Double Strike (A Davis Way Crime Caper Book 3) (11 page)

I began hyperventilating.

The only sounds in the room for the next twenty minutes were the snip of Angela’s scissors and my scorched vanity hitting the floor. Finally, she held up a mirror. I had a sleek layered bob that tapered to my chin.

“It looks good, Davis. You look real nice. Very sophisticated.”

“Thank you, Jeremy.”

I will never call him No Hair again. Ever.

*     *     *

I sat up most of the night watching Bradley sleep. If I had been able to lie down maybe I could have slept, but the pillow hurt my head. A crescent moon kept me company. Every once in a while I reached over and touched Bradley’s hair—all on his head, none singed, no burned bald spots.

I couldn’t keep my brain on one channel. Probably because it had been lit on fire. My angst went from personal (still married to Eddie the Ass) to public (humiliation) to panic, about (my hair) the Strike It Rich kickoff. We’d dropped the ball somewhere. I didn’t know if our biggest problem was internal or external, but I knew where it started: people dump.

As a rule, we don’t hire a new catering manager without shining a flashlight into the corners of his closets and under his bed, then running a quick trace on the woman he lived with the whole time Bill Clinton was in office, just to see what popped. If he said he graduated from California Culinary School but I discovered he’d actually dropped out of California Welding School, no way he’s coming in our door. Or it could be the old girlfriend was our wedding coordinator, who had fifteen years of running restraining orders against the guy applying for the catering job, and the only reason he was applying for the job was so he could stalk her harder. If so, there’s no way we’d hire him.

This is how we do it.

If Jeremy and I don’t vet these people, we don’t know who’s in our house. We can’t protect our house if we don’t know who’s in it. The Strike It Rich team, forty strong, had blasted in as a unit. We barely took a peek. I ran quickie background checks and criminal records, and the only thing that popped was a computer guy, one of the five on the Information Technology team, with a DUI in 1994. A sprinkling of ugly divorces and two bankruptcies, and that was it. Elspeth Raiffe had passed only because nothing on the surface was out of place. I cleared her myself, along with Cassidy Banking, because I was vetting forty people in a day instead of one in a week. We felt like we were covered because they came with casino credibility via the Montecito. If they were good enough for the Montecito, surely they were good enough for us. Had Cassidy Banking Williams been the only file at my elbow, I still might have dug deep enough to know she was from Alabama. Or that Elspeth Raiffe was an add-on, not part of the core Montecito unit, which would have raised a flag. As it was, we needed it done. I did it, then I dumped it all on No Hair’s—sorry, Jeremy’s—desk, and he gave everyone the green light too.

I should have checked their dental records, Starbucks reward card, and frequent flyer miles like I always do. Every single one of them.

The Strike employees were only half of what we’d missed. By giving them a pass, we’d given the Strike players a pass too. They snuck in through Facebook.

I had nothing against social media. I hadn’t jumped on the bandwagon and I probably never would. It’s my law enforcement background: The risks associated with putting that much personal information out there greatly outweighed the cute puppy pictures. Even if I wanted to or had the time, who would I be cyber friends with? Meredith? Smerle T. Webb?

Major players have always come to the Bellissimo through the front door, and for the most part, single file, not in a posse. Most have gambling histories, if not local, then certainly in Atlantic City or Vegas, two clicks and a player-account hack away.

Anyone bringing a sizeable amount of money into the Bellissimo is always introduced by a casino host, who knows their shoe size before they put a foot in the door. Marketing knows who they are, because ninety-percent of the time they’re the ones who sniffed them out and tossed them to a casino host. We have their background, banking, and brokerage information. We know the make and model of their European cars. We know where their yacht is docked. We know Lydia is the wife and Carmen is the girlfriend.

We knew none of this about the Strike players. The Strike team knew more about the Strike players than their own mothers knew, but it wasn’t shared information, and now we had felons as honored guests. Strike had snuck them in the cyber backdoor, electronically, and so many at once, it didn’t occur to Mr. Sanders, to… Jeremy, or to me to see if they might be pot farmers.

We’d dropped the ball. We’d dropped several balls.

“Davis?” He was a dream. “You need to sleep.”

“I can’t,” I whispered.

“Your hair hurts?”

I would have laughed at that, but I didn’t want to interrupt the moonlight. “Do you still love me, Bradley?”

