Double Dog Dare Read online

  “The loading dock behind the hotel. Come on, Vree. Let’s go.”

  “Where’s your friend taking Bootsy?”

  Over my shoulder, I said, “To her house. About four miles from here. Fantasy lives in a subdivision that backs up to the dog beach.”

  “A beach just for dogs?”

  “The stretch of beach where dogs are allowed. With their owners.”

  The freight elevator doors clanked closed.

  “I’d love to live close to a dog beach,” Vree said. “Can you imagine? How fun would that be? How many dogs does Fantasy have?”

  “None. She has three tall skinny sons, an unemployed husband, and a new bonus room over her garage. Her husband turned the garage attic into a bonus room. Bootsy will be in the bonus room.”

  “I love bonus rooms. Like for arts and crafts? Or a home gym? Or a media room? Storage? What?”

  Vree wanted to know everything. Every single thing. Which would come in handy with what we had ahead of us—I would need to pull from her stockpiles of Pine Apple trivia—but being on the receiving end of her useless information gathering was draining. “More like a playroom. He built it for the boys.”

  “Why? I mean—”

  “Because they hogged the television in the family room.”

  “Gooch and his brothers hog mine. NASCAR.”

  “I think it’s Xbox at Fantasy’s house.”

  “Right. Gooch and his brothers play Xbox too. Some days I think—”

  “The boys don’t like the bonus room,” I said.

  “Why not? What’s not—”

  “It has low ceilings, no windows, and Fantasy’s housekeeper was locked in it for three days.”

  “What? Locked in? Like trapped? Stuck? Stranded? That’s horrible. Why couldn’t she get out? They didn’t hear her? Was her car in the driveway? Couldn’t they see it?”

  “Reggie bought the door at a Home Depot clearance, and found out the hard way it was a security door that automatically deadbolted from the outside. They were at a hockey tournament in Hattiesburg with the boys, so no one was home to hear the housekeeper. Or see her car. Her phone was dead, so she couldn’t call anyone.” I kept going, answering her endless questions before she had the chance to ask them. “The police found her after her daughter reported her missing. They retraced her steps to Fantasy’s.”

  “That’s awful! Do you remember—”

  “When they found her, she was wearing a Saints jersey and playing Red Dead Redemption.”

  Vree said, “Harsh. One time—”

  “She was okay. The bonus room has a little kitchen, bunk beds, and a shower.”

  “Still, though. I’d have clawed my way out. I have mild, sometimes medium, sometimes raging claustrophobia. Do you? I mean, like this elevator—”

  Finally, ding ding, twenty-ninth floor.

  “What happened to the housekeeper?”

  “She quit.”

  “I guess so.” Vree stepped off the elevator. “I’d have quit too. Did you see that movie—”

  I closed my ears.

  I couldn’t take one more word.

  I’d missed two calls and ten pictures from Bradley. I clicked through the photographs of my girlie girls with dog after dog after dog. Not because I had the time, but because I needed the respite. I dialed Bradley. “Sorry I missed your calls.”

  “I thought maybe you were wearing noise-cancelling headphones and didn’t hear the phone ring.”

  “What?”

  “Motormouth,” Bradley said. “Speaking of, she needs to register her dog.”

  She didn’t have a dog to register.

  Vree needed a dog.

  I needed a sister.

  I needed off the phone too, but didn’t want to raise red flags.

  “Davis? Is everything okay?”

  Too late.

  I told a partial truth. “Bradley, I’m…jumpy. Just…jumpy.”

  “Understandable,” he said, quickly followed by, “Quinn! Don’t pull his ear! Davis? I need to go.”

  I took a minute to gather my strength, then set about finding my sister.

  * * *

  I found Vree on my sofa in the living room. She was clicking through pictures of Bubblegum on her phone, baby-talking to them and bawling.

  I sat down beside her. I held my hand out. She passed me her phone and I shut it down. She used a sleeve to mop her eyes. Clearly, I couldn’t leave Vree alone, even to talk to my husband for five minutes. Left to her own devices, she came unglued. So to add to my load, I would need to keep her by my side.

