Double Agent Read online

  “My mother would kill me.”

  “It’s rain and wind.”

  “Several feet of sideways rain and wind that rips off roofs.”

  “Potato potahto.”

  I dropped another slot machine.

  “We do need to hurry,” she said. “I need bread and milk. If there’s any left.” Over the radio, I heard the metal-on-metal of a slot machine door closing. By way of echo, a millisecond later, I barely heard it live across the deserted casino. “How much longer do you think we have?”

  “If I don’t stop to breathe, I have another two hours. You?”

  “About the same, maybe two and a half,” she said.

  It was one lunch, two thousand more slot machine drops, and three hours later when my radio said, “That was my last one. Where are you?”

  “I’m at the big bank of Day of the Dead slots near the theater. I still have one more row.”

  “I’m headed your way,” she said. “My back hurts, I want a whole bottle of wine, and this place is freaking me out.”

  It was me too. The casino, at all times, three in the morning on Christmas morning no exception, was a hub of noise, energy, and activity, and the only entity I’d ever seen stop it was Mother Nature. That woman could shut down a casino, and shut down it was. Fantasy and I were alone in eighty thousand square feet of lifeless gaming. The blackjack tables were empty, stools ajar. The bars, lounges, and restaurants were dark, tabletops cluttered. The slot machines were powered down, so there were no bells, whistles, or flashing lights. It was deathly quiet. Which was why when the clatter of Fantasy’s cash cart stopped as she parked it close to mine, the crack of a gunshot ringing out was infinitely louder than it would have been otherwise.

  It took a beat for us to process what we’d heard.

  It took another beat for our ears to stop ringing.

  Fantasy drew her gun from the waistband of her jeans as I went for mine, in my tote bag on the bottom shelf of my cash cart.

  It wasn’t there.

  Fantasy pointed across the casino. I nodded in agreement, still batting for my Bellissimo tote bag that had my laptop and my gun in it. The shot came from the west wall, down twenty long rows of slot machines, across a wide aisle, then past another fifty rows of slot machines.

  Still no tote bag. No laptop. No gun.

  Had I left my bag in the last cash cart I’d loaded?

  No, I hadn’t. I moved it to an empty cart to fit the last cash box in the full cart, steps I’d repeated with every cart change. I batted down the bottom row, then tried another shelf. I felt between, above, and below cash boxes. “Fantasy,” I whispered. “My tote bag is gone.”

  “Maybe we could look for it later?” she whispered.

  “My gun was in my tote bag.”

  “What?” she whispered. “Where’s your gun?”

  “Gone,” I whispered back.

  She shook her head in disbelief. “Why can’t you keep your gun on you like everyone else in the world?”

  First of all, not everyone else in the world kept a gun on their person. I’m barely five foot two and weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet. I didn’t have a good place to keep a gun. Second of all, we could argue about it later. I pulled my cell phone—something I did keep on my person—from my back pocket and dialed. “Daddy. You might need to come get Bex and Quinn.”

  “On the way, Sweet Pea.”

  Hiccup.

  TWO

  Back in the day of cha-ching slot machines, Fantasy and I would’ve been dropping hundreds of thousands of dirty coins and rolling them around in little red wagons. Or big red wheelbarrows. Modern day casinos were completely coinless, played with paper—cash and cash-equivalent cash-out tickets—the money gathered in metal boxes inside the machines, the boxes removed twice a week (and when hurricanes made last-minute turns and were barreling our way), loaded onto cash carts, then rolled to the counting room outside the main vault. The cash carts were steel cages on wheels. The cages were six feet long, three feet wide, and four feet tall. Split down the middle by a solid metal panel, each side had five long rows, and each row held fifty cash boxes. Each cash box held anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000, ballpark, but generally true. Five hundred boxes fit on a cart. So each cart was worth somewhere between $2,500,000 and $10,000,000, and most drops averaged fifty million, give or take, in cash. (Give or take a few million.) (Dollars.) I stealthily inched my cart of dollars to the east wall, Fantasy covering me, leaving only enough space for us to wedge between the wall and the cart. She had a full view of anything coming our way, and I could see the casino entrance, where the eight cash carts we’d already filled were parked against the locked front doors. We took cover behind the steel cart, our backs against the wall.

