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

“When fall break is over.”

Which was as far as I was going to get with Little Sanders.

I stood, walked behind the television, and dangled the cord. “About this morning.”

He traced a line from his right temple to his jaw, where I’d slammed his head into the hood of a car.

“Are we good?” The cord danced.

It was impossible to read little Sanders’s face. His discerning smile reminded me of his father. The evil glint in his eye reminded me of his mother.

“You don’t remember anything about a gun, do you, Thomas?”

I swung the Xbox cord like a pendulum. He followed it with his eyes. “No, Dude.”

I plugged in the game.

*     *     *

I wove in and out of emergency vehicles still parked in quickly abandoned ways down half a mile of Beach Boulevard against five lanes of heavy midday traffic, wearing a creamsicle silk robe that barely covered my butt, running shoes, and Bradley Cole’s RayBans. Bianca had confiscated every stitch of clothing I keep at work for her own temporary wardrobe. I had to go home to get dressed, but not before I flagged down three large men to help me get my Volkswagen bug out of the sand it was mired in.

On the short drive to get dressed, I thought about what a missed calendar opportunity today was; it could have been, should have been, Friday the thirteenth, and it wasn’t anywhere near over.

I could hear my home from the wrong side of the door. I snuck in and used a tall potted peace lily for cover. From the open foyer inside our condo, it’s one huge room. Three granite steps down lead to the living room and three granite steps up, to the dining room, kitchen, and breakfast nook. My sister Meredith was up, banging pots and pans at the sink. My father was sitting at the breakfast table to her left behind a newspaper. The bulk of the noise was coming from down, where my grandmother and my niece, Riley, were singing along with the soundtrack of
The Little Mermaid
on the television, set at a volume guaranteed to make it through the sands of time filling Granny’s ears. My mother was also down, at the desk, in one corner of the living room, and Anne Cole, my future mother-in-law, was sitting in a wingback chair in the opposite corner, as far away from my mother as possible. My mother was staring out the window. Anne Cole was staring at a wall. Both mouths were thin, straight lines, both had a foot going ninety-miles an hour, and all four fists were balled. I caught my sister’s eye. She twirled a finger around, pointed, then mouthed, “
Go. Leave. Get out of here
.”

My father looked over his glasses and invited me to join him behind the Metro section. I tiptoed. Meredith scooted over and joined us.

“What’s going on?” We huddled. “Where’s Bradley?”

“He went to work,” my father whispered.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Meredith spit it out quickly. “Bradley’s mother says you can’t cook and doesn’t think you should wear a white wedding dress.”

I felt a growl coming on. “I could cook if I wanted to and my dress isn’t white.” It’s not even a wedding dress; it’s just a dress. A creamy off-white bordering on pale-yellow dress. “And why is Mother mad at Anne? She told me yesterday I should be ashamed of myself for wearing white.”

“She changed her mind,” Meredith peeked over the newspaper, “when Anne said something. Now Mother’s on your side like you’re the original Vestal Virgin.”

My father shifted in his seat.

“What color does Anne want me to wear?” We were whispering the conversation all over Daddy and all Under the Sea, which Granny and Riley had backed up and were enjoying again. At the top of their lungs.

“Blood red?” Meredith shrugged. “Black?”

I stayed behind the newspaper with Daddy, who tapped my nose and assured me everything would be fine, while Meredith snuck off to my bedroom to get me clothes. I dressed in the pantry, tossing Bianca’s orange robe down the garbage chute. I gave Daddy’s hand a squeeze goodbye, then snuck out.

THREE

It takes great creative minds to keep it exciting at a casino. Never let your patrons get bored. Boredom leads to thoughts of personal fiscal responsibility. Thoughts of personal fiscal responsibility empty a casino faster than a fire. So ramp up the excitement. The exciting Strike it Rich Sweepstakes was less than a week away, and neither Fantasy nor I was very excited, more than anything else, because it had snuck up on us.

