Praise for the Davis Way Crime Caper Series
“Seriously funny, wickedly entertaining. Davis gets me every time.”
– Janet Evanovich
“As impressive as the amount of sheer fun and humor involved are the details concerning casino security, counterfeiting, and cons. The author never fails to entertain with the amount of laughs, action, and intrigue she loads into this immensely fun series.”
– Kings River Life Magazine
“Fasten your seat belts: Davis Way, the superspy of Southern casino gambling, is back (after Double Dip) for her third wild caper.”
– Publishers Weekly
“It reads fast, gives you lots of sunny moments and if you are a part of the current social media movement, this will appeal to you even more. I know #ItDoesForMe.”
– Mystery Sequels
“Fast-paced, snarky action set in a compelling, southern glitz-and-glamour locale...Utterly un-put-down-able.”
– Molly Harper,
Author of the Award-Winning Nice Girls Series
“A smart, snappy writer who hits your funny bone!”
– Janet Evanovich
“Archer’s bright and silly humor makes this a pleasure to read. Fans of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum will absolutely adore Davis Way and her many mishaps.”
– RT Book Reviews
“Snappy, wise-cracking, and fast-paced.”
– New York Journal of Books
“Hilarious, action-packed, with a touch of home-sweet-home and a ton of glitz and glam. I’m booking my next vacation at the Bellissimo!”
– Susan M. Boyer,
USA Today Bestselling Author of Lowcountry Bonfire
“Funny & wonderful & human. It gets the Stephanie Plum seal of approval.”
– Janet Evanovich
“Filled with humor and fresh, endearing characters. It’s that rarest of books: a beautifully written page-turner. It’s a winner!”
– Michael Lee West,
Author of Gone with a Handsomer Man
“Davis’s smarts, her mad computer skills, and a plucky crew of fellow hostages drive a story full of humor and action, interspersed with moments of surprising emotional depth.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Archer navigates a satisfyingly complex plot and injects plenty of humor as she goes….a winning hand for fans of Janet Evanovich.”
– Library Journal
“Archer’s writing had me laughing out loud…Not sure if Gretchen Archer researched this by hanging out in a casino or she did a lot of research online. No matter which way, she hit the nail on the head.”
– Fresh Fiction
“In the quirky and eccentric world of Davis Way, I found laughter throughout this delightfully humorous tale. The exploits, the antics, the trial and tribulation of doing the right thing keeps this story fresh as scene after scene we are guaranteed a fun time with Davis and her friends. #LoveIt #BestOneYet.”
– Dru’s Book Musings
The Davis Way Crime Caper Series
by Gretchen Archer
Novels
DOUBLE WHAMMY (#1)
DOUBLE DIP (#2)
DOUBLE STRIKE (#3)
DOUBLE MINT (#4)
DOUBLE KNOT (#5)
DOUBLE UP (#6)
DOUBLE DOG DARE (#7)
DOUBLE AGENT (#8)
DOUBLE TROUBLE (#9)
Bellissimo Casino Crime Caper Short Stories
DOUBLE JINX
DOUBLE DECK THE HALLS
DOUBLE TROUBLE
A Davis Way Crime Caper
Part of the Henery Press Mystery Collection
First Edition | June 2020
Henery Press
www.henerypress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Henery Press, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Copyright © 2020 by Gretchen Archer
Cover design by The Creative Wrap LLC
Author photograph by Garrett Nudd
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Trade Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-567-3
Digital epub ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-568-0
Kindle ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-569-7
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-570-3
Printed in the United States of America
For Worth, my best girl
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, Henery Press. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be published. Thanks for the wonderful memories.
ONE
I took my eye off the ball.
I was looking one way when I should have been looking the other.
I didn’t see Birdy James disappear with five million dollars because at the time, which was six o’clock in the morning, my eyes were closed. Still, I should have seen it coming. I was wallowing about it on the phone with my best friend, Fantasy. At six fifteen in the morning. (Best friend, coworker, and at the moment, very groggy life coach.)
“Go back to bed.” She yawned. “Five hundred dollars isn’t the end of the world.”
“Five million, Fantasy. Five million dollars.”
“It’s the end of the world.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You’re a big help.”
“I’m asleep, Davis. I’m trying hard to wake up,” she yawned again, “and until I do, here’s my best advice: take a breath. When the sun comes up, we’ll find Bird Woman, turn her upside down, I’ll take one ankle, you take the other, we’ll shake the money out of her, and everything will be fine. You’ll see.”
All I could see were dollar signs. Five million of them. Obscuring my view of everything else. I could barely see the go button on my coffeepot. “It’s hard to believe Birdy James would steal five million dollars, if for no other reason, she’s too old to spend it. She’s what? Ninety? Ninety-five?”
“She’s old as dirt,” Fantasy said. “I’ll give you that.”
What I needed was for someone to give me five million dollars.
“Have you told Bradley?” she asked.
