We Will Be Crashing Shortly Read online

  WE WILL BE

  CRASHING

  SHORTLY

  Hollis Gillespie

  To Mae Renaldo

  CHAPTER 1

  The last time I saw Mr. Hackman he was dead, but not decapitated.

  I thought it was important to point that out. Because here I was hiding out while being sought in connection (“alleged” connection) with two homicides, and I wanted to emphasize the kind of killer I’d make if I were one, and if I were one I would not go around chopping off the heads of people like Mr. Hackman, an airplane mechanic whose guts I couldn’t stand. I’ll give you one of the reasons I hated him (and this is just one): His wife Molly, one of my favorite waitresses at the Waffle House, was still in the hospital in a coma, where he put her because he was a wife-beating son of a bitch.

  I probably should have called the police right away. But I’m miserably aware of the public nature of 911 calls these days. Eight months ago I called the police when I came home to find my stepfather rummaging through my mother’s files. Normally this would not have been alarming, but my stepfather was supposed to be in prison, or at least it was my understanding that prison was where they put fired WorldAir pilots who bombed planes. Evidently I was wrong.

  It seemed like that 911 recording ran in the news on an endless loop for days afterward. The worst was the Southern Times. The headline read, “Deposed Airplane Princess Places 911 Panic Call, Shoots Stepfather.” I did not shoot my stepfather, by the way. Not with a real gun, anyway. I used a paint gun. I thought it would assist the police in catching him—what with the easily identifiable, giant yellow splotch on the man’s crotch—but then when the police arrived they just let my stepfather go. Today I was still stupefied over that.

  So no, I did not cut off Mr. Hackman’s head. Nor did I immediately (or at all) call 911 that day in the airplane hangar while I stood over his dead body. Instead of calling the police, I thought it would best serve the situation if I ran away and hid in the cargo bay of a nearby L-1011 until someone else came along to discover the body.

  But this is not to say I didn’t kill Mr. Hackman. I’m pretty sure I did.

  “Are you certain? Are you absolutely positive?” Officer Ned asked. He seemed really concerned about me. He’d tried to reach my mother, who was on a cruise ship with my grandparents off the coast of Antarctica, but the most he could do was send a fax and trust it made it to her cabin. I suppose it was saying something that he had yet to call the real police and turn me in, considering they—along with the rest of the world, it seemed—were looking for me.

  “Yes,” I told Officer Ned. “I’m certain.”

  Officer Ned is a 6'5" former professional linebacker with legs like rockets. He could chase down a cheetah, he is that fast. (I’ve seen him tackle a fugitive on the airport tarmac even though the bad guy had half a runway head start.) He is African American, has a nice smile if he’s so inclined (which he isn’t often); he keeps his hair cropped close, his suits impeccable, and his vintage motorcycle boots constantly on his feet. And all five of his bullet wounds have healed nicely, thank God. Officer Ned was also my best friend, or one of them anyway. Two of those bullet wounds he got while saving my life.

  Recently, due to circumstances that would seem fortuitous, he became the head of security at WorldAir, the largest international airline in the country. This was due in large part to me, seeing as how I owned the airline at the time. A very short time.

  Now here we were, Officer Ned and I, in Hangar North 90 sitting in the dark cargo bay of the same L-1011 under which Mr. Hackman died. It’s also the same L-1011 that we crashed in Albuquerque last April. WorldAir brought it back to Atlanta first to forensically investigate the damage and then to Frankenstein it back together by using another L-1011 that ran off the end of the runway a few years back. That plane lost its nose, and this plane lost its tail. Bing bang boom, glue the two together and get one good as new . . . hopefully. One thing they have yet to repair, though, is a hole in the bulkhead of the lower galley. That hole leads to the luggage belly and then to the floor hatch that accesses the cockpit. It’s easily obscured with a strategically placed meal cart. I know about this hole because I put it there, and Officer Ned helped me do it. I also knew that if I was patient he’d eventually know where to find me.

