On Thin Ice. Debra Brown Lee

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      Chapter 5

      The rhythmic whomp of chopper blades ripped her from an uneasy sleep. Lauren sat up in the hard, single bed and blinked her eyes open to pitch-black. “Oh, right.”

      Before she’d gone to sleep last night, she’d drawn the blackout shades in the trailer’s tiny bedroom. Not that it was necessary in the dead of an arctic winter when darkness prevailed twenty-plus hours a day.

      She checked the glow-in-the-dark hands of her watch. 2:40 a.m. Great. She’d never get back to sleep now. Why had she dreamt of a helicopter? In this weather, it was the last thing—

      Wait! There it was again. She scrambled out of bed and ripped the Velcro-lashed drape away from the window. The harsh yard lights made her squint. She blinked a few times, to make sure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing.

      Absolutely nothing.

      No blowing snow. Not a breath of wind, in fact. The yard between her trailer and the drilling rig and the rest of the camp was perfectly still. Then she heard it again. She hadn’t been dreaming. From this vantage point she couldn’t see the chopper pad lying out beyond the camp, but her ears told her everything she needed to know.

      Someone was here. Thank God!

      She flipped on the overhead light and snatched a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from the pile of clothes she’d unpacked last night. If the weather had cleared long enough for a chopper to get in, maybe she could get word to her boss. Let Bill know what had happened to Paddy O’Connor, about the faulty computer system and those strange rock samples she’d found outside her trailer when she’d arrived.

      Not bothering to wash her face or run a comb through her tangled hair, she jerked the connecting door open to the lab, just as the fluorescent lights snapped on overhead.

      Jack Salvio stood across the room, framed by the lab’s open doorway, a master key in his hand. “Good. You’re up.”

      “What’s going on? There’s a chopper outside.”

      “Grab your gear. You’re outta here.”

      “What?” She padded across the linoleum to where she’d left her boots, and slipped them on.

      Ignoring her question, Salvio brushed past her and made a quick survey of the lab, his gaze darting across the stainless steel countertops, pausing on the open notebook at her workstation. She knew what he was looking for.

      “Those samples you took from my locked trailer yesterday—where are they, Jack?” She was still steamed about the whole incident. She’d come back here yesterday afternoon to find them gone. Salvio was the only other person with a key.

      “I told you. They were from last week. Shoulda been shipped days ago back to the lab at Tiger. It’s taken care of now.”

      “That’s not the point.”

      He started to read her handwritten notes about the unusual samples. Lauren closed the distance between them and snapped the notebook shut.

      What Salvio didn’t know was that he’d missed one of the samples when he’d confiscated the crate. Lauren’s eyes darted to the open plastic bag sitting next to her microscope. Salvio’s gaze followed. She snatched it off the counter and stuffed it into the pocket of her cardigan.

      “What’s that?”

      “Nothing. Just something I was working on yesterday.” She tossed him a blank look.

      “Don’t screw around, Lauren. There’s no time.” He continued to eye the bulge in her pocket, the lines in his face deepening into a scowl.

      “I’m not screwing around.” She tried to ignore the fact that for some silly reason he was making her nervous. “What exactly is going on here, Jack?”

      “Like I said, you’re outta here.”

      “That’s ridiculous. I’m not leaving, I just got here.”

      “Yeah, you are. I’m sending O’Connor’s body back to Deadhorse. You’re going with it.”

      “What? I can’t leave now. We’re nearly at target depth.”

      No one else knew what to look for—where and how much to sample, or what the samples meant, whether they had to drill deeper, or if they could stop. No one could make those decisions except the geologist.

      Besides, she wasn’t going anywhere until she found out where those peculiar rock samples had come from, and what Salvio had done with the crate.

      “You’re the one who found the body. And someone from Tiger’s got to make the report. It’s you or me.” Salvio nodded at the rig. “Unless you want me to shut the whole frickin’ thing down like I wanted to in the first place. Then we can go in together.”

      “No. That’s out of the question, and you know it.”

      “Well, then?”

      Lauren swore. Salvio was in charge and couldn’t leave the island while they were drilling, especially now that they had no toolpusher to manage the crew. And if they didn’t keep drilling, they’d never finish on time.

      “Start packing.” Salvio shot her a nasty look just begging her to challenge him. “The break in the weather’s temporary. We got a half hour at best.” He started for the door.

      Lauren’s hand closed over the rock sample in her cardigan pocket. Instinct told her it was the key to this whole nightmare. On impulse, she dashed into the bedroom and stuffed it into a half-full box of tampons. Safest place on the planet. No guy in his right mind would ever touch that box.

      Grabbing her jacket, she followed Salvio out the door. The cold hit her like a brick wall. The wind had died, but the ambient air temperature had dropped. She jogged after him, teeth chattering.

      The whole place was in an uproar. Salvio hadn’t been kidding. Four men in bunny boots and survival gear exited the prefab camp, bearing Paddy O’Connor’s stiff, plastic-wrapped body across the yard toward the chopper pad out back.

      “Why didn’t you wake me sooner? You can’t make a decision like this on your own. What if the weather gets worse? I might never get back to the island. We need to call in, tell someone what’s hap—” Lauren stopped dead in her tracks. “Wait a minute!”

      Salvio turned.

      “The chopper. How’d you get it?” She spun toward the tiny communications shack nestled between the camp and the rig. “The satellite link! It’s up!”

      “Not anymore. It was working just long enough for me to make the call to Deadhorse for the bird.”

      “But Bill Walters… Didn’t you—”

      “Never got the chance to call him. Besides—”

      Lauren didn’t wait for him to finish. Pushing through a line of men making for the rig, she stormed toward camp.

      “Get your stuff together, Fotheringay!” Salvio shouted after her. “You’re СКАЧАТЬ