“Were too,” LaVonda countered, “with a birthday bow.”
Exasperated, Officer Ned dropped the back-and-forth. I made sure to let him know it was okay. I forgave him. Molly had really done a number on me as well. It’s like she knew exactly how to ingratiate herself into my friendship. Was it also part of her long game to get a job waiting tables at Flo’s and my favorite Waffle House in Hapeville? And to think I brought flowers to her hospital room almost every day! Wait . . .
“Who’s the woman with her face bashed in at the hospital right now?” I asked Flo.
She took a long drag on her menthol and exhaled the smoke out of the side of her mouth to deflect it from blowing into my face. “No idea, kid.”
We heard Malcolm making his way back through the hole in the bulkhead. “You leave that poor child to me,” LaVonda whispered to us, her trauma training kicking in. “Don’t nobody tell him a thing about his dad. We have to handle this one tiny piece at a time.”
Before Malcolm rejoined us, Flo turned to Officer Ned to address another dire subject. “Looks like you have a huge problem to deal with, Thor,” she intoned, explaining that a gang of airport security officers and ambulance drivers had been in cahoots with Hackman on a smuggling ring.
“Drugs? Do NOT tell me they are smuggling drugs!” gasped LaVonda.
“Not drugs,” Flo said. “Counterfeit airplane parts.”
Otis stiffened with attention. Airplane parts were his territory. They were violating his territory! “Which parts?”
Flo took another drag and shook her head. Me? I wasn’t surprised. Criminals, not to mention those who are just desperate to escape their circumstances, were figuring out new ways every day to smuggle contraband across country borders—human, animal, and otherwise. I’d befriended a veteran customs agent at the Atlanta airport who worked the afternoon shift that met most of the flights arriving from South America. He was a wealth of information. He told me about the time a lady tried to smuggle a sedated baby white tiger in a suitcase with a bunch of stuffed tiger toys, and the time a woman tried to smuggle her husband’s dead body out of the country by buying it a ticket and trying to push it on the plane in a wheelchair. When she was caught she said she thought he was just sleeping. But the counterfeit airplane parts, that was especially odious.
“How are they smuggling the parts?” Officer Ned interrupted.
Suddenly it came to me with the clarity of a cowbell. “I know how they’re smuggling the parts,” I said. “They’re stuffing them inside the dead bodies.” And when the corpses were slow in coming, they created their own by killing a few coworkers in their vicinity. That would explain the missing airport employees.
“Think about it,” I continued. “They must have been deflecting the casket cargo to Grand Cayman, where they probably have some setup that allows them to stash the contraband inside the corpses before they’re shipped back.”
“But why Grand Cayman?” Officer Ned asked. Flo and I shrugged. The island was part of the British Antilles and probably stuffed to busting with corrupt, greasy-palmed officials who had no qualms about threading unidentified dead bodies through their coroner’s lab and back again.
“And what are the plane parts that are being falsified?” Otis was insistent and I understood why. Counterfeit engine parts don’t undergo any quality control at all, let alone the rigorous strength testing that clears any standard part for use in an aircraft. That’s why these parts were so expensive—some costing upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece—because they had been forged with meticulous precision and tested to guarantee durability. This was also why the counterfeit market was so lucrative, because counterfeit parts could be made for pennies and sold to unsuspecting airlines for the same markup as real ones. Right now, millions of lives were at risk if unsound parts were being used to repair and update aircraft engines. “Which parts?” Otis repeated.
“Wait,” I reached into my cargo pocket and retrieved the sandwich bag containing the curious octagonal-shaped objects I’d collected yesterday. “This came from one of the corpses last night . . .”
“Ew.” LaVonda covered her face with the crook of her arm, but hours ago I’d used the galley sink to clean the gunk off the pieces as best I could, so they weren’t that bad. Otis took one from me and examined it closely with his good eye.
“See there?” I indicated some tiny raised numerals on the underside.
