Authors: Gretchen Archer
TWO
Our workspace is divided into three large rooms: the bullpen, the closet, and control central. The bullpen is just inside the door. It’s where we have meetings, lunch, hers and hers sofas, and where No Hair catches us watching Lifetime movies. Control central is through a door to the right. It glows. We have desks, white boards, pictures of Fantasy’s dogs/kids (two large dogs, three small kids,) and four different computer systems up and running at all times. Mounted flat screens march across the middle of three walls flashing live feed from the casino, count room, cage, vault, and accounting. We even keep surveillance on surveillance. On the other side of the bullpen is the closet, our very large dressing room where we step in ourselves and step out other people. For me, that used to mean hot, itchy wigs, but recently, I started airbrushing my head a different color when the occasion called for it with spray paint called Colour Couture. Two hundred dollars a whack. It takes two whacks to get my hair completely dark, a lot of work to wash out, and that stuff ruins clothes, towels, and pillows. The closet is full of clothes. We have uniforms for every department in the Bellissimo—housekeeping, restaurants, security, gift shops, pool, transportation, maintenance, spa, valet, horticulture, and casino floor. Most of the clothes, though, are street clothes. We have casual collections, so we can sit and play quarter slot machines without garnering undue attention, all the way to designer apparel that neither Fantasy nor I could afford in our lifetimes, especially me, because lucky me, I’m a stunt double for Bianca Casimiro Sanders and have to dress the lavish part. So I have ludicrously expensive clothes to match Bianca’s, each with its own insurance policy. There’s Chanel, Versace, Halston, Donna Karan, Valentino, and Paula Deen. (Kidding.) These designer duds are why Bianca Sanders shows up in our hidey-hole; she doesn’t let me step out as her for a split second unless she approves the color of panties I’m wearing, and she shows up regularly to disapprove.
Being a dead-ringer for Mrs. Richard Sanders was how I landed this job, and exactly how I landed in jail. We look so much alike that it even fools the elevator facial-recognition software, and it was a sad, sad day when she figured that one out. The only detail that keeps us from being identical twins separated at birth (aside from our ages, personalities, politics, ethics, and net worths) is our coloring. So I have to regularly alter mine, then dress up as her and do every single thing she doesn’t feel like doing, which is most things. Some of the more ludicrous things she’s demanded I do in the past six months have included posing for a family portrait with her husband and son, give plasma for her at a Bellissimo-sponsored donor drive, and take an eye exam.
“But Mrs. Sanders,” I’d said, “how am I supposed to pull that off?” My eyes are the same color as my hair, a coppery cinnamon color. Hers are green, requiring me to wear tinted contact lenses while I do my Bianca chores. Not to mention I have twenty-twenty and she does not.
She hung up on me, so I guess she got it. There is no doubt in my mind that any day now she’s going to say, “I have a splitting headache and need you to have sex with Richard tonight.” Then tell me how to fake one.
Bianca Sanders is as unreasonable and self-centered as they come, and at the moment, there was nothing between me and her unreasonably bloody foot but a hollow wooden door.
First-aid first, and Fantasy handled that, because I was still in the ladies room with a cold, dripping hand towel pressed to my forehead, my head between my knees, stars circling above me, and sirens ringing in my ears.
“I could use some help out here, Princess!” Fantasy shouted. “Get it together!”
“I’m trying, Fantasy.”
“Get out here. Bring me a clean towel and some whiskey.”
I picked myself up, dusted myself off, then threw open the door. “What flavor of whiskey?”
Fantasy looked up from Bianca’s bullet-riddled foot. “Honestly, Davis, I don’t care. I don’t think she does either.”
We slapped her awake. (“Easy, Davis,” Fantasy snapped at me. “She’s going to come to and smack you back.”) We gave her sips of brandy, then stretched her out on the ruined sofa, elevating her left foot.
“We need to get you to the emergency room, Mrs. Sanders.”
“Can you walk?” Fantasy asked.
She was appalled. “I’m not going out in public wearing
this
.”
This
looked like a perfectly acceptable emergency room outfit to me, and
this
probably cost more than the emergency room doctor’s car. The problem must be that
this
was wrinkled. And bloody.
“We’ll find you something else to wear,” Fantasy suggested.
“Absolutely not. I’m not sitting in a germ infested emergency room.” She weakly snapped her fingers for more brandy. “Find Gregory before I bleed to death.” I waited for her to say to me, “And I’m going to need your foot.”