“Of course I do. I’d love you if you were bald.” He propped up on an elbow. “Do you still love me, Davis?”

“I will love you forever, Bradley.”

He took my hand in his. My left hand. The one that never wore the engagement ring he gave me.

I cried a little bit, then I slept.

*     *     *

@LuckyStrikePlayers #StrikeItRich winners! It’s here! Casino doors open at 3. #BringItOn #Where’sMyChair?

*     *     *

Jeremy and I started Strike It Rich Opening Day behind the closed door of the 3B with a gallon of coffee and four computers up and running. I’d gotten in late, because I had two hours of sleep and because I had to do my hair three times to get it decent. Shopping list: huge round brush with the softest bristles on Earth. #Ouch

On a brighter note, when the smoke cleared, I still had eyebrows and eyelashes.

I had twenty aerial shots up of the Jennings Tree Farm properties in DeKalb County, Alabama, a locale that would haunt my nights for years to come.

“Where’d you get these?” Dire government warning in a halo font marched across every shot. “Did you hack all this?”

“No,” I said. “My dad.”

“It looks like a maze.” Jeremy studied. “A labyrinth of Christmas trees.”

“But they’re not all Christmas trees. See the slight color differentiation when you get past the first three rows?” I traced a line across the screen with my finger.

“Yep.”

“Marijuana puts out some crazy chloroform that makes it an odd color, easy to spot from above, which is how so many growers get caught,” I said. “The DEA does constant satellite surveillance, and picks up on the
color
of weed. But in this case, the color of the pot is barely distinguishable from the color of the blue spruce trees. They’re growing Christmas trees to camouflage the pot.” I directed his attention to the next screen. “But watch this.” I started a timeline slide show.

When it ended, Jeremy—I’m not sure how long I can keep up this Jeremy business—started it again. After he viewed it for the third time, he said, “They’re never harvesting the trees, but harvesting the pot twice a year.”

“Right,” I said. “The Christmas trees are there for show. And this airplane hangar?”

No Hair squinted. (See? I don’t know if I can do it.)

“They have one little plane. This hangar would hold fifty little planes. It isn’t an airplane hangar at all,” I said. “It’s a marijuana processing plant.”

“Since when does it take a satellite dish that big to process pot?”

I took a closer look at the NASA-worthy parabolic dish on the west corner of the hangar, the same color as the roof, barely distinguishable. Maybe the hangar was more than a pot plant.

No Hair—sorry, I just can’t do it—leaned back in his chair. “So why all the gunfire, and who did the shooting? Do we think this farm is protected by a Mexican cartel?”

“I don’t know who did the shooting,” I said, “not yet, anyway. But they weren’t shooting to kill.”

“How do you know?” No Hair asked.

(Not one hair on my head had even thought about growing back yet and I’d already given up on calling No Hair by his name. I am so weak.)

“Because Baylor and I are still alive.”

He sat very still for several minutes.

“Why are these people here, Davis?”

“I don’t know. But I have a feeling we’re about to find out.”

“I have the same feeling.”

The air was thick with regret, apprehension, and hair product.

“Two questions.” He stood.

“Shoot.” I began shutting down computers.

“Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Very little,” I said.

“Are you divorced?”

“Not at all.”

TWELVE

Bea Crawford, my ex-ex-mother-in-law, was born somewhere on the back end of eleven children to Homer and Ida May Arnold of Minter, Alabama, seventeen miles north of Pine Apple. She met my ex-ex-father-in-law, Melvin, when they were both fifteen at Camp Salvation, a church camp off Butter Springs Road where Wilcox County residents could ship their kids for a month of every summer. On the last Friday of that month, they burned a straw man in effigy to demonstrate the wages of sin. The next day, they’d baptize the terrorized campers in a bacteria-riddled pond, participation 100%, then send them home to their parents walking the straight and narrow. The story goes that once they had the bonfire up and running, and they’d already scared the living daylights out of the campers circled around the fire, a counselor would tear out of the woods brandishing a straw man dressed in Liberty overalls screaming, “Repent! Repent! Repent!” Then toss him on the fire. The preacher, using a stream of butane as a directional aid for emphasis, condensed the finer points of the month’s devotional messages into broken sentences, squirting gas at the blazing straw sinner with each inspirational word. “This. Is. What. Will. Happen. If. You. Backtalk. Your. Mama.” And more. “This. Is. What. Will. Happen. If. You. Dance.” And on.

