We Will Be Crashing Shortly (17 page)

“Likewise, Thor,” Flo said, and walked into his embrace.

“Flo!”
I clambered to her side to join in on the hug. She turned toward me and then caught sight of Otis, who had sprung forth from behind the nearest stack of caskets.

“What the
hell
?” she shrieked. “You’re dead, you bastard! I heard the ambulance driver say so!” As if to prove to herself that she wasn’t hallucinating, she picked up the crowbar from the floor and threw it at him.

Otis turned and winced when it hit him in the butt. “Ouch. Watch it. I’ve had enough trouble with crowbars lately.” Flo wailed with relief and threw herself into his arms.

We explained to her how she wasn’t the only one who thought Otis was gone, as we found him in one of the travel caskets just like any other cadaver. “I wasn’t dead, I was just rebooting,” Otis said, which was as good an explanation as any. LaVonda called for assistance getting free from the jumpseat again, and as I turned to help her I caught sight of someone else in the elevator. He had his back to me—a tall man in an expensive suit—but when he turned around the recognition hit me. I wanted to throw myself through the small door and stick to him like a squid, but I could do little more than just stand there like an idiot, staring at him.

“Hi, April,” Malcolm emerged from the elevator and smiled shyly at me.

Finally my motor functions returned and I went to him, blinking back tears of relief. Captain Beefheart flung his pudgy self against his chest, where Malcolm held him close. Beefheart had always been Malcolm’s dog, after all. Officer Ned led us into a huddle, where we debriefed each other on the events since yesterday.
Was it really just 24 hours since I saw Malcolm get abducted outside his dad’s office?
I marveled.

“Actually, they took me four days ago, not just yesterday. The driver mistook me for my Dad.” That driver was Ash Manning, of course, who, as part of the grift, had gotten hired as a driver by Malcolm’s mother. (Evidently her background check consisted of one question: “When can you start?”) When Hackman realized they got the wrong Colgate, he must have decided to use Malcolm in a ploy to get to his father.

“What did they want with your father?” Officer Ned asked.

“The money he took,” Malcolm lowered his head, “—that he stole.” They told him his father refused to bend to their demands, even at the risk of Malcolm’s own welfare. “Finally they asked me to impersonate him, and I said yes. It’s the least I could do.”

“What do you mean they
asked
you?” I cried. “It didn’t look like they were politely asking you from my perspective. And they
shot
at us.”

“Those were just blanks,” he shrugged. “They would never hurt any of you. They promised me.”

We stared at him, agog. All except Flo, who asked Malcolm to take Beefheart through the bulkhead and down the catwalk in case he had any business to take care of. “And make sure he craps under the pilot hatch so the boys in the cockpit can enjoy the aroma,” she laughed.

When Malcolm was out of earshot, she turned to us and lowered her voice. “They got in his head, Crash,” she told me. “He thinks he’s going to Grand Cayman to get the money and give it back to the people his father stole it from—not just the shareholders, but the pensions of all the employees, and the people who invested their life savings in the stock of Colgate Enterprises. The kidnappers convinced him he’s doing the right thing—restoring his family name.”

I realized this meant Malcolm thought his father refused to talk even when Hackman threatened his family. Malcolm was under the impression his dad valued the money over him, when the likely truth was the opposite—if his father had given Hackman what he wanted, there would have been no reason for them to keep Malcolm alive. Now here the stupid thugs have killed Mr. Colgate and still didn’t have the bank account information. But obviously they thought they no longer needed it, since they’d convinced Malcolm to fly to Grand Cayman and impersonate his father in an attempt to access the funds.

Flo explained that, for her part, she had been able to convince the criminals of her usefulness by suggesting she schedule herself as part of the cabin crew for their flight to Grand Cayman. Malcolm backed her up and that was why she’d been escorted home and back, to change into her uniform.

“And guys,” Flo continued, “Malcolm doesn’t know his dad’s dead.”

I gasped and covered my mouth. Poor Malcolm! They must have spent days brainwashing him. “Yeah,” Flo said. “They laid it on pretty thick.”

Malcolm called to us from the behind the bulkhead to apologize for taking so long. “Beefheart doesn’t want to poop.”

“That’s okay, you take all the time you need,” Flo called to him, then turned back to us and lowered her voice.

The two airport ambulance drivers, she explained, were also part of the smuggling scheme. After she hopped in the back of the ambulance with Otis, they brought Flo straight to Hackman’s safe house across from the Cheetah strip club, where Malcolm was holed up with Ash and little Miss Chesty GargantoBoobs from the getaway car. It’s also the reason the woman didn’t kill Flo the second she was dragged through the door by the drivers, because it would have blown her cover as a compassionate do-gooder trying to reunite people with their lost pensions. No matter how brainwashed Malcolm was, I doubt he’d have remained her ally if she killed his friend right in front of him.

“Who
is
that woman?” I asked.

Flo lit a cigarette and eyed me with reluctance. “You’re not gonna like this . . .” She shook her head and decided on a different approach. “Okay, they call her Dr. Lullwater. I don’t know her first name.”

“Dr. Lullwater! She came to my office this morning,” Officer Ned exclaimed. “She had
documents
. Here, I kept a copy of her credentials.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a square of printer paper and unfolded it. “This is her badge.”

“Right,” Flo snorted. “I bet it is.”

I peered at the grainy image on the paper. The name on the badge read “Lena Lullwater, Forensic Psychologist, ABPP.” The face in the picture, though, read something different altogether. The hair was platinum blonde and the double chin was gone, but I recognized her. I pointed to the image so hard I nearly punched the paper from Officer Ned’s hand.

“That’s Molly Hackman!”

“I said you weren’t gonna like it,” said Flo. She was right. I was furious.

“I told you, Thor!” LaVonda piped up. “Did I not TELL you? And here you were ready to hand over our April with a birthday bow.” We realized she was still stuck in her seat. Flo reached over and with one twist undid the jumpseat harness so LaVonda could stand, but instead LaVonda remained seated, her hands clasped, listening to us eagerly.

Officer Ned protested. “I wasn’t about to hand April over until I heard her side of the story.”

“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:

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. Abducted by Aliens.
   YouTube footage shows the presence of extraterrestrials over the seventh archipelago. (Could be doctored footage.)
   
4. 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.
   
5. Deliberately Shot Down
   , prompting an international cover-up.
   
6. 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.