* * *
Gregory Jakeaway, MD, treats Bianca Casimiro Sanders’ raging hypochondria. He’s her personal physician, and as such, is expected to have a fresh batch of Botox on him at all times, never speak to her of the dangers of smoking, plus read her mind and (poof!) appear when she needs him, which is when she’s awake. People magically appear to do Bianca’s bidding all the time. The woman has concierge everything—doctors, dentists, diamond brokers—everyone comes to her to spare her having to go to them. She does travel by limo to New Orleans, 90 miles east of Biloxi, every three weeks to “get out of the house” (have her roots done), and makes me go there too when my hair isn’t up to her standards, which is about every two weeks. Whatever she does to herself, she wants done to me, her body double, and we’ve only had one problem so far. Make that two.
“Miss—” she tried, “you.” She shook a finger at me. “David.”
“It’s Davis.”
“Of course. We’re having our breasts augmented.”
“Oh, no we’re not.”
For the past three months, I’ve had to wear bras with water balloons in them while doing my Bianca chores.
She has an in-house staff in addition to her off-site people. Bianca has two personal chefs (at a venue with twelve restaurants) and two personal trainers. She has an on-call veterinarian and a full-time dog walker for her ill-tempered Teacup Yorkshire Terriers, Gianna and Ghita. What she has the most of, though, are personal assistants. She hires and fires them regularly, and every time she hires a new one, it costs us a week of work. Fantasy and I have to vet them: background checks including credit reports, criminal, driving, marital, medical, military, and school records, worker’s comp claims, bankruptcy histories, and favorite menu item at Taco Bell.
In the past few months, we’d done it three times. Twice, after all our work, Bianca changed her mind and decided she wouldn’t be able to tolerate the person we’d researched all the way back to the playground. (“Her nail beds are
blue,
” and the other, “she smells like
bread.
” Tidbits we might like to have known before we spent a combined eighty hours combing through the details of their gynecological histories.) The last one, just a month ago, hadn’t passed the muster—I voted no—and No Hair let Bianca hire her anyway. A largish fuss ensued.
“Don’t hire her, No Hair. She lives in a P. O. Box.”
“We’re hiring her.”
Which struck me as odd. No Hair, former MBI (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation,) isn’t much of a gambler. In fact, he’s rule-follower number one around here, especially when it came to protecting Mr. & Mrs. Sanders. The girl, Peyton Reynolds, was spotless. Too spotless. Squeaky spotless. Making her a bad bet. I said don’t hire someone who’s so off the grid she’s never even been to traffic court and No Hair said I discriminated against people who don’t have criminal records. (No, I don’t.) “Besides,” he added, “Bianca will fire her before she has a chance to do any harm.”
Apparently not.
“Who shot you, Mrs. Sanders?”
“I need a cigarette.” She said it with a lot of breath and even more drama.
“We don’t have any cigarettes,” Fantasy told her, tossing the green pack of skinny cigarettes behind her back to me. “Who shot you?”
An hour passed before she whispered, “Peyton.”
“Your new assistant?” I didn’t whisper.
“Maybe she didn’t shoot me directly.” Bianca waved toward the glass of brandy, which meant she wanted me to hold it to her lips so that she might have a sip. “But it’s her fault.”
“Did she or did she not shoot you, Mrs. Sanders?” Fantasy asked.
Bianca sighed and covered her eyes with platinum, diamonds, and a perfect manicure. “It was my gun, but it was her fault.”
“Who was holding the gun?” I asked. Like pulling teeth.
Bianca waved the hand she wasn’t hiding behind through the air, dismissing the question.
“Mrs. Sanders?” I moved in closer, something I didn’t particularly want to do. “Did you shoot yourself?”
She whimpered.
“You shot
yourself
in the foot?”
* * *
No Hair had No Phone Manners. “What, Davis?
What
?”
“So sorry to bother you” (I wasn’t within a mile of a so-sorry voice), “but Bianca has shot herself in the foot and refuses to go to the hospital.”
“Assess.”
“She’s fine.” I waited a beat for No Hair’s life to stop flashing before his eyes. “I can’t get Dr. Doolittle on the phone.”
“His name is Jakeaway.”
“Sure it is.” I’d stepped into the closet to call him, because Bianca was well on her way to being brandy drunk, and she was lamenting her latest fear at the top of her lungs. (Shoes. She was wailing through an inventory of shoes she feared she’d never wear again.) I filled him in on what little we knew, and he said he’d get Dr. Jakeaway on the phone immediately.
“She’s tried,” I said. “He’s not answering.”
“That’s because she calls him all day every day. He reaches the point that he just stops answering. He’ll pick up when I call. How bad does it look?”
“To her or to me?” I asked. “Because she’s acting like her leg’s blown off.”
“To you.”
“As shootings go, not bad,” I said. “It’s surface. It skidded along the top of her foot. No bullet in there and no exit. Obviously, she can walk on it and the bleeding has stopped.”
