Max Collins - Fly Paper

If he had his way, it wouldn’t have happened. He’d sure as shit tried to plan around any overt violence. But what the hell, you can’t shelter a kid forever; if you do, he’s going to suffocate. He figured Jon would get over it. There’d be a scar, but Jon would get over it.

Yes, the kid would have a rocky conscience for a while, Nolan knew, but that was the way it should be. It wasn’t healthy to feel good about killing a man, even a man the likes of Sam Comfort. When killing gets easy, a man is less than human, in Nolan’s opinion, and a man who likes killing isn’t a man at all. Besides, it’s bad for business. Society and its law-enforcement agencies take a much dimmer view of killers than they do of thieves, possibly because most of society fits into that latter category, to one degree or another.

Anyway, it was over and done, and they were sitting pretty: pretty rich, and pretty lucky to be alive, and pretty sure nothing could fuck up at this late date. Nolan did feel a little bad about holding onto the two guns. Normally, he’d have got rid of them immediately, since they’d been fired on a job — especially when they’d been fired and killed somebody on a job — which these guns had. And he would get rid of them when he got back, after he had seen to it Jon and the two hundred thousand were returned safely to that antique shop in Iowa City. He would’ve asked Bernie for a fresh gun when he returned the Ford early that morning, but Bernie wasn’t there yet, so he’d decided to risk holding onto the .38s for a short while. But it was not good policy to do so, and it grated on him even now, thinking of those two guns down in the suitcase in the hold, nestled next to all that cash. Even Jon, over their mid-morning brunch (two bucks for a goddamn stinking cold hamburger!) had expressed concern about the guns, which had pleased him because it showed that Jon was getting more perceptive about things that counted, and irritated him because the kid had spotted a flaw in Nolan’s supposed perfection.

Hazel was coming down the aisle, looking very nice in the tailored flight attendant outfit, with its soft, light colors. She stood beside their seat, leaned down, and asked, “Can I get you gentlemen something to drink?”

“I thought you were working first class,” Nolan said.

“I was, but since you were riding tourist, I traded off with one of the other girls.”

“Can you do that?”

“If you’re senior flight attendant, you can.”

“Oh, you got rank, huh?”

“It’s called age. But it was kind of silly for me to do.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, this junket’s such a short hop, I’m not going to have much of a chance to do anything besides serve a few drinks and pick up the empty cups.”

“Yeah, but anything, just so you can be close to me, right?”

Hazel said to Jon, “I see why you need all three seats. One for you, one for him, and one for his ego.”

Jon said, “He’s just talking big so nobody notices he’s airsick. If he had his way, we’d be traveling by covered wagon.”

Hazel laughed, and Nolan did too, a little. Nolan ordered a Scotch and Jon a Coke, and let Hazel go.

“She’s a nice lady,” Jon said.

“Yeah. She lives in Chicago. One of those high-rises on the lake. Has lots of days off, she says. Maybe I’ll be able to get in and see her now and then.”

“Chicago isn’t much of a drive from the Tropical, is it?”

“An hour, if the traffic is bad. Only, I hope I won’t be at the Tropical much longer.”

“With half of last night’s take in your sock, you shouldn’t have to be.”

Nolan nodded, then said, “Say, kid.”

“What?”

“I, uh, never really, you know, thanked you for last night.”

“Thanked me?”

“Yes, goddammit. You did save my fucking ass, you know.”

“Well, you saved mine. So what?”

“Yeah. So what.”

They both sat back and tried to look gruff. Nolan was better at it than Jon.

“Hey, Nolan.”

“What”

“That kid. The one with the wig.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“He’s headed up toward the front going up through the first-class compartment.”

Nolan had no comment.

“I don’t know, Nolan, something weird about him, I tell you. Something’s going on with that kid.”

“Aw, shut up. Go to sleep for half an hour, or go get one of your funny-books and read it or something.”

They sat in silence. Five minutes went by, and then the dull little bell sounded that signaled the intercom coming on.

The captain again.

“We’ll be having a little change in course this morning, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll be rerouting our plane directly to the Quad City Airport at Moline. Those of you who were headed there anyway shouldn’t mind this little detour as much as the others.”

The captain’s lame attempt at humor had the reverse of its intended effect: it was easy to see past his superficially light, joking tone and tell something was wrong, very wrong, and the murmur of passenger concern swept through the plane like a flash flood.

He continued, “Now, I don’t want anyone to panic. Everything is in control.” The captain hesitated. “But I feel you should be aware that we have a man with a bomb aboard... and he’s just chartered himself a plane.”

Like all flight attendants, Hazel knew she might one day be involved in a skyjacking, but she wasn’t overwhelmed with fear by the prospect. At one time she would have been: at one time she’d been deathly afraid of flying itself.

Fifteen years ago, when she’d first applied for a job with the airlines, she’d requested ground duty. Then, when she got into the program, she’d begun a gradual change of mind, even after that grueling week of intensive training under emergency conditions, in which she’d had to overcome some of her fears, anyway, just to live through the damn thing. The advantages a flight attendant had over girls on the ground were many, with fewer hours of work for the same amount of pay perhaps the biggest lure of all, and oh, those gorgeous travel possibilities! Factors like that had whittled away at her flying fears, and the statistics had helped, too. Knowing that a plane was safer than a car, for instance, if for no other reason than that the man behind the controls was a professional, not a sloppy amateur like most motorists. That if an engine went out, there were three more to take its place. That practically every little town in the world had some sort of air strip, so a landing spot was always close at hand.

Of course, there were accidents, and air accidents have few — if any — survivors. A flight attendant friend of hers (not a close friend, but more than an acquaintance) had been on a plane that was struck by lightning and went crashing to the ground, providing a fiery death for the friend and fifty-some other people aboard. Don’t think Hazel didn’t have a sleepless night or two over that.

But every profession had its risks, and for a woman, being a flight attendant was pleasant, even glamorous, no matter what Women’s Lib had to say about it. In fact, liberation of the sexes had only gone to show what a good job the flight attendant had: males had begun clamoring for the jobs, and many a tired businessman had recently had the disappointment of looking forward to a bouncy blonde stewardess and getting instead a brawny blonde steward.

Skyjacking was one risk, however, Hazel hadn’t had to consider fifteen years ago; during the first years of her career the term hadn’t even been coined. The hijacking of a commercial airliner was so infrequent that the industry, from board of directors down to flight attendants, thought of it as some bizarre, freak occurrence, an incomprehensible and frightening crime, but certainly no large-scale threat to air travel itself. The 1968 rash of hijackings — twenty-one in all — changed that attitude quickly enough, and skyjacking became a major worry in the minds of all airlines personnel. Hazel included.