Double Strike (A Davis Way Crime Caper Book 3) (16 page)

“There is no us to discuss.”

Chairs. The chairs were somehow connected to the pot farm and the pot farm was connected to the Strike casino. How? The chocolate-chip-cookie chairs in the Strike Casino? Could Have A Seat be the supplier?

“Don’t you move a muscle, Eddie.”

“I’ll be right here for as long as you want me, Davis.”

Eddie Crawford delivers all his lines as if his life were one big porn-movie audition. He says these bedroom things to everyone: me, my mother, his first cousins, the teenager in the speaker at Sonic, and graveside, to the widow.

I ran back to the computers, logged into the Bellissimo system, dug through, and found the bill of lading from the Strike furniture delivery. The Wonder Chairs were manufactured and shipped directly from Imminent Furniture, Inc. in Indianapolis. Strike One.

“I’m very busy, Eddie.” I took my seat again, peeked at the time, scratched at my snow hat. “You have five minutes.”

Eddie was wearing tight stonewashed jeans (he’s such a girl), black square-toed boots, a black silk shirt only half buttoned (at three o’clock in the afternoon), and his hair was graying at his temples (ha ha).

“I’m here to do you a favor, Davis, so you can maybe not bitch at me before I change my mind.”

“Alright, Eddie.” My eyes were beginning to sting and my scalp was on fire. “Go ahead. Do me a favor.”

Wait. Gulf Container Cargo had popped up too. Have A Seat was shipping chairs overseas. Maybe office chairs? The only office chairs in Strike were in the computer room. With the IT crew. Who controlled the gaming.

“Stay right there.” You ass.

I ran back to the computers. The Strike IT office chairs, six of them, had been requisitioned internally. They were Tempur-Pedic TP8000 Ergonomic Mesh Mid-Back Task Chairs, and they’d come straight from Staples on Denny Street in Pascagoula. Strike Two.

“Okay, Eddie.” I plopped. “What’s this favor?”

“I’m going to sue you, Davis.” He said it like
I’m going to have the mahi-mahi
.

“How is that you doing me a favor?”

“My favor is telling you up front.”

“You’re too late. I’ve already heard.”

He was irritated at being scooped. I knew this because he was grunting.

“What is it, exactly, you’re suing me for?”

“Abandoning me.” His humor returned. He cat smiled. His eyebrows danced. “It’s a law. Call Smerle T. and ask him. You ran off and deserted your husband.”

“Eddie.” You are so sad. “You are absolutely out of your mind. I didn’t abandon you, you idiot. We divorced fair and square. You can’t take me back to court and divorce me again for a different reason. What happened, and obviously that brilliant legal mind you have working for you didn’t bother to mention it, was a simple paperwork error. That has since”—now it was my turn to cat smile—“been taken care of.”

“Oh, bull
shit
.” He bolted upright, his boots hit the floor, and a stowaway Xbox controller popped out of a sofa cushion.

My head whipped around so fast the tassels from the pompom hat hit me in the nose. I ran back to the computers, yelling a string of things at Eddie on the way—talk to your mother, it’s done, we’re
very
divorced, go play in traffic.

Had Have A Seat ever shipped anything to Brewster-Exeter Academy for Boys? My shoulders drooped with the answer before my fingers could start the search. No. Anything the Jennings sent to the school would have been transported on their private plane. I had no way of knowing what was on that airplane. Strike Three.

“If you get up and run out of here one more time while I’m talking to you,” Eddie poked a finger, “I’m leaving.”

(Promise?)

The door beeped with a swipe and No Hair filled the space. The entire space. He narrowed his eyes at me. Or, rather, at my pompom hat. He turned to Eddie and threw a thumb in the air. “You’re out.”

Eddie Crawford slinked to the door, then looked back over his shoulder. “I’m gonna be there when you marry your sissy lawyer boyfriend, Davis. When they say, ‘Does anyone think these two shouldn’t get married?’ That’ll be me,” he thumped his stupid chest with an open palm, “standing up and telling them you’re already married. Illegally. To me. And one more thing.” He waited until the room grew still. “If you think you’re going to be any better at being married to him than you were at being married to me, you’re dead wrong. Do that bastard a favor and don’t marry him. You’re not fit to be married, Davis.”

