We Will Be Crashing Shortly (4 page)

Tow trucks and emergency vehicles had finally arrived. The burning BMW and helicopter had been doused by a fire truck that pulled up on the other side of the freeway divider. Once the fire was out the smoke thickened like soup. For a bit. And so many emergency lights were flashing it looked like an outdoor disco. The traffic was so gridlocked that people had given up any thought of getting to their destinations and gotten out of their cars to commune together, take photos, and comment on the sight.

Eyes were everywhere but on me, for once. So I took this opportunity to, yes,
assess my situation
. First I noticed that the officer had left the car running, I assumed in order to maintain climate control on this cold night. On top of that, the thick Plexiglas security partition—the one that separated the front and backseats of the police vehicle—had been kindly left lowered a few inches in order for some of that heat to pass through to the backseat, probably to avoid lawsuits from suspects freezing to death on the way to being booked.

I could see how these circumstances would be useless to someone with her hands cuffed behind her back. But thankfully my hands were free because the police officer was nice enough to consider my comfort when cuffing me. I took a stealthy look around to assure that everyone was still looking at the spectacle on the freeway instead of at me, and was pleased to see that people had begun returning to their cars at the urging of the officers, who were all involved in directing traffic, which had begun to move again at the pace of sludge.

I’m skinny. There, I said it. I have arms like broomsticks. In fact, some of the tabloids had taken to insisting people should be worried about my weight. I’m sure this was in retaliation against all the other tabloids that were touting me as a “winsome beauty.” Everything comes full circle in the media, believe me. I was sure if I gained five pounds I’d be labeled porky or even pregnant, so the last thing on my list of concerns was my image. Obviously, because this right here was my fourth public wreck.

Anyway, with my skinny arms and that two-inch opening, it was almost effortless to reach through the lowered partition to the driver-side door handle and press the button to lower one of the power windows in the backseat of the police car. From there I slipped through the window to the ground. Crouching, I waddled from car to stranded car, jiggling door handles until one opened. It was one of those ridiculous big black Humvees that probably ran on the blood of endangered white rhinos or something. The tractor wheels practically came up to my waist. I could hear the ozone weeping as I crept inside to lay on the floorboard of the backseat.

I was not a second too soon. Almost immediately the driver returned and got behind the wheel, then a passenger entered on the other side and both doors slammed with a comforting
thunk
. The engine revved reliably and I felt us begin to creep along with the rest of the directed traffic. I heard the flicking of a butane lighter, then the unmistakable smell of menthol cigarette smoke.

Flo!
I thought excitedly.

“Uh, do you mind not smoking in my car?” I heard Mr. Roundtree say. I glowered from my hiding place.

“Your car doesn’t need my cigarette to smell like smoke,” Flo said, lowering her window, which allowed the burning smell from outside to make her point.

“Don’t just toss it outside! There’s probably still fuel spilled on the road!”

“Well, what the hell do you want me to do with it then?” Flo inhaled deeply, obviously trying to get in as many hits as possible before being forced to relinquish her cigarette. “There ain’t exactly an ashtray in here.”

“Just . . .” He sighed in exasperation. “Okay, keep it until we get past the police, then throw it out.”

“At this pace I’ll have to light another one,” Flo chuckled.

Mr. Roundtree laughed nervously. “I guess we’re lucky no one got killed. No one got killed, right?”

“Hell if I know.”

“What’s this now?” he grumbled. “A road block?”

I crawled into the backseat and sat upright. It was dark out and Flo and Mr. Roundtree were focused forward and still hadn’t noticed me. I figured if there was a roadblock it’d be a lot less conspicuous if I were sitting out in the open like any number of other innocent passengers. I doubt that the officers had the time to be super detailed when they were checking every car for escaped detainees, so at this point they were probably looking for anything suspicious, and nothing is more suspicious-looking than a teenager hiding on the floorboard behind the driver’s seat. I made sure to tuck my cuffed hand out of sight.

Our car crawled toward an officer shining his flashlight into the cars before directing them to move on. When we reached him, Mr. Roundtree rolled down his window and asked, “Is there a problem, officer?”

