DOUBLE MINT

Praise for the Davis Way Crime Caper Series

DOUBLE STRIKE (#3)

“
Double Strike
is special—funny, unique, and I love Davis.”

– Janet Evanovich

“Delightful and hilarious…this novel shines with its resilient and reliably acerbic
heroine, and the mystery is at its strongest when it highlights and exposes the fascinating
details behind gambling, casinos, and the domination of social media. This is an extremely
fun and entertaining third entry.”

– Kings River Life Magazine

“Fasten your seat belts: Davis Way, the superspy of Southern casino gambling, is back
(after
Double Dip
) for her third wild caper.”

– Publishers Weekly

DOUBLE DIP (#2)

“A smart, snappy writer who hits your funny bone!”

– Janet Evanovich

“Archer’s bright and silly humor makes this a pleasure to read. Fans of Janet Evanovich’s
Stephanie Plum will absolutely adore Davis Way and her many mishaps.”

–
RT Book Reviews

“Slot tournament season at the Bellissimo Resort and Casino in Biloxi, Miss., provides
the backdrop for Archer’s enjoyable sequel to
Double Whammy
...Credible characters and plenty of Gulf Coast local color help make this a winner.”

–
Publishers Weekly

“Snappy, wise cracking, and fast-paced.”

–
New York Journal of Books

“Hilarious, action-packed, with a touch of home-sweet-home and a ton of glitz and
glam. I’m booking my next vacation at the Bellissimo!”

– Susan M. Boyer,

USA Today
Bestselling Author of the Liz Talbot Mystery Series

“Take a gamble and read
Double Dip
! Five stars out of five.”

–
Examiner.com

“Davis and her associates, in particular Fantasy and No Hair, are back in this sophomore
drama by Ms. Archer that does not disappoint in delivering delightfully charming and
amusing adventures from the halls of the Bellissimo.”

–
Dru’s Book Musings

DOUBLE WHAMMY (#1)

“If Scout Finch and Carl Hiaasen had a baby, it would be Davis (Way).
Double Whammy
is filled with humor and fresh, endearing characters. It’s that rarest of books:
a beautifully written page-turner. It’s a winner!”

– Michael Lee West,

Author of
Gone With a Handsomer Man

“Archer navigates a satisfyingly complex plot and injects plenty of humor as she goes.
This madcap debut is a winning hand for fans of Janet Evanovich and Deborah Coonts.”

–
Library Journal

“Fast-paced, snarky action set in a compelling, southern glitz-and-glamour locale.
A loveable, hapless heroine Jane Jameson would be proud to know. Utterly un-put-down-able.”

– Molly Harper,

Author of the Award-Winning Nice Girls Series

Books in the Davis Way Crime Caper Series

by Gretchen Archer

DOUBLE WHAMMY (#1)

DOUBLE DIP (#2)

DOUBLE STRIKE (#3)

DOUBLE MINT (#4)

Copyright

DOUBLE MINT

A Davis Way Crime Caper

Part of the Henery Press Mystery Collection

First Edition

Digital epub edition | July 2015

Henery Press

www.henerypress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Henery Press,
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Copyright © 2015 by Gretchen Archer

Author photograph by Garrett Nudd

Bently photograph by Kenneth Munoz

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real
locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are
the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN-13: 978-1-941962-80-0

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

For Bently

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you Deke Castleman, Claire McKinney, Larissa Acker-man, Cheryl Green, Stephany
Evans, and Kendel Lynn.

One

Jeep USA rewarded the top fifty Jeep dealerships in North America by sending the franchise
owners and their families to Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii, where they spent two glorious
weeks in private villas with names like Kamaole Estates, Hula Paniau, and Wailea Beach.
Sixteen-year-old Kiki Logan, whose father owned the Jeep dealership in Jackson, Mississippi,
hooked up with seventeen-year-old Austin Griffith, whose father owned the Jeep dealership
in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. They lied to their parents in general, but specifically
about sneaking out to meet the other. They hid on a strip of secluded beach beside
a shallow saltwater lagoon and drank spiked Hawaiian Punch for most of the second
week. Fast-forward eight months, and it’s Hele Mai ‘Oe I Ko Maua Male ‘Ana! (We’re
Getting Hitched!) and Hāpai Kaikamahine! (It’s a Girl!) at the Bellissimo Resort and
Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Where I work.

