Double Strike (A Davis Way Crime Caper Book 3) (14 page)

“I’m ready to deal. Deal or no deal. Let’s make a deal. Deal me in.”

“Bea.”

Strike Casino was blowing up, every
future
Gaming station occupied; I was watching from a safe corner. I’d been wearing black suede boots for eighteen hours. I was half asleep; Elspeth was dead. Fantasy had been bringing me coffee since midnight, and before she sat it down on the table in front of me, she took a slug of it. Then stood there waiting on her tip. For drinking my coffee.

“Have you been drinking, Bea?” I switched ears. “Can’t we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Hey,” my ex-ex-mother-in-law said. “I’m not the one in a pickle. That’d be
you
, Davis. And I thought you might want fair warning.”

I’m up. “Fair warning? Fair warning about what?”

“Eddie might have accidently found out what was going on.”

“What? Bea? Accidentally?”

Now I was wide awake. I was in the quietest corner Strike offered, but I still had trouble hearing her over the gaming. I switched ears again. “It’s the simplest thing in the world, Bea. Call the courthouse, verify the paperwork, and the whole thing will be over. And you
told
Eddie?”

“I did not tell Eddie,” she said, “and you can stop with your smart mouth right now or I’ll hang up. It was Smerle T. who told him.”

Next up on my to-do list, take Smerle T. Webb down.

“You can’t expect to steal somebody’s car and there not be… be…”

In a million years, Bea Crawford wouldn’t come up with the word, so I handed it to her. “Repercussions.”

“Damn straight, Davis. You play, you pay. Smerle T. told Eddie what was going on, then talked him into filing for a divorce, and I’m being
nice
to you. Calling and telling you up front.”

“Who told Smerle T., Bea?”

We observed a moment of silence as an innocent squirrel detonated.

“Well,” Bea said, “I can’t reveal my sources.”

“You mean you can’t incriminate yourself.”

“Don’t start talking shit to me, Davis.”

Never. “When did all this happen?”

“Just a while ago. I missed Conan.” She pronounced it as two names: Co Nan. “I’m wondering if you might want me to step in for you. And then maybe you’ll do me a little favor.”

Here it comes. She started the fire, now she’s volunteering to put it out for a price. “What, Bea?”

“I need a little help with Melvin.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Other than he has Bombay gin for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and Eddie the Ass Crawford for a son.

“The bank’s gonna take the diner from us. You breathe a word of this to your family and I’ll wring your neck. You hear me, Davis? I need you to float me a loan so we can keep the diner and for payback I’ll get Eddie off your back and I’ll call the courthouse in Camden.”

My temples throbbed.

“I’m offering to sell you part of the diner under the tables. This is a good deal for you, Davis. You get your divorce and you get to secretly own part of Mel’s Diner.”

The flat screens around the room running Strike commercials on a long loop lit up with a win video: Missy Jennings hit a $70,000 jackpot and advanced to the next level.

#SurpriseSurprise

“Sliding me a little is going to be a whole lot cheaper than Eddie taking you to the cleaners in another divorce, Davis. And you just ask yourself this,” she said, “is your lawyer still going to want you after you and Eddie go at it again like junkyard dogs in court?”

A very good question. One I reluctantly pondered after I told Bea I’d see her in hell before I’d give her a penny. (No, I didn’t.) (I told her I’d call her back after I’d had some sleep, then against all that is good and right in the world, I told her to have a number ready for me.) (She asked why I wanted a number when it was money that she needed.) (I hung up.)

I love Bradley Cole. He loves me. We’d been through so much in our three years—too much—and we both believed one day we’d live a life that didn’t involve holding our breaths until we worked through the latest fiasco, courtesy of me. We wanted a family. We wanted to grow old together. These facts played on a loop in my brain when I was in the shower or at a red light.

However.

