We Will Be Crashing Shortly (11 page)

Flo sensed it before I did, and tentatively placed her hand on my elbow as she backed away from the casket. I should have trusted her instincts, but instead I peered closer at the bloated corpse. My brows furrowed. It appeared as though the tension against the stitches was causing them to come undone. “What the . . . is that . . .”

Boom!
The cadaver exploded like a loaded cigar. Thick, rust-colored gore coated the interior of the not-so-carefully sealed hermetic bag. Luckily the thick plastic kept most of it from splattering all over us like gut stucco, but believe me, enough got out to send Flo and me scuttling to the other side of the wheel well to escape the scene.

“What the hell was that?” Flo lit another cigarette, her hands shaking.

“Jesus God,” I gasped.

I think I knew what happened. My mother was a fanatic about those forensic shows that detail terrible rapes/homicides/abductions and crimes of the like, and often forced me to watch them with her so she could point to the screen and exclaim, “See? Never go near a man in a van!” or “What’d I tell you? Never answer the door!” I remember one show steered from the norm by investigating a funeral home in Georgia where the director was caught ripping off the families of the deceased by not performing the services for which he’d been paid, I mean
at all
. People would drop off their loved ones for cremation, for example, and two days later the mortician would hand them a box of ashes that later proved to be nothing but incinerated kitchen garbage. Later the uncremated bodies were found dumped and rotting around the backyard, covered in tarps, leaves, and pieces of plywood.

For the deceased who were to forgo cremation and be buried after an expensive closed-casket ceremony, the shady mortician reserved a special kind of neglect. He just placed their remains in the casket and sprinkled a few pounds of ground coffee on top to try and dissipate the smell. Ground coffee used to be pretty effective at masking the scent of narcotics when smugglers tried to get past the drug dogs at customs, but it was less effective at camouflaging the reek of rotting flesh, and soon the funeral home was the subject of local suspicion. The suspicion instigated an official federal investigation during a somber funeral one hot day when the casket at the center of the ceremony very unceremoniously blew up like a bad parlor joke. It turned out that the body, a misanthropic spinster aunt whose estate everyone in the room was hoping to inherit, had not been embalmed at all, so it continued to decompose in the heat and accumulate trapped gases until the inevitable happened.

I started to explain this to Flo, but she remembered she’d seen the same episode and cut me off. “What are those, bones?” she pointed to a bunch of octagonal-shaped objects amid the sludge. They were not bones. They looked like plastic machine parts. There were a lot of them.

I poked at a few with the toe of one of my Doc Martens boots.
What the hell is that?

“Are any more dead bodies going to explode?” Flo asked nervously. “Because if so, we need to maybe leave. I can handle a house fire, tunneling underground, homicide, what have you, but I don’t think I can deal with any more juice from a dead guy getting on me just now. I have my limits.”

“Me, too.” There was still one casket that remained unopened, but the claim sticker I’d finally found on it showed that it had come into ATL that afternoon from JAX. The ticket we found at Colgate’s house specified cargo that originated in ATL and was due to ship out to GCM tomorrow night. I took Flo’s hand and we walked toward the security cubicle to wake up the guard, who was still napping like a big hibernating bear. I swear, sometimes I think WorldAir employees only come to work to get some rest. Flo would totally back me up on this. She herself loved to fly on aircraft like the very L-1011 in the hangar with us right now, where she could smoke, drink, and sleep off a bender in the privacy of the passenger-free lower galley.

On the picnic table outside the security window, one of the lunch boxes sat open exposing a number of used sandwich bags. So I grabbed a couple and quickly doubled back to the sack of muck that was now the poor pot-bellied guy. The WorldAir flight attendant training manual teaches you to collect contaminated items by putting your hand into a plastic bag as though it was a fingerless glove, plucking up the item, then turning the bag inside out so the item sat inside without your fingers ever having touched it. I collected a couple of those weird gadgets that were mixed in with the guts, then sealed the sandwich bag and put it into one of the pockets below the knee zipper of my cargo pants.

Heading back, I saw that Flo had yet to awaken the security guard. Instead she was leaned over his computer terminal, typing something on his keyboard. “What are you doing?” I whispered from force of habit. Someone was sleeping, after all. Then I remembered the whole point, and extended my hand toward his shoulder to shake him awake.

