“April!” Otis turned toward me and I flung myself in his arms. “That’s my girl!” he laughed. “Murder and arson. I’m so proud. Did you shoot Ash?”
Shooting people seemed to be Otis’s answer to everything. Like me, Otis is into lists, and he has lists taped up all over the house: “Top 8 Reasons to Never Answer the Door,” “5 Easy Ways to Disarm an Intruder,” “4 Best Ways to Escape a Choke Hold,” “9 Reasons Why You Should Shoot First and Ask Questions Later,” and “The 8 Components to Optimum Situational Awareness.”
If Otis ever actually shot anyone I never heard about it, though he did narrowly miss me once. He argued that I should not have been breaking into his home at the time. But what is a girl supposed to do when she lost her key and her uncle lives in an old biscuit factory with no doorbell? Besides that, he is the one who taught me how to pick locks in the first place.
Otis stepped into the role as my caretaker when my stepfather Ash was revealed to be the lying, thieving, heartless ball of buttholes I had been telling everyone he was since he lied and thieved his way into getting full custody of me a few years ago. But Fulton County family court moves like a comatose turtle. Waiting for it to correct a grievous mistake requires time-lapse photography and a hibernation pod. I mean, they literally found all the pieces of the bombed plane I was in, shipped them to Atlanta, and put them back together before a single status hearing was held on the subject of my custody. My only comfort is that Ash’s spanking new wife Catherine, a WorldAir attorney as well as my former guardian ad litem to the court, did end up in prison for her part in the bombing and embezzlement attempt. She promptly annulled their marriage from behind bars and hasn’t spoken to Ash since. This according to an article in the Southern Times.
Until today Otis was staying with me in my mother’s townhome located in a swanky neighborhood just north of downtown Atlanta, which, if you ask me, was kind of like asking a spider monkey to watch over the animal lab. My mother is partial to pastels in her décor, and Otis blended in like a biker at a tea party. Steel-toed work boots, band-merch T-shirts, and grease-stained jeans was his staple ensemble. He used to wear his long curly hair in a ponytail until it got caught in the cooling fan of an engine he was working on. He was lucky there was a hacksaw within arm’s reach so he could saw himself free before the engine ate his whole head. Today he wore his blond hair at chin level, just long enough to cover the two quarter-sized patches of bald spots from the incident. Oddly, it worked pretty well with the eye patch.
Otis turned to Roundtree and asked, “Who’s this?” I introduced them and Roundtree, who held Trixi in one hand, extended the other to Otis, who shook it enthusiastically. “Nice white suit,” he said.
“Nice black eye patch,” Roundtree responded.
“Come on in. Can I get you a drink?”
“Do you have sherry?”
“Will tequila do?”
“Perfectly.”
Flo had already opened the giant metal gate that was Otis’s front door. As I mentioned earlier, Otis lived in a renovated old biscuit factory—a big concrete box, essentially, with 24-foot ceilings, giant clerestory windows, and leaking skylights. The entire structure was secluded by a forest of bamboo trees and accessible solely via an almost invisible easement alley. The front third of the building housed his machine shop, the middle third made up his living quarters, and the back third contained his exercise equipment, collection of sophisticated computers, security monitors, scanners, and 3D printers. The floor throughout was concrete, riddled with rusty tools and containing a drain in the center. This was his home. My mother referred to it as “Uncle Otis’s House of Sharp Objects and Flame.” When I was a toddler I wasn’t allowed inside for fear I’d end up with a bunch of fishhooks in my head or something. As I got older it became one of my favorite places to hang out.
Otis closed and locked his gate and followed us through the covered alleyway that was his living room. He gathered us around his kitchen island, poured five shots of tequila, drank two, then dispensed the rest. “So,” he said, “what the hell is going on?”