Water activities in the toxic-waste-runoff lake a half-day’s hike away were used to weed out unrepentant sinners, beginning with water moccasin snake-bite first-aid pep talks. “If a snake tries to bite the sin out of one of your friends, God commands you to help that friend out of the water and get them to the snake bite station.” A teenage counselor with a supply of dishrag-strip tourniquets and rusty straight razors manned the snake station.

Camp Salvation touted horseback riding as another one of their major amenities, and the stories told about the old swayback one-eyed horse can still be heard around Pine Apple today. Apparently, the horse was hung like a… horse, afflicted with oddly placed tumors the size of soccer balls, and every year, some poor kid’s summer camp vacation was cut short because the horse, Glory, either bit them in the face or kicked the holy shit out of them. They say the ghost of Glory still stampedes through the backwoods of Wilcox County and if you sin in some major way, he’ll appear in your bedroom, bite you in the face, then stomp you to death with one of his tumor feet. (True story: The Legend of Glory was actually used as a defense in a spousal-abuse trial when I was in high school. A truck driver named Red Eggleston claimed he didn’t beat his wife, Sue-Sue, half near to death, no, it was old Glory who did it. Locked jury, mistrial, and three years later when Glory showed up and beat Sue-Sue to within an inch of her life again, she got after the old ghost horse with her shotgun, but accidentally shot and killed Red. Buckshot everywhere. No criminal charges were brought against her.)

It was the Health Department who shut down Camp Salvation a few years before I was born, and not because of the annual head lice infestation. Someone did the math and traced the spike in babies born to unwed teen mothers during the month of March back to Camp Salvation.  I guess by their teenage years, Camp Salvation either scared the pants off the teenagers, or they’d been hit over the head with the Bible enough.

And so began the epic romance of Mel and Bea Crawford, the result of a meet-cute at Camp Salvation. They married, then several years later, the Crawfords abducted a baby from somewhere, and he grew up to be the man I married twice, and, apparently, I’m still married to.

Bea is made up of fat rolls, roll after roll, like a tower of blow-up donuts on feet, and she’s flushed all the time, so make them blow-up strawberry donuts, and Mel would be a very tall thin man, if he didn’t suffer from textbook early-onset osteoporosis. They owned Pine Apple’s only three-square’s restaurant, Mel’s Diner, a regional health hazard, and Mel had spent so many years bent over the fryer (casing the fryer basket for the errant rodent, I’m sure), he could no longer stand up anywhere near straight. Their son, however, looked like Alabama George Clooney, which is why it’s so hard to believe he’s their
real
son.

I did not marry Eddie Crawford the Ass for his looks. Or his brains, which wasn’t even an option, given that he didn’t have any. The first time I married him was by total accident, and the second time was one of those “If you were on a desert island, would you take one man and ten sandwiches or ten men and one sandwich?” I was on Pine Apple Island where there were exactly zero sandwiches and even less men. There was Eddie, and I married him, a mistake I’ve paid for in every way imaginable. To this very day.

His mother, a lifelong friend of my mother’s, didn’t like me a bit as a child, liked me considerably less as a teenager, and has made hating me as an adult a part of her daily routine, because her son and I had gone through a mud-slinging, name-calling, hair-pulling, eye-gouging divorce, and she, naturally, sided with him. Eddie the Rotten Rotten Rotten Human and I managed to split the whole county in half. #TeamDavis. #TeamEddie.

It is what it is, it’s years behind me, and Bea and I had recently found some common ground. I actually enlisted her aid on a Bellissimo sting last year that had changed her life for the better. And by changed her life for the better, I mean she stopped coloring her hair fireball orange, had a luxury casino vacation, and came out of it with a little cash.

Since then, I’d run into Bea once or twice when I’d been in town, and she’d actually said hello instead of sticking her fat donut foot out and tripping me on the sidewalk.

I picked up the phone to call Bea on Saturday morning, knowing the war was about to begin again. I felt sure it was Bea who had signed for the notification that the divorce needed a little more work, and I felt even surer it was Bea who ignored the notification that the divorce needed a little more work. To what end? I have no idea. I don’t think it’s that she wants me for a daughter-in-law. Again.

