We Will Be Crashing Shortly (3 page)

Ms. Washington hushed Flo when she started to sing along with Pink’s
“
Blow Me,” which was playing on the radio. I had turned left on Memorial and then veered right onto Trinity Avenue so Ms. Washington could lecture me while we drove past city hall. I was about to circle back to the DMV parking lot when my attention was drawn to a silver Rolls-Royce parked on the curb outside the corporate offices of Colgate Enterprises. That’s got to be Malcolm’s dad’s car, I thought, and was momentarily confirmed when I caught sight of Mr. Colgate, only to realize it wasn’t Malcolm’s dad but Malcolm himself I was looking at.

Wow, I thought, it’s funny what the last eight months have done to my best friend. When I met him he was a cherubic redhead with a warm smile and easy manner. He must have grown an inch a month since our inflight adventure last year. No longer cherubic, he was now a strapping guy, with thick wavy hair, a pronounced jawline, and green eyes that crinkled into half-moons when he smiled. I’d known him since we were 12, having spent most of that time on airplanes traveling coast to coast between divorced parents. He was the only friend I had who was my age, and the only one I knew who came close to relating to the idiocy of my custodial situation. We’d spent countless hours updating each other on the travails of our divorced parents and their ensuing custody battles. My woeful tale included a vicious adoptive father who lied and bribed his way into becoming my primary physical custodian. Astoundingly, Malcolm’s story was even worse than mine. Believe me, I’d met his parents. His mother was a verbally abusive, blue-blood boozehound who reveled in using the court as a club with which to berate his father, a rich corporate mogul now disgraced and under indictment for fraud, insider trading, and tax evasion. Malcolm bounced like a pinball between them, back and forth, with them both seeming to put anger and resentment at a precedent over their son’s welfare. I was amazed that Malcolm turned out to be such a kindhearted and jocular young man.

Watching Malcolm today, I had to smile. I had never seen him in a suit before, and realized I assumed I was looking at his wealthy father due in part to that and in part to the bombshell on his arm. She had platinum blonde hair, boobs big enough to be seen from outer space, and stiletto heels so high she could use them to spear lobsters.

I slowed down and waved to him, despite Ms. Washington’s gentle admonishments. He didn’t see me, so I attempted to toot the horn a little. The only problem was that the horn of a 1970s BMW sounded a lot like a hotel fire alarm, or maybe that was just one of my uncle Otis’s upgrades to this particular BMW, but whatever the case, the sound was enough to make everyone’s eardrums bleed.

Not surprisingly, everyone within a radius of two blocks jumped like nervous squirrels. Flo and I both laughed, and even Ms. Washington let a tiny smile crease the firm line of her lips. By this time, we were flush with Mr. Colgate’s Rolls. Malcolm and his paramour both jerked their heads up at the sound of the horn. I expected him to smile broadly at the sight of me, as he usually did, but instead his face froze in an odd expression. It was so unexpected that I stopped the car completely, causing the vehicles behind me to make a mild seesaw as they braked to avoid my back bumper.

“Oh, that one’s gonna cost you,” Ms. Washington firmly check-marked the form on her clipboard. “Another move like that, young lady . . .”

“Flo, what’s wrong with Malcolm?” I interrupted.

“I don’t know,” Flo sounded concerned, as well.

I lowered my window and called, “Hey, Prince Charles!” I tried to sound cheery by poking mild fun at the stately condition of his attire. “What’re you up to all fancy like that?”

“I, uh, I . . .” Malcolm stammered. His face turned white and his eyes were pleading. “Miss, I think you have me mistaken for someone else.”

I waited for him to tell me he was kidding, and when he didn’t I furrowed my brow and continued to assess the situation. That was one of the most important things you learned from the WorldAir flight attendant onboard manual—assess the situation. I couldn’t believe the number of people who died like day-old fruit flies simply because they didn’t bother to do this.

“Situational awareness, kid,” Otis liked to point out to me with a wink. “Don’t forget. Sounds simple, but it’s not. You got to be aware of your surroundings.” He should know, I guess. He witnessed close-hand how the lack of situational awareness can erase 583 people in the blink of an eye. In fact, I would not have been surprised if Otis had helped write the chapter on situational awareness in the WorldAir flight attendant manual. I’ve read the manual cover to cover a couple of times now, and the last and most important item on the checklist for situational awareness was “Use Your Intuition.”

