Double Strike (A Davis Way Crime Caper Book 3) (21 page)

Richard Sanders went to his office without a word. No Hair briefed him every thirty minutes or as needed. Mr. Sanders didn’t respond or even acknowledge he was listening. No Hair said, “When I stop talking, he hangs up.”

We convened in the hall outside of the four interview rooms that were doubling as holding cells. Fantasy turned the corner and joined us.

“Missy Jennings isn’t giving me anything,” I said. “Nothing.”

“Her husband isn’t giving it up, either. All he wants is his lawyer and the DEA,” No Hair said. “He’s spouting off names of dealers in three states, and throwing Wesley Shaefer under the bus. It’s the other side of the coin with Wesley Shaefer, trying to cut a deal and offering up Red Jennings. I’ve got someone from the DOJ coming in to talk to both of them. I’d gladly authorize an exchange of immunity for Bianca, but I don’t think either of them has a clue as to where Levi is.”

“What about Cassidy Banking?” Fantasy asked.

“She’s wailing,” I said. “On and on about how they made her do it. She’s innocent. I can hardly make out a word she’s saying. Honestly,” I surrendered, “she’s going to pass out any minute from screaming.”

Fantasy pushed up the sleeves of the hoodie she was wearing. “Let me take a crack at her.”

No Hair and I watched from the central observation room as Fantasy stepped in. A new audience had Cassidy cranking it up. No Hair reached for the dial on the volume box to squelch the screaming. Fantasy circled her screaming prey, holding her chin, tapping her cheek, and with each of Fantasy’s steps, Cassidy screamed louder. In one motion, Fantasy jerked Cassidy up by a handful of black sweater and gold chains. The chair went skidding across the floor and hit the wall. Cassidy screamed loud enough to wake the dead in three counties. Fantasy, holding the shrieking woman up by her clothes, raised her right hand, then slapped the holy shit out of Cassidy Banking. And the girl finally shut up.

#Don’tMessWithFormerPrisonGuards

No Hair glanced at his buzzing phone. The calls were coming in too quickly for him to take any but the most urgent, but this one he took. “It’s Baylor.” He listened, hung up, then said, “The game’s down. All of Strike gaming has gone black.”

It was ten till six. The raid on Lickskillet had been set for seven. If all went perfectly, it should still take at least an hour to get to Walter, at which point, I fully expected the game to go down. The game would go down when Walter came up. It was happening too early. If they had changed the timeline to sidestep the weather, surely they’d have notified us. What had gone wrong in Lickskillet?

Fantasy came in the door shaking the stinging hand she’d used to smack the living daylights out of Cassidy. “Did you hear her? Levi Newman took off after the computer guy in Alabama. Walter. And he has Bianca with him.”

TWENTY-TWO

The four Bellissimo jets were no help at all. The only airport that could accommodate even the smallest of the planes was forty miles from mountainous northeast Alabama. That meant thirty minutes of getting in the air, forty-four minutes of flight, landing in a storm, then having to arrange ground transportation in a monsoon rain. No Hair challenged the pilots, and they suggested he call the governor of Alabama and ask him to shut down Interstate 59; they could possibly put a plane down on it, which would be the only way to get anywhere near Fort Payne. The Bellissimo also owned two EC35 Eurocopters insured for four-dot-two million each, and they weren’t any help either. The pilots wouldn’t do it. The pilots couldn’t do it. They’d never get clearance with the FAA because of the weather. The only option was to fly in Class G uncontrolled airspace under VFR, Visual Flight Rules. “Through storms? At night? Are you familiar with the term kamikaze mission?”

