Double Agent

by Gretchen Archer

  “Bianca?”

  She stirred. “David? Is that you?”

  “Let’s get you to bed, Bianca.”

  “Where am I, David?”

  Her eyes were open; she couldn’t see a thing.

  “David?”

  I hauled her up.

  “Is there swine here, David? I feel as if I heard the unmistakable call of swine.”

  “I think you dreamed it.”

  And my name is Davis.

  She all but fell across the bed.

  I pulled a two-way radio from my back pocket, which was a relief. Part of my fatigue was just fatigue. The other part was the load I was carrying: phones, radios, passkeys, a jumble of slot machine keys in one pocket and the lion from a Silly Sounds puzzle in the other, plus I had a cold loaded gun tucked in the waistband of my jeans. “Bianca.” I snapped my fingers near her face. Her eyes popped open; I shook the two-way. “If you need me, push the green button.”

  “I abhor the color green, David.”

  “I have the radio set to channel ten,” I said. “That’s how you reach me. The green button. Channel ten. When you wake tomorrow morning, push the green button and I’ll have someone bring you coffee.” I nestled the radio between the large vats of her prescription happy pills and designer vitamin collection on the nightstand, knowing good and well who would bring her coffee.

  Me.

  “Channel ten, Bianca.”

  She snored.

  “Goodnight, Bianca.”

  * * *

  I barely made it to the other side of the vault door before I ran into Miller the Medic.

  “She’s fine,” he said. “Her vitals are good, her balance, her vision, her reflexes, and she’s not in any danger.”

  It took me a second—he was talking about Danielle. I let the wall hold me up. “Not in any danger? She thinks she’s in Vegas and doesn’t remember her pig. That’s dangerous.”

  “She has transient global amnesia either brought on by the blow to her head or the amount of alcohol she consumed last night.”

  “If she has amnesia, how does she remember how much she drank?”

  “Didn’t someone say she spent the night in the drunk tank?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean she was drunk.” It was more a case of three strikes and Eddie was out. When the third casino security notification crossed my phone in the middle of the night—First, Eddie the Idiot picked a fight with the master brewer at Hops, the casino’s craft brewery, because they didn’t have Bud Light, which was right before he climbed on a blackjack table slinging his shirt over his head like a lasso, claiming he’d lost it to the dealer, then twenty minutes later, was all over the casino trying to sell lucky five-dollar bills for twenty—I had him thrown in the drunk tank, not realizing (or caring, at the time, because I was asleep) Danielle would go down with him. I had no idea if they were drunk or not. It was a safe bet they were, so I told Security to toss him and anyone with him in the tank, then rolled right back over.

  “The thing is,” Miller the Medic said, “she needs to be woken up every two hours for assessment.”

  “Assessment of what?”

  “If she wakes easily. If she’s better or worse.”

  “When will she get her memory back?” With no casino video surveillance past eight that morning and with Jug Dooley in the wind, Danielle and Eddie were our only sources of information for anything and everything that happened after, which was to say we were in deep trouble with those two as our only witnesses. Given my horrible choices, I’d rather question her.

  “She’ll get her memory back somewhere between any minute and never,” he said.

  “She knows who Batman is.”

  “Perfectly normal,” Miller said. “She most likely knows her Social Security number and who the president is too.”

  I doubted that.

  “She’s lost her short-term memory.”

  The thing was, Eddie wasn’t a short-term memory. Neither, unfortunately, was I.

  Our two-ways blared. “Miller.”

  It was Head Storm, Mark Perry.

  “Go for Miller.”

  “We’ve got one about to go down in the great room.”

  “On the way.”

  He said it running, throwing over his shoulder to me, “Wake her every two hours.”

  Great.

  I meant to follow Miller to the great room I had yet to set foot in, but he was long gone. What I followed instead was the soundtrack of the casino world I lived in, the unmistakable music of slot machines, growing louder with my every step. It was an electronic version of an old unwelcome tune punctuated with bells and whistles, the Pine Apple High spirit song: “We will fight, fight, fight, for every bite, bite, bite.”