Bradley was my husband. “No.”
“Have you told No Hair?”
No Hair, our boss, had a real name. (Jeremy Covey.) We called him No Hair because he was bald, bald, bald. “No.”
“Have you told Mr. Sanders?” she asked.
Richard Sanders owned the Bellissimo Resort and Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, where half of us lived and all of us worked. Which made him everyone’s boss. “No. I haven’t told Mr. Sanders,” I said. “For one, it’s six in the morning here, which means it’s the middle of the night in Vegas. And for two, if I haven’t told Bradley and I haven’t told No Hair, why would I tell Mr. Sanders?”
“Because it’s his five million dollars.”
“Not exactly.”
“Then whose money is it?” she asked.
“Not the Bellissimo’s and certainly not Birdy’s,” I said. “Which is why I’m not waking Mr. Sanders to tell him. He’ll want to know whose money it is, and I don’t even know. Another reason I’m not telling him is I don’t want Bradley or No Hair to hear it from Mr. Sanders before they hear it from me.”
“Then tell them.”<
br />
“No.”
“So no one knows.”
“I know. And now you know.”
“Surely Baylor knows,” she said.
“No,” I said. “He’d tell everyone else.”
“Maybe I should tell Baylor, let him tell everyone else, then we could all go back to sleep.”
“Do not tell Baylor,” I said. “Do not.”
Baylor, just Baylor, like Snoopy was just Snoopy, was the third and final member of the Bellissimo Resort and Casino’s covert casino security team. It was me, Fantasy, and Baylor. Baylor was young enough to be fearless (late twenties), built like a lumberjack (but without the beard) (or the flannel shirt), and a deadeye with firearms (bang bang). But he had no background in law enforcement to my six years as a police officer in my hometown of Pine Apple, Alabama, and Fantasy’s seven years as a corrections officer at Harrison County Women’s Detention Center, so Baylor deferred to us. We made sure of it. We made him do all our dirty work. Like stakeouts. We made him run all our errands. Like lunch. And we kept all kinds of secrets from him. Like then. “Besides,” I said, “why would I tell Baylor before I told you?”
“Good point,” she said. “But you have called the police, right?”
“Not yet.”
“You need to call someone.”
“I did call someone. I called you.”
“I meant call someone else. Besides me.”
“I will.” I blindly batted in the cabinet above the coffeepot, then poured straight caffeine into a holly and ivy mug with a candy cane handle.
“And you’re waiting on…?”
“Christmas.”
“It’s June,” she said. “And if you’re not going to tell anyone else until Christmas, stop worrying. Surely we can scare up five million dollars by Christmas.”
“Legally?” I asked.
“Probably not.”
Because without a doubt, we knew how to obtain money illegally. It was our job, it had been for years, to apprehend casino cheats, and they’d taught us well. Fantasy and I could probably pull off a roulette scam, a Baccarat heist, and card count enough blackjack to net five million dollars by that afternoon. Each. Blindfolded.
“Then we do this the old-fashioned way,” she said.
“What way is that?” I asked. “Smash and grab?”
“We follow the money trail until it leads us to the five million, then put it back where it belongs before anyone knows it’s missing. We’ll start with the Bird Woman.”
“Too late,” I said. “She’s gone.”
“You said yourself she’s a hundred years old,” Fantasy said. “She couldn’t have gone far.”
“I didn’t say she was a hundred. I said she was old.”
“What do you have on old Bird Woman?”
“Not much.” I poured more coffee. “A sister, Constance, and a nephew, Malcolm, in Bossier City, Louisiana.”
“If I were Bird Woman and I made off with five million dollars in the middle of the night, I’d go straight to my sister’s in Bossier City, and it’s practically next door,” Fantasy said. “I can pick you up in an hour—” she hesitated “—or four.”
“It’s not next door to us,” I said. “Bossier City is next door to Shreveport. And Shreveport is a six-hour drive.”
“We can make it in four,” she said. “We’ll be back by dinner.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Their names are Bexley and Quinn.”
My name is Davis Way Cole. I’m thirtysomething, happily married, and the mother of Bexley and Quinn, toddler twin girls I couldn’t run off and leave. Not only was I a single parent with my husband in Vegas, I was all but singlehandedly in charge of the Bellissimo, a 1.2 billion (billion) dollar gaming property, while everyone else—Bradley, President and CEO, along with No Hair, Director of Security, and Richard Sanders, the owner of the Bellissimo—attended the Global Gaming Expo. The last thing I said to Bradley before he left for Vegas the day before was, “Don’t worry. I’ve got this. I can handle the girls and the casino for one little week. Nothing will happen.” There I sat, not twenty-four hours later, having let a little old lady sneak past me with five million dollars. So far, all I’d done about it was whine to Fantasy and brew coffee.
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me the story. The short version.”
“There is no short version.”
“The sun isn’t up yet, Davis. Try. Be efficient with your words.”
