Double Agent

by Gretchen Archer

  The back of the van was stuffed with black canvas bags full of money.

  Bellissimo money.

  Make that life. There’d be no five-to-ten for Jug.

  And no wonder FEMA had volunteered to drive my mother’s car and take Bradley’s mother to safety. He’d followed his money to keep an eye on it.

  I crossed the bus aisle to the front bench seat on the other side. I banged the half-window down. “Hey, Bea!”

  Nothing.

  “BEA!”

  From her kitchen window, she yelled, “WHAT, Davis? People are trying to sleep, you know.”

  I wasn’t positive, but it should have been around six-thirtyish in the evening. “Bea? Do you have your shotgun?”

  By way of answer, she slid the long barrel out her screenless kitchen window. “Who do I need to shoot?”

  “A hundred dollars if you don’t let anyone touch Jug’s van.”

  The shotgun retreated. A minute later the front door opened. “Cash?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re on,” she said.

  Jug had a foot on the first step inside the school bus. He turned. “Hey, Bea.”

  She cocked her shotgun on her way to his van. “Hey, Jug.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Knowing Jug had the money made using him for FEMA bait tricky.

  Given any other circumstances, we’d have locked him up immediately.

  We didn’t, because we needed him to identify FEMA. Too, we had no way to restrain him except at gunpoint, and Jug, I knew for a fact, was slippery. And we didn’t have zip ties or handcuffs. We didn’t have a rope, a straightjacket, or even Scotch tape. We had guns. And given the choice of Scotch tape or guns, I’d take the guns any day, but for all we knew, Jug was packing too.

  It was Alabama.

  Everyone was packing.

  We didn’t necessarily want a Pine Apple shootout.

  He bounced on the front bus bench opposite me, Bradley between us. “Why are we going to Chief’s house, Davis?”

  “My mother made pot roast. Remember?”

  “Right.” A frown crossed his face, his cheeks filled with air, he pounded his chest with the side of a fist, then the rest of us dove for cover as the combustible buildup from the beer escaped Jug. Louder than the helicopter. After a reasonable amount of time, I peeked to see if he’d blown out the windows of the school bus.

  “How much have you had to drink, Jug?”

  “That was my last one.”

  “Of how many?”

  He shot both hands out and splayed his fingers, preparing to count.

  Bradley leaned past me. “Take a right on Banana Street, Baylor.”

  “The Chief lives on Main Street,” Jug said, as if I didn’t know.

  Baylor parked the school bus at the corner of Banana and Main. Front porches lit up in every direction. I rolled my eyes. Someone spotted Jug and barked an X-rated greeting through an open window. Climbing out of the school bus, he gave it right back.

  We had two blocks to travel on foot, the cover of night falling, and Jug shuffling behind us. No urgency whatsoever. A Friday evening stroll with an old high school buddy, her husband, and their friend. Jug whistled. We’d traveled half a block when he announced, “Hey, Davis. You know I got your money?”

  We came to a dead stop in front of Mabel Carother’s house.

  The streetlight straight above us lit like an interrogation lamp.

  “Why, Jug?” I asked. “Why do you have our money?”

  Jug’s hair was a sloppy mess, casting long shadows over his face. “I’m taking it to the bank for you.”

  “Our bank is in Biloxi.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said with great authority. “It’s in Jackson.”

  (Jackson? Mississippi or Alabama?)

  Either state, Jug went from five-to-ten to life, then ten-to-twenty if he was nothing but the clueless getaway driver, and clueless he was, to the point of there being a strong possibility Jug wouldn’t be found competent to stand trial.

  We told Jug we’d take the money off his hands and deposit it ourselves right after pot roast. A friend of his was already there.

  “Cool,” Jug said. “Who?”

  “The man who busted you out of Biloxi lockup twice, Jug. The man who asked you to jam our backdoor. The man you helped load our cash and the man who asked you to deposit it.”

  “He’s at Chief’s?” Jug ambled along. “Small world.”

