Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (25 page)

Me:
Yes, go.

Eddie the Ass: “He said the key was here and it’s not.”

I stared at the key under the tape just inches from my nose.

Bianca: “Let me walk you through this, Edward.”

Me:
Edward
?

Bianca: “The drawer isn’t locked. If the drawer isn’t locked, we don’t need a key. Nothing’s here.”

Eddie the Genius, after a pause to process: “Oh.”

Me:
Yeah, Bianca, get used to that.

Everything went pitch black as the door to Teeth’s office slammed shut. I jumped and hit my head
again
.

Bianca: “There it is again.”

Edward the Ass: “What?”

Me:
Nothing. Get out of here.

The exterior door opened, then closed, effectively plunging me back into total, and thankfully solitary, silent darkness.

For several hours, which might have actually been several minutes, I did nothing but sit there and pant, hand over heart to keep it in my chest. I was just about to calm down when the phone in my purse buzzed again sending shock waves back through me. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe, and I wondered how many years of my life had been frightened away from me.

I reached up and pulled off the wig and let out the breath I’d been holding, still under the desk in the dark. I freed the key from beneath the tape, then crawled out, banging my head on the way up just like on the way down.

What now? I rubbed my head, and sank into No Hair’s chair.

I placed the key on the desk. I dug in my purse and located my own keys, then used the penlight take a look at what all I’d managed to leave Bradley’s place with. I had my Marci Dunlow a.k.a. Bianca Sanders twin identification, my super-secret cell phone, and nine dollars. The three calls I’d missed were from home: the station (my dad), home (my mother), and the Front Porch (Meredith). I knew what this was—a family feud—and it would have to wait.

I poked on the keypad that granted me entry into No Hair’s desk again. With a stab of guilt, I tossed my cell phone in the middle drawer, knowing my mother would give me down-the-road for being out of reach, but I had bigger fish to fry just now. I tried to stuff the wig in with the phone—I couldn’t even see past the damn thing—but it wouldn’t fit. Now I had a good reason to open the mystery drawer, like I needed one. I slid the little key off the desk and stabbed at the small lock, hoping like hell the secret drawer wasn’t full of porn, and thank goodness, it wasn’t. It was full of Glock.

It was a beauty. A Glock 27 .40 caliber is only about six inches in length, it’s a dead-eye, an automatic with a hair trigger, and looked like it was equipped with a standard nine mag. I wasn’t about to touch it, but that was only until I caught a glimpse of what was underneath. I angled the penlight and sure enough, there they were, three bright blue Bellissimo casino chips. The casino chip I could see clearly was stamped 5000. Jackpot! A Glock .27 and $15,000.

What were Bianca and Eddie after? The gun or the money?

All of a sudden, I knew exactly what to do, and I’d have to touch the gun to do it. Emotion, or temporary insanity, rather than logic, took over. I love guns.

The next ten minutes of my life are a blur. I got a hold of the grip, only intent to scoot it out of the way, but honestly, I couldn’t help myself. I hefted it up, groaned with pleasure at the cold, hard defense of it, immediately dropped into a Weaver stance, trained it on an imaginary bad guy across the dark room, and putting about as much pressure on the trigger as a cotton ball would, blew a new door into No Hair’s otherwise solid wall.

The same scene could unfold a hundred more times in my life, and in ninety-nine of them, I would still assume that no one could possibly be a large enough idiot to lay down a loaded gun without the safety on.

I’m not sure what happened next.

When the ringing in my ears stopped I could hear myself panting and I was still seeing huge red blobs in the darkness from the flash. I would have happily tossed the gun through the nice big hole in the wall, like getting rid of a lit grenade, but knowing the safety wasn’t on it occurred to me that if I threw it I’d probably shoot myself in the process, so I found enough wherewithal to gently lay it down on the desk, watching my own hand shake like a ninety-year-old’s, and backed away until I bumped into a solid wall that I slid down. I sat there and waited in the dark for someone to come shoot
me
. I could smell gunfire.

I have no idea how much time passed before I began entertaining the idea that no one had heard the shot, no one was coming to get me, and my best move was to put as much distance between myself and this office as possible.