Looking at Malcolm, my intuition was screaming at me right now.

Ms. Washington urged me to continue driving, but I ignored her and focused on the scene at the side of the road. The blonde woman took care to keep her face directed away from me. It turned out she was not “on” Malcolm’s arm so much as she was grabbing it and urging him into the backseat, where someone else was reaching out to pull him inside. Malcolm was still staring at me in a white-faced panic as the woman placed her hand on the top of his head while she and the man both pulled and shoved him into the car.
What the hell?
The man in the backseat then urged the driver to go, and it was then that I recognized Mr. Hackman.

“That bastard!” Flo hissed from behind me.

The sight of Mr. Hackman brought out anger in me, as well. He was a small, paunch-bellied, balding man who looked older than his 52 years. He had successfully lobbied against unionization of the WorldAir mechanics, only to appoint himself official corporate liaison solely for the purpose of conceding the new contract in obvious favor of management. We figured he did this in order to accept heavy bribes, a contention that was backed up by the McMansion he acquired in Alpharetta soon afterward. By then Molly told us she had left him, due to the spousal abuse as well as the apartment she discovered he kept downtown across the street from the Cheetah so he could house a small harem of strippers at his beck and call. But evidently he didn’t want Molly to go on her own terms. So he ambushed her in the garage one night, and beat her with a lawnmower blade until her head was hardly more than pulp.

Today the case was “pending,” as the police put it, and was on the verge of going cold because the only witness, Molly herself, was on life support and couldn’t finger her attacker. My friend Alby, a former flight attendant who now ran her own small law practice, is the sole reason Molly still breathes. The minute the police declined to charge him, Mr. Hackman was at the hospital as Molly’s next of kin demanding the removal of her life support. I happened to be in her room at the time, delivering my daily bouquet, when suddenly Mr. Hackman barreled in with a gaggle of nurses, insisting she be unplugged because “it’s what she would have wanted.”

Panicked, I got Alby on the phone, and she was able to petition for emergency custody of Molly and thus put off any unplugging for at least ten days, at which point Mr. Hackman would have to appear in court to argue against the petition. Mr. Hackman was livid, and he’d been beaming heavy hate vibes at me ever since. Officer Ned called some old contacts at the station and found out that Mr. Hackman had taken out a half-million-dollar life-insurance policy on Molly, and Alby and I were the only things keeping him from collecting it right away.

So the sight of Mr. Hackman usually frightened and angered me, but now here he was rough-handling my friend Malcolm, which especially got my blood to boiling. I yanked the parking brake and lay on the horn with both hands. Pedestrians covered their ears and stared at me. Ms. Washington hooted with consternation and told me to keep driving. Flo encouraged me from the backseat. “Block ’em in, kid!”

Mr. Hackman flailed furiously at the driver, urging him forward. The driver looked over his shoulder at us and I felt my blood turn to ice.

“Ash, you bastard!” I screamed.

“Call me Dad,” he sneered back at me. He put the Rolls in gear, slammed on the gas, and basically shoved us out of the way with barely a dent in the expensive Rolls bumper.

We, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well. The front bumper of our BMW, probably in place with nothing but staples anyway, peeled halfway off and hung to the ground like a limp banana leaf. “They’re getting away!” Flo harped, tossing another cigarette out the window.

I disengaged the parking brake, shoved the transmission in gear, and left skid marks smoking on the asphalt as I tore off after them. It soon became evident that, while Otis may not have cared a single bit about the outward appearance of this car, he certainly turbocharged the engine. We shot out like a rocket and caught up to them instantly. By this point Ms. Washington had slipped into such a state of panic that all she seemed able to do was clutch the dashboard handle, her eyes bulging and her body stiff with fear. And no wonder: Ash had begun bumping us with the Rolls in an effort to push us off the road or into oncoming traffic. At one point it was like we were hitched together as we turned left onto Central Avenue. A block later we would empty into the freeway.
The freeway.
I had never driven on the freeway.