  Before I could die of humiliation, my two-way radio buzzed, sending a shockwave through me. It was Baylor.

  “Hey,” he said, “you’d better get down here.”

  “Who plugged in the slot machines, Baylor?”

  “The Storms, I guess. They played them all through dinner.”

  “How do I unplug them?”

  “They’re running off the generator. Find a Storm electrician and ask for help so you don’t sabotage the generator. Cool game. Have you seen the Blazing Davis Bonus Round? Your boobs are on fire.”

  I had to wake Danielle in two hours.

  I wondered where, on Disaster, I could find a bucket of ice water.

  I wondered if after I woke her with ice water, I could use the empty bucket to knock her memory back into her head the same way it’d been knocked out.

  I wondered why, when she answered “here” for me, when I actually wasn’t on the bus to Dauphin Island for our sixth-grade beach trip, everyone believed her when she said she thought they’d called her name twice. I wondered why, in eleventh grade, when our SAT scores were returned, Danielle scoring the highest in our county with my score landing me at the rock bottom of the barrel, no one would ask how she managed to switch our answer sheets. And more. So much more.

  I wasn’t innocent. I didn’t take it sitting down. (Although I sat down to take the SAT again, scoring an almost perfect 1600.) But it was my father who stopped me from giving back exactly, if not worse, what Danielle dished out. “Do you want to be that person, Davis? Do you?”

  I did not.

  “One day her envy of you won’t manifest itself in such harsh ways and she’ll need you, Sweet Pea.”

  Or one day she’ll forget everything, leaving me alone with the seventh-grade memory of her lying in wait for the school secretary to step away from her desk, then using the loudspeaker to announce I’d gotten my period. Or of swiping my clothes from my gym locker during gym class, then wearing them to school the next day, daring me to accuse her of stealing.

  Danielle Sparks was one of the hardest lessons I’d ever learned.

  I would have PTSD from her for the rest of my life.

  And I would be waking her up every two hours, as if none of it had happened.

  The worst? The day hadn’t come when she needed me, the day had come when I needed her.

  Baylor interrupted my mental stroll down Danielle Lane with, “Hey, can you come down here?”

  “Down where?”

  “I’m on lobby patrol.”

  “You’re in the lobby?”

  “What does lobby patrol mean to you, Davis? Yes, I’m in the lobby. And there’s a woman beating on the front doors.”

  “Send her away, Baylor. Send her to a shelter. Drive her to one in a Bellissimo limo if you have to. She’ll be safer at a shelter than here.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “It’s your mother-in-law.”

  “What? Why is she here?”

  Because Bradley had been too busy to return her many calls. She drove eight hours because she
was worried.

  So, as it turned out, I spent the night before Hurricane Kevin hit Biloxi on Disaster with my real husband, my daughters, my dog, my mother, the Storms, two gaming agents, the Weather One crew, two very drunk Michiganders, my ex-ex-husband, his amnesiac girlfriend, twenty-five mortifying megatower slot machines, my boss, No Hair, the fourth on our team, Baylor, CSI’s Number One Fan, a pig, and my mother-in-law.

  NINE

  I flattened myself against the wall on the hall side of the great room doors.

  I needed to let Bradley know his mother was there, but I wasn’t about to step into the great room and let everyone, or even a single someone, make the connection between sixteen-year-old me on the slot machines and thirtysomething me in living color. Instead, I peeked.

  The first thing I saw was the miles of lobster carcasses littering the cafeteria tables. Where was the Storm housekeeper? Was his name Broom? I looked past the lobster shells to the back wall, lined with megatower slot machines, every seat filled, but mercifully, after another No Hair man whistle to get everyone’s attention, not being played.

  It felt like my first victory of the excruciatingly long day.

  Chip Chapman had the floor.

  “Here’th whath I know.”

