We Will Be Crashing Shortly (14 page)

“Right!” LaVonda chimed in to move things along. “That’s what all that slapping sound was, right?” I had to love LaVonda. She was looking for anything to back the fact that—by siding with me—she’d gone with her intuition above her training. And the fact is that there were many ways to tell your phone had been tapped, and I’m sure Flo knew most of them, as she was privy as I was to Otis’s list of five warning signs that your phone is being tapped. Here is the list:

1. Overheating.
   It is normal for a cellphone to generate heat when you’re using it—a result of the battery being active—but if your cell seems really hot even when you’re not using it, your line may have been compromised.
   
2. A Drained Battery.
   A tapped phone loses its battery life faster than a normal phone because it’s constantly recording conversations, even when it appears to be sitting idle.
   
3. A Controlling Romantic Partner.
   It’s now easier than ever for stalkers to tap someone’s phone, with devices like spy SIM-card readers easily available to the public. These devices can be used to remotely check the deleted messages and phone activity of nearly any phone of your choosing.
   
4. Static.
   If you hear static, not just when you are on a call, but when you are
   not
   using your cellphone, it’s a sign your phone is tapped. Listen for a pulsating static, as opposed to simple bad reception. Static with a regular pulse indicates someone on another end switching back and forth between lines.
   
5. Weird Cellphone Activity.
   If your phone spontaneously shuts down, lights up, installs programs, or otherwise acts like it’s possessed by a poltergeist, that’s an indication that it’s tapped and controlled by someone else.
   

The thought of Uncle Otis brought the sting of tears to my eyes again, but I fought them back. The last thing he would have wanted was for my mind to be clouded and diverted from my mission by sorrowful thoughts about him. So back to Flo’s phone; the sound in her connection indicated none of these things on Otis’s list. Instead it was simply a deliberate
slap, slap, slapping
that Flo said she was creating herself. Perhaps she was just making herself a Bloody Mary after all, but I had a very different opinion.

“No, that sound wasn’t a wire tap,” I surmised. “It was Morse code. Three episodes of three.”

“What’s it mean?” LaVonda exhaled in wonderment.

Officer Ned was the first to answer. “It means S.O.S.,” he said, “the international signal for distress.” He shook his arms vigorously. “Now get me the hell out of these cuffs.”

After he assured me he wouldn’t hogtie me and drag me off to the authorities, I took the picks from my pocket and went to work on one set of handcuffs. LaVonda was more hesitant. “You sure you’re not mad at me?” she asked.

“I’m furious at you,” he answered. “But I’ll wait until all this is over with before I fire you.”

“You can’t fire me, it says so in my job description,” she huffed, unhooking her massive janitor ring. She tried hit-and-miss to find the correct key by attempting to insert each one into the lock like Prince Charming looking for the foot to fit the glass slipper. In the end it was quicker for me to just pick her lock as well, and soon Officer Ned was free, rubbing his wrists and looking undecided on whether to reprimand us or galvanize us into action. Finally he squared his shoulders and seemed about to dispense direction on our next step, when suddenly all three of us stumbled and fell. Captain Beefheart went skittering from LaVonda’s arms down the catwalk, where he touched the bulkhead like it was home base and came skipping back to us with eyes excited and tongue lolling.

“What happened?” LaVonda cried. “Who moved the floor?”

“Shhhh!” I whispered. “The floor isn’t moving. The
plane
is moving.”

“Oh, Lord, this plane is NOT moving. No, it is NOT.” She sat upright and shook her head. But the plane
was
moving. I pulled the pairing summary from my pocket and realized we were within three hours of the aircraft’s scheduled takeoff for Grand Cayman. A mechanic must have been dispatched to tow the vessel to the gate in preparation for departure, which explained the lack of engine noise.

“NOT moving. NOT moving,” LaVonda keened.

“Be quiet, please,” Officer Ned told her. He stood and, since there were no guard rails along in this part of the cargo area to steady him, he kind of crab-walked to the bulkhead, where he pushed the meal cart aside and made his way through the hole and into the galley. The officer guarding the hangar must have forgotten to tell his replacement that LaVonda and Officer Ned were inside the aircraft. Maybe he didn’t think it was necessary, seeing as how the two of them were airline employees and this here plane was a big chunk of the airline itself. The hangar was so huge that the aircraft was not considered part of the crime scene below, because it would have been like cordoning off the top half of an office building because a murder had been committed in its parking lot.