  “Who is in this casino and how’d they get in here?” Fantasy whispered between pants, gun at the ready, her eyes darting in every direction.

  “How’d they get my gun?”

  Rhetorical. We knew how that might have happened. Half of dropping was all but climbing into the slot machine to free the cash box in the back. Someone could have easily swiped my tote bag from the bottom shelf of the cart when I’d been deep inside a Triple Gold Digger Deluxe, not to mention the many times I’d stepped away to stretch my legs, fill my coffee mug, or answer my phone. Fantasy and I were the only people in the locked casino. I didn’t have my tote bag hanging from around my neck the whole time, or any of the time, because if I were going to swipe something from a cash cart, it wouldn’t be a tote bag. Meanwhile, Bradley’s phone went straight to voicemail for the fifth time in a row. Not only had he been in charge of Bex and Quinn while I’d been dropping, he was the most essential Bellissimo employee every day of the week, every week of the year, today exponentially. The last time I’d called to check on the girls, I caught him between calls with the Red Cross and the governor. I tried his phone again, not wanting to contact him via two-way radio, because even squelched and on a private channel, the outgoing and incoming signals would echo through the empty casino, giving the shooter our exact location.

  Fantasy checked her gun.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Full clip and one in the chamber,” she whispered.

  I nodded.

  We had nine rounds between us and a shooter somewhere in two acres of forsaken casino.

  “How in the world did someone get in here?”

  I slid an inch her way because I had a cage bolt digging into my knee. “I have no idea.”

  Bradley, from the control center on Disaster, had spoken to us over our two-way radios that morning when he’d initiated lockdown for the second time, the first being after the casino was completely cleared at eight that morning. At nine, he unlocked it to let us in, and five minutes later, locked it down again. “You’re in?”

  “We’re in,” I’d said.

  “The cages are there?”

  “They’re all here,” I’d said. “Ten empty cages.”

  “Run thermal imaging, Bradley,” Fantasy said. “Make sure we’re by ourselves.”

  “Hold on,” he’d said.

  We’d held on, dreading the drop job in front of us.

  “You’re completely alone,” he announced. “Before I lock you in, are you sure you don’t need anything?”

  “We’re good,” I’d said.

  “Here goes,” he said. “Stay in touch and see you in a few hours.”

  Fantasy and I, standing in the center aisle of the casino, listened as electronic locks and security-beeps echoed from every corner, every nook, every cranny, every door, every emergency exit, every stairwell, every venue entrance, every service access, and every elevator. We were officially in casino lockdown mode and, according to thermal imaging, alone. We made a strong pot of coffee at Stir, the casino’s martini bar, filled mugs, and began dropping slot machines. For lunch, we’d nosed through the walk-
in cooler at Snacks, the casino deli, and built ourselves chipotle chicken cheddar wraps. (Which should be a menu item.) (They could name it The Davis and Fantasy Chipotle Chicken Cheddar Wrap.) In the hours we’d been emptying slot machines, there’d been no hint of anyone else. A lot more coffee, a whole lot of money, but no activity, no noise other than the racket we were making, and certainly no doors opening, which would have sounded jarring alarms. Yet there we were, wedged between a wall and a metal cart stuffed with money with an active shooter somewhere in the casino.

  “There’s a trapdoor in the floor somewhere, right?” she whispered. “Did someone sneak in?”

  There was a one-man trapdoor along the floor somewhere in the casino. It had something to do with ancient building codes and access to something plumbing related, or maybe electricity related, back in the day. The trapdoor was no longer used or required, not that I knew where it went, other than down, or even where it was, other than under several thousand pounds of slot machines. And we’d have heard someone tossing slot machines around to get through it. “No one came through the trapdoor.”

  “Could someone have dropped down from the ceiling?” Fantasy whispered.