There were times when it hit me like a freight train—now was one of them—when I knew it could fall apart in a heartbeat. Of course it could. Arnold and Maria. Brad and Jen. Scarlett and Rhett. I couldn’t stay in the giddy place about my relationship one hundred percent of the time. (Who could?) He said the right things, he made the right moves, and the engagement ring I wore at home and on my off days was perfection. We laughed, we cried. We knew how to connect on a level that far surpassed anything I’d even known existed. But how much of our relationship could be attributed to me having a different color of hair several days a week? (It’s there. I just don’t think about it.) And me being in the thick of all things Richard Sanders, Bellissimo, I-can-get-front-row-Maroon 5-tickets? How much of how Bradley loves me is about the me with an exciting job that keeps me busy ninety hours a week? He never complained. What man would? My obligations meant he could work late, sleep late, be alone, play golf, have the whole bed/pizza/remote, be
this
close to single, and never hear a peep out of me. The biggest question of all: isn’t it somewhat suspicious Bradley Cole has the stamina to go through it and through it and through it with me and my ex-ex-husband?

The dress up routine? Would end. Along with my round-the-clock schedule. If all goes as planned, and in a year or two (tick tock tick tock) I will give up my job, and there’s a chance in letting it go, I’ll be giving up my relationship as I know it. I’ll be waiting at the door for him forty pounds heavier wearing yoga pants and stringy hair, with a teething baby on my hip demanding to know where he’s been. Will he still love me? Will he love me like he does today? Let’s say yes. Let’s say he’ll still love me the same in spite of the yoga pants. Maybe he loves me even more. (!) Invariably, though, without a doubt, there’s no way around it,
this
will happen: my ex-ex-husband will pop up and bring yet another nightmare into our lives, and when everything is different—stay-at-home-mommy-yoga-pants-Davis—will Bradley still be willing to deal with my ex-ex-husband?

I’m going to have to kill Eddie Crawford.

It’s the only way to protect what I have with Bradley.

The Jennings, one at a time, on their way to the bar or from the lounges, cashed another combined $120,000 from their Strike account while I was busy channeling my mother—the sky is falling.

Two in the morning. One more hour of Strike. One more hour to pick a killer out of this crowd. The doors burst wide open and a killer waltzed in. Bianca Casimiro Sanders, backlit from the big casino, stood in the open doorway looking, for all practical purposes, like Lady Macbeth Miranda Priestly Cinderella’s Stepmother, the blonde in
Fatal Attraction
. She’d found her way home from Paris, she’d found her ruined fur, and she’d found me. She did her runway walk and dropped the totally trashed $38,000 white mink fur with ermine tips at my boots, then told me I’d better have a wig on, because if I’d cut my hair without her permission, I could find myself another job.

FIFTEEN

Before Brianna Strother caught a federal flight to Florida, the last trip she’d take with Elspeth, where she’d join her wife’s family in Cocoa Beach and say goodbye, she gathered everything they had on the Jennings and left it on her dining room table for us. She was having no trouble making the big decisions, but the smaller ones were knocking her down. “I don’t know where Elspeth’s keys are! She puts them everywhere! Anywhere! They could be in the
freezer
for all I know!” There was a sharp edge of hysteria that wasn’t there three minutes ago when we were talking about Brianna’s single-parent options. “I don’t understand why she can’t just put them in her
pocket
or her
purse
!” I told her we’d work it out. Fantasy was working the front door lock. I was standing guard. “We should have brought a dog.”

Fantasy stopped with the tension wrench. “Why?”

“So I could look like I’m walking a dog.”

“You look,” she stood and popped the door open, “like a nut job already, Davis. A dog would just make matters worse. And if I failed to mention it, you smell just horrific.”