And there it was.

SEVENTEEN

Alabama, the Heart of Dixie, for the most part, is nervous. As if at any moment the Civil War might start up again, and the state, itching for a do-over, stays at the ready. There are great things about Alabama—my family, Nat King Cole was from Alabama, and the infamous words, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” were spoken at the Battle of Mobile in 1864. A proud moment in Alabama history. It’s no secret that the state flag was designed to complement the Confederate flag, and has never been changed. Alabamians won’t hear of it. It can be found flying high and proud, flagpole to flagpole beside its inspiration, in each and every one of the sixty-seven counties. So you see the prevailing mindset: the South shall rise again.

Alabama is also a state full of extremists. We have religious extremists, environmental extremists, and political extremists. And we have more than our share of residents who are adamantly opposed to many, many issues: paternity tests, nuclear weapons, copyright laws, speed limits, Google, drones, property lines, socialism, fuel prices, Al Gore, and Chick-fil-A being closed on Sunday. Take all this protest and factor in the races Alabama’s not winning. If not dead last, we’re sure gunning for it, in obesity, unemployment, overall health, poverty, teen pregnancy, high-school dropout rate, and minimum wage. The result? Overweight, unemployed, sick, uneducated, flat-broke citizens who are mad about
everything
.  Put five million of these people in one place, and there might be a little trouble. Things looked, for the most part, ordinary in Alabama—schools, churches, Target Super Stores. But beneath the whisper-thin veneer of civilized society lurks a fat, broke, opinionated beast, who doesn’t see the glass half full, and expects, maybe even eagerly anticipates, the worst. More than half of Alabama residents have registered firearms. The other half, and I know this for a fact, have unregistered firearms, mostly of the sawed-off variety. Alabama is locked and loaded. “It’s on!” says Alabama. About everything.

None of this applies to football. Alabama football fans are an extremist group all their own, the most vocal and violent of all the extremist groups in the state, and that’s a whole different story.

So when I found Walter Shaefer, only to lose Walter Shaefer, then I found him again, then I lost him for good, being from Alabama, knowing how Alabamians operate, I had a pretty good idea where to start looking.

*     *     *

Wednesday afternoon turned blur.

Eddie the Stupid Crawford was heavily escorted off the property. He was eighty-sixed two years ago when it was discovered he’d been (a) aiding and abetting a slot-machine heist and (b) sleeping with Bianca Sanders.

I know. It makes me seasick too.

She’d since repented, reformed, and recommitted. He was then, and is now, beyond help. Eddie hadn’t even tried to move on. I’m not sure he’ll ever get over having punched so high above his pay grade. He lived for the day Bianca remembered him, said his name, or even acknowledged his existence. I believe his Bianca fixation was a large part of the reason I couldn’t get him off my back. To see me is to dream of her. To show up and bother me is to be in the same zip code as her. To sneak into the Bellissimo and screw up my life is to possibly run into her.

I can’t say I wasn’t a little shaken by his parting sentiment, which had nothing to do with Bianca and everything to do with me, and I secretly planned to run it through my psyche later and check it for viability. I did, after Stupid’s speech, stop breathing, and had to be led to the sofa and served two fingers of Maker’s Mark. Could it be I didn’t have it in me to be the wife Bradley Cole deserved, and that sorry dog Eddie went and said it out loud? If I had any anxiety about being married to Bradley—and I’m not saying I do—but if I did, it was nothing but perfectly normal pre-wedding jitters. In spite of even Bradley suggesting otherwise. Unless not having his mother’s blessing was really doing a number on me. I couldn’t do Bea Crawford again. I barely lived through it the first time. Not to mention the second go-around. No way I’d sign up for that kind of grief a third time. It could be I’m just too spooky, and somewhere deep down, I thought these roadblocks—lightning striking the Bellissimo, Little Sanders showing up, Elspeth dying, me still being married to Stupid—were the universe trying to tell me something: wait. Or what Stupid said.