My name is Davis Way Cole. I’m a redhead, a newlywed, and lead investigator on an
undercover team for the casino, which is to say I, along with my partners Fantasy
Erb and Baylor (just Baylor, like Batman) perform workplace duties no sane person
would ever agree to. Tonight’s impossible task? The Hawaiian Jeep wedding.

The families were bitter rivals and sworn enemies from way back who couldn’t agree
on anything, much less a wedding venue, so the wedding was booked on our neutral ground.
Huge wedding. The $100,000 package. It was all so Romeo and Juliet.

The mother of the bride and the mother of the groom raised all kinds of hell in the
weeks leading up to the wedding, which was nothing compared to the fits they pitched
when they checked in and began tearing it up in person. Our special events coordinator,
Holder Darby—mid-fifties, ’80s big hair, wears Birkenstock clogs every single day
of the year—who’d been with the Bellissimo booking, organizing, and being paid very
well for coordinating every wedding, reunion, and conference since 1996, walked off
the job. She didn’t show up for work Wednesday or Thursday, and finally on Friday,
the day of the rehearsal dinner, Human Resources tracked her down. Holder told them
she would never set foot in the Bellissimo again, ever, she’d had it with being bullied,
threatened, and strong-armed, send her last paycheck via the United States Postal
Service, and don’t call back. All because of a Hello Kitty cake.

The wedding parties checked in on Tuesday. Groom’s Mother arrived first. She burst
into Holder Darby’s office to have a word about the bride’s cake. It got ugly, and
Holder had to call security. Groom’s Mother, who housekeeping reported “ate rocks
for breakfast” and was “mean as a snake,” incensed at having been kicked out of Holder’s
office, decided to give it another go. She laid in wait, then followed the wedding
coordinator out of the employee parking garage all the way to her Sunkist Country
Club Road home. Groom’s Mother angled her Jeep Laredo E against the back bumper of
Special Events Coordinator’s Audi S8 sedan, then climbed out of the car, dragged poor
Holder out of hers, and put her in a headlock. She told Holder if she heard the words
“Hello” or “Kitty” one more time in regard to her only son’s wedding, she would take
that cake and shove it so far up Holder, she’d have Hello Kitty coming out her ears
for six months. Holder didn’t even clean out her desk, she just stopped coming to
work.

Until she could be replaced, Holder’s job fell in my lap. Starting with the Hawaiian
wedding. Mission? To keep the Jeep people from killing each other over a Hello Kitty
cake. Here’s how stupid this fight is: The groom’s cake is a towering Minecraft number
garnished with diamond, emerald, and eyeball cupcakes.

The ballroom was split down the middle. The families marked their territories with
two completely different decors, menus, and live entertainment. This marriage was
doomed.

We made it through dinner without incident, the Hello Kitty cake was cut and served
without bloodshed, and it looked like we were home free when the very pregnant bride
propped her swollen feet in a chair and the older Jeep guests began nodding off. It
was the dance bands who started the war. The Groom’s band began playing Van Morrison’s
“Crazy Love” before Bride’s band finished the last few measures of Frank Sinatra’s
“Fly Me to the Moon.” A contractual infraction. The lead singers began arguing from
their respective stages over headset microphones. Ugly things about each other’s questionable
paternity. F-bombs all over the place. In the blink of an eye, twenty musicians were
off those stages and in a pile on the dance floor, fists and bass guitars flying.
Every wedding guest under the age of sixty hit the dance floor and joined in.

Fantasy and I, on opposite sides of the brawl, spoke via earpieces.

“Where’s Baylor?” I asked. “He needs to get in there and break it up.” A man’s shoe
flew in front of my face. Then a bridesmaid’s bouquet.

“Need some help over here, Davis.”

