“Ladies and gentlemen, the plane is still on an active taxi,” she announced. “Please stay seated until the aircraft has come to a complete stop and the captain has turned off the fasten-seatbelt sign.” Once she finished her announcement she immediately re-engrossed herself in the tabloid opened on her lap, a total violation of federal regulations, by the way.
I kept my eyes expectantly on Officer Ned.
“What?” he finally asked.
“You know there’s a tailcone exit on this plane, don’t you?” I said.
“Really? Well, I doubt my prisoner can open it,” he chuckled.
“It tells you how to open it right here in the safety card,” I told him. I pulled the card out of my seat pocket and unfolded it. “Right here,” I pointed. “And there’s no flight attendant manning the back of the plane right now.”
When I say Officer Ned moved in a flash, I am not exaggerating. It was like, whoosh!, and he was halfway to the back just as the prisoner opened the aft door, which the flight attendant had already disarmed—another total FAA violation, seeing as how the plane had not come to a complete stop yet. Because of this the tailcone did not drop and deploy the slide, as it would have if it was armed like it should have been. What happened instead was worse.
I got up and followed right behind, because I did not want to miss this. When you open the tailcone exit of an MD-88 in the disarmed position, it enables you to lower the aft staircase, the one reserved for the ground crew so they can enter the plane from the back and begin cleaning the cabin before the passengers are even finished disembarking through the front door.
In this case, the prisoner, who had unlocked his handcuffs (not surprising, since there are hundreds of tutorials on YouTube showing you exactly how), was already at the end of the catwalk along the interior of the tailcone by the time Officer Ned dove through the back door and missed the man’s ankles by about a nano-inch. The other passengers had jumped up from their seats, thinking all the activity meant it was okay to start gathering their carry-ons and lumber toward the exit, oblivious to the fact that one, the plane was still moving, and two, anything was wrong. The flight attendant at midcabin, equally oblivious, kept repeating her PA admonishment for everyone to remain seated or she’d have to tell the captain to stop the plane on the tarmac, which would actually have been a good thing to do, but she never did it.
The attendant who should have been manning the aft door was still holed up in the side galley. He did not so much as peek through the curtain, not even when the fire started.
Because it turns out that when you drag a metal staircase along asphalt behind an airplane in the hot California sun, it causes sparks. And sparks cause fires. Luckily I’d grabbed the Halon extinguisher from the bracket behind the last seat on my way back there. I didn’t expect to use it to actually put out a fire, because a Halon extinguisher happens to be a great weapon in case you need to throw it at the head of an escaping car thief, but then the sparks ignited the brake pad on one of the landing gears, and, well, there was nothing for it but to pull the pin on the extinguisher and begin spraying it in a fan formation as the flight attendant manual instructs.
Before the smoke obstructed my view, I saw Officer Ned overtake his prisoner right as he was about to reach the chain-link fence along the runway. It was a pretty impressive sight, considering the head start the thief had on him. But Officer Ned has legs like rockets, he really does. I’m glad he’s one of my few friends.
Regarding the fire, all I had to do was pull the inflation handle of the escape slide. Once it deployed and came in contact with the fire, which hadn’t grown that big (it takes ninety seconds for a fire to grow out of control), the slide popped and the ensuing burst of air extinguished the flames. I snuffed any residual flames with the extinguisher. By then we’d reached the gate and the jetway was already in place. Later Flo told me that the pilots never even knew anything went wrong other than the incessant beeping on their flight panel indicating an open aft door, which they ignored, and the flight attendants remained oblivious as well, until all the passengers had disembarked and they noticed a charred tailcone exit at the back of the plane.
The tower did notice the commotion, though—it would have been hard for them not to—and so had dispatched a swarm of emergency personnel. FAA officials and airport security had started to descend upon the jetway, along with airline representatives clutching in-flight incident forms for people to fill out, but I slipped by them unnoticed.
I’m just an unaccompanied minor. What do I know.
CHAPTER 3
Ash’s place is a dismally furnished one-bedroom condo where he expected me to sleep on patio cushions he put on the floor of his laundry room. It’s located in Manhattan Beach, a neighborhood near LAX that is super popular with newly divorced airline pilots. They move there thinking they’re part of this hip-surfer-bikini community, when really it’s mostly middle-aged divorced old crust buckets like Ash all trying to suck the youth out of the sand or something. It’s pretty pathetic, and I hate it.
Ash’s girlfriend Kathy doesn’t even live in Manhattan Beach. She lives in Carlsbad, which is about two hours south of LAX and one of the reasons Ash is never home. Lately I’d spent entire custodial periods at his place without laying eyes on him, which was fine with me. He would usually call his landline, though, to make sure I’d arrived. Because if I hadn’t it meant my mother hadn’t followed the judge’s order, and he could drag her back into court again. Ash had a maddening advantage over my mother considering his girlfriend was an attorney and every bit as empty-hearted as he was.
But what made it all the more maddening was that it was clear Ash didn’t want me around. I’m not surmising here; he told me so all the time.