Fantasy stood behind me and patted my shoulder. Pat pat, there there. No Hair sat down with me. He reached out and took one of my hands in his big paw and gave it a shake. “Do you want me to kill him, Davis? Because I will. Say the word.” I opened my mouth to say the word, but before I could take him up on his kind and generous offer he added, “Please get whatever that is off your head or I will have to kill you before I kill him.”

I hit the showers.

*     *     *

Have A Seat and Walter Shaefer dropped off the map five years ago, which was, probably not a coincidence, when Cassidy Banking was promoted at the Montecito in Las Vegas. And within months of when the Jennings bought an airplane, built a runway and a hangar for it, and shipped their son off to boarding school. Have A Seat was still in business, but for whatever reasons, they’d gone dark. Walter, I don’t know about. Yet.

It’s hard for me to believe, in this day and age, Have A Seat did everything manually. The only recorded documentation of any manner of business transaction I could find wasn’t generated by Have A Seat. The only traces were produced on the other ends—Fed Ex, Moffett International Transport, Onweave Incorporated, Soon Fatt Buffet, Southern Textiles—by tangent businesses associated with Have A Seat, either shipping materials in, receiving product from, or delivering Szechuan Shrimp to. But there wasn’t corresponding documentation from Have A Seat that they’d ordered anything. Or received anything. Or shipped anything. There wasn’t a trace of anything Have A Seat in the marketplace, in the media, or in their own backyard. Google Earth couldn’t even find them. The IRS knew nothing of them.

The only way to be as anonymous as they are in today’s free market is to meticulously clean up after yourself. Wipe your cyber slate clean each and every day with each and every transaction. Which I’d bet Walter Shaefer was perfectly capable of—9
th
grade State Science Fair winner for crypto-system software development (sold to Alabama Technical Enterprises), perfect SAT score at age fifteen, Fort Payne High School valedictorian (duh) at age sixteen, honors B.S.-M.S. degree in computer sciences from Rutgers at age twenty-two—which meant he was perfectly capable of manipulating the protocol software running Strike too. Walter Shaefer probably
wrote
the Strike software. At a red light. Or during a television commercial. Or between salad and entrée.

Walter Shaefer made me look like a toddler with a VTech.

And I couldn’t find him.

I couldn’t find him, I couldn’t find anything on Have A Seat, and I had no idea what they were manufacturing—boat seats, church pews, bus-stop benches—but one thing I felt certain of: Whatever it was going out the back door of Have A Seat was stuffed plumb full of pot. And both Have A Seat and Jennings Tree Farms were turning it all into legitimate income at Strike Casino. As a team.

These people had grown up together, they’d gone into business together, and they’d formed a Northeast Alabama drug cartel together. A drug cartel cleaning their houses in our house. Walter Shaefer, computer geek extraordinaire, was probably the brains behind it all. And he was lost in space.

Walter Shaefer was the key. He had the answers. But, where was he?

#FindWalter

I loaded the most recent photograph of him I had into the Bellissimo’s facial-recognition software. It was five years old, and it was a newspaper article announcing the retirement of Archie M. Shaefer, of Lickskillet, Alabama, and the passing of the Have A Seat torch to his sons Walter and Wesley. It was the last solid documentation of Walter’s existence.

It was six o’clock. I needed to scoot, so I didn’t take the time to crop Wesley the brother out before I ran the photograph through the age-progression app of our facial-recognition software. I zipped it to Fantasy, Miss Gold Shoes Bikini, who was passing out drinks.

Here’s what this Walter guy might look like today. Have we seen him? (The one on the left.)

She texted right back.
No. But make the one on the right bald.

Fantasy, I don’t have time for this.

Do it.

I did it.

That’s our bartender. I’m standing right in front of him.

Which meant Fantasy and Wesley Shaefer were standing directly under the gold icicle glass sculpture. The same one Elspeth took her last breath under. And bald, mean, creepy Wesley Shaefer was the same man who’d busted in on me and Elspeth in the liquor closet. Chances were he knew where his brother was.

