Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (22 page)

“What time are you supposed to be there?” George asked.

“Seven.”

“Where is it you need to go before?” He glanced at the clock on the dash. “You having your picture made?” He laughed at his own joke.

“Very funny.” I set the hat aside so I could pick at the ugly pants. “I was thinking we’d get a donut.”

“Come again?” He caught my eye in the rear view mirror.

“A donut, George. A cup of coffee and a donut.”

After a long argument, which I won, I stayed in the car while George’s lazy self went into the Krispy Kreme, doing a brisk business at this ungodly hour, where he stood in line to get me three chocolate-glazed and a bucket of coffee. A neon sign announcing hot donuts cast a blinking red glow on me.

When George returned, he drove a block east to a darkened fast-food restaurant, parked just left of a streetlight, then twisted in his seat so he could either watch me eat, or have another laugh at my expense. When I saw the set of his jaw, though, I knew the fun and games were over.

“You’re not going to like it, George,” I said through thick chocolate.

“I already hate it.”

I explained my theory to him: Bianca Casimiro had made a deal with his son to write backdoor software for a video poker game, Double Whammy Deuces Wild Progressives.

“What kind of backdoor?” George asked.

“Where there’d be a key of sorts, George, where the game could be won at will.”

“And he did this? My son rigged this game?”

“It looks like it.”

I leaned heavily on the fact there was no evidence that led me to believe his son had out-and-out complied, or even profited in any way. It felt more like Morgan had been forced or coerced in some manner. I purposely left out the part about his son banging my boss’s wife.

Afterward, it was so quiet in the car, I could hear the steam coming off my coffee. I had explained my theory as kindly, respectfully, and gently as I possibly could, and this in spite of how George had laughed his ass off at me not fifteen minutes earlier, but his heavy heart sucked all the air out of the car anyway, and I had to crack a window to breathe.

After several moments of silence, I wondered if George had fallen asleep.

Finally, he asked, “What else?”

“She knew how to win it,” I said of Bianca, “but it’s a two-man job, so she lined up pawns.”

“Did she have sex with the pawns, too?” George asked.

So much for sparing him that piece of the story.

“It’s safe to assume so,” I answered. “But two of them are dead, George, so I can’t very well ask.”

“How did they die?”

“Their necks were snapped.”

“Ah,” George said. “Same killer. A large man with a martial arts background. And that means my son’s death wasn’t premeditated.”

I agreed. Killers have their ticks, and this one went for the neck. Breaking a neck left very little in the way of evidence. Whoever did this hadn’t thought out his first kill, or he wouldn’t have made such a mess. He cleaned up his act before the next two victims met their maker. “I’m sure you’re right, George.” Unbelievably, the coffee still hadn’t cooled enough to drink, but that didn’t keep me from trying, and I got a scorched tongue for my efforts.

“I can think of two who might fit the bill,” he said, “those big guys you work with. Got a pick between ’em?”

“I honestly don’t know, George. I don’t want to stick my foot out and trip the bald one, unlike the other one,” I said, “the one with the big teeth. Every time I’m in the same room with him, I want to poke his eye out with a fork, but I’ve got nothing on either of them.”

“Have you looked?”

“Briefly.” Well, my father looked briefly. “I probably should nose around.”

“Good idea,” George said. “Rifle through their desks.”

Their offices scared me.
They
scared me.

“George?”

“Hmm?”

“You know how sometimes you really don’t know who has the hate?”

I beat down the evil that jumped in my throat, and I’m sure George was doing the same. In a very practiced process, I crawled up from the dark place so I could keep going, and I’m sure George was clawing his way back, too. We had a secret, me and George: the only way to keep going—left foot, right foot, inhale, exhale—was to know that you were here to stop it from happening to someone else. If you give up, you leave a hole. Then someone falls in it.

“They’ve got another shill in there now,” I choked out, “who won, and yet he’s still alive,” I said. “At least so far. I don’t know what’s coming, George. I guess he’s next if someone doesn’t stop them.”

“Your ex,” George said.

