Double Strike (A Davis Way Crime Caper Book 3) (5 page)

“Excuse me. How did you get in here?”

Except her.

“Is there something I can help you with?”

“I, uh…”

“You were in the orientation meeting,” she said, “and you were fired.” The woman behind the accusations was also behind the cashier’s cage, and she was one of the Strike managers introduced by Levi Newman. Cassidy Banking. “You need to leave. Right now. Or I’ll have to call security.”

“Wait.” I took a step in her direction. “I really need this job. I really really need it.”

She stepped from behind the counter. “Then you’ll really really need to speak to Mr. Newman.”

If I were still allowed to assign monikers, I’d call this one Vogue. As in on the cover of.  Cassidy Banking was tall and so thin I could see her bones. Her gold hair was slicked back and tucked somewhere, and her eyes were black. She matched the room. She wore very little, or very good, makeup, and all black clothes, including several feet of black boots that flared out above her knees. Her only accessories were a collection of bracelets halfway up her left arm.

“Let me help you out here,” she said. “I’ve worked with Mr. Newman for years. It’s no three strikes and you’re out. It’s
one
strike and you’re out. He won’t hire you back.”

Shoot.

“This is a big casino.” She gestured beyond the doors I’d snuck through, bracelets jangling. “I’m sure you can get a different job, just not in Strike. This,” she presented the immediate area, “is a machine. A lot of work, money, and effort have gone into it, and its success hinges on seven days of gaming. There’s no room for error.” She dusted her hands together. “Now, if you don’t mind.” She showed me the door, bracelets jingling.

I skedaddled. No need to stand around and let her get a really good look at me, because there was no doubt I’d be back in some form or fashion.

It was time for Granny’s nap, and when her naptime rolled around, it didn’t matter who, what, when, or where. I rubbed through three layers of sweaters. “Granny?” She woke with a bark and a start and tried to kill me with her suitcase. “Granny, it’s me!” I blocked the blows.

“I thought you were trying to rob me blind!” She adjusted. “Did I mess my hair up?”

I’m just over five feet tall and Granny’s an inch shorter than me, but her hair, colored, shampooed, and set (in stone) every single Thursday morning of her life for the past five decades, was cornflower blue and towered over both of us. For every millimeter she lost in stature as the years rolled by, she made up for in hairdo, which at this point, erupted from her head a full seven inches. She would soon have Marge Simpson’s hair, and right now it was a nightmare, leaning way starboard. “Your hair’s just fine, Granny.”

“I’m going to see that little casino later, honey. Right now I need to take a power nap.” She wobbled up. “Let’s bounce.” She shuffled in the direction of the main aisle that led to the casino entrance. I snatched her good luck charms off the Diamond Doozy slot machine and caught up with her, just in time to stop dead in my tracks. At a blackjack table to my right, sitting at third base, was my coworker, Baylor, hiding under a Braves baseball cap and sunglasses. Beside him, on second, under a Center for Disease Control hat and silver reflective Costa Del Mars, was none other than fifteen-year-old Thomas Sanders. Chewing on a toothpick. Tossing out hundred-dollar chips.

I snuck up between them. “Never split tens.” I grabbed Little Sanders by the ear and dragged his happy ass out.

FIVE

No Hair paced in a threatening way. He planted each foot slowly and deliberately, like he was rubbing out a scorpion with every step. He tapped his chin, occasionally studying us, and when he turned to pace the other way, I could see the bulge of the butt of his gun beneath the fabric of his jacket stretched across his wide back.

“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight.”

Baylor, Little Sanders, and I were lined up on one of the sofas in our basement office. The one at the receiving end of No Hair’s wrath.

“You.” (Baylor.) “Are supposed to be taking care of Thomas.”

We all heard Baylor swallow.

“Do you need to be reminded there are surveillance cameras in the casino? Five dedicated cameras trained directly on every single blackjack table? Recording everything?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, what? You need to be reminded?”

“No. I remember. I knew. I know. I didn’t know there were five cameras, but—”

I leaned past Little Sanders. “Baylor, shut up already. The whole thing is rhetorical. Sit there and take it like a man.”

No Hair turned on me. “I’ll get to you in a minute.”

I zipped my lips.

“And are you aware, Baylor,” No Hair was fists on hips, “that it is against the law for a minor to even
be
in the casino unless accompanied by security and passing through?”

“He was accompanied by security,” Baylor said. “I’m security.”

“You were.” No Hair let that sink in a minute before he moved over a spot. “And you, young man.”

“Dude.”

No Hair inhaled sharply.