  Then would have been a good time to ask Jug how the two imposter gaming agents ended up floating in the Bellissimo fountain, a question I’d ask as soon as my daughters were safe. Instead, I said as we turned the last corner, “We’re going to look in the window first, Jug. We want to surprise him.”

  “Who?”

  “Your friend, Jug.”

  “K.”

  There was no way Jug would be found competent to stand trial, and thoughts of how I could possibly have imagined that Jug had the wherewithal to have compromised my family took me all the way to the house I grew up in. From across Main Street, the whole scene looked like a Norman Rockwell. Everyone we could see through my parents’ bay window and around the warm lights of the dining room table were people we held in our hearts, starting with our daughters, who were our hearts, all the way to my sister, Meredith, and my niece Riley. The problem was, we couldn’t see Daddy, or worse, FEMA. The dinner crowd was so large, Mother had inserted the leaves in the dining room table, extending both ends out of our line of sight. Daddy must have been at the head of the table; FEMA must have been at the other end. We weren’t about to sneak up and peep in the window for Jug to identify FEMA, because Jug didn’t sneak.

  Bradley looked at his watch.

  Bust in guns blazing it was.

  We didn’t have time for anything else.

  “Baylor, you take the front door with Jug.” We checked again to make sure we were locked and loaded. “Bradley and I will take the back.”

  “What’s with all the heat?” Jug asked. “Are you going to shoot up your family, Davis?”

  The three of us said, “Shut up, Jug.”

  “Don’t I need a gun?” he asked.

  We said, “Shut up, Jug.”

  Ten minutes later, my mother-in-law was screaming at the tip top of her lungs, aimlessly lobbing dinner rolls through the air, my sister was under the table with my niece, my mother was cowered in a corner hunched over her beloved gravy boat, our Goldendoodle, Candy, was barking her head off, Daddy was swinging a pair of handcuffs like a pendulum, Bradley and I had our daughters in our arms, and Baylor had a gun to FEMA’s head.

  “Is this him, Jug?”

  “Him who?”

  “The man who let you out of jail twice.”

  Jug said, “Nope.”

  The handcuffs stopped swinging.

  The only noise in the room was from our dog, Candy, who was gathering wayward dinner rolls.

  “Look again, Jug.” Baylor cupped FEMA’s chin from behind with his free hand and none-too-gently turned his head side to side as my sister hustled the children, hers and ours, out of the dining room. Anne Cole, shooting eye daggers at FEMA ran out behind her.

  “Nope.”

  I was elated my daughters were safe. I was relieved we’d located the Bellissimo’s money. I was grateful to have lived through the helicopter ride. But if we were falsely accusing a federal agent, we still had big problems on our hands. “You’ve never seen this man, Jug?”

  Jug had his eye on the pot roast in the middle of the table. “Sure,” he said. “I’ve seen him.”

  I threw my hands in the air. “Where, Jug? When?”

  FEMA struggled under Baylor’s firm grip.

  “He killed them two men who helped us load the money last night,” Jug said.

  The imposter gaming a
gents.

  “He said that way, we didn’t have to split our money with them.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched my father shake his head in sad disbelief.

  “Ran an ice pick through their brains.” Jug said it through a mouthful of dinner roll he’d picked up off the floor. “Maybe it was this morning.” He eyed my niece’s barely touched plate of food. “You know how you don’t get any sleep when you’re partying? Hard to know what day it is? Then—” Jug used a second dinner roll from the floor as a pointer “—he tied Danielle up and hid her in the casino. Made me put slot machines on her, and I’d already moved them slot machines twice. Or once or twice. Maybe five times. Those suckers are heavy. He said after I got the money in the bank I could come back and get Danielle.” Jug inventoried the scattered silverware on the table. “And I thought, but what if the storm got in the casino before I got back? She’d get all wet. And then I thought, what’s she going to eat? He said Danielle couldn’t come with us because she was a wild card, and I said, ‘I know. That’s the best part about Danielle. She’s wild as a buck.’” Jug settled on an abandoned spoon. “And she’s smart too.”