It was left to me to recount the night’s events, seeing as how I was the only one not drinking tequila. Anita had one shot and was looking all wonky, flushed and smiling. Flo matched Otis shot for shot, and probably had half a flask of vodka from her purse as we spoke. It was well known she could rival Otis in the drinking department any day of the week. Roundtree belted his first shot and then sipped his second like it was a fancy liqueur. Fifi Trixibelle curled up in a soup mug on the counter and fell asleep, snoring surprisingly loudly for such a miniature dog. Mr. Colgate’s suit jacket lay on the floor in case any more canned pumpkin rumbled forth from her bum.
Once I finished filling Otis in, he asked to see the objects we’d extricated from Trixi. I lay the four items on the counter and noticed that Anita had done an admirable job of scrubbing them clean. “Anything else?” he asked. “Anything from the house?”
I remembered the handgun, pulled it from my cargo pocket, and placed it on the counter. At the sight of the gun, Roundtree belted back the rest of his tequila.
“That’s it?” Otis questioned me.
I remembered the notepad and baggage claim check, pulled them from my pocket, and also placed them on the counter.
“Where’d you get these?”
“They were on the kitchen counter next to the phone at Hackman’s place,” I answered.
“Actually,” Anita held up her finger, then brought it to her lips to suppress a dainty burp. “Actually, the police dispatcher said the house belonged to Morton Colgate.”
“Yeah,” said Flo. “That’s right. Why is that?”
“It can’t be. Malcolm’s dad lives—lived—in Los Angeles,” I said. “I mean, that’s the reason Malcolm was always having to fly cross-country, because his parents shared custody.”
“Let’s look it up,” Otis said, opening his laptop. We told him the address and he entered it into some site that spat forth information on these things. “Yep, it says here that the house was bought by Colgate Enterprises, but then it was quitclaimed to someone else.”
“What’s ‘quitclaimed’?”
“It refers to when the owner of a piece of property transfers all interest of the property to someone else. Basically it means he bought the house for someone else.”
“Does it say who?”
Otis scrolled further down the screen. “Yes. Molly Hackman.”
“Molly?” Flo and I exclaimed simultaneously. Why would Mr. Colgate buy Molly a big-ass house?
“I bet they were having an affair,” Flo said.
“Um hmm, girl, you know it,” Anita clicked her glass with Flo’s and threw back another shot.
In some ways it made sense, and in others not at all. For one, it would explain why Hackman was so furious at Molly when she left him, and why his revenge against Mr. Colgate was meted out so viciously. But then what was this business about kidnapping Malcolm? And Trixi? What was with the dog? And what did Ash have to do with anything? And who was the blonde woman present during Malcolm’s abduction? I voiced all these questions to the others at the round table, but they were so certain illicit sex was behind everything that they barely gave my thoughts any weight.
All but Roundtree. He put down his shot glass and eyed me intently. “She’s right,” he said. “An affair doesn’t answer all the questions. We should look more closely at those photos I took during Crash’s driving test.”
“Let me get you your phone,” Flo got up to retrieve her purse.
“Stop, I stole it back from you hours ago,” he said, producing the phone from his pocket. Flo, nonplussed, sat back down and finished her tequila.
Otis uploaded Roundtree’s photos and brought them up on his 30-inch computer monitor. We gathered around to peer closely at the details. He clicked through the day’s earlier images until we got to the first one that showed us in Otis’s old BMW outside Colgate Enterprises. “Oh, by the way,” I said, “sorry about y
our car.”
“No problem. A flame of glory—it could not have hoped for a better demise.” He zoomed in on the silver Rolls-Royce in the photograph. “Do we know whose car this is?”
I was about to tell him it was Mr. Colgate’s car, but come to think of it I wasn’t sure whose it was. As far as I knew, Colgate lived in California, and I assumed he used company cars while in town to check on his Atlanta operations. Last year during my days as an unaccompanied minor flying from coast to coast to fulfill my own ridiculous court-fortified custody schedule, I’d used the onboard WiFi to look up the troubles Mr. Colgate faced with the IRS. Poor Malcolm, I’d thought. The most detailed article appeared in Forbes, which informed that Colgate’s troubles started when his ex-wife turned him in to the IRS and then to the FBI, as there were also some accusations that he had misled shareholders and engaged in other nefarious activity. At present not only had Colgate been indicted for tax fraud, but he was also under investigation for embezzlement, insider trading, and money laundering. If you asked me, it was a miracle that he’d escaped incarceration so far, though ironic to note that if he had been in a cushy federal prison right now he might still be alive today.