“If the Gaming Commission, who happens to be crawling all over this place at the moment, caught you in the casino, they’d close the doors. The fines would be through the roof, which you might remember has a big hole in it right now, and not only would your father be extremely disappointed in you, he’d probably fire Baylor.” He cut his eyes back to Baylor. “Not that I’m not going to.”

Baylor assumed a fetal position.

(No, he didn’t.)

“And you.” (Me.) “Somehow managed to get fired before the job even started.”

I shrugged. “That guy’s a real hard ass, No Hair.”

“Yeah? So am I.”

“Baylor.” No Hair whipped around. “You get the waitress job for Strike it Rich.”

Baylor’s eyes popped. I snickered. Thomas said, “Dude.”

“Get to uniform distribution, get yourself fitted for a uniform, and I hope it’s the most ridiculous, humiliating getup you’ve never even dreamed of,” No Hair said. “Then go sit through orientation for the rest of the day.”

Baylor whimpered. I snickered. Thomas said, “Dude.”

“You.” (Dude.) “Get upstairs with your father. Grab a book or a laptop or just sit quietly in the corner.” Little Sanders’s left leg started going a mile a minute. “Spend an afternoon seeing what your father deals with all day every day and see if you can’t drum up a little respect for how much is at stake here.”

“And you.” It was my turn. “You’re the new Social Media assistant. You’ll be working with Elzbath. Get ready to do twitters.”

Oh, no. Hashtag, no. No, no, no.

“MOVE.”

*     *     *

“You’ve reached the Wilcox County Court’s clerk’s office. We’re sorry we’re unable to take your call—”

I hung up. It was Saturday, government offices closed. I’d have to hack into the court’s records. I’d known about my legal troubles, which is to say I’d been sick, for twenty hours now, and had not been able to make myself look into it. I was hoping it would just go away. (Ooops! Nevermind!)

Bradley Cole, bless his heart, who’d known for twenty-one hours, was entertaining the troops on this, what was supposed to have been, our wedding day. Other than Granny, who was upstairs in her Bellissimo guest room napping off her morning gambling, everyone was touring Beauvoir, the plantation home of Jefferson Davis. Which took all of three minutes. Bradley said he’d drag it out, then we’d all meet up for dinner. Tomorrow, thankfully, everyone would go home. And by everyone, I mean his mother.

Dinner with the fam at six-thirty would be dinner one for me. I (Bianca) had a dinner date with the Jennings, who’d given Little Sanders a ride on their little plane, at eight. They were next on my list. After the Wilcox County Records Department’s database.

I had 3B to myself. Our offices are made up of three large hard-to-get-to rooms below sea level. I was in the room I call control central amid an assortment of computers, monitors, and other power-hungry electronics, and where I generally did my best work. I’m a degreed criminologist (University of Alabama at Birmingham) and a degreed computer information scientist (same school). When a cyber-digging is necessary, this is where I hole up.

I’d received, without responding to, several texts and tweets. Hashtag Elspie was
#PUMPED!
at having a virtual assistant, and couldn’t wait to
#HOOK!
with me. Baylor texted instructions to organize his going-away party, because he wasn’t wearing “this shit” for a whole week. And Fantasy regaled me with quick pictures of Strike Orientation funnies I was missing after being fired. Most featured Hashtag Elspie, who had to be on crack, and several were of Levi Newman. “
Check it out, D. He wears a rug
.” Fantasy snapped the casino manager’s wavy chestnut mane slipping sideways. “
Do we know these people
?” She zipped over a picture of Cassidy Banking, who I’d had so much fun with when I ran into her at the Strike casino earlier today, huddled with two well-dressed backsides, one male, one female. I couldn’t see them. So I couldn’t tell her if we knew them or if we didn’t.

Seconds later, a second photo popped up of all three faces, Cassidy’s and the two strangers, all very serious and all studying something in the distance, and no, we didn’t know them. That I knew of. “
Something’s off here, D. These people aren’t part of Strike and she shouldn’t know them.
” The messages had come in right and left, so when my phone actually rang, I almost jumped out of my skin.

“Daddy!” I patted my chest. “You scared me.”

“We’re back at the hotel, Punkin’. Can you spare a few minutes for your dear old dad?”

“Of course I can. I’m in my office. I’ll meet you behind Shakes and bring you down.” Only a handful of people could actually waltz down here, and only a handful of people, myself excluded today, wanted to waltz down here. Super Secret Spies have Super Secret Inaccessible Offices. If you weren’t us, you had to be escorted by one of us.

“Ten minutes,” he said.

“Great.” I wasn’t in the mood to hack into Alabama’s Vital Records anyway, because I’d have to type my rat bastard ex-ex husband’s name when I did.