“Yes. ‘V-2927-PRES45.’” He slipped the counterfeit part into his pocket. “This is not good.” Part number V-2927-PRES45, he explained, was a sophisticated new circuit breaker for the aircraft’s pressurization panel. The FTSB had recently mandated that all WorldAir jets were to be retrofitted with this device by the end of November, as well as the jets of all other airlines based in the United States and those outside the U.S. with routes into and out of our country. These kinds of mandates were constantly levied by the federal Department of Transportation in response to new information regarding aviation accidents.
Because, like I said, air travel was an ongoing human experiment. Every time a plane crashed, the practice would be to figure out what failure—mechanical or human—caused it, then retrofit all remaining aircraft to safeguard against it happening again. Take Tuninter flight 1153, which, after both engines failed, crashed into the Mediterranean Sea, killing half the people onboard. When the investigators salvaged the engines from the ocean, they could find nothing wrong with them, concluding that the aircraft simply ran out of fuel because the wrong kind of fuel gauge had been installed in the cockpit. It was that simple—a matter of kilograms versus gallons. Since that accident, the FTSB had implemented a mass gauge replacement so a mistake like this can never occur again. For this reason, the manufacturing of new aircraft replacement parts is an immensely profitable business.
But sometimes the cause of a plane wreck was a mystery that never got solved. A devastating case in point would be WorldAir flight 0392, which disappeared without a trace over the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Sydney, Australia, last November. Not a trace of the 747 or the hundreds of passengers and crew contained therein have been found. Conspiracy theories abounded, many of them from Otis, who kept an ongoing list. Here it is:
OTIS’s ONGOING LIST OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES INVOLVING THE FATE OF WORLDAIR FLIGHT 0392
Life Insurance Scam. One or more of the people onboard had a hefty death policy, the beneficiaries of which somehow engineered the destruction of the jet midflight.
Hijacking. The plane was flown to a remote area in Afghanistan, where the passengers are alive and living in mud huts, subsisting on insects and rainwater.
Abducted by Aliens. YouTube footage shows the presence of extraterrestrials over the seventh archipelago. (Could be doctored footage.)
Accidentally Shot Down in Army Training Exercise. A New Zealand oil-rig worker claims to have seen the plane go down in flames into the Gulf of Thailand, where multinational army training maneuvers were under way.
Deliberately Shot Down, prompting an international cover-up.
Hijacking Theory #2. The plane was forcibly redirected and flown in the shadow of another passenger jet traveling to Siberia. Passengers are alive and living in ice huts, subsisting on sardines and melted snow.
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time agonizing over the mystery myself. It was a particular sore spot with me, because I’d known two of the flight attendants onboard the plane.
The intercom crackled to life. “We’re third in line. Prepare the cabin for takeoff,” the pilot instructed. We had about ten minutes before we were in the air. LaVonda hooted fearfully and did a scaled-down version of her back-and-forth panic dance. Then, out of habit, she sat in the jumpseat and buckled up. Malcolm, who had made it back from behind the bulkhead with Beefheart, eyed her with amused curiosity.
“We need to get upstairs,” Flo moved toward the elevators, then stopped and turned back to us. “I mean all of us. You can’t stay down here during takeoff. It’s dangerous.”
She
was right; the jumpseats located in the lower galley were there for inflight only, not for takeoff. We’d have to go upstairs and take passenger seats. Flo sensed my nervousness. “There’s only a few people up there,” she said. “They’ll never know you’re onboard.” She dowsed her cigarette in the galley sink, adding, “Probably.”
I shrugged. An L-1011 was the length of two city blocks. Things commonly occurred at one end of the plane that remained completely unknown to the people at the other. Especially when the engines were running, because the engines drowned out all other sounds. Recently while a flight to Dallas sat on the runway waiting for takeoff, a passenger near the last row mistook the air-conditioning condensation as smoke coming from the vents and tried to incite a panicked spontaneous evacuation of the aircraft. It took ten minutes for the flight attendants in back to get the passengers to stop screaming, while those in first class, with their earphones, cocktails, and complete lack of situational awareness, had no idea anything unusual was happening behind them.