“What’s the license number?” Anita asked.
“What?” We all turned to her.
“The tag number of the Rolls-Royce,” she reiterated, “what’s the number?” She huffed impatiently. “Never mind, move,” she instructed Otis, who leaned to one side so she could access his keyboard. A few rapid strokes later we were looking at the DMV government employee interface. Within seconds she had pulled up the registered owner of the Rolls. Otis’s eyes widened lasciviously. Stuff like this was catnip to him. I imagined the leverage he could garner against people by accessing this private information.
“There, see?” Anita pointed to the screen. “It was not a company car for Colgate Enterprises.”
No, it was a company car for WorldAir.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” I ventured, a glint of company loyalty bursting to the surface. “They could have stolen the car.”
“Who steals a silver Rolls-Royce?” Flo asked. She had a point.
“I totally would,” Otis mumbled.
“Hackman is the liaison for the mechanics union, maybe that was part of the deal he brokered during contract negotiations.” Now I was the one who had a point. It would not have surprised anyone that the self-serving Hackman had put his oily thumb on the scale to include perks like this for himself while the threat of a strike loomed heavily in the air and the other mechanics worried about making mortgages.
“Look at the knockers on that broad,” Otis broke the silence. He pointed to the bombshell clutching Malcolm’s arm in the picture.
“I know, right?” said Anita. “It’s like she needs a bicycle pump for those puppies.”
For all we knew she had a face like a frying pan, because none of the frames came close to catching her mug. Could it have been Malcolm’s mother? I thought. I knew it was a long shot, because the last time I saw her she did not have blonde hair and weighed at least 20 pounds more than the person in the picture. But that was a while ago; she could have gone to Costa Rica and had the fat sucked out of her in that time. Who knew.
“Drag queen,” said Roundtree. Our heads turned toward him in unison, like meerkats.
“Why do you say that?” Flo asked.
“Trust me,” he assured. We didn’t really.
Otis got up from the desk and returned to the kitchen island to assess the items retrieved from Trixi and the crime scene. He plucked a number-2 pencil from a cup on the counter and used it to shade the sheet. This outlined the impressions made from the note written on the previous sheet:
V-2927-PRES45
“What do you think that is?” I asked.
Otis shrugged. “It’s a serial number for one of our airplane parts.”
That made sense, since Hackman was an actual airplane mechanic. It was easy to forget he had a professional title other than Murdering Thieving Wife-Beating Kidnapping Odious Arsonist Pig. I really didn’t understand people like Hackman. He had a good job with a great company (when the CEO wasn’t trying to sabotage it)—who could want anything more? My grandfather, who was secretly richer than any of us knew or could even imagine, loved to labor with his hands, as did all of my family members. Even Otis. Even me. The days I spent impersonating a flight attendant were way more fun than now, when I’m supposed to be waiting with bated breath on whether the court will deem me deserving of a huge fortune. The money wasn’t a big deal—half the fun in life is figuring out how to get by without it. The only thing I cared about was if they were true, the rumors. I didn’t know why it should matter—Roy Coleman was my grandfather regardless of whether we were connected by blood—but I just didn’t want anything else taken from me for the time being. So I tried not to think about the impending court-ordered DNA test, the exhumation of my grandfather’s grave, and the excruciatingly slow legal process of proving our genetic connection.
“Hey, April, where’d you go?” Otis asked, snapping his fingers before my face. I shook the cobwebs from my head and focused.
Otis held Trixi’s button between his thumb and forefinger to peer at it closely. He picked up Colgate’s suit jacket from the floor and examined it. It was a Brooks Brothers single-breasted jacket with peaked lapels and canvas lining. I know these things from the small selection of suits Officer Ned kept in his office. He liked to lecture me on their attributes as he removed the plastic from their trips to the dry cleaners. Colgate’s jacket closed in front with one button, or it would have if the button wasn’t missing.
