Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (20 page)

“Is this about Eddie?” she demanded.

I moved the pillow an inch so I could see her. “Mother.” She looked up. “Do you really want me to move back home?”

The answer was in her silence.

“Mother.” She looked up again. “How is Daddy?”

The answer was in her smile.

I pulled the pillow over my head again.

“Knock, knock!” I heard a muffled voice. I peeked out and saw Natalie’s feet. I knew they were her feet because I recognized the brown leather boots from my first day on the job. I stayed under the pillow. I listened to the boots cross the floor.

“You must be Mrs. Way.” Natalie’s muffled voice reached me, and so did my mother’s cooing.

Here’s where my mother turned on the charm to the point of me trying to tell anyone about how she really operates and them finding it hard to believe. Finally, my mother shut up, but not before working the conversation around to telling Natalie that she had an unused college degree because of me.

Natalie made the appropriate noises while Mother droned on, and when Mother finally took a breath, Natalie asked, “How’s our patient?”

“Oh, goodness gracious,” my mother gushed, “I’m not sure
what
Davis was thinking! She knows she’s allergic to shellfish!”

I shot out from under the pillow. “Like hell, I knew it!”

Natalie’s head jerked back and she clapped a hand over her mouth.

“If I’d
known
, Mother, I wouldn’t be here!”

I saw my mother’s sly smile. I looked to Natalie’s shocked face. My mother—try to believe me—loved me getting caught with my pants down, and from the glint in her eye, I knew it was happening. I just didn’t know how. Was I naked? I peeked. Almost, but no. Had I grown two heads? I’d better look. I jumped out of the bed and found the reflective box over the small sink. I almost passed out; the backs of my knees caved.

Two normal heads would have been a huge improvement over the one head I had. Enormous cherry-red welts covered the entire surface of my face, crept down my neck, and I could see them on my chest through the thin bed sheet someone had half tied on me. My lips were deep, blood red, almost black, swollen, and cracked. The area between my forehead and my nose was so blown up that my eyes appeared to be little recessed dots in the back of my head, and there was an ugly gash above the left one. For the second day in a row my blonde hair was standing on end, like it desperately wanted away from my scalp. I wasn’t going to use the shampoo from the New Orleans stylist one more time. That stuff was toxic. It turned my hair into runaway straw during the night.

I whimpered into the mirror, drowning kitten sort of noises.

*    *    *

Wouldn’t you know it? Bianca Sanders and her brother didn’t even eat dinner at Bones. I could have died a fish death, and all for naught. Natalie casually dropped that bomb over the phone while I was snipping off my plastic hospital bracelet with a toenail clipper. To make it all better, she gave me some time off. (She didn’t want me at work until I could be seen in public and said public not run and scream.)

“Will your mother stay with you until you’re feeling better?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “She’s already halfway back to Pine Apple.” Mother dropped me at the door after snapping a picture of me with her cell phone. We were at a red light between Patient Discharge and Bradley’s Place. “Davis. Look here.” I turned. Click. “Your father will want to see this.” Now, as if I didn’t have enough to do, I’d have to hack my own mother’s phone.

The antihistamines the hospital sent me home with refused to let me sleep for more than ten minutes at a time. So while my system calmed down, I sat at my three computers and two slot machines in Bradley Cole’s packed-out dining alcove. There were two slot machines now, because before I was released from the hospital, No Hair and Teeth had removed all seven thousand pieces of the first video poker machine and delivered two more that had, I assumed, yet an additional code to crack, because these were linked together. These were programmed to pay a progressive jackpot.

I wondered, not for the first time, what Bradley Cole’s neighbors thought about his sublessee who, at the moment, looked like something out of a horror flick, and at most other moments, was entertaining all manner of men at all hours, testing a different shade and style of hair, dog-cussing dry-cleaning delivery guys, living on pizza and Moo Shu pork, or had slot machines running in and out the door.

