Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (30 page)

“I didn’t shoot him.”

“Of course not, honey.”

Right. Everyone in prison was innocent.

“No, seriously,” Fantasy said, “you seem harmless, and I’m not just saying that because you’re two feet tall. Believe me, honey, I know the difference.”

She looked like she was about to stroll away, and I had to keep her here, if for nothing else, just civil conversation. “How long have you worked here?”

“Too long,” she said. “I’ve climbed up the pay ladder to the point of being stuck. I can’t go anywhere else and make this money,” she said. “And I’ve got a kid with bone-plate problems that would be a pre-existing anywhere else. So here I am,” she said. “Stuck.”

I knew exactly how she felt.

She locked a laser beam on me. “And I won’t do anything that might get me unstuck.”

I got it—boundaries. Or in this case, bars. So instead of asking her to pass me her Sig Sauer P238, I asked about my father. I’d see her again before Bradley Cole would cut through the solitary-confinement red tape.

I couldn’t sleep that night, waiting for Fantasy’s shift to start.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” she said. “My boys had homework coming out their ears last night, and the only thing I can tell you is that there isn’t anything bad on the Internet. The only story I could find says what you already know: He had a heart attack and a triple bypass.”

*    *    *

Thanks to Fantasy, I began eating again.

“Girl, tell them you’re diabetic.”

“But I’m not,” I said.

“So? Everyone in here lies out their ass. Tell them you are, and until your next physical when they find out you aren’t, which could be when pigs fly, you’ll get fresh fruits and vegetables,” she explained, “instead of Mystery Casserole.”

From that day on, I had a banana, a small container of fat-free peanut butter, and a slice of wheat toast for breakfast. My second meal was almost always tomato soup, five stale crackers, and an apple or an orange. Starvation problem solved, and more than that, she snuck me food.

“Up and at ’em, Doe. Inspection.”

She came in, flipped my mattress, pretended to frisk me, shined a light down the sink drain and in every corner, and when she left I had a glorious cornbread muffin, warm, swimming in butter, and a Dr. Pepper over crushed ice. I almost cried.

She snuck me to the shower, too, and even allowed me a small slice of privacy, in the room with me, but with her back turned. I was allowed two showers a week; she got me out of there every day. “What are you doing scratching that head, Doe? Get up. We’re going to the showers.”

She brought me a second set of prison digs, and a between the cotton top and drawstring pants was a zipped plastic bag, sandwich size, with a tablespoon of thick liquid green stuff in it. “Wash the one you’re wearing in the sink,” she said, “then spread it out under your mattress to dry.”

When I wasn’t eating, showering, worrying about my father, or planning my jailbreak, I was thinking about Bradley Cole.

My history with men was pathetic. The stuff of nightmares. Four years passed between my life-altering encounter with Mr. World Cultures Teacher and the next time I worked up the nerve. When I did it was a three-night stand, and as everyone knows, those don’t even count. Then another year passed before I dated a biology major, Geoff, for six boring months, immediately followed by a two-night stand (again, doesn’t count) with the coxswain on the UAB rowing team (he smelled funny), then the long, tumultuous decade of debauchery with (do I have to say it aloud?) Eddie the Ass. That’s it. Sum total. None of which had prepared me for Bradley Cole. Just like all the photographs hadn’t prepared me for the 3-D version.

For example, his hair wasn’t dark blond, like in the pictures. Bradley Cole’s hair was gold. Fourteen subtle shades of gold, including sunshine, candlelight, and honey. It was neat, short, very lawyerly, and looked soft. His green eyes weren’t just green; they were green flecked with gold, and they like the rest of Bradley Cole: warm, engaging, and brilliant. The man glowed. (Maybe that was me glowing.) Past all the glow, he was five-foot ten, maybe eleven, with an athletic body, the tapering kind, that said baseball. (Bradley Cole’s body said Varsity Pitcher Throws Perfect Game No-Hitter Shutout in State Championship.)

I couldn’t stop thinking about his hands.

Sadly, my only true point of reference was Eddie the Ass. He was the physical man-bar in my life, and, admittedly, he was pretty. Bradley Cole wasn’t pretty—he was all the way
handsome.
It took days for me to figure out what was missing in Bradley Cole. Eddie the Ass had
something
Bradley Cole didn’t. I finally put my finger on it: the Sleaze Factor.

