We Will Be Crashing Shortly (7 page)

“Scooter, what’s with your radio? Can’t you get any tunes?” asked Flo.

“It’s a police radio, Flo,” he said impatiently.

“Wait, what?” I said. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I use it for work,” he said.

“You’re an
entertainment
blogger,” I said. “Why would you need a police radio?”

“I have my aspirations, you know,” he said petulantly. “I don’t want to always be writing about drunk-driving celebrities and poorly behaved heiresses and whatnot.”

Poorly behaved heiress?
I would have been rankled if I didn’t suddenly feel bad for him. Who aspires to be a real journalist anymore? I thought. You may as well set your sights on becoming a chimney sweep or something. Sure, some probably still exist, but it’s not like there’s an overwhelming market for them these days, what with bloggers doing the job for free and no one giving a crap about the truth anymore. Flo often commiserated with me on the state of the news media.

“Ain’t no such thing as journalism anymore,” she would grumble, making sure to blow the smoke from her menthol away from my face. “These days it’s just a bunch of baboons bloviating on the Internet. They should all go to the Middle East and get their heads whacked off like respectable reporters.”

I peered at Roundtree from a distance and suddenly it occurred to me—the suit, the goatee, the comb-over, the gas-guzzling throwback for a vehicle; Roundtree was the epitome of old school. Even his name, “Roundtree,” like a character in a Dickens novel. I wouldn’t be surprised if he made it up as a pseudonym for future novels. It occurred to me he hadn’t asked a single paparazzi-type question this whole evening. In fact it appeared as though he were doing his best to keep from interfering with events as they transpired, like he literally handed over the wheel to us and took a backseat to better be an objective recorder of events. Begrudgingly I realized it couldn’t hurt to have someone like him on our side. Still, though, he did nickname me “Crash” and the moniker stuck. He was far from getting a free pass in my book.

I decided to keep my mouth shut and continued to crane my ear toward his radio. Flo and Anita discerned that all foreign objects had been effectively ejected from Trixi’s anus, so Anita gathered everything and headed back to Kroger to use the bathroom to toss the excrement and wash off the contraband.

“There it is again,” I said, pointing to the radio.

“What?” asked Flo.

“I swore I heard my name.”

Roundtree hurried over and reached through the driver’s side window to turn up the radio.

Attention all cars in Fulton County,
the dispatcher buzzed,
again, be on the lookout for a female subject, approximately 16 years old, five feet ten inches tall, long brown hair, khaki cargo pants and brown hooded sweatshirt. She was last seen in the Milton Parkway area and is wanted for questioning in connection with a possible murder, home invasion, and arson. Two witnesses report she was seen entering the residence of one Morton Colgate at 801 Milton Chase Way in the Milton Chase subdivision of Alpharetta. The subject’s name is April Mae Manning. Should you catch sight of subject, use extreme caution to apprehend immediately, she is considered armed and dangerous.

Roundtree turned to me with a look of sheer excitement. “See?” he clapped his hands and pointed. “You
are
a fugitive!”

“Scooter, get in the car,” Flo demanded. He hopped in the backseat just as I closed the hatch and lay flat on the back floorboard. Flo gunned it to the Kroger entrance just in time to catch Anita on her way back from the restroom. “Get in, girl! Hurry!”

Anita jumped into the front seat with a hoot of excitement. “What now?”

“The police have a BOLO out on April. They think she set the fire and killed Malcolm’s dad.”

“Why? What . . . how?”

“Evidently they have two asshole witnesses who said so.”

We all knew who those witnesses were—Hackman and Ash. They must have made good on returning to the rubble to dig out what they wanted from the ashes, only to find that we’d escaped and taken Trixi with us. I closed my eyes and tried to rest while Flo uncharacteristically followed the traffic laws with agonizing precision. The Humvee was enough of an attention magnet on its own; add frantic driving and we’d probably be swarmed with SWAT helicopters within minutes. Flo threw her cellphone out the window as we entered the freeway in case Hackman alerted the police that she may be accompanying me. No need to be concerned about the phone belonging to Roundtree since Hackman had no reason to expect we’d be with him. I watched the stars in the night sky as we seemed to crawl down the highway at the pace of a herd of pachyderms. I didn’t even have to ask Flo where we were going. I knew we were headed straight to Otis’s place.

