Double Dog Dare Read online

  He sneezed again. “Hold on.” I heard two distant sneezes. The first faraway sneeze made me wonder why he was sneezing. Bradley never sneezed. The second one gave me the split second I needed to jump through the safe-subject window he’d opened.

  I blessed him two more times, then said, “A couple checked in?”

  “Jeremy keeps calling them schmucks.”

  No Hair divided casino guests into one of three categories: lucky ducks, cat ladies, or drunks. Schmucks was a new one.

  “Davis, these people are raising hell all over the casino. Have you seen the incident report?”

  The incident report listed, well, casino incidents: disturbances, underage gambling, medical emergencies, security threats. And I hadn’t looked at it in months.

  “Apparently, they had reservations, a room for themselves and a room for their bodyguards—”

  “We have guests who brought bodyguards?” I asked. “Who?”

  “Schmucks. Other than that, I have no idea who,” he said. “But after raising hell at the front desk, they ended up in a Magnolia Suite.”

  Magnolia Suites, of which there were six on the twenty-seventh floor, had four bedrooms, indoor pools, and private poker rooms. Serious gamblers, who had twenty-five hundred a night to blow on a hotel room, stayed in Magnolia Suites. The schmucks causing trouble were either serious poker players, super rich, or they’d raised so much hell checking in, the only way to appease them was to put them in a Magnolia.

  “The guests have been there a day,” Bradley said. “Maintenance has had to repair two walls, replace a room of carpet, and the police have been called three times. That I know of. No telling what Jeremy and Baylor aren’t telling me.”

  “Why the police?” Honestly, I didn’t care why. I took it for what it was: No Hair and Baylor were busy. Which was very good news for me.

  “One of the calls was for indecent exposure.” He sneezed. “I don’t have any other details.” He sneezed again.

  “Bradley, is it dusty there?”

  “No,” he said. “Why?”

  “Why are you sneezing?”

  “I have no idea. Where was I?”

  “Schmucks and details.”

  “Right,” he said. “I don’t have details and I don’t want them. Davis, I’m tired of the details. Keep Bex and Quinn as far away from the public venues as you can until Jeremy and Baylor take care of the schmucks.”

  “I won’t let the girls out of my sight, Bradley.”

  When the whole story came out, and it would, Bradley would remind me of this conversation. The conversation in which I could have told him about Meredith, about Gully and Greene and Bootsy, about Princess and Harley, not to mention the dead woman in Fantasy’s bonus room, and didn’t.

  “Tell me about judging the show,” he said. “Then I need to let you go.”

  I used my sleeve to mop my brow. There was no air in the pantry. “The dogs marched around the ring in a circle, then stopped at the judges table to give us dirty looks, and we gave them points.”

  “For?”

  “Presentation? But I wasn’t really sure what they were presenting.”

  “How did you delegate points?”

  “Bianca,” I said. “She was watching close-circuit, and she texted. ‘That one is hideous, David. It looks like a monkey. Zero points.’”

  “Bex and Quinn were where?” he asked.

  “In the front row. With Vree. Bradley, I wish you could’ve seen what Bianca had me wearing.”

  “I did.”

  “How?”

  “You’re on the front page of the Life section in USA Today.”

  Surely not.

  “What was up with the hat?”

  “I didn’t have time to go blonde.”

  “Ah.”

  “Tell me about Nashville.”

  “It’s beautiful. The new SGF offices are in a part of town called the Gulch, between downtown and Music Row. I wish you could see—” He sneezed again.

  What was up with all the sneezing?

  “Are you coming down with something?”

  “No.” He sneezed again. “I feel great. It would be hard to be in this city and not feel great.”

  He was still on his Nashville kick, planning his exit interview already, just as I was beginning to think we’d need to be farther from Biloxi than Nashville. We would need to move to Tibet. Or Niue. Or Point Nemo, the oceanic pole of inaccessibility.

  * * *

  We split up at ten ’til ten Monday morning.