My phone beeped in another message as I was rising from my chair to go fetch Daddy. Fantasy zipped two more pictures to me. The first a tight shot, showing a hidden handoff behind a handshake—a thin slip of white paper. The second picture was wide, and all you could see was the handshake. It was Cassidy Banking slipping something to the people we didn’t know.
We should track these people down, D.

My phone kept dinging until I muted it. Hashtag Elspie, tweet, tweet. Davis, delete, delete. I couldn’t ignore her forever, but I couldn’t deal with her right now, either.

My father is in his late fifties. He’s the Chief of Police and Mayor of Pine Apple, my Alabama hometown, population just over/under four hundred. Two years ago, he’d had a heart attack and bypass surgery, which had taken away his spare tire but hadn’t diminished him in any other way. Honestly, he felt better, looked better, and was healthier all the way around than in the years before the heart trouble, and I loved him with all my (at the moment troubled) heart.

He made small talk in the elevator and down the long hall. It’s been a nice visit, but he’s ready to get home; the paperwork is surely piling up. Granny’s a little hard to handle when there are slot machines and hot toddies nearby. My young niece is getting restless with no other little ones to play with. Mother doesn’t know what to do with herself without a kitchen.

We had one foot each inside the door. “Why have you postponed the wedding, Davis?”

I burst into tears. He pulled me into a big hug, and let me cry it out. When it was all over but the hiccups, he asked, “Does he just want to wait awhile, honey?”

“Who?”

“Who?” Daddy held me at arm’s length. “Bradley.”

“Neither one of us wants to wait.”

My father tapped his right temple. His thinking move. “Then which one of you postponed the wedding?”

I hiccupped. “Neither.”

“So why aren’t you getting married today?”

“We don’t have a marriage license, Daddy. It was denied.”

“What in the world? Why?”

“Because,” (hiccup) “I’m still married to Eddie.”

Daddy slapped a hand over his heart.

*     *     *

Anne Cole, who may or may not end up being my mother-in-law, didn’t know a thing about (me) my job, and when I showed up for our family dinner dressed as Bianca so I could zip straight to my second dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Jennings, she was a little stunned.

“Those are the largest sunglasses I’ve ever seen in my
life
.”

Going outside the confines of the Bellissimo property all dolled up as Bianca was a gamble, and I tried my best to avoid it. First, if she knew I was out dressed as her and she hadn’t sanctioned it, she’d have a fit. Second, people recognized her and wanted to rub elbows. To avoid anyone interrupting our dinner by approaching Bianca (me) and asking for Bellissimo favors at Outback Steak House (my grandmother’s all-time favorite fancy restaurant), I was wearing Heidi London metal studded sunglasses that were so big, it looked as if I was wearing two metal-studded personal pan pizzas on my face.

When Bianca had tossed them to me, because it looked as if I’d been “weeping” (I had), I asked if they were for Halloween and she’d answered, “Certainly
not
.” Then suggested I acquire some
style
sense. I suggested she acquire some
common
sense. (No, I didn’t.) “And no smoking,” Bianca said. “It was hard enough to quit once. I’m not putting myself through it again.”

“Your headdress is very Jackie-O.” Like the sunglass observation, Anne Cole didn’t mean this one as a compliment either. I’d covered my Bianca blonde French twist updo, which looked more like an eagle’s nest on my head, with a red silk scarf I tied beneath my chin. Under the scarf and pizza glasses, my lipstick was high gloss blood-curdling red.

I haven’t even gotten to the good part of my outfit.

Bianca had me in all white, the same color neither my mother nor Anne Cole thought I should be wearing today, and they were right this time: no one should wear this on any day. The dress was your basic sleeveless pencil, two sizes too small for me and three sizes too small for Bianca, but it was the just-arrived beast she’d snagged from the Fur Salon at Saks today that sent this getup over the top.

It was seventy degrees out.

She had me in a white mink hooded cape with dyed ermine tips that looked like mutant beetles crawling all over it. The fur was buttoned at my neck and flared out six feet just past my butt. The hem of the dress hit a smidge below the fur, and Bianca’s a big believer in the bare leg look. I was wearing a mini dress and a massive fur coat that could barely clear a doorway on top of bare legs. On my feet, solid white six-inch platforms. It was nothing short of mortifying to be ordering a blooming onion in this blooming outfit.

I shed the coat, but wouldn’t let the waiter hang it (Bianca would kill me if a waiter breathed on it before she got to shock the public wearing it), so I climbed out of it, rolled, then wadded the thing and held it in my lap, which was about as comfortable as trying to sit at a long, skinny dinner table with my arms wrapped around a bale of hay.

“What is it you do, exactly?” Anne Cole’s tone was suspicious and accusatory. “I thought you were on the casino police force.”

