Flight Risk

by Jennifer Fenn

  Mac:

  Here it is!

  Steve:

  The Lollipop Kid.

  Mac and Steve (singing):

  We represent the Lollipop Kid!

  Steve:

  You know, you look just like one of those Munchkins. On the Tide’s website, the story’s blowing up with comments. It’s got more hits than anything I’ve ever seen posted up there. And we’ve found a Facebook page that is apparently Robert Jackson Kelley’s—

  Mac:

  You gotta say all three names. You just have to.

  Steve:

  You can just see it on a wanted poster, can’t you?

  Mac:

  Well, we’re gonna pay the bills with a quick commercial break and then we’d love to hear from you. Do you know where the Lollipop Kid lurks this morning?

  Interview with Dalton White, Seattle Community College, October 15, 2010

  From Flight Risk: The Robert Jackson Kelley Story

  “You tell me: how does Robert keep walking away from plane crashes? He just walks away! They don’t even find his footprints! What? Are his bones made of adamantium or some shit, like freakin’ Wolverine? Does he parachute out? Can he friggin’ fly?

  “He was driving everyone crazy, and he knew it. That second time he arranged the Dum Dums in this big smiley face, right next to the plane. Like, have a nice day, suckers.”

  FEBRUARY 12, 2010

  Holt ran his hand over his stubbled chin and wished fervently to be back in his warm bed. Instead, rain spat on him and sand worked its way into his boots.

  He couldn’t believe he was standing in front of a second wrecked plane, as big an eyesore as a beached whale. And again, no sign of Robert Jackson Kelley. He got away—alive—again.

  The Sheriff’s Department was a small one: the deputy, four detectives, and the sheriff himself. Dispatch, which also directed calls from across the bridge in North, Doby, and Womset counties, employed at least double. Without the summer’s influx of tourists, Holt doubted his position would exist at all. But Holt’s entire outfit had been called out to the beach, and they were combing over the wreckage, wearing gloves. He’d sent two guys into the woods. Holt stood in the middle, watching, his stomach roiling. He wished he had Tums.

  “There’s blood in the sand over here.” Holt pointed with his toe. “You guys getting this? Don’t let the rain wash it away.”

  “We’re taking samples, Sheriff.”

  Holt knew he’d have to spend the next several hours on the horn, playing up a terrorist threat he didn’t believe existed, in order to rush these specks of Robert Jackson Kelley’s blood through one of Seattle’s crime labs. If these two crashes were chalked up to just a local punk, the samples would languish in the state’s backlog of nonviolent investigations. He’d have to make the case for an island-based sleeper cell, a delicate dance of convincing the lab and not making himself look like too much of a fool when he arrested a local punk after all.

  Deputy Hauser stuck his head through the plane’s bent window frame, like an annoying sitcom neighbor popping his head over the fence. “Check this out, Sheriff.”

  There were his men, stumbling out of the trees, one with his arm slung around the other’s shoulders, leg awkwardly bent. Sweat stains bloomed under their arms. Did they have pine needles in their hair? “We thought we heard him, went tearing through the trees. McMullen blew his knee out.”

  McMullen shook his head, panted. “And it wasn’t even him. Damn raccoon.”

  Just what Holt needed. Down a man, looking out of shape, bumbling, small-time. What if a lack of manpower forced him to deputize citizens?

  If Robert Jackson Kelley tried this stunt one more time, the results would be disastrous for both the kid and the sheriff. How many times could an untrained pilot cheat death?

  Holt hadn’t found a body since Rob Kelley Senior had left one in the middle of the road.

  He had no choice now but to release Robert’s name and photo to the public. Someone, somewhere on this island, knew where the kid was. Someone was feeding him. He wished he had a photo other than Robert’s mug shot, snapped by Holt himself, grinning for the cameras, full-out cheesing, wide and proud. But the mother had lied to him already; he knew Robert had never been anywhere near the ferry. Holt doubted she’d offer up a snapshot.