  “Vree, listen to me.”

  She nodded.

  “Has Gully ever hurt a flea that you know of?”

  Vree sniffed. “No.”

  “He won’t start now,” I said. “Gully needs money, Vree, this is about money, not Meredith and Bubblegum. Meredith is his path to money. You have to believe he’s not going to hurt them. I have to believe he’s not going to hurt them. If you don’t believe, I can’t believe. If I don’t believe, we won’t be able to do this.”

  “Do what? I mean—”

  “Find them,” I said. “Then get them back. I can’t do it without you, Vree. I need your help.”

  “I’ll help, Davis. You bet I will. All day long. All week long. As long as it takes, every single minute. But what I don’t understand is, if this is about money, and Meredith is his path to money, why did he take Bubblegum too? How did she get mixed up in this? She doesn’t have any money. I mean—”

  “Bubblegum was an innocent bystander, Vree. She doesn’t have a thing to do with it. And Gully’s not going to hurt either one of them. He just needs money.”

  If I said it enough, I’d believe it.

  “Why would Gully need money, Davis? He’s making a fortune off Jesus Water.”

  Jesus Water, pffft. Gilford Gully had a brother who worked for a beverage-filling plant, Dixie Cola, maybe, in Greenville, twenty miles from Pine Apple. Years earlier, or decades earlier, Dixie relocated their operations to Mexico. Pastor Gully teamed up with Brother Gully, they leased the abandoned filling plant, and Jesus Water was born. Pastor Gully blessed the water, Brother Gully filled the bottles, and they couldn’t possibly still be in business, much less making money. Blessings in a Bottle. Drink the water, and be blessed. “Vree, Gully isn’t making a dime off Jesus Water. He never has and he never will.”

  “He is, Davis.” Vree was bright eyed, either with enthusiasm or lingering tears. “He must be making money. His brother hired Bootsy. If they weren’t making money—”

  “What?” This time I grabbed Vree’s arm. “What about Bootsy?”

  “Bootsy works for Jesus Water.”

  She could have told me this earlier.

  “How long has she worked for Jesus Water, Vree?”

  “A year? Maybe longer. Gooch’s youngest brother grew up and moved out, which was more like Bootsy got tired of him drinking all night and sleeping all day, and she kicked him out. Then all the boys were gone and Bootsy didn’t have anything to do. You know how that is when you don’t have anything to do? She got a job. Bootsy went to work for Gully’s brother at Jesus Water. I mean—”

  Stop sign.

  Gully, Bootsy, Gully’s brother, Jesus Water.

  I’d asked her point blank for a connection between Gully and Bootsy, and there it was. Jesus Water. I stood. “Let’s go, Vree. Up and at ’em.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To my office. We’re going to find Meredith and Bubblegum.”

  * * *

  “How are we going to find them in your office?” She was on my heels. “I didn’t know you had an office. Is it where your husband’s office is? Same place? Do you share an office? One of these days I’m—”

  “We’re here.” My office was throug
h my kitchen. I pointed to the chair across from my desk. She sat. She opened her mouth; I beat her to the punch. “Vree.” I pulled Bootsy’s phone from the pocket of my jeans. “I need to think and work. So I need you to sit there and keep quiet. Just like before. Only speak to answer my questions, and give me the shortest answers you can.”

  She zipped her lips and nodded. Then, through her locked jaw, she eked out, “What are you going to do?”

  I looked up from Bootsy’s phone.

  “Right.” She zipped her lips again. “But I still want to know what you’re going to do.”

  “Vree, whispering is still talking, and I’m going to find them.”

  “How?”

  So far, the be-quiet-and-let-me-think program wasn’t going so well. I laid Bootsy’s phone down, drew a deep breath, and said, “If Gully has a lick of sense, he’ll be on a burner phone.”