Uncle Otis was standing in his driveway when we arrived. He had a police radio, too, and wisely knew not to call Flo in order to avoid having her cell ping off a nearby tower, thereby enabling the police to triangulate our position. Instead he simply expected us to come, and we did. Flo had barely braked to a stop before the doors flew open and we clamored out of the car.

“Flo!” Otis exclaimed pleasantly, his arms outstretched as he came toward her.

“Back off, Bluto,” Flo held her arm outstretched and plowed past him. She called all of her ex-lovers “Bluto.”

“Anita!” he extended her the same greeting, but got the same response, because Flo had told Anita everything about the philandering Otis during their bonding session over Trixibelle’s pumpkin-poop episode in the back of the Humvee.

“April!” Otis turned toward me and I flung myself in his arms. “That’s my girl!” he laughed. “Murder
and
arson. I’m so proud. Did you shoot Ash?”

Shooting people seemed to be Otis’s answer to everything. Like me, Otis is into lists, and he has lists taped up all over the house: “Top 8 Reasons to Never Answer the Door,” “5 Easy Ways to Disarm an Intruder,” “4 Best Ways to Escape a Choke Hold,” “9 Reasons Why You Should Shoot First and Ask Questions Later,” and “The 8 Components to Optimum Situational Awareness.”

If Otis ever actually shot anyone I never heard about it, though he did narrowly miss me once. He argued that I should not have been breaking into his home at the time. But what is a girl supposed to do when she lost her key and her uncle lives in an old biscuit factory with no doorbell? Besides that, he is the one who taught me how to pick locks in the first place.

Otis stepped into the role as my caretaker when my stepfather Ash was revealed to be the lying, thieving, heartless ball of buttholes I had been telling everyone he was since he lied and thieved his way into getting full custody of me a few years ago. But Fulton County family court moves like a comatose turtle. Waiting for it to correct a grievous mistake requires time-lapse photography and a hibernation pod. I mean, they
literally
found all the pieces of the bombed plane I was in, shipped them to Atlanta, and put them back together before a single status hearing was held on the subject of my custody. My only comfort is that Ash’s spanking new wife Catherine, a WorldAir attorney as well as my former guardian ad litem to the court, did end up in prison for her part in the bombing and embezzlement attempt. She promptly annulled their marriage from behind bars and hasn’t spoken to Ash since. This according to an article in the
Southern Times
.

Until today Otis was staying with me in my mother’s townhome located in a swanky neighborhood just north of downtown Atlanta, which, if you ask me, was kind of like asking a spider monkey to watch over the animal lab. My mother is partial to pastels in her décor, and Otis blended in like a biker at a tea party. Steel-toed work boots, band-merch T-shirts, and grease-stained jeans was his staple ensemble. He used to wear his long curly hair in a ponytail until it got caught in the cooling fan of an engine he was working on. He was lucky there was a hacksaw within arm’s reach so he could saw himself free before the engine ate his whole head. Today he wore his blond hair at chin level, just long enough to cover the two quarter-sized patches of bald spots from the incident. Oddly, it worked pretty well with the eye patch.

Otis turned to Roundtree and asked, “Who’s this?” I introduced them and Roundtree, who held Trixi in one hand, extended the other to Otis, who shook it enthusiastically. “Nice white suit,” he said.

“Nice black eye patch,” Roundtree responded.

“Come on in. Can I get you a drink?”

“Do you have sherry?”

“Will tequila do?”

“Perfectly.”

Flo had already opened the giant metal gate that was Otis’s front door. As I mentioned earlier, Otis lived in a renovated old biscuit factory—a big concrete box, essentially, with 24-foot ceilings, giant clerestory windows, and leaking skylights. The entire structure was secluded by a forest of bamboo trees and accessible solely via an almost invisible easement alley. The front third of the building housed his machine shop, the middle third made up his living quarters, and the back third contained his exercise equipment, collection of sophisticated computers, security monitors, scanners, and 3D printers. The floor throughout was concrete, riddled with rusty tools and containing a drain in the center. This was his home. My mother referred to it as “Uncle Otis’s House of Sharp Objects and Flame.” When I was a toddler I wasn’t allowed inside for fear I’d end up with a bunch of fishhooks in my head or something. As I got older it became one of my favorite places to hang out.

Otis closed and locked his gate and followed us through the covered alleyway that was his living room. He gathered us around his kitchen island, poured five shots of tequila, drank two, then dispensed the rest. “So,” he said, “what the hell is going on?”