  Fantasy walked Bexley and Quinn to July on the twenty-fifth floor. Vree went on dog patrol, and I, in tweeds, riding boots, and a black felt derby perched sidesaddle on my Bianca blonde ponytail, judged the obstacle-course round of the dog show.

  Arriving two minutes early for the second round of competition, I took one of the minutes to see what I’d missed in my haze of trauma the night before. The ballroom, the center of the conference facilities, was directly above the casino. Other than the massive crystal chandeliers, everything else had been dogged. The competition ring colors were Mardi Gras—green turf, purple stages, and gold boxes identifying the different breeds—Neapolitan Mastiff, Newfoundland Labrador, Boykin Spaniel, and several more boxes touting dog breeds I’d never heard of, and had no chance of recognizing—it’s a good thing they wore numbers. The ring was fenced in, surrounded by spectator bleachers, and the overwhelming smell was that of buttered popcorn. I spent the second minute before the first dog jumped and jogged around the obstacle course talking to Bianca.

  I rolled my eyes as I answered my clone phone. “Good morning, Bianca.”

  “David. Take my hair down or twist it into a chignon. I look like I’m in eighth grade.” She must have thought about what she said and decided looking like she was in eighth grade wasn’t all bad. Because she followed with, “On second thought, I’ll let it go this one time. But cross your ankles, not your legs. How many times do we need to go over this?”

  I spotted the close-circuit cameras as the announcer stepped up to the podium.

  “Gotta scoot, Bianca.” I muted my phone.

  The dogs did their thing for almost an hour.

  I thought I’d lose my mind for fifty-nine minutes of it.

  The split second I entered the last score for the last hurdle, I slipped out the back, then ducked and dodged my way from the convention center to my office, where Fantasy was ticking items off our to-do list. She put her pen down and said, “You look ridiculous.”

  “Thank you.”

  Her? With the lips the day before? I hadn’t said a word.

  She was in my chair, so I sat down to the unfamiliar view from the other side of my desk. “Where are we?”

  “I tried Operations, Maintenance, and Engineering. No one has seen the housekeepers. And that’s not the bad news.”

  It was plenty bad.

  Where had Bootsy stashed those men?

  “No Hair called,” she said.

  Three phones were lined up between us. My uncloned phone, Bootsy’s, and Fantasy’s. She said No Hair had called her phone, and when she didn’t answer, he dialed mine.

  “Why?” I pulled the derby off and sailed it. “What’d he want?”

  “He wanted to know why I didn’t answer my own phone but answered yours.”

  “What’d you say?” I loosened the ascot choking me.

  “I said, ‘No Hair, what do you want?’”

  “And?”

  “He wants us to find the oil sheik’s missing dog.” She pointed in the general direction of next door. “He said someone in the Leno suite called for a limo to drive the caregiver and Harley to the dog beach. Which explains why they were in my neighborhood. But the caregiver and the dog never showed up for the limo. So we don’t know how they ended up in my neighborhood. Then he said if w
e didn’t find the missing dog in the next thirty minutes, we need to sit down with the oil man and look at security footage.”

  “How long ago was that?” I asked.

  “Right after you left.”

  I left an hour earlier. Our thirty minutes were up thirty minutes ago.

  “How are we supposed to look at security footage with a blind man?”

  “I asked the same question, and No Hair said stop being cute.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Right? And why would we want to? What’s left after cute?”

  I wrestled out of the tweed jacket. “We brought Harley in through the back door and up the freight elevator. No security cameras, there’s nothing to see. And why us? Why can’t Baylor look at nothing on security footage with the blind oil man?”

  “No Hair’s busy being Bradley because Bradley’s out of town, Baylor’s busy being No Hair because No Hair’s busy being Bradley, and both are busy chasing schmucks in the casino.”

  “Bradley mentioned schmucks in the casino when he called this morning.”

  “There are always schmucks in the casino.” She waved it off. “No Hair wants to know what we’re busy doing, because someone needs to find the oil man’s dog. He said they needed help, and for us to get off our lazy butts and help.”