LaVonda appeared behind us, clutching Beefheart, steadying herself against the galley counter. She closed her eyes and began to pray under her breath.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“I ain’t never flown in a plane before.”

“LaVonda,” Officer Ned said. “We’re not flying, we’re just getting towed to the gate. From there you can take the jetway back to the concourse.”

She exhaled and seemed to relax, though any tiny jostle of the airplane made her tense up again. I smiled in spite of the circumstances. Who knew LaVonda was afraid to fly? I never bothered to ask her. When she moved to Atlanta from Los Angeles last year, LaVonda had driven the moving truck while her partner flew over with their two children. Now here was a woman who was afraid to fly employed as an airline trauma liaison to help with people who were afraid to fly. It made a strange kind of sense, if you asked me.

As I said earlier, the Atlanta International Airport covered about 133 square miles. So it would take a good while for us to get to the gate. Officer Ned banged his phone against the palm of his hand when he realized the battery had gone dead. He asked to borrow LaVonda’s, but she’d left hers on the electrical cart she’d used to drive over to the hangar. “Do you at least have a charger?” he asked.

“Of course I have a charger.” She produced it from her vest with a flourish. “For what good it does. There’s no outlet here.” She was partially right. There were plenty of outlets in the galley along the power strip above the meal-cart bays, but they were the 30-amp, four-prong kind. On top of that, the power to them had probably been cut long ago, as most domestic flights don’t offer hot food anymore. And to further stack cards against us, LaVonda’s charger was the kind you plug into car cigarette lighters, not the outlet kind. Unfortunately it was useless. Officer Ned thanked-but-no-thanked her and she tucked the cord back in her pocket.

I led LaVonda to one of the jumpseats on the side of the dumbwaiter elevators at the rear of the small galley, and buckled her in. We were only traveling at a moderate taxi along the tarmac, but she seemed set to panic nonetheless. I tucked Captain Beefheart in her lap, which comforted her. Captain Beefheart was not only a smart dog, but mellow as a monk. I can count on one hand how many times I’d heard him bark at—let alone bite—anyone. Since the crash last year, he’d become somewhat of an Internet celebrity, thanks in large part to Flo’s JetHag Facebook page, which each Thursday featured an update devoted to Captain Beefheart. These updates often took the form of lists, such as “Captain Beefheart’s 15 Best Selfies,” or “Captain Beefheart’s Top 10 Air-Travel Safety Tips,” or my favorite, “Captain Beefheart’s 5 Ways to Survive an Aircraft Fire.” Here is that list:

1. Don’t drink alcohol.
   Airline studies have proven that a majority of people who don’t make it out of a burning fuselage have alcohol in their systems. So don’t order alcohol during the beverage service. (I’m almost positive Flo invented this statistic to lower her workload on her own scheduled flights. But still it probably wasn’t bad advice to caution against being drunk during an emergency.)
   
2. Keep your head at armrest level while crawling out of the smoke-filled cabin.
   (While smoke rises, poisonous industrial fumes sink, so the most breathable air would be located in between.)
   
3. Before takeoff, count the rows to your nearest exit.
   (Most likely you’ll be blinded by smoke and need to feel your way off the aircraft.)
   
4. Even if they drop from the ceiling (which they probably will) don’t use the oxygen masks during a fire.
   (Pure oxygen is highly flammable, so bypass the masks if you don’t want to combust before the fireball even reaches you.)
   
5. Request an exit-row seat.
   (Seriously, all that speculation about which seats of the aircraft are safer in the event of a crash—front, mid, aft—is useless. The safest seats on any aircraft are those located by the exits. The sooner off the airplane the better your chances of surviving.)
   

Maybe I had an affinity for this list because my own father—my real father, not that spineless asstard Ash Manning—died in an aircraft fire when I was four years old. I still remember how he used to wake me up each morning. He’d put his hand on my face and wait for me to smile. “Hi, Goldie,” he’d say. That was his nickname for me, Goldie, on account of how in the summertime the color of my hair almost matched the color of my skin. No one else ever called me that anymore, and I missed it. I liked it so much better than “Crash.”

