Unaccompanied Minor

by Hollis Gillespie

  I found the handcuffs, pulled them out, and headed for Cinderblock. “I’m making a citizen’s arrest!”

  “Those are my handcuffs! I wondered what happened to them! Hand them back to me right now!”

  “All right! Enough!” Flo could holler pretty loud for a tiny lady. Plus, in order to clap her hands vigorously to get our attention, she had snuffed out a perfectly good half-finished cigarette. Again, if you knew Flo, that should signal the gravity of the situation. “Hugh,” she said to Cinderblock, “tell her.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Officer Ned interjected. “April, this is Hugh Newman. He’s my former partner.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Cinderblock said to me.

  “I think we’ve met.” I glared at him.

  “Let me finish, April,” said Officer Ned. “Hugh and I used to be partners in the Atlanta police department, but then I got shot—”

  “I see you’re still a magnet for bullets, Ned,” Cinderblock chuckled.

  “—and he got promoted to do undercover work. When you sent me the e-mail about Jalyce Sanders—”

  “That was an anonymous e-mail,” I said.

  “Maybe you thought so, but I could tell it was you. Anyway, when you sent me the e-mail, I knew you were talking about Hugh’s investigation. So I gave him a call. We got together and discussed some details—”

  “Jalyce Sanders? Is she just a detail?” I fumed.

  “No,” said Cinderblock. “She was an undercover investigator, a really good one, too. God bless her soul.”

  “I… wait, she was?” Wow, this would explain why she knew so much about sociopaths and serial killers. “Then why did you kill her? Why did you try to kill me?”

  “I didn’t kill Maryanne—her real name was Maryanne—I didn’t kill her. That was that skinny witch Kathy, she did that. I was just infiltrating their money-laundering ring as a bodyguard—”

  “Henchman,” Officer Ned interrupted.

  “Okay, henchman, and she asked me to help her get rid of Maryanne’s body, and it turned into this whole ‘oh, by the way, can we swing by and kidnap this little hell-on-wheels wildcat while we’re at it and kill her, too’ kinda thing.”

  “So you were gonna kill me to keep from blowing your cover?”

  “No, I was gonna stop it before it got that far,” he said. Then, under his breath, “Probably.”

  I paused to think for a second. This solved the puzzle of the second Jalyce Sanders, as presumably she had been replaced with another investigator. Poor Jalyce, or Maryanne. I felt my heart tug. “Wait, what’s this about a money-laundering ring?”

  “He can’t go into detail about that, April. It’s still an active investigation,” Officer Ned explained.

  “Oh, now we’re keeping secrets,” I griped. “Then why were you taking Beefheart to the front cabin?” I asked Cinderblock, referring to the time when the old lady had thwacked him with her cane to allow me to retrieve the dog.

  “Beats me,” he answered. “I was just doing what I was told. I’m a henchman. That’s what I do.”

  Malcolm finally piped up from his perch on the access ladder just below the hatch. “Flo, what did you mean by ‘Mac, season two, episode five?’ Was it the mountain lion? And how it represents the hijacker with the gun?”

  “And the snake, remember the snake?” asked Officer Ned. “What did the snake represent?”

  Flo looked at them like they’d each grown an extra arm out of their foreheads, then turned to me and asked, “Did you bring the nitroglycerin tablets?”

  “Yeah.” I reached into my pocket and handed them to her. “Why do you need them?”

  “Right! Nitro tabs!” Officer Ned exclaimed. “For the heart attack! The pilot had a heart attack, remember?” he nudged Malcolm.

  “How did we miss that?” Malcolm said.

  Then Officer Ned straightened sharply. “The pilot had a heart attack?”

  “Relax, Thor,” Flo said. “Nobody had a heart attack—except for maybe one or two of the passengers.”

  “So you need the nitro tabs for them?”

