Hot Point Read Online Free PDF Page B

last warm fall nights. No one here except her, her helicopters, and the sleeping forest. She could unwind and focus in the silence.
    It didn’t take her long to find the patch over the hole made through the hull’s skin by the bullet that had nicked the hydraulic hose. After that, her inspection went much faster. She went to every single patched hole and poked around until she could figure out the trajectory of whatever had punched it. This craft had endured a rough life. She cataloged thirty-four hits that penetrated the hull and several dozen grazes that had only creased the metal skin. Maybe that wasn’t much by Army standards, but it was thirty-four too many in her world.
    Bullets really creeped her out. Her mom had been shot in a grocery store holdup and had died in her dad’s arms. It was months before he stopped flinching if Denise dropped something, like one of her schoolbooks. She went from a precocious nine to an adult ten in those same weeks with no one noticing, not even her.
    Well, this helicopter had been a weapon of war, and it had been shot. She hoped that whoever had flown in it was okay.
    One by one she traced each of the thirty-four lines of impact. By the inside shape of the penetration—behind the outside patch—she was able to estimate the angle of trajectory on each hit. She found scuffs and creases where rounds had hit secondary surfaces and finally spent the last of their energy. No fragments or leftover rounds. The Army mechanics had done a good job of it.
    There was a long scrape on the shaft that drove the rear rotor, but it was utterly meaningless. No damage done beyond the cosmetic. Around sunrise she found a spot where bullet number thirty-two had taken the insulation off a wire for a weapons’ system harness that no longer had any weapon to connect to. She replaced the wire anyway.
    â€œYou been here all night, Wrench?” She’d spotted Vern when he was halfway across the field from the bunkhouse, so his silent approach didn’t alarm her this time. He came up to lean casually against the nose of the helicopter.
    He wore an unzipped fleece jacket against the cool morning. The open front revealed a fire T-shirt from a blaze two years ago that had seen a few too many washings. The material was so thin that it took no great effort to imagine the man underneath. None! So she looked away and returned her attention to the last two bullet trajectories. That didn’t stop her from thinking about how nice six feet and one inch of lean and casual pilot looked in the first light of day.
    â€œOnly for a few hours.” When he asked what she’d figured out, she eyed him carefully. “Do you actually want to know, or are you merely being polite?”
    His grin was easy. “Bit of both. I’m interested, though I don’t expect to understand a tenth of what you do. I’m a lowly pilot who breaks choppers, not some, you know, ‘Goddess-Incarnate Mechanic’”—he put air quotes around the title—“who can actually fix them.”
    â€œI should get a bumper sticker.”
    â€œI’ll get it for you. The polite part is terribly self-serving. If I show interest in what you’re doing to my helicopter”—he let it drag out making it absolutely clear that he knew it was the first half of a really lame pickup line—“then you’re just that much more likely to take really good care of my chopper. Anything that makes you take more care of the chopper is good for the preservation of my skin. I’m rather attached to my skin. I like having it intact.”
    She had to laugh. Okay, so he hadn’t gone for the pickup line about him showing interest to make her like him more. Which actually did make her like him more. She’d bet that he knew that too, but found she didn’t care.
    He was an attentive student as she used the last two bullet holes to demonstrate what she’d been doing. She