Unaccompanied Minor (26 page)

Investigator DeAngelo:

What do you mean, how I’d act? What have I got to do with any of this?

Agent Kowalski:

Investigator DeAngelo, turn around and put your hands behind your back. You have the right to remain silent….

First, I appreciate how this term paper is asking me to make a list. I love lists. Second, I apologize for taking so long to finish this assignment. It took me a while to realize I had five people in my life who deserve my admiration. But in light of recent events, I’ve come to see that very differently. Today I now believe there are more than five people, even, which may inspire me to make a few lists within a list (which is awesome):

I admire my granddaddy Roy Coleman because he was a modest man who loved to labor with his hands. This is where he differed from his old friend and WorldAir CEO Alan Bertram. They both started out as engineers, both hired on the same day at WorldAir, but where Roy Coleman liked to push up his shirtsleeves and put in an honest day’s work, Mr. Bertram liked to climb the corporate ladder by stealing inventions from his oldest friend to skip as many rungs as possible on the way to the top.

Some of my favorite memories are from the Sundays I used to spend with my granddaddy Roy while I helped him tinker with engines and test his inventions in the large barn in the back of his property. “To work is to pray,” he used to say to me.

My granddaddy died when the jack supporting the vintage Ford Rambler he was restoring collapsed and crushed his chest. But before that, he had quietly amassed a portfolio containing escalating chunks of company stock bought with the fees from a number of patents on a number of inventions that had been licensed by WorldAir. Before Granddaddy Roy died, he had never once even asked to see this portfolio, and afterward his old (backstabbing) friend Mr. Bertram had been entrusted to pay the renewal and licensing fees into a trust that had long ago been set up for my father and me. Evidently Mr. Bertram thought that since Roy Coleman was dead it would be better to pocket that money instead, but not before laundering it along with the other funds he was stealing from WorldAir. He didn’t think anyone would notice. He was wrong about that.

It turns out Officer Ned used to be a linebacker for a professional football team, the name of which I won’t mention because he’s asked me not to. Anyway, this explains why he had the ability to move with the speed of a cheetah when circumstances called for it, what with his innate athletic reflexes and all. His football career lasted exactly one season before he was fired for beating the crap out of two teammates after he’d discovered they were running a dog-fighting ring. Officer Ned asked me not to mention that part, too. He said it wasn’t important, but we saw that differently.

By my count, Officer Ned saved my life several times, once when he threw himself in front of the bullets heading for my face, and again when he pulled me out of the burning fuselage of the crashed WorldAir flight 1021. And probably again when he broke my fall once we dove out the door together, only to be confronted by a deflated escape slide. He also saved the life of my friend Malcolm Colgate, not to mention Malcolm’s emotional support dog, Captain Beefheart. Malcolm and Beefheart are two of the most precious things I hold dear. If I’d lost them, I don’t know if I’d have been able to go on, so I count this as an official fourth time Officer Ned saved me. He seems uncomfortable with my gratitude, though.

Following the crash, he was in a coma for a day and a half. When he awoke, the three first things he said were:

• “Are April and Malcolm okay?”
  
• “Where are my boots?”
  
• “Flo, put out that damn cigarette,
  this is a hospital
  !”
  

He’ll deny it, but Flo swears this was the correct order of his post-coma statements, and she should know because she was there for a day and a half sleeping in an upholstered armchair next to his bedside, claiming to be his “patient advocate,” and demanding he receive the quality pain medication and not that “generic crap.”

Considering his injuries, I’m impressed that Officer Ned only spent a week in the hospital recovering from them. But he kept reminding me this was not the first time he’d been shot, and haranguing that the worst of his hurt was due to the fall from the aircraft. It caused his other lung to collapse (the first lung had collapsed when he’d been shot in the ribs). “It didn’t help that you landed right on top of me,” he said. I didn’t remind him that he’d made sure to break my fall. Now that I’m a major shareholder in WorldAir, I plan to recommend him to replace the head of company security. I hope he doesn’t turn it down like he did with the promotion he was finally offered from the Atlanta Police Department. First, he can’t be worse at the job than the present WorldAir head of security is (I mean, all this happened right under his nose), and second, I plan to recommend LaVonda Morgenstern as his second in command (I can’t
wait
to see the combustion created by the chemistry of those two). How awesome would it be for me to be
Officer Ned’s boss
? I seriously can’t wait for that day. I might even give back his badge I stole.