“Time to open your eyes.” My father would shake me gently, then a tad more firmly. “Time to wake up.”

He did not follow Beefheart’s five steps. No, instead he ran
away
from the exit to assist some passengers in the back of the plane whose evacuation was being obstructed—and that wrong step cost him his life. The fuel in the wings ignited and the plane was engulfed before the firemen could unroll their hoses. Anyone who didn’t make it out by then didn’t make it at all.

There should be a sixth step in Beefheart’s list, and that would be “Leave Everything,” because the obstruction impeding the evacuation that day—the one responsible for my father’s death and those of two other people—was a passenger attempting to retrieve his bag from the overhead bin.

LaVonda thanked me for buckling her in, then sat there bug-eyed with worry, clutching Beefheart like he was a flotation device. I smiled out of endearment. “Don’t worry,” I told her, “we’ll be at the jetway soon.” She nodded wanly. Officer Ned, for his part, kept smacking his cellphone against his palm like he was trying to awaken a weary prizefighter. I wondered what phone call he had to make that was so pressing.

I pulled myself through the galley’s ceiling hatch and up to the passenger area above so I could get a better vantage of our surroundings. The area below only afforded a single tiny window located in the galley door off the port side of the plane, which severely limited my lookout ability. I knew the L-1011 was empty because the scaffolding leading to the left-front entry door, the only door used during repairs and inspections, had been dissembled long ago. Besides, we would have heard anyone ambling aboard. An L-1011, while the engines are turned off, has all the sound insulation of a slumlord apartment building.

Eventually we came to a stop way outside one of the domestic concourses. I assumed we were waiting to pull up to a gate, as all of them appeared to be full with other aircraft connected to the concourse by a collection of jetways, which extended from the concourse like flexible, biomorphic tubes atop adjustable metal support pillars on wheels. But then I felt our aircraft jostle as the tow tug unhooked itself from the nose, and saw the tug drive off into the distance, leaving us stranded in a remote area of the tarmac.

“Where we at?” I heard LaVonda exclaim from the galley below. “They hook up the jetway yet?”

“Not yet.” I tried to sound reassuring as I hopped back through the hatch, dropping to my feet in front of her jumpseat. “Hold tight.”

“Hold tight? What the hell do you think I’m doing? Hold tight. Right. Me and Beefy are strapped the hell in,” she said nervously. “Excuse my mouth. I tend to use the word ‘hell’ a lot when I’m having the hell scared out of me.”

I saw that she’d tucked Beefheart against her chest under one of her shoulder straps. Out of habit I instructed her to take him out. It’s never safe to strap a baby in under a seatbelt with you. The centrifugal force from an impact will crush it between your body and the restraint, I explained. “Oh, don’t talk like that,” she begged me, removing Beefheart from under her belt. “I did NOT hear you say the words ‘impact’ and ‘crushed’ right now. No I did NOT.”

I informed Officer Ned of our location on the tarmac, and he sighed with resignation. “That’s why I’ve been trying to pull up my cell,” he said. “I was afraid they’d do this.”

“Do what?” LaVonda asked.

“Use a remote gate,” he answered.

“What the hell is a remote gate?”

“It’s when they park the plane off the concourse and bus the passengers over,” I smacked my forehead.
Of course
they’d use a remote gate! Why waste an expensive passenger gate and jetway for a ferried flight containing only crew members and nonrevenue corporate wanks? Why didn’t I think of this? I wondered if I wasn’t suffering from brain trauma after all.

“What? What does this mean?” LaVonda looked from me to Officer Ned and back again.

“Ah, it just means, you know,” Officer Ned spoke evenly, patting her hand to allay her alarm, “that we might have to go along for the ride.”

“What ride? I ain’t up for no ride! This has been ride enough! What ride?”

Eventually she lapsed into a daze, staring straight ahead. Officer Ned snapped his fingers near her face a few times, but it didn’t register even an eye blink. Finally we left her like that. She was strapped into the jumpseat and probably didn’t know how to extricate herself, which precluded her from jumping up and performing her signature “Hooting Panic Pacing” up and down the galley floor. So we left her there like that while we discussed this turn of events.