Free We Will Be Crashing Shortly by Hollis Gillespie Page A

trading, and money laundering. If you asked me, it was a miracle that he’d escaped incarceration so far, though ironic to note that if he had been in a cushy federal prison right now he might still be alive today.
    “What’s the license number?” Anita asked.
    “What?” We all turned to her.
    “The tag number of the Rolls-Royce,” she reiterated, “what’s the number?” She huffed impatiently. “Never mind, move,” she instructed Otis, who leaned to one side so she could access his keyboard. A few rapid strokes later we were looking at the DMV government employee interface. Within seconds she had pulled up the registered owner of the Rolls. Otis’s eyes widened lasciviously. Stuff like this was catnip to him. I imagined the leverage he could garner against people by accessing this private information.
    “There, see?” Anita pointed to the screen. “It was not a company car for Colgate Enterprises.”
    No, it was a company car for WorldAir.
    “This doesn’t mean anything,” I ventured, a glint of company loyalty bursting to the surface. “They could have stolen the car.”
    “Who steals a silver Rolls-Royce ?” Flo asked. She had a point.
    “I totally would,” Otis mumbled.
    “Hackman is the liaison for the mechanics union, maybe that was part of the deal he brokered during contract negotiations.” Now I was the one who had a point. It would not have surprised anyone that the self-serving Hackman had put his oily thumb on the scale to include perks like this for himself while the threat of a strike loomed heavily in the air and the other mechanics worried about making mortgages.
    “Look at the knockers on that broad,” Otis broke the silence. He pointed to the bombshell clutching Malcolm’s arm in the picture.
    “I know, right?” said Anita. “It’s like she needs a bicycle pump for those puppies.”
    For all we knew she had a face like a frying pan, because none of the frames came close to catching her mug. Could it have been Malcolm’s mother? I thought. I knew it was a long shot, because the last time I saw her she did not have blonde hair and weighed at least 20 pounds more than the person in the picture. But that was a while ago; she could have gone to Costa Rica and had the fat sucked out of her in that time. Who knew.
    “Drag queen,” said Roundtree. Our heads turned toward him in unison, like meerkats.
    “Why do you say that?” Flo asked.
    “Trust me,” he assured. We didn’t really.
    Otis got up from the desk and returned to the kitchen island to assess the items retrieved from Trixi and the crime scene. He plucked a number-2 pencil from a cup on the counter and used it to shade the sheet. This outlined the impressions made from the note written on the previous sheet:
    V-2927-PRES45
    “What do you think that is?” I asked.
    Otis shrugged. “It’s a serial number for one of our airplane parts.”
    That made sense, since Hackman was an actual airplane mechanic. It was easy to forget he had a professional title other than Murdering Thieving Wife-Beating Kidnapping Odious Arsonist Pig. I really didn’t understand people like Hackman. He had a good job with a great company (when the CEO wasn’t trying to sabotage it)—who could want anything more? My grandfather, who was secretly richer than any of us knew or could even imagine, loved to labor with his hands, as did all of my family members. Even Otis. Even me. The days I spent impersonating a flight attendant were way more fun than now, when I’m supposed to be waiting with bated breath on whether the court will deem me deserving of a huge fortune. The money wasn’t a big deal—half the fun in life is figuring out how to get by without it. The only thing I cared about was if they were true, the rumors. I didn’t know why it should matter—Roy Coleman was my grandfather regardless of whether we were connected by blood—but I just didn’t want anything else taken from me for the time being. So I tried not to think