*    *    *

Day six of solitary confinement dawned to the music of Fantasy rolling a cart down the hall. I sat up, feeling the metal supports beneath the wafer-thin pad pretending it was a mattress, to see, first thing in the morning, the not-Fantasy guard, Jerry. “You got a package from your attorney, Doe.”

My bare feet hit the cold floor.

I have an attorney?

A shock of blonde hair fell into my face, while it all registered. I
am
a blonde, I am in prison, and this guy is in charge of me. And more than that, the glowing Bradley Cole
is
an attorney.

Jerry used a handheld device, trained a beam, and the opening in the gate that made up the fourth wall of my cell slid open, at the same time a rubber support protruded, the exact shape of the food trays, but this time instead of a bowl of soup, Jerry tossed in books. One slid into the floor, and seeing what I could attach to as a personal possession, I dove for it.

One afternoon I’d stretched out on the bed and taken mental inventory of all my stuff, both in Biloxi and at home. It was a crazy long list of things I owned, everything from an antique typewriter I’d swiped from Meredith’s shop, a Dutch Doll quilt Grandmother Way had hand-stitched, to Burberry rain boots I’d only worn once. In here, I was cut off from it all, both things that mattered and things that didn’t, and the three books being
mine
, I certainly didn’t want anything to happen to them.

From my knees, clutching the fallen book to my chest, I looked up for Jerry to thank him, but he’d closed the opening in the door and was gone, back to the desk chair he used as a La-Z-Boy.

I spread them out and sat on the cold floor with them. I picked them up, one by one, hugging them, inhaling them, then running my fingers over all the surfaces. I turned each one over, gently shook them, and of course nothing fell out. I lined them up by size.

The smallest was
Sit Still and Wait for It
, by Sasha Jones. I could have fit it in my back pocket had I had one. The next was a previously well-loved paperback romance,
The Missing Secretary
, by Lilly Jasmine. Lastly, largest, and the bestseller as far as I was concerned,
A Bypass Surgery Survivor’s Guide to a Long and Healthy Life
, by P. Derrick Ameston.

I didn’t wake up screaming that night.

TWENTY-ONE

Bradley Cole had warned me that he wouldn’t be back until he had news, but he’d failed to warn me that with hope, which he’d given me, it would be a long wait.

Receiving the best news ever, that my father was recovering, didn’t provide the relief I thought it would. Initially, of course, it did; I cried, danced, laughed, and relived every moment of my childhood. I fell to my knees and assured God I’d keep all the prison promises I’d made, and after an entire day of that, I collapsed in relief. The biggest relief? No more endless hours of imaging my father without life or my life without my father.

But I had to fill the hours with something, and as they dragged on, his healing actually served to make my situation worse: I had to get out of here and get to Daddy before someone else did. I had to get out of here before Daddy put two and two together and came up with trouble. I had to dig myself out before Daddy was forced to. If my father learned of my predicament, he’d have a heart attack.

I got that Bradley Cole wanted me to
Sit Still and Wait for It
. Regardless, after another day, I began pacing my four-by-six cell, and read
The Missing Secretary
twice, the good parts more times than that.

I replayed the twenty-eight minutes with Bradley a million times, picking it to pieces, and tried to make sense of the book titles. Where in the world was Natalie? I used Fantasy as a sounding board when she had time, but she was more interested in the Bradley Cole angle than anything else. “Girl,” Fantasy said. “You’ve got it bad for him.”

“He is pretty wonderful.” I looked at her. “And I miss his clothes.”

The rock through the window had to have been George, and the accompanying message asked more questions than it answered. The note around the rock had three words, written in block letters, and underlined twice: IT WASN’T HER.

It wasn’t her? Her who? Bianca?

“Why would he throw a rock through my window?” Bradley had asked.

“So he wouldn’t be recorded by the condo’s security cameras,” I answered. “George’s story is a long one, and he operates completely under the radar.”

“He’s the cab driver who parks at the VIP entrance, right?” Bradley asked. “Where the shooting took place?”

I nodded.

“Then he saw the whole thing. All we have to do is track him down.”

“No,” I shook my head. “He only knows who it wasn’t. If he knew who it was, he’d have said.”