She’d mentioned it. She made me hang my head out the window on the ride over. Hair and Makeup Angela had somehow gotten her hands on a gallon jug of bull goo (I did not ask) and I was treating myself to a Viagra mask before this Monday got into full swing. Angela taped a note to the bucket:
Get it on for an hour in the mornings, let it sink into your scalp, and even after you shampoo it out it will work its magic all day
. A good plan. I had a shower cap over the bull mask and a cashmere sweater tied around the shower cap (a last-minute grab because I tossed ten drawers in our closet and still couldn’t find a scarf), but bulls are stronger than plastic and cashmere. I couldn’t do the keep-it-cold business, because I just didn’t have time to fashion an ice hat for myself, and I didn’t want to freeze to death. After batting the sleeves of the sweater out of my face a hundred times, I gave up and tied them in a knot on top of my head. “This isn’t a fashion show, Fantasy.”

The dining room table held two little objects: a memory card and a flash drive. I snatched them, then we hightailed it back to the Bellissimo, me hanging out the window like a Labradoodle going bye-bye. I went straight for a shampoo in our 3B office.

“What in the world are you doing, Baylor?” I grabbed the remote control and muted the zombie apocalypse. He and Little Sanders, from deep in their gaming bean bag chairs, stared up at my head. I’d doubled the cashmere knot and had been using what was left of the sleeves to mop up everything dripping down my face. “What?”

I’d barely turned on my way to the shower when sudden insane murderous shrieks stopped me dead in my tracks and scared the holy bejesus out of me. Terrorizing zombie music almost knocked me down. I’d had enough. “
Ba
ylor!”

“Sorry.” He stared at my face, upon which it was raining bull juice. “I unlocked the next level.”

“Dude. You used a code.”

“A code? You cheated, Baylor? Can you not set a good example for Little Sanders for ten minutes?” I tipped my head back so it would drip in a different direction.

“I paid for the cheat code, thank you.”

I was breathing through my mouth. “You paid money to get a code to cheat your way to the next level? Why can’t you just
play
yourself to the next level, Baylor?”

“Dude. What is that smell?”

“Not to mention you’re getting ripped off,” I told him. “You’re buying those codes from Xbox, dumdum, who already has your money.”

I’d bet my bottom dollar Xbox programmers had written and were selling Xbox cheat codes.

OMG.

I ran.

*     *     *

@StrikePlayers Day 4 and 10 more #OUT #Don’tBeNext #CrackTheCode #StrikeItRich Congrats @DanceMamaMissy @Trip7s @Ace_High @TreeMan

*     *     *

I knocked on the back door of Mr. Sanders’s office at noon, stuck a foot in, then jumped ten feet into the air. I screamed and slammed the door closed. Levi Newman was in my chair! He’d looked right at me!

The door flew open and Mr. Sanders filled it. I’m pretty sure I screamed again. “Come on in, Davis,” he held an arm out, “and for goodness’ sake, calm down.”

I was formally introduced to Levi Newman. I watched the gears grind as he placed me several times in several different places. I wonder what all they’d told him. Sagittarius. Mint Chocolate Chip. 32 C+.

“I fired you at orientation, didn’t I?”

“Yes. You did.” All of a sudden, I didn’t like this guy. I didn’t like his patronizing tone. I didn’t like his fake tan. I didn’t like his job or the way he did it. I didn’t like that he looked like David Hasselhoff. I just didn’t like him.

Mr. Sanders and No Hair explained that they weren’t trying to blindside me. (Sure, they weren’t.) Levi Newman had come to them several hours ago, having discovered that Strike Casino surveillance camera feeds had been overridden and wiped clean for five hours early Sunday. In addition, he suspected he had smurfing, or something equally prohibited, going on within the banking division of Strike. (Smurf·ing, [noun] to break up large sums of money into smaller sums so as to stay off the bank’s/casino’s/IRS’s radar.) (So he was paying attention.)

I’d worked with Mr. Sanders and No Hair long enough to know that these two tidbits hadn’t been Levi Newman’s ticket into the Loyal Order of Bellissimo. It was only when he slapped down ten photographs of me in ten different hair colors/compromising positions, they had no choice but to induct him. “This woman is behind it all,” he’d said. “Is this woman your
wife
, Richard?
What
is going on here?
Where
is the social media girl?” One thing led to another. Most of it led to me. Soon I’d be wearing a gold engraved Bellissimo name tag like everyone else.