  “Hell, no. They’ll be fine. I need the nitro tabs for the hijackers. Right now they’ve got the pilots hogtied on the floor of the first-class cabin. I have to say it’s one of the more satisfying sights I’ve ever seen, but we’ve got to bring the fun to an end and get them back in here to land the plane before we get shot out of the sky.” She motioned my attention to the cockpit window, where a Navy fighter jet could be seen monitoring us with missiles at the ready.

  “Crap!” I said. “Holy crap!” Then suddenly a mechanical whirring sound arose from the flight panel.

  “What’s that sound?” Cinderblock frantically assessed the flight panel.

  The fax machine on the control panel of an L-1011 is not like the kind you see in hotel lobbies and outdated offices. It’s a small metal box built into the instruments that blends in with all the other metal doo-jigs in the cockpit. When it jumps to life, it sounds like a lawnmower starting up. Cinderblock couldn’t even figure out where the sound was coming from until the thermal mimeograph-type paper began spitting through the little slit in the metal. “What is that?” He pointed to it.

  “That should be the coordinates to land the plane,” I said, tearing off the paper and studying it.

  Flo continued to brief us on her knowledge of the present situation. It went thusly: All together there were four hijackers, Ramona, Kathy, the fake drunk, and that imposter Brighton McPherson that we’d thrown off the plane (“That we know of,” I added, determined not to fall for another sleeper). Presently the hijackers had cleared the first-class cabin of passengers and were using it as a command center.

  Surprisingly, they had not planned to hijack the plane today. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. They had planned for this day to go as smoothly as any of the many other days they’d spent smuggling money to and from the liberal banks in the Cayman Islands. “But then they got a message from their boss telling them that you were on the plane, April,” Flo said, “and, for some reason, it was necessary to keep you from getting off alive.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “I don’t know, kid. But it partly explains why you’ve been shot at twice today. No other passengers have been shot at.”

  “I’ve been shot at,” Officer Ned said.

  “No, you blocked April while she was being shot at,” she corrected him.

  “You’ve been shot at,” he said.

  “I am not a passenger, Thor. I am a crew member, and they only shot at me to try to get to her. April here is the only one who has had two deliberate attempts on her life.”

  “Three,” I corrected. “Let’s not forget when I got kidnapped and thrown in a car trunk with a corpse.” I glared at Cinderblock.

  “Right, three,” Flo agreed. “But only twice today.”She went on to tell us that the note I’d left on the seat really wrecked the smugglers’ plans, too, because if the plane was diverted due to a bomb scare they knew they’d have to disembark without their bags and stand by as the entire airplane got searched by the DEA and all the other formidable government agencies with initials ending in “A” (TSA, FAA, CIA, and probably the NRA, who knows). Their big bag of money would definitely get discovered. So they had to improvise.

  “What big bag of money?” I asked. “Malcolm and I went through all the crew bags, there was no money.”

  “That’s just it, I don’t think there is a bag of money,” she surmised. “I think this time they were given a bag with something else in it.”

  “The bomb!” Malcolm exclaimed.

  “Right, the bomb.”

  I shook my head. This was too much. I knew Ash was a gutless bovine, but even he wouldn’t bring a bomb on a plane, would he? Then I remembered the candy-colored locks on the bag, and it occurred to me that his role was not to look inside. His role was to blindly just bring the bag on the plane and not ask questions.

  “Flo, how do you know all this?” Officer Ned asked.

&
nbsp; “Ramona and her cronies are not keeping any secrets from us. Alby and I pick up what we can and compare notes. The other flight attendants just sit in first class doing nothing. Granted, they have a gun on them, but still.”

  “They’re just letting you and Alby hear everything?” I asked.

  “Kid,” she said, placing her hand on my arm. “They’re not expecting us to live through this. They plan to kill us and pin the hijacking on us. Already they’ve got a bomb threat on a note in your handwriting, and your voice on a phone call making demands to the NTSB.”

  Not to mention the letter I’d written to Judge Cheevers with the false threat to bomb a plane in the hopes that my newly erratic behavior would convince him to revisit the custody arrangement. Crap. “And what about him?” I pointed to Cinderblock.