  Interview with Joey Kovach, Gold’s Gym, Seattle, October 10, 2010

  From Flight Risk: The Robert Jackson Kelley Story

  “There was this time the sheriff thought he saw him. He’d been pushing his cart full of groceries across the parking lot at Shipley’s Market. Toilet paper and Hungry-Man dinners, I bet. He was off duty, out of uniform. Jeans and a Mariners T-shirt. Maybe he’s even whistlin’, grinnin’, thinking back on all the speeding tickets he gave kids that day. Then suddenly he thinks he spots Robert Jackson Kelley, on the other side of the lot, and he takes off running, faster than you’d think for an old guy like that. The cart rolls away, clattering into a minivan. A bottle of Coke rolls out, stops against the van’s tire. The sheriff’s full-out sprinting, haulin’ ass, going for this kid in a pair of cargo shorts and a black hoodie up over his head. He’s yelling, he’s waving his arms, other shoppers are stopping whatever they’re doing, thinkin’ they’re really gonna see some action. Getting out their phones so they can film it all and put it all over YouTube. The kid stops walking and the sheriff grabs his shoulder and spins him around.

  “Of course it’s not Robert. Sheriff’s standin’ there looking like Paul Blart. You almost start to feel sorry for him. All he has now is a shook-up bottle of Coke.

  “Kelley’s long gone, a ghost, vapor.”

  From the Seattle Times’s website: “The Lollipop Kid: Yannatok Teen Steals 2nd Plane, Taunts Police,” February 12, 2010

  YANNATOK—A Yannatok teenager, identified by police as Robert Jackson Kelley, Junior, 18, is suspected of stealing a second Cessna TTx, owned by Ted Jenkins of Tacoma, from Tomkins Airstrip early this morning. Kelley is also wanted in the theft of a Cessna 182 belonging to Yannatok resident Gary Stanton from North County Airport only three days prior. Yannatok police have released a photograph of Kelley. Residents are warned to consider Kelley armed and dangerous and to contact police immediately with any information regarding his whereabouts. Kelley was reported missing from the Sea Brook Youth Home on February 4, where he was being held on misdemeanor drug charges. His whereabouts since that time are unknown.

  Nicknamed “the Lollipop Kid” by locals, Kelley has become notorious for leaving Dum Dum lollipops at the scene of each plane crash.

  “Everyone’s calling him the Lollipop Kid,” confirmed Mira Wohl, a seventeen-year-old former classmate of Kelley’s. “I’m not sure who started it, but now everyone’s saying it. Someone spray-painted it on the side of Shipley’s, and then it started showing up in bathrooms at school, on the lockers, in that Sharpie that never comes off.”

  “Mr. Kelley seems to think he can thumb his nose at the law,” Sheriff James Holt of the Yannatok Sheriff’s Department said in a statement released yesterday. “He needs to be brought to justice, for the safety of everyone on the island as well as his own. I want to urge the citizens of Yannatok to keep their eyes open and take common sense precautions such as locking their doors.”

  “I would like restitution,” Stanton commented. “But I’m glad no one was hurt.”

  Regarding the Sheriff’s Department’s ongoing efforts to apprehend Kelley, Stanton added, “In a place this small, all the deputies ever deal with is drunks and domestic calls. There’s no helicopter, no SWAT. The K-9 unit is the sheriff’s own dog. You can’t see fifty feet in front of you in those woods. It wouldn’t be hard for somebody to disappear.”

  “I come here with my family every year,” Jenkins, owner of a vacation home, stated to reporters. “We eat at the restaurants, go the shops. It’s quiet. Now I feel like I might as well stay in the city. This guy needs to be caught.

  “Catch him and let me deal with him,” Jenkins added. �
�I’ll show him what he can do with his lollipops.”

  Not everyone on Yannatok Island shares Jenkins’s sentiments. Bill Greer, a retired contractor and lifetime Yannatok resident, says, “These deputies go after us for all sorts of piddling stuff. You don’t have a permit to burn this, you can’t just go and build that. I’m glad to see someone sticking it to ’em.”

  FEBRUARY 12, 2010

  Robert hobbled along the road, sweat-glazed, dizzy. His throat was so parched it hurt to swallow.

  He knew he could land one of those planes. He’d done it a thousand times on his computer, in his head. He could picture it now, like a movie. Smoothly gliding onto the beach. What happened after that, the next frame, was what he couldn’t see.