It was left to me to recount the night’s events, seeing as how I was the only one not drinking tequila. Anita had one shot and was looking all wonky, flushed and smiling. Flo matched Otis shot for shot, and probably had half a flask of vodka from her purse as we spoke. It was well known she could rival Otis in the drinking department any day of the week. Roundtree belted his first shot and then sipped his second like it was a fancy liqueur. Fifi Trixibelle curled up in a soup mug on the counter and fell asleep, snoring surprisingly loudly for such a miniature dog. Mr. Colgate’s suit jacket lay on the floor in case any more canned pumpkin rumbled forth from her bum.

Once I finished filling Otis in, he asked to see the objects we’d extricated from Trixi. I lay the four items on the counter and noticed that Anita had done an admirable job of scrubbing them clean. “Anything else?” he asked. “Anything from the house?”

I remembered the handgun, pulled it from my cargo pocket, and placed it on the counter. At the sight of the gun, Roundtree belted back the rest of his tequila.

“That’s it?” Otis questioned me.

I remembered the notepad and baggage claim check, pulled them from my pocket, and also placed them on the counter.

“Where’d you get these?”

“They were on the kitchen counter next to the phone at Hackman’s place,” I answered.

“Actually,” Anita held up her finger, then brought it to her lips to suppress a dainty burp. “Actually, the police dispatcher said the house belonged to Morton Colgate.”

“Yeah,” said Flo. “That’s right. Why is that?”

“It can’t be. Malcolm’s dad lives—lived—in Los Angeles,” I said. “I mean, that’s the reason Malcolm was always having to fly cross-country, because his parents shared custody.”

“Let’s look it up,” Otis said, opening his laptop. We told him the address and he entered it into some site that spat forth information on these things. “Yep, it says here that the house was bought by Colgate Enterprises, but then it was quitclaimed to someone else.”

“What’s ‘quitclaimed’?”

“It refers to when the owner of a piece of property transfers all interest of the property to someone else. Basically it means he bought the house for someone else.”

“Does it say who?”

Otis scrolled further down the screen. “Yes. Molly Hackman.”

“Molly?”
Flo and I exclaimed simultaneously. Why would Mr. Colgate buy Molly a big-ass house?

“I bet they were having an affair,” Flo said.

“Um hmm, girl, you know it,” Anita clicked her glass with Flo’s and threw back another shot.

In some ways it made sense, and in others not at all. For one, it would explain why Hackman was so furious at Molly when she left him, and why his revenge against Mr. Colgate was meted out so viciously. But then what was this business about kidnapping Malcolm? And Trixi? What was with the dog? And what did Ash have to do with anything? And who was the blonde woman present during Malcolm’s abduction? I voiced all these questions to the others at the round table, but they were so certain illicit sex was behind everything that they barely gave my thoughts any weight.

All but Roundtree. He put down his shot glass and eyed me intently. “She’s right,” he said. “An affair doesn’t answer all the questions. We should look more closely at those photos I took during Crash’s driving test.”

“Let me get you your phone,” Flo got up to retrieve her purse.

“Stop, I stole it back from you hours ago,” he said, producing the phone from his pocket. Flo, nonplussed, sat back down and finished her tequila.

Otis uploaded Roundtree’s photos and brought them up on his 30-inch computer monitor. We gathered around to peer closely at the details. He clicked through the day’s earlier images until we got to the first one that showed us in Otis’s old BMW outside Colgate Enterprises. “Oh, by the way,” I said, “sorry about your car.”

“No problem. A flame of glory—it could not have hoped for a better demise.” He zoomed in on the silver Rolls-Royce in the photograph. “Do we know whose car this is?”

I was about to tell him it was Mr. Colgate’s car, but come to think of it I wasn’t sure whose it was. As far as I knew, Colgate lived in California, and I assumed he used company cars while in town to check on his Atlanta operations. Last year during my days as an unaccompanied minor flying from coast to coast to fulfill my own ridiculous court-fortified custody schedule, I’d used the onboard WiFi to look up the troubles Mr. Colgate faced with the IRS. Poor Malcolm, I’d thought. The most detailed article appeared in
Forbes
, which informed that Colgate’s troubles started when his ex-wife turned him in to the IRS and then to the FBI, as there were also some accusations that he had misled shareholders and engaged in other nefarious activity. At present not only had Colgate been indicted for tax fraud, but he was also under investigation for embezzlement, insider trading, and money laundering. If you asked me, it was a miracle that he’d escaped incarceration so far, though ironic to note that if he had been in a cushy federal prison right now he might still be alive today.