“Don’t bother,” Flo said. “He’s dead.”

“What? Why?”
I implored. Flo shrugged and shook her head sadly, then she directed her attention back to the computer screen. Someone had shot the guard in the forehead and then placed his cap back on his head, propped his feet on the desk, turned off the light, and voilà, instant undiscovered homicide for a few hours at least, because since when was the sight of a sleeping security guard suspicious at all? Christ, I thought, the body count for today was really getting to be uncomfortable.

I crept to Flo’s side and saw that she had entered the WorldAir employee interface and pulled up the information on the list of travel caskets scheduled to pass through the airport today and tomorrow. Since the caskets were considered cargo and not human beings, there was zero information on the identities of the deceased, only the identities of the people authorized to claim them. That day alone there had been eight travel caskets shipped to Atlanta on WorldAir; seven of them came from Grand Cayman, and one from Jacksonville. All of them had been authorized for pickup by the same person: Ash Manning.

I slammed the desk in anger. I’ve known Ash since I was four years old, when he’d begun his campaign to ingratiate himself into the life of my newly widowed mother, who suffered under the impression I’d need a male authority figure in my home. Back then Ash was a blue-eyed, handsome, blond, fit pilot for WorldAir who made about a quarter million a year. My working-class mother was thrilled when he suggested he officially adopt me—that was, until he divorced her later. By documenting himself as my father via the legal adoption, and booting my mother out of the picture, he had positioned himself to be not only the executor of my estate but my next of kin, in line to get everything in the event of my demise. By the time I figured out what was happening I was in this airplane right here, literally minutes away from crashing. Luckily his plan was foiled and everything turned out happily ever after . . .
not.

For some reason Ash was still at large, evidently with the blessing of the police, who’d refused to apprehend him after he’d broken into my house last year. My lawyer friend Alby looked into it and saw that this was due, in part, to the fact that the Fulton County court had yet to sign off on the petition she’d submitted on my behalf to remove Ash as my legal parental guardian. Therefore, when the police arrived after I’d called them, they stood down because the situation was considered a “civil matter” and not a criminal one. Still, this didn’t explain why Ash was free to frolic all over Georgia committing arson and attempted murder and giving false statements to the police. Just last year he had been involved in the bombing of a passenger jet. That was a federal offense, right? Shouldn’t they be waterboarding his worthless ass in Gitmo right now?

“I should have gone to Sweden,” I’d heard Flo grouse many times about her connection to Ash. At first I thought she made this lament because Sweden had been historically more progressive when it came to the plight of single mothers. But recently Flo corrected me. “All I know,” she said, exhaling a cloud of menthol smoke, “is that abortion was legalized there in 1938.”

Ash had been fired from his pilot duties at WorldAir—at least there was that small consolation for the time being—but not banned from using the airline to travel as a passenger. Flo pulled up his travel information to show he was booked on a flight to Grand Cayman the following night.

Then she retrieved the pairing summary that detailed the flight crew, cabin crew, and aircraft type and number. I’m pretty versed with this interface, having been tutored by Flo, my mother, and a number of other flight attendants who relied on me to submit their scheduling requests throughout the month.

Looking at the pairing summary in regard to Ash’s flight, I knew something was different right away. First, the flight number was way off sequence. WorldAir flight numbers all start with either a zero or a one, and none of them are over four digits long. This flight number began with a nine.

“Ah, charter flight,” I remembered.

“Not only that, but it’s a ferry,” Flo added. A ferry flight is when the aircraft is being flown with just deadheading crew members and no paying passengers. Aircraft are transported this way for many reasons—perhaps they are broken but airworthy, or needed to be transported in order to pick up passengers who are stranded because their connecting flight is grounded with a mechanical problem, etc.

“If it’s a ferry flight, then why is Ash booked on it? He’s not a crew member anymore.”

“He is, though.”

“
What?
” I thought we fired his crooked ass. “I swear, if WorldAir has hired him back, I’ll . . .”

Flo stopped me. “Crash, he’s not part of the WorldAir crew. He’s a part of the Peacock Airways crew.” I looked closer. It was true. According to the seniority date depicted next to his employee number, Ash had been hired by Peacock Airways the previous September. Seriously? I thought. Do these people not perform background checks?