I pulled myself up from the floor. So the gun had misfired. It shouldn’t have had a round in the chamber, and it certainly should have had the safety on. Even with all this justification, my legs were shaking so hard that covering the ten feet from the wall to No Hair’s desk was still difficult.

I picked up the gun again, my hands still trembling, clicked the safety on and popped out the clip, well after the fact. I couldn’t get it out of my hands fast enough, dropping the clip in the drawer, and placing the gun beside it. I felt around in the dark for the three casino chips, swiped them, then closed and locked the drawer. I swallowed the little key.

(No, I didn’t.)

I ran, not bothering to lock up after myself with the new entrance and all, took the straightest path to the casino and once there, made my way to the closest bar.

“Whiskey.” I white-knuckled the bar.

“Well?”

“Well, what?” I asked. “I need some whiskey. Please.”

The guy rolled his eyes and poured me a shot.

I tossed it back.

Edward Crawford wouldn’t win a million dollars today if Marci Dunlow was the early bird, worms and such. Then Bianca Sanders wouldn’t kill him, which was only fair. She could get in line behind me. I was here first.

*    *    *

I got in line. Knowing the video poker machines wouldn’t take the blue tokens, I made my way to the cashier cage, my throat and belly burning from the whiskey, and I was in good company. This was a popular spot.

There were five cashiers behind a tall marble counter with gold bars up to the ceiling. I guess that’s why it’s called a cage. Every line was four or five people deep, and no one seemed to be in any manner of hurry. The whiskey wasn’t working yet, so I took deep measured yoga breaths, or maybe they were Lamaze, knowing that I had to calm down in order to finish this.

My wanderings hadn’t put me in this particular queue before, and I noticed a kiosk of reading material cashier patrons could entertain themselves with while waiting. The racks were stuffed with pamphlets advising gamblers on how to go about saving themselves from the evil addiction. After picking one up and reading it in yet another attempt to distract myself from what I’d done, I’d summarize the message this way: If you can’t be reasonable about how much you lose, you don’t get to come back. So be reasonable. When I bored of reading, I took advantage of one of the standing anti-bacterial hand sanitizer dispensers planted at one-foot intervals. How can your hands be too clean when you’ve just fired a weapon?

It was at this point, when I was just about calm, that it occurred to me that I hadn’t wiped down the gun.

Damn.

While I was trying to decide if I should go back and take care of the gun, imagining a crew of people examining the hole I’d blasted in the wall, the guy in front of me stepped away and it was my turn.

The counter rose almost to my shoulders, but the cashier on the other side was barely taller than me, so we did the short-girl smile. With a quick survey I saw the reason for the bars: stacks of banded currency and racks of casino chips were everywhere. I placed the three blue chips on the counter between us. “Can I get money for these?”

“Of course,” she smiled. “Whoa! Congratulations!”

She spread out the three chips, displaying them for the seven hundred cameras that were trained on us, then scooped them up and tapped them twice against the counter. Her cash drawer popped open and bounced against her. She turned the chips over, pausing for the briefest of seconds, just long enough to catch my attention.

“I’ll be right back.” She backed away, smiling, and took the $15,000 in casino chips with her.

Before I could guess where she’d gone or why I was as nervous as a thirteen-year old at cheerleading tryouts, she returned with a man at her side. She smiled, he smiled, I smiled, we all smiled.

“Do you have a player’s card?” he asked.

“Yes!” I dug it out.

“ID?” he asked.

I pulled that out, too. I was passing this test with flying colors.

A small plastic disk appeared. The cashier popped it open. “We need a thumbprint and index finger for anything over ten thousand,” she said.

It sounded reasonable to me. And no risk, because my prints led exactly nowhere.

The man and woman exchanged a rapid-fire non-verbal communication of some sort, and I had a feeling they were about to tell me that for whatever reasons, they weren’t cashing these chips for me, when he nodded, giving her the go-ahead.

She dropped a healthy stack of the green stuff into the top of a bill counter, depressed a button, and cash started flying on her side of the bars.

Before the man stepped away he asked, “Where will you be playing, Miss Dunlow?”