  Baylor cuffed FEMA, then he and I walked him to Daddy’s patrol car. Over his shoulder, FEMA said, “You’ve got way bigger problems than me.”

  “Oh, really?” I gave him a quick shove. “You killed two men, stole fifty million dollars, left a woman to die under slot machines, then had the nerve to sit at my family’s dinner table. How much bigger does it get?” For all my bravado, a chill ran through me.

  Baylor opened the perp door, then swept an arm.

  “I’ll be out in a week.”

  Baylor buckled him.

  “I know how to cover my tracks.”

  “Witnesses, FEMA,” I said. “You left witnesses.”

  “Fine, upstanding, pillars-of-the-community, your witnesses.”

  Unfortunately, when it came to Danielle and Jug, he had a point. A point I’d worry about later. I leaned in close enough to smell the eucalyptus. “Who’s your partner?”

  FEMA choked out a sick little laugh. “That’s for you to figure out.”

  I slammed the door.

  Baylor and I turned for the house, but I still heard him through the car window. “If I were you, instead of looking for my partner I’d be looking for someone with international connections.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks on Mother’s pea-pebble path.

  FEMA yelled even louder through the glass, “You can test hair follicles to see who’s traveled out of the country recently.”

  Baylor cupped a hand on my elbow, propelling me forward. “He’s full of it.”

  That, he was.

  Or was he?

  With one last wary, sidelong glance at FEMA—what was he talking about?—I stepped through the front door of the home I’d grown up in as my father was ending a call with the Greenville Police Department, twenty miles east of Pine Apple, requesting prisoner transport. Greenville was on the way. We weren’t sure what to do with Jug just yet. The smart move would’ve been to stuff Jug in the Weather One helicopter, take him back to Disaster, walk him up and down the rows of sleepers in the bunkroom, and let him identify FEMA’s partner, who’d sprung him from Biloxi lockup twice. But that would mean being stuffed on the helicopter bench seat with Jug. And not only would it be the most miserable ride of my entire life, who knew if that person was sleeping on Disaster. For all we knew, that person was somewhere else on the three million square feet of Bellissimo property, had been pulling strings from Biloxi PD the entire time, or was long gone.

  We had a minute to decide what to do with Jug, because he wasn’t going anywhere anyway until my mother finished with him. She’d whipped the dishtowel from her apron ties, much like any of the rest of us would jerk a weapon from a holster, and was using it on Jug’s head. “You haven’t got the sense God gave a goose!” WHACK WHACK WHACK. “Your grandmother is rolling over in her grave!” WHACK WHACK WHACK. “The next time someone asks you to drive around with Davis’s money, don’t!” WHACK WHACK WHACK.

  Daddy eased the dishtowel from her.

  “What gave FEMA away?” I asked him. “How’d you know?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “Your mother the human polygraph machine did.”

  Two bright spots of red still burned on Mother’s cheeks leftover from the dishtowel thrashing she’d just given Jug. “Every word out of that man’s mouth,” she said. “Lies, lies, lies.”

  Now that was a good do-it-yourself CSI trick: my mother the walking lie-detector.

  Bradley called the Weather One copter. When they asked how many passengers, he told them two. We passed our baby girls to our parents for the second time that day, hugged everyone harder than we had that morning, then Bradley drove the school bus back to Pine Apple Elementary, where we’d catch our helicopter ride.

  We left Jug with Daddy—an unfortunate situation both were very familiar with—and we left Baylor with him too. Not only did Daddy need the backup, but a Banks Security van from Montgomery was en route to Pine Apple. Baylor would meet them at Jug’s van, oversee the load, then accompany the fifty million back to the Bellissimo.

  After the storm passed.

  EIGHTEEN

  “Hey. It’s me. Danielle.”

  I think I heard America gasp over the helicopter din.

