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Not so the girl named Penny.
The other one, Diana, was pleading with him. What was she saying? Drop the girl? Crash the helicopter?
Sanjit didn’t think so. He’d seen something very wrong in Diana’s dark eyes, but not murder.
Murder lived in Caine’s eyes.
Sanjit had the cyclic pulled all the way back. The rotors wanted to pull back from the cliff, but Caine would not let it go.
Diana stepped backward. Walked with halting steps to the cliff edge.
“No!” Sanjit cried, but she was falling, falling.
It all happened in a heartbeat. Diana stopped in midair.
The helicopter was released from Caine’s grip. It jerked suddenly backward.
Penny fell. The rotor blades retreated.
She fell past the rotors safely and Diana floated in midair and the helicopter roared backward like it had been on the end of a stretched bungee cord.
Diana was thrown more than lifted back onto the grass. She rolled and sprawled and looked up just in time for Sanjit to meet her eyes for a split second before he had his hands full.
The helicopter was moving backward but falling, like it intended to ram its tail rotor straight into the deck of the yacht below.
The other thing, the other thing, lift it lift it twist it twist it and up the helicopter went. It spun wildly around as Sanjit once more forgot the pedal but it was rising. Spinning and rising and spinning faster and faster and now Sanjit was jerked wildly as he fought to find the pedals.
Clockwise, slower, slower, pause, counterclockwise faster, faster, slower, pause.
The helicopter hovered in midair. But far from the cliff now. Out over the sea. And twice the height of the cliff.
Sanjit was rattling with nerves, teeth chattering. Virtue was still praying, gibberish mostly, and not English gibberish.
The kids were in the back screaming.
But for a few heartbeats at least, the helicopter was not falling and not spinning. It was rising.
“One thing at a time,” Sanjit told himself. “Stop going up.” He loosened his death grip, and the twist grip went back toward neutral. He kept the pedals right where they were. He did not move the cyclic.
The helicopter was pointing toward the mainland. Not toward Perdido Beach, exactly, but toward the mainland.
Virtue stopped praying. He looked at Sanjit with huge eyes. “I think I pooped a little.”
“Just a little?” Sanjit said. “Then you’ve got nerves of steel, Choo.”
He aimed and pushed the cyclic forward.
The helicopter roared toward the mainland.
Brittney stared down at Edilio. He was facedown in the sand.
He bore the mark of a whip. His neck was raw and bloody, as though he had been lynched.
Tanner was there, too, looking down at him.
“Is he dead?” Brittney asked fearfully.
Tanner did not answer. Brittney knelt beside Edilio. She could see grains of sand move as he exhaled.
