Free Catch Me If You Can by Frank W Abagnale Page B

asked that Pan Am be billed for my lodging. All they asked was Pan Am’s address in New York.
    At intervals I’d hole up in a city for two or three weeks for logistics purposes. I’d open an account in, say, a San Diego bank, or a Houston bank, giving the address of an apartment I’d rented for the occasion (I always rented a pad that could be had on a month-to-month basis), and when my little box of personalized checks arrived, I would pack up and take to the airways again.
    I knew I was a hunted man, but I was never sure how closely I was being pursued or who was in the posse those first two years. Any traveling con man occasionally gets the jitters, certain he’s about to be collared, and I was no exception. Whenever I got a case of the whibbies, I’d go to earth like a fox.
    Or with a fox. Some of the girls I dated came on pretty strong, making it apparent they thought I was marriage material. I had a standing invitation from several to visit them in their homes for a few days and get to know their parents. When I felt the need to hide out, I’d drop in on the nearest one and stay for a few days or a week, resting and relaxing. I hit it off well with the parents in every instance. None of them ever found out they were aiding and abetting a juvenile delinquent.
    When I felt the situation was cool again, I’d take off, promising the particular girl that I’d return soon and we’d talk about our future. I never went back, of course. I was afraid of marriage.
    Besides, my mother would not have permitted it. I was only seventeen.

CHAPTER FOUR.
If I’m a Kid Doctor, Where’s My Jar of Lollipops?
    National Flight 106, New Orleans to Miami. A routine deadheading deception. I was now polished in my pettifoggery as a pilot without portfolio. I had grown confident, even cocky, in my pre-empting of cockpit jump seats. After two hundred duplicitous flights, I occupied a jump seat with the same assumption of a Wall Street broker in his seat on the stock exchange.
    I even felt a little nostalgic as I stepped into the flight cabin of the DC-8. My first fraudulent flight had been on a National carrier to Miami. Now, two years later, I was returning to Miami, and again on a National jet. I thought it appropriate.
    “Hi, Frank Williams. Nice of you to give me a lift,” I said with acquired poise, and shook hands all around. Captain Tom Wright, aircraft commander, forties, slightly rumpled look of competence. First Officer Gary Evans, early thirties, dapper, with amused features. Flight Engineer Bob Hart, late twenties, skinny, serious demeanor, new uniform, a rookie. Nice guys. The kind I liked to soft-con.
    A stewardess brought me a cup of coffee as we taxied toward the runway. I sipped the brew and watched the plane traffic on the strip ahead. It was late Saturday night, moonless, and the aircraft, distinguishable only by their interior lights and flickering exhausts, dipped and soared like lightning bugs. I never ceased to be fascinated by air traffic, night or day.
    Wright was apparently not one to use the squawk box. All three officers had headsets, and none of the three had offered me a set for monitoring. If you weren’t offered, you didn’t ask. The cockpit of a passenger plane is like the captain’s bridge on a ship. Protocol is rigidly observed, if that’s the tone set by the skipper. Tom Wright operated his jet by the book, it seemed. I didn’t feel slighted. The conversation between the three and the tower was clipped and cursory, rather uninteresting, in fact, as most such one-sided exchanges are.
    Suddenly it was real interesting, so interesting that I started to pucker at both ends.
    Wright and Evans exchanged arch-browed, quizzical looks, and Hart was suddenly regarding me with solemn-eyed intensity. Then Wright twisted around to face me. “Do you have your Pan Am identification card?” he asked.
    “Uh, yeah,” I said and handed it to him, stomach quaking as Wright studied the artistic fake. “This is