I pointed in the wrong direction, but these two, not to mention previous events, had me flustered. “Behind the waterfall,” I said.

She placed the cash in front of me, and I grabbed it. The man smiled, the cashier smiled, I smiled. I backed away.

“Hey!” A lady I plowed into protested.

“Sorry.”

I turned and quick-stepped to Private Gaming.

NINETEEN

It happened so fast.

A different young man was hosting the Big Bucks Room, Hollywood’s weekend counterpart, I guessed, and this one more Broadway than Hollywood. He took one look at me, almost fell over, reached up and pressed his hidden earpiece, where apparently someone behind the curtain informed him that I was
not
Bianca Sanders, and then they probably told him to get it together.

“Good afternoon, Miss Dunlow,” he said breathlessly, his face Christmas red.

“I’ll need a bottle of water and a Bloody Mary,” I breezed by him, “extra olives.”

“Certainly.”

Not for the first time, I wished this could wait until tomorrow, when I could run it all by Natalie and have some backup, but to quote Mr. Sanders, this iron was
hot
. I couldn’t call her, because I’d left my phone in No Hair’s desk. With Teeth now another notch up on my probably-a-bad-guy list since he was apparently hiding things for Bianca and Eddie, there was no one on property to assist me.

If I hadn’t found the chips, I wouldn’t be here at all, because I’d tapped out Marci Dunlow’s line of credit the night before, and that couldn’t be helped until, again, I could get with Natalie. Finding the chips was almost a sign, and if I didn’t do this right now, backup or no backup, Miss Nevada and Mr. Alabama would be cashing in. Since one of the elements was obviously timing, with thirty-seven minutes passing between Bianca glitching the power and Cartier Eddie winning, I had to get going. It was now or never. If I could win it, first of all, it’d be fun, and second of all, Eddie wouldn’t.

I sat at the fourth machine and said, “Here goes nothing.”

A waitress arrived with a tray. I took the drinks then shooed her away with a hundred-dollar bill. I knocked back half of the Bloody Mary, finally had something for breakfast that wasn’t alcoholic (two olives), then reached for the water. I twisted off the lid, perched the bottle on the edge of the machine, then elbowed it.

“Uh-oh,” I said aloud.

I let about half of the water loose before righting the bottle, hoping it would be enough to find the little button, and apparently it was, because almost immediately the video poker machines winked at me. I downed the rest of the Bloody Mary, hoping vodka and whiskey weren’t a bad mix, and hoping no one in surveillance got winked at too. I noted the time, I tried to breathe, and the peppery tomato juice burned through me, causing me to hallucinate about Pine Apple. I missed home.

My arms felt like they weighed a hundred pounds each as I gathered my purse and Bloody Mary dregs, then traded the seat at the fourth machine for the ninth, the one Eddie won on. I pulled a half inch of hundreds from the nice stack, loaded the machine one by one, and let the music of the game calm me down. It had been eight minutes.

The next twenty minutes flew by. I had another drink, relaxed a little more, began winning back some of the money I’d lost the night before (whammy
this
you crazy game), and watched the clock.

Broadway was a squirmer. He left me alone for the first fifteen minutes I was there, thank goodness, because he might have taken issue with me dousing the carpet, but more and more, it felt like he was hovering.

“Where is everyone?” I asked him on one of his many trips by.

“What’s that?” I swear the boy almost jumped out of his skin.

“Where did everyone go?” I asked.

He shrugged, his eyes dancing all over the room. “It’s Sunday afternoon, you know. Not much going on.”

“You must be expecting something,” I poked at the screen, holding two tens.

“How’s that?”

“The two men at the entrance,” I tipped my head.

When I’d arrived, there was the usual one tuxedoed greeter. The next time I looked up there were two large suits, one dark gray, the other dark blue, flanking the waterfall. They looked almost menacing from behind, and they were most definitely packing, one a leftie, his shoulder-holster bulge on the wrong side. I assumed they were Bianca’s Welcome Wagon, and what seeing them said to me was
hurry
.

“Oh,” he said, “those guys.” Broadway looked at everything but me, probably because my resemblance to you-know-who was too creepy for him to deal with. “We’ve got VIPs in the building.”