Double Strike (A Davis Way Crime Caper Book 3) (10 page)

“No.”

“Davis, did you beat Baylor up?”

“No.”

“You lost one of your purple contacts.”

“I know.”

Baylor dropped into one of the bean bag chairs. “Those Jennings people are pot farmers, Fantasy. They have a whole mountain of pot. A whole mountain.”

Her eyes popped open in shock, then narrowed in concentration as she thought about it, then the pieces fell into place. “That explains why they’d hire a hooker to babysit their kid.”

Baylor couldn’t make the connection. “How?”

“That stuff kills brain cells, Baylor.”

He tried to look up at his own head.

“Is he lying?” she asked me. “Is there really that much pot?”

“Yes,” I said, “there is.” And Baylor was all but tipped over backwards, still trying to look up at his own head.

“I thought you two went to Pine Apple to get a divorce.”

“We did,” I said.

“How’d that turn out?”

“We’re still married.”

ELEVEN

@LuckyStrikePlayers #StrikePeek @9tonight #You’reGonnaLoveIt! #WaitTillYouSeeTHIS!

*     *     *

Friday morning all drug farmers, dingbat country lawyers, social media assistants, artillery support, car thieves, and federal agents chasing bananas had to take a breather, because Bianca Sanders was moving out of Jay Leno’s place. Three construction crews working three shifts alongside seven decorators, two project coordinators, four home stagers, and a representative from Sotheby’s in Santa Fe had, in just minutes outside of a week, put the Sanders home back together again.

It’s truly amazing what money can buy.

Physically, Bianca didn’t move a thing but her lazy butt to a limo, which took her to New Orleans for the day, away from the stress of the move, while Fantasy and I were “entrusted with her beloved possessions” and charged with “everything in its place by three chop chop”, and we were babysitting the dogs, because their trainers, handlers, and groomers were upstairs installing their new rooms. I ordered them each a T-bone steak, then lured them into a closet. For their own safety. Lest they get accidentally packed.

“Shouldn’t we cut them up?” Fantasy asked.

“The steaks?”

“Yes, Davis. The steaks.”

“That’s half the fun for dogs, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Those steaks are bigger than those dogs.”

“It’ll be fine.” I told them to take naps after lunch, they growled at me, I closed the door.

We wandered around packing everything that wasn’t nailed down.

“Let me ask you something, Davis. Shouldn’t this be Jimmy Fallon’s place now?”

We had a canvas laundry cart the size of a refrigerator in the middle of the room and we were lobbing things into it willy-nilly. “Yes.” I sailed a hardback Mommy Porn how-to reference manual of Bianca’s through the air and got two points. “To hell with Jay Leno.”

“Davis!”

“He’s moving on to another stage in his life, Fantasy. And in doing so, he has to give up everything? Even this place?”

“First of all,” she stretched her back, “this suite will forever be known as Jay Leno’s place, okay? Are you happy now? And second of all, are you still singing that song? No one is discriminating against you and I wasn’t discriminating against Jay Leno.”

I had a Louis Vuitton tote in my hand, probably worth a million dollars, stuffed with two million dollars’ worth of dog clothes that had just been returned from the cleaners laundered, ironed, folded, and labeled in teeny boxes. “I honestly think the minute I get married my job is going to get to this right here.” I shook the Louis Vuitton. “I will be in charge of the dog clothes. I’ll be put out to pasture just like Jay Leno. I’ll be nothing but Bianca’s slave and you’ll be mine.”

“I’m already yours,” she said. “Watch this.” Fantasy walked to a house phone and ordered us a pitcher of mimosas and several trays of food. “Whatever looks good. We’re in the mood for brunch. And chocolate,” she said. “Chocolate brunch.”

She dialed housekeeping next. She had them pick up the laundry bin stuffed full of Bianca’s trinkets and sex manuals and deliver it all upstairs to the newly remodeled Sanders residence with a note to the Sotheby’s person:
Bianca said put all this up where it goes
.

We spent the next several hours at Jay Leno’s indoor pool.

“These mimosas are all orange juice.” Fantasy polished off another one.

“We’d better order more.” I did the honors.

“We need our vitamin C.”

Two pitchers of mimosas later, the subject rolled back around to my irrational wedding anxiety.

“You promise me, Davith?” Fantasy was propped on an elbow, stretched out on one of Jay Leno’s oversized pool loungers, when her chin fell off her fist. She stayed there, horizontal, and asked, “This has nothing to do with Bwadly? Nothing’sh happened?”

“Crush my eyes.” I was deep in another one of Jay’s oversized loungers. “Poke my heart out.”

“Then whass the problem?”

The problem was nothing and the problem was everything.