  In his right hand, a lobster claw. He thought it was a microphone. I think it was safe to say live broadcasts were over for the night, and I was pretty sure I was looking at the call the Head Storm had made to the Medic Storm.

  “New Orlando is clothing up shopth,” Chip tried to say. “Battening the hatcheths. Manthatory ebbacuations. Thisth thing is a BEASTH!” He dropped his lobster mike. He stared at it on the floor. Then stared at his empty hand. His producer, at one of the cafeteria tables, stood and put Chip Chapman out of his Merlot misery.

  “I believe what Chip’s trying to say is the mayor of New Orleans has issued a mandatory evacuation. To be perfectly honest with you,” the producer said, “the latest satellite images we have are unprecedented. Not since Katrina have we seen this kind of massive storm. In the past hour it’s mushroomed to blanket the entire Gulf. The winds are registering at one hundred and ten miles an hour, and if it keeps up, the National Weather Center will upgrade Kevin to Category Four.”

  Chairs scraped.

  “The storm is less than two hundred miles away,” the producer said. “But it’s gathering speed, and while I realize everyone is enjoying the slot machines and the wonderful food—” from the kitchen, Filet, who might have been Asian, which explained the heavy accent, smiled wide and waved with both hands “—I strongly advise those of you leaving to go.”

  Chip Chapman hit the deck. One minute he was up, the next he was down.

  Miller the Medic rushed him.

  Bradley took two steps forward and said, “No one’s going anywhere. No one is going back to their hotel room, no one is evacuating tonight, in fact, no one is leaving this floor.”

  The women from Michigan squealed their delight.

  I heard the Disaster elevator open in the great hall behind us. I found my phone and texted my husband: Your mother is here. I watched him read the message, then surrender with both hands.

  Hurricane Kevin might kill us all.

  * * *

  The vault door leading to Disaster’s suites couldn’t be breached with anything less than the combination or a truckload of dynamite. Outside the vault door, I was armed and alert. Inside, knowing my children were close and secure, I could almost breathe. Between the suites was yet another security door accessed by yet another combination that led to the only emergency exit from Disaster. The double-walled steel door opened to a dark dank concrete tunnel, six feet wide, twelve feet high, four miles long (it felt four miles long), that wrapped around an exterior corner of the thirteenth floor and led to a helipad. Behind the helipad we found a concrete inlet with iron benches and chairs bolted to the concrete, an industrial-sized telescope on a permanent black iron base, all behind a waist-high iron-rail balustrade. The cavernous space was barely lit by flickering gas lamps and the glow of No Hair’s Hawaiian shirt.

  It was all as unnerving as it could possibly be.

  At eleven forty-five on Thursday the twelfth, with Baylor on guard in the casino lobby and Fantasy on the first shift of Disaster housing patrol—“It’s like Spring Break at Daytona Beach in the bunkroom, and the FEMA man is driving me crazy asking for Q-tips he says he needs for specimen swabs”—Bradley, No Hair, and I traveled the narrow concrete tunnel, then stepped outside with Mark Perry, Head Storm. At which point I could really breathe, because it was my first fresh air of the gruelingly long day. Sticky air, gloomy air, but air.

