Free We Will Be Crashing Shortly by Hollis Gillespie Page B

about the impending court-ordered DNA test, the exhumation of my grandfather’s grave, and the excruciatingly slow legal process of proving our genetic connection.
    “Hey, April, where’d you go?” Otis asked, snapping his fingers before my face. I shook the cobwebs from my head and focused.
    Otis held Trixi’s button between his thumb and forefinger to peer at it closely. He picked up Colgate’s suit jacket from the floor and examined it. It was a Brooks Brothers single-breasted jacket with peaked lapels and canvas lining. I know these things from the small selection of suits Officer Ned kept in his office. He liked to lecture me on their attributes as he removed the plastic from their trips to the dry cleaners. Colgate’s jacket closed in front with one button, or it would have if the button wasn’t missing.
    Otis placed the button from Trixi against the buttonhole on the jacket. “Could be,” he deducted. I thought it was curious that the button was not the two-hole or four-hole sew-through kind you’d normally find on expensive suits. Instead it was a teakwood toggle, with enamel ball caps on each end and a loop on the back used to attach it to the fabric. Otis plunked his toolbox onto the counter and began rifling through his heavy metal implements.
    “Looking for a pickax?” Anita rolled her eyes. “Give it.” She deftly snatched the button from him and opened a small eyeglass repair kit she’d rifled from her big purse. In it was the smallest screwdriver I’d ever seen. Otis left the room and came back with a giant industrial magnifying glass, the kind with a lighted halo and weighted base that comic book characters probably used during their experiments that turned them into supervillains. After Otis assured us it wasn’t a death ray, Anita placed the button under the glass and we all gathered to look at its magnification.
    “There,” Otis pointed to a seam where the wood met the enamel ball cap. Anita gently pried the point of the jewel driver into the seam and the ball cap popped off. She handed the toggle to Otis, who upended it over the palm of his hand. Out came a tiny glinting rectangle, as thin as paper but stiffer, and about one and a half times the size of a grain of rice.
    “What is that?” I asked.
    “That,” Otis frowned, “is a microprocessor.”
    “What’s it for?”
    “Let’s find out.” He carried it to a worktable covered in computer parts. I’d always assumed this material was like an ongoing art project or something, seeing as how several mobiles made from computer trace material hung throughout his warehouse. But it turned out a lot of this stuff had a use. Otis was like Captain Nemo that way. He rummaged through the stuff until he found an interface, popped something out, flicked it away, popped Trixi’s microprocessor in its place, then inserted the interface as a whole into to the back of a hollow hard drive that had been sitting in the corner like a discarded old artifact. He hooked that up to another huge monitor then pushed the power button. Nothing happened. He pushed it again. Nothing.
    “Is it plugged in?” I asked.
    “Crap.” He plugged it in and pushed the power button, and the monitor lit up like a police car.
    “Why are the lights flashing?” I asked, then I realized it wasn’t the monitor that was lighting up like a police car, but an actual police car that had pulled up in the easement alley behind Otis’s warehouse. In a panic I dropped to the floor.
    “Get under the table,” Otis instructed me just as a helicopter searchlight flooded the room through the skylight above. Otis leaned back in his chair, shielded his eye, and waved to the pilot. A fleet of additional police cars, with lights and sirens blaring, clamored to a stop outside at the edge of the carport. Anita and Roundtree hastily sat down on the sofa and tried to look innocent. Flo seemed unaffected by the mayhem. She had returned to the end of the island where the other items from