Unaccompanied Minor (9 page)

I’d like to take a second here to clarify something. Even after all my supposed preparation, it’s a lot harder than you think to fight off a man who’s built like a big cinderblock with hands like anvils. I even kicked him square in the crotch, and it didn’t seem to break his stride. He flipped me on my stomach like a rodeo calf, and tried to zip-tie my hands. My extreme objection to this was making itself evident. I wasn’t nicknamed after the Tasmanian Devil for nothing. I was even beginning to think I was wearing him down, when suddenly I felt a wet cloth over my nose and mouth. It smelled exactly like nail-polish remover, only ten times the potency.

I wondered how Old Cinderblock got nail-polish remover, because he didn’t have it when he kicked down the door. Then I felt an immediate weakness take over my body, reducing my fighting to a few anemic kicks and twists. Thick fuzz quickly closed in on the periphery of my vision, and amid the sound of Old Cinderblock calling me every profanity in the book—the real profanities, not the ones Officer Ned uses—I heard another voice, deep and drawn out, like it was carried across caverns on the echoes of the wind.

“The same key fit both locks, you idiot,” Kathy said, and then I blacked out.

I awoke when my head bumped against the back fender of Cinderblock’s car. Whatever he used to knock me out didn’t have much of a lasting effect, but I kept myself limp like a sack of birdseed so he’d think I was still unconscious. My hands and ankles were bound together by zip ties, and it felt like he’d wrapped that silver electrical tape over my mouth and around the back of my head at least three times.

He was not
at all
gentle flipping me around while unlocking his trunk. And I seriously cannot even believe no one intervened or called 911 or anything. Granted, Ash’s driveway was secluded by high hedges, but still, in Atlanta we would have had at least four people filming this on their cell phones by now.

Old Cinderblock plunked me in his trunk, threw my backpack in on top of me, and slammed the hood down. He was cussing up a flood of filth, too. I heard him and Kathy take their places in the front seats, and soon I felt the car backing out of Ash’s driveway. I thought it would be best to lie still for a few minutes until I was certain the car was in a populated area. It was early March, so dusk was setting in early as well. The trunk was not airtight, but it was light tight, and I could not see a thing.

I especially could not see any glow-in-the-dark escape handle. These kinds of emergency trunk releases have been required on all non-hatchback vehicles since the 2002 model year. So this was either a sedan built before then—which would not have surprised me, because the trunk alone was practically bigger than the laundry room Ash expected me to sleep in—or the handle had been removed, which raised the hair on my arms. Why would you remove the emergency-release handle from inside a trunk unless you were planning to trap people inside?

First I had to get out of the zip ties. They were the standard kind you buy at the hardware store. Luckily he’d bound my hands in front of me instead of behind my back. Zip ties, contrary to popular thought, are not that strong. But like those Chinese finger traps, they can seem deceptively impenetrable if you struggle with them in the wrong way.

I knew more than one method to get out of zip ties, but in this instance I simply used the quickest way I knew how. Here’s a rundown for the ones around my wrists:

1. With my teeth, I gripped the excess tab extending from the locking toggle to tighten the zip tie around my wrists as much as possible.
   
2. I extended my elbows on either side of me as far as they would go, creating maximum tension on the super-tight zip tie.
   
3. I raised my arms (still bound at the wrists) above my head as high as I could (luckily it was pretty high because the trunk was spacious), then yanked them down toward my torso with a mighty snap while simultaneously yanking my elbows apart. (“Remember to yank your arms down
   and
   out at the same time,” my mother and Grammy Mae had taught me. “Down
   and
   out.”)
   

The zip tie popped off my wrists like a party favor. The trick is in the tension, I was told. To deal with the one around my ankles, I grasped the toes of my feet and yanked them toward me as hard as I could while pulling my knees apart. Off it popped. In the darkness I heard a small piece of glass shatter as my knee banged against something dense. I ignored the tape around my mouth for the moment, snatched up my backpack, and felt for the blue aluminum carabiner I kept clipped inside. A carabiner is a metal loop with a spring-loaded gate commonly used as a keychain, and this one was useful because it came equipped with a tiny LED flashlight built in along its length. It provided all the light of an anemic firefly, but still it was a godsend right then.

The car lurched along slowly so I figured we were stuck in the famous L.A. traffic. We hadn’t driven far enough to have made it to the freeway yet, so I thought that was encouraging. I could hear Old Cinderblock griping to Kathy, who ignored him and must have been texting, because I could hear the continuous telltale cell phone pings.

“Doll, I thought you said this was gonna be easy,” Cinderblock groused. “I’ve had cartel bodyguards go down easier than that little wildcat. And you neglected to tell me this was a double package.”

“Don’t call me doll,” she finally responded, her voice as empty as an air pocket, “and it’s not my fault I had to improvise. It needed to look like she never made it home.”

A familiar fury boiled in my chest. I didn’t think my opinion of that woman could have gotten any lower, but now here a trap door opened to reveal an entire Grand Canyon of awfulness about her. Even my overactive imagination had not begun to graze the tip of the monstrous gutter rat she really was.

While we were stopped I could hear the bustling of curbside parking and retail activity, so I figured we were still on Manhattan Beach Boulevard. Then the car lurched forward, signaling a green light, which kicked me back into gear. I did a quick scan with the pin light along the hatch seal looking for a release handle again in case I just missed it the first time, but to no avail. So I immediately began pulling out the taillight housing and yanking the wires. With that done, I focused on one taillight and tried to knock out its bulb and casing to create an opening big enough to stick my hand through. It’s been proven in the past that a frantically waving hand where a taillight should be is a good way to catch the attention of other motorists.