*    *    *

The swelling in my face went down; the swelling in my brain went up. I went to work on the slot machines, wrestling six computer chips off two motherboards, tossing the random number generator chips again, then running the four containing the game data through the SimonHex software to look at them backwards. Forty hours, one nap, and three pizzas later, between the four game chips from the progressive machines and the two from the first video poker machine I’d demolished, I couldn’t find a single digit reassigned. I knew there had to be a difference, other than the obvious, which was simple script at the end of the programs communicating to the machines left and right, and, truly, it turned out to be as simple as two plus two, so I spent an entire day and loads of Bellissimo money attempting to prove to myself there was no difference in the programming between stand-alone and progressive machines.

Because there
had
to be, unless an outside influence triggered the progressive win. I hoped to everything holy that it wasn’t that, because if it were something outside the programming, I’d never find it. The possibilities were too infinite. It could be having seventeen rubber bands in one pocket, and three marbles in the other. It could have been a toothpick held between the teeth just right. Or maybe it was a lunar eclipse. Or a handheld trigger. Or singing the machine a Broadway tune in E-flat.

There was one thing left to try, then I’d have to do what they hired me to do: get it out of Eddie Crawford.

I couldn’t decide which one I’d rather not deal with, Teeth or No Hair, so instead of calling their individual phones, I called their office. I got Teeth.

“You need a
what
?”

“A printer,” I said. “A heavy-duty printer. And about six zillion sheets of transparent paper.”

“See-through paper? There’s no such thing,” he said. “And what constitutes a heavy-duty printer anyway?”

Why did everyone argue with me? An hour and a half later, an Office Depot delivery truck blocked the main entrance into the builidng unloading two huge wooden crates followed by a rolling dolly stacked with smaller corrugated boxes.

I watched through the mini blinds, and raised the window an inch to listen when some unflattering chatter about me ensued.

“It’s that subleaser on three.” A man, who I’d seen in the elevator, was juggling grocery bags talking to a woman, who I’d seen in the lobby. They were shivering, trying to keep warm, awaiting entry to the building.

“You know, I thought we couldn’t sublease,” the woman said.

“I called him,” the man said. “He’s been transferred back to Las Vegas for six months.”

What
? He tattled to Bradley Cole about me?

“He said she was his cousin.”

“Right,” the woman said. “And I’m his mother.”

“Were you here last week when someone delivered
slot
machines?”

“You have got to be kidding me,” the woman said. “Like there aren’t enough right down the street.”

I slammed down the window. They both looked up, then shrugged at each other.

“Lady!”

I spun.

“Where in the world do you want to set this up?”

One of the Office Depot guys had uncrated the two parts of the printer. Good Lord. When I told Teeth I needed a heavy-duty printer, I hadn’t exactly meant one that could print Christmas catalogs.

In the end, we shoved Bradley Cole’s bed into the corner, and set the printer up in the bedroom. Getting the two parts through the doorway had taken its toll on both the door frame and the walls. Now I’d have to track down a carpenter and a painter.

“How am I supposed to get to the bed?” I asked.

“I guess you’ll have to climb over the printer.” The guy shoved a clipboard at me. “Sign here.”

Here’s one good thing that came from being married to Eddie Crawford: I knew a little, a very little, about things electrical, probably just enough to flash fry the whole building. (And my neighbors thought standing in the cold for ten teeny minutes was an inconvenience.) So instead of getting dressed and going to a store, pissing off Teeth a little more, or trying to get George to run my errands, the first thing I did was splice enough Ethernet cable to get the printer hooked up to my network. This required a steak knife, duct tape, squeezing my eyes shut and praying several times, and dragging one of the hard drives to the hall between the dining room and the bedroom. I surveyed my handiwork. This place was now officially an obstacle course. 

I sat down at one of the keyboards and typed, DAVIS LOVES BRADLEY. I hit print, and heard the bedroom whir to life as the machine ejected a sheet of printed paper. Success. After loading the paper bin to the fill line with ream after ream of transparencies, I printed the encoded data for the long-gone slot machine. Loading the printer again, I queued up the readable code for the first of the two new machines, then the second. In the end, I had three stacks of transparencies on the kitchen counter that rose to the tip of my nose.