“Sit tight for now,” he said. “I’ll get Jakeaway there, then you go find the assistant.”
“What?” I pulled the phone away from my head and looked at it. “For one, the assistant’s probably long gone. For another, I can’t go track that girl down. You’ve got me in a slot-machine tournament in a few hours!”
“Find that girl.”
* * *
Gregory Jakeaway arrived eighteen minutes (of Bianca breaking the sound barrier with her ear-piercing agony) later. Clearly he pumped iron when he wasn’t tending to Bianca Casimiro Sanders’ medicinal needs. I’d bet there were more than a few steroids in his little black bag too, because the man was huge. Not larger than No Hair—no one’s larger than No Hair—but he looked bigger, because he was all brawny muscle and because he wore clothes two sizes too small. I’d seen him dozens of times, and every time he’d been wearing a golf shirt that was bursting at the seams, straining against his ridiculously large neck, biceps, and chest. Tonight’s skintight golf shirt was powder-puff pink. He wore absurdly small, tight, bright short shorts with the golf shirts. Year round. The only concession he made to slot-tournament season were citrus-shade sweaters he draped across his shoulders and looped loosely around his neck. He was Dr. Malibu Ken.
Fantasy rode the elevator to meet him, then escorted him to our bloody sofa full of Bianca.
“Kitten!” He rushed to her side.
(Kitten?)
He produced a syringe from one of his muscle groups, held it high to get a good look, squirted a few drops in the air, then cooed at her as he stabbed her in the hip. Lights out. Ten minutes later, he presented his findings to us. Bianca was in another realm, mouth wide open and snoring. A Kodak moment if ever there was one.
“There are twenty-six bones in the foot,” he said, “and she missed every single one.” He gazed at Kitten with admiration. “She grazed the metatarsal here,” he pointed, “but all that really happened is the bullet grazed the exterior mid-foot—” (then there was a spiel I tried not to listen to: tissue, ligaments, planum, Chex-Mix, tendons, dorsum) “—but in the end, it’s just a flesh wound.”
She snored on.
“It looks worse than it is.”
It looked nasty.
“And it just appears that she lost a lot of blood,” he said. “She didn’t lose all that much and what she did lose is probably all here.”
Our bullpen looked like a blood mobile that had been in the middle of a ten-bus pileup.
“We’ll probably want to do a skin graft in a few days,” he said, “and of course she’ll be bedridden for a few weeks,” he smiled at us (2,000 watts), “but she’ll be just fine.”
A few weeks of bedridden Bianca was very bad news for me. No telling what was on her calendar, all of which she’d expect me to do. (“Go get my cankle lipo for me and I mean
this minute
.”)
He snapped on gloves, patched up her boo boo, generously passed out pain pills, antibiotics, and instructions, then transferred her to our other gold sofa. The one she hadn’t ruined. Yet.
“How long do we have?” I asked.
Dr. Jakeaway was soaping and scrubbing his muscles at the sink. “Before what?”
“She wakes up.”
“Six to eight hours.”
“What do you have that would keep her out for six to eight days?” Fantasy asked.
His head fell back on a laugh, and a whole new set of wiry-looking muscle things popped out of his distended throat. “Six to eight days! You’re funny!”
We got rid of the good doctor, bagged everything, including the ruined sofa cushions, and tossed it all out the door. We updated No Hair and he made the decision that Richard Sanders didn’t need to know about this until his plane landed.
“Do either of you know how Bianca got hold of a gun in the first place?”
We didn’t.
He signed off with this: “Bianca is staying right there with you girls until you locate the assistant and find out what happened up there.”
There was no telling what happened up there. Bianca said it was the assistant’s fault, but Bianca passed out fault like it was bubble gum. The girl could have run Bianca’s bath one degree too warm, or served her a martini with three stuffed olives instead of two. For all we knew, Bianca could have blown the assistant’s head off simply because it was Friday, left her in a puddle, then dragged her own bloody foot down here without saying a word about the dead body upstairs. I could hear it now, “Yes, I failed to mention it, because she wasn’t going to get any deader and at the time I was in danger of losing an
appendage
!”
And she was snoring like a bear.
To put off the possibility of a dead body in the Sanders’ residence for a few minutes, Fantasy banged around at the bar and produced a bottle of Jack Daniels and a glass. She poured herself two inches and tipped it my way. “Fortitude.”
“Where’s my fortitude?”
She tossed it back, then poured another. “Davis,” she said, “you can’t drink.”
Like hell. I was a champ.
“If you think you’re pregnant,” she said, “don’t drink.”
I hadn’t said a word. Not a peep. Not even to Bradley Cole.