“Can you get lost? Kathy’s coming over and she doesn’t like you lurking around,” he’d say as he stood in front of the mirror in the foyer, running his fingers through his thinning hair to distribute the mousse evenly. I didn’t get why women found him attractive. I mean, sure, he had the blond hair and blue eyes and he was kind of tall and he’d held up okay physically for being forty-nine, but he was vain and mean and there was that black, sucking sinkhole in his chest where his heart should be. Personally I wondered how his romantic prospects got around that.
“Move it!” he hissed at me.
“My absolute pleasure, Dad,” I hissed back. At this point I’d usually grab my things and catch the bus to the airport to sneak into the employee lounge to eat the free snacks they sometimes put out for the crew. All I had to do to get past security was list myself on a flight, print the boarding voucher and stand next to a big family in the security line so the TSA agent would assume I was with them. As long as I stayed in the concourses on the other side of security, I never had to show my passport again. I could literally fly all over the country without going through another checkpoint.
That’s why checked baggage has been such a downside since I’ve been disappeared for the past three weeks. Baggage claim is outside the security checkpoint. To retrieve a bag would have meant leaving the concourse and then re-entering through security. I rarely chanced it. About six weeks ago when I was just a part-time runaway, before I disappeared, I was in a hurry and tried to simply go through security on my own without piggybacking on a big family. I’d done it a few times before without incident; I showed them my passport and they must have just assumed I was over eighteen. But that day I got popped by a TSA agent who, judging from her appearance, I could have sworn would have been a complete cakewalk.
“Young lady, where is your escort?” she asked me sternly. I knew I was in trouble the second she called me “young lady.” She wore her hair in a mass of long cornrows supplemented by hot-pink extensions all bunched up and sprouting from the top of her head like an erupting volcano. She eyed me levelly over the top of purple-and-red-framed reading glasses.
“My mom has gone through already. I’m just trying to catch up with her,” I answered. I was friendly and confident and looked
her in the eye. I had practiced this.
“Well, we can’t let you through security unless you’re being escorted by a parent or guardian,” she said humorlessly. Dang, I thought, she must have kids of her own. Mothers are the hardest to fool.
“My mom’s probably just trying to get rid of me,” I joked.
“Um-hm.” She sounded not at all like she was buying my act, which was saying something, because my act was pretty good. Instead she eyed me like a shoplifter, unhooked her walkie-talkie, and spoke into it, directing her colleague to “monitor” me until they could find my mother. I spent the next forty minutes sitting next to the surveillance podium while various TSA agents took fruitless turns paging my mother over the airport PA system.
Then—thank God!—I saw Officer Ned making his way to the head of the line. He must have been on his way back from escorting another prisoner, because I could tell he was wearing his gun holster even though he was alone. He looked as irritated with the slow-moving crowd as he must have looked with the criminal he’d ferried around earlier—and as he customarily did with me, come to think of it—but that didn’t stop me from calling out to him.
“Officer Ned, hi! Over here! Officer Ned!” The other TSA agents were a little startled by my hollering, but thankfully Volcano Head had gone on a break, so without her critical eye on me I felt more free to call attention to myself. “Here! Hi, Officer Ned!” I hooted.
He finally heard me and lifted his head to scan the crowd like he was searching for someone who’d made an offensive remark. This guy needs to cheer up, I thought. When he caught sight of me he rolled his eyes and shook his head as though my appearance in his life right then was the rotten cherry on top of the crap sundae that had been his afternoon. Undeterred, I smiled excitedly and added jumping to my arm waving. Eventually, after struggling back into his black motorcycle boots (who wears motorcycle boots through a TSA scan?), he lumbered over to me while refastening the watch he’d removed for the security scan. His badge hung on his belt, half visible beneath the waistband of his lightweight bomber jacket, a departure from the usual LEO suit jacket.
“What is wrong with you, April? You can’t be yelling out my name. I’m supposed to be incognito,” he said.
“False,” I answered. I was the wrong person for him to try to con, because I knew that plainclothed LEOs are not expected to travel undercover. “You’re just saying that so people won’t bother you.”
“Exactly.”
He nodded his acknowledgement to the TSA officer in the podium at my side, who gave him the invisible law-enforcement brotherhood handshake and asked, “Are you here to escort this young lady to her gate? Her mother isn’t answering any of our pages.”
“Yes, that’s exactly right,” I interjected. “I’ll be fine now, thanks for your help. Officer Rockwell can take me to my gate. I’m sure my mother’s there waiting for me. Shall we go, Officer Rockwell?” I grabbed my backpack, hooked my arm through his elbow and half-dragged him onto the concourse.
When we got to a safe distance from the security area he dug in his heels and gently yanked his arm away. “What the hell’s going on here?”
“By the way, you’re welcome,” I teased him.
“I’m welcome for what?”
“For saving your butt when that prisoner tried to escape.” I nudged him playfully, but Officer Ned was about as playful as a porcupine. Still, his face softened with reluctant appreciation.
“Thank you,” he sighed. “Now tell me what the hell is going on here.”
“You heard the TSA agent,” I lied. “I got separated from my mother and she didn’t hear their pages, which, you know, can you blame her?” I cupped my hands behind my ears to indicate the fact that the airport PA system sounded as clear as a ham radio during a hurricane. “I probably would have been there forever if you hadn’t come along. Thanks!”