My mouth dropped open. “Who? What?”

He started the car. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”

The new day finished dawning as we drove to the Bellissimo in silence, other than the music of me slurping coffee.

When we arrived, he turned to me. “Morgan fixed the machines so they’d pay out,” he said. “What did the other guys do?”

“They were electricians.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s right on the Internet, in their obituaries.”

“What do you think that has to do with it? Surely it’s not a coincidence.”

“I think they knew how to cause the machines to lose power for a split second,” I said, “long enough to reset. Somehow, they caused a power surge, which seems to be the trigger,” I explained. “All three times the jackpot has hit, it’s been within an hour of a power flash, and there’s been an electrician there every time.”

“How in the world,” his black eyes bore into mine, “do you mess with the power in a casino?”

They didn’t mess with all the power, just the one bank of machines, but now wasn’t the time for details, or I’d be late for my meeting. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m about to find out.”

Fifteen minutes later, a very large man dressed just like me pushed through double doors to the reception room, where I waited alone. “Sandy?” he glanced between a clipboard and me.

I looked around for Sandy, too. Then I jumped up and shot out my hand. “That’s me,” I said. “Sandy McCormick.”

“You’re from accounting? Going to take a look around?”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” he tipped his hard hat. “Welcome to Electrical Engineering. Follow me and I’ll give you the ten-cent tour.”

*    *    *

I trailed behind him into another world, a scary world. Every piece of equipment I could see was the size of a school bus. Half of them were on end, rising two stories into the air. Catwalks were built above everything, and scores of people dressed in the navy blue Dickies attire crawled all over the place. Wide walkways between the machines were marked by red-painted paths, and emergency cut-off switches were scattered along the walls. The noise alone would knock you down. My companion decided to add to it by screaming at me.

“On any given day, the Bellissimo load requirement is thirty-five megawatts, but we’re built out to fifty-five. That’s enough for a whole city. Hell,” he laughed, “we
are
a whole city. Now over here, we’ve got thirteen-point-two kilovolt feeders coming in off three different substations. You see those?”

I followed his hand and nodded, but I had no idea what I was looking for, and he might as well have been speaking Russian.

“We’ve got six steel rooms here that are bolted together,” he yelled. “This is just the first, the largest, and built on exterior walls for the head room. Follow me and we’ll go downstairs and take a look at the conduit.”

I trudged along, hoping a conduit wasn’t a large animal. As promised, we took a look at the miles of conduit—not animal at all—and every navy blue Dickied electrician took a look at me. From there we walked a mile through a tunnel before climbing eerily silent steps. He swiped a card that hung on a chain from his neck, and glass doors slid open to allow us entry into the noise again.

“Do you know where you are?” he yelled.

“I don’t have a clue,” I yelled back.

“You’re two levels below the casino. The vault is above us, over there.” He pointed. “And the main banking center is over there.” He swung his arm in the opposite direction, clearing my hard hat by a mile.

This room, as large as a theatre, without a splinter of natural light, had rectangular metal silver cabinets, each the size of a one-car garage, spaced along the walls with six huddled together in the middle of the concrete floor. I didn’t count, but there had to be more than thirty altogether. Coming out of the cabinets were thousands of colorful ropes of wire that climbed up the walls and steel poles like rainbow vines, disappearing into the ceiling. The fronts of the metal boxes had blinking panels. I’d be afraid to even guess how many million lights were blinking in that room, just like I’d be afraid to guess how many million grains of sand were on a stretch of beach. If I really did work in accounting, I would go back and suggest this department’s pay be doubled because of the sensory overload alone. As my eyes began to adjust, my guide started up with his electric mumbo-jumbo again.

“Every switch in here is on a single feeder with emergency generator backup. It all leads to a threesome.”

Finally, a term I was familiar with.

“We’re on thirteen breakers in this room, each on a twenty-five kilovolt automatic transfer. Every outgoing feeder ties straight into one of the main sources, and they’re all connected to each other. So if we have an outage here,” he pointed to one of the garages, “its neighbor,” he pointed to another, “picks it up.”