*     *     *

I stood in the middle of our dressing room. Of the three rooms that make up our 3B offices, this was my favorite. A safe haven. A place to breathe. A great place to think.

One wall is solid Beauty Station, split into hers and hers vanities complete with Hollywood spotlights. The countertop is an International Cosmetic Convention, and we have cute upholstered cube-shaped stools scooted under. There are matching upholstered benches scattered around we use as catchalls. A second wall holds clothes, hanging for miles, until you reach the far right, where it’s tip-to-top drawers. The tip drawers are mine. It would take an elevator for me to get to the top. We have Bellissimo uniforms in both my and Fantasy’s sizes. In addition to the uniforms, we have street clothes, for when our jobs required us to be casino patrons and gamble (so fun), and the hanging rod has six feet of air, where my Celebrity Double clothes are supposed to be. Bianca had lost her clothes in the fire, requisitioned mine, and hadn’t returned them. Indian giver. Opposite the clothes is a wall installed by a custom closet outfit—shelves (tons of shoes), cubbies (tons of handbags), and drawers (tons of sunglasses, jewelry, accessories, and automatic weaponry), and sprinkled throughout the shelves, the odd wig. Left over from my early, itchy days at the Bellissimo. Before the highly flammable Colour Couture was born.

No Hair never comes in here because he has Bra Phobia.

We’d recently allowed Baylor one inch of hanging space for his Bellissimo suits. Only. He uses the coat closet for his other uniform getups. And we didn’t let him change clothes in the dressing room. (“That’s what the hall is for, Baylor. You and your janitor jumpsuit get out there.”) He’s not allowed to use the ladies room in our downstairs offices either. Last winter, he was stuck in a crawl space behind a wall in a guest room for four hours gathering evidence against counterfeiters changing ten-dollar chips to thousand-dollar chips. They did it by applying pressure-sensitive vinyl overlays, then cooking them in the grownup equivalent of an Easy Bake Oven. The results were astoundingly realistic. It was supposed to be a quick in and out, but the counterfeiters wouldn’t leave their room, so Baylor was stuck. When he finally escaped the vent, crying permanent paralysis, he decided he was going to take a shower in our bathroom. We put an immediate stop to that bad habit before it could start. (“Baylor. This building has two thousand shower stalls in it. Go find one.”) He whined about that too. He’d whined the whole day. He wasn’t in that crawl space an hour before he was so hungry he threatened to pass out. (Drama, drama.) It was Super Bowl Sunday, which meant, of course, that it was Puppy Bowl Sunday on Animal Planet, and Fantasy and I were
busy
. She was keeping one sofa warm and I was stretched out on the other keeping it warm. Baylor would not stop texting.

We paused Puppy Bowl, dressed in housekeeping uniforms, broke into the guest room a floor above the counterfeit room (thank goodness the guests weren’t there), pried the heat and air vent off the wall, cut a small hole in the heat and air duct, then dropped two snack-size boxes of Sunkist raisins on him. After all that, he was still bitching.

I texted him.
Baylor, what did you want us to do? Drop Taco Bell on your head? The poker chip guys would SMELL it. Eat your raisins and shut up
. He came huffing into the offices a few hours later and put one foot down and the other was headed for our shower. We set him straight.

This is a room where I have a little control.

I called my father.

“Punkin.”

“Daddy.”

“Are you okay?”

“I am, Daddy. Are you?”

“I’m good.”

“Can you get a hold of a power-usage grid of the Lickskillet property?”

No doubt Daddy was tapping his right temple. His thinking move. “What am I looking for?”

“I already know the hangar is pulling all kinds of power,” I said. “See if anything else on the property is.”

“Okay.”

“And I need you to go back over the aerial shots of the Lickskillet property, Daddy.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Anything we didn’t see the first time.”

“Let’s say I don’t find anything,” he said. “What would my next step be?”

“Thermal imaging.”

“That might be hard to come by, Sweetie.”

I bit my lip. I didn’t want to go back to Lickskillet.