  Mark Perry was hired by No Hair. He was a Mississippi State Trooper when he wasn’t a Stormer, and he and No Hair had known each other since forever and a day ago when No Hair was with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and Mark Perry was the Mississippi Highway Patrol Communication Liaison with MBI, liaisoning directly with No Hair. They’d worked well together then, he was No Hair’s first choice to lead the Storm team those many years ago, and his first Storm hire. Since then, Mark Perry had been promoted by Mississippi several times, currently holding the position of Special Agent in Charge of the Governor’s Detail, meaning his was the lead car when the Governor traveled the state. And if Vernon R. Wilson trusted him, given the day I’d had, that was good enough for me. Plus, after settling my mother-in-law in to the small suite bedroom beside my mother and the girls, I cyber cleaned every closet of Mark Perry’s life, finding a strong portfolio for a state employee, but no skeletons. One divorce, one two-year-old daughter named Madeline who lived with her mother on Pine Needle Place in Montgomery. And that was after I pulled him up on surveillance to see exactly what he’d been up to all day. He’d spent it directing his crew by cell phone, two-way radio, and a Microsoft Surface Pro from the hotel tower, where he and another Storm cleared all twenty-seven Bellissimo guest floors. He’d searched, room to room, closet to closet, behind draperies, under beds, and inside shower stalls, for stowaways. He hadn’t been anywhere near the casino at any time, much less the time around when it had been breached. Surveillance showed Perry in the hotel from eight that morning until he answered Filet’s dinner bell without stepping into the lobby even once, stopping several times for phone calls, two-way radio communication, computer tablet chores, twice for vending machine snack breaks, and the only thing he’d found other than seventeen hundred unmade beds was a bath faucet running on the fourth floor, flooding three rooms below it on the third, and a pig on the seventh floor, a pig he couldn’t catch.

  We didn’t move for the first few minutes. We looked out over the eerily dark and silent city of Biloxi and listened to the amplified splash of the Bellissimo fountain below us, the same fountain my children had romped in earlier, the whitewater noise almost deafening without the muffle of street traffic.

  I rested my head on my husband’s shoulder, listened to the fountain cascade and breathed the thick air, as Mark Perry ticked off the list of what his team had accomplished and what they had left to do. The Storms were one venue short of completing their interior hurricane preparedness checklist. They’d cleared the entire building, prepped the lower floors, relocated the inventory from the lobby jewelry store, Rocks, to the Disaster vault, and secured all vital documents from the executive offices. At daybreak, they would redirect their energies outside. On their agenda: check the entire roof for any loose debris and secure the satellite system, scour every square inch of landscaping for dead or dying tree limbs, because, he explained, dead branches repurposed themselves as projectile missiles during hurricanes, then turn off the water mains, shock the pools, and more I didn’t catch.

  “After that we’re back in the building to move all lobby furniture to the mezzanine, check the seventeen hundred hotel rooms one last time, then we’ll be down to our next-to-the-last chore before total lockdown, backing up the operating system for the third
and final time. We’ll go to work at daybreak tomorrow morning, we’ll be finished by nine, then we’ll be back on Disaster until the storm passes, at which time recovery efforts will begin. What we haven’t done and what we still need to do is close the casino,” Perry said. “Can anyone tell me why?”

  No Hair slapped a printout of Wells Cannon’s driver’s license on the iron table between them. And Wells Cannon looked decidedly better in his driver’s license photo than he had in his bloody fake-officer’s uniform on the floor of our casino.

  “I know him,” Mark Perry said. “I hired him for the Storm Team after Katrina. His name is Fargo. What about him?”

  Somehow, I formed words. “His prints came back, and his driver’s license has him listed as Wells Cannon.”

  “We called him Fargo,” Mark Perry said. “As in Wells Fargo. Because he was obsessed with money.”

  “His obsession with money may have been the end of him,” Bradley said.

  No Hair landed a printout of a second picture of Wells Cannon on the table, one I’d taken in the casino just before we rolled him in a tapestry drape panel and stuffed him in an ice bin.

  Mark Perry bent over the picture. “What happened?” He picked it up and angled it for more light. “Was this picture taken here? Downstairs?”

  “Yes, and why you haven’t been able to close the casino,” Bradley said.

  “When was this?” Perry asked.

  “Earlier today,” Bradley said.

  Then he asked the same questions we’d answered twice already, first FEMA, then Gaming: did we know who shot him and had anyone spoken to him before he died.

  “No and no.” It wasn’t so much that I wanted to withhold information from him, but rather that I didn’t want to get into it with him. Which was to say, I was exhausted.

  Perry let go of the picture and it floated to the iron table. “Why was he here in the first place?”

  “All answers we need,” No Hair said.

  “Let’s talk about your team,” Bradley said.