Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (5 page)

Why would someone want to end
me
?

There wasn’t even a remote possibility that Eddie Crawford set this up. Eddie Crawford couldn’t set up breakfast. That meant it was either a nightmare of a coincidence (I don’t even
believe
in coincidence) or someone here was playing me.

Best, all things considered, to never know.

So much for my new start on life. I could find another job playing dress up and casino games (luxury accommodations included), that passed out cash and was on the beach.

In about a million years.

*    *    *

After some liquid courage from the Five Star mini bar, I decided Natalie wasn’t going to call and the best thing to do was leave. She’d figure it out. During this decision-making process, though, I accidentally took a little nap. I napped through the night, and I’d have probably napped until noon if bells and alarms hadn’t started blaring like demented electronic roosters. The sirens were coming at me from all directions: the phones in my purse, the bathroom, the desk, and beside the bed.

Dammit.

I batted for the closest one.

“Davis, be in my office in an hour.”

I protested vehemently, but only after Natalie hung up. It was then that I remembered the previous day’s events and the fact that I’d quit my new job.

I reached up and gently examined my head to see if it might have railroad spikes embedded in it. I tried to recall the events of the previous evening, and the only thing that stood out was the mini bar. I looked around without moving my head and managed to locate the fridge.

Yep. Wide open and empty.

I lobbed one limb at a time off the bed and didn’t get anywhere near upright when I attempted to stand. It was all I could do to walk across the floor because it was a landmine of teeny bottles. I drank three gallons of water straight from the tap, then washed down a Migraine Unlimited with a fourth.

*    *    *

Natalie Middleton’s office always smelled like there were a dozen roses in it, but today wasn’t my day, so it almost knocked me down. She dropped her sexy glasses in the middle of her desk, sat back, crossed her arms, and waited for me to sit.

I glanced at Mr. Sanders’ closed door.

“He’s in Dubai.”

Do what?

“How are you this morning, Davis?”

I gave her the blankest of blank looks. “Did you not get my note?”

“I did.” She waved it. “Did you not get a copy of the employment agreement you signed?”

The telephone book.

“You agreed to work here for a minimum of ninety days or reimburse us the cost of hiring you. So your choices are to write me a check or fulfill your commitment.” She crushed my resignation letter into a gumdrop-sized ball. “Up to you, Davis.”

Oh, dear.

“It’s a simple breach of contract,” she explained, “just as lying on your application, withholding pertinent information, or misrepresenting yourself during any of your interviews would be breach of contract.”

Oh, double dear.

“How much money are we talking about?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Natalie pushed the resignation gumdrop around. “Somewhere in the small-car range.”

“It cost a small car to hire me?”

“Your background checks took an unusual amount of resources, Davis.”

I see.

“I asked you to play the game, learn it, and tell me how it’s won,” she said. “You walked off the job just before the jackpot hit.”

Did she stare at the casino cameras all day long?

“If you think someone’s stealing the jackpot,” I suggested, “can’t you just arrest him?”

“Him?”

“Or her! Or it!”

“No, Davis.” Natalie sat back. “We can’t just arrest
him
for winning. I want to know
how
he wins it. That was your assignment.”

“Can’t you ask the man with the big teeth?” I was trying to come up with Teeth’s name. I grabbed for my phone and pulled up the contact list. “Jeremy?”

“Jeremy?”

“Is he the bald-headed one?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then the other one,” I said. “The one with the really white teeth.”

“Paul,” Natalie supplied.

“Right.” Amundo.

“Why would I ask Paul?”

Something in the tone of her voice let me know we’d changed lanes. I had no idea why, nor did I want to know. “I thought I saw him,” I said.

Natalie’s fingers tapped out a tune on her desk. “He works here, Davis. You’ll see both Paul and Jeremy often.” She rose, poured two cups of coffee, then returned.

I thanked her, then burned my mouth.

“I’ll give you the chance to make this right in a few weeks, Davis. The jackpot will climb back up, then you can try again.” She picked up the paper ball that was my resignation, then let it drop on her desk. “And I’m going to ignore this.” She leaned in, taking me into her confidence. She spoke slowly. “I don’t know if you saw a
ghost
, or if someone offended you, or if you simply don’t like the food here.”

“Oh, I love the food.”