I took a deep breath. “There was a typo. Someone entered the wrong routing number on a five-million-dollar wire. A bank in Philly accidentally wired five million dollars to us that was meant for a real estate closing in Seattle.”
“That’s it?” she asked. “The whole story?”
“I was trying to be efficient with my words.”
“I’ll give you a little leeway,” she said. “There has to be more, because Bird Woman wasn’t even in the story. You have one more minute, then I’m going back to bed.”
It took two more cups of coffee and thirty more minutes.
Fantasy did not go back to bed.
And I smelled T-R-O-U-B-L-E.
TWO
It started the day before when I was trying to say goodbye to my husband as he left for Vegas.
That’s not true.
It started the year before with a hurricane. In mid-October of the previous year, Hurricane Kevin blew through the Bellissimo. Not necessarily the Gulf, or even the city of Biloxi, but all the way through the Bellissimo. We were closed for four months while the demolished lower levels of the resort were remodeled. We reopened on Valentine’s Day, bigger and better, to great fanfare, lots of heart-shaped fireworks, and several new venues—a new bank, a new convention center, and a new employee childcare facility—along with, much to my dismay, new responsibilities for my elite security team.
I was far from happy with the new program.
Before, as lead spy on our spy team of three, when the Daily Incident Report hit my inbox, detailing anything and everything of interest that had occurred at the Bellissimo in the previous twenty-four hours, I read it.
That’s not true.
I skimmed it. I skimmed the Daily Incident Report. The ten percent of it that needed my team’s attention got it. The other ninety percent, I let slide. There were seventeen hundred guest rooms in the hotel, which roughly translated to thirty-four hundred hotel guests, mostly couples, on vacation. Every other day, one of those seventeen hundred couples was going to do what they were going to do in the hotel elevators. What were we supposed to do the day after the fact when their indiscretion showed up on my Incident Report? Track them down and tell them to get a room? (They had a room.) (In our hotel.) Explain indecent exposure? (Indecent exposure was self-explanatory.) Call their mothers? Their priest? Their marriage counselor? (“Hey. Whatever you’re doing, it’s working.”)
No Hair said that by not following up on every single incident, too much was slipping through the cracks, and that my team needed to be more thorough. Regardless of how large or small the incident, it was my team’s new responsibility to resolve it. Report back. Close every small case every single day.
I said following up on a guest complaint that the $1,800 Dolce & Gabbana stilettos she purchased at Heels, the shoe store on the Mezzanine, pinched her toes, was a waste of our time and talent, and I went on to say No Hair had ulterior motives. Like burying me so deep in paperwork I’d be too busy to miss my old job. Which he denied.
He was the boss; he won. When we returned from hurricane break, the Daily Incident Report was divided into thirds and delivered in three parts to Fantasy’s, Baylor’s, and my inbox. Our new job was to work independently to resolve every single solitary entry on our Incident Reports. The good news was, we no longer argued about who would do what. (Which had been half our workday.
) (Arguing about who did what.) If it happened in the casino, it was Baylor’s responsibility. His Incident Report might say a fresh new gambler, wearing a “Finally Twenty-One!” banner below her twenty-one-rhinestone birthday tiara, won $100,000 on a single lucky spin of a slot machine—a highly unusual event, and more than anything else, our team pursued highly unusual events—Baylor would pull the surveillance video, watch the birthday girl win, watch the payout, make sure she made it to her hotel room safely, then electronically tag her and track her through the rest of her casino vacation until she was safely out the door. With her windfall.
Casino incidents were the most interesting.
Fantasy followed up on what were usually the most boring, from every square inch of the resort outside of the fifty-thousand-square-foot casino. She tracked down slip-and-falls at the spa, horseplay at the pools, elevator indiscretions, and the week before, attack lobsters. Two teenage boys charged three dozen lobster dinners to their gambling parents’ in-room-dining tab, then from the top of an indoor waterfall on the mezzanine level, just above the lobby, the boys dropped the lobsters, one by one, whole lobsters, on unsuspecting guests’ heads below. The guests thought attack lobsters were jumping out of the waterfall. Fantasy, with three mischievous sons of her own, knew the teenage-boy drill, and let those boys have it. They probably wouldn’t eat lobster again for the rest of their lives, much less drop one on anyone’s head.
So, Baylor handled the casino, Fantasy handled the lobsters, and me? Internal departments. I followed up on unusual events involving, regarding, or concerning the forty-five hundred employees who worked within the various departments of the Bellissimo, like Marketing, Human Resources, Payroll, Casino Services, Catering, Groundskeeping, and every other department, all the way down to the smallest department in all of Bellissimoland—Lost and Found. Which was where the problem with the missing five million dollars started, or maybe where the problem with the missing five million dollars ended, but for sure, it was how the missing five-million-dollar problem landed in my lap. Because while I was only temporarily in charge of Bellissimoland for the week, I was permanently in charge of Bellissimo Lost and Found.
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