  I searched for buttons through the ruffles of the blouse I was wearing.

  “Are you going to strip, Davis?”

  “Did you tell him you’re busy with the Hair of the Dog tournament and I’m busy with two little girls and judging the dog show?”

  “He hung up on me before I could. He said get to work, then…click.” She took a deep breath, then clasped her hands on my desk. She leaned in. “There’s one more thing.”

  We didn’t need one more thing.

  We needed three or four less things.

  “He wants one of us to—” she used air quotes “—‘stop watching soap operas and eating bonbons long enough to take cage at four.’”

  My hunt for lost buttons in the sea of ruffles on my horse blouse ended.

  If one of us needed to take cage at four, it meant it was still Monday. Which sounded impossible, but if someone had to take cage, it was indeed, one of the longest days of my life, and still Monday. Monday meant the cage audit, where one of us—No Hair, Baylor, Fantasy, or me—oversaw the transfer of the weekend’s casino cash haul to the vault. Usually we drew straws, because no one really wanted to be in the windowless basement count room alone for an hour counting stacks of money. Then verifying the count. And signing off it. It being tens of millions of dollars.

  If one of the million dollars were to, say, be misplaced, it wouldn’t be caught until another one of us took cage the next Monday. At which point, Greene Gully’s blood business would be completed. And my sister would be home.

  * * *

  Between one Monday’s cage count and the next, a misplaced million could be replaced.

  * * *

  Fantasy, in her navy-blue security blazer, left for round two of the Dog Days slot tournament at eleven fifteen. I picked up the house phone and dialed the Leno suite. The sheik’s secretary answered. I identified myself as a Bellissimo internal security operative, then set up an appointment for one of my coworkers and me to go over security footage with the oil sheik at three o’clock. “If you don’t mind me asking, how will this go?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How will we watch surveillance video with a man who can’t see?”

  “You’ll be surprised at His Excellency Al Abbasov’s skills,” the secretary said.

  I’d been surprised enough in the past two days to last the rest of my life, thank you very much.

  (His what?)

  “Thirty percent of our brains are devoted to vision,” he said. “From birth, His Excellency has redirected his untapped visual cortex function to his other senses. He can smell a lie. He can hear you blink. He can source a wine to its geographical origin by tasting a drop. He’s more than capable of processing what you describe. Without his dog, though, he’s bumping into walls. He needs the dog. We’ll see you at three.”

  Which gave me a few good hours to check in with my sister, track Bootsy the Witch, and make some kind of, any kind of, progress with the dead problem in Fantasy’s bonus room.

  “How long should we plan on meeting with Mr. Al Abbasov?” I asked.

  “Address him as His Excellency.”

  Sure thing.

  “And I’ve scheduled you for fifty minutes. Until 3:50.”

  Which would free me up to take cage at four.

  If I were so inclined.

  Then Vree’s smiling face filled my office door. “Davis!”

  She was more than smiling. She was beaming.

  And she wasn’t alone.

  Leverette Urleen, MD, Pine Apple, Alabama’s resident physician, was with her. Wearing one of his signature seersucker suits, slack bowtie, and exhausted wingtips, he looked like Albert Einstein, smelled like Sunday morning at the frat house, and had a wide smug smirk on his face. He was absentmindedly scratching his chest. “Hey, Davis. Long time no see. Vree says you need my help with a stiffie.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He said, “A stiffie. Cadaver? Carcass? Dearly departed?”

  * * *

  In as far as how much trouble I could potentially be in with my marriage, my job, and felony theft charges when I waylaid a million dollars during the cage count that afternoon, which would land me in the pokey for years to come, heaviest on my heart, with my sister as safe as she could be for the time being, was the dead body at Fantasy’s. And not so much that we walked off and left her there—at the time, it was our only option—but the fact that the woman, who looked like Mrs. Doubtfire, had to have a family somewhere. Was there a husband pacing a floor? Probably not. Who would leave a husband to live and travel with a blind oil baron to take care of his dog? What about children? She had to have children. At her age, they’d be grown. Which meant we walked off and left someone’s dead mother in an easy chair. And what if her children had children? The dead woman could have grandbabies who adored her, or a sister! She, like me, might have a sister with whom she shared a bond like no other. So as sorry as I was to see Urleen, the quackiest of all quacks to ever take the Hippocratic Oath—and I was so sorry to see him—even I had to admit, he was my best option.