“Good to know, Davis.” She rolled her eyes a little bit. “Good.” She sat back and crossed her arms again. “You’re welcome to go if you want to.” She gave the door a nod, “but you’ve made a ninety-day commitment, and I’ll need a check from you before you leave.”

I was brokity-broke-broke-broke. And then some.

“I went to bat for you, Davis.”

I saw a little mean streak in her who I hadn’t met before.

“And I don’t want to talk to Mr. Sanders and have him ask me how it’s going with you, then have to tell him
this
.” She tapped the resignation ball.

I slinked around in the chair.

She passed me a teal-blue canvas duffel with caramel leather trim. “Take the weekend, Davis, and be back here Monday morning at eight. Your assignment won’t be in the casino.”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say, but opened my mouth and spoke anyway. Mostly vowels.

“That’ll be all, Davis.”

*    *    *

Welcome to Pine Apple, Alabama. Population 447.

We thought of ourselves as larger, counting all the populace and some of the livestock just past the city limits signs as city-dwellers too, but the fact remains: Pine Apple is too small for me to sneak home and my mother not know. There are twenty miles of AL-10 to cover between I-65 (civilization) and Pine Apple (back, back woods), and I promise you, my mother’s phone rang every other mile marker. “Davis just zipped by here, Caroline.”

At every family gathering a story is referenced. Somehow, someway, at some point, someone sneaks it in. My mother, a maverick of her day, went to college. She swapped her mortarboard for a white veil and married my father the afternoon of the same day she graduated. Here’s where the bottom dropped out for Caroline Annette Davis Way: She immediately became pregnant with me.

The obstetrician asked her if she wanted to hold her baby. “No,” she said. “Give her to her father.”

Daddy and I have been inseparable ever since. I worship the ground he walks on, meanwhile my hair stands on end at the very thought of Mother.

One lazy Alabama afternoon when my sister Meredith was pregnant with her daughter, Riley, I sat at one end of the porch swing with Meredith, propped on pillows and stretched across, resting her swollen feet in my lap. We were drinking the kind of lemonade that’s nine parts sugar and one part lemon, swatting flies and praying for her labor to begin. Meredith was tracing beach-ball circles on her distorted abdomen. “What if we’re like you and Mother, Davis? What if the baby and I just don’t
like
each other?”

*    *    *

I drove straight to the police station.

“There’s my girl!”

I collapsed into my safe place without speaking. My safe place wrapped his arms around me.

“Where the heck have you been, Sweet Pea?”

“Daddy,” I took the perp seat beside his desk, “I got a job.” I think.

“It’s a good thing, too, because your landlord’s threatening to evict you.”

“Mother’s so full of hot air,” I said, dropping my purse to the concrete floor.

“Oh, now,” my father said.

“If she evicts me, she’ll have to move all my stuff back home.”

“She claims she’s going to have the Goodwill pick it up.”

“Isn’t the property in your name too, Daddy? Can’t you control your own wife?”

“I’m much better at controlling her than I am you.”

“Oh, Daddy.” I took a swat at him. “Hey, has anyone been nosing around about me?”

“Let me get us a cup of coffee,” he said, “then we’ll talk.”

It made the back of my knees cave in to see my father aging. When I was ten, there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. I walked to the station after school every day. “I can’t run this place without you, Deputy.” My part-time job responsibilities included making yards of paper-clip necklaces, Wanted Dead or Alive posters, and snack duty—graham crackers and milk or Fritos and Dr. Pepper. One day, something catching his eye, he turned to me, “I’ll be right back, Punkin. Stay put.” He’d spotted elusive Old Man Brinkley slinking out of the hardware store. Daddy hollered for him; Old Man Brinkley made a run for it; my father took chase, running up and over a parked car in a single leap, as if it he’d jumped a fire hydrant.

When I was seven years old, I watched him cut down, chop, and stack the logs of a giant sugar gum tree in our backyard, singlehandedly, in one day. Mer and I were shoulder-to-shoulder at the kitchen window from sunup till sundown, Daddy throwing us waves and winks and giving us the signal that yes, now, bring him a glass of iced tea, as the tree that had shaded our childhood surrendered to our father. “Watch this, girls!” he hollered. He stood back, the sun beating down on his slick chest, and blew with the same force it takes to blow out candles on a birthday cake. The tree went down with a scream and a crash that shook the floor under our feet. “Daddy’s so strong,” Meredith panted. “The strongest,” I agreed.

