Double Strike (A Davis Way Crime Caper Book 3) (17 page)

“I’ll find a way.” He didn’t want me to go back to Lickskillet. “I’ll be in touch.”

I texted No Hair and asked him to make ten minutes for me and tell Levi Hasselhoff I was on my way to the casino. He texted back.
Who?

Levi Newman, No Hair. Tell him Bianca wants to play the Strike game and she wants total privacy.

I called Bradley.

“Another late night?”

“The latest ever, Bradley. I don’t know if I’ll make it home tonight at all. I’ll be in Strike. Do you want me to get you a pass?”

“It depends. Are you going as Bianca or the social media girl?”

“Bradley!”

“I’m kidding,” he said. “And I’m
never
setting foot in Strike again, I wish
you
weren’t, and Friday can’t get here soon enough.”

“Bradley. Do you want to get married this weekend?”

The world stood still. Even the squirrels.

“Let me think about it, Davis.”

“Let me know.”

“I’ve thought about it,” he said. “I do.”

*     *     *

“I’m not coming in there.”

“I’m not coming out there.” I was still glued to my spot in the middle of the dressing room. I was clutching my phone to my heart. “I won’t be able to say it.”

“Dammit, Davis.” There was nowhere for No Hair to sit. He would flatten our stools to pancakes. The upholstered bench was a foot thick with clothes needing a car wash, a seamstress, a Goodwill drop off, or, mostly, a hanger, not that he wouldn’t crush all that to smithereens too. He stood in the doorway.

“See this guy?” I held up Walter Shaefer’s picture. “He’s been missing for almost five years.”

“Who is he?”

I rattled off a mini This Is Your Life Walter.

“There’s no way that man’s alive. That man is dead, Davis. He’s been missing for almost five years because that’s how long ago they got rid of him.”

“No Hair,” I said, “this man,” shake, shake, shake, “is running the Strike casino from a remote mainframe and he’s probably doing it with a gun to his head. He’s buried all right, I’ll give you that, but he’s not dead.”

“Buried where?”

“In one of those crazy underground bunkers crazy Alabama people build.”

*     *     *

@StrikePlayers #DownToTheWire Who will walk away with the million? #StrikeItRich

EIGHTEEN

InVade is the Oxycodone of malware—the Kobe beef, the blue diamond, the hen’s teeth.

Malware is a nickname; it means malicious software. It’s used to disrupt computer operations and/or gather information (and for this intent, it makes the news) or infiltrate a system. There are cheap, barely viable malwares all over the Internet. It doesn’t take much to download and run one, wreaking havoc along the way, but it doesn’t take much to detect and shut them down either. Not that they don’t leave their mark. Street malware is used for financial gain, exploitation, and cyber espionage. Malwares are written and implemented by three groups of people: White Hat Hackers, who mean no harm, mostly testing the security of their own systems, Black Hat Hackers, who definitely mean harm, and Elite Hackers, the most skilled, the most concealed, and usually members of secret organizations like Masters of Deception. Elite Hackers never see the light of day, as they take every breath from the pit of a hardware amphitheater and live on a steady diet of Totino’s Frozen Pizza and Orange Crush, from deep in their grandmother’s basements. InVade is a malware maintained and circulated among the Elite, and the vetting for procurement of it makes getting a seat on the Supreme Court Justice Bench look like getting a seat on the front pew at Early Service.

I knew one person who might be able to hook me up with InVade. I made the call.

“Yes, I remember you, Davis! Of course! How’d you find me?”

“Oh, you know.”

“You hacked me!” (True.)

“No! I found you through the Alumni Affairs Office.” (Not true.)

His name was Evan Allison, and yes, I slept with him in college. We met in Data Structures (Java) class, were partnered on a final-exam code-writing assignment, and wound up naked in the back of a Dodge Durango parked behind the Blue Monkey Lounge. Turns out, it wasn’t his car. All very humiliating. Especially since the screaming car owners—“Hey! What the hell?”—were carting little kids on their hips, one each. Haven’t spoken to Evan Allison one time since. Until today.