“None that you need to worry about,” he answered. Then his flashlight settled on me in the backseat. “Who’s that?”

They all craned their necks in my direction. Mr. Roundtree was so startled it looked like someone touched him with the hot end of an electrical cable. Flo, on the other hand, simply smiled broadly and said, “Why, that’s my granddaughter. My son and I are taking her to Disney World, that is if we can catch our flight.”

The officer shined his light on Mr. Roundtree. “This is your daughter?”

His head nodded with slow trepidation. “Uh, we came from Alpharetta . . .”

“Your plates read Forsyth County, which is way south of Alpharetta,” the officer noted suspiciously.

“What he means is we had to pick her up at her mother’s,” Flo interrupted. “They live in Alpharetta and her mother couldn’t be bothered to take her to the airport to meet us.”

The officer lowered his flashlight and said, “I know what that’s like. Hope you make your flight.”

“Thanks, officer!” Flo called out as Mr. Roundtree raised the window and hit the gas.

“Oh my God oh my God oh my God . . .” he keened. “I’m abetting an escaped convict! Whadoo I do? Whadoo I do?”

“I’m not a
convict
,” I said. “I haven’t been
convicted
of anything.”

“Calm down,” Flo told Mr. Roundtree. Then she turned to me, her face alight. “Good job, Crash! How’d you know which car to get into?”

“I didn’t. I just opened the first unlocked door and got inside.”

Just then we saw Ms. Washington ambling along the side of the freeway, looking dazed. Traffic was still moving slowly enough for us to stop and call to her from the second lane without causing too many people to honk and curse at us. “Do you need a ride?” I asked her. My voice seemed to startle her. She looked up and then away, shaking her head fervently.

“I think she’s in shock or something,” I told Flo.

“No shit.”

We couldn’t just leave her to wander the freeway, traumatized, I thought. “Please, Ms. Washington, get in the car. Look, I’m not the one driving. See? I’m in the backseat.”

At Flo’s urging, Roundtree used his urban tank to muscle the other cars out of the way so we could be next to Ms. Washington. It was the surrounding horn-honking more than anything that finally got her to acquiesce and get in the backseat with me. As a driving instructor, it must have affected her sense of roadway decorum for us to be hindering traffic flow while haranguing her to come inside the car. It must have been stronger even than her sense of personal safety, because it was obvious she felt more out of harm’s way wandering the concrete embankment on the freeway than she did inside a car with me. She settled herself next to me and buckled herself in with a huff. Flo introduced her to Roundtree, who decorously declared his pleasure to make her acquaintance, which she ignored.

“What’s that?” she indicated my left wrist.

“Handcuff,” I lifted it to show her the dangling end.

Mr. Roundtree laughed a bit hysterically. “Yeah, you’re not a convict.”

“Do you have a paper clip?” I asked her.

“Safety pin do?” she sighed.

“Sure.”

Handcuffs were the easiest locks to pick, if you asked me. In most cases, all you had to do was insert a small, stiff wire along the top of the tooth-and-cog wrist brace where the ratcheted lever connected to the brace. The wire held the locking tooth up and away from the ratchet. It took me less than a minute to pick the lock and release my remaining wrist from the restraint. I slipped the handcuffs into my back pocket, where I realized I’d put the set of picks Otis had given me and mentally slapped my forehead. I specifically carried them there in case I ever did get handcuffed. But I always envisioned it happening by an abductor, not a lawman.

I don’t carry a backpack anymore, but my usual uniform included a pair of cargo pants and a zip-up sweatshirt, an ensemble with enough pockets to tote the contents of an entire toolbox if I wanted. I put the safety pin in a pocket along my thigh and felt the presence of a nine-volt battery I’d slipped in there the other day after Otis left it on the kitchen table. Like him, I found it hard to throw away useful things. Sometimes I even forgot all the stuff I was carrying.

“So, where’re we headed?” Flo asked me.

“Hackman’s place,” I answered.

“What?” hollered Roundtree. “Who is Hackman? And why are we not going to the police to turn you in?”

“Turn me in for what?”

