Unaccompanied Minor (10 page)

I flinched when the bell on the door rang, indicating a customer had opened it. “Out!” LaVonda called at him. “Go on! Get out! Can’t you see we in
distress
here?”

The startled customer backed up and closed the door softly, and LaVonda locked it after him and flipped the Closed sign. She busied herself gathering things for my aid, talking all the while. “You don’t have to tell me what happened, child, but I can tell it ain’t have been good. All I’m gonna say is if some nasty bastard got to you in a bad way, you can’t be washing nothing off. I know it’s hard, ’cause the first thing you wanna do is jump into a barrel of battery acid to get it off you, but that shit be evidence, ’scuse my language….”

She continued on and on, covering my shoulders with her large insulated windbreaker, making a compress by wrapping a bag of ice in a souvenir I Heart L.A. T-shirt and instructing me to hold it to my head, then changing the subject to more pleasant matters, like how her wife was pregnant with their second baby, and they were gonna name the child Dixie LaRue if it was a girl, and Jacques if it was a boy, only she pronounced the name “Ja-QUEZ.”

It occurred to me the Gatorade, the jacket, the steady stream of talking was LaVonda’s way of keeping me from slipping into shock. I didn’t think she needed to worry, but then that’s what all people about to go into shock think. It wasn’t until I stopped shivering violently that I realized I’d been shivering at all. Wow, they teach you about this stuff in the first aid section of the WorldAir flight attendant manual, but when it really happens it still seems to come out of nowhere.

The ambulance arrived before the police. LaVonda told them the little she knew, told me to go with them and that she’d inform the police where I went when they got there. She squeezed my hand and said, simply, “Be strong now, girl.” As we backed out of the parking lot, I marveled at how the good—and bad—in people can show itself at the most unexpected times.

The ambulance took me to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where the ER nurses patched me up and put me in a fifth-floor room with a shower so I could clean myself up, which I did gratefully. I smoothed my wet hair with the comb from the amenity kit they gave me, and lay on the hospital bed waiting for the police to come, which seemed to be taking forever. My bloody clothes and shoes had been left in the emergency area and replaced with a hospital gown. I padded barefoot to the door and was surprised to find it locked from the outside. I knocked loudly and began to call out. “Hey, why am I locked in here?”

A stern voice answered me through the door. “Stay put, young lady. We’re just following the protocol for runaways. Your guardian’s on the way to pick you up.”

“What guardian? I don’t have a guardian! Let me out of here. I need to talk to the police!” I shrieked. I dashed to the bedside phone and tried to dial 911, but the cradle had no dial. The phone was for incoming calls only. I frantically pushed the nurse buzzer, only to be yelled at by the guard at the door to stop. Then—and I had to shake my head to make sure I wasn’t imagining it—I heard Kathy’s voice call out to him from down the hall.

“Pardon me, but is it really necessary to shout at her like that?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m April Manning’s guardian ad litem. Here’s the judge’s order. My name is Catherine Galleon.”

“Great, come with me to the nurses station to sign the release papers.”

What?
Kathy wasn’t my guardian ad litem! Was she?

I stood frozen, not in shock or fear, but suspended in that flash of a moment before instincts take over, when you “assess your conditions” like they teach you in flight attendant training. My conditions, though, appeared pretty dismal.

The bathroom had no window, and even if it did I was too high up for a window to be any good. And regarding resources, there was just the hospital bed with an empty meal tray perched on it. What was I supposed to… then suddenly I jumped into action.

I grabbed the meal tray, broke off its flimsy metal legs, and tied them together like a bundle of sticks using the ties I ripped off the back of my hospital gown.

Then I slid the long end of the flat tray—which was made of melamine, thin but very strong—under the hinge-side of the door just far enough to be flush with the edge on the other side. I lifted the other end of the tray and rolled the bundle of bound metal beneath it, creating a sort of seesaw. From there I stepped firmly down on the elevated end of the tray, and the ensuing leverage hoisted the door a half an inch, which was plenty to lift it off its hinges so I could prop the door ajar enough for me to sneak through. I was careful to ensure it remained erect and did not noisily slam down on the linoleum floor—then I grabbed my backpack and slipped into the hall and then into the stairwell without looking back to see if anyone had noticed. Thank you, season one, episode six of
MacGyver
.