I knew he was a six-figure software development engineer for the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and I’d read he’d sold proprietary software to Pixar, so I felt confident, as close to the frontlines as he was, he’d be able to point me in the direction of InVade. I also hacked his Facebook page. He’d grown a thick and unruly beard, wore thick and unruly eyeglasses, had three hairs on his head—I could trade him bull goo for InVade—and was divorced.

For recreation, it looked like he built and raced soapbox derby cars. He also collected cats and named them after reality television celebrities: Honey Boo Boo, Bruce Jenner, Ivanka. (Trump.) He was very happy to be thrown back in time to the backseat of that Durango, and not without hesitation (me begging), did he agree to set me up with a flash version of InVade.

He would only send it to a dedicated and secure line, and I had to wait until he could get to a workstation at Best Buy on Memorial Drive, one of those geeky drop-off pick-up points the Huntsville cyber underground used, and the only place he was willing to do the deed. He would be attaching a twenty-four-hour shelf life accessory with an anti-piracy bonus feature he assured me would be harder to penetrate than Fort Knox.

(Did the guy not trust me?)

“I would love to see you too, Evan.”

“Anytime. Anytime you’re within a hundred miles. Or two hundred. Have Durango will travel, Davis. Just call me.”

Walter Shaefer was going to owe me big time.

*     *     *

What to wear to catch a den of thieves.

I was going Bianca, because no one else could walk into Strike and demand a seat at the table. Or in one of those chairs, as it were. Maybe her husband could, but he was busy with her son. She was upstairs busy doing who-knows-what. Hiding from the blindingly white décor. Staring in the mirror. Plotting my demise.

“What is it, David? I’m busy.”

(Plotting my demise.)

“Mrs. Sanders, I wanted to let you know I’ll be in the Strike Casino tonight, and I’ll be attending as you.”

“You know I no longer have an interest in gambling, David. It’s crude.”

“It’s Davis.”

“What?”

“I need to speak to Missy Jennings.”

“Who?”

“The mother of Quinn Jennings, Thomas’s classmate.”

“Yes. Straighten that situation out, David. You made that mess. Fix it.”

She hung up. She would be mad about her fur for a long, long time.

I stared at the clothes in the dressing room. I had two choices: Santa’s Helper (last year’s Have-Your-Picture-Made-With-Santa’s jolly old elf took terrible liberties with good little gamblers in his lap and was behind bars on multiple indecent exposure convictions) or Carolina Herrera. I went Carolina, in a silk cocktail dress, black with a white crossover bodice, notched V-neck, princess seams, and on my feet, Louboutin python T-strap skinny heels, and in my bag (matching Louboutin python wristlet), my phone, a Burt’s Bees Lip Shimmer in Watermelon (my dinner, probably), a flash drive, and a Ruger LC9. Point. Shoot. Bang. I guess I got a little carried away (I love guns), because I never heard Hair and Makeup Angela coming. She appeared out of nowhere, found me in stop-right-there mode, screamed bloody murder, and hit the deck. “Oh my God, Davis!”

“Oh my God, Davis? How about oh, my God, Angela! You scared me to death! Don’t sneak up on me!”

She rolled over onto her back, hand to heart. “Don’t shoot me!”

I reached out a hand to help her up. She crawled away backwards on all fours, petrified. Her boots were red leather with little black buttons.

“I would never shoot you on purpose, Angela.” She stood—her eyes were Frisbees—and was trying to make a run for it, but she bumped into the vanity, which scared her to death all over again. Movie screaming. “Angela!” She took off scooting down the length of the vanity, clearing a path through the bronzers and blushers. Which is when it occurred to me to stop waving the gun around. “When you pick up a gun, one of the first things you do is make sure the front and back sights are lined up! That’s all I was doing! Settle down!”