We may have accidentally dozed off when our phones woke us almost two hours later, dinging with regularly scheduled Strike It Rich propaganda, this time a mini movie, made up entirely of photobombs of almost-naked waitresses, courtesy of Little Sanders.

“Are those my boobs?” Fantasy was still on her back holding the phone above her head. “This is a good movie, Davis. X-rated, but good.”

“Thank you.” I eyed the three empty mimosa pitchers. “Did we drink all that?”

Fantasy was gently prodding about her head. “My face is numb.”

“What time is it?”

“Two o’clock.”

We both bolted up and said it together. “The dogs!”

I peeked in the closet, then slammed the door closed.

“Davis. Are those dogs dead?”

I couldn’t blink. Or breathe. “Not too much.”

She pushed me aside, cracked the door, and peeked for herself. She closed it as quickly as I had, then turned to me. “You’re bathing them.”

When Bianca found us at Jay’s indoor pool, she clapped gloved hands to her face. “My babies! Swimmy-swimmy! Puppy stroke!”

We called housekeeping about the closet.

*     *     *

Then I went swimmy-swimmy.

My hair caught fire. I jumped into the Bellissimo swimming pool to put it out in front of five hundred people, several dozen of them representing news outlets, so Bianca Sanders’s humiliation was well documented. GulfCoastNews(dot)com was first, posting the video of me tearing into the night with a foot of flames trailing from my head, arcing through the air in a cocktail dress and a perfect cannonball, then landing in the deep end of the Bellissimo swimming pool with a great big splash. It got seven thousand views on YouTube before we could get it down. I missed it at the time, because I was in the pool putting my hair out, but my Amy Medina phone had received instructions from Hashtag Elspie, somewhere close enough to know what was going on but not at the party, to Snapchat a photo only, because we wanted to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. (#Snapchat?)

The first problem was the dress Bianca had me in. She’s so cutting edge, she has to have it right off the runway, and I pray the day doesn’t come when naked is the new black, because she’ll have me going out in public naked. When I asked her to reconsider the dress, which was hideous and surely already a fashion don’t, she said, “No. YOLO, David.”

(It’s Davis. And what she constantly missed was that she wasn’t taking fashion risks based on the fact that she only lived once, when she was, in fact, living a double wardrobe life—her own, which was almost solid black, and through me, which was almost solid ridiculous.)

The dress was a peacock blue number. The fabric was a metallic Jacquard, and very little of it. It had peek-a-boo cutouts everywhere, so the only parts of my body that were covered were the ones required by law. The dress had no sides. Or front. Or back. And I had no leverage with her at the time, because she was aggravated with me already for being late. Any other time, I could go downstairs and change into something fit for public consumption from the stash of Bianca clothes I kept in the office, but there wasn’t a stash. She’d confiscated it days ago.

“If you’d been here on time, David, I might have considered it. Now it’s too late for me to choose something else; I’m no longer in the mood. Wear the Giambattista, and right this minute, before I’m so late Richard gets upset with me.”

Bianca Casimiro Sanders believed in arriving fashionably late or not at all, so her giving me a lecture on tardiness when I’d run in panting and apologizing was absurd. I sat through the sermon—she paced back and forth in front of me in a silk lounging getup covered in black feathers—wondering where the logic was in wasting what little time I didn’t have to get ready screaming at me.

“Are you even listening to me, David?”

“It’s Davis.”

“An hour of my life is lost waiting on you.”

I was twenty minutes late. Some days, like today, when I have three pitchers of mimosas for breakfast, I lose track of time.

She made several other moot points, and I wondered, for the millionth time, how Mr. Sanders stayed married to her. Her father owned this casino, and that had to be a big part of it, and then there was Little Sanders, the teenage terror tie that binds. From the outside looking in, though, it appeared that Mr. Sanders genuinely loved Bianca. He’d certainly put up with enough of her loose interpretation of their marital vows through the years. And they touched each other often, subtle stuff. He was often amused by her behavior. The rest of us weren’t.

“My time gone.” Her hand fluttered through the air. “Never to be retrieved.”

I took my lumps.

“If I start smoking again and it’s your fault,” she threatened, “
you
will be the one going under the knife. Not me.”

See? Not only is it not funny, it makes no sense, but Mr. Sanders would turn his head and smile at that.

“I’ve had a terrible afternoon.” She peered into her gigantic martini glass. “Gianna and Ghita don’t feel well.”

Too much swimmy-swimmy.

A feather escaped Bianca’s robe, and she batted through the air trying to catch it, sloshing martini everywhere. “Angela is ready for you. Angela has
been
ready for you for hours, David. You’ve totally wasted her life, too. Now, shoo.” Bianca waved me into her recently restored dressing room. Our hair and makeup woman Angela was, as Bianca promised, waiting. We exchanged a “she’s-so-batshit-crazy” look, and I plopped into the director’s chair.