In the past six weeks, we’d chased disappearing liquor shipments by posing as bartenders (I told everyone we were out of mixed drinks; it was beer, wine, or nothing, because making a Three Wise Men #2 isn’t anywhere nearly as easy as it sounds), we’d played in a week-long Texas hold ’em tournament (flops and turns and rivers, oh my!), and had busted up a counterfeit Gucci ring operating out of Spikes, the ladies shoe store on the mezzanine level, after which we felt obligated to keep a few pieces of remarkably genuine-looking evidence (two whole sets of luggage) for comparison purposes in case they ever tried it again.

Not to mention I’d been planning a wedding.

We’d been too busy to give the upcoming Strike It Rich festivities much thought and now here we were at the gates. Which, as it turned out, we had to crash.

Casino events come and go, and we were so familiar with them at this point—slot, blackjack, keep your hand on the Dodge Ram the longest—our team was seldom needed. For the most part, we let sleeping casino events lie. Marketing cooked up the crazy contests, they landed on Mr. Sanders’s desk for approval, he sent it to us, we gave it a hard look, signed off on it, and for the most part, casino parties ran like clockwork.

The Strike It Rich Sweepstakes, however, skipped all those steps. It’s been shrouded in secrecy and the closer it got, the less we knew about it. At first it was annoying, like going to the mall. (What is Victoria’s big secret? Just tell us.) Then it was irritating, like a new bottle of Advil. (I already have a headache. After thirty minutes of breaking into the bottle, I have a migraine.) It was approaching downright suspicious. (Like sushi.)

Our old casino manager never blinked an eye when a “temporary” employee showed up to lend a hand. Our new casino manager didn’t want a hand, and if we offered a hand one more time, I had a feeling he might chop it off.

Three weeks ago Fantasy and I got the bright idea to sneak in and nose around. (No Hair said, “You two sneak in and nose around.”) We’d been turned away. Local features reporters weren’t welcome in the new casino; they had their own media person, thank you. We waited a week, then waylaid two faux finish painters (sat them down at slot machines, liquored them up, and gave them free play credits), then showed up at the Strike door as their faux finish replacements in cute painter-girl outfits only to be refused again. Our names weren’t on the approved entry list. And just last week, when Junior League Fantasy and I, in Lilly Pulitzer and pearls, had tried to get in with silver trays loaded with lemon bars, the door had been slammed in our faces a third time. At which point we were aggravated, irritated, suspicious, and mad.

What were these Strike people hiding?

One thing we did know was who they were hiding behind—our new casino manager, Levi Newman. Levi began his current reign six months ago, the first month a transition of out-with-the-old and in-with-the-new(man), as the former casino manager, Ty Thibodeaux, who’d come with the first brick, the only casino manager the Bellissimo had known since the ribbon cutting in 1996, was retiring.

Naturally, the new casino manager wanted to bring in his own staff of faithfuls who’d also lost their jobs when—don’t know the details—someone had gone on strike, and in the end, the Montecito closed its doors. And Richard Sanders, as good as they come, wouldn’t dream of displacing his own staff just because it was a new day. Handily clearing the line in the sand, Levi Newman tossed up pie charts, bar graphs, and earnings projections, selling Mr. Sanders on a fall campaign guaranteed to blow the lid off, with one caveat: It would need a separate staff. And designated space for a second casino, a mini casino Newman would be in charge of. “Let me show you what I can do, Richard.” He showed Mr. Sanders how he could sneak his people in the back door to implement the Strike it Rich package. Bellissimo staffers would fill the grunt-work gaps when the time came, but until then, the Vegas transplants were in charge. Total strangers had called the gaming, marketing, accounting, and mini casino-floor shots for Strike. And there had been, to date, exactly zero information sharing. We had no idea what was going on behind the Strike doors.

Mr. Sanders said it was simply a matter of the Strike staff not wanting the details of the gaming leaked before the event. I doubted that. I felt certain they were locked up in that mini casino emptying the Bellissimo vault. No Hair landed in the middle. He understood the Strike staff wanting to keep a lid on the big gaming reveal, but as we were turned away again and again, he too wondered if there wasn’t something shady going on. The consensus was the Strike Sweepstakes only lasts a week. What all can happen in one little week?