“Escaping police custody for one,” Roundtree ran his fingers worriedly through his thinning red hair. It was a feature that made it easy for me to spot him in a media horde. Few reporters have quite the freckled scalp and copper-colored comb-over that Roundtree sported. Add his penchant for white suits, goatees, and neon Fluevog shoes and you have a guy who could stealthily blend into any crowd of clownfish on the face of the earth. But since clownfish aren’t common in the streets of Atlanta, Roundtree sticks out like a disco ball in a bucket of rusty crowbars.

“So, Scooter, now you want to implicate yourself in abetting the escape of a suspected criminal?” Flo intervened. (By the way, she called all skinny guys “Scooter.”)

“I wouldn’t be implicating myself if I just drove to the police station right now to turn her in.”

“Where’s the story in that?” Flo reminded him.

“Believe me,” Roundtree responded, “I have plenty of material. I don’t need to jeopardize my journalistic ethics.”

“What ethics? You write a blog.”

Suddenly I understood how these two were in cahoots. Roundtree must have been sending web traffic to her blog in exchange for information and vice versa. This would explain Flo’s explosion in cyber popularity over the last year, given that the
Southern Times
was a major metropolitan newspaper that had survived extinction by booting most of their trained writers in favor of bloggers, “citizen journalists” (I’m sorry, I can never say that phrase without the air quotes around it), and entertainment writers like Roundtree (I feel air quotes are in order for the word “entertainment” here, as well), who are a hybrid of the two. (His byline reads, “I write about trending topics.”) I felt betrayed by how Flo apparently sold me out as click bait for her website, and I resolved to chew her up for it later.

“We’re going to the police right now,” Roundtree added, although the car continued to creep along at the pace of a glacier, softening the impact of his declaration.

“When you say ‘material’ you mean photos, right?” Flo asked. “Because I have your iPhone right here.” She held it up and tossed it to me before Roundtree could snatch it back from her. I quickly began flipping through his recent photographs and was frustrated to see he’d started snapping pictures from as early as my arrival at the DMV for my driving test that afternoon.

“Give that back!” Roundtree insisted, flailing his right arm behind him in a blind sweep while he kept his eye on the road to steady his driving. Ms. Washington seemed to be impressed with his priorities.

“Don’t give it back,” Flo instructed me, then turned back to him. “Now, Scooter, we are not nearly done with the day’s adventure. If you want to drop us off you can, but you’ll have to live without your pictures until we’re sure you haven’t ratted us out to the police.”

“Keep it. I don’t need the iPhone,” Roundtree huffed. “Everything instantly uploads to my iCloud account. I can access it anytime I want from anywhere.”

“Who do you think you’re dealing with, some farty old shut-in?” Flo countered. I chuckled in spite of myself. “I sent the pictures to my account and then deleted them from your Photo Stream. You really should implement a lock on your iPhone.”

The fact that I was flipping through Roundtree’s recent photos showed that Flo was lying when she said she’d deleted them, but he must have believed they were gone because he banged his steering wheel and let loose an expletive. I continued to flip through the pictures and decided not to delete them all because the stream was a pretty good representation of what had happened since we left the parking lot of the DMV. Here was the proof to show I was trying to stop a crime in case I ever did get hauled into the hoosegow. He got a few of Hackman aiming a gun at us and even snapped a number of angles of Malcolm before he was shoved into the car. It’s probably a miracle Roundtree didn’t get in an accident himself. Otis and Ms. Washington both would have scolded him for being distracted by incidents outside the vehicle. I selected all the photos and emailed them to myself so I could retrieve them on the iPad mini I kept in Officer Ned’s office. Speaking of, I used the phone to call him, but he probably didn’t pick up because he didn’t recognize the number. Then I left a message telling him what really happened, because no doubt he would have gotten the media version by now.

We were halfway to Alpharetta before I remembered that Ms. Washington needed to be taken home. “Wait, we should drop you off,” I told her. “Where do you live?”

“College Park,” she replied.

“We just drove a half hour in the opposite direction, why didn’t you say anything?”

She shrugged and straightened her tortoise-shell eyeglasses. “My kids are grown. My cat is fed. Ain’t nobody anxious for me to get home.” She fiddled with the handles of her embroidered Guatemalan handbag. “I saw that boy get taken. He must be scared.”