Flo pointed to the vessel number on the pairing summary, which indicated the airplane to be used on the flight. “Can you believe it?” The vessel number was that of the very L-1011 in the hangar with us now. Evidently Peacock planned to take possession of it tomorrow, and was having it delivered. Ash was piloting the plane to Grand Cayman.

Also booked on the passenger manifest, interestingly, were Mr. and Mrs. Morton McGill Colgate. I was more surprised that the two agreed to be in the same plane together than I was that they were registered on the flight in the first place. Colgate Enterprises owned a hefty amount of stock in Peacock Airways.

“Guess Mr. Colgate won’t be making that flight,” Flo intoned gravely. She pressed the “print” button at the top of the screen, and the old-fashioned dot-matrix printer sprang to life with a bunch of bleating screeches as it spat out the screen capture. I snatched the printout before it hit the tray, folded it, and put it in another of my pockets. I reminded myself to make sure to buy five more pairs of cargo pants if I ever survived this adventure. My new uniform, I thought. You could bury me in it.

Above the printer was another employee community bulletin board like those at each bus stop in the employee parking lot. I suddenly stood straight, snatched a paper off the wall, and turned to Flo. “What is it?” she asked.

I didn’t respond. Instead I walked past her and ran back to the tug train we’d left on the starboard side of the L-1011. Flo followed me loyally but reluctantly, suggesting that maybe we should turn ourselves in now and let the authorities try to find Malcolm. It was saying something that Flo now wanted to entrust “authorities” with our task, since Flo had been instructing me all my life not to trust authority. One of the first things I remembered her telling me as a kid was, “If someone ever shows you a badge and tells you to leave somewhere with him, kick him in the nuts. Don’t be shy. Kick him hard.” She based this advice on all the serial killers—Ted Bundy, Angelo Buono, Kenneth Bianchi, etc.—who had used fake police badges to effortlessly subdue their victims (“A police badge isn’t kryptonite, kid, for the sake of Christ on the cross,” Flo insisted). This was in addition to the actual policemen who themselves turned out to be serial killers and/or rapists—Manuel Pardo, Drew Peterson, Lawrence B. Woods, etc.—“and don’t even get me started on the security guards,” she would say. To Flo, security guards were all shady miscreants. “It’s the perfect job for a killer on the lam,” she maintained. No disrespect to the dead one at his desk behind us. But in any case, to hear Flo say she was ready to toss the towel to the authorities meant she was definitely out of ideas.

But I wasn’t on the same page just yet. When we reached the mess of caskets, cadavers, and exploded innards we’d left behind the wheel of the L-1011, I gingerly stepped over the gory rubble to get a closer look at what was left of the guy who had exploded. It was not pretty. But at least the area above his shoulders suffered minimal impact. The fresher blood that covered his face from his internal combustion was a different color than the stain that spread over his chin and neck. That was because the latter wasn’t a blood stain at all. It was a birthmark.

“I think you do know this guy,” I said to Flo.

“I was just kidding when I said that.” She sounded weary.

“I don’t think so.” I showed her the paper I’d taken from the bulletin board. It was a missing-person announcement. “Have You Seen John Lassateur?” it read.

Yes. I believe we had.

“Holy Christ,” Flo exclaimed. “What the hell happened to the poor guy?”

Before I could speculate, an employee bus came careening into the hangar. It was headed for us, then cut an extreme left, popped up on one side, plunked heavily back down onto four wheels, ran over the picnic table, and came to a stop by crashing into the security hut. In the distance I could barely make out the driver.

“Otis!” I screamed.

The door flew open and Otis descended onto the tarmac, waving to us gamely, only to have Hackman fly out from the bus and tackle him from behind. The two tumbled across the concrete in a dusty ball of kicking feet, flying fists, and curses.
Had they been fighting all this time?
I wondered. I picked up the crowbar and ran toward them to give Otis a hand. Flo, ever the pragmatist, had gone the opposite direction, unhooked the tug from the tow carts, hopped aboard, and pulled up alongside me before I’d reached halfway to the commotion. I hopped on and she sped us the rest of the way.