  “April, please,” Officer Ned exhaled shakily and rubbed his temples with one hand. The other hand he reached over to take mine in his. “Start from the beginning.”

  CHAPTER 2

  I’ll start from the beginning. My name is April Mae Manning. I’m 16 years old (in a few days), the progeny of a long lineage of blue-collar airline employees, product of a bizarrely broken family, former runaway, former flight attendant impersonator, and victim of circumstances. Those circumstances include, but are not limited to, an evil stepfather and an engineer/inventor grandfather who left me a giant inheritance that included controlling stock in an international airline. Here is a piece that ran in the news about me last year:

  Southern Times

  “Teenager Credited with Saving Flight 1021 is Forcibly Removed from WorldAir Offices”

  by Clay Roundtree

  Entertainment Section, December 10, 2013

  The FBI credits 15-year-old April Mae Manning for the survival of all passengers aboard hijacked WorldAir flight 1021, which on April 1 was crippled by a bomb, an incapacitated pilot crew and zero cockpit radio communication. Though there were no passenger fatalities, among the crew there was one flight attendant and one air marshal fatality, as well as one hijacker.

  “If it wasn’t for that kid, we’d all be just a red streak on the side of a mountain somewhere,” John Porterdale, 53, a passenger on the fateful flight, says of Manning.

  “This is all very much still under investigation, so I can’t comment on any details of the hijacking right now,” informs Anthony Kowalski of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When asked to confirm reports that Manning was responsible for reconnecting cockpit communications in the ailing L-1011 aircraft, Kowalski simply answered, “That kid is a hero.”

  Until recently Manning was considered to be the largest shareholder at WorldAir, due to the estate she inherited from Roy Coleman, then believed to be her paternal grandfather, who died in 2009. In an odd twist of events yesterday, Manning was forcibly removed from the airline’s executive offices after authorities confronted her with a subpoena from the Supreme Court compelling her to provide a DNA sample.

  “It’s best for everyone’s safety that we take these steps to determine the truth behind any allegations of broken lineage between Mr. Coleman and Ms. Manning,” says WorldAir spokesperson Rand Appleton.

  Manning will be stripped of her seat on the board until her DNA conclusively connects her to Coleman’s, whose remains are scheduled to be exhumed from Tolomato Cemetery in St. Augustine, FL, next week. Coleman’s late son, Robert Madison Coleman, until recently believed to be April Manning’s biological father, was cremated and is therefor unable to provide conclusive DNA material.

  “We just want to be thorough,” added Appleton, “especially in light of recent events.”

  Recent events include the disappearance of WorldAir flight 0392, which vanished from the radar over the Pacific Ocean on its way to Hawaii from Sydney, Australia, on November 18. After an extensive search using vessels dispatched from fifteen surrounding countries, nothing has been found of the plane or of the 267 passengers and crew within it.

  “It’s like it evaporated into thin air,” says Walter Munson, a former investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). “There was not even a single cellphone ping to help triangulate a location. An entire 747 aircraft, just, poof.”

  At first I was bel
oved by the media, but then of course my popularity hit a point of diminishing returns. No surprise. For one, I’m not all that chirpy; I don’t trust the media, the police, lawyers, judges, or bureaucrats. Then when the Supreme Court very publically granted WorldAir permission to seek proof of my paternal lineage, suddenly I was the “alleged” and “self-proclaimed” heiress to the company. Because it doesn’t matter what you said or whether you actually said anything at all—if positive things are published about you, you will be credited with having said it. I swear it’s true, and it’s crazy. Not a single article ever printed contained a real quote from me. But now that the pendulum of public attention has swung the other way, suddenly I’m the “suspected imposter progeny of Roy Coleman” while my mother was expected to prove she didn’t sleep around.

  The first I even heard of this turn of events was when I was taking the driving test to qualify for my learner’s permit. As I pulled out of the Atlanta DMV, which was housed in a double-wide mobile home across from Turner Field, suddenly my car was accosted by a gaggle of reporters and “citizen journalists” (an oxymoron if I ever heard one).

  “Pull over!” the instructor insisted. “Now!”