Anyway, even shot up and hopped full of painkillers, Officer Ned’s first thought is to help others before himself. I think it’s another reflex with him. A rare and amazing reflex worthy of my admiration.

The boots, by the way, had belonged to his father, who was a motorcycle cop.

Some would say Malcolm is my only friend, but they would be wrong. More specifically, he is my only friend my age. I admire him because he’s brilliant for the following reasons (a list within a list!):

• He was the one who noticed that Flo had overheard the hijackers talking about how the NTSB had my voice making demands on tape in a telephone call. “How would the
  hijackers
  know that?” he asked. And he was right, of course; how would the hijackers know about that phone call—unless someone at the National Transportation Safety Board told them.
  
• He is the one who suggested I filibuster during my statement to the authorities to see if I could flush out who the traitor was. We knew it had to be somebody from the FBI or the NTSB, or even WorldAir. That’s why my statement took ten million years to make. It was to give Old Cinderblock, otherwise known as undercover detective Hugh Newman, time to convince the authorities to send a bogus fatality list to the CEO of WorldAir. I even had to impersonate the symptoms of mild shock, not that they cared. In the end it was bigger than even we thought, and our brains can go pretty far out there.
  
• He is almost as knowledgeable as I am when it comes to aviation disasters.
  
• He is also the one who persuaded his father to get his attorney to hound the police regarding the microchip implanted in Beefheart. (I swear, is it me? Or are the police sometimes as deaf as dirt when it comes to anything an unaccompanied minor has to say?) It turned out there was a ring of prisoners in the Fulton County Pen—one of whom was a previous CEO of WorldAir serving four years for embezzlement—who were calibrating the microchips in the support dog–training program to convey the bank account numbers and other information needed to wash the funds in Grand Cayman. It turned out that those microchips are electromagnetic, so they can easily be used as a sensor, as well, and also easily (Mr. Alan Bertram thought) be used to kill a giant bird with one stone. I seriously look forward to the day Malcolm gets to testify against him during the criminal trial against the CEO of WorldAir for attempting to bomb one of his own aircraft.
  
• He also got his father’s attorney to file an official contempt charge against Kathy Landry for gross misconduct as a guardian ad litem. It’s a tiny drop in the bucket of the other charges pending against her right now, but it’s supremely satisfying for me and Malcolm—not to mention Captain Beefheart. To think it was her idea to enlist unwitting children of divorce—whose welfare she’d been entrusted with by the court!—and their innocent emotional support animals in this criminal scheme. “What a bottom fish,” as Flo would say.
  

I admire Flo because she’s sixty-seven years old, has seen it all and is surprised by none of it, not even a nonrev runaway who lives in the sky. She is the kind of person who can kill a man, come across a bomb, get shot in the head (pretty much), outsmart hijackers (one of whom was her estranged son), and just continue on like it was any other day. Oh, and let’s not forget the plane wreck. She stepped out of the escape slide like it was a limo door. For her the only personal casualty from the day was the big bun she styled her hair in. Today she has a cute haircut she calls “The Meg Ryan.” We got separated after the ambulance ride back to the concourse of Albuquerque International Airport. I told her to please go check on Officer Ned, and she did as I asked, but not before going through Kathy Landry’s purse to produce her cell phone and point out a few interesting names on the contact list. WorldAir CEO Alan Bertram’s private cell number was listed under “Old Sucker.”

“How do you know Alan Bertram’s private cell phone number?”

“Kid, let’s just say he and I go back. I’ve been around, you know” was all she’d admit.

