Unaccompanied Minor (24 page)

“Okay,” Cinderblock blustered. “The money is coming from the airline, both dirty and laundered. From WorldAir. As far as we’ve been able to tell. Regarding the minor,” he hooked his thumb to indicate me, “all I know is what I’ve overheard, and that is something about something set to expire, and they need to get her out of the way or else something reverts to something, blah blah blah. I don’t know.”

I was starting to get insulted that he hadn’t paid closer attention, considering they were plotting someone’s murder—my murder! What are these undercover operations like, anyway, do they just let the criminals go nuts, kill anyone they want, and scoop up the poop afterward to mash a case together? Take the imposter Brighton McPherson, whose hitman activities seemed to be gamely tolerated in exchange for being an informant. I was starting to see why Officer Ned may have been overlooked for a job like this one. This would never sit well with him.

“I think I know what’s happening,” Alby said. “The license on the patent expired three years ago, April, but WorldAir is still acting as though they have rights to it. This money being laundered all this time… I think I know whose money it is.”

“Whose?” Malcolm, Officer Ned, and I all asked in unison.

“April,” she said gently, taking me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye, “I think the money… is yours.”

“What?
My
money? I don’t have any money!”

“Well, yeah,” Malcolm piped in, “now that Ash and Kathy are stealing it all.”

And then it all made sense. The ridiculous custody battle, the vicious, lying, succubus of a sociopathic guardian ad litem, the zeal with which Ash pursued the title of primary physical custodian (and of course his simultaneous complete and utter lack of concern about my welfare). All of that ensured he’d become the legal executor of my estate, an estate that no one seemed to know I had except Ash and Kathy.

“Why would a money-laundering ring go to all this trouble just for a hundred and seventy-five thousand a month?” I asked. I mean, it was a lot of money to me, but it didn’t seem worth creating a crime family over, or murdering people over, or bombing airplanes over for that matter.

“April, I don’t think you understand,” Alby explained, her voice patient. “We are not just talking about your monthly trust payments. We are also talking about the control of the patent, licensing fees, and your grandfather’s shares in the company. Together all this probably creates a sizeable chunk of ownership in the company.”

“What company?” I asked. This was too unreal seeming.

“
WorldAir!
” Malcolm, Officer Ned, and Alby all said at once.

A stunned silence descended on the cockpit—or, actually there could have been noise in there, but I was just too stunned to hear it. Then Flo knocked on the cockpit door to signal it was Alby’s turn to take over wet-nurse duties in the cabin. When the door was closed, Flo informed us that half the band of hijackers had become convinced they were having a stroke and had accessed the emergency medical kit in the passenger cabin to down even more nitro tabs and take turns hooking themselves up to the defibrillator. The other half, which included Kathy and Ash, had become so paranoid of the others’ intentions that they’d actually come to physical blows and had to be separated by some well-meaning passengers.

By now all of the hijackers were certain each was being double-crossed by the other, and the last Flo saw they were all eyeing each other with hissing suspicion from different corners of the cabin. Any remaining non-criminal flight attendants stayed petrified in their seats at the spectacle, and the pilots had passed out from constricted blood flow due to the fact that they’d been hogtied for the last half hour.

The passengers themselves were still mostly utterly ignorant of what was transpiring, other than the fact that this was a very odd and eventful flight, seeing as how guns kept going off (or maybe it was firecrackers, or minor explosions in the engine) and dead air marshals were being stuffed in the coat closet (or maybe it’s just another drunk guy) and oxygen masks were being dropped and giant life rafts were being deployed (okay, that actually happened) (right?). Any communication between Ramona and the lower galley was done through the intercom system, not the PA system, so it was beyond the earshot of passengers, and anyone who had gotten themselves shot and/or killed had done so in a galley or cross-aisle outside the direct view of passengers. I’m not saying every single passenger was completely oblivious to the nefarious goings-on of WorldAir flight 1021, but those who weren’t knew to stay out of the way, and those who were just kept ringing their call buttons, wondering why the snack cart was taking so long. Anyone left over was experiencing the placebo effect of fake hypoxia and were therefore harmless for the time being.