“I’ll find him.” Bradley promised.

“That will never happen,” I said. “George is so long gone it’s as if he was never even here.”

The note under the door had been from No Hair. Bradley paraphrased it for me: No Hair said this was my own fault for snooping around in his desk. While he knew of my predicament, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it, seeing as how I’d left a trail.

“The note said you left your
hair
in his office and that she walked right to it. He doesn’t say who ‘she’ is or what ‘it’ is. Do you know, Davis,” Bradley asked, “who ‘she’ is, what it means by ‘you left your hair,’ or how you left a trail?”

I couldn’t answer because my life was flashing before my eyes.

“The note said he was with Richard Sanders.” Bradley’s voice was far away. “But it didn’t say where.”

I couldn’t respond because the world’s worst news was sinking in.

“Davis?” Bradley waved a hand in my face. “Can you fill me in?”

“Sorry,” I shook the cobwebs out. “George is saying Bianca didn’t shoot her husband, and No Hair’s saying I forgot my wig, and my prints are on the gun.”

Bradley Cole could not  have been more confused. “No
what
?” he asked. “No
hair
, did you say? I’m very confused on the
hair
issue.”

I couldn’t explain because I was too busy thinking about lethal injections.

“What gun, Davis? You shot a gun that day? Your prints are on
what
gun?”

“Doe!” A guard interrupted. “Time’s up.”

Bradley Cole reached out and placed his strong, warm hands on top of my cold shaky ones. The room spun around me at his touch.

“Don’t worry,” he’d said. “I’ll dig into this. Don’t worry, Davis.”

Seven ridiculously long days and nights had passed since that meeting, with no word from him other than the books. There were times I wondered if I’d dreamed it.

“Stop fretting,” Fantasy advised. “He’ll be back.”

She’d no sooner finished repeating the comforting words to me on my eighth day of solitary confinement when the intercom in my room squealed. “Doe. Your lawyer’s here. Transport in ten.”

“See?” Fantasy asked. “I told you.”

*    *    *

Now that he was my attorney of record, I could meet with him anytime, and we didn’t have to do it in the crowded visitation room, although honestly, I’d have done it with him anywhere: crowd, no crowd, judges, videographers, zoo animals, I didn’t care.

We were allowed thirty minutes in a private room: all glass walls, guards on every corner, and speakers that could be turned on should the penal system think I was spouting off geographical coordinates to all the bodies I’d buried.

Bradley could bring his brief case, any documents related to my defense, and his cell phone, although no signals got in or out of the bunker. He had to leave his keys, weapons, and any street drugs for resale he was sneaking to me at the door.

Today he was wearing a white button-down oxford shirt under a navy blue knit sweater and khaki pants. His shoes were the Italian loafers that at last sighting were on his closet floor tucked between my (Meredith’s) Tory Burch peep-toes and Michael Kors black clogs.

I was wearing blue prison scrubs.

Honestly, we gooed at each other for the first little bit like he was there to pick me up for the prom. I wondered if I might be imagining it. Maybe it was just me doing all the gooing.

“How are you holding up, Davis?”

I nodded, smiling. “I’m better,” I said. “Better.”

“You got the books,” he said.

“I did. I love them all. Although there’s not much to
Sit Still and Wait for It
,” I said. “Dull stuff.”

He laughed. “I didn’t read it. But if you’ll write me a little review, I’ll post it on the Internet for you.”

Things got real serious real quick. “So he’s okay?”

Bradley’s voice was soft. “He’s fine, Davis. He’s doing fine. He’s making a great recovery.”

I squeezed my eyes closed, swallowed hard, and tried not to blubber.

“I picked up the phone to call a dozen times,” he said, “and couldn’t figure out what to say. So I got in the car and drove to scenic Pine Apple, Alabama.”

He reached for his cell phone, pushed buttons, and passed it to me. Our hands touched, and a guard banged on the window with his baton.

I scrolled through the underwater photos, underwater because I began crying as soon as I saw the first image of my father, dressed in gray wool pants and a pale yellow V-neck sweater that hung on him like he was a wire hanger, strolling the rows of Mother’s winter garden beside my parents’ house, my mother and sister at his elbows, my niece apparently running circles around them.