Once he snuck into our room in the dead of night, crouched between us, and whispered, “Come on, girls, it’s Sissy’s time.” We watched our father, the man who blew down trees and leapt cars, deliver a litter of pups with such tenderness and care that it made the momentous event more about him than the warm new puppies. Neither I, nor Meredith, nor Sissy, could take our eyes off him. He held three of those pups in his one hand.

My daddy could snap his fingers and we would come running. He chastened us when he needed to with a cut of his eyes, and it felt like a sword slicing through. And this man, who I truly believe hung the moon in the sky, now rose from his chair with an unconscious groan and took his seat again, placing a hot cup of coffee in front of me with a deep sigh.

“Oh, these old bones,” he said.

“I love you, Daddy.”

He smiled, and the gullies around his eyes deepened. “So what have you gotten yourself into, young lady?”

I squirmed, wondering what I could and what I should say. “It’s security work.”

“That much I gathered.”

“With one of the casinos in Mississippi.”

“In Biloxi,” he said.

Meredith ratted me out.

“Don’t blame your sister.”

Daddy read my mind.

“Blame Blanche.”

Someone needed to go down for this. Might as well be Blanche, one of Pine Apple’s two bank tellers.

“She called several weeks ago because your debit card was being swiped in Biloxi, and since then, by my count, you’ve been there seven more times.” He crossed his arms and leaned back. “I’m relieved to hear you say this is about a job, and not about Eddie.” He smiled. “Congratulations.”

World’s Greatest Father.

“Now, what can I do to help, Davis?”

Universe’s Greatest Father.

*    *    *

On Sunday, I went through my apartment dumping out everything—closets, drawers, and cabinets—and attempted to put it back in a more orderly fashion. I didn’t intend to give up my apartment just yet, but should Mother make good on her threat to give away my worldly possessions just because my rent was a few dozen months in arrears, I could have Meredith intervene. It would be easier for my sister if she didn’t have to decide what to do with the baton collection left over from my high school fire-twirling days. Anything that in any way reminded me of my marriage went into black lawn-and-garden bags.

It was time.

Throwing away stack after stack of four-year-old magazines, restraining orders (so unnecessary), and eviction notices (from my own mother) gives one time to think. In the light of the sober day, it occurred to me that Natalie Middleton hadn’t asked me to tell her
who
won the Double Whammy game at all; she wanted to know
how
it was won. I had eighty-something work days to figure out
how
the game was won and avoid Eddie the Ass while I was at it. The farther I went down the I-screwed-up road, the hotter my face felt. Natalie Middleton must think I’m half crazy. I blamed it on the clock: gambling round the clock, liquor round the clock, and clocks in general, because time heals all divorces, and I was tired of waiting on it.

The clock struck three when I hoisted the last garbage bag from my old life in the big blue dumpster, and with it, I mentally wiped my new-job slate clean. I’d show Natalie Middleton I could be trusted to stay on my rocker, I was grateful to her for giving me a second chance, and I couldn’t wait to check back into my hotel room. The Bellissimo was a big place and Eddie Crawford didn’t know Marci Dunlow. He wouldn’t know it was me if I walked up and slapped him. I turned to see Daddy’s patrol car winding down the long drive.

We sat at the kitchen table, a football game on television providing background music.

“I wish I had something to offer you, Daddy, but tap water’s it.”

“I’m fine.”

“There’s no reason for me to fill this place up with groceries.” I gestured wide. “I’m leaving for Biloxi in a couple of hours.”

“About that,” my father said, then landed a case file between us.

It turns out that Richard Sanders, President and CEO of the Bellissimo Resort and Casino, began his career at the age of sixteen as a part-time bellman at Glitz, a 4,500-room hotel and casino on the Las Vegas Strip. He remained employed at the Glitz through college, then UNLV’s graduate program. A few years down the road, he was the casino manager, and engaged to marry the owner’s youngest, Bianca Casimiro. Fifteen additional years brought us to today. The Sanders had one child, Thomas, the Xbox gamer who was twice my size. The move to Biloxi happened seven years ago, the same month I was trotting down the aisle for the second time, when the Casimiros, already the owners of eight resorts in Las Vegas proper and two in New Jersey, acquired additional properties in Indiana, Louisiana, and Mississippi, in cash deals.