I hopped on a chair and spotted Fantasy across the ballroom. She was wrestling a fire
extinguisher away from a wedding guest who was trying to run out on the dance floor
with it.

Good idea. I pulled my phone from my pocket, hacked the Bellissimo’s building management
control system, and turned on the sprinklers. Five alarm, full blast, make it rain.
The fighting stopped, but the rain didn’t. I managed to turn the sprinklers on and
in the process, drowned my phone, so I couldn’t turn them off.

It took until midnight to get the soggy guests sorted and disposed of. Thirteen were
hauled off to jail, including five from the Top Forty band, two from the Jazzy Lounge
band, and just the one Groom’s Mother. The other guests were sent to their hotel rooms,
with the bride and her family traveling via ambulance to Biloxi Regional Medical Center
where she delivered a seven-pound five-ounce baby girl. The whole time, a cleaning
crew pushed industrial wet-dry vacs through the ballroom. The groom was finally located
in a guest room with a Hello Kitty bridesmaid, dry as a bone.

I didn’t get home until one in the morning, and when I did, I woke up my husband.

“Bradley.” I climbed into the warm bed. “You have to call Holder Darby and make her
come back to work.”

He pulled me into a hug and kissed my forehead. “You have frosting in your hair.”

* * *

The problem wasn’t Hello Kitty; the problem was summer.

Summer, with its fireworks, flip-flops, and SPF fifty, is the least welcome of the
four seasons in casino land. From June through August, it’s a madhouse. Diehard gamblers
stay home and wait it out.

That we’re on the Gulf doesn’t help a bit, because the humidity stays at equator rainforest
sauna levels. You can’t step outside without being attacked by swarms of love bugs,
plus red tide rolls in, unpacks, and gets comfy.

It isn’t any better inside.

For one, the bell just rang, so it’s a playground of hot sticky children and their
hot sticky parents. (“I will wear every last one of you out right here and right now,
I mean it. Shut up and stop hitting each other. Get down from there. I am not playing
around.”) (This is before they even have a room key.) Families are notoriously unprofitable
for casinos, because they spend their vacations chasing themselves up and down the
halls and around the pool, logging at least five hours a day at Plenty, our new buffet,
and standing in line at Lost and Found to pick up the kids they’ve misplaced. They’re
everywhere but in the casino.

Then there are the weddings. Wedding parties spend their time and money at photo shoots,
spa parties, all-day golf and fishing excursions, bridal luncheons, and tux fittings.
Weddings keep the hotel, catering, floral, the salon, all eight bars, and in the case
of the Hello Kitty, local police, fire house, and hospitals busy, but they don’t get
anywhere near the casino.

So Holder Darby, to offset all this unprofitability and keep the marketing people
off her back, spent her winters booking summer conventions. Trade shows. Professionals
Behaving Badly. Holder booked and planned the conferences singlehandedly and in my
three years, there’d never been a bleep on the conference radar. The Bellissimo loved
summer conferences for the warm body and bottom line contributions, and until now,
by all accounts, the Bellissimo had loved Holder Darby. Because if it weren’t for
the Tiki Torch Researchers of New England, Ostrich Farmers United, and Flavored Dental
Floss Reps of America, this place would go flat broke, and all because of summer.
She had the summer packed out with fraternity, family, and Friends of Fleetwood Mac
reunions, twelve conferences, countless weddings, then ran off and left it with me.

* * *

By noon Sunday I’d (shampooed the frosting out of my hair) taken fifteen Holder Darby
calls and put out fifteen Holder Darby fires, including ordering $28,000 in replacement
wedding banquet chairs and tracking down a wayward load of lobster. Is this what she
did on her day off? No wonder she quit.

