Free We Will Be Crashing Shortly by Hollis Gillespie

belted back the rest of his tequila.
    “That’s it?” Otis questioned me.
    I remembered the notepad and baggage claim check, pulled them from my pocket, and also placed them on the counter.
    “Where’d you get these?”
    “They were on the kitchen counter next to the phone at Hackman’s place,” I answered.
    “Actually,” Anita held up her finger, then brought it to her lips to suppress a dainty burp. “Actually, the police dispatcher said the house belonged to Morton Colgate.”
    “Yeah,” said Flo. “That’s right. Why is that?”
    “It can’t be. Malcolm’s dad lives—lived—in Los Angeles,” I said. “I mean, that’s the reason Malcolm was always having to fly cross-country, because his parents shared custody.”
    “Let’s look it up,” Otis said, opening his laptop. We told him the address and he entered it into some site that spat forth information on these things. “Yep, it says here that the house was bought by Colgate Enterprises, but then it was quitclaimed to someone else.”
    “What’s ‘quitclaimed’?”
    “It refers to when the owner of a piece of property transfers all interest of the property to someone else. Basically it means he bought the house for someone else.”
    “Does it say who?”
    Otis scrolled further down the screen. “Yes. Molly Hackman.”
    “Molly?” Flo and I exclaimed simultaneously. Why would Mr. Colgate buy Molly a big-ass house?
    “I bet they were having an affair,” Flo said.
    “Um hmm, girl, you know it,” Anita clicked her glass with Flo’s and threw back another shot.
    In some ways it made sense, and in others not at all. For one, it would explain why Hackman was so furious at Molly when she left him, and why his revenge against Mr. Colgate was meted out so viciously. But then what was this business about kidnapping Malcolm? And Trixi? What was with the dog? And what did Ash have to do with anything? And who was the blonde woman present during Malcolm’s abduction? I voiced all these questions to the others at the round table, but they were so certain illicit sex was behind everything that they barely gave my thoughts any weight.
    All but Roundtree. He put down his shot glass and eyed me intently. “She’s right,” he said. “An affair doesn’t answer all the questions. We should look more closely at those photos I took during Crash’s driving test.”
    “Let me get you your phone,” Flo got up to retrieve her purse.
    “Stop, I stole it back from you hours ago,” he said, producing the phone from his pocket. Flo, nonplussed, sat back down and finished her tequila.
    Otis uploaded Roundtree’s photos and brought them up on his 30-inch computer monitor. We gathered around to peer closely at the details. He clicked through the day’s earlier images until we got to the first one that showed us in Otis’s old BMW outside Colgate Enterprises. “Oh, by the way,” I said, “sorry about your car.”
    “No problem. A flame of glory—it could not have hoped for a better demise.” He zoomed in on the silver Rolls-Royce in the photograph. “Do we know whose car this is?”
    I was about to tell him it was Mr. Colgate’s car, but come to think of it I wasn’t sure whose it was. As far as I knew, Colgate lived in California, and I assumed he used company cars while in town to check on his Atlanta operations. Last year during my days as an unaccompanied minor flying from coast to coast to fulfill my own ridiculous court-fortified custody schedule, I’d used the onboard WiFi to look up the troubles Mr. Colgate faced with the IRS. Poor Malcolm, I’d thought. The most detailed article appeared in Forbes , which informed that Colgate’s troubles started when his ex-wife turned him in to the IRS and then to the FBI, as there were also some accusations that he had misled shareholders and engaged in other nefarious activity. At present not only had Colgate been indicted for tax fraud, but he was also under investigation for embezzlement, insider