I was studying the ceiling, thinking about cobwebs and crawlspace when it no longer mattered. My cover was blown. My office door burst open, Fantasy filled the space, then yelled over her shoulder, “Call off the dogs. I found her.”
I heard Bea through the pane of glass that separated us. “Good.” Then she tipped her head back and yelled, “I got a bone to pick with you, Davis.”
My mother poked her head in my office. “Well, aren’t you the quiet mouse today. I didn’t even know you were back. Are you two about ready for lunch?”
I grabbed my phone, my purse, and my partner (by the ear), then flew out before Mother could feed me. “We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Mother, we have to go to the office. Call me if you need me.”
By then, Bea was sweating a puddle on my kitchen floor. “I could eat.”
Fantasy froze in her tracks, trying to decide what Bea was wearing, or if Bea was wearing anything at all under her skimpy sports bra. I grabbed her by the other ear and we made a run for it, but stopped cold when we got to Birdy in the living room. Sleeping in her wingback chair. Beside her chair, a plastic crate. On top of the plastic crate, my dog. Inside the plastic crate, mortar fire.
I turned to Fantasy.
“It’s the cat,” she said.
“You were supposed to take the cat to our office.”
She pointed. “Listen to it. How are we supposed to work, as loud as that cat is?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It can’t stop sneezing.”
“That’s not sneezing, Fantasy.”
“Its nose is broken.”
Curious Candy pawed at the crate. “Candy,” I loud whispered. “Get down.”
Candy would not get down. She was too interested in the lawnmower backfire noises coming from the crate. We stared at the dog on the cat crate for two more seconds, looked at each other, then flew.
Mother could handle it.
My mother, when it got right down to it, could handle anything.
We couldn’t call the elevator fast enough.
“About the cat.” Fantasy slumped against the elevator wall opposite the one I was slumped against, catching my breath. “The vet said if the cat comes back drunk again, they’re calling Animal Services on Birdy.”
“When we get to the office—” I was still trying to catch my breath “—let’s stay.”
“Forever,” Fantasy said.
“But we need to try to bust into Lost and Found on our way to the office.”
She patted the gun at her hip.
I pulled the Birdy note from my pocket and waved it at her.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A cheat sheet.”
Neither worked.
When the elevator doors opened and we saw the long line of Elvii waiting at the Lost and Found door, we stayed put. “When does the next round of the slot tournament start?” I asked.
Fantasy checked her watch. “In forty-five minutes.”
“We’ll come back then.”
“We’re supposed to be working the next round of the slot tournament, Davis. Baylor will kill us.”
“He’ll get over it.”
* * *
Our office was in the basement. The sub-basement, really. Two and a half levels below the sea, which made it two and a half levels below the casino, and it took three elevators to get there. Three elevators, a digital handprint, and a retina scan.
Our phones beeped on the same beat.
We didn’t bother looking.
We knew exactly who it was.
She said, “One of us is going to have to answer.”
“And say what?” I asked. “Hey, Baylor, we lost five million dollars? The minute he gets wind of our—” I searched for the right word “—predicament, he’ll tell. He’ll be on the phone with No Hair so fast, Mr. Sanders will have a fit, and Bradley will fly home and divorce me.”
We turned the last corner. Our office door was in sight.
“Have you talked to him at all?” I asked.
“Bradley?”
“Baylor,” I said.
“No. But I did shoot him a text to say I was at the dentist.”
“We use the dentist excuse too much with him.”
“That’s what he said.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Solo. So it probably wasn’t Baylor for the four-hundredth time. It was a text message from my mother.
Great.
I stopped to read it. Fantasy stopped with me.
Bater is talling for you and cares neither a tabid bobby bare or a stunk in a gauge in your divvy doom.
“That dirty dog.”
“Who?” Fantasy asked. “Which dirty dog? We know several dirty dogs.”
“Baylor.” I showed her my phone.
She zoomed in. “What does that even start to say?”
I read it to her. “Baylor is calling for you and there’s either a rabid baby bear or a skunk in a cage in your living room.”
She shook her head.
A photo dinged in. From my mother. Taken through the kitty carrier door.
I showed it to Fantasy.
“I know,” she said. “I had to drive it around.”
Its nose was crooked, leaning way left. Its face was swollen. Its mouth was wide open and its eyes looked like snake slits. With the fur on its face blown back, probably from the recoil of the revolutionary-war-cannon sneezing, it did look a little like a baby black bear. What passed through my mind wasn’t that I had to share my home with a recuperating cat that sounded like fireworks exploding, in addition to my mother, Birdy James, my ex-ex-mother-in-law, who shouldn’t have even been there, plus enough tomatoes to feed the world. What passed through my mind was how desperate Megan Shaw must have been to have done that to an innocent animal.
Poor cat.
I texted my mother back. Mother, that’s Birdy’s cat. It needs some love. And it might be a good idea to put it in my bedroom and close the door so Bex and Quinn won’t want to play with it. I don’t think it feels well.
She texted back: I’ve had it with you two.
Then Baylor texted: I will crook it pish.
The messages came in on top of each other and I may have mixed them up. Baylor was sick of us and my mother would cook pish for the cat.
Because all cats loved pish.
We finally made it to our office-office door. Which was just one of the reasons Fantasy and I worked so much from my home office, because it took forever and a day to get to our office-office. That, and because our office-office, much like everything else at the Bellissimo since the hurricane, wasn’t quite what it used to be.
Fantasy showed the digital pad her eyeball.
I showed her my phone. “Baylor again.”
Our office door clicked open just as she said, “If one of us doesn’t call him back, he’ll beat on your front door.”