“Where are you flying? I’m taking you to your gate and meeting your mother.”
“I’m catching flight 1420 to Atlanta,” I said.
“No, you’re not.” He eyed me intently. “That flight was canceled.”
“Well, then we’re just gonna take the next flight.”
“No, you’re not,” he said again. He was really starting to bother me. “All flights to Atlanta are canceled. Haven’t you been listening to the announcements?”
“Who can hear the announcements?” I asked. It was a reasonable question. “Nobody can hear anything through these speakers.” Later I found out that an overloaded electrical transformer had blown up beneath the D Concourse at Hartsfield and closed down the entire airport for the rest of the night. It was the first time in the history of forever that anything like that had happened, and wouldn’t you know, it occurred just as I was trying to lie my butt off to a police officer.
“What’s your mother’s cell phone number?” Officer Ned flipped open his phone expectantly.
I didn’t skip a beat. “The TSA agents already tried calling her.” My eyes were wide with honesty. “But her phone is dead.”
Officer Ned snapped his phone shut impatiently. He took a card from his breast pocket. “I’m starting to find it a little hard to believe that your mother hasn’t called the police and enlisted a SWAT team to try and find you.” He handed me the card. “Do you see what it says there? I am an officer of the law. I will talk to your mother, do you understand? Right now. Take me to her this second. Or,” he continued, “you can just cut the crap and tell me what’s going on here, April.”
“Okay, fine.” I took a deep breath and let it out with an air of dramatic dejection. “I’ll tell you everything. First I have to pee, though. Can I please go pee? There’re no bathroom breaks when you’re practically held prisoner at security.”
You really can’t blame Officer Ned for losing me after that. First, I knew from experience that begging to use the bathroom was an effective ruse with him, and second, how was he to know that the door to the crew lounge was down the same hallway that led to the concourse restrooms? Or that I could gain access through that door, descend the stairs, and disappear into the busy lower region of the airport?
Escape like this was one of the benefits that came with impersonating my mother. And WorldAir was such a large corporation that any discrepancies juxtaposing her pass travel against her nut house commitment would not be discovered for months, possibly even years, if ever. For example, it had been eleven years since the death of my real father, and we still received his empty pay stub in the mail every month. The industry machine moves very slowly in this regard, so I felt secure in using her badge to camp in the crew lounges and even to book myself in the jumpseat sometimes, since I’m five-nine, which is tall for a fifteen-year-old, and when I spatula makeup on my face and wear my hair in a twist, I can pass for her now that they don’t put birthdates on the badges anymore.
That night, once I was certain I’d ditched Officer Ned, I moseyed over to the employee cafeteria and used my mother’s badge to buy a “payroll-deduct” hamburger, finished all of my homework—barring the composition on the five people I admire the most; I was having a hard time with that one (I wonder why)—and spent the night in one of the comfortable La-Z-Boys clustered in a dark corner for flight attendants to use when they need to catch some snores between trips. I would have slept better if not for a coworker (I consider them coworkers), who noisily masticated a big bag of microwave popcorn all night. Seriously, I wanted to swat it out of her hands like how they showed us to do to weapon-wielding assailants in the flight attendant self-defense training video.
Swat it to the ground! I kept thinking. It was such a satisfying mental image, all the popcorn flying in the air. Swat it to the ground! I grinned and attached my earphones to my charging portable DVD player. I was on episode sixty-five of MacGyver, “The Secret of Parker House,” in which MacGyver accompanies his friend Penny Parker (played by Teri Hatcher) to an old house she inherited from her aunt, but suspects foul play when the house appears to be haunted. I fell asleep jus
t as he was improvising a torpedo using a pipe and an old boilerplate.
The next morning I booked myself on the first flight to Atlanta as a nonrevenue employee using my mother’s badge, because the standby list was a mile long due to all the cancellations from the night before. By listing myself as a jump-seating flight attendant instead of an unaccompanied minor, I could at least grab a jumpseat if no passenger seats were left.
It was just my luck that Officer Ned was standing by for the same flight. I tried to avoid him, but he must have been on the lookout for me. When he caught sight of me he looked furious, but also, I could have sworn, a little relieved as well.
“Officer Ned!” I exclaimed, figuring I might as well play up our encounter. I rushed over and threw my arms around him. He stiffened with surprise, but after a second he patted my shoulder awkwardly. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” I cried. The people around us began to gaze fondly upon our reunion.
Officer Ned detangled himself and held me at arm’s length. “All right, April.” He nodded skeptically. “One more time, where’s your mother?”
“She’s already on board,” I lied.
“Really? They haven’t even begun the boarding process!” He was angry now.
I hesitated for exactly one second before answering him. “Ah, she’s working the flight. All the cancellations from yesterday really screwed up flight attendant scheduling.”
“Right.” He rolled his eyes.
“Seriously, she volunteered to work the flight so the plane could meet minimum staffing requirements. I’ll introduce you when you get on board, I swear.”
“Is that so? Well, we’ll just wait here until they call our names and board the plane together, then.”
Unaccompanied Minor Page 5