We lined up to ride up to the passenger cabin. Flo and Malcom first, next me and Officer Ned, then Otis and LaVonda. It was a lumbering process and I debated just climbing up through the escape hatch that opened into the passenger aisle above, but decided that might draw attention. As a general rule I considered attention to be bad, believe me. I missed the days up until last year when I could sail through airport security and customs wearing a tiara made out of pipe bombs if I wanted. But those days ended when I became a public piñata in the news. Now it felt like I could barely walk to the drugstore without a SWAT team swarming down.
As Flo stepped into the elevator with Malcolm I heard LaVonda ask, “Wait, that was Morse code, right? On the phone earlier?”
Flo looked at her like she was nuts. “Are you nuts? I was making a batch of Bloody Marys.” As if to emphasize her point, she produced a flask from her apron pocket and took a swig.
Officer Ned said, “But the MacGyver reference, that was to let us know your phone was tapped, right?”
Flo shook her head and took another swig. “Amateurs,” she said. “Tell ’em, Crash.”
I had no idea. Flo closed the elevator door before I could get her to clarify. The MacGyver episode in question differed from most in that it didn’t deal with overt espionage, but a family-law situation in which a boy had been kidnapped by his noncustodial father. Turned out the father was the nephew of a crime boss and, you know, hijinks ensued.
Flo sent the elevator back down for Officer Ned and me, but he was too big and tall to fit in with me, so I entered it alone, flipped the toggle switches, and began my ascent. It was actually one of my favorites, that MacGyver episode. The father was a narcissistic wonk who only wanted the child for selfish reasons. Given my history with Ash, I could totally relate. When I was a kid he used to insist my mother bid for long overnight trips just so he could leave me locked in the house while he partied with his friends. I remember the neighbors once sent the police over after hearing me cry all night, only to have Ash return in time to intercept them at the door and convince them that the college sophomore in the car with him was actually my babysitter and there was nothing to worry about. In the MacGyver episode Flo mentioned, the crime boss character provided an interesting twist, because he ended up having a change of heart and siding with the mother.
This was on my mind as I exited the lift and stepped into the midgalley of the L-1011. I opened the door to see Anita standing there in a flight attendant uniform. Anita! Why is Anita here? I was actually happy to see her, but before I could cry out in surprise, she crossed the galley in two quick steps and angrily punched me in the face.
CHAPTER 20
“Ouch! What the . . .” I grabbed my jaw, stumbled backward, and felt for a jumpseat to sit down. I sat in a passenger seat instead. The jet accelerated down the runway. Free of the weight of passengers, it lifted into the air almost immediately. The floor pitched. Anita stumbled after me and raised her hand to hit me again. I looked up in shock. It did not even occur to me to strike back.
“That’s enough, Teddy,” Molly Hackman told her. Teddy? “I don’t want her dead just yet. Take her to the midcabin with the others.” In her hand Molly cupped the gun I’d used to shoot her husband, the one I gave Flo before I went into hiding.
Most people have the assumption that a firearm can’t be dispatched in an airplane cabin without causing an explosive decompression. But that assumption is an exaggeration. Most of the time the bullet would just lodge itself in something in the interior of the plane—a seat, meal cart, bulkhead, body. If this happened, of course, the cabin air would not be compromised because there’d be no damage to the skin of the fuselage. Now if the bullet actually pierced the aluminum skin, there would of course be cause for alarm, but no reason for panic, per se, because modern jets are built to withstand this level of damage. The hole would create a small leak, but the pressurization system was designed to compensate for it. Even a few holes like this would have no effect on the integrity of the aircraft.
But if the bullet blew out part of the structure, that would be a problem. Damage like that could cause a domino effect leading, in seconds, to a catastrophic depressurization. Consider that Aloha Airlines flight that turned into a midair convertible in 1988 because of “metal fatigue”—a crevice in the plane’s aluminum skin corroded over time until it created enough friction to rip the roof off the plane midflight. Astoundingly only one person died in that accident—a flight attendant, of course. If only she’d been strapped in, she would not have been caught up in the debris that got sucked out of the opening.