The one little week was a little week away, we were finally getting in, and the better question turned out to be how many times could our phones ding? Clearly the Strike It Rich Sweepstakes was powered by Twitter. Because we were forced to sign up (@WayToGo) and instantly began receiving tweets. Tons and tons of tweets.

We were deep in 3B when our phones tweeped at the same time.

#StrikeItRich quick meet @5 Employee Training B. Orien-tation reschedule tomorrow @8 Theatre C. No shows ~NO!WAY!~ DM @ElspieBabie #GameOn

It took Fantasy and me ten minutes to decipher it. We had a meeting at five in an employee training room. The orientation that hadn’t taken place today because of the lightning strike this morning was rescheduled for tomorrow. If we couldn’t make it, although we’d better find a way, send a direct message.

So far, our only glimpse of Strike It Rich had been the social media blitz of it all. It rolled out eight weeks ago via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Vine, which I’d never even heard of. To earn their way into the sweepstakes, hopefuls had generated forty-seven million social media impressions, including more than fifty thousand likes on Instagram, twenty-two million impressions on Twitter, half a million hits on Tumblr, and seventeen thousand new Facebook fans. It was the buzz, and the Baby Boomers were furious. They didn’t even get on the line. How were they supposed to qualify?

The Social Media Director, a fourteen-year-old hipster, was driving us crazy. She spoke in hashtags, dusted glitter over her makeup, wore her long dark hair in a bouncing palm-tree ponytail that burst out of the crown of her head, and she didn’t eat, she juiced. She carried a big jug of thick, dark green slush around that she regularly slurped from, and it was disgusting. We received notifications from her around the clock, and had suffered through numerous #StrikeItRich promotional videos she kept posting on Vine and YouTube, all ridiculous, and all requiring a giddy response from us (#DoUsASolid! #WeighIn! #Comment! #Like! #Share!) Her Pinterest page was nothing but baby hedgehogs, Miley Cyrus, and #StrikeItRich propaganda, and she constantly electronically requested we go look at it. She gave me a pingy headache right between my eyes.

She’s the Social Media director for Strike It Rich and her name is… wait for it… Elspeth Raiffe. Fantasy and I called her Hashtag. Sometimes we called her Hashtag Elspie. When our assignments had come through a few weeks ago—we’d applied for, traipsed around half naked for, and been hired as, Strike It Rich cocktail waitresses—No Hair had overheard us complaining about Hashtag Elspie’s giddiness and I got the lecture again.

“Davis.” No Hair scowled at me. “We’ve been over this and over this. Do not call that girl anything except her given name.”

“Her given name is stupid.”

“Her given name is Elzbath.”

“You don’t even know her name, No Hair.”

I grew up in a town of four hundred, where everybody knows your name. When I’d landed the job at the Bellissimo, I met more people in thirty days than I’d met in the previous thirty years, and keeping up with everyone’s names had been impossible. Easier, for me, was to assign nicknames, and No Hair didn’t like it a bit. We’d reached an agreement, after I accidentally called a high-roller Mrs. Claus (total accident, he’s a really nice man, who looks just like Mrs. Claus) that he would continue to allow me to call him No Hair instead of Jeremy (old habits and such) if I would agree to call everyone else by their real names. He insisted it made communication between us easier if he didn’t have to try to figure out who Cleats and Glows in the Dark were.

Whatever.

“Why are we on cocktail duty, No Hair?” Fantasy had asked. “We’ll run our legs off.”

“Would you rather empty garbage cans?”

Cocktails it is. Although, I didn’t do a very good job of pouring myself a cup of coffee and coming out of it without injuries. This cocktail waitress gig would be a challenge. “Do we get to keep our tips?”

“Davis!” And then another lecture. Yes, we were highly compensated already. Yes, people would line up around the block for our jobs. Yes, Richard Sanders would be very disappointed in my attitude.

Yes.

“Should we tweet Elspie back?” Fantasy asked. “Tell her we’ll be there?”

Before I could say no, our phones binged again.

#WaitressWorkouts! #BellissimoBarre! M-Th 6-8 RT to everyone! No shows ~NO!WAY!~ DM@ElspieBabie #StrikeItRitch #BringIt!

“Shoot me now,” Fantasy said.

