Six Passengers, Five Parachutes (Quintana Adventures Book 2) by Ian Bull

Author:Ian Bull [Bull, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

* * *

Robert Snow

Day 10: Monday Morning

Malibu, California

It’s a sunny and clear late Monday morning, and while millions of Los Angeles office drones toil in their cubicles, Tina and I are hiking on the Backbone Trail that runs right along the crest of the Malibu Mountains.

“Are our bags safe in that dirt parking lot?” I ask.

“We’re the only people up here,” Tina says, adjusting her day pack. She’s got the picnic lunch and water, and I’m carrying the blanket and towels. She reaches and takes my hand.

“It’s so quiet,” I say.

“That’s why we came. You deserve this calm before the storm.”

We walk hand in hand. I haven’t held hands and walked with a girl since high school. Maybe never, actually. Maybe I just saw it in a movie about high school.

“We’re so high up that the ocean looks tilted from here,” I say.

“And blue. The sky and the ocean are almost the same color,” she says, then closes one eye and points in a long arc at the horizon, where the sky touches the sea.

She dressed sexy for me, in black hiking shorts and a tight blue shirt. Even the floppy sun hat and glasses add to her look. She reminds me of a trekker fucking her way around the world. I’d like to think she did that in her younger days.

“I never knew you could do this is L.A.,” I say.

“I try to do it as often as I can. It keeps me sane.”

The only noise is our shoes crunching on the dirt road. After all that work—the taping, the fighting, the rushing, the travel—this silent, slow emptiness is exactly what I need before I drive ten hours to Arizona.

“There are deer, bobcats, and coyotes up here. Even mountain lions,” Tina says.

“Mountain lions? Will we see one?” I ask, looking around.

“Probably not. They avoid us.”

I imagine a mountain lion tracking us and then leaping out and attacking. I remember a TV show about how to survive animal attacks. When a lion bites your arm, you resist the urge to pull your bloody arm away, and instead you push your arm deeper inside its mouth and throat so that it chokes. Or maybe that was an alligator. I want to tell Tina and impress her with my knowledge, but it now seems dumb enough that she might just laugh.

“Feeling better?” she asks. “You weren’t happy last night on the plane.”

“I guess I wasn’t.”

She squeezes my hand. “We need to be on the same page. The crew will be looking at us. We have to be a united front—”

“No chinks in the armor. I answer for you, and you for me. You’re saying my own lines back to me.” I laugh.

Tina swings our hands as we stroll along. It feels nice. “It’s what you tell me before every big production, but you need to hear it, too. You’re the best producer there is, but you always get so worked up before it begins.”

“I go into warp drive.”

“That’s why I want to clear the air before it gets crazy.

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