Paper Doll Read Online Free Page B

cord twisting behind.
    â€œLewis is having a cat throw,” Bryant said. He had decided he owed it to the cat.
    Bean stood, without turning. “Was that a cat?” he asked.
    The cat gained speed behind them, swinging now in a distant ellipsis around Lewis’s head.
    â€œHe wants you to go over there,” Snowberry said. “That’s why he’s doing it.”
    â€œSomeone should do something,” Bean said.”
    â€œDid you hear what I said?” Snowberry asked. “It’s a trap.”
    â€œThat’s wrong. It’s horrible,” Bean said. He turned from them and took two steps out into the drizzle.
    â€œConcentrate on what I’m saying,” Snowberry said. “T-R-A-P.”
    Bean strode off.
    Snowberry rolled the dice. “No hope,” he said.
    Bryant and Piacenti stood up, as well, and Snowberry looked up at them in surprise. He said, “All right, all right,” and got to his feet. He added, “He showed me the harness. It was well designed.”
    They walked through the light rain in an echelon, like gunfighters. Bryant felt self-conscious and faintly silly.
    Snowberry squinted ahead at Lewis. “Imagine,” he said, “if he’d turned his genius to good, instead of evil.”
    The men were cheering in the chilly drizzle. Ahead, Lewis had given the cord a few sharp wristy turns and let fly, sailing the cat out over the tarmac. It flew with legs outspread, like extended landing gear. It landed with some force and scrabbled up, stunned. Lewis and the men made a show of calling off the distance, footstep by footstep, and Bean reached the cat first, bending over it with a tenderness evident even at Bryant’s distance. Bean looked over at Lewis and the men with hostility and Bryant could see the cat’s tail curling slowly and alertly behind his protective back.
    As they closed in on the group, Lewis asked for the cat and Bean refused to give it. Lewis hit him in the face and he fell onto his back. The cat sprinted free and crouched nearby, indecisive with fright.
    Snowberry and Piacenti tried to break it up, and someone from Boom Town jumped on Bryant’s back. Bryant recognized him as a tech sergeant named Hallet and abruptly found himself twisting on the wet tarmac on his side, trying to free himself from an armlock. Hallet tore at his hair.
    â€œHey, you guys, an officer,” someone said.
    Gabriel broke it up with the shaky authority of a more or less new first lieutenant. Bryant pulled himself clear with a hot ear and a painful scalp and slapped Hallet’s hand away. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Are you crazy?”
    He trooped them into the hangar, out of the rain. Bean’s mouth was bloody and the blood bubbled onto his chin. Lewis rubbed a toothmark out of his knuckle. Bryant’s ear was burning and he wondered what Hallet had done to it.
    Gabriel confronted them with his hands on his hips. “So,” he said. “Let me ask you: have any of you come across, in your experience, the phrase ‘Dislike May Split a Crew’?”
    Bryant gazed straight ahead. He could not look at Lewis.
    Gabriel proceeded to dress them down. He was only a first lieutenant and not a very impressive one, though he meant well. Bryant thought about bacon.
    He asked them if they thought he liked having to do this. “Is it that you don’t have enough to do?” he said. “Do we have to fill up every minute to keep you out of trouble?” Boredom was getting to be the explanation accepted for any of the aircrews’ actions that seemed unusually peculiar or pointless.
    Bean and Lewis and Bryant spent the night guarding the fuel bowsers—huge, hulking, and filthy trucks that fueled the Fortresses before missions. The bowsers did not need to be guarded. The rain was a good deal more insistent. They stamped their feet endlessly in enormous shallow puddles and Bean hunched as