“Have I wasted your life, Angela?”

Our eyes met in the mirror. “Totally, David. My whole life.”

I found Angela several months ago, because I got tired of Bianca complaining that I was misrepresenting her. (Well, Bianca, stop sitting around here all day chasing feathers and go represent yourself.) She wanted me to have better hair, better makeup, and looser morals. I began sneaking Angela, who I knew from the salon on the mezzanine level, into our inner-sanctum to doll me up when I did my Bianca duties and was immediately caught. “David, I know you’re not responsible for your hair tonight, because when left to your own devices, it looks as if a feral cat has attacked your head. Who did my hair for you?”

I was forced to produce Angela.

Bianca claimed her as her own. She took total credit for Angela’s genius with makeup brushes and total control of her life. I warned Angela to keep a nice distance between herself and Bianca, but by that time, Bianca had already given Angela a CEO salary, a baby Mercedes, a set of Bottega Veneta luggage to roll the makeup around in, and unlimited shopping passes at Sephora and Neimans. So now poor Angela was Bianca’s bitch.

Tonight was the VIP soft opening of the Strike It Rich casino. It would be attended by local dignitaries, media, and Alabama marijuana farmers. No gaming until the official opening tomorrow. Tonight was gawking at the gold waitstaff and test driving the incredible chairs. We’d be showing off
future
Gaming to the media, city dignitaries, and to the other dozen Biloxi casinos which had been issued five passes each so they could wonder how we did it. From the Grand Palace Casino, we were welcoming the president, the casino manager, and the heads of customer relations, marketing, and legal counsel—Bradley Cole.

The star of the show, the biggest showoff of them all, Bianca Casimiro Sanders, was running late. And it was all my fault.

Angela waved all her magic wands, sprayed me blonde, then pulled my hair half up with the rest in loopy gold curls down my back, loaded my face with makeup, then, ta-da! I stepped past the mirrors to slip into something appropriate, took one look at the extreme inappropriateness dangling off a silk padded hanger, and almost passed out. Surely not. The first hour of this shindig was on a piazza between the Bellissimo pool and the ocean. Closer to the ocean, but down a twenty-foot seawall to get there. People were married on the piazza all the time, in the
summer
. I would literally freeze to death in the two ounces of blue fabric Bianca had chosen for the evening’s festivities. Had the woman stepped outside lately? The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since noon and the wind whipping off the Gulf was enough to knock down small homes. Which is when I asked Bianca if I might wear Plan B and she told me she only lived once.

“Where’s the jacket?” I asked Angela. “And tell me its floor-length.”

“There is no jacket.”

“Angela.” My hands were in perpetual motion trying to cover up various things. “There has to be a jacket.”

“She said for you to wear the…” Angela reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a slip of paper. “It’s a white mink hooded fur with ermine tips. The one you wore the other night.”

The fur coat that had taken a chocolate milk bath. It was downstairs in our offices stuffed in a Hefty bag until I could find the time to check it in somewhere for detox.

The coat was the second problem.

Angela was a boot girl. I’d seen her in twenty different pairs of boots—cowboy, sleek leather, studded, wedged. She wore skinny jeans, teeny tops, and long cardigan sweaters with the boots.

“Angela, let me borrow your sweater.”

She peeled it off.

I covered the spots of metallic blue fabric with Angela’s sweater and donned hubcap-sized sunglasses, then made my way downstairs, calling in the cavalry on the way.

“Fantasy, help.”

“Davis,” she whispered into the phone. “They’re spraying me gold. I’m getting ready for the VIP party on the piazza, which is in two minutes. It’s not like I can run out half gold. What is it?”

“It’s that stupid chocolate milk fur coat.” I hurried down the long basement hallway to our offices in aqua blue six-inch Jimmy Choo peeptoe heels and coded myself in. “She wants me to wear it to the party tonight. Please come help me clean it up!” I stepped in. Empty. Dimly lit. Quiet. Maybe I could just stay here. Forever. “I have, seriously, one minute to get that thing ready to wear.”

“Girl, I have zero minutes,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

I whimpered as I tore into the Hefty bag. The fur spilled out and the smell knocked me down. I dug for, found, then Febreezed the holy crap out of it. Sleep Serenity flavor. The whole jug. If we had a clothes dryer, I’d have thrown the thirty-eight-thousand-dollar fur in it to fluff it up. But we didn’t, so I got after it with a hair dryer, which, I found out quickly, only cooked the spoiled milk. I eased my arms in, whimpering again, and held my nose as I made my way to fresh air. Surely outside in the cool wind no one would notice.