Half of the people checking in for the next conference didn’t like their rooms. (What’s
not to like? It’s a five-star resort on the beach.) The Massey-Ortiz wedding planner
and her team arrived to prep for next weekend’s nuptials and they weren’t happy about
the soggy reception hall. (I got chewed out in rapid-fire Spanish when I suggested
we move the wedding to the outdoor pavilion. “
¡Los insectos del amor!
”)

The Wagner Family Reunion needed a pediatrician, or four, because half of the Wagner
preschoolers woke up with an odd purple rash on their feet, and the other half had
bacterial swimmer’s ear. (Take them home.) So at one o’clock on my day off, a day
Bradley and I try to spend being married, the only day of the week he doesn’t work
twelve straight hours, I called Holder Darby myself. I didn’t care what it took, we
needed her back.

At three, when she still hadn’t answered, I walked out my front door, hopped into
my car, and drove to her house. My front door is on the twenty-ninth floor of the
Bellissimo. My car is four elevator rides and a long dark walk through a tunnel away.
And driving to Holder’s Sunkist Country Club Road home didn’t do me any good, because
she was gone.

The house, a white brick and stucco Mediterranean with a circular drive and a professionally-decorated
lawn, was pretty. Maybe ten years old, one level, big square windows all across the
front, on a wide lot in a nice quiet neighborhood. I parked in the circle and eyed
the newspapers strewn around the front porch. I marched up three porch steps and rang
the bell. I heard an insane scream coming from inside.

I beat on the door. “Holder! Holder! Are you in there?”

More insane screaming.

I dodged azalea bushes on my way around the house, tried the door that led to the
garage, a car inside, but it was locked. I pushed through a white waist-high gate
to the backyard, nice infinity pool, long and skinny with a stone fountain on one
end, and hopped across round terracotta stepping stones to the back porch. I pounded
on the French doors.

“Holder? Holder!”

I ducked out of sight when I heard the screaming round the corner and head my way.
I peeked. It was a cat. A fat, yellow, flat-faced cat, with a long thick tail, bared
teeth, and terrific lungs. I could see down its throat. I don’t speak cat, but the
cat’s dining room was on Holder’s kitchen counter, a fish-shaped rubber mat, and it
was obvious what the yelling was about. Two silver bowls were tipped over, both empty.
I shook the doorknobs; the cat shrieked.

“Hold on, cat.” I dug in my Super Secret Spy bag—think doctor bag, full of tools I
need for my trade, but much nicer, because Michael Kors made mine. The cat, screaming
bloody murder and racing back and forth against the French doors, was making me nervous.
I dumped out my spy bag on a patio table. From the pile, I grabbed my new gun, a G42,
the brand new .38mm and the smallest Glock pistol ever made, and my Quik-Piks, a set
of universal bump keys. The only doors I can’t get in with my Quik-Piks are cockpit,
White House, and my mother’s. (She’s on to me.) Where did I get this amazing tool?
Amazon.

I wiggled past the lock, stepped into Holder Darby’s kitchen, and the cat began weaving
in, around, and through my legs, still breaking the sound barrier with its asylum
noises. With my eyes and gun everywhere, I inched to what looked like a pantry, reached
in, blindly grabbed a box, then dumped a small hill of cat crunchies on the counter.
The cat hopped up and, thank goodness, shut up. I filled a coffee cup with water from
the kitchen sink and put it beside the crunchies. “Chew your food, cat.” That cat
had absolutely no use for me now that it had food. “You’re welcome,” I whispered.
“Where’s Holder?”

Leaving my shoes in the kitchen, I cleared Holder’s home room by room (nice master
with patio that led to the pool, closet large enough for four QVC-addicted women),
and Holder Darby was not here. Odd lights were on—nightstand, front hall, patio—so
she’d probably left at night. An assortment of prescription bottles were lined up,
smallest to largest, along the bathroom vanity. Wherever she’d gone, she hadn’t packed,
and she had high blood pressure, something I completely understood, because the woman
had the world’s worst job. And she’d left in the middle of a movie. I sat on the first
of three steps that led down to a media room, where a Blu-ray logo swam across the
television screen and a full glass of wine on a small table beside a lounger had been
collecting fruit flies, another fun summer Gulf amenity.

I called my husband. “Bradley. Holder Darby’s gone. Poof. Absolutely gone.”

“Davis, get back here,” he said. “The vault has been robbed.”