Up Close and Dangerous by Linda Howard Page A

pair of brackets. She stared at it in disbelief. Was she already hallucinating? She blinked, but the crowbar was still there. She touched it, and felt the cold, rough metal. The bar was a short one, just about a foot long, but it was real, and it was just what she needed.
    Removing the crowbar from the brackets, she jammed the sharp end in at the middle, where the lock mechanism was, and pushed up. The lid buckled a little, then sprang open.
    She grabbed the olive-drab box with the red cross on it, and once more worked her way out. Going down on her knees beside him in the snow, she fumbled with the latches on the box. Why did everything have to have a damn latch? Why couldn’t things just
open
?
    His eyes opened, just a slit, and he managed to lift his hand toward his head. Bailey grabbed his wrist. “No, don’t touch it. You’re bleeding a lot, so I have to put pressure on it.”
    “Suture,” he rasped, closing his eyes against the blood that seeped into them.
    “What?”
    He took a few breaths; talking was still difficult. “In the box. Sutures.”
    She stared at him, aghast. She could put pressure on the wound. She could clean the cut, she could fashion butterfly bandages from tape to hold the edges of the cut together. She could put salve on it. But he wanted her to
sew him up
?
    “Oh, shit!” she blurted.

6
    A RGUING WITH A SEMICONSCIOUS MAN MADE NO SENSE, but Bailey couldn’t seem to stop herself. “I don’t have any medical training, unless you count watching
ER.
No one in his right mind would want me sewing on him, but, hey, you aren’t in your right mind, are you? You have a head injury. On the theory that it isn’t smart to let someone with possible brain damage make the decisions, I’m going to ignore that suggestion. Besides, I don’t sew.”
    “Learn,” he muttered. “Make yourself useful.”
    She ground her teeth together. Useful? What did he think she’d been doing while he lolled about unconscious? Did he think he’d made it out of the plane under his own steam? She was wet and freezing because she’d been lying in the snow, pulling him out of the plane. Her hands were turning blue, and she was shaking so hard it would serve him right if she
did
try to sew him up.
    The cold made her think: the jacket. She’d forgotten about the jacket, which was even more evidence that shock, or cold, or both, had slowed down her mental processes. She pulled it on, grateful for even that thin protection from the cold, but she was so wet she wasn’t certain anything could get her warm unless she first got dry.
    Silently she tore open a pack of sterile pads and placed two of them over the cut on Justice’s head, using her hands to hold them in place and apply pressure. A rough sound of pain rattled in his throat, then he bit it off and lay perfectly still.
    She should probably talk to him, she thought, help keep him conscious and focused. “I don’t know what to do first,” she confessed. A fit of convulsive shaking seized her and she stopped talking, her teeth chattering so hard she couldn’t have said a word anyway. When the shaking passed, she concentrated fiercely on holding the sterile pads in place. “I have to stop this bleeding. But we’re in the snow”—another episode of shaking interrupted her—“and I’m so cold and wet I can barely move. You’ll go into shock—”
    He took a few breaths, as if gearing himself up for the ordeal of speaking. “Kit,” he finally managed. “Blanket…in bottom of kit.”
    The only kit at hand was the first-aid kit. Leaving the pads in place on his head, she began taking things out of the kit and setting them in the open lid. Under everything, neatly folded in a sealed pouch, was one of those thin silver space blankets. Opening the pouch, she shook the blanket open. How much good it would do she didn’t know, having never used one before, but she wasn’t about to question anything she could use as a barrier between them and the cold. She was