I ran down one flight of stairs before I remembered I was naked but for a hospital gown with no ties. So I stopped and rifled through my backpack to find the damp souvenir T-shirt LaVonda had used to wrap my ice compress. I put that on, tied my hospital gown around my waist like a towel and peeked into the hallway of the floor below mine. I saw nothing useful, so I descended to the next floor and then the next, until I saw what looked to be an open linen closet. I snuck inside and grabbed a pair of blue hospital scrubs and put them on, including the mask and cap and the elasticized booties over my feet.

And this is how I departed through the side door of the Cedars-Sinai emergency room, just as a cluster of security officers were rushing inside to answer the alert call regarding an escaped delinquent.

A bus was parked at the stop across the street, so I jumped on it not caring where it was headed. I showed my transit card to the driver and was relieved to hear the bus was headed to a stop near the airport. I disembarked across the street from Hertz Rent-a-Car, then caught their shuttle to the WorldAir departure area, where I presented my mother’s badge at the employee line through security.

The fact that I was in hospital scrubs alarmed nobody. Almost all flight attendants have second jobs. I know of at least two who are nurses, several who are attorneys, and one who is the mayor of a small town in Tennessee. I planned to tell the security guard I was out of uniform because I was off the clock but needed to complete some computer-based training in the employee lounge.

But all she asked me was “How’d you get that shiner?”

“Unruly crack-addict gunshot victim,” I answered.

She waved me through and I gathered my things off the x-ray conveyor, hurried to the WorldAir concourse, and went down the stairs to the large, windowless cluster of hallways and communal rest areas deep in the bowels of the LAX airport that houses the crew lounge. I stayed there for two and a half days. My constant presence went undetected because everyone else was in transit. It’s why the WorldAir crew lounges are the perfect places to hide.

First task at hand was to assess my resources. I withdrew Jalyce’s small pocketbook from my backpack and opened it to discover that it was not her pocketbook at all, but Kathy’s.
Awesome
, I thought. I looked at the name on her driver’s license and saw that, indeed, the horrid little ferret’s full name was actually Catherine Galleon Landry.

Kathy’s small wallet contained one hundred and sixty dollars in cash, which I gratefully folded and tucked into the side pocket of my backpack along with her driver’s license, a slip of paper covered in some nearly indecipherable scribbling and penciled notations (all I could make out were the words “angel” and “angels,” which I found hugely ironic), and a small plastic device the size of a playing card with a clip on the back that at first I took to be Ash’s garage-door opener.

Funny
, I thought,
why didn’t she give this to Cinderblock instead of the key?
It would have given him carte blanche access to the condo, because the door leading to the garage from the kitchen didn’t even have a lock.

But upon closer inspection I saw the device wasn’t a garage-door opener at all—or at least not Ash’s. Instead of a clicker, it had a small screen on the front for a digital display. So whatever it was, it was going in my backpack with the other pertinent items I recovered from her purse.

Everything else—the purse, the small wallet, a few credit cards, a tube of lipstick, and a packet of condoms (yuck)—I divided among all the trash receptacles throughout the facility. Other than the driver’s license, it didn’t look like Kathy had lost much to slow her down. The small purse was probably just an auxiliary bag, because I’d seen her usual purse and it was big enough to easily fit a bunch of severed heads inside.

Over the next few days, I grabbed what I could from the lost-and-found room—a small Rollaboard, a pair of purple flip flops, a pair of men’s comfortably worn size 7 regulation loafers, some uniform pieces that could also pass for regular clothes—and stealthily committed petty thievery from the bags of dozing flight attendants to get the rest. A word of advice: those supposedly TSA-approved, candy-colored luggage locks? They’re a piece of cake to pick. Ash used them regularly, which cracked me up. (To the girl who reached her layover to discover all her makeup and underwear had disappeared from her bag, I say sorry and thank you.)