  I gunned it instead. Most of them got out of my way, except Clay Roundtree of the Southern Times. I tried to frighten him into moving, but the only person I frightened was the DMV lady assigned to assess my test. She screamed like a fishwife, grabbed the wheel, and slammed us into a tree. The move smashed the passenger-side front bumper, accordion-style, of the car my uncle Otis had leant me for the occasion.

  The DMV lady stumbled out of the car clutching her neck and demanding the contact information for the owner of the vehicle. I gave it to her but no lawsuit was filed, probably because Otis began dating her the day she called him for his insurance information.

  The car, by the way, was a seventies model BMW 2002. You would think it’d been in perfect mechanical condition, considering Otis is an actual mechanic for WorldAir. But it was already so beat up that the crash actually realigned the frame from former wrecks and made it drive better.

  “This is fabulous,” Otis shouted over the grinding of the gears. He’d seen the melee on the news on the television in the break room at the airplane hangar, and had gotten a coworker to drive him to the DMV and drop him off so he could scoop the car off the tree and take me home. “It’s like you gave the car a chiropractic adjustment!”

  I was really glad to see him, because I had been stuck there for nearly an hour. The crowd of reporters had been bolstered by news vans and even helicopters, and had gotten so big I couldn’t break through to walk back to the DMV to cower in a stall of the filthy ladies bathroom. So I simply sat with my back against the tree, pulled my knees to my chest, and prayed the vultures would dissipate—a futile hope. Again, actual helicopters were involved.

  Gawker.com had the biggest field day with that one, although no one, not even Clay Roundtree, could wrestle a quote from me. “How’s it feel to know that the CEO of the company your grandfather left you suspects you’re the bastard child of an illicit union?” he shouted as I struggled to close the passenger door shortly before Uncle Otis peeled us away from there. When the piece appeared on the ST website later, Mr. Roundtree had dubbed me “Crash Manning,” a name that has stuck ever since.

  “I like it,” Otis grinned. It was a tad scary when he grinned like that. My uncle Otis was an impervious, booze-addled, arguably certifiable genius, and actually my great-uncle once removed if you want to get specific. He was also a former pilot, having worked for Pan Am for just one year until he became one of the few survivors of the infamous Tenerife airport disaster of 1977. To this day it remained the deadliest accident in aviation history, caused by a simple miscommunication between Spanish air traffic control and the pilot of a KLM 747.

  “It was not just a simple miscommunication,” Otis always corrected people about that day. “There were many factors leading up to it. Nobody ever mentions the bomb anymore.” He was right, of course. (Otis is rarely wrong about airline information.) Earlier that day, a bomb had detonated at a nearby airport, causing traffic to be diverted to Tenerife in the midst of a dense fog. The pilot of the KLM 747 understood he had clearance to take off, which he attempted to do while another 747—the one my uncle was in—was parked on the runway. The resulting collision annihilated both planes and killed everybody aboard the KLM flight plus all but 61 people aboard my uncle’s plane. Otis doesn’t talk about it much until he’s drunk, and then the details come out.

  “The fog was dense like chowder, completely impenetrable,” he’d slur after half a bottle of Jägermeister. “The conditions were terrible for traffic, but perfect for terrorists. Everyone was on edge.”

  Selfishly, I love to listen to him talk about it. Otis was deadheading at the time, sitting in the cockpit jumpseat behind the two pilots. He could hear the communication between the doomed KLM pilot and the control tower. “I remember thinking, ‘Shit, that guy thinks he’s cleared for the runway!’ We all heard it. We could see their lights coming toward us.”

  On the cockpit voice recorder, you could hear Otis urging the captain along with the copilot and engineer to hurry off the runway. “Get off! Get off!” he cried. The captain did what he could to move the mammoth aircraft out of the way, but a 747 in a dead stop is no match for one barreling at 180 mph. All the survivors were found in the front section of the aircraft.