Davis Way

Pine Apple, Alabama

Super Secret Spy/Bianca Sanders Body Double

“Sit down, Davis,” Mr. Sanders said. “Bring Levi up to speed.”

I didn’t tell all. (I rarely do.) (Especially to fifty-year-old men who get in tanning beds.)

“So Cassidy is in on this?” Rather than angry, or panicked, the casino manager acted personally offended. “Cassidy has been with me for years. Someone is forcing her to do this. She knows exactly what will happen if she’s caught laundering money.”

“It happens, Mr. Hasselhoff.”

Uh-oh.

“Mr.
Newman
! Mr.
Newman
!” I rushed his name out ten more times. He finally let me stop by waving his pinkie ring. No Hair growled, and Mr. Sanders hid behind his wedding band. I wish I didn’t
think
nicknames, then I could stop saying them out loud and humiliating myself. Mr. Sanders came out from behind his hand and rolled it. Keep going, Davis, I’ll kill you later.

“The Jennings opened an in-house account and deposited an unusually large amount of money into it before the tournament started. Now they’re systematically withdrawing it.”

“Why?” Levi Hasselhoff asked.

“Because they report and pay taxes on casino transactions. They’re using the Strike casino to give themselves a legitimate source of income.”

“I take it their primary source of income isn’t legitimate,” Levi Newman said.

“You’re right.”

“I thought he was a farmer.”

No Hair and Mr. Sanders were watching it like Wimbledon.

“He is. He grows pot. Tons of it. He has twenty-five thousand marijuana plants hidden between rows of Christmas trees in the hills of northeast Alabama.”

One of Levi Newmanhoff’s eyebrows tried to move. (Levi Botoxhoff.) He seemed a little stunned, paling under his fake tan, twitching. “What will that net? What’s the street value?”

“At the end of the day, fifty million.”

“What else?” His posture and speech became a tad manic. “What other leads are you following? Who else from my team is in on this? What other evidence do you have?”

I waved a one-finger signal to No Hair to let me take this. If we were going to talk about Missy Jennings making it rain, well on her way to winning the tournament, I wanted him to bring it up. “That’s it, Mr. Newman.”

“What are we going to do?” Beads of sweat marched across the Botox.

“We’ll wait for the Strike competition to end,” I said, “then we’ll have them arrested.”

No way I was telling this man anything else.

We sat quietly in his wake. I was panting.

“Davis, he’s our casino manager.”

“I know, Mr. Sanders, but he wasn’t here because he’s the casino manager. He was here to find out how much we know.”

*     *     *

At the end of the day, it would cost me twelve thousand dollars to buy a divorce from Eddie the Ass Crawford by cutting a deal with my ex-ex-mother-in-law. A big court brawl with her son would be decidedly more expensive. Not that I was the least bit happy about the arrangement; it was the principle of the matter. No part of me wanted to give money to Bea Crawford. No part of me wanted to be a silent partner in Mel’s Diner. And no part of me wanted her to have a secret to hang over my head for the rest of my life.

However, all of me wanted to be divorced, and this looked to be the most expedient and least painful path. I didn’t have time to explore any other divorce avenue short of throwing myself at Eddie the Snake Snake Snake’s feet, and I didn’t have time for that. (Not that I would if I did.) If we didn’t find Elspeth Raiffe’s killer and hand he/she/it over to the feds, this whole place would shut down. So twelve thousand dollars to Bea Crawford it is.

“You won’t regret this, Davis.”

“I already do, Bea.”

“This’ll take some of the sting out,” she said. “From now on, you can eat at Mel’s free.”

My next call was to Bradley Cole, who I’d slept in the same bed with last night, but hadn’t had a conversation with other than a quick text message exchange since Sunday night. Bradley, whose only brush with dead bodies had been of the funeral-home-visitation variety, was still shaken up about Elspeth. Actually, he was shaken up about me.