The second day, once I was presentable, I asked the guy at the supervisor window to please check on “our colleague” Jalyce Sanders. I told him I heard she’d been hurt or something, and I wanted to know where to send the flowers. He pulled up Jalyce’s schedule and said, “Well, she must have recovered, because her schedule is normal. I don’t see any absences.”

“Wait… what?”

“Yeah, she came in today a few hours ago. She’s working the gate to Atlanta this afternoon.”

I thanked him and walked away, rubbing my temples. I knew that was Jalyce I had seen in the trunk of Old Cinderblock’s Impala. I still had her broken tortoiseshell eyeglasses and her employee badge in my bag. I knew she was dead. I knew it. I thought about calling the police again, but look what happened last time. I’m an
unaccompanied minor
. Evidently all Kathy had to do was show up with a court order and,
boom!
, suddenly I’m the one who gets locked up and treated like a criminal.

I was sure the police would simply follow protocol, hand me over, and assume it would be sorted out later. Remember Jeffrey Dahmer? The Milwaukee serial killer who cooked his victims like a stew and kept their body parts hanging around like a human BBQ smokehouse? One of his victims—a naked and bleeding fourteen-year-old—actually escaped and called 911, only to have the police officers
hand the kid back to Dahmer
, who’d told them he was responsible for the boy, and they believed him simply because he was older and it was easier that way.

It was sorted out later, of course, when police were sifting through the decaying pile of corpses at Dahmer’s place and—“Oh, looky, there’s the severed head of that kid from earlier.” [Palm slap to the head.] “Make sure to notate that.”

So no, I have no illusions about how my rights as a minor would play out at the precinct with Kathy standing there waving a paper signed by a judge. They’d hand me over like a bouquet of roses. Are you kidding? I’m an unaccompanied minor. I have no rights.

And Ash—who knew where he fit into all this? At first I assumed he was the one who put Kathy up to all this, but then why bother with Old Cinderblock if that were the case?

Plus, Ash had e-mailed me twice since I’d been abducted. They were the same vitriol he usually expected me to pass on to my mother, this time about how he was going to drag her back into court because it was her fault that the wallpaper on my iPad depicted a bunch of naked men.

It didn’t. My iPad wallpaper depicted a collection of artwork by Michelangelo, such as the statue of David and the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which, in the real world, would be considered masterpieces of the Renaissance. But, again, family court doesn’t exist in the real world.

Anyway, Ash’s e-mails showed no sign that he knew or cared whether I was missing. It seemed to me that if Ash wanted to track me down so his cronies could finish a botched hit, he would have tried to trick me into revealing where I was. I’d known him since I was four, so I was pretty versed in his duplicity. If he was trying to put one over on me, it would have read as inauthentic as a big bag of breast implants. So I was reservedly skeptical about his involvement in all this, but still considered him a vain, worm-hearted weasel.

The next day I felt prepared to leave the lounge. The bruise on my forehead had diminished to where it could be hidden by makeup, I had an adequate supply of clothes and amenities, plus I was beginning to have repeated run-ins with the same people as they passed through the lounge on their way to work their trips. So I used the company computer to access my mother’s employee interface, booked myself jumpseat on a flight to Detroit, printed out my boarding voucher, and ventured upstairs.

I looked around the concourse to be assured no one would come running to tackle me, and was relieved to encounter the customary crowd of self-focused bovines as far as the eye could see, so I slipped into it seamlessly. On the way to the Detroit flight, I passed the Atlanta gate and stopped at a distance to see what I could make of it. I didn’t recognize the person there, so I came closer until I was standing directly across the counter from the gate agent.

“Can I help you?” She smiled at me expectantly. Her badge read Jalyce Sanders; her face read anything but.

“No,” I said. “I just thought you were somebody I knew.”