  He staggered in the vacation house’s direction, but he wasn’t sure if that was the best plan. Would the cops start to nose around the empty houses? Call up the owners and tell them to check on their places? He pictured Holt cruising down the shore roads, his classic rock on low. Maybe if Robert talked to him, in secret, he could explain that all he wanted now was to get off Yannatok. Maybe Holt could help him. How could Robert get in touch with him without walking into the sheriff’s station and winding up in cuffs? And Robert wouldn’t try it with any other cop; it had to be the sheriff. Holt had been cool to him when he’d been busted, or rather, when Joey Kovach had been busted and thrown Robert under the bus. And he was the one who always came to Robert’s school, telling the kids that the police were there to help them. At this point, Robert would happily pack his bags for Sea Brook, shoot arrows, and swallow little blue Adderalls and sing “Kumbaya.”

  The sun had come up, fat as a juicy orange, and Robert was still lingering by the road. Maybe he could hitchhike. Maybe he’d get picked up by someone on their way to work in Seattle, and there he’d be, over the bridge. For a while, not a single car passed. He hobbled in the house’s direction, thought better of it, turned around, shuffled back the other way. He couldn’t think. A handful of those little blue pills he’d been so cavalier about unloading might help now. His stomach ached, empty but for candy.

  He was so roughed up, so dirty, with sand in his hair and the skin between his mouth and his nose scraped and his clothes stinking and wet, that whoever offered to give him a ride was probably someone he should stay away from. Or someone who would recognize him and drive him straight to the police.

  Something was coming down the road. His old school bus was huffing along. And there was Mira Wohl’s BMW, nipping right behind. The road was too narrow to pass. The bus screeched to a halt to pick up a few elementary schoolers. Mira braked and banged on Stella’s steering wheel in frustration. Her strawberry hair was shorter, angled into twin chin-skimming points. A kid in the back of the bus stretched his mouth wide and stuck out his tongue. Mira’s girlfriends laughed and waved their middle fingers. Alex Winters was missing from his passenger seat perch.

  Robert pulled up his hood and kept walking. When he snuck another quick peek at the car, it was crawling behind him and the girls in the back were whispering. One of them leaned forward to talk to Mira and pointed in his direction. A flush spread from his neck to his ears, and he walked faster. The car slowed to match his pace. The girls in the back, Justine Pierce and Riley Brennan, were also his former classmates.

  “Hey!” one of the girls called, and they all laughed. Robert burrowed farther into his sweatshirt. Justine leaned out the window. “Got a lollipop?”

  Now the girls were in hysterics, clutching one another. The bus was long gone. Robert didn’t get it. Were they making fun of him?

  Justine yelled again. “Hey! Why are you walking? Don’t you have a plane?”

  They knew. He wasn’t sure how, but they knew. He put his head down and broke into a run, thinking of the girls gathered around that pink phone in the cafeteria, the slim rectangles Justine or Riley or Mira were surely going to whip out to call 911 and report the fugitive hobbling down the road. Why wouldn’t they? He was just a free lunch kid with a telltale apple sticker on his ID.

  The car matched his pace, rolled along beside him no matter how fast he tried to outrun it.

  “We won’t tell,” Mira called.

  Robert looked up just in time to catch her wink, and then they sped off.

  For the first time in his life, Mira Wohl had talked to him. All he’d had to do to get her attention was steal a plane. For just a second, he really, really wished he had had a lollipop. Three, even.

  Interview with Mira Wohl, Willamette University cafeteria, October 2, 2010

  From Flight Risk: The Robert Jackson Kelley Story

  “I could have whipped out my phone right then and taken a picture. Had it on Twitter in like five seconds, right there under my name, @mira_mira_on_the_wohl. And probably would have gotten like a hundred thousand new followers, too. Or sold it to the newspapers. There wasn’t any reward money yet, but a few days later, I could have gone to the sheriff and my tip still would have been worth something. Could have told them what he was wearing, where he’d been prowling around. I bet Vera Hunt would have interviewed me.