  “They think I’m on their side,” he answered for Flo. “They thought I’d been busted and was being extradited back to L.A. That’s why I was pretending to be an escorted prisoner. And that’s why, I might add, no one has been pounding on the door of the cockpit.”

  Just then, someone pounded on the door of the cockpit. We all jumped, startled. Officer Ned hit his head on the knobs of the cockpit ceiling and winced. Malcolm retreated all the way back into the cargo bay at the base of the access ladder. Flo looked through the peephole and opened the door.

  Alby Madison stepped inside and closed the door behind her. “Your turn,” she told Flo. Flo bundled her hair atop her head as best she could to try and make herself presentable, then moved to walk out the door.

  “Wait!” I whispered. “Where are you going?”

  “They’re having us take turns tending to the cabins. They want the passengers to get a good look at us in order to bolster their story later on, is my guess. Not that it matters; half of them are panting for breath due to hypoxia.”

  “Wait, that was a fake decompression just to get the plane to dive. There was never any real loss of oxygen,” I said.

  “I know—and good one, by the way—but try telling them that.”

  “And they want one of us locked in the cockpit at all times, too, so it will appear to the fighter pilots that we have control of the aircraft,” Alby explained. “They can’t hear us because all communication has been shut down for some reason.” I tried to look innocent.

  “Here I go,” Flo said.

  “Wait,” Officer Ned said. “Don’t forget the nitro tabs. What good are they gonna do?”

  “They can’t hurt,” she shrugged. “I’ve already spiked their coffee pot with half my stash; OxyContin, Xanax, beta-blockers, and that migraine medication. So far all it’s done is make them fight with each other. Now, these nitro tabs oughta push them into some serious symptoms.”

  “You’re gonna give them heart attacks,” Officer Ned warned.

  “Here’s to hoping,” Flo said, and started for the door. I put my arm out to stop her, my eyes pleading. “I’ll be fine, kid,” she promised me. She sounded so certain it made my heart hurt.

  CHAPTER 17

  Once Flo left we were all silent for a moment, digesting the information. Alby broke the silence. “Flo tells me you’re Roy Coleman’s granddaughter,” she said. I nodded wanly. Everyone at World­Air had known my grandfather Roy, even the CEO of the company. “A friend of mine interns for the law office that he used to file all his patents,” she added.

  That’s right, I remembered. Alby is a third-year law student. I perked up with a sad smile. Malcolm emerged halfway through the hatch again, and I absently stroked Beefheart’s sweet head.

  “Uh, I’m sorry to hear he’d passed. He had quite a portfolio. What did you do with the shares that he left you?” she asked, trying to allay the quiet in the confined area.

  I was deep in thought. How were we going to get out of this? Don’t freak out, figure it out. Malcolm was up for conversation, though. “What shares?” he asked Alby.

  “Her grandfather left her his shares of the company.”

  “What company?”

  “World­Air, of course. What company did you think I meant?”

  Malcolm nudged my calf and said, “April, I think you want to pay attention to this.”

  “What?”

  “This lady says your grandfather left you some shares in this company.”

  “What?” I directed my attention to Alby.

  Alby eyed me quizzically. “Didn’t you know?”

  “What?” Evidently I was having trouble coming up with different words.

  “April, your grandfather created a lot of useful inventions. He even holds the patent on the fuse that was the legacy of that plane wreck in Sioux City….”

  “1989!” Malcolm said. “Sioux City, Iowa, DC-10, a faulty engine fan disk disintegrated and blew shrapnel that severed all three hydraulic lines by the tail-mounted engine and disabled the aircraft’s entire hydraulic system.”

  “The pilots lost all flight control,” I remembered. “They had to attempt to minimize the crash landing by using engine thrust only. It was almost impossible to do. It’s a miracle anyone at all survived, let alone over half the people on board.” To this day, the pilot of that plane, Alfred C. Haynes, is one of the few who inspires my faith in the profession.

  “Yes, honey,” Alby spoke in a deliberate tone. “Your grandfather invented the fuse that prevents any catastrophic loss of hydraulic fluid, so a crash like that can never happen again. Didn’t you know that?”