  Otis lost his left eye in the accident, which canned his piloting career. He left Pan Am after that to join WorldAir as a mechanic, a move several steps down for him, and he never piloted a plane again. Today he kept a collection of glass eyes in a bowl by his sink, but normally eschewed them in favor of a black eye patch. Maybe it was this rogue-pirate effect that explained his evident irresistibility with women. I couldn’t tell you how old he was because he had a face like a leather saddle, but it worked for him. I put him somewhere in his sixties, but youthful, like a blond Keith Richards, and with a giant toothy smile like that creature in the Alien movies.

  “‘Crash,’” he repeated, clapping me on the back. “The name feels right.”

  I disagreed. Recently I’d had to postpone my piloting lessons because my instructor, upon learning—in midair—who I was, became so flustered that he fainted on the instrument panel and we landed in a tree at the edge of a Walmart parking lot. Some would call that a crash, but I’m reluctant to admit it, even though in truth I was not aiming for the tree but the actual parking lot. Anyway, everybody lived, which is saying something because it was only my fourth flying lesson. Since then I’ve been relegated to using the sophisticated simulator in the WorldAir pilot-training complex. It was one of the perks of my on-again, off-again ownership of the airline.

  Today I thanked God I got the board to hire Officer Ned as head of company security. It was a perk that turned out to benefit me, seeing as how I’d just killed one of our mechanics and was at present an official fugitive from the law. Officer Ned shook his head and handed me a peanut packet. His cellphone vibrated to life. I jumped even though the ringer was off.

  “Who is it?” I whispered.

  Officer Ned clicked “decline” on his screen. “LaVonda,” he sighed. Then his phone dinged quietly, indicating a text message. He looked at his screen and rubbed his temples again. “She’s on her way over.”

  “How does she know I’m here?”

  “I told her I had a hunch you were hiding here,” he said. Again, Officer Ned and I had a history with this airplane. I knew if I sat tight he’d figure out where I was.

  A luggage tug squealed to a stop outside our hangar. I heard LaVonda calling to the policeman assigned to protect the crime scene, “I am the WorldAir Trauma Liaison, you just tell your boss that it’s written in my work duties to assess all areas where trauma has occurred. And murder is damn traumatizing, you hear me? Now let me through.”

  It must have worked, because next we heard LaVonda scrambling up the scaffolding and onto the wing. She had one leg ins
ide the window exit of the plane when the officer yelled at her to get down. “The murder didn’t happen on the aircraft.”

  “Don’t you be yellin’ at me to get down off my own plane owned by my company I work for who gave me this important job, the duties of which . . .”

  Officer Ned had had enough. He was up and through the hatch in two seconds, calling to the officer to stand down. “This is my assistant,” he waved assuredly. “I’ve got this.”

  “Your assistant?” LaVonda lowered her voice. “You specifically said I was not your assistant. I like ‘colleague’ better. In fact, I think it’s gonna say so in my . . .”

  “Thank you, officer,” Officer Ned said. There was some more hoarse whispering between him and LaVonda, and then I heard a strange scuttling sound come running down the aisle above me. My heart leapt. Could it be? I stood under the opening in the floor above me, and sure enough.

  “Captain Beefheart!” I whispered excitedly. The dog jumped into my arms, licking my face, grunting and squirming like a furry little sea lion.

  Captain Beefheart is a loveable mutt with a half-chewed-off ear who looked like a small crocodile covered in fur. In actuality, he’s a corgi/pit bull mix (how those two breeds got together is testimony to the ingenuity of attraction). He was found as a puppy in the compactor of a trash truck after the dumpster in which he’d been abandoned was upturned inside of it. Luckily the trash man heard yelping, dug the puppy out, and dropped it off at a rescue organization. My friend Malcolm then chose Beefheart as his emotional support animal, owing to the amount of time he’d flown as an unaccompanied minor between the East Coast where his mother lived and the West Coast where his father moved to get away from her.

  The thought of Malcolm made my heart sink again. I buried my face in Beefheart’s neck and held back tears. Officer Ned effortlessly descended back through the hatch and then turned to help LaVonda with her attempt, which was not at all effortless.