  “But of course I didn’t do any of that. Justine wanted to, but I told her no way. I’m not a snitch, for starters. Plus, he looked so beat up, like a homeless person or like he’d been in a fight. And he was wandering around like he was lost, like he totally didn’t have a plan. He looked like he didn’t know who we were for a second, and I thought, ‘How long has he been out here, all wet and dirty?’ Turning him in would have been just mean, like kicking a puppy or something.

  “And this might sound crazy, but I totally got what he was doing. I scored the part of Juror Number Eight. The best part in the play, the most lines. I sat down with my English teacher and went over all of it, so I could really act, like Kristen Stewart or Emma Stone. My teacher thought I was a natural! But I could barely even be happy. Because you know what people were saying? That I cut my hair because really, the jurors are all guys, and I thought it would help me get a part. People in this school just make up whatever they want. I cut it because I’ve had the same long hair since I was, like, five, and Alex and I broke up, and I just felt like a friggin’ change. So many of my so-called friends turned on me after the breakup, and I was tired of being my same old self, basically, and doing what everyone expects me to do. If I could have stolen a plane and flown off this friggin’ island, I would have done it, too.”

  From the Seattle Times’s website, in the comments section for the Times’s article “The Lollipop Kid: Yannatok Teen Steals 2nd Plane, Taunts Police,” February 12, 2010

  Posted by TruPatriot911 at 3:40 p.m., February 12, 2010

  This kid could be planning anything. They need to catch him and quick. You know who else liked to screw around with planes? Hang around airports? Mohamed Atta.

  Posted by Airman45 at 5:58 p.m., February 12, 2010

  Fly, Robert, fly! Who do you think will play him in the movie?

  Posted by PacSunn, at 9:52 p.m., February 12, 2010

  Where is this kid’s mother?!?!?

  FEBRUARY 12, 2010

  Deb planted a sign in front of the trailer. No trespassers. Beware of dog. A reporter spotted Hulk on the porch, though, wagging his stubby tail, and after that they didn’t hesitate to snap pictures on the lawn.

  * * *

  Yellow police tape wound through the Tomkins fence and across the front door like a finish line Holt thought he’d never cross. He and his deputies had been combing the place for hours, while Walt Meehan, the airport’s general manager, hovered nearby, making his scorn for the Sheriff’s Department known. He trailed them around the hangars, questioning every photo they took, every surface they swiped. Holt had brought along Bandit, though he didn’t think the dog would unearth any evidence. He still missed Copper, his first K-9 partner, but loyal, smart, energetic Bandit made a fine replacement. Something about the animal put a swagger in Holt’s step. But Walt kept glaring at Bandit like he had shit on the floor.

  Holt and the dog joined
Walt in his office, a neat little cubicle lined with shelves displaying various logbooks and a dozen or so intricate model fighter jets. Walt’s certifications hung over his desk. Not a stray paper, not a single wrapper or Coke can. The thought of Kelley’s grimy hands on his keys was probably driving Walt nuts. Probably wasn’t thrilled about Bandit’s paws on the carpet, either. Holt took a notebook from his pocket. “In any B and E, the first question is, what’s missing?”

  “Besides a plane?”

  Holt wished he carried a Taser. “Money? Electronics?”

  Walt sighed. “No. Computers don’t look touched. Didn’t use the shower. There’s food missing, though. Candy. I only realized it because I counted up the change in the can just yesterday. It was short, which usually doesn’t happen. Guys around here are honest.”

  Holt clicked his pen and kept his expression neutral. “Candy?”

  He nodded. “Reese’s. A Snickers bar, I think. Some lollipops, just like everyone’s saying.” Walt stood. “Look, I gotta tell ya, I’m not happy with how this is being handled. Is the FBI going to come out here? Homeland Security? Because your deputies seem out of their element. And I want this guy caught so I can get some kind of restitution.”

  “Mr. Meehan, we are conducting an extremely thorough investigation. In fact, you’re going to need to cease operations while this facility is considered a crime scene. And I also ask that you not speak to the media about any aspect of this investigation. We are being very careful about what information is released to the public.”

  “And why is that?” Walt barked. “And how I am supposed to cease operations? I need to pay rent.” Walt shook his head. “I’m going to stay here, sleep here if I have to, until this guy’s in handcuffs. How do you know he won’t be back? And when will I get restitution? What about the camera he smashed?”