  “No,” I answered, bewildered.

  “Your mother never told you? The papers must have been sent to….” Then she clapped her hand over her mouth. “Your mother!”

  “They were sent to my mother?” I asked.

  “No! I just remembered. Your mother doesn’t have custody of you! She’s not your primary physical custodian. The papers were probably sent to….”

  Ash Manning! That bastard!

  Officer Ned had to hold me back from busting through the door to try and bust open Ash’s head. “Calm down, April, listen to what else she has to say.”

  “There’s nothing else I can say,” Alby said. “I don’t have access to her grandfather’s file. Not even April has access to his file. The only person who does is her legal custodian… oh, and her guardian ad litem.”

  Kathy Landry! I fumed. I turned to charge out the door once again. Officer Ned and Alby moved to stop me, but that proved unnecessary because I was already halted by a glimpse of something in my periphery—the unmistakable designer pattern of a Louis Vitton bag. It was wedged under the jumpseat reserved for deadheading pilots. Ash Manning was deadheading this flight. Ash Manning always carried the bags for that hollow-boned dung beetle he called a girlfriend!

  I grabbed the strap of the bag and gave it a mighty tug, marveling at how strong it held. The bag remained pinched between the jumpseat and the fuselage. Alby reached over and grasped the second strap, and with a heave we were able to pull it free.

  “What are you doing?” asked Officer Ned.

  “This is Kathy’s giant carpetbagger purse.” I unsnapped the clasp, unzipped all the compartments, and yanked it open. Seriously, it was half the size of a golf bag. As a designer purse it must have cost more than a small car. In the side compartments were several legal files, which, upon cursory glance, proved to be her pending guardian ad litem cases. As a corporate attorney for World­Air, Kathy’s standing as a guardian ad litem registered with the Fulton County family court system not only helped fulfill her firm’s quota of pro bono work, it evidently also raked in a nice side income for her, judging by the exorbitant tacked-on fees she extorted from the terrified parents of her charges. Believe me, a GAL’s power holds heavy sway with judges, it was rare when someone challenged their recommendation. Malcolm’s father’s successful discrediting of Kathy’s recommendation was a rare and wonderful thing. I flipped through the files and caught sight of a few heartbreaking faxes from parents who were tearfully flummoxed by Kathy’s stupefying recommendations. (“Their mother is married to a registered sex offender, how can
you give her custody of my sons?” “Little Nadine’s father is on parole for manslaughter, please tell me your custody recommendation is a mistake!”) As heartlessly as Kathy brandished her power, she was equally anal in her recordkeeping, and the files included copies of the checks and money transfers for the bribes she’d received to garner her favor. I found my own sizeable file and flipped it open—no canceled checks or copies of money transfers, instead there was an inch-thick folder of strange legal documents bearing my grandfather’s name.

  I handed the folder to Alby. “Can you look at this and tell me what it means?”

  She quickly scanned the contents of the folder. “April, your grandfather licensed World­Air with the use of his patent, and he directed all the funds from the royalties into a trust on your behalf. You were supposed to begin receiving graduated payments every month starting on your fifteenth birthday.”

  “Payments? What payments? How much are the payments?”

  “A hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  “A hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars?”

  “A month.”

  “A month?”

  Malcolm whistled through his teeth. Officer Ned clutched his chest like the news had punched him there. Cinderblock kept quiet, his eyes behind his bottle glasses, faultily focused on the horizon. For my part, I was thinking of those nights I spent sleeping on patio cushions on the floor of Ash’s laundry room, and the days I spent foraging for food through crew rooms and flight lounges, and that instant, right then, when I was wearing discarded old uniform pieces patched together from the lost and found. All of this when I had money?

  “Why wasn’t my mother included in this trust?”

  “That’s a good question. Originally it was set up for your dad, and when he died—” she reached out to touch my arm in sympathy “—it should have been passed to his surviving spouse. I don’t know why it skipped her and went straight to you.”