  The first leg of the ride south was faster, easier, and quieter than the ride north. Faster because we had a tailwind instead of a headwind. Easier because we knew our daughters were safe. And quieter because for the first fifteen minutes, we were too beat to shout at each other over the helicopter noise and the pilots were too busy on their headsets and control dials for chitchat. Had it not been for knowing what we had to do when we returned to the Bellissimo—ETA twenty-seven minutes—we might have slept. And not because we had the chance, but because we were so far past exhausted. At our feet, a thirty-year-old Tupperware container the size of a small suitcase full of pot roast, carrots, pearl onions, potatoes, and gravy. My mother said, “Bring my Tupperware back, Davis.”

  We’d been in the air seventeen minutes when the mustachioed copilot turned around waving a tablet full of Danielle. We grabbed it and searched for any hint of what we were going home to. The generator was still down. Danielle’s backdrop was solid black, so the light hit her bruised forehead like a beacon. Then the camera zoomed out and had I not been sitting, I’d have fallen.

  Danielle was wearing July’s wedding dress.

  I slapped my chest, gasped, my legs shot out as far as the cramped quarters allowed, accidentally tipping over the Tupperware. I righted it—still warm—without taking my eyes off (July’s wedding dress) the tablet.

  “Here’s Bacon.”

  The camera cut to Bacon sleeping in her orange crate, wearing a white tulle headband.

  “So, we don’t have lights,” she said to America, “or anything else, like food. I just ate the last bowl of Fruity Pebbles. We don’t have milk either, and Fruity Pebbles with Dr Pepper don’t taste the same.”

  Eyes downcast, she forlornly rocked the microphone back and forth.

  She sighed, and I could feel America sighing with her.

  Bradley asked the pilots if we could go back to Pine Apple and pick up Baylor. They said not if we wanted to make it back to Biloxi.

  “It’s all dark and quiet here, except for the rain isn’t quiet,” Danielle said to America. “It’s like, beating this place up. We don’t even know if anyone outside is alive. Davis, if you’re listening—” I was listening “—I hope you’re alive. I really do. And what’s so funny is I’ve never wished that before and now I do.”

  I could feel America on the edges of their seats, riveted to the sad bruised girl in the wedding dress, alone and hungry in the storm, wistfully willing there to be life for her, for me, and for everyone in and beyond the storm.

&n
bsp; “There’s only five or eight or six of us awake.” Danielle studied her wedding lap. “And we don’t know if the rest of them are going to wake up or not.”

  America gasped.

  Danielle held the microphone close to her lips to woefully confess, coast to coast, “I hope my boyfriend Eddie wakes up. I mean, me and Eddie, you know?”

  America knew.

  She looked dead straight into the camera. “I really hope there’s someone out there who can help us.” Her head dropped, and I’m pretty sure all of America’s heads dropped too. Finally, Danielle lifted her sad face. “I can’t tell you what the weather is, except for loud-ass rain, so I’m going to sing you a song.”

  Oh, Danielle, don’t.

  “This is my backup dancer, Jenn.”

  Jenn Chojnacki’s head popped out from behind Danielle’s. She made jazz hands, then popped to the other side of Danielle’s head with more jazz hands. She was either buck naked or still wearing the silver bodycon dress, which the camera couldn’t see.

  “This is a special request from Fantasy,” Danielle said. “I know ya’ll don’t know Fantasy, but she’s real nice. She made her kid give me the last bowl of Fruity Pebbles.” Danielle took a deep breath. “I’ve decided if I get out of this hurricane alive, to be a better person. I mean, who tells their kid to let a stranger have their Fruity Pebbles?”

  America’s heart broke for the kid who gave up his cereal for the poor bruised girl in the wedding dress.

  “If I live, I’m going to be a better person,” Danielle said. “If I live till tomorrow, I’m going to be that person who gives away their Fruity Pebbles.”

  Danielle cocked an ear. She curled a lip and squinted an eye. Then she looked to her left and said, “Shut up, kid.”

  Danielle Sparks. One step forward, ten steps back, all her life.

  She smoothed the wedding dress across her lap.

  “Everybody knows this song,” Danielle said to her lap. “Everybody sing with me.” She looked dead into the camera. “I can’t do this alone.”

  I know, for a fact, America cleared their throats to sing with Danielle.