I turned from the massive stacks of work, opened a bottle of red wine (ignoring the dire warnings on the antihistamine prescription bottle), grabbed a Nelson DeMille paperback from Bradley Cole’s shelf in the living room, made my way past the computers, climbed over the printer, and sat there staring at the bedroom walls, listening to the buzz still in my ears from the printer going non-stop for hours, sipping wine from the bottle. The printer had generated so much heat in such a small room that even though it was off, the room was still hotter than eight hells, so I fanned myself with the book instead of reading it. At some point, I passed out.

Twelve hours later, I woke up ready to call the pharmaceutical company that sold the antihistamines and tell them the way around the sleep deprivation the medicine induced was a bottle of red wine. I felt like a bear just up from hibernation.

I went straight to the shower, if you call crawling over a massive machine straight to, and stood under the hot water until it was gone. When the fog cleared, I saw in the mirror that I’d also slept off the last of the fish. I looked just like my old self, my old self in this case being a version of Bianca Casimiro Sanders. And I was starving.

*    *    *

The coast is different from mainland America in one decided way: the deep blue sea. Another difference was the language; the coast had extra words. I’d grown up two hundred miles from the spot upon which I stood, and we had a porch. Bradley Cole had a lanai, a porch that offered a view of the Gulf. After polishing off four frosted cherry Pop Tarts and three cups of coffee, I realized I had nowhere to work, because every single surface inside Bradley’s condo was already designated workspace, so I bundled up in his Patagonia fleece jacket and transferred the stacks of transparencies to the lanai, then weighted the stacks against the wind with dinner plates.

I tugged out sheets one, one, and one from the three towers, tapped them together, and held them up to the winter sun in hopes of finding a variant between the three machines. I didn’t. The three page ones were exact matches. So were pages 100. So were pages 1000.

I couldn’t find anything in the software that triggered the massive wins. My best guess was something external in combination with the anomaly I found in the software was the ticket. The number five meant something, but I wasn’t positive what. The pencil marks in the thick manual meant something, but again, I didn’t know what. I wished I could pick up the phone and ask the guy who’d written it, but he was dead. Another solution would be to ask one of the three people who’d accomplished it, but only one of them was still alive, and I didn’t want to talk to him. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and my brain hurt again. The walls were closing in on me; I wanted out.

I had two things on my to-do list. I needed an inside glimpse of the Casimiro family; I couldn’t proceed on just George’s word for it, and the Internet would only give me so much. That meant poking around in Richard Sanders’ closet full of skeletons. While I didn’t look forward to it, he certainly broke the ice when we cleaned out all my closets.

And I needed to find out what the three previous winners—the two dead ones and my rotten, rotten, rotten excuse for an ex-ex-husband—had in common. Eddie Crawford had one outstanding feature, one large attribute, and it wasn’t in the intelligence department.

How in hell could it be
that
?

*    *    *

Richard Sanders probably earned an astronomical amount of money, like six figures a
week
. And rightly so, because he had a hellacious job, the details of which I didn’t want to know. If I had his job I’d go in every day, close the door, put my head on the desk, then cry. I’d holler “Go away!” if anyone knocked.

In addition to his big job, he ran in powerhouse circles—financiers, tycoons, Democrats, celebrities. In spite of it all, I found him to be a very approachable guy, and as far as I could see, treated everyone, tennis pros and librarians, with the same level of interest and respect. (Last week a little-old-lady library assistant from Tupelo won a gigantic payday on a slot machine, the one with the wheel, and he took her out on the town to celebrate. It was all over the news.) So when he called and asked to see me, I didn’t panic right away, because for one, he’d warned me this little chat was coming. For another, I’d almost choked to death right in front of him (how much worse could it get?), and for yet another, he already knew about my asinine ex-ex-husband, and for just one more, he was paying me a lot of money and if I wanted to keep spending it, I’d better make myself available.