“Have at it,” Flo told Alby. “It ain’t pretty.” She gratefully lit another cigarette and dragged deeply before noticing my expression. “What?” she asked. I didn’t answer.

“Cinderblock… I mean, Hugh,” I said, passing him the coordinates that had been faxed earlier. “Can you read these and get us down?”

He squinted at the paper and finally answered. “Yes and no,” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘yes and no’?” I asked.

“Yes, I can read these coordinates, and no, I can’t get us down,” he said.

“Why? All you have to do is punch in the numbers,” I said.

“I’m aware of that, young lady. I’m also aware that these coordinates—” he threw them at the floorboard on the copilot’s side “—are wrong.”

We tried to revive the pilots, but to no avail. They had been untied by a helpful passenger who’d discovered them on the way to the lavatory, and the pilots then each made themselves a cup of coffee from the pot of Flo’s pharmacological cocktail. It wasn’t a matter of shaking them awake. They were awake, if staring straight ahead, gritting your teeth, shaking like a hummingbird, and sweating like a silverback gorilla could be considered “awake.” The issue was that their condition was useless. (“Tell me something new,” Flo snorted sardonically.)

The hijackers had long been reduced to minimal threats. Flo’s gun was empty and the other gun, the one taken from the air marshal, had been flushed down the lavatory toilet by Ash, who had become convinced Kathy meant to kill him with it. I’m sure he wasn’t far off the mark with that. Because, as the spouse of my official custodial parent, Kathy stood to inherit my grandfather’s trust the minute Ash was out of the way. The only glitch was that I had to be out of the way first in order for Ash to inherit it himself. I don’t know if he understood that this was part of her plan or not, but I was certain his greedy little hooks were all over the scheme to steal my grandfather’s patent money and launder it through the Caymans. That was a no-brainer.

I sent Flo and Alby through the cabin to see if they could find a pilot traveling nonrevenue, or any facsimile thereof who could help us make an instrument landing of the plane. No such luck.
Seriously?
I thought. It’s like you’re buried in this element when you’re trying to duck the radar, but when you need it,
poof!
, gone except for the hallucinating contingent strapped to their seats in the forward galley.

Flo had gotten hold of the imposter Brighton McPherson’s cell phone and was yelling “Representative!” into the mouthpiece. She hung up in exasperation.

Agent Kowalski:

Why didn’t you dial me back?

April Manning:

Because your number is blocked, Agent Kowalski. Believe me, I tried.

Investigator DeAngelo:

So what did you do?

April Manning:

I dialed 411 and asked for the number of the Circle K at the corner of Manhattan Beach Boulevard and Inglewood Avenue.

Investigator DeAngelo:

Uh… say again?

April Manning:

I called the Circle K at the corner of Manhattan Beach Boulevard and Inglewood Avenue. Thankfully, LaVonda Morgenstern answered the phone.

“Hi, LaVonda!” I said. “It’s April, remember from a few weeks ago? When you called 911 for me?”

“Well, hi there, honey pie!” she shrieked into the phone. “How are you doin’? You know I went by the hospital to see how you were holding up after I finished talkin’ to the police. They said you were a runaway, but I told them, ain’t no runaway situation here, this be an
abuse
situation here—”

“LaVonda, seriously, it’s so good to hear your voice—” It really was. “—but I need you to do me a favor, please. Do you think you can?”

“What is it, darlin’?” Her voice took on a tone of seriousness. “Wait, let me lock the door, some fool be tryin’ to come in here and buy something. I swear, some
people
.
Get out!
” she yelled at the intruding customer. “Can’t you see we in
distress
? Okay, child, just tell me what you need.”

I asked her to please open her laptop (“It already open, girl”) and pull up Google maps to see what the nearest airport was, about twelve hundred miles west of Atlanta, Georgia. “Okay, got it,” she said. “Albuquerque Sunport International Airport. Now what?”

“Can you Google the coordinates for landing an L-1011 at that airport?”

As before, she did as I asked without question. “How do you spell ‘coordinates’?”