“My mother will answer.”
“Or worse,” she said, “Bea.”
“No.” We stepped in. “Way worse,” I said. “Birdy might answer. Then we won’t have to tell him something’s up. He’ll know.”
“Birdy won’t answer the door,” Fantasy said as we stepped in. “She won’t hear the doorbell.”
That was when we heard the door. The groans and grinding gears of the office door behind us. Its lockdown feature had been engaged.
We made a U-turn and stared at it.
“Who locked the door?” She looked at me. “Did you lock the door?”
“No,” I said. “Did you?”
“No.”
We checked our phones. Neither of us had accidentally asked the door to lockdown, because it couldn’t even happen accidentally. It took a ten-digit code. Had the door malfunctioned? I
tried to open it. I couldn’t. I showed it my retina. It didn’t authorize me to leave. Fantasy, her hand not registering on the digital handprint screen, said, “What the—”
Our phones dinged on the same beat. It was Baylor. You two stay put until I get there.
“Who does he think he is?” she asked.
I took a right.
“When he gets here,” she said, “we’ll lock him up.”
Over my shoulder, I said, “Then who’ll work while we chase money?”
“Good point,” she said. “And where are you going?”
“To Command Central.”
“Why?”
“To reprogram the door. So we can get out before he gets in.”
I had two degrees from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. One in Criminal Justice, the other in Computer Information Science. Both came in handy all the time. Like then, when I needed to hack through lockdown software.
“What do you want me to do while you open the door?” Fantasy asked.
“Clothes,” I said while waking up my computer. “We need clothes and IDs.”
“What kind of clothes?” she asked. “What kind of IDs?”
I ran through the list. “We know what happened in Casino Credit, so we’ll skip it and hit the Vault first as Gaming auditors, so suits and Gaming IDs. Then we’ll hit Room Service as Immigrations and Customs to see if we can track down Gold Lamé Elvis. So same suits, different IDs.”
“Who is Gold Lamé Elvis?”
“We won’t know until we get to Room Service.”
“Why?” she asked. “This is Keystone Cops, Davis. Why are we doing this?”
“So we can find Megan Shaw and five million dollars.”
“I thought the plan was to bust into Lost and Found.”
“We can’t bust into Lost and Found until the traffic dies down. Let’s use the time between now and then wisely. We’ll do flybys in the departments I think the money made stops in on our way to Lost and Found. By then, everyone will be at the slot tournament.”
“Except not us,” she said, “because we don’t have Elvis costumes.”
“We’ll go in our suits,” I said. “Find us follow-the-money-trail suits and they’ll have to do.”
“Okay,” she said, “following-the-money-trail suits. Do you want to follow the money as a blonde or a brunette?”
“See if you can find my chestnut brown ponytail wig,” I said. “And anything but green contacts. I’m not in a green-eyed mood. I’m in a blue-eyed mood.”
“Got it,” she said. “Suits, IDs, ponytails, and blue contacts. I’ll do my best. If you need me, I’ll be in the closet.”
* * *
Our office was comprised of three large rooms. First, and just inside the door I was attempting to open, the room we called our bullpen. It was our base of operation, our conference room, and often, our lunchroom. It had a kitchenette, a pedestal dining table with four leather chairs, two sofas, and a brand new 4D UHD HDR Smart TV, in front of which, Fantasy and I spent most of our office-office hours. On the sofas, actually, in front of the television, and for the most part, we watched the Hallmark Movies and Mysteries Channel.
Like I said, our new jobs were boring.
In addition to there being nothing interesting to do, because Baylor did everything interesting, we considered watching Hallmark mysteries continuing education. Research. On shrewd investigative procedure and clever apprehension techniques. We loved our Bravo time too, which we also considered research, because celebrities frequented the Bellissimo, and we needed to keep up. Baylor, who requisitioned our new office television (and swears he didn’t) (actually, he didn’t, but one thing Fantasy and I knew how to do, and we did it well, was stand our ground), and after a terrible chewing out from No Hair for requisitioning a new television when there was nothing wrong with the brand new guestroom television we had (except it was a preprogrammed Hospitality television, with restrictions I didn’t want to spend a week of my life bypassing), told us to scoot over, because he had every right to watch the new television too. Since he’d apparently requisitioned it. While in a coma. The problem was Baylor watched sports. ESPN, and SOCCER, and BASKETBALL. Which forced me to reprogram our new television to permanently block all sports channels. What was he thinking? Watching pickleball tournaments when he was supposed to be working? And for all the trouble it was to hack our new television, I could have saved myself the time and trouble by hacking the Hospitality television in the first place.
To the right of the bullpen was Command Central, full of computers, video surveillance monitors, printers, and desks. The room was dark, cold, and it hummed. Command Central was where I generally did my best work. Like then, breaking through lockdown doors.
Our third room, and to the left of the bullpen, was our closet, our very large closet, where we used to get dressed. The problem was a car had blown up directly above our office-office when Hurricane Kevin paid us a visit the year before. It wasn’t like the car blew up in our office-office, or even close, but being directly underneath, we’d suffered water damage. Basically, our office-office, specifically our closet-closet, died. We replaced the computers and surveillance monitors in Control Central first. Then we refurbished the bullpen. We had yet to completely restock our closet. We’d restocked our inventory of Bellissimo uniforms, which was a simple after-hours visit to Human Resources with a laundry bin, which we filled with Bellissimo uniforms, because we never knew what department we might need to sneak into. Since the resort reopened after hurricane break, among other tedious assignments, we’d paid a visit to Chops, the steakhouse in the casino, dressed as servers, to have a few words with a casino guest who pinged every Bellissimo Security radar