Unaccompanied Minor (22 page)

“Officer Ned,” I addressed him impatiently. “We need something to bang against that bullet. Malcolm is wearing tennis shoes, and I just have on a pair of loafers. The heel of your boot is the hardest thing we have.” I refrained from saying “other than your head,” because that was just too easy. “So hand it over.”

He glared at me sternly, like he was really going to fight me on this, then he deflated and rolled his eyes. “Fine!” He leaned against the metal access ladder and pulled off his left boot. “Take it. Just… take it.” He handed me the boot. Seriously, what was it about Officer Ned and his boots?

I thanked him, and asked him and Malcolm to stand aside in case there was any, like, shrapnel or something from the fallout of blowing the hatch open. Officer Ned then tried to insist that he be the one to bang the bullet with his own boot, but I talked him out of it for two reasons. One, he already had a bullet in his ribs, which really diminished his ability to swing in an upward thrust. And two, I didn’t trust him to really give it a whack, seeing as how he was so attached to that boot and all.

Then Malcolm tried to insist that he be the one to swing the boot, but all I had to do was point to Captain Beefheart all swaddled to his chest like a papoose and say, “Think again, Pocahontas.” So they both stood aside and braced themselves while I used Officer Ned’s boot to wallop the base of that bullet as hard as I could.

My advice would be to never try this at home. In fact, don’t ever try it on an aircraft, either, unless said aircraft happens to be getting hijacked and you really have nothing to lose. Because we were not exactly sneaking up on them with this approach, what with the deafening
Bang! Pow!
that resulted in the explosion, albeit a controlled explosion. Kind of. Because there was a bit of shrapnel, which explains the black stippling on the side of my face right now. And the smoke. I haven’t even mentioned the smoke!

We didn’t wait for the smoke to clear. Instead, the three of us held our breath and quickly pushed up on the underside of the hatch, expecting some resistance. Surprisingly, there was none. It flew open and the three of us burst through like a trio of coughing, dirty, bleeding jack-in-the-boxes with fists flying.

I was the first to clamber up the ladder and into the cockpit, with Officer Ned following close behind. Again, that man can move fast, even injured and hopped up on OxyContin. He simply sprang up and landed crouched like a cougar at my side, he even somehow had time to put his boot back on. Malcolm made it in about as far as the tops of his shoulders, with little Beefheart’s face peeking up curiously from under his chin. All of us were tensed and ready for a fight, just as soon as we finished coughing and waving the smoke from our eyes. In the confusion, I could have sworn I heard a familiar voice. I fruitlessly tried to rub the sting from my eyes and steel myself for the inevitable enemy assault. I flailed my arms madly, but only encountered air and smoke. Then I heard it again. The voice.

“Christ, kid,” Flo groused. “What took you so long?”

“Flo!” I yelped. It would have been a scream, but I had a throat full of gunpowder smoke, which tends to constrict your ability in that regard. “Flo!” I threw my arms around her.

“Watch it!” she warned, careful to keep from burning me with the tip of her cigarette like a bad crack mother. Then she realized I was crying and gave into my embrace. “Oh, okay now,” she said, the cigarette held at a distance. “There, there. Okay, stop your blubbering. C’mon now. You, too, Thor.”

“I’m not crying,” he insisted. “The smoke is stinging my eyes.”

“Why didn’t you just open the hatch from your side to let us in?” Malcolm asked.

“I don’t have the key to that thing. Do you see any keys on me?”

“I thought you were dead!” I sobbed. “I thought he shot you!”

“He did, the bastard.”

I pulled away to assess her condition. She looked even worse than I did. The customary wedding cake–sized bun on her head looked like it had been detonated by a land mine. Blackened tufts spiked up through the teased white wonderland that was her regular hair color. Then the realization struck me.

“Your bun!” I said. Of course! That bun had been deceiving people into thinking she was an inch and a half taller for forty-six years.

“Yep, saved by the bun.” She patted the mess on her head. “It even took a minute for them to realize I wasn’t dead.”

“And they didn’t come back to finish the job?”

“Well, yeah, but somebody intervened.”

“Who?”

She took a drag on her cigarette, then she studied the smoke wafting from its tip and said, “Ash.”

“Ashtray’s right there.” I pointed to the ashtray in the armrest of the pilot’s jumpseat, a design feature left over from the days when smoking was legal on aircrafts.

“No, April.
Ash.
”

I looked at her in puzzlement. Why did she keep saying “ash?” I was showing her that the ashtray was right….

“Wait,
what
? You mean
Ash
? Ash
Manning
?” I shook my head. “He’s the one who got them to get you to come up from the lower galley. Since when does he show a molecule of compassion for anyone? Why would he suddenly grow a backbone?”

“Well, maybe it’s because I’m kind of related to him.”

“What? How?”

“He’s sort of my son.”

“What do you mean,
‘sort of your son
’?”

“I don’t know, kid, the seventies were such a blur. For all I know, Thor here is my son, too.”

Officer Ned chuckled at that. It was the closest thing to an actual laugh I’d ever seen come out of him.

“Flo,” I implored, “how come you never told me this?”

“He’s not exactly something to brag about, kid. We haven’t spoken in years. He didn’t even intervene on my behalf until after they’d already shot me!”

Huh, she was right about that. I was relieved I could continue to hate him as intensely as always, the spiky old bag of asses that he was. Malcolm cleared his throat to remind me we had important business at hand, and we should readdress it immediately. I looked down at his head sticking up from the floor hatch, and he nodded it sideways to direct my attention to the pilot’s seat.

Right! The plane, who was piloting the plane? I turned my head to see Cinderblock at the wheel.

Officer Ned intercepted me before I could attack him.

“Calm down, April,” he said.

“That guy tried to kill me!” I hissed. “He killed my friend Jalyce! He’s a murdering, mean old kidnapping… and he is not a pilot!”

“April, I said calm down,” Officer Ned repeated.

Cinderblock turned to face us and rested his elbow on the back of the pilot seat. “I am too a pilot, little miss wildcat,” he said. “Or I used to have a private pilot’s license, anyway.”

“Arrest him!” I demanded of Officer Ned.

“April, this is the third time now I’ve told you to calm down.” He was clutching his side in pain. I ignored him, plunked myself down in the engineer’s chair, and began digging through my bag. “What are you doing?”

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.