The piazza had been set with round tables, white linens, and silver candelabras holding electric candles, all around a fire pit in the middle. I could hear orchestra music. Tea lights looked suspended in the air along the perimeters. It was so nippy out the waitresses were wearing fleece-lined gold capes over their bikinis. Five hundred heads turned when I stepped through the white iron gates. I caught Bradley Cole’s eye with a subtle wink as Mr. Sanders approached, smiling, holding his arm out for me to hook my hand through, until he caught a whiff of me. I painted on a smile for the cameras, clicking away, while Mr. Sanders turned his head and choked half to death. I know he wanted to ask what the hideousness was, but he didn’t want to get any closer to me than he already was. I may have been better off going with the spoiled milk perfume, because the combination of spoiled milk and Sleep Serenity was not good.

Not. Good.

“Let me get you a drink, Bia.” And here, Mr. Sanders put some distance between himself and the fur. Which is to say me. But not before he said, “Take that coat off, Davis. Just take it off.”

The only waiter in the sea of waitresses on the piazza, wearing a gold six-pack, a bow tie, and gold cowboy boots, approached me with a tray of champagne, his whole gold body concaving in a gag. “Oh, my God, Davis.”

“Shut up!” My blonde head whipped around. I smiled at everyone.

“Take it off!” He lost the tray of champagne to the nearest flat surface, while I climbed out of the coat for him to take somewhere, anywhere, I didn’t care where. My body temperature immediately dropped a good thirty degrees, the cameras went wild. For all I wasn’t wearing, I may as well have been standing there in electric blue Post-it notes. I tried to paint on my Bianca snooty smile, but my teeth were chattering too hard.

Bradley Cole, drink in hand, made his way to the edge of my audience, and he didn’t look happy at seeing so much of me in such a large crowd. I sent him a this-is-totally-out-of-my-control look. He sent me a put-the-coat-back-on look. I shot back with a you-don’t-understand-the-coat-is-worse-than-the-dress look.

Mr. Sanders reappeared with a drink for me, a cold drink, which would surely send me into hypothermia. I guzzled it.

“Let’s get you to the fireplace.”

I backed up to it to the point of roasting my rear end, which brought about the evening’s final problem. A spark rose, floated through the air, and landed on the two cans of Honey Kiss Gold Colour Couture on my head. It was a flash fire. Poof.

*     *     *

The Sanders’ recently remodeled living quarters on the thirtieth floor went black. Fantasy cut the Wi-Fi and cable, and Bianca’s phone was disabled. Mr. Sanders’s jet was fueled up to take Bianca somewhere far, far away, and keep her there, until the chances of her seeing herself soaring through the air with her hair on fire were minimized. It was all very Olivia Pope—organized, detailed, and not everyone would make it out of this mess alive.

I cried while Fantasy cut the wet blue dress off me in the deserted Bellissimo spa locker room. Much of the length of my hair was still there, but I could only feel fuzz and rawness around my face. Fantasy helped me into warm dry workout clothes she’d snagged from the Bellissimo spa shop on our way in, the whole time saying soothing things.

“It’ll be okay, Davis. Stop howling, Davis.” She was still in her gold waitress bikini with the cape tied around her waist like a gold skirt, and she was biting the tag off a Bellissimo sweatshirt.

She tilted my chin left and right. “It’s not that bad!” But when I turned to look in the mirror, she spun me like a top and landed a purple Bellissimo ball cap on my head. “No, no! Not now! Everyone’s waiting on us.” We convened in Mr. Sanders’s office—me, Fantasy, Baylor, No Hair, Mr. Sanders, and Bradley Cole. Also in attendance, a dermatologist, a medic, and Hair and Makeup Angela had been called back in. Liquor was poured and passed.

It had been a very drinky day.

Bradley Cole held my hand while everyone else stared. Angela let what was left of my hair fall out of the hat, I heard lots of sharp inhales, a few muffled gasps, and Baylor snorting.

The dermatologist dabbed something soothing, butter, maybe, along my hairline and down my neck, then presented his findings. “You have spots of first-degree burns,” he said. “Think bad sunburn. They’ll heal quickly. The product,” he shook the empty can of Honey Kiss Blonde Angela had produced, “contains cyclopentasiloxane and dimethiconol, which, as you can see, are highly flammable.”

I couldn’t see a thing. Everyone else was circled around me staring at my head, and I had yet to look in a mirror.

“How tender is your head, Davis?” Angela asked. “Can I go ahead and work on it, or would you like to wait?”

“Now’s good,” Bradley Cole said. “Please.”