“It’s your dime.”

A. There are no pay phones left in the world.

B. If there were, they’d be four dollars.

“Bea, it’s Davis.”

#AwkwardSilence. A few months ago, Fourth of July weekend to be exact, a skinny teenage boy named Cuff, who I dragged into a stairwell by the ear, sat down, then had a long talk with after he used the money his gambling-addicted parents had given him to keep quiet while they were in the casino to clean out the inventory of bubble bath from the sundries shop in the lobby, then dumped it all in the Bellissimo pool, the whole Bellissimo Olympic-plus-sized pool, the same pool I’d put my hair out in last night, told me every time there’s an awkward silence, it means a squirrel blew up, as in spontaneously exploded. #GoodToKnow #UselessTriva #PoolClosedForThreeDays

“Whatcha need, Davis?”

I sensed no hostility in her voice. In fact, I heard an edge of interest. As if I might be calling to invite her back to the Bellissimo to help me solve another caper. (#NotAChance)

“How are things, Bea?”

Another awkward silence. (Poor squirrel.)

“What’s this about, Davis?”

Boom, boom, boom. Squirrel Apocalypse.

“I’d rather talk to you about this in person, Bea, but I can’t get to Pine Apple right now. I’m covered up with work.”

“I heard you burned your hair off your head and you’re bald as an eagle.”

“What? Who told you that?” My hair fire was twelve hours old.

“I ran into your sister.”

“Where’d she say she heard it?”

“Is this what you called me about, Davis?”

(SQUIRREL DOWN! SQUIRREL DOWN!)

“No, Bea.” I rubbed the tender space between my eyebrows with three fingers, which is what I do when I’m gearing up to tell a big fat one. “I called you about my retirement.”

“You barely work. You prance around that casino and drink red wine. What exactly is it you’re retiring from? And are you moving back
here
?”

“I drink white wine, Bea.”

“Stop beating around the bush.”

“We switched insurance carriers at the Bellissimo,” I announced.

“That was stupid,” she said. “This Obamacaring business is the end of insurance. You just don’t need it anymore. I canceled our Blue Cross. We’re waiting on our Obamacaring to come through.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Thank you.”

I plowed right in, fearing for the squirrel population. “We didn’t cancel the insurance at the Bellissimo, Bea, but I’ve run into a little problem with the new insurance company you might be able to help me with.”

She said, “I doubt it,” but I could feel Bea’s interest pique, as in, if I need her help there’d be something in it for her.

“Well, if you can help me, Bea, I won’t have to bother Eddie with it.”

“With
what
?”

“It’s like this.” I rose from the chair I’d been sitting in and began pacing as best I could around my desk and Fantasy’s, the computers, whiteboards, and the huge lump in my throat. “I named my parents as beneficiaries of my life insurance policy, should something ever happen to me, and you’re not going to believe this”—I didn’t even believe it myself—“the insurance company rejected it.”

“Do you have the lime disease, Davis? Is that what you’ve called to tell me? Because you should be talking to Kizzy. I can’t help you. I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

It’s not like I didn’t know what I was in for when I dialed her number, which she still told people was W-I-9, 3229.

“That’s not it,” I said. “I’m healthy.” With a hairline recently receded by a half-inch all around. “It was rejected because”—#Help—“you’re going to think this is funny, Bea. I think it’s hilarious.” (Like root canals are hilarious.) “Alabama thinks Eddie and I are still married. Can you even believe that?” I batted down the sudden urge to (throw up) run screaming into the Gulf of Mexico and keep going. #Backstroke “It’s a simple paperwork error, Bea, but I need you to make a phone call to the Camden courthouse and help me clear it up.”

No. Squirrels. Left.

“Well, well, well,” she said. “Davis Way needs my help. Again.”

“Bea.” I could hear the edge of a plea in my voice. “You know Eddie and I aren’t married.”

“No, Davis, I don’t know anything of the kind. In fact,” she said, “it sounds to me like you are.”

#SquirrelSpeciesExtinct

“Bea?”

I looked at my phone.

It said call ended.

*     *     *

@LuckyStrikePlayers Welcome! See you in T-Minus 3 Hours!