  Vree nodded. “Like a prepaid—”

  “Exactly. If he’s not on a burner phone, I can pinpoint his location. There’s a good chance he’s not and I’ll be able to. Because Gully doesn’t have a lick of sense.” The good news was my sister did. Pit the two of them against each other on any field, level or otherwise, and Meredith would be the victor. In fact, I expected her call any minute. She’d say, “I left that nut Gully on the street in downtown Guadalajara. I have Vree’s dog and I’m on my way.”

  My phone wasn’t ringing, and neither was Bootsy’s.

  I picked Bootsy’s up and waved it at Vree. “Quiet time.”

  She said, “You go ahead, Davis. I’m going to sit here and shut up.”

  I didn’t know Gully’s number, Vree didn’t either, and I wasn’t about to call anyone in Pine Apple to ask for it, then have to explain why I wanted it. His Jesus Water employee and kidnapping accomplice had his number. According to the recent call list on Bootsy’s phone, they’d talked four times the day before and twice during the night, at two, then again at four that morning. No wonder Bootsy had been sleeping so hard. She’d been up all night.

  So premeditated.

  There was one text-message exchange, when Gully let Bootsy know he’d received a notification that the email had been read. (By me.) Bootsy responded, 10-4 Pastor. I checked the times, and they matched. Bootsy, who must have been lying in wait for hours, in the lobby, the casino, or the parking garage, had shown up at my door minutes after I read the email and Gully texted her. Their last phone call, less than two minutes in duration, was half an hour later, which was when I was sending out an SOS to Fantasy.

  I powered up my system to look for Gully’s phone. I worked on a Mydlar SPRO personal super computer. I had two college degree notches on my belt—one in criminal justice and the other in computer information science. In my professional career, I’d used them both. Extensively. After the girls were born, I took myself out of the line of fire as far as live criminals were concerned, and earned my Bellissimo paycheck tracking criminals down from the computer-processing side. Several months ago, I built a big one. (Processor.) I had a knack for computing, and a system large enough to accommodate my knack. In what was intended to be a laundry room behind my kitchen, I had 600GB of DDR4 EEC memory, five hard drives, four Quadro and Tesla acceleration cards, and three monitors the size of movie screens.

  The tower whirred to life and the monitors woke up.

  Vree said, “Whoa.”

  I hacked into Gully’s cellphone service provider’s mainframe and plugged in his phone number. Then I asked for a location. A dot pulsed red on the screen. It wasn’t pulsing in Mexico. Gully’s phone was in Houston. And Houston was in Texas.

  Relief flooded through me.

  He had Meredith, against her will, and while he wasn’t far from the Mexican border, he hadn’t crossed it. His phone’s tracker gave me a ten-mile radius where Gully could be. Ten miles in mid-town Houston was a needle-haystack proposition, but that didn’t dampen my spirits. Meredith was on American soil and the dot wasn’t moving.

  My phone rang, scaring Vree to death. It was Fantasy.

  “Hey.”

  “Don’t hey me, Davis. I called to tell you I’m on my way to work and I’m bringing this crazy Pine Apple woman with me. You can have her back.”

  “No! You can’t!”

  “Oh, yes, I can.”

  “Fantasy, I have to have more time.”

  “For what, Davis? What do you need more time for?”

  Instead of answering her question, I asked one of my own. “What’s wrong?”

  “She started a fire is what’s wrong. I had to stomp it out with my brand new Givenchy loafers.”

  “The ones with the chain trim?”

  “Those.”

  “What happened?”

  “She started a fire. Flames and smoke?”

  “How?”

  “That’s a very good question. Because the fire was in the stairwell outside the bonus room.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Inside.”

  Oh, no.

  “Explain to me, Davis, how she started a fire outside the bonus room from inside. I’d like to know.”

  So would I.

  “You can’t bring her back yet. Seriously, Fantasy, you can’t.”

  “Dammit, Davis.”

  SIX

  Gully’s phone plan included a feature called Sharing is Caring. It looked a lot like AT&T’s Family Plan, times ten. It was maxed out with all ten share spots filled, giving Gully access to those ten phone numbers’ data—activities and locations. Bootsy’s name was fourth on Gully’s share list, after his wife Gina, and between his brother, Greene Gully, and Pine Apple’s latest ridiculous excuse for a doctor, Leverette Urleen, MD. No surprise to find Bootsy on the list, considering what I’d learned in the space of one morning. But my name was on the list too—what?—and so was my father’s. Big unauthorized surprises.

