Beside him, our fourth, Baylor, dressed in equally disturbing Hawaiian garb.
Had I not had to initiate Operation Catch My Flying Daughters—I’d parked the bellman carts too close to each other and the girls were airborne, jungle gyming their way from one to the other—I’d have collapsed in relief.
With No Hair’s and Baylor’s arrival, our chances of evacuating skyrocketed.
* * *
Bradley was waiting on us to usher Bex, Quinn, Mother, Bianca, and the bellman carts away from the crowd as quickly as possible. He took a right through the residential door with them, and I took a left for Fantasy. I wove through the rowdy crowd. Behind Fantasy, looking exhausted, dazed, and terribly confused, was Danielle Sparks. Her bloody hair was stuffed into a Bellissimo ball cap, the bill casting a shadow over her bruised and swollen forehead. Ten feet away was Eddie the Idiot, his arms full of sleeping pig. Fantasy answered before I asked. “No Hair and Baylor woke up, heard the weather, and chartered a plane home.”
“What about the wedding?”
All conversation came to a complete stop with a man whistle. One of those two-fingered ear-piercing man whistles that could be heard above all else.
“That’s better.” No Hair looked up from a clipboard, caught my eye, and barely nodded. “Look, people,” he said. “I left my wife sleeping in Maui this morning to spend the rest of the day stuffed in a toy airplane, then had to land in a corn field in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and that was before catching a ride in the cargo hold of a National Guard Humvee. I’ve been here all of ten minutes. I don’t even have circulation back in my feet yet. I don’t know who made the room assignments or the reasons behind them. If you have something to say about it, talk to Mother Nature. I’m sure not a single one of you wants to be here—”
Summer Shugart raised a giggly hand. “I love it here.”
“Good to know, lady. Good to know. Now, if you don’t mind.”
Summer awkwardly lowered her hand.
No Hair cleared his throat. “As I said earlier, these are your temporary room assignments. Mr. Cole will speak to you about the evacuation plan after dinner. You’re here with your belongings as a precaution.”
They were there with their belongings because we wanted them in one place, needed their hotel room cardkeys destroyed so they couldn’t roam the building, and so we could peek in the guest rooms they’d just exited in hopes of finding my laptop, my gun, and our money.
“I’m going to read this list one more time,” No Hair said. “If I call out your name, step to your left, my right, you’re on your way to the bunkroom. If I don’t call your name, you’ll be escorted to a private room. Those of you who don’t like the idea of the bunkroom, see me. I’ll be happy to make arrangements for you at city jail. If you want to eat, you have fifteen minutes to drop off your things in your assigned rooms and get to the great room. From what I understand, when the lobster’s gone, it’s gone. And rest assured,” he looked over the crowd, “you’ll be in line for lobster behind me.”
* * *
Bradley made the unpopular room assignments. While I’d been gathering guns, luggage, my offspring, my dog, my mother, and my lot in life, Bianca, he’d been in the control room of Disaster, zipping through surveillance video, isolating individuals who’d been nowhere near the casino from the half hour before the fateful shot rang out until the half hour after. And as a reward for their temporary innocent status, those individuals got the bunkroom. The people he thought we needed to keep a closer eye on got private rooms, including, unfortunately, Eddie, Danielle, and the pig.
I led Eddie to a room at the very end of the single-room hall, as physically far away from me and my family as possible.
“This is you, Eddie.”
I punched the Disaster administration code into the keypad and opened the door.
He barely glanced. “Nope. We need a big bed.”
“If the bed’s not big enough, sleep on the floor.” It was my first glance at a Disaster single room. There wasn’t much more floor than there was bed.
“How are we supposed to fit in here, Davis? Is this you being a bitch to me and Danielle and Bacon?”
I had a loaded gun digging into my ribs, my hip, and my liver. If sleeping arrangement negotiations with Eddie went on two more seconds, I’d show it to him. “This is your room, Eddie. Danielle will be at the other end of the hall.”