The plane leveled and Anita yanked me to my feet. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” she whispered to me as she made a big show of shoving me around. “Just act scared, okay? And I’m sorry!” I was so relieved this was an act—that she hadn’t turned bad after all—that I immediately forgave her despite the stinging in my jaw.
“What’s with the ‘Teddy’ business?” I asked. She hushed me and shoved me into a seat next to Flo. Officer Ned, who had come up in the elevator after me, was directed by Molly’s gun to take the seat across the aisle from us. Molly handed Anita the zip-tie handcuffs from the cockpit flight kit and instructed her to bind our wrists. All cockpit flight kits contained four sets of these handcuffs for the purpose of neutralizing unruly passengers should the occasion arise. Unlike normal zip-ties, which are easy to pop free from, if you ask me, these plastic cuffs were super thick and made specifically to subdue people. In her zeal to appear authentically henchman-like, Anita pulled the zip-ties really tight around our wrists. There was one left over, which Molly told her to use to bind Officer Ned’s ankles together.
Malcolm sat up front in the first row behind the cockpit. Otis and LaVonda had not come up from the galley. In fact, LaVonda may well have been stuck in the jumpseat below again. I noticed the badge clipped to Anita’s pocket flap. “Teddy LaVista,” it read. I turned to Flo.
“That’s the badge Otis gave you in the parking lot!” I whispered.
“I told you, they never look.”
I’ll say, the only thing Anita had in common with the man in the badge was that she was also African American. Flo explained to me that she figured out the real Teddy LaVista was part of Hackman’s smuggling ring, a person Molly only knew as a name on a list Hackman had made and magnetized to their refrigerator. When Molly escorted Flo back to her house to collect her uniform, they’d found Anita there sitting on the stoop, holding Trixi. The only way Flo could keep Molly from turning Anita into another dead smuggling mule was to slip Anita the badge and introduce her as “my roommate, Teddy LaVista, who lost her key again.”
It probably helped that the name “Teddy” could be loosely construed as a girl’s name, and, again, Anita was holding Trixi at the time. Molly, it turned out, had known that Mr. Colgate fed the button containing the microprocessor to her dog—that much Hackman had been able to get out of him before torturing him to death—and was so elated to be reunited wi
th Trixi that she credited Anita with the pup’s return. Before long, Anita was getting outfitted into a spare uniform and listening to hushed instructions from Flo to act tough.
“What does this have to do with the clue you dropped about the MacGyver episode?” Officer Ned whispered, exasperated.
Flo lit a cigarette, barely encumbered by her bound wrists. “You two never understand my MacGyver references. I’m way over your heads.”
Molly stood nearby, assuring we saw the gun in her hand. She carried a large Nike rucksack on her back. She approached us and snapped the cigarette from Flo’s fingers. Rather than snuff it out on the carpet like I expected her to do, she started smoking it herself. Flo grumbled and unwrapped a stick of gum.
“You can’t point the gun at all of us,” Officer Ned challenged her.
“You’re right,” she agreed, “but one of you will do.” She aimed the gun at my head.
“Molly . . .” I began.
“Not a word from you.” She took another drag from the cigarette, furious. “It’s like a cloud of chaos follows you wherever you go. You would not believe the cleanup I’ve had to perform since yesterday.”
I held my tongue. The most pressing question in my mind, I’m ashamed to say, had to do with her newly minted double-D cups, not to mention the fresh platinum Betty Boop hairdo. Today she looked less like a Waffle House waitress and more like a Las Vegas cocktail waitress. Molly saw where I was staring and read my mind. “Costa Rican plastic surgery.” She smiled. “Part of the perks of being married to a crooked airline mechanic—free travel and all the implants you want.”
“Not to mention liposuction,” mumbled Flo. Molly shot her a look that shut her up.
“Do you see that boy up there?” she pointed toward Malcolm in the front cabin. “He’ll do anything I ask. He’s devoted to me. And why wouldn’t he be?” Her face turned sarcastic. “The poor kid—a father who didn’t love him enough to confess where he kept the money he stole, a mother who ran off and can’t be bothered to answer the phone.”
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