It took Felton Parham from the Department of Justice to authorize the task force schedule change. Move in. Now. He made the call at six fifteen, as Mr. Sanders, No Hair, and a Biloxi police officer boarded the best travel option we had: the Bellissimo Eclipse 550, a small fast jet used to shuffle high rollers short distances. No Hair was right back at the Bellissimo. Because of how the plane was equipped, it wouldn’t hold him. The six-seater had been reoutfitted for two passengers plus pilot and steward, with luxurious amenities, and No Hair, the size of a refrigerator, tipped its luxurious scale. The choices were to rip out the kitchenette and restroom, leave them in a pile on the tarmac, or take off without No Hair. There was no guarantee they’d be able to land anywhere near Lickskillet; there was no guarantee Bianca was even there; Mr. Sanders would not sit at his desk for one more minute.

No Hair looked at me. “Sometimes I’m just too tall.”

That’s it, No Hair. You’re too tall.

Fantasy, No Hair, and I set up camp in the observation room in the middle of the interview rooms below the casino. We watched Missy Jennings, head on the table, periodically pounding it—why, oh, why—with her fists. Several times she rose and beat on the glass separating us. Calling us ugly, ugly names. Sailor language. Bad stuff. We turned off the volume.

The observation room door was wide open to the hallway, and someone had rolled in a cart of coffee and whiskey. I fixed myself an Arnold Palmer—half and half. Baylor called at six-thirty-two to say the natives were getting restless. He’d had to snag two bartenders from the main casino floor to help with the drunks, and one of the bartenders had walked off, refusing to work under the gold glass spikes above the bar. (I don’t blame him.) Baylor called Chops and had them bring platters of lobster and thinly sliced tenderloin, then he called Seven, one of the three Bellissimo nightclubs, and brought in a small band to play Luther Vandross music and hopefully put all the players to sleep (didn’t work), and he had no other tricks up his sleeve. We were on the verge of a Strike Casino riot. I marched across the hall and keyed myself into the drunk tank. The five IT guys and two waitresses looked up. I asked, “Who is Doug Engelbart?”

A man in his mid-forties who had a wiry goatee and wore frameless eyeglasses was stretched out on one of the metal benches. He said, “Doug Engelbart invented the first computer mouse in nineteen sixty-four.”

“Get up,” I said. “You’re coming with me.”

We climbed the service steps to the hallway behind the east wall of the casino and made our way to Strike. I turned to him. “What’s your name?”

“Bobby Tobey.”

“Do you have any way of communicating with Walter?”

He opened his mouth to lie. He snapped it closed. “No.”

“Can you get the game up?”

“Probably, but I’ll have no control over it. Whoever wins wins,” he said, “and whoever loses loses.”

Which is all we ever wanted from the Strike Casino.

I pushed through the small hallway. After you, Bobby Tobey. I pointed to the computer room. “Do it.”

I pulled my phone out of my pocket.

@StrikePlayers Game back up in 30. Sorry. #OurBad #PatiencePAYS #LastNight #Enjoy!

*     *     *

Alabama Governor Harris Lee declared DeKalb County to be in a state of emergency at six-thirty. Emergency Management, the Red Cross, and a Weather Channel guy in waders up to his neck were on the way. Mandatory evacuations were being executed for residents of all populated places in and around Fort Payne; the water was pouring off the mountains and flooding the city.

A rockslide had closed both lanes of Greenhill Boulevard. Shelters were slapped together at the high school gymnasium and in Fort Payne First Lutheran’s sanctuary. No power anywhere except generator. The storm had churned its way upstate and was parked over Fort Payne, with dry air wrapping around it, creating intense levels of atmospheric instability. In other words, the storm wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and for the next hour, lightning strikes could be as many as 158 an hour per square kilometer.

“If nothing else,” Governor Lee said, “get in your bathtub and pull a mattress over your head.”

The storm knocked out our cell phone communication with the task force ten minutes after they entered the Jennings Tree Farm compound. Mr. Sanders and crew radioed they were approaching the Northeast Alabama Regional Airport in Gadsden, forty-eight miles from Lickskillet, and they’d keep us posted. It was fifty-fifty, they might have to push back, they’d let us know.