  “From the conference center?” I looked up. “How?” I whispered. “Security cleared every inch of this place, including the conference center. And even if someone had been hiding upstairs, we’d have heard them jackhammering through.” We both worked part-time; we shared a job so we could spend more time with our families. Before that, we’d worked full-time; we knew the building well; there was no direct access from the conference center to the casino. Solid concrete, yes. A Mission Impossible-style ceiling drop access point, no. The casino hadn’t been breached from above, which only left below. My head thudded onto my bent knees.

  “What?” Fantasy shook my sleeve. “What?”

  I pointed at the floor.

  She stared at the carpet.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered.

  Oh, no was right.

  Below the casino, which was to say below sea level, the vast dungeon space was divided into a four-square grid. The northeast quadrant was employee staging, where shift-change teams of dealers gathered (their courage) before they marched down the center aisle of the casino to take their places at craps, blackjack, and Caribbean stud poker tables. The northwest section, directly below the main casino cage, held the counting rooms and the vault, cleared hours earlier of contents and employees by an armed security team from Banks, the Bellissimo’s contract cash couriers. The southwest corner was storage, a virtual casino graveyard filled with obsolete slot machines, three-legged banquet chairs, and enough outdated holiday paraphernalia to decorate an abandoned shopping mall. All cleared by Security with one exception: the fourth zone, which included the drunk tank. When the armed guards came through before lockdown, they couldn’t clear the drunk tank because it was still occupied. They turned it over to the Biloxi police, who said they’d scoop up our drunks as soon as humanly possible, given their impromptu Kevin-preparation circumstances. The last we heard over our radios was that the police had arrived. We were building our chipotle chicken cheddar wraps when the call came through; the police were there to transfer our drunks to their jail.

  Unless they hadn’t.

  What if they hadn’t?

  “Oh, surely not, Davis.”

  I was having trouble breathing.

  “DAVIS!”

  I stopped breathing altogether.

  It was my ex-ex-husband, Eddie Crawford.

  “DAVIS! I THINK I SHOT MYSELF!”

  I might have hyperventilated.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Fantasy’s head was between her knees. She was panting too. “How does he not know if he shot himself or not?”

  “He doesn’t know what day of the week it is, Fantasy.”

  She stealthily rose, as if to take a peek, then changed her mind and dropped back down. “What if he’s not alone?”

  “DAVIS!” My name echoed through the empty casino. “CAN YOU HEAR ME? ARE YOU THERE? I NEED A DOCTOR. DANIELLE NEEDS ONE TOO. I THINK SHE’S DEAD.”

  Fantasy grabbed my arm. “Who’s Danielle?”

  “His she-devil girlfriend and my least favorite person in the world.”

  “I thought he was your least favorite person in the world.”

  “He is,” I said. “She is too. It’s a tie.”

  “DAVIS!”

  Fantasy said, “It looks like you’re going to your high school reunion after all.”

  * * *

  I didn’t even graduate from high school. I got a General Education Diploma on my way to two college degrees from the University of Alabama at Birmingham—one in Computer and Information Science and the other in Criminal Justice. Even if I had walked across the Pine Apple High School Cafetorium stage in a bright yellow cap and gown, I still wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with the reunion. My class, from Kindergarten on, was only fourteen people. Ten of those still lived in Pine Apple, three were in prison, and I, mercifully, was long gone. The ten left standing saw each other every single day of their lives, I ran into all ten every single time I went to Pine Apple, and between visits my mother told me every single move each of them made. What was there to reunite about? So when the Evite hit my inbox weeks earlier, I did what I always did, hit the delete button. Same with the follow-ups. Had I taken the time to open even one, I’d have known the reunion wasn’t being held in the Private Party Closet at Mel’s Diner on Main Street in Pine Apple, like the two-year, five-year, seven-year, eight-year, ten-year, eleven-year, fourteen-year, and fifteen-year reunions. The seventeen-year reunion was a destination reunion, the destination being my home and my workplace. The Bellissimo. I heard about it from our Special Events Coordinator, Lisa Hudson.

  “Davis? Let me run something by you.”

