We Will Be Crashing Shortly (8 page)

“What’s the license number?” Anita asked.

“What?” We all turned to her.

“The tag number of the Rolls-Royce,” she reiterated, “what’s the number?” She huffed impatiently. “Never mind, move,” she instructed Otis, who leaned to one side so she could access his keyboard. A few rapid strokes later we were looking at the DMV government employee interface. Within seconds she had pulled up the registered owner of the Rolls. Otis’s eyes widened lasciviously. Stuff like this was catnip to him. I imagined the leverage he could garner against people by accessing this private information.

“There, see?” Anita pointed to the screen. “It was not a company car for Colgate Enterprises.”

No, it was a company car for WorldAir.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” I ventured, a glint of company loyalty bursting to the surface. “They could have stolen the car.”

“Who steals a silver
Rolls-Royce
?” Flo asked. She had a point.

“I totally would,” Otis mumbled.

“Hackman is the liaison for the mechanics union, maybe that was part of the deal he brokered during contract negotiations.” Now I was the one who had a point. It would not have surprised anyone that the self-serving Hackman had put his oily thumb on the scale to include perks like this for himself while the threat of a strike loomed heavily in the air and the other mechanics worried about making mortgages.

“Look at the knockers on that broad,” Otis broke the silence. He pointed to the bombshell clutching Malcolm’s arm in the picture.

“I know, right?” said Anita. “It’s like she needs a bicycle pump for those puppies.”

For all we knew she had a face like a frying pan, because none of the frames came close to catching her mug. Could it have been Malcolm’s mother? I thought. I knew it was a long shot, because the last time I saw her she did not have blonde hair and weighed at least 20 pounds more than the person in the picture. But that was a while ago; she could have gone to Costa Rica and had the fat sucked out of her in that time. Who knew.

“Drag queen,” said Roundtree. Our heads turned toward him in unison, like meerkats.

“Why do you say that?” Flo asked.

“Trust me,” he assured. We didn’t really.

Otis got up from the desk and returned to the kitchen island to assess the items retrieved from Trixi and the crime scene. He plucked a number-2 pencil from a cup on the counter and used it to shade the sheet. This outlined the impressions made from the note written on the previous sheet:

V-2927-PRES45

“What do you think that is?” I asked.

Otis shrugged. “It’s a serial number for one of our airplane parts.”

That made sense, since Hackman was an actual airplane mechanic. It was easy to forget he had a professional title other than Murdering Thieving Wife-Beating Kidnapping Odious Arsonist Pig. I really didn’t understand people like Hackman. He had a good job with a great company (when the CEO wasn’t trying to sabotage it)—who could want anything more? My grandfather, who was secretly richer than any of us knew or could even imagine, loved to labor with his hands, as did all of my family members. Even Otis. Even me. The days I spent impersonating a flight attendant were way more fun than now, when I’m supposed to be waiting with bated breath on whether the court will deem me deserving of a huge fortune. The money wasn’t a big deal—half the fun in life is figuring out how to get by without it. The only thing I cared about was if they were true, the rumors. I didn’t know why it should matter—Roy Coleman was my grandfather regardless of whether we were connected by blood—but I just didn’t want anything else taken from me for the time being. So I tried not to think about the impending court-ordered DNA test, the exhumation of my grandfather’s grave, and the excruciatingly slow legal process of proving our genetic connection.

“Hey, April, where’d you go?” Otis asked, snapping his fingers before my face. I shook the cobwebs from my head and focused.

Otis held Trixi’s button between his thumb and forefinger to peer at it closely. He picked up Colgate’s suit jacket from the floor and examined it. It was a Brooks Brothers single-breasted jacket with peaked lapels and canvas lining. I know these things from the small selection of suits Officer Ned kept in his office. He liked to lecture me on their attributes as he removed the plastic from their trips to the dry cleaners. Colgate’s jacket closed in front with one button, or it would have if the button wasn’t missing.

Otis placed the button from Trixi against the buttonhole on the jacket. “Could be,” he deducted. I thought it was curious that the button was not the two-hole or four-hole sew-through kind you’d normally find on expensive suits. Instead it was a teakwood toggle, with enamel ball caps on each end and a loop on the back used to attach it to the fabric. Otis plunked his toolbox onto the counter and began rifling through his heavy metal implements.