We sat around a steel table, the three of us, barely breathing, for the next thirty two minutes. No Hair took the call that Mr. Sanders had landed safely in Gadsden, but was going nowhere because I-59 was closed. He had his buddy, Vernon Rider Wilson, the governor of Mississippi, on the phone with Governor Lee of Alabama, requesting state troopers. He’d let us know. Fantasy quietly checked in with her family, I checked in with mine. Everything was A-OK and soggy in Pine Apple, and Bradley had made his way to Strike, where he was helping tend bar. “On the other side,” he said, not the side of the bar where Elspeth lost her life. He liked making martinis, there was a bit of art to it, and he’d be right here should we need him for anything. There wasn’t much Bradley couldn’t do in a casino.

The task force contacted us by satellite radio at seven-twenty-two.

“We have everyone in custody. We moved them out in Humvees. We’re down the mountain and we’re not going back up for a second sweep until daylight or the weather breaks.”

Walter Shaefer’s fifty square feet of prison under a ten-by-ten steel grate in the southeast corner of the airplane hangar/marijuana processing plant, we were told, was open and empty.

“You have to go back in,” I said to the radio. “You have to go back.”

“We have secured the area, Miss Way. We have two dozen people in custody. My orders are to clear out. I couldn’t go back in if I wanted to, and truthfully, only an idiot would drive up that mountain in this storm.”

After five minutes of total silence, I looked at No Hair and Fantasy. “If you all will excuse me, I have to call an idiot.”

I walked slowly to the end of the hallway, where I fell against the wall, then slid down to the linoleum floor. I dug my phone from my pocket, looked to heaven above for help, and dialed.

He answered. “This better be good.”

“Where is my grandmother?”

“What’s it to you?”

“She’s my grandmother, Eddie. Answer the question.”

He huffed. “They had a group seminar on the art of love,” he said. “She’s in the lodge with no clothes on doing body painting with twenty other old fat people. It’s the nastiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“How did you see it, you pervert?”

“I’m their pizza delivery boy, thank you. I got a large meat lover’s for myself and can’t even eat it after what I saw. I’m thinking about washing my eyes out with battery acid. It’s raining like a mother here, Davis. Do you need something, or are you just calling to bitch at me because your grandmother’s such a Koo-Koo bird?”

“You listen up, Eddie, and you listen good.”

“I don’t know who you think you’re talking to—”

“Shut up.” I knew exactly who I was talking to. “I’m sending you an address. Plug it in the GPS of that thing you’re driving, and you haul ass.”

“I’m not driving this tank in this weather. You’re like a dumb blonde with red hair, Davis. You’re a dumb red.”

“That it’s a tank is the very reason you can drive in this weather.”

“What?”

“Eddie, I swear to you, I will hunt your sorry ass down and kill you with my bare hands if you don’t do this right here, right now, this minute.”

My bare hands were shaking.

“Why should I? Why should I do
anything
for you?”

“It’s not for me,” I said. “It’s for Bianca.”

I heard the engine turn over. “Where am I going?”

“You’re driving eight miles to Fort Payne. Take a right behind the McDonald’s, then seven miles up a mountain to a tree farm. You’re looking for a paved road on the left about halfway up. It will lead you to the big house where owners live. Don’t miss it. If you get to the top you’ve gone too far and you probably won’t be able to turn around. Find the house. Bianca’s in it somewhere.”

He hung up.

I cried.

Twenty-eight minutes later, my cell phone, in the middle of the table, buzzed. A picture of a rattlesnake, teeth bared, flashed on the screen. I answered it in speaker mode. Eddie raised his voice over the background noise of pelting rain on the aluminum siding of the RV.

“Davis? I didn’t have any trouble finding the house,” he yelled. “I’m looking at it. It’s burning down to the ground. Lightning must have got it. What do you want me to do?”

We looked at each other over the rattlesnake.

“Stay there. I’ll call you back.”