“We’re not in the same room?” Eddie turned to Danielle. “Baby?”
“I don’t even know you,” she said. “Or that pig.”
That pig, awake and thankfully on a leash, was loud. And fat. And slow. And clumsy. (And cute. I had to admit it. The pig was cute. She had little pink bows on her ears and she sounded like a blender.)
I pushed the door open wider. I was about to give him a little push when he stepped in on his own. “Come on, Bacon.” He whistled. “There’s snacks.”
I wondered if Danielle took note of how quickly he traded the idea of sharing a room with her for Cool Ranch Doritos.
I walked her to the other end of the hall, then coded her in. She eyed the bed without complaining. (I guess so.) (I was about to drop, and I hadn’t been hit over the head.)
“Listen,” she searched for my name.
“Davis.”
“Cool name.” Her forehead was every shade of purple. “I want to thank you for helping me.”
In her life, Danielle had never thanked anyone anywhere at any time for anything. That I knew of, anyway.
“I’m not sure who he is. Or his pig. Or why I’m dating him.”
She’d dated him off and on her whole life, including through both my brief and unfortunate marriages to him.
“And while he reminds me a little of Batman,” she said, “so maybe that’s why I’m dating him, I don’t like him a bit, and I don’t want to be around him.”
I knew exactly how she felt.
“He’s so rude,” she said. “And, not to stoop to his level and be rude too, but—” she looked right and left “—he doesn’t seem all there.”
Running through my mind were my children, my mother, and Bianca Sanders behind a vault door, millions of dollars of cash missing, and a dead man in an ice bin. I didn’t have time to agree with her: Eddie Crawford was certified stupid. Instead, I said, “I bet you’d like a shower.”
“You’d bet right,” she said.
“Everything you need should be here.”
She pressed her lips together and looked away. “You might be the nicest person I’ve ever met.”
I might have misunderstood her.
“Really,” she said. “You are.”
“Thank you, Danielle.” And you’ll regret saying that when you get your memory back. “Miller,” I said, “the medic. Do you remember him from the casino?”
“Now him,” she said, “I like.”
“He’ll be by to check on you soon.” So hurry with your shower. “He has a portable something or another he’s going to use to see if you have a concussion.” Or worse. “And he’s going to run a few cognitive tests.”
“I’m in,” she said. “I’m sure I have a mother somewhere, and I’m sure she wants me to marry a doctor.”
First of all, I wasn’t sure Miller was a real doctor, as in MD. I think he was a junior doctor, as in Physician’s Assistant. Which was close enough. Second of all, for the first time in my life, I felt a pang of sympathy for the woman who’d bullied and harassed and humiliated me since before I could remember. She didn’t have a father, that anyone knew of, anyway. She’d been raised by her grandmother, the nastiest woman alive (then, she’d since met her maker), because her mother ran off with a drummer who said he knew Lynyrd Skynyrd when Danielle was just a little girl, and no one had seen or heard from her since. “My mother’s here,” I said. “And for sure, she’d want you to marry a doctor.”
“You’re so sweet.” Danielle put a warm hand on my arm, and I couldn’t help it—honestly, she was the single meanest person I’d ever known—I stopped myself from pulling away. Instead, I got closer. As close to her as I’d ever been in my life. I looked as far into her brown eyes as I could. “Danielle? Do you really not know me?”
She squinted, which must have hurt, because it turned into a grimace. “I do know you. You’re—”
“Davis.”
“Right!” She threw her arms around me. “Davis!”
Twilight Zone.
It was all so strange. Everything about the day had been strange, and I had a feeling there was so much more to come.
Then it came.
Or, rather, she came.
EIGHT
For dinner, Bradley and I shared a pot of coffee in the control room, a room through the door and left of the great entrance hall of Disaster. The control room looked like the top of an air traffic tower, but without the view. It was ten feet wide and twenty feet long with a concrete floor and exposed steel beams along the ceiling. A black laminate U-shaped desk ran along three walls, and there were six computers, one dedicated to the National Weather Center, all running off a central processor. They were the only updated electronics I’d seen on Disaster.