Angela flipped and bent over the vanity, gripping it with both hands, head flopping, tongue lolling. “This. Job.”

I pushed her down onto a stool because her knees were Jello.

“Between her and you, I swear, Davis, I’m going to go work a makeup counter at the mall.”

It’s not like I didn’t warn her.

It took a shot of bourbon to steady her hands. Geesh. One little gun non-incident. She eventually (second shot of bourbon) calmed down, sprayed me Honey Kiss blonde, and finally able to speak, gave me the details of the brutal tongue lashing she’d taken from Bianca earlier about “the state of David’s hair.” My new hair was at an impressive, and challenging, length. Long enough to cover my scalp, but too short to lie down without being asked repeatedly.

“I had to hold the phone away from my head,” Angela said. “She was having a fit. Look down.” We were at the eyeliner part.

“Tell me about all the chairs you have in your house, Angela. Every one.”

“Look up.” Mascara. “Okay. I’ll start in my kitchen and work my way to the play room. We have lots of bar stools. Do they count? Then we have to decide how we’re going to get out of the casino business, repackage this bull stuff, and get rich quick.” She tugged on a strand of my baby hair. “The new hair is twice as thick as your old hair, Davis. This stuff is miracle hair grow tonic. Although, we’re going to have to put some strong scent in it. Maybe strawberry. We’ll make a fortune off bald guys if you don’t accidentally shoot them first.”

I was headed downstairs to order a drink from a bald guy. And I may very well have to shoot him first.

*     *     *

“Welcome to Strike, Mrs. Sanders.”

I threw my Rachel Zoe cashmere wrap at the big burly bouncer and kept going. (Bianca is such a raging bitch.)

Day by day, as players have been eliminated from the competition, then gone as far into debt as they possibly could, the gaming stations had, one by one, closed. I had my choice of four empty gaming stations. I went left, because there was less attention, noise, and crowd, all of which was radiating from the right side of the room, where Missy Jennings’s winning streak had set up camp. I avoided the little cafés and the cashier cage, and made my way to a corner, the most obscure of the four empty
future
Gaming Wonderchairs. Fantasy and No Hair were between me and everything else. I sat down and was welcomed by a waft of Chocolate Chip Cookies. The chair discreetly adjusted to my height and weight, and a small panel on the right armrest blinked and asked for my thumbprint.

Not yet.

I pushed the button and the three play screens lowered from the ceiling. I pulled a flash drive full of venom from my python clutch, then tilted the middle screen enough to get to the console behind it. There wasn’t a visible port. If I couldn’t get into the system, we were toast.

I used the flashlight app on my phone and still couldn’t find a port. If I tore the thing up, someone from IT would be out here in a heartbeat. I closed my eyes and used my fingertips (when one of your five senses stops working try a different one), finally feeling a small flat panel with a pinhole. Except I didn’t have a pin.

“No Hair. Psssst.”

“What?”

“I can’t get this thing open. I need something small and pokey. Like a straight pin or an earring.”

“I don’t wear earrings, Davis, but
you
do.”

Right. I get nervous.

Bianca’s jewelry was all booby-trapped. Hard to get off and on because of security clasps, complicated fasteners, and burglar alarms. For the most part, I went fake. Tonight, I was faking Chanel black enamel Camellias with the little CC logo on one petal. I pried one out and stabbed the pinhole with the silver stud. A black panel the size of a postage stamp popped off. I let out the breath I’d been holding and took another deep one. The armrest panel blinked for my thumbprint. Give me your tired, your poor, your thumbprint. In a minute, Walter. In a minute.

Here goes nothing. I plugged the flash drive into the USB port. Bikini Fantasy Mind Reader passed me a glass of something, and asked how it was going. I gave her a quick nod. The download was almost complete; the drink was a smoky Chardonnay.

One, two, three.

