Unaccompanied Minor (15 page)

The opening on the lid didn’t provide the greatest view, but it was enough. What I saw was a man’s face peering up at me from between his own naked knees. He had been shoved in on his back through the front of the cart, his legs bundled into a fetal position above him. His eyes were open and bulging, his tongue dark and protruding, his lips frozen in a horrific grin of death.

“That’s him, Flo!” I gasped, tears welling in my eyes.

“Who?”

“That’s the
real
Brighton McPherson!”

“What’s that around his neck?” Flo asked.

“It’s a garrote,” I answered, recognizing the handles at each end of the wire that was still knotted tightly around the dead man’s throat. It was either a convenient or a sad fact that my mother’s and Grammy Mae’s addiction to true-crime television had prepared me with this knowledge.

The terror barely had time to register in either of us before the loud mechanical churning began, indicating one of the elevators was in action again. I scurried back to stand beside Malcolm, who gave me a look that silently begged for an update on recent developments. I cupped one hand over my mouth and the other over his, then put my palms together in a praying position to try and impart the importance of staying silent right then. He understood. Beefheart, as ever and thank God, rested in his arms, as calm as a monk.

I heard Flo flip the lid of the trash cart closed just as the elevator engine stopped and its door opened.

“I need you to stand over here,” the voice said. He was no longer trying to fake a Southern accent, but I could tell it was the imposter Brighton McPherson.

“Scooter,” Flo said (she called all men who were thin and well-groomed Scooter), “I need you to shove this trash cart straight up your puckered poo hole.”

I could feel my senses heighten, remembering another list my mother had given me that I kept tucked in my flight attendant manual:

1. Another passenger’s aluminum crutch or cane.
    Two presumed hijackers were beaten to death with one of these on a Chinese flight last year.
   
2. The red Halon fire extinguisher.
    There is always at least one of these on board, usually mounted on the bulkhead behind the last row of seats in each cabin. It’s heavy and metal and can drop you like a mofo if you’re hit with it.
   
3. The H
   ₂
   O fire extinguisher.
    There is also always at least one of these on board, too, right next to the red one. It’s smaller, but even heavier because it’s filled with water instead of Halon gas.
   
4. The liquor kit.
    All those booze minis come in a long metal sleeve that slides in and out of the beverage cart. Yank that out and swing it around hard enough and heads will (probably) literally roll.
   
5. Can of soda.
    These suckers are heavy, and if you throw one hard enough it can be like a big, slow bullet to someone’s head.
   

I had just unclipped the H
₂
O fire extinguisher from its bracket by the jumpseat when I heard the imposter yell to Flo, “Do as I say, old lady!”

I jumped out just as the man jumped over the cart, which Flo had positioned as a block between her and the elevator, and caught her neck in another of his garrotes. Without hesitation, I clouted him across the back of the head with the thin metal tank as hard as I could.

“What the…
ouch
!” He clutched his head and turned to face me.

Surprisingly, the blow didn’t knock him out, but at least he dropped his grip on the handles of the garrote. This freed Flo to pull it from her neck and gasp air into her lungs. By then the imposter had turned his attention to me. I swung the extinguisher into his gut battering ram–style, but the only purpose it seemed to serve was to make him more furious, if that was possible.

The look on his face pierced a million little icicles of fear into my heart. His teeth were bared like a hyena, his eyes monstrous in their anger. I tried to hit him with my weapon again, but he was too close; in fact he was coming at me with the force of a freight train.

“April, duck!” I heard Flo call out.

I covered my head with my arms and dropped to the floor just as I heard a curious popping sound. The imposter hit the ground in front of me like a sack of wet cement. His arms grazed mine as he fell.

For a moment everything was silent but for the roaring of the engines, then I stood up and assessed the condition of the assailant. His head was bleeding, and he was not moving. I backed away and looked at Flo with confusion.

“What did you hit him with?” I asked.

“A bullet,” she said. “That’ll be the last time that bastard ever calls me ‘old lady.’”

“Flo! What are you doing with a gun?” I exclaimed. She placed the gun on the counter and sifted through her carry-on bag, which, judging by how most of the contents were strewn at her feet, must have been where she normally kept it.

“I always carry one.” She found the lighter she was looking for and lit another cigarette. The quaking of the flame echoed the shaking of her hands.

“You can’t bring a gun on an aircraft!”

“Says who?”

“Says security!”

“I don’t carry it through security,” she said.

“Wait… what?”

“We’re picked up at the employee parking lot and brought straight to the crew lounge under the concourse. I can bring anything on board I want.” Her shaking had subsided, and I gave her a big hug.

It was starting to make sense. Flo worked high-time turnarounds, like this one to LAX and back. Her “layover” consisted of fifty minutes at the gate. She never left the plane, let alone went outside security.
She can bring anything on board she wants
.

Malcolm finally made a sound. “What about decompression?”

“What?” Flo and I asked at the same time.

“The bullet could have ricocheted and caused an explosive decompression? Like what happened on that Aloha Airlines flight in the late eighties,” Malcolm recited, “when a crack in the fuselage caused the front end of the plane to rip open midflight and suck out a flight attendant right along with her beverage cart.”