“Looking for a pickax?” Anita rolled her eyes. “Give it.” She deftly snatched the button from him and opened a small eyeglass repair kit she’d rifled from her big purse. In it was the smallest screwdriver I’d ever seen. Otis left the room and came back with a giant industrial magnifying glass, the kind with a lighted halo and weighted base that comic book characters probably used during their experiments that turned them into supervillains. After Otis assured us it wasn’t a death ray, Anita placed the button under the glass and we all gathered to look at its magnification.

“There,” Otis pointed to a seam where the wood met the enamel ball cap. Anita gently pried the point of the jewel driver into the seam and the ball cap popped off. She handed the toggle to Otis, who upended it over the palm of his hand. Out came a tiny glinting rectangle, as thin as paper but stiffer, and about one and a half times the size of a grain of rice.

“What is that?” I asked.

“That,” Otis frowned, “is a microprocessor.”

“What’s it for?”

“Let’s find out.” He carried it to a worktable covered in computer parts. I’d always assumed this material was like an ongoing art project or something, seeing as how several mobiles made from computer trace material hung throughout his warehouse. But it turned out a lot of this stuff had a use. Otis was like Captain Nemo that way. He rummaged through the stuff until he found an interface, popped something out, flicked it away, popped Trixi’s microprocessor in its place, then inserted the interface as a whole into to the back of a hollow hard drive that had been sitting in the corner like a discarded old artifact. He hooked that up to another huge monitor then pushed the power button. Nothing happened. He pushed it again. Nothing.

“Is it plugged in?” I asked.

“Crap.” He plugged it in and pushed the power button, and the monitor lit up like a police car.

“Why are the lights flashing?” I asked, then I realized it wasn’t the monitor that was lighting up like a police car, but an actual police car that had pulled up in the easement alley behind Otis’s warehouse. In a panic I dropped to the floor.

“Get under the table,” Otis instructed me just as a helicopter searchlight flooded the room through the skylight above. Otis leaned back in his chair, shielded his eye, and waved to the pilot. A fleet of additional police cars, with lights and sirens blaring, clamored to a stop outside at the edge of the carport. Anita and Roundtree hastily sat down on the sofa and tried to look innocent. Flo seemed unaffected by the mayhem. She had returned to the end of the island where the other items from Colgate’s place were laid out. She held the baggage claim ticket in one hand and Fifi Trixibelle in the other.

The sirens outside stopped, but the warning lights remained flashing as the shrill feedback of an activated megaphone pierced the silence. “This is the police,” the officer began. No duh. “This is the police,” he repeated. “We need everyone inside to vacate the premises immediately.”

The floodlight from above shifted as the helicopter left to sweep the surrounding area. “Go!” prompted Otis, and I darted from beneath the table and down the basement stairs. The others followed me. Once downstairs, we huddled for a few seconds on what to do. It was Anita who suggested she and Roundtree turn themselves in, because “it’s not like we did anything wrong.” Outside we heard the officer tell his comrades to hold fire—
hold fire?
—and urged us once again to give ourselves up.

“Besides,” she added, “I recognize the voice of the officer on the megaphone.”

“Really? Who?” I asked.

“My boys are all police officers,” she smiled.

“Ain’t you full of surprises,” Flo slapped Anita’s palm soundly then hugged her goodbye. Anita took Roundtree’s hand and they ascended the stairs together, their visages lit by the floodlight from the overhead helicopter.

“Wait! Take her.” Flo rushed over and handed Trixi to Anita. The dog yipped excitedly and Anita put her in her purse as Otis closed and locked the door after them. It was an ironclad door fortified with a floor-mounted lock jamb. It might take a minute for the police to break it down, but no doubt they would.

“Wait,” I cried. “Where’s the microprocessor?”

“It’s fine,” Otis said.

“Where’d you put it?”

“Where do you think? I fed it back to Trixibelle.”