Well, the Pine Apple slot machines I had yet to see, and didn’t want to, were (infuriatingly) updated electronics.
The processor was hardwired directly to the generator and connected to a Disaster-dedicated satellite I hadn’t seen either, but Bradley had, and he said it looked like NASA. The room was a bunker, only four of us had access, and the equipment it held was in place to ensure we maintained power, computer processing, and communication at the Bellissimo in the event of an emergency.
Between the dead man and the missing money, I wasn’t sure where to start. Between the dead man and the missing money, I’d probably end up at the same place regardless of where I started.
The dead man wasn’t going to get any deader, we had everyone contained, so I started with the money. I split the two computer screens along the east wall of the control room into quads and watched expedited surveillance of all casino entrances and exits beginning that morning at five when the National Hurricane Center news broke that the storm had turned. It was announced over the loudspeakers and our guests were ushered out. At the time, video surveillance showed Eddie, Danielle, and Jug downstairs in the drunk tank—Eddie was, as he’d said, asleep, Danielle was awake and arguing with Jug, who was arguing back—as an unidentifiable casino security suit head-on-the-desk slept outside the cell. I scanned the warp-speed feeds until the surveillance clocks crept to seven a.m., watching everyone, including the drowsy security suit, who was supposed to be guarding the Pine Apple drunks, leave. When the casino had been completely evacuated except for Eddie, Danielle, and Jug in the drunk tank, I paused all eight feeds.
While I manhandled the computers, Bradley ran the Disaster Help Desk: questions, complaints, special requests, phone calls in and out, and Disaster two-way radio traffic.
Bianca’s bed was unacceptable (“…atrocious. Never in my life…”), specifically the two-hundred-thread-count (“…for peasants”) and patterned (“…appalling fleur-de-lis”) sheets, which, in the end, not wanting anyone in or out of the vault door leading to the suites where our children were, was resolved first by Baylor fetching acceptable bedding from Bianca’s penthouse, and second by my mother. Because if bed making was an Olympic sport, my mother would win the gold.
One of the gaming agents, the man with the wife and girlfriend, wanted out. He’d confiscated a to-go lobster dinner and a case of assorted whiskeys, and his girlfriend had the engine running at the main entrance. Rather than inconveniencing the Gaming Board any more than we already had, Baylor accompanied him downstairs, then right back up. Fifteen minutes later, No Hair radioed in the same scenario, but it was four to-go lobster dinners, a case of assorted wines, and the man’s wife waiting downstairs. Baylor escorted him the second time too, then safely back on Disaster, radioed in that the wife was hotter than the girlfriend.
I looked up from the two computers along the west wall, where I was scanning everyone in the building into our facial recognition software on one computer, then running the images through miles of surveillance starting at five that morning through the other. “Bradley? Where’s July?”
He stared at the radios and phones lined up on the black desk in front of him. “I haven’t seen her.”
No Hair said he left his wife, Grace, sleeping in Hawaii. Had Baylor left his bride-to-be sleeping in Hawaii too? “Did they get married?” I asked. “Like at the hotel or the airport before Baylor and No Hair left?”
“Why would they get married at an airport?”
“Because they wanted to get married in Hawaii. The airport is in Hawaii.”
“Davis, I honestly don’t know.”
Computer five dinged. I rolled my chair and watched Banks, our cash couriers, back down the long tunnel drive beside the casino to the dungeon door when they’d arrived to clear the vault that morning. Only Banks, Gulfcoast Laundry, and the Biloxi Police Department had access to the dungeon drive.
No Hair radioed in from the great room. “Is there any way to cut these people off? Last call for alcohol? I feel like the Sigma Chi housemother. And the pig is running loose.”
I grabbed for a radio. “Send the pig and its owner back to their room, No Hair.”