  Leverette Urleen could tell the story all day long and no one would believe him.

  The dead woman needed my help. She deserved it.

  Those two truths pulled me up from my desk. My limbs felt leaden. It was half past eleven. I had a meeting with His Excellency at three and the cage count at four. Which left plenty of time to get to Fantasy’s with Urleen the Idiot. I said, “Let me change clothes.”

  The horse clothes were killing me.

  THIRTEEN

  The talented team of designers and installers from the Bellissimo theater department had turned the conference-center slot-tournament room into a dog house. Because of the proprietary nature of the game inside, cell service was blocked. To talk to Fantasy I either had to call on the security channel of the casino’s two-way radio system and let everyone else in security listen in, or walk in the dog door. Urleen and I walked in the door of the Hair of the Dog slot tournament under the pitched roof of a massive redwood dog house. Directly above our heads was a crooked white sign with hand-painted letters: FiDO. The lower-case I was dotted with a pawprint. Urleen made a beeline for the open bar to our right. I caught him by the back of his wrinkled jacket. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “A little libation is just what the doctor ordered. And I’m the doctor.”

  I gave him a shove. Away from the bar. Where the bartenders were wearing furry dog-ear hats and the drinks were being served in stemmed glass dog bowls. Just past the bar was a gated fence with a security guard
dressed as a dog catcher.

  “Your badge?”

  Urleen puffed up. “I’m a doctor.”

  “So?” the security suit said. “Where’s your badge? This is a private event.”

  “I’m a private doctor.”

  “You need a badge, private doctor.”

  I peeked over the Balenciaga sunglasses covering half my face.

  “Mrs. Cole.” The dog catcher recognized me. “Welcome.”

  I grabbed Urleen by the seersuckered sleeve. “Come on.”

  The first year Bradley and I were married, we kept my identity secret. We tried to, anyway. I worked undercover, and the best way to blow that cover would’ve been to walk around on Bradley’s arm waving my wedding band. It wasn’t long, a year, maybe, until our marriage was the worst-kept secret throughout the three million square feet of Bellissimo property. When a graveyard shift of blackjack dealers took it to the next level, the payout on their “Is He or Isn’t He?” pool topping five thousand dollars, one of the dealers, wanting his ex-wife off his back for unpaid child support, laid in wait behind a giant schefflera tree in our vestibule, then snapped a picture of a welcome-home kiss Bradley and I shared just inside the open front door of our private residence on the twenty-ninth floor. The problem was, at the time, I’d just finished a round of Bianca Sanders duty—I was temporarily blonde, green-eyed, and head to toe Givenchy. So the blackjack dealer took, and distributed, a picture of what looked like the casino president sharing a sloppy kiss with the owner’s wife.

  At which point, we had to come clean.

  Bellissimo President Bradley Cole was, indeed, married, to a woman who did, eerily, favor Bianca Sanders.

  The blackjack dealer won the five-thousand-dollar pool, but lost his job before he could be fired for using such poor judgement when he was arrested for failure to pay the back child support.

  The photograph floated around for months.

  By then, I was pregnant with the girls, and present day, most of the Bellissimo knew Mr. Cole was married to the seldom-seen mother of the twin girls, who were often seen with him on Saturdays, and that his wife looked a lot like the mean woman who lived in the Penthouse. I was no longer the lead story in the employee break room, but still, I didn’t parade around the property toting a Boss’s Wife sign. I hid under a hat or behind sunglasses when I went out my front door. Like then. As soon as security recognized me and let us in the fence, I was back behind my sunglasses. And being barked at.