I told her the wrong spelling, but Google suggested the correction and she was able to bring up the search results. “Okay, there is a jumble of letters and numbers here,” she began, “I’m just gonna call them out to you, okay? N three five degrees—I think that’s ‘degrees,’ right? The cute little circle at the top? I know if we were talking about weather that would mean ‘degrees.’”

“It does,” I clarified.

“Right.” Then LaVonda continued, “… two point four one; W one oh six degrees three six point five five….” I recited the numbers aloud to Cinderblock as LaVonda recited them to me.

“T-O-R-A ten thousand, T-O-D-A ten thousand, A-S-D-A ten thousand,” LaVonda continued, then said, “Wow, what is that sound? What is happenin’ on your end of the phone, child?”

“Uh, LaVonda, I’m going to hand you over to my guy Hugh here,” I told her, and Cinderblock took the phone and gave her a gruff greeting. Officer Ned positioned himself in the copilot’s seat. I could still hear LaVonda’s loud voice asking about that noise on my end of the phone. But I didn’t have time to answer. I had to get back down to the lower galley, because that noise was the sound of a bomb that had just exploded.

“Malcolm!” I screamed as I crawled back through the avionics area and down the catwalk, because I realized with a choking panic that Malcolm was not at the foot of the access ladder anymore. “Malcolm!” I felt the plane make an autopilot dive in order to accommodate an altitude that could compensate for the decompression, a
real
decompression this time.

I saw that the hole in the bulkhead had been cleared of the camouflage and I stepped through, expecting to see a bombed-out war zone. But no, the galley appeared intact. I hopped into the lift and flipped the toggles to take me to the cabin above. When I opened the door, that’s when I saw the war zone.

Passengers screamed as debris flew through the aisles toward the back of the plane. Oxygen masks flapped around in the wind like kelp on an active ocean bed. Passengers cried, screamed, lapsed into catatonic states, or flung their hands aloft like this was a roller coaster ride. By the time I stepped out of the lift, the plane had already completed its dive, once again to under fourteen thousand feet and the air was safe to breathe without an oxygen mask. When I exited the galley, I saw that all the passengers from the D zone had been relocated to the forward cabins, and where the aft left door should have been, a sizeable hole gaped instead.

“Malcolm!” I screamed again, my voice cracking with terror. “Malcolm!”

I felt a hand on my arm. I turned to see that it was Malcolm, wearing an oxygen mask. Captain Beefheart was wearing one as well, still strapped to his chest. And Malcolm was not so much touching my arm as he was grabbing it.

“Sit down!” he yelled over the rush of the air and the engines.

I did as he said and buckled myself into a seat. Malcolm strapped an oxygen mask over my mouth and nose and motioned for me to breathe in and out slowly. I wondered why he thought he needed to instruct me on how to breathe, and the thought made me giggle uncontrollably. I reached out to slap him playfully and he caught my hands, folded them into my lap, and held them there. I continued to giggle until suddenly things didn’t seem too funny anymore. The aircraft leveled out and it was safe to take off the oxygen masks, though few of the passengers did.

I took a few deep breaths and pulled off my mask.
Wow
, I thought,
so that’s what hypoxia feels like.

Malcolm pulled off his mask and I saw that Alby sat in the seat next to him. We were the only three passengers in D zone, plus Captain Beefheart. You have to count Captain Beefheart.

“What happened?” I cried.

The digital screen on the bomb had started to count down again, Malcolm explained. There was no time to clamber back through avionics to tell me about it, so he and Alby worked to secure the bomb in the position that, according to the flight attendant manual, would create the least damage in such a situation. In this case, it was against the left aft door of the cabin. So Malcolm and Alby gingerly placed the device there and enlisted the passengers to help by handing over their carry-on bags, blankets, neck pillows, and anything else that could be stacked against the device to create a buffer against the cabin and direct the explosion outward. They finished by using seatbelt extensions, neckties, earphone wires, and anything else they could use to fashion a webbing to direct the blast outward against the door instead of inward against the fuselage. After that it was just a matter of waiting… then
boom!