“The pig’s owner is nowhere to be found.”
I froze my fifth computer screen at 7:28 a.m., when Banks drove up the dungeon drive with the contents of our main vault.
The two-way radio beeps were giving me a headache. It was No Hair again. “Brad, I’m going to need you in here. I have the Weather One crew asking for their hotel rooms back, I have two drunk women chasing a pig, and everyone is asking evacuation questions I think you should answer.”
I started the feed again on my fifth computer screen, real time, frame by frame, and stopped it at 7:42, when a black Chrysler Town and Country Touring van that had seen much better decades entered the service drive on the right of the building, looped the service circle, plowed through our security gate like it wasn’t even there, bumping over it to back down the dungeon drive. The van had no license plates, front or back. I couldn’t begin to see, from my surveillance video perspective, anything resembling a driver or passengers.
“Hello to the alls?”
Our radios blared.
“Filet, who is my person, has prepareded the snackses for before the midnightses.”
I checked the time. It was eleven o’clock. An hour before the midnightses.
“No one eatses Filet’s wonderful Kobe steakses because everyones eatses the fat lobsterses, so Filet, who is my person, slices the steakses skinnys, very skinnys, like Filet’s beautifuls wifeses, then shaved the provolones cheeses on topses to broils on beautiful loaveses of breads from the France. Is hot. Please to wash filthy hands from loud slotses machineses.”
What about the slotses machinenses? People were playing them? I shot out of my seat to put a stop to that business just as a ski-masked figure exited the beat-up Chrysler van on the grainy surveillance video in front of me. I sat back down to watch. He was wearing police blues. It was Wells Cannon. He walked to one of the corner cameras on the parking pad, aimed, then shot it out. He took ten steps to the other camera and did the same.
I jumped both times.
Looking down the barrel of a gun was never easy. Or pleasant. Even on a computer screen.
Bradley left the phones and radios to watch over my shoulder.
I set all surveillance to 7:55 as he stood outside of the dungeon security door. I couldn’t see him enter from the loading dock, because he’d disabled the exterior cameras, but I could catch him coming in the door.
At 7:58, the security door opened, but from three different camera ang
les, I only caught a white sleeve opening the door. I couldn’t even see a hand—just a white-sleeved arm. I switched to interior camera feeds to identify the white-sleeved person who let Wells Cannon in as he walked down the hall. Of the nine interior surveillance feeds I had running, seven went down at eight o’clock sharp, including the one I had my eyeballs glued to. The only cameras I had left were from outside the casino looking in. I’d lost everything inside.
“What happened?” I slammed the offensive keyboards—enter, enter, enter, home, home, home, escape, escape, escape—trying to get the video back. “What happened to the feed? We just lost the casino and the dungeon from every camera.”
“What time?” Bradley asked.
I pointed to the corner clocks. 8:01.
“Lockdown,” Bradley said. “We evacuated the casino, Banks left with the contents of the vault, so I locked it down at eight. After that, I only unlocked it for five minutes to let you and Fantasy in for the drop, then locked it right back down.”
“But…but—”
“Davis, honey, lockdown disabled all fixed electronics. We don’t have, nor will we have, any video surveillance of anything that happened in the casino or the dungeon this morning after eight o’clock.”
Wells Cannon entered our building at eight in the morning but didn’t die for hours. What had he done all that time? Who was attached to the white-sleeved arm that let him in our building? Who took my Bellissimo tote bag with my gun and computer? Who relocated ten cash carts around us? Where were our ten cash carts? Without casino surveillance after eight o’clock that morning, how in the world would we ever know?
* * *
I checked on Mother and the girls. They were sleeping soundly, all four, especially the furry one who was worn out from hours of barking her name at my mother. I peeked in on Bianca, who’d changed out of her black (always) silk cocktail dress into black (always) silk pajamas, also asleep, straight up in a chair. The sheets on the bed were crisp white linen.
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