“Looks like we have company,” Flo said. I glanced up to see the police cars in the rearview mirror, then I heard their sirens. Ash yanked the Rolls to the right and broke away from us, taking Ms. Washington’s door with him. The door fell to the ground in a flurry of sparks and cartwheeled along the freeway before crashing into the windshield of one of the police cars in our pursuit.
Oh, Christ
, I winced,
I hope the officer is okay
. Next to me, Ms. Washington was pale against her freckles. The open road whizzed by at her side, and she had begun to hyperventilate.

The engine of the Rolls-Royce is a wonder of mechanical construction. In fact, it can be found in many of the jet casings of the aircraft that compose the fleet of WorldAir. But it was nothing compared to the bionic power of whatever Otis had put under the hood of his jalopy of an old BMW, because not only were we able to outrun the police, we were also able to match the Rolls in speed and maneuverability in spite of the extra wind drag created by our missing door.

“Woo hoo!” Flo kept hollering from the backseat, until Mr. Hackman rolled down his window and fired a gun at us.

“Heads down! Stay low!” I screamed out of habit from memorizing the flight attendant crash commands in my mother’s onboard manual. Ms. Washington had already lowered her head down to her arms, and I would have thought she’d fainted but for her constant keening, “Oh, Lord Christ on the Cross! Jesus God in the Glory of Heaven! Deliver us from this evil! Deliver us!”

I could smell smoke, but if Mr. Hackman had hit our engine, the BMW didn’t betray it. I kept in close pursuit until our cars gained on a Volvo station wagon filled with a young family. Two kids were in the extra third-row seat that faced away from the driver, toward us. Mr. Hackman thrust his gun out the window, not at us, but at them, making it clear he intended to fire at their car if we kept chasing him.

“April,” Flo’s voice was calm. “Back off.” I took my foot off the gas and kept my eyes on Malcolm, who had turned back to face me as the Rolls disappeared into the distance.

But there was no time for tears. Suddenly the engine sounded like a blender full of bolts, so I pulled to the emergency lane and came to a stop. Once we were stopped the source of the smoke smell became evident, as black clouds began billowing from beneath our hood. Flo and I quickly got out of the car and had to extricate poor wide-eyed Ms. Washington, who was stiff and still praying. Seconds later the BMW burst into flames as high as a four-story building.
Dammit.
I heard the sirens as the remaining officers caught up with us, as well as the sound of something else. What was that?

I shaded my eyes and looked up.
Helicopters!
Double dammit. One for the police and one for the news. Then my curses were drowned out by the explosion.

Otis’s car blew up like a bomb. And if I thought the flames were high before, they were nothing compared to now. Luckily we three had reached a safe distance away, but I wish I could say the same for the news copter. A piece of shrapnel hit the helicopter windshield, which so panicked the pilot that he put the thing down right smack on the freeway. The pilot discerned too late that he planted the machine too close to the burning car, but luckily he was able to jump out and run away before his helicopter burst into flames as well.

By this time traffic was stopped for miles in each direction. The heat, the flames, the flashing sirens—the catastrophe was almost hypnotizing. I heard a man chuckle near me. “This is great. This is amazing.” I turned to see Clay Roundtree standing next to me with his pen poised above a notebook.

“Oh, my God!” I cried. “How did you get here?”

Flo stepped between us. “Relax, Crash,” she said. “I texted him when we left the DMV. He’s been behind us the whole time.” I was speechless. My eyes yanked furiously back and forth between them. I was just about to scream when suddenly we were surrounded by officers with their guns drawn.

“Who is the driver of this vehicle,” one shouted angrily. Flo and Mr. Roundtree backed away from me slowly, as did Ms. Washington. Slowly, I raised my hands above my head and tried to look meek. “I don’t have my license yet.”

As the officer turned me around to cuff me, I was briefly blinded by the flash from an iPhone camera. “Amazing,” Mr. Roundtree chuckled as I was shoved into the back of a squad car.

What happened next is why I seriously worry about the state of the Atlanta police department sometimes. In particular their quality of training. First, the officer who cuffed me neglected to thoroughly tighten the brace around my right wrist. So I waited until I was locked inside the police car to easily slip my hand out of it. From there I simply waited patiently, or as patiently as I could given that I’d just witnessed the kidnapping of my best friend along with the complete collapse of civil order along an eight-mile stretch of freeway.