And that’s when my niece Riley, sitting directly across from me, sent her large glass of chocolate milk flying.

*     *     *

“It’s so nice to meet you? Right? This place is perfect for us? And you’re, like, Head Bitch? Right?” Missy Jennings ended every statement on a lilt, so everything sounded like a question. And she was the second person I’d met in one day with ink-jet black eyes. “Red plays the tables? And I like the slots? Right? And this is way closer to home than Vegas? So we went online and here we are?” Jazz hands, and a totally veneered smile. Her husband, Redmond Jennings, also totally veneered, plus pickled in aftershave, paid absolutely no attention, but knew to smile in agreement when his wife took a breath. Like just then. Bianca would have picked up her steak knife and gone for the woman’s jugular. Like just then.

“And where is home, Missy?” I asked.

“Girl?” she waved a hand through the air. “We’re from a spit in the road in Alabama? Right? You’ve never heard of it?”

(Try me?)

They looked too young to be parents of a high school senior, and they looked too young to have the kind of money they were wearing. Missy had ten pounds of jewelry on her person, Red, fifteen. Honestly, they looked like they’d just had talk-show makeovers, everything mannequin matchy-matchy. He wore designer jeans and ostrich cowboy boots, a silk sports coat over a stiff, starched tuxedo shirt unbuttoned for as far as I was willing to look, with ropes of gold chains resting on a shag carpet of wiry chest hair. (Totally grossing me out.) She wore everything, I mean everything, she could get on her person. There was big hair, false eyelashes, double-pierced ears, and a charm bracelet with seven hundred noisy charms. She wore four layers on her top half—silk teddy, oversized designer T, cashmere scarf, and matching cardigan sweater—all tissue thin and the same shade of olive green. And on her bottom half, a short, bouncy (olive green) peplum skirt over olive green leggings, and olive green suede booties. I had the feeling there might be a price tag somewhere between them they’d forgotten to snip off ten minutes ago.

We were in Chops, the steakhouse, one of the twelve eateries at the Bellissimo. We had reservations at the fanciest of the Bellissimo restaurants, Violettes, but I’d changed it last minute, needing a darker and less populated venue, one where the chances of Bianca having her picture snapped was less likely, since I was wearing chocolate milk all over her new fur. And speaking of price tags, Meredith had poked on her phone while I’d smashed the chocolate milk deeper into Bianca’s fur with a stack of Outback Steak House napkins. When she found it on Saks’s website she flipped her phone around, showed everyone, and gave us the good news. “Thirty-eight thousand dollars.”

I let go of my thirty-eight-thousand-dollar chocolate-milk panic soon enough. When I met the Jennings, in fact. (Right?) I was already seated in a dark corner and on my second glass of Calm Down Chardonnay when the waiter led Missy and Redmond Jennings to the table. They were ten minutes late to dinner, but had already arrived on my phone. I had four photos of them huddled up with Cassidy Banking. These were the people Fantasy suggested we take a look at. (Check. I’m looking.) And that trumped the chocolate milk panic. Not that there won’t be hell to pay on the fur coat business.

“Please,” I said over salads. “Tell me about yourselves.”

“Red has a little farm? Right?” Missy flagged down the waiter and asked for more Ranch dressing. “And I’m a dancer? I have a dance studio?” Jazz hands.

“Lovely.” I smiled. “What do you grow, Red?” Other than hair on your chest.

“Trees,” he finally spoke. “Christmas trees.”

I had no idea there was that much money in Christmas trees.

Quinn was their only child. Missy willingly volunteered between bites of a well-done petite filet that her son was a slip-up after a high school football game, which I knew first-hand was just part and parcel of an Alabama heritage. “That game went into overtime? Right? And next thing we knew? A bundle of baby boy?” Jazz hands. They traveled often, mostly to Vegas until the Montecito closed, so boarding school was the right place for their son. “Can’t leave them home alone? Right? And we still act like teenagers? Right, Red?” Red winked at his wife. “There’s nothing for Quinn to do in Alabama but get in trouble? Right?”

According to his school records, Quinn had found plenty of trouble in New Hampshire, and according to the school’s annual report, Missy and Red Jennings weren’t too offended, because they were Diamond Donors. Their hefty donations fell in line right behind Quinn’s misconducts.

At the end of my second dinner on what should have been my wedding night, I thanked them again for giving Thomas a ride, wished them luck with the Strike It Rich Sweepstakes, and as we stepped out of the restaurant, I casually asked them if they’d bumped into any old Montecito friends who’d transferred to the Bellissimo.

“No.” The first word out of her mouth without a question mark. “We don’t know a soul who works here.”