“How often does that happen?” I asked as I looked around the room. “An outage.”

“We shoot for never,” he said, “but you know the old saying, shit happens?”

“Sure.”

“Well, shit happens here, too. Everything’s color coded,” he yelled. “If it’s blue, it’s a light fixture, and as you can see, we’ve got a ton of lights. It might be something as innocent as a light bulb blowing in one overhead that throws the switch.”

We stepped over to a thick bundle of multi-colored cables coming out of a steel box that I couldn’t have wrapped my arms around.

He picked out a blue cable with the tip of a finger. “If this guy blows,” his finger inched over, “this guy picks him up. And the panel lets us know the fixture’s on backup, then we repair the central. The only thing that happens upstairs is a blink. The backup system kicks in immediately.”

“Does that work for slot machines, too?”

“Slot machines are the green cables,” he said. “And they don’t necessarily work like a light fixture, or say an oven in one of the restaurants. They’re piggybacked,” he looked at me, “backed up twice,” he explained. “Because if they go down, it has to be reported to the Gaming Commission.”

That pesky gaming board again.

“But it happens,” he said. “We had an incident a couple of months ago where a lady somehow dropped a tiny earring, not any bigger than a minute, on the bill feeder, then sent a five-dollar bill through that caught the earring, and a whole bank of machines went black.”

“Really?” I couldn’t see Eddie Crawford wearing earrings.

“There was liquor involved.”

“There would be,” I said. “What happened?”

“Backup kicked in,” he said. “The other slot machines tied in with the one that went down barely blinked, they didn’t even stay down long enough to lose data. The players kept on playing while maintenance dug the fried earring out of the downed machine and the casino people did a week’s worth of paperwork over a little gold hoop.” He glanced at his wristwatch, then at the next door.

“Wait,” I grabbed for his arm. “Can a player unplug a slot machine, then plug it back in?”

He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Hell, no. Ninety-eight percent of the machines have outlets underneath, through the cabinets and into the floor. I think someone would notice a player moving a machine and a cabinet to get to the outlet.”

“What about the other two percent?”

He adjusted his hat. “Sometimes on the progressives, you’ve got an exposed floor switch tying the marquee to the bank of machines, but it’s not like a light switch, clearly marked off and on. It’s a recessed floor button no bigger than a pencil eraser. A player wouldn’t know what to look for. There isn’t
anyone
out there who’d know what to look for unless they were the one who’d installed it.”

Oh, hallelujah.

“Now follow me through here,” he said, “and I’ll show you our babies.”

“Babies?” I had to break into a run to keep up with him.

“We have our own fuel cells,” he yelled over his shoulder. “They feed right into the central boiler room. Watch out,” he swiped his card again, “it’s hot in here.”

*    *    *

“Same time tomorrow?” George asked me.

“No.” I pulled off the hardhat and the black wig came with it. I used all ten digits to knead my head. George watched me in the mirror out of the corner of his eye, and he looked just this side of frightened. I looked, I’m sure, better than I felt.

The guided tour had lasted several more miles, then I had to sit in a glass-walled office and flip through hundreds of pages of overtime sheets as if I cared what was on them. Every once in a while, I’d jot a note. Mostly
Davis loves Bradley
. Nervous electrical engineers who didn’t want to lose their overtime pay filed by regularly, smiling if they caught my eye. I went to the kitchenette twice for coffee, and got hit on by electricians both times. I wasn’t going there again. No way.

My tour guide, whose name I finally caught after we reached the offices and everyone we walked past gave him a back-pat and a shout-out, Dale Boy, poked his head in the door at noon.

“I’m outta here, young lady.”

“Thanks for your time, Dale Boy.”

He looked offended. “It’s just Dale.”

“Dale.”

And finally, at three, I closed up shop. I cut through the second level of the employee parking garage to get to the other side of the state of Mississippi where George was, and fell into the backseat. “Take me home, George.” I leaned my head back and kept my eyes closed until the car stopped.

“What’d they do to you?” George asked. “Beat you up?”