“How,” he’d asked, “can you
do
that? I couldn’t even
look
at her, Davis, and there you were on
top
of her.”

It’s just this: When a life is violently cut short, then that life’s body falls in your lap, the gore of it all is replaced by a fervent desire for justice for the person who lived in the body. That’s in your lap. It’s disgusting. It’s heart-stopping. It’s the stuff of nightmares. But if everyone ran from dead bodies, there’d be no one to right the wrongs.

The thought of eating at Mel’s Diner made me sick. Processing a murder scene didn’t.

I can’t explain it.

“Bea’s agreed to do it.”

“How much?” Bradley asked.

“Peanuts.” Lie number one.

“The feds are taking over the Elspeth case today, right?”

“Right.” Lie number two.

“So you’ll be home at a decent hour? Tell me you’ll be home at a decent hour.”

“I’ll be home at a decent hour.” Lie number three.

*     *     *

Now that I was out of the closet with Levi Newman and didn’t have an immediate supervisor at Strike (may she rest in peace), I didn’t have it hanging over my head that the Strike casino was open, busy, and I needed to be there. I still Instagramed and Tumblded, but (a) I had a stash of great stuff on the camera, and (b) it was a little after the fact, with the competition nearing the halfway point, and (c) Fantasy texted me hourly as Missy Jennings won, and I let the ravenous cyber public know. (
These gold shoes SUCK and Dance Mama Dance just won another 125K
.) (#WinnerWinnerChickenDinner @DanceMamaMissy #She’sStrikingItRich!) It was two in the afternoon on Monday, and I needed some electronic time of my own. In my own office on my own mainframe talking to my own father.

First, we caught up. Pine Apple’s dodo bird excuse for a medical practitioner, Dr. Cliff Kizzy, was out fishing on Mountain Laurel Lake a week ago and hooked himself an ear. He panicked, I’m skipping the next part, and now he was convalescing at home after plastic surgery at Baptist Medical Center South in Montgomery. Filling in for him was Dr. Corey McKinney, MD, Family Medicine, on loan from Stabler Memorial in Greenville. It just so happened that my niece Riley woke up with an earache and a low-grade fever on Dr. McKinney’s first morning at Pine Apple-A-Day Health Care Center. Meredith marched into Kizzy’s office to tell him Riley was in the car, and would stay in the car, lest Kizzy lay a hand on her, and demand a prescription for bubble-gum flavored antibiotics. She left with the bubble-gum prescription and a date to give Dr. McKinney, SW/M, 36YO, NS, a personal tour of The Front Porch, which she owned and where she lived. The Front Porch is a restored three-story antebellum on Main Street, a block from the police station, and the house my father grew up in. Now it’s Meredith’s pride and joy and Pine Apple’s one and only tourist attraction. She sells vintage Flinstone lunchboxes, Titanic-era tea towels, old Nancy Drew books, and serves chocolate malteds at a retro soda-fountain bar.

“We kept Little Punkin’ last night while they went to dinner in Montgomery.”

“Oh, really.” I said it very soap opera. My sister hadn’t been on a date-date in a long-long time. That we knew of. She went on the occasional overnight antique-auction-buying junket with Garry, a restoration furniture dealer who lived in Camden, just up the road, and I always thought she came back from those trips with the Love Glow, but Meredith—deny, deny, deny—always claimed it was the Cocktail Flu. Not the Love Glow.

He was as boring as all get-out, so I wanted to believe her. Regardless of what you asked the guy, he gave one-word answers: “Firecracker.” “Mustard.” “Gillette.” I can’t imagine how that would work without clothes.

“How late was she out with the doctor, Daddy?”

“She’s still out, Sweet Pea. Riley spent the night with us and your mother took her to school this morning.”

Air silence while Daddy swallowed his adult daughter’s lifestyles and a squirrel blasted itself to that big nutground in the sky.

