Chapter 3

“Right. Well, what do I do? How do I get home?”

“Let’s see…” She turned her attention to her computer. She clacked a few keys, muttered a few hmms. “I can put you on our ten o’clock flight to Houston,” she eventually said. “From Houston, we have a ton of flights to L.A. They’re all jam-packed at the moment, but we’ll put you on standby. You’re bound to get on something.”

“You think?”

She shrugged. “People miss flights all the time. Take you, for example. All you need is for some poor sap to go to the IHOP in Houston and you can take his seat.”

“They teach you to call customers ‘saps’ in your training, do they?”

She shrugged again. “You wanna talk to my supervisor about my qualifications, or you wanna go home? The Houston flight leaves in twenty minutes.”

“Nah, I’ll take it,” Shep said. “Let the next poor sap worry about your attitude.”

“That’s the spirit.” She handed a boarding pass across the counter, then yelled “Next!”