Flo chuckled, “Good one,” then she and I looked to Otis expectantly. Surely he would not have been a decent eccentric if he didn’t have a secret passageway that led away from his property, right? Knowing Otis, there was probably an underground moat with a personal submarine waiting. Outside I could hear voices from the growing crowd of onlookers surrounding the scene. A news helicopter had already added to the noise coming from above, and I imagined that the news vans were probably jostling for as close a position as possible.

Otis retrieved a big box from his metal shelves and tossed it onto the floor. It contained a bunch of hard hats, jumpsuits with rubber waders, and reflective orange vests. He put a set on over his clothes and instructed us to do the same. Then he ran his hand along the brick foundation that made up the lower wall of the basement, came to a spot that seemed to satisfy him, and began pulverizing it with a sledgehammer.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Where’s the door?”

“There’s no door,” he said, taking another mighty swing. A brick broke free and fell to the dirt floor in a cloud of dust. Four more whacks and there was a hole the size of a sofa cushion. Otis activated the light on the brim of his hard hat and looked through the opening and smiled. To me, though, there was nothing but blackness on the other side.

“Go,” he waved us inside. We hurried through even though we had no idea why, but the police were beginning to break down the front door above us so we didn’t ask questions. Once we were all through the wall I was surprised to see that we could almost stand upright in the opening.

“What is this?” I asked.

“It’s a coal reservoir,” he answered. “In the past, all the factories on this street were connected by a common coal hole. It was easier for when the truck made a delivery, they only had to pour the coal down one chute.”

“There are no other factories on this street,” I reminded him. About a decade ago, his neighborhood had been targeted by gentrification and code enforcement, resulting in the outbreak of ice-cream-colored new buildings surrounding him now (“An infection of yuppie huts!” he liked to rail).

“Right, all the factories burned down. It’s not really a good idea to connect a bunch of factories to a common fuel source, is it?”

Otis scuttled around in the reservoir, his feet crunching over the bits of coal that had probably been there for over a hundred years, until he reached the far wall. He ran his hand over it until he found another satisfying spot, and began thwacking that with the sledgehammer as well. Soon another hole was formed, and the three of us crawled through it to another cavern of blackness, and then another, and so on, until finally we reached one where Otis stopped pounding the bricks and instead started pounding a metal hatch about shoulder level above the ground.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s the old coal chute,” he said. The door gave way after the third whack, and we helped Flo through first, then me, then Otis crawled though on his own, and fairly swiftly for a guy his age, I might add. Once he closed the chute behind him, I turned around to find that we were in the well-organized basement of someone’s home. Otis intuited my question. “Yeah, a lot of the yuppie huts on this street repurposed the foundations of the old structures.”

“Someone’s upstairs,” Flo whispered.

“Let’s leave then,” he said, removing his hat. He stepped out of his coveralls and left them folded on a nearby utility shelf. Flo and I followed suit. Then Otis casually climbed the stairs into the house. Flo and I followed him with trepidation. Upstairs, three stoned teenaged boys were watching
American Horror Story
on television, either oblivious to or uncaring about the police and helicopter lights swarming the air outside their windows.

As we passed through the living room, one of the boys took a hit off his bong, inhaled deeply, and waved to us in greeting. “Otis,” he nodded, exhaling the smoke.

“Trevor,” Otis nodded back. “Is your mom home?”

“She’s outside taking in the sights.”

“Keys?”

“On a hook by the kitchen door.”

We emerged from the house to find ourselves half a block from Otis’s warehouse, where, by the sound of things, the police must have successfully broken down his barricades. Before we could make it to the dilapidated truck that was to serve as our escape vehicle, we were descended upon by a TV news reporter who’d seen us leave the house. His camerawoman shoved her newscam in my face, and I was certain I was busted until the newsman thrust his microphone at me and asked, “Is it frightening to know that your neighbor may be involved in terroristic activities, arson, and murder?”

Later, when the clip went viral and the newsman was ridiculed out of his job for not recognizing me as the suspect at the center of all the mayhem, my eyes were as wide as dinner plates when I mumbled, “No comment.”

Flo and Otis each placed a hand on my shoulder, turned me away from the camera, and guided me through the crowd of bystanders to the truck, where we all piled into the front bench seat. “Where to?” he asked.