It was a little after two in the afternoon. Fantasy and I were enjoying freshly brewed coffee and a few quiet moments in our basement offices. In other words, we were hiding. From @ElspieBabie, Bianca Sanders, and the world at large.

Rumor had it the Gaming Commission would allow the casino to reopen at eight tonight. I sent a car to the Regent to (get my family away from my future mother-in-law) bring my family back to the hotel, and they were half a mile above me in their guest rooms making revised rehearsal-dinner plans and waiting on updated wedding plans, of which, I had none. Baylor and Little Sanders were off playing squash. (Squashing what?) Bianca Sanders was resting comfortably at Jay Leno’s place, surrounded by a three-stuffed-limo delivery of replacement luxuries from boutiques all over the French Quarter, and rumor also had it she’d cleared half the racks at Saks Fifth Avenue on Canal.

“What’s Bellissimo Barre?” Fantasy asked.

“Isn’t it part of the employee fitness thing?”

“I get that,” Fantasy said, “but what’s barre?”

“I think it’s ballet.”

“We’re taking dance lessons?”

Hell if I know. So far, the Strike It Rich learning curve had been steep, and we were at the bottom scrambling our way up.

“Maybe it has something to do with the waitress uniforms,” she said. “Are we in ballet tutus for this gig? Have you looked?”

When the Strike It Rich waitress uniforms we’d suffered through an afternoon of fittings for had arrived—#SCORE! #STRIKEITRICH uniforms IN! Pick up @uniform dist. ASAP! Probs? Need a refit? DM@ElspieBabie!— right in the middle of Dr. Phil, naturally, we sent Baylor to fetch them. They were still in our dressing room.

“Maybe we should look,” I said.

“Go ahead. Bring mine, too.”

The hanging bags weighed nothing, even though the paperwork attached said each contained three uniforms. How could six uniforms weigh less than six marshmallows? I lobbed the bags over the sofa back and unzipped. “There’s nothing here.”

Fantasy peered. “There.” She pointed at a dangling string.

Gold bikinis. Between the two hanging bags, we had six shiny gold bikinis.

*     *     *

To: [email protected]

CC: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Mr. Sanders,

Weeks ago, Mrs. Sanders signed off on a community service project for Thomas’s fall break. It was an asbestos removal project at a homeless shelter/soup kitchen in Methuen, Massachusetts. The school reports a confusing computer glitch, in which Thomas’s name was removed from the roster. They’re looking into it. Thomas met up with a boarding student in Hunt Hall, Quinn Jennings, a senior, whose parents were flying him to the Bellissimo for fall break. Thomas made his own arrangements to accompany him. The Jennings, Missy and Redmond, are from Lickskillet, Alabama, checked in on Wednesday afternoon, and this is their first trip to the Bellissimo, although they’re former Montecito players, so it’s possible that someone formerly with the Montecito knows them. They both qualified for the Strike It Rich Sweepstakes through Google+. I’m in the process of background checks on them, and I’ll let you know ASAP. Mr. Jennings is a farmer, and the wife, Missy, runs a ballroom dance studio in Fort Payne, Alabama. Thomas’s plans include returning to school on the Jennings’ private plane, a Pilatus PC-24 with 214 hours on the engines, spotless record, qualified and dedicated pilots (2), tail numbers 0821MS, next week. Late Wednesday. Classes resume on Thursday morning. I’m striking out on any news regarding the alleged gunfire in the lobby this morning. Security video is inconclusive. It’s probably just a vicious rumor. Let me know if I can be of any further assistance. DW.

Ten minutes later there was a reply.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

David. Set up dinner with the Jennings for me (you) and express my gratitude, etc. Dress appropriately, no commitments.

Two minutes after that, Mr. Sanders weighed in.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Davis, let’s get all we can on the Jennings. Get back with me as soon as you can. I see you were scheduled for a few days off, and I’m hoping with the complications and aftermath of the storm, you can reschedule. Have Baylor keep an eye on Thomas until I can wrench myself away from my desk. Get word to Thomas to be in our suite at 7 for dinner. Security has taken forty eyewitness reports on gunshots in the lobby this morning. Keep digging. We will be pressing charges. RS.