Free Unaccompanied Minor by Hollis Gillespie Page A

good at it. My mother wasn’t the only one I did it for. I processed bid schedules for my Grammy Mae (also a flight attendant), because her airline was an affiliate of WorldAir and their employee computer interface wasn’t that different, and Flo Davenport, although both of them are so senior they hardly needed a secret weapon. By the way, the top five most popular trips to work, according to the WorldAir Atlanta-based flight attendant seniority graph, are (I love lists):
Narita
São Paulo
Buenos Aires
Honolulu
Beijing
    These routes have high-time payouts and utilize the Boeing Triple Seven aircraft, which has the luxurious flight attendant rest area completely separate from the passenger cabin, where the crew can sleep fully reclined and watch movies if they want. Occasionally my mother got to fly those trips when I’d find one for her that fell during Ash’s custodial time. I constantly worked the swap boards on her behalf, so that when a senior flight attendant needed to drop a prime-time trip, I was there to snatch it off the screen and move it to my mother’s schedule before anyone else could get it. But never did my mother’s job interfere with her custodial time with me—or her “court-ordered visitation,” as Ash called it.
    By the way, there is no such thing as court-ordered visitation (he also called it “court-supervised visitation”). It was just Ash’s way of trying to make my mother sound crazy—to anyone who would listen—crazy as in an unfit mother. The fact was a lot less dramatic than that: my mother shared custody of me with her ex-husband Ash Manning, a man who is not my father, who adopted me when my mother really was in a vulnerable state after my dad’s death. This gave Ash legal rights as though he were my real father. The shared custody schedule was bound by an “agreement” my mother was railroaded into signing under threat of the GAL’s recommendation to the judge.
    Ash Manning never had any use for me, so I didn’t know why he was so hell-bent on that. As I got older I was determined to find out. Especially in light of recent events. Like the kidnapping.
    When the knocking came of course I did not answer the door, seeing as how I’m good at minding my lists. And of course I had set the extra deadbolt. I’m a third-generation flight attendant (although a fake one for now). We always click the extra deadbolt.
    At first when I heard the key in the lock I assumed Ash was home, so I had already begun grabbing my things to get ready to leave. But then I heard the knock and thought that was curious. Did Ash forget that the same key unlocked both the doorknob and the deadbolt? The knock came again. I tiptoed over.
    I didn’t look through the peephole on the door, because predators always expect you to look through that. I looked through a clear spot in the intricate stained-glass panel beside the door instead, because it gave a much better vantage. For example, I could see the person knocking was a no-neck stocky guy about five-foot-eleven with rheumy thyroid eyes behind glasses as thick as the bottom of glass bottles. He was wearing a blue jogging suit and a ridiculous pitch-black toupee. I could also see that his hands, which he hid behind his back, held two things: a large roll of silver electrical tape, and a packet of plastic zip-ties.
    Then he said my name! “April,” he called. “I’m Ash’s friend. I’m a fellow pilot at WorldAir. I need to pick up some stuff for him. Can you let me in? He forgot to give me the key to the other lock.”
    I knew this guy was not a pilot for WorldAir. Pilots undergo mandatory retirement at the age of sixty, and this guy looked like he was a hundred years older than that. Also, his eyeglass lenses were thick as a stack of nickels. WorldAir didn’t hire half-blind pilots. The kidnapping kit he held behind his back did not help his case, either. I turned to tiptoe away and got maybe four steps down the hall when he kicked the door open. He