She reminded me to filibuster my incident report as long as possible like Malcolm suggested I do in order to give Old Cinderblock some time to work some angles from his end. “And I don’t have to tell you—do I, kid?—to keep in mind that there might be one or two sleepers left to deal with.” She did not have to remind me.

This is why, when Investigator Peter DeAngelo of the NTSB stepped into the interrogation chamber, something clicked in my memory; it had to do with that slip of notepaper I’d pulled from Kathy’s little purse after I escaped the car trunk. At the time, among the indecipherable scribbling and penciled notations, all I could make out were the words “angel” and “angels,” but when I discovered the context the scribbling began to make more sense to me. First of all, one of the “angels” referred to Angels Among Us, the pet-rescue organization that unwittingly supplied the information mules for her money smuggling.

The other “angel” on the paper was not an angel at all, but “DeAngelo,” as in Investigator Peter DeAngelo of the NTSB. I was able to get a good look at his badge when he first stepped into the interrogation chamber to speak with Detective Henry. Ah, I realized, Agent Kowalski had said he would relay my message to the NTSB, which also explains why the landing coordinates faxed to the cockpit were meant to nosedive us into the tarmac.

“Hello, April,” he said when he finally turned to me. “I’m Investigator DeAngelo of the NTSB.”

Hello, sleeper,
I thought to myself as I shook his hand.

I admire my mother because, though she’s not perfect, she did the absolute best she could given the circumstances, which were far from ideal. She married Ash in a misguided attempt to provide a father for me, and when that blew up in her face she fought with the ferocity of a grizzly bear to make things right. Not every (or hardly any) move she made in this regard helped matters, but considering the deck she had stacked against her, I’m in awe of the fact that she didn’t snap like a turkey bone and just give up. Other mothers have cracked under a lot less, Alby told me. (“And she could be like mine,” Malcolm said.) Also, I think it says something that, in the face of all this strife, she never once asked my granddaddy Roy to dip into my trust to help her out. I really do. It makes me remember the end of her sky stories, when she’d tell me right before I fell asleep, “Remember, April, I love you more than anything. I love you more than Grammy Mae, I love you more than Poppa Max, I love you more than Flo, I love you more than Ash. I love you more than I love myself, and I even love you more than you love
yourself
. I love you, I love you, I love you… ” and those were the words I heard as I drifted off to sleep.

After seeing my three best friends almost make a no-parachute skydive from the lower galley of the L-1011 on my fifteenth birthday, I understand now how horrifying and helpless it feels when someone you love is in danger. My mother understood I faced a threat in her divorce situation, and she knew the threat was way greater than Ash Manning, but she didn’t know what it was or why, for God’s sake, I faced it. The most she could do was try to learn to navigate the bizarro world of family court, and that takes time, believe me. Alby has been studying family law for five years, and it won’t be until next month when she finally takes the bar exam, “and even then you’re just beginning to map the battleground,” she says. That explains it pretty well, too. My mother was not even present at the right battleground. She was stuck in the real world, not the bizarro world of family law, where a mother’s proclamations of love for her child are used as a weapon against her.

Case in point: Even though Ash was in prison awaiting trial for colluding with hijackers, the court still wouldn’t return my custody to my mother. The reason? Despite everything, Kathy Landry was still my guardian ad litem and, get this, she had the gall to fire off a letter from her hospital bed recommending against returning me to my mother. Never mind that this shebeast had tried to kill me,
and
steal my trust fund by marrying my stepfather; never mind that my stepfather Ash Manning hasn’t seen me since his idiot actions almost killed me and one hundred fifty other people, including himself; never mind that she was party to the bombing of an aircraft; never mind that she used her status as a court officer to further her money-smuggling agenda. Never mind any of this, because all of this was happing in
another
court. In the eyes of
family
court, Kathy still had a paper with Judge Cheevers’s signature on it, and if there’s anything judges hate, it’s to have one of their bad decisions come back to slap them in the face. They hate it so much, in fact, that they’ll invent reasons against having to admit the decision was ever bad in the first place.