thing, as far as I can tell.” His toes wiggled again.

She swatted his leg again. “Be still, or you can get your own feet warm.”

“I don’t have any boobs to tuck them against, and even if I did I wouldn’t be able to get my feet up to my chest. I’m not into yoga.”

He was definitely feeling better, and was more awake; he was speaking in sentences instead of one- or two-word answers. Chocolate had to be a miracle drug.

“Well, tell you what: get some breast implants, take up yoga, and you’ll be set for life.” Judging that he’d had enough fun, she removed his feet from under her shirts, tugged his clean pair of socks on him, and tucked the layers of clothing around him again. “Fun’s over. Is your forehead frozen yet?”

“Feels like it.”

“Let me finish reading the instructions, and we’ll get this over with.” She picked up the booklet again. “By the way, since we don’t have any water to flush out the wound, I’m going to use mouthwash. It might sting.”

“Great.” A world of irony was in the single word.

Bailey hid a smile as she read. “Okay…yada yada…I got that part.
‘Grasp the needle with pliers so the point curves upward.’
” She looked at the curved suture needle, then the rest of the contents from the first-aid kit. No pliers were included. “That’s great,” she said sarcastically. “I need pliers. Normally I have a pair in my makeup bag, but, gee, it never occurred to me I’d need them on vacation.”

“There’s a small toolbox in the plane.”

“Where?”

“Secured in the baggage compartment.”

“I didn’t see it when I was getting the bags out,” she said, but got to her feet to recheck. “How big is it?”

“About half the size of a briefcase. It’s just a few basic tools: hammer, pliers, a couple of wrenches, and screwdrivers.”

Feeling as if she’d been in and out of the wreckage so often she was wearing a groove in the earth, Bailey maneuvered her way back into the plane, clambered into the passenger seat, and looked over the back into the baggage compartment. The floor of the plane was buckled from the impact so everything back there had been tossed around, but the cargo net had been in place to keep anything from flying out the way her tote bag had. Just as she opened her mouth to tell him nothing was there, he said, “It should be in brackets against the back wall, just inside the baggage compartment door. See it?”

She looked where he’d said and there it was, safely secured. Duh. She’d been looking on the floor of the plane, not on the walls. “Yeah, I’ve got it.” Toolbox in hand, she backed out of the plane.

She felt a little light-headed when she stood, so she remained still for a moment. Was it altitude sickness again, even though she’d been careful to move slowly? Or did she need some of that candy bar? After a moment the dizziness passed, so she voted for the candy bar.

“I think I need to eat, too,” she said, going to her knees beside him and breaking off a bite of the Snickers bar. “I don’t want to pass out while I’m jabbing a needle into you.” At this rate, she’d be doing good to have him stitched up by sunset.

Thinking of sunset reminded her of time, and she realized that not once had she checked her watch. She had no idea how long ago she had regained consciousness, or how long it had so far taken her to accomplish her tasks, much less how much time she had left in the day. Automatically she pushed up the cuffs on her left arm, and stared at her bare wrist where her watch had once been.

“My watch is gone. I wonder how that happened.”

“Probably you banged your arm against something and a pin snapped, or a link broke. Was it expensive?”

“No, it was a cheap waterproof deal I bought for vacation. I’m going—I
was
going—white-water rafting with my brother and his wife.”

“You can catch up with the guide party tomorrow, or the day after.”

“Maybe.” Slowly she chewed the candy, not sharing with him her terrible sense of isolation, as if rescue was a long time away.

She allowed herself only one bite, to stave off the dizziness, then forced herself back to the matter at hand. After carefully folding the wrapper over the remaining portion of candy and putting it aside, she removed the cold pack from his forehead.

“I have to shift you around, so you’re lying with your head downhill, at least until after I rinse the cut—unless you want mouthwash all over your face and running under you.”

“No thanks. I can do this myself, though; just tell me what you want me to do.”

“Slide toward me, first; I don’t want you to get off the blanket into the snow. Okay, good. Now rotate on your butt—wait a minute, let me get this piece of vinyl under your head. That’s it.” His gyrations had caused part of the mound of clothes to fall off and she took a minute to replace them.

To keep the mouthwash out of his eyes, he tilted his head back as far as it would go. “Okay. Here goes,” said Bailey, using her left hand as a barrier against any stray splashes, and began carefully pouring the mouthwash over the cut. He twitched, once, then held himself very still.

She watched for any trash or dirt that may have gotten into the wound, but all she saw was blood being washed away. The instructions had said not to dislodge any obvious clots, so she tried not to let the mouthwash splash directly into the cut. When all the mouthwash was gone, she put the cap back on the empty bottle and set it aside, then opened one of the alcohol prep pads and began cleaning around the cut.

She didn’t let herself think about the seriousness of the gash, or how easy it would be for him to pick up an infection in these less than sterile circumstances. Instead she concentrated on what she had to do, step by step. She wiped her hands, the needle, and the pliers with another alcohol pad. Then she put on the disposable plastic gloves and wiped everything again. She wiped his forehead with an iodine pad. When she had done everything she could possibly do to kill every germ, she prepared a suture, took a deep breath, and began.

“The instructions say to start in the middle,” she murmured as she punctured his skin with the curved needle and forced it on around to the other side of the cut. “I guess that’s so you don’t end up with a big lump of skin at one end, if I don’t sew you up evenly.”

He didn’t answer. His eyes were closed and he was taking very measured breaths. Even with the ice pack and ibuprofen, Bailey knew this had to hurt, but evidently it wasn’t the agony she’d feared she would be inflicting on him. He wasn’t tensing every time she jabbed him, at any rate. She went slowly, afraid of making a mistake. Every stitch had to be tied off and clipped, so one stitch was independent of all the others, and the instructions had said to make certain the knot was lying on the skin, not directly on the cut. She made herself think of it as hemming a pair of pants, which didn’t help a lot because sewing was
so
not her favorite thing to do—and she wasn’t very good at hemming pants, either.

The gash was a good six inches long. She had no idea how many stitches per inch she was supposed to put in, so she simply worked from the middle and put in as many as looked right to her. When she was finished, her hands were shaking, and she was sure she’d taken at least an hour to get the stitching done. She carefully blotted the line of black stitches, wiping away the dots of blood where the needle had punctured his skin, then hesitated. Should she apply antibiotic salve before putting a bandage over the wound? She didn’t think doctors did that now, but then they normally did their stitching in a sterile environment, with all the drugs and paraphernalia they needed. She and Justice were stuck on the side of a mountain, in the snow, with very little food. She thought his immune system might need all the help it could get.