I used the touchscreen on the left screen to get to the gaming menu, system, help, located a keyboard, then tapped out a message:
Hi Walter. My name is Davis. I’m here to help you.

Three, two, one.

The Strike gaming system went black.

Cries went up through the room as the gambling came to an abrupt halt.

I counted to ten. The armrest panel began blinking again. I squeezed my eyes closed, then pressed my right thumb to it. Walter Shaefer would know everything about me there was to know in three minutes, and we could both be dead in five. There was a chance I’d set wheels in motion that would result in a bullet to Walter’s head and his bald bartender brother hopping the bar and coming at me with a gold icicle of death.

He’d have to get through No Hair to get to me. And Walter was already as good as dead; this was his only chance.

When the monitor began swarming with floaties, it occurred to me to blink, to breathe.

A lifetime/two minutes later, the game reset and I collapsed in the chair. It coughed up a cloud of Chocolate Chips. It was chaos on the small casino floor; I could hear Levi Hasselhoff flipping his wig saying, “power surge power surge power surge.”

Walter Shaefer was still alive. My gaming monitor flashed
HELP
, and beneath it, 34.34  -85.696. My hands shook as I shot a message back: 2014:ja7:a:4x70:C:777:8:1.

*     *     *

@StrikePlayers #Hiccup #All’sWell #PointsRecorded #PlayersPlayOn

*     *     *

No Hair and I rushed down the dark hall to 3B doing some heel clacking (me) and heavy breathing (him).

“What were all those numbers?” He left all things electronic to me.

“I sent him an IP address to contact us.” I had a terminal up in Control Central in a flash. “He sent geographic coordinates.” I plugged them in. The red dot radiated from Lickskillet, Alabama. We watched it like a heart monitor.

“Talk to him again, Davis. Find out exactly where he is and how we can get to him.”

“No way, No Hair. I’ve taken the game down once. Five IT guys behind Strike are trying to figure out what just happened, and if all five of them aren’t working this heist, at least one of them is and right now he’s telling himself it was a fluke. If I break into the system again, he’ll know it wasn’t an accident and they’ll kill Walter before we can get to him. If anyone realizes their system is compromised, they won’t need Walter.” I grabbed the clean laptop I’d used earlier to receive InVade from Durango Lover Boy. I clicked open the Microsoft Messenger and read the only message:

.-.. . ...- .. / -. . .-- -- .- -.

We stared at it. After a few seconds, the message began to fade, then the laptop glowed with the blue screen of death.

“What happened?”

“He InVaded me.” I slapped the laptop closed. I rubbed my forehead. “He wiped this computer.” I knew going in that if I managed to make contact with Walter, and if he managed to respond, he would destroy the evidence to protect us both, which is why I didn’t give him an IP address to anything Bellissimo. (Boy, would I catch hell if the Bellissimo system was wiped.) (We have Pentagon-worthy backup.) (Still.)

I fell against the back of the chair. “I knew Morse Code back in the day, but I never knew how to
read
it.”

No Hair was in a chair beside me. Elbows to knees. Staring at the floor. “I caught it.” He looked like he’d caught Flesh Eating Bird Flu Rabies.

“What did it say?”

“It said Levi Newman.”

*     *     *

We needed the dog off the scent, so No Hair got Levi Newman on the phone. “We’ve looked into this, Levi, and we’ve got nothing.” He told him we had carefully examined every aspect of Strike operations and we couldn’t find a single thing wrong with the exception of a little loosey goosey banking, and we felt sure the girl who’d been missing since Sunday afternoon, the social media girl, Elspeth (he said, “Elzbath”) took off for parts unknown for personal reasons unrelated to any Bellissimo business. He went on to remind Levi that Strike was his domain, and we needed to get back to the business of monitoring our domain, everything else, before Richard got back in town and fired us all. “We’re security, Levi,” No Hair said, “and Davis is all I have. She’s more Inspector Lucille Ball Clouseau than anything else.”

I had nothing to throw at him.