  Preachers got away with murder.

  I clicked the S&C icon on Bootsy’s phone and nosed around. Circles to the left of member names filled white when other sharers were on their phones, and lit green when sharers were talking to each other. Which was how Bootsy had known I was on the phone with Daddy—we were sharers and carers. And how she hadn’t known I was on the phone with Fantasy or Bianca. Bianca didn’t share and she sure didn’t care.

  Bianca.

  I’d forgotten all about her. And the dog show I had to judge.

  This was supposed to have been a fun week with my sister.

  Now look.

  I didn’t remove myself from Gully’s share and care list, which he would have noticed. Instead, I cloned my phone, then blocked him from the clone. Next, I placed a tracker on his—goose, gander, all that—and programmed my phone to notify me if his moved an inch. Next, from Bootsy’s phone, I texted him: Davis wants proof of life. He texted back: Come again? I shot back: Send a picture. He texted back: Of what? This went on until I almost lost my marbles, then ten of the longest minutes of my life later, Bootsy’s phone dinged with a photograph of Meredith. Since nine o’clock that morning I’d been telling myself Meredith was in no real or immediate danger, because both Gully and Bootsy were incapable of truly harming anyone. We were inconvenienced, starting with Meredith, and in a compromising position, starting with me, but Meredith wasn’t in any real danger. That’s what I’d been telling myself, anyway, until the proof-of-life photograph appeared on Bootsy’s phone screen. It hit me hard.

  It wasn’t an image of Gully with a knife to her throat, but something about it was terrifying all the same. Meredith, against a backdrop of the dark interior of the twenty-year-old Winnebago, was sitting at the small kitchenette table, Bubblegum beside her, both staring blankly out the motorhome window. The view past the window, the sliver I could see, was concrete. As in parking lot. I could see boredom in Meredith’s posture, tension in her set jaw, and something else—apprehension? Worry?
Was it fear? Was Meredith afraid?

  Which scared me to death.

  I enlarged it, trying desperately to see what had her attention outside the window, looking for clues as to exactly where they were, and found none. I showed it to Vree, who burst into tears. “I know, Vree.” I let her sob on my shoulder. “I know.” I let her get it out, then stopped the crying the only way I knew how, by asking her to talk. “Vree,” I said. “We need to talk about dogs.”

  “Okay.” She sniffed. “Sure.” She mopped her eyes. “I love to talk about dogs.”

  Vree loved to talk. Period.

  * * *

  The waterworks stopped and the talking began, and Vree talking, as tired as my ears were, was better than Vree crying. My brain raced desperately for an easy fix to the hard problem I was facing, all the while I pretended to listen, nodding along, commenting when I had to, through her recitation of Bubblegum Howard’s championship résumé: Miss Bow Wow Alabama; Little Miss Sweet Southern Sassy Paws; Miss Furry Personality; Miss Red, White, and Barking Blue; Miss Canine Cutie Alabama; Miss Southeastern Pup Glitz; Miss Southeastern Tail-Wagging Most Talented—the list went on. And on. And on.

  I caught her taking a breath and dove in. “Bubblegum’s titles don’t sound like dog awards.”

  “Have you seen Toddlers and Tiaras? Or Little Miss America? Or Pageant Princesses? Just like that, but with fur.”

  Really?

  “What—” I wanted to know “—is Bubblegum’s talent?”

  “She’s a dancer,” Vree said.

  “She’s a what?”

  “She dances. Swing, foxtrot, and contemporary.”

  The dog danced?

  “All I have to do is say ‘Katy Perry’ and she’s up on her back paws killing it, Davis. I mean it, she’s so good.”

  The dog danced.

  “I’m her choreographer.”

  “So, this is a talent competition?” I asked.

  “Not totally. But talent is twenty-five percent. I mean, there’s also composite, eveningwear, swimwear, and interview too.”

  What?