Otis placed the button from Trixi against the buttonhole on the jacket. “Could be,” he deducted. I thought it was curious that the button was not the two-hole or four-hole sew-through kind you’d normally find on expensive suits. Instead it was a teakwood toggle, with enamel ball caps on each end and a loop on the back used to attach it to the fabric. Otis plunked his toolbox onto the counter and began rifling through his heavy metal implements.
“Looking for a pickax?” Anita rolled her eyes. “Give it.” She deftly snatched the button from him and opened a small eyeglass repair kit she’d rifled from her big purse. In it was the smallest screwdriver I’d ever seen. Otis left the room and came back with a giant industrial magnifying glass, the kind with a lighted halo and weighted base that comic book characters probably used during their experiments that turned them into supervillains. After Otis assured us it wasn’t a death ray, Anita placed the button under the glass and we all gathered to look at its magnification.
“There,” Otis pointed to a seam where the wood met the enamel ball cap. Anita gently pried the point of the jewel driver into the seam and the ball cap popped off. She handed the toggle to Otis, who upended it over the palm of his hand. Out came a tiny glinting rectangle, as thin as paper but stiffer, and about one and a half times the size of a grain of rice.
“What is that?” I asked.
“That,” Otis frowned, “is a microprocessor.”
“What’s it for?”
“Let’s find out.” He carried it to a worktable covered in computer parts. I’d always assumed this material was like an ongoing art project or something, seeing as how several mobiles made from computer trace material hung throughout his warehouse. But it turned out a lot of this stuff had a use. Otis was like Captain Nemo that way. He rummaged through the stuff until he found an interface, popped something out, flicked it away, popped Trixi’s microprocessor in its place, then inserted the interface as a whole into to the back of a hollow hard drive that had been sitting in the corner like a discarded old artifact. He hooked that up to another huge monitor then pushed the power button. Nothing happened. He pushed it again. Nothing.
“Is it plugged in?” I asked.
“Crap.” He plugged it in and pushed the power button, and the monitor lit up like a police car.
“Why are the lights flashing?” I asked, then I realized it wasn’t the
monitor that was lighting up like a police car, but an actual police car that had pulled up in the easement alley behind Otis’s warehouse. In a panic I dropped to the floor.
“Get under the table,” Otis instructed me just as a helicopter searchlight flooded the room through the skylight above. Otis leaned back in his chair, shielded his eye, and waved to the pilot. A fleet of additional police cars, with lights and sirens blaring, clamored to a stop outside at the edge of the carport. Anita and Roundtree hastily sat down on the sofa and tried to look innocent. Flo seemed unaffected by the mayhem. She had returned to the end of the island where the other items from Colgate’s place were laid out. She held the baggage claim ticket in one hand and Fifi Trixibelle in the other.
The sirens outside stopped, but the warning lights remained flashing as the shrill feedback of an activated megaphone pierced the silence. “This is the police,” the officer began. No duh. “This is the police,” he repeated. “We need everyone inside to vacate the premises immediately.”
The floodlight from above shifted as the helicopter left to sweep the surrounding area. “Go!” prompted Otis, and I darted from beneath the table and down the basement stairs. The others followed me. Once downstairs, we huddled for a few seconds on what to do. It was Anita who suggested she and Roundtree turn themselves in, because “it’s not like we did anything wrong.” Outside we heard the officer tell his comrades to hold fire—hold fire?—and urged us once again to give ourselves up.
“Besides,” she added, “I recognize the voice of the officer on the megaphone.”
“Really? Who?” I asked.
“My boys are all police officers,” she smiled.
“Ain’t you full of surprises,” Flo slapped Anita’s palm soundly then hugged her goodbye. Anita took Roundtree’s hand and they ascended the stairs together, their visages lit by the floodlight from the overhead helicopter.
We Will Be Crashing Shortly Page 6