But this must have been an early model car, because the taillight portal was too small to be punched through with my fist. So I twisted around and shone the pin light toward the back of the trunk. Maybe there was a jack kit with a crowbar in it. I was encouraged to see the big bundle covered in a coarse army blanket that my knee had hit earlier. Great, I thought,
stuff
! There was bound to be something useful in there. I whipped away the blanket, shone the dim light on its contents, and began screaming.

Gaping at me, her large eyes vacuous and dead, her ice-blond hair spiked with blood, was my friend Jalyce.

My screams were muffled by the electrical tape still wrapped around my mouth and head, so thankfully Cinderblock and Kathy didn’t hear me over the car radio. Tears welled in my eyes and ran down my cheeks, loosening the adhesive on the tape, which I pulled down below my mouth so I could breathe better. Poor Jalyce; she had given me a ride home from the arrival gate that afternoon.

You neglected to tell me this was a double package.

I had to improvise. It needed to look like she never made it home.

My crying began to turn into ragged gasps. If not for me, Jalyce would still be alive. Her child would still have a mother. I had to clasp my hand over my mouth, because low-pitched keening sounds were escaping from my throat. I closed my eyes tightly, and I was a nanosecond from detonating into full-on freak mode when suddenly I heard my mother’s voice descend on my mind like a calming breath: “Don’t freak out, girl.
Figure
it out.”

I stifled my sobs and forced myself to focus. Jalyce was gone, that was certain. She had already started to stiffen. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. It was a statement weighted with such truth I almost felt she heard me. I took her eyeglasses from her jacket pocket—my knee had earlier shattered one of the lenses—and put them in my backpack. Her employee badge was still clipped to a lanyard around her neck, and I took that, too, as well as a small pocketbook at her side. The trunk was lined with a plastic tarp, but I dug through that, found the flap in the trunk’s carpet lining indicating the jack compartment, then pulled out the kit, careful to be quiet.

No crowbar was inside, just a standard scissor jack minus the detachable handle to operate it. But I didn’t grow up the granddaughter of an aircraft engineer (not to mention the grandniece of an airline mechanic) without picking up a few things. So I twisted the end bolt by hand until the jack expanded to the point it was tightly pressed against the floor and roof of the trunk.

“The interstate is ahead,” I heard Kathy tell Cinderblock. “Get in the left lane and take 405 south.”

My fingers alone weren’t strong enough to turn the bolt and raise the jack further; I needed more leverage. From my backpack I grabbed one of my mother’s sturdy lacquered chopsticks and inserted it through the jack bolt to create a crank handle. From there I kept cranking the jack against the roof until the pressure proved stronger than the lock and —thank you, Lord Jesus God Christ on the Cross, as Flo would say—it popped open.

Quickly I reached out to capture the trunk lid so it wouldn’t fly up and draw the attention of the detestable duo up front, and, just as the left-turn light changed to green, I slid quietly from the trunk to the asphalt below and pressed the lid back down, grateful that, though wonky, it still clicked shut. I skirmished toward the startled drivers of the three cars behind me. None of them unlocked their doors to allow me inside, even though I patted pleadingly on their passenger-side windows. None of them even immediately flipped open their phones to dial 911 that I could see. (And you wonder why I have trust issues.) Instead, they simply followed Old Cinderblock onto the interstate, leaving me behind to be grateful my escape had gone unnoticed by the bickering pricks in the old Chevy Impala with my friend’s corpse in the trunk.

I stood at the intersection of Manhattan Beach Boulevard and Inglewood Avenue. In this part of L.A. the neighborhoods go from good to bad to gang-banger in a matter of blocks, and I was definitely no longer in the nice parts. I could see jet planes landing in the near distance, which gave me comfort because it meant LAX was nearby, and airports comforted me. I ducked into a dilapidated Circle K convenience store and stumbled toward the lady behind the counter, who was engrossed in something on her laptop. I begged her to call 911, which, surprisingly, she did without question.

“We gotta girl here who look like she been tied up and dragged behind a truck,” the lady said into the receiver. “Uh oh, now she cryin’. You better hurry, this po’ child in
distress
.”

We were the only people inside, so I sank to the floor with my back against the counter. I saw my reflection in the aluminum of the reach-in cooler opposite me, and gasped. The twisted electrical tape stuck to my tufted hair and still circled my throat like a terrible necklace. My right eyelid drooped heavily because a large hematoma had formed at the bruise on my forehead where Old Cinderblock had banged it against his fender before tossing me in the trunk. My wrists and ankles still bore red marks from the zip ties. My white T-shirt was torn, filthy, and, curiously, covered in blood. No wonder no one had let me in their car, I thought.

But the blood… what was with the blood? I wasn’t bleeding, was I? Then it hit me like a bag of nickels: it wasn’t
my
blood. It was Jalyce’s blood.

The convenience-store lady clucked at me reassuringly and offered me some Gatorade, which I accepted gratefully. She was a sizeable African American woman and her name tag identified her as LaVonda Morgenstern. She wore her hair cropped very close to her scalp, and large earrings carved from coconut shells hung to her shoulders. I could see the botched removal of a gang symbol tattoo on her arm, and around her wrist was a thick bracelet made of embroidery thread that bore the rainbow colors of the gay community.