  It was early Monday, the Monday morning of what would turn out to be the week of Hurricane Kevin. When I took the call, I had yet to hear those two words spoken together—hurricane and Kevin. Bradley had just kissed us bye on his way to his office on the second floor. I was barely awake, still in my pajamas, brewing coffee and toasting strawberry Pop-Tarts for Bex and Quinn, and the only weather news I’d heard was that Florida might get wet. “Sure, Lisa.”

  “I have the smallest reunion I’ve ever booked arriving this afternoon, only eight oceanside deluxes and one grand suite reserved, and they’re all in your name. I need to precheck everyone into their rooms. Are these house charges, do you want me to run them on a credit card, or should I wait until they check out and send the bill to Mr. Cole’s office?”

  “I don’t want you to do any of those.” I cut the girls’ Pop-Tarts into scalene triangles. “I didn’t book nine rooms.”

  “The reunion coordinator booked them, but in your name. I need to know how you want to pay for it.”

  “I don’t want to pay for it any way at all.” I blew on the warm Pop-Tarts before I passed them to the girls.

  “Hot, Quinn,” Bexley, the boss of Quinn, in the booster seat next to her said. “Hot hot hot.”

  “Hot.” Quinn backed away from the Pop-Tart. “Hot.”

  I picked up a triangle and pretended to take a bite, saying, “It’s okay. Go ahead.”

  Lisa Hudson, in my ear, said, “So you’ll pay for these rooms?”

  “No, Lisa. I was talking to my daughters. And I don’t want to pay for a family reunion unless it’s mine.”

  “Not a family reunion,” she said. “This is a high school reunion.”

  “What high school reunion books nine rooms?” I asked. “Who has a high school that small?”

  Uh-oh.

  I almost fell out of my chair.

  I had a high school that small.

  “Lisa, no. No, no, and no.”

  “No, what?”

  I fanned myself with a napkin.

  “
Hot, Mama?” Bexley asked.

  “It’s fine,” I told my sweet baby. “I’m fine.”

  “So you will pay for the rooms?” Lisa asked.

  “I was talking to one of my daughters again.” Taking a work call while mothering toddler twins was just one of the reasons I only worked part-time. “What’s the name of the high school?” I hoped against hope.

  “Yours,” she said. “It’s a fruit—”

  I knew the fruit. “Who’s your contact?” I caught my forehead with the palm of my hand and sighed loud enough to be heard in fruity Pine Apple.

  “Danielle Sparks. Do you need her number?”

  “I have her number.” Boy, did I have her number. “Take this one completely off the books, Lisa. Cancel everything. They’re not coming here.”

  “Oh, Davis. I’m not sure I can do that.”

  “Fine. Let me get to my computer and I’ll do it.”

  “But they’re on their way. And what about their game?”

  “Their game? They ordered a game?” Special Events offered one-of-a-kind event-themed slot machine games to groups booking weddings, conventions, or reunions. The games were contracted out to a boutique slot machine manufacturer in South Bend, Indiana, Sphinx Slots. Sphinx had a crackerjack team of programmers and graphic artists, plus a warehouse full of slot machine cabinet skeletons. Sphinx could write, build, and deliver one-of-a-kind slot machines in under three weeks. The games were clever, cute, and big convention hits. Recently we’d hosted The Crouton Council. (Who knew?) The slot machine reel graphics were salad ingredients, but unlike every other slot machine on the casino floor, the goal wasn’t to line up like images—three celery stalks in a row paid nothing. The goal was to make a salad across the win line: an iceberg wedge, cherry tomatoes, and bacon bits. Or romaine, Parmesan, and anchovies. When that happened, the game rained croutons and cash. Two weeks later we hosted a Proctology Roundtable. I had nothing to say about their game, nothing at all, except conventions were the only groups who ordered games. They were large enough to spread the hefty price tag across hundreds of registration fees. Weddings almost never wanted a themed game; they were there for the hydrangeas and the sunset-on-the-Gulf photo ops. And I’d never heard of a reunion ordering a slot machine game; there were never enough attendees to justify the cost. But the Pine Apple Pulps had said yes?