I shook my head. “That was due to the age of the aircraft and stress in the construction, not a bullet hole,” I countered. “Didn’t you see
Mythbusters
? They tested the bullet-hole theory and found that any extra internal pressure caused by a bullet through the fuselage still wouldn’t be enough to cause an explosive decompression.”

“Even at cruising altitude?”

“Yeah, I know, right? I was surprised, too.”

“All right, Einsteins,” Flo interjected, “this is a .22, it’s not gonna go through any walls. The shot wasn’t even loud enough to be heard over the engines. The bullet didn’t even exit the back of that guy’s head.” She pointed, and we all turned our heads to silently look at the disheveled and dead imposter on the floor.

We jumped when the intercom screeched to life. “Flo, can you send up a few bags of ice and some milk, please?” The voice belonged to Ramona.

Flo grabbed a half dozen small cartons of milk from one of the reach-ins, I grabbed two large bags of ice from the freezer, and we both tossed them in the elevator and pushed the up button.

“Coming right up.” Flo spoke into the handset as pleasantly as possible, considering the circumstances. Then she turned back to me and Malcolm.

I furrowed my brow in thought. “Flo, I remember Ramona saying the imposter didn’t make it to briefing, right?”

“Right. We had a message on our sign-in screens informing us the pre-flight briefing would be held on the aircraft instead of one of the briefing rooms in the lounge,” she answered.

“Well, it looks like the real Brighton McPherson actually did make it to briefing, but then got intercepted,” I said.

“I’m calling the pilot,” Flo insisted, lifting the handset.

I halted her by placing my hand on her arm and pointing to the manifest I’d brought with me down from the mid galley. At the top of the sheet, someone (presumably Ramona, the coordinator) had inked in the three names of the pilots on duty in the cockpit—as well as a fourth name, the name of the off-duty pilot riding jumpseat in there with them.

That name was Ash Manning.

Flo replaced the handset in its cradle, took her packet of cigarettes out, and lit another one. “What’s your suggestion?” she asked.

“Well, we don’t know if this guy is the only imposter on the crew,” Malcolm offered.

I looked at him.
Impressive
, I thought. “Right! Flo, were there any other flight attendants on the crew that you didn’t know or recognize?”

Flo exhaled her smoke dejectedly. “Kid, you know how it is. It’s not like it used to be when we all knew each other. There are fifteen thousand flight attendants at WorldAir now, and with trip drops, swaps, and jetway trades, we never know who we’re flying with anymore. That’s part of the beauty of this job. And it’s the reason you’ve been able to stay on the run for the past few weeks.”

“Can you confirm the identity of
anyone
on your cabin crew?” I asked.

“I just drank a thermos of Bloody Marys! I barely recognize
you
!”

“Oh, that’s comforting. You just fired a gun in my direction!”

“You should count your lucky stars, normally I’m a
terrible
shot.”

“Excuse me,” Malcolm interrupted. “I think I have an idea.”

We turned to him expectantly.

“Isn’t that the stowage area for the crew bags?” he asked, pointing to the shelves on the other side of the sink where he and I had hidden earlier. Black regulation suitcases were stacked one on top of the other on the shelves, secured with a sheet of thick plastic webbing across the alcove to keep them in place.

Yes, we nodded, those were definitely the crew bags.

“Well, let’s look through them and see if we can find anything suspicious. Or at least see if any other flight attendant brought a weapon on board today. We could probably use it, the way things are going.”

“Good idea,” I said. “Flo, why don’t you start on that. Malcolm, we need to do something about this…” I indicated the dead imposter Brighton McPherson. “… this situation.”

“You want
me
to….” Malcolm stammered. I knew it was asking a lot. This was probably his first dead body, while I was starting to feel like a freakin’ pro.

I nodded sympathetically. “We can’t risk him being seen by any of the other crew members until we can rule them out as imposters as well.”

Malcolm placed an airline blanket inside the sink and put Beefheart on it with a ramekin of water at his side. He turned to me with an air of readiness, like a butler about to receive my bidding. My heart widened a bit. I was so grateful for his presence, yet so sorry to have involved him in this. We rifled through the dead man’s pockets to see if we could find his true identity, but all we found was his cell phone and another one of those plastic devices with a clip on the back that looked like a garage-door opener. It had a screen for a digital display very similar to the one I’d retrieved from the purse I’d snaked from the trunk of Old Cinderblock’s car a few weeks earlier. Kathy’s small auxiliary purse.

I grabbed a flight attendant apron, notorious for their deep pockets, and put it on. Once all the pertinent items were transferred from the imposter’s pockets to mine, I anchored an empty meal cart near his feet, clicked open its front flap, and we unceremoniously shoved the imposter Brighton McPherson inside of it with all the pomp and tenderness I’m sure he himself had shown to the real Brighton McPherson.

Surprisingly there wasn’t much blood spatter, considering this was a crime scene where an assailant had been shot in the forehead. But there were some specks on the wall and a spot about the size of a salad plate that had soaked into the grotty old flooring. Thank God the bullet hadn’t exited the back of his skull; it spared us the gore of many of the crime scenes my mom and I had watched together on true-crime television.

As though reading my thoughts, Flo said, “Don’t worry about the blood. They never clean these planes. For all the crew cares, that stain is left over from some other accident years ago. Believe me, people are always bleeding in this thing. If you sprayed luminal down here this place would light up like a Jackson Pollack painting.”