*     *     *

I called in the fire to the emergency responders in Fort Payne. They said too bad and don’t worry, a fire won’t last ten minutes in this rain. I poured myself another Arnold Palmer.

“We can’t ask him to go into a burning house, Davis.” No Hair had taken off his tie, a goose sitting on a golden egg.

“Sure we can.” I paced. I stopped. I paced. I stopped so fast I almost tripped over myself. “Who talked to the waiter who was tied up in Levi Newman’s room?”

“I did,” Fantasy said, “on the fly, earlier. Why?”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he’d own this place next week.”

He might be right.

“Why?” No Hair asked.

“Because.” I took a deep breath. “Levi Newman had to know he could fit into the waiter’s uniform. And if—”

No Hair stopped listening, took a corner, and started dialing.

Five minutes later, a Biloxi police officer walked the waiter to us; they’d been taking his statement in the banquet hall on the conference level above the casino—temporary staging for Bellissimo Mayhem Round Two—first the lightning strike and evacuation, now this.

I offered the waiter coffee or whiskey. He couldn’t decide, so I made him an Arnold Palmer, then sat down across from him.

“What’s your name?”

“Scott Rosenburg.”

“When did you meet Levi Newman?”

His right eye twitched.

#Gotcha

“How much did he pay you for the uniform and a few hours in the tub?”

The whole right side of his face twitched.

“Come on, Scott. Whatever he paid you, we’ll pay you twice that.”

No Hair, against a wall, cleared his throat.

“I want immunization.”

“Do you mean immunity?”

“Right.” Left eye joined in on the twitching.

“Of course, Scott. We’re on the same team. Just one question before you go. We need to cover all our bases. Who else have you seen in his room? Anyone, anytime.”

(Please don’t say Bianca. Please don’t say Bianca. Please don’t say Bianca.)

“A blonde woman,” he said.

Oh, holy shit.

“What about that immunization?”

“You’re going to walk out of here free as a bird, Scott, with as much money as we can stuff in your pockets.”

“A tall woman with long blonde hair who wears a lot of jewelry.”

“Thank you, Scott.” I tipped my chair back on two legs. “Officer?”

The patrolman stuck his head in.

“Book him,” I said. “Conspiracy, withholding evidence, aiding and abetting.”

Scott had himself a little fit. “That’s enticement! You tricked me!”

“I can entice you all I want, Scott. I’m not an officer of the law, and you’re a dumbass.”

No Hair and I looked at Fantasy. She said, “Let’s go have another little chat with the tall blonde who wears a lot of jewelry.”

We entered the room and closed the door. Cassidy took one look at Fantasy and started whimpering.

“Cassidy?” Fantasy perched herself on the table next to her. “You sure have pretty teeth.”

Cassidy, pale and trembling, shaky-whispered, “Thank you.”

“Braces in middle school?”

Cassidy shook yes.

“Laser whitening,” Fantasy tipped Cassidy’s chin up with one finger and examined her, “oh, every six months?”

The pretty white teeth chattered.

Fantasy leaned in. “Do you want to keep them in your head?”

Cassidy froze.

“Tell us what Levi Newman knows about your sister’s property and where he would go to hide.”

Ten minutes later I stuck my head in the door and was warmly welcomed (not) by Missy Jennings. “The school needs Quinn’s birthdate, Missy.”

The question caught Missy off guard, and she auto-answered. “December twenty-sixth. Ninety six.”

I ducked out. Two seconds later, Missy realized the school knew Quinn’s birthdate. Aunt Cassidy might not have it on the tip of her tongue, but the school had it handy.

#MajorScreaming

The Jennings had a safe room. Of course they did, the Yankees were coming. It was behind the back wall of the detached four-car garage. I dialed Eddie’s number.

The storm had broken; the house was gone.

There’s a safe room, Eddie.

Cool. Next up on his to-do list: build a safe room under his mobile home.

Great, Eddie. Shut up, Eddie.

He was going in. To save Bianca.