My mother, he told me, had been busy. Her Sunday School Class is in charge of the annual Pine Apple Resident Directory-Combo-Cookbook. It’s a wafer-thin production that never changed and a full-time job for Mother from Halloween till Christmas, as she desperately sought any hint of change in Pine Apple. Daddy said they had an interesting twist this year: The ladies were at a deadlock as to whether or not to include a gluten-free recipe section after the business directory page. I don’t actually know what gluten is. Which made me think of Elspeth, who put grass clippings, free-range eggs, and red bell peppers through a 500-horsepower blender, then sucked it from a straw and called it dinner.

Oh, ElspieBabie.

Daddy told me for the month he’d issued seven parking violations, one speeding ticket, and had four domestic disturbance calls, three at the same residence. “Now,” Daddy said, “about Lickskillet.”

I tucked my knees under the desk and poised my fingers over the keyboard to take notes.

“The ballistics reports came back this morning. The casings pulled from the car you were driving trace back to a crew out of Scottsboro, Alabama. Four brothers and a first cousin, all with long records of assault and various gun convictions, and all four have done time. They’re in the vigilante personal protection business. They come in and work for your farmer twice a year, for two or three-month stints during harvest doing perimeter protection, escort services, and it looks like a little shipping and handling. The Fort Payne police say they live in those woods with a terrorist-worthy arsenal.”

Cousin, escort, terrorists
. “Why don’t they go pick them up, Daddy?”

“Honey, even the feds won’t go near these guys. The local force went in a year ago and half them turned in their badges that day.”

Feds, badges, big chickens.
“Was anyone killed?”

“No one was even grazed,” he said. “They aborted the mission after the first shot was fired in the air.”

Grazed, air, aborted chickens
.

“And these boys don’t even have a history of shoot-to-kill,” Daddy said. “They’re just big thugs with big guns. Regardless, what Fort Payne had left of a force wouldn’t go back in, which is when the new chief called in the feds.”

Chief, chickens, thugs
. “What happened to the old chief?”

“Retired,” Daddy said. “No one knows where. Tucked and ran.”

“He probably tucked and ran with a boatload of money, Daddy. Or he wasn’t taking a payoff and he’s at the bottom of Weiss Lake.”

“One or the other,” Daddy said. “Regardless, Davis, stay out of there.”

Boatload, Weiss Lake, DO NOT ENTER
.

“Do you have any idea about their distribution, honey?” Daddy asked. “Can you find a money trail?”

“The money trail leads here,” I said. “What I have to do is find the points between Lickskillet and Bellissimo, and the feds have given us four days to do it.”

We talked about the fact that with a private plane, the Jennings could be shipping pot to Bora Bora. Or Toronto. Or Carmel-By-The-Sea. (Daddy pointed out they’d need a much larger plane to make runs that long without refueling several times, and suggested I look way closer to home.) We moved on to talk about Strike It Rich, everyone in my world, then the latest twist in my grandmother’s divorce. “The big problem is the dog,” my father said, “and guess where Cyril got it.”

I knew before Daddy finished saying the words. “That sorry Smerle T. gave him that dog, didn’t he?”

“You got it,” he said, “just to stir up trouble.”

“Smerle T. knows good and well Granny’s petrified of dogs. I swear, Daddy, something needs to be done about him.”

“I’ll tell you one thing that needs to be done about Smerle T., Davis,” my father said. “You need to replace his car.”

I said, “Pffffffft.” I typed,
Kill Smerle T. so I won’t have to buy him a car. Call Bianca. Just get it over with.

When there was no chitchat left in either of us, we talked about what we, and by we, I mean me, didn’t want to talk about—Elspeth. I don’t like hearing the your-job-is-too-unpredictable/dangerous/perilous edge in Daddy’s voice. It always leads to him hinting he could use me back in Pine Apple.

(I’m not going back in a blue uniform anywhere ever.)

(So uncomfortable.)

(Unflattering.)