*     *     *

The camera Hashtag Elspie gave me was a Canon PowerShot Elph 330 HS and I’d finally made friends with it. It was so small I could tuck it away in a pocket or my bra, and it had a 10X zoom lens. The best? Built-in Wi-Fi, so only one step between taking pictures and the various cyberspace destinations Hashtag wants them distributed to. I’d had a nice break from all things social media, but now that the games were going live, Hashtag Elspie expected the Strike Klout score to take a leap. Whatever in the hell that was. Baylor had given me the best advice: “Since you don’t know what you’re doing, Davis, take a million pictures. You’ll accidentally get good ones.” Which, incidentally, was an extension of his general life philosophy, especially with women—hit on everything and you’ll accidentally score some wins. And it was good advice.

I walked away from each and every Bellissimo assignment with another little life lesson—never pass just the salt when someone asks, pass both the salt
and
pepper, think of the corners of fitted sheets as pockets to slide your hands into, then clap your hands together and, wa-la, it’s folded neatly, and never use flour for sauces or gravies, use cornstarch, then you’ll never have lumps—so if nothing else, my takeaway from the Strike assignment would be this: Don’t record your life in photographs taken on your phone when there are itty bitty cameras that are easy to use and take much better pictures.

My objective was to show the world what they were missing at the Strike It Rich Sweepstakes, but not live gaming or players. I couldn’t release photographs of anything on the play screens or identifiable player faces. I snapped lots of
future
Gaming chairs in motion, food, drink, the glittering icicle light fixture, and more of Baylor’s boots. The Strike staff had all signed waivers; I could shoot them at will. (Ha ha.)

Angela Hair and Makeup Woman painted my hair Chocolate Covered Bing Cherry with a whisper-soft paint brush, then spiked it up a little. I wore the cutest Milly suit I’ve ever seen. #GoingHomeWithMe The jacket had multi-directional gray and vanilla stripes, bracelet sleeves, and striped flap pockets. The bottoms were striped shorts. Not linen, but looked like linen. Ivory silk shell, ivory heels. #Fab #TweetedNeckDownSelfie #LetTheGamesBegin

*     *     *

If the thought of leaving the casino business had ever passed through my brain, which I doubt it had, because I stayed too busy to live anywhere but in the moment, or the past as it were—it never would again. If this is the future of gaming, I’m in.

When Strike gaming went live, it took all of two minutes for me to see why fifteen thousand people had Instagramed so hard to earn a spot.
future
Gaming was social integrated wagering, starring the player, from the comfort of individual entertainment centers. Starting with the eight-million pixel sleek screens, displaying theatre quality high-definition graphics and 3-D imagery in front of them, to the Dolby surround sound enveloping them, and the heated, massaging, chocolate chip subwoofer they were sitting on, these people were making casino history. It was high-tech entertainment at a level I’d never dreamed of, and I only had one question: Who wrote this programming?

The players only looked isolated in the individual gaming stations. They were actually competing against one another for several levels of community jackpots and they were in competition with each other to earn overall points. At any time, they could pull up live feed of any other gaming station to see, talk directly to, or combine efforts with any other Strike player. From the same left screen, they ordered truffle this or caviar that. Of these players, the ten with the lowest overall points twelve hours from now would be eliminated. To earn points, they won rounds, beating the game, and in doing so, unlocked bigger and better and bonus games, and with each advance, they also unlocked richer media content.

It was hard to imagine, given where it started, where it might end.

I could see how the players could stay in the chairs for twelve-hour shifts, especially since the chair let them pause the game, shut out the world, and nap. And I could definitely see where the ten who were eliminated in this round would be back in the chairs for the next round, on their own dime. (“Their! Own! Dime!”)

I was glued to a black granite wall taking it all in through the LCD screen of the camera, when I zoomed out to see Hashtag Elspie had stopped cartwheeling around the room ponytail flying. I peeked over the camera to see her holding up the granite wall directly opposite me, staring me down. I hopped to and began snapping
future
Gaming images for the insatiable Twittersphere, and, before too long, evidence. Because a good accountant can take a stack of W-2Gs, win-loss statements, and IRS 5754s, and turn you into a professional gambler. But there isn’t an accountant out there who can keep you out of federal prison if you’re caught spending your marijuana money.

*     *     *

I sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand on his shoulder. He woke slowly, stretched, and reached for me in the moonlight. “Come to bed, Davis.” He looked at the clock on the nightstand. “It’s two in the morning. Come to bed.”

“Bradley,” I whispered. “We have two players laundering drug money through the Strike casino.”

You could have heard a mosquito blink.

He threw back the covers and sat up. “I’ll make coffee.”

At a quarter till ten, the Strike casino rocking, the crowd well past its legal limit, Red Jennings quietly made his way to the cashier’s cage, where he signed a slip of paper Cassidy Banking had waiting, then she passed him two banded stacks of cash. He slipped them inside his jacket and continued playing. Forty-five minutes later, he did it again. When his pockets were stuffed, it was Missy’s turn. She shouldered her big bag, made her way to Cassidy Banking’s window, where she signed for and received inch-thick stacks of hundred-dollar bills. By my count, the Jennings withdrew $140,000 from their player account on the first night of Strike. Cash. Bellissimo cash. Drawn off a player account they wired money into before the tournament began. Drug money. The Jennings were laundering drug money through the Strike casino.

There are three ways to bankroll your gambling habit. The first, and most common, is what’s in your wallet, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. The second is with a casino marker, in which the player establishes credit then borrows from the casino with ten days to pay it back, or else. The third way, and what the Jennings had done, is to establish a player account in which the player opens a house account and deposits their own money with which to gamble. But not their own
drug
money. And the Jennings weren’t gambling with it, either. They were simply running it through Strike banking to receive the Cash Transaction Reports, so when April 15
th
rolled around, they wouldn’t have to tell the IRS they manufactured and distributed marijuana, they could tell them they were professional gamblers. And they have the documentation to back it up. On our letterhead.

We had money launderers in our casino.

Unheard of.

Money laundering in a casino is a thing of the past, long gone, the way of Vito Corleone and pom-pom socks.

First of all, no one can follow cash—there’s too much of it, and it’s unnecessary, because current federal law requires casinos, financial institutions, and all other business establishments to report suspicious monetary activity. They call it Title 31 of the United States Department of the Treasury’s Bank Secrecy Act, under which all casinos must report shady financial activity, such as suspicious deposits from unknown sources, and the step skipped for the Jennings, thanks to Cassidy Banking. We advise gamblers, in writing, that to structure their transactions in such a way so as to circumvent Title 31 requirements is also illegal, and if they try it, they’ll be prosecuted. So it’s impossible to launder money in today’s casinos, unless, of course, the gatekeeper processing your large suspicious activity were (your immediate family) in on it. Then you’d be gold.

If the Bellissimo was caught knowingly receiving dirty money and not reporting it, the federal agencies on our doorstep fighting to prosecute us would include FinCEN, the Federal Crimes Enforcement Network of the United States Department of the Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, and of course, the Gaming Commission. Being drug money, we’d be welcoming the Drug Enforcement Agency, too, at which point Homeland Security would come sniffing around, and before this was over, it would include every sworn officer of the law and courts in the states of Mississippi and Alabama. The Bellissimo would be the subject of federal investigations, and that’d be
after
we were shut down. Next, federal indictments would be passed out like parking tickets, accompanied with jail time. Lots and lots of jail time. Starting with my boss, Richard Sanders.

With his casino experience being so much broader than mine, encompassing every aspect of operating a casino, Bradley understood all too well the implications and ramifications of money laundering at the Bellissimo. “Davis. Listen to me.” The more we discovered about the Jennings—three o’clock in the morning and we were still huddled over my laptop—the madder he got. “Turn this over to the feds before you end up in jail or dead.” He ticked off a list: “You’ve been shot at, lit on fire, and now you’re risking federal indictments if you sit on this information.”

“My hair catching fire didn’t have anything to do with this.”

“Oh, right,” he surrendered. “Carry on.”

I gave him a minute, which is what I’ve learned to do on the rare occasions when the top of his head’s about to blow off. It took several minutes for him to come back to me. “Do you know how long it’s been going on?”

“One day.”

“Do you know how high up it goes?”

“Not yet.”

“It could be the whole Vegas team, Davis.”

“I know.”

“It could be the new casino manager, the credit manager, marketing,” he said. “The whole Strike team might be in on it.”

“I know, Bradley. I know.”

We finally made our way to bed. When I’d almost slowed my brain down enough to sleep, he reached for me. “Has it occurred to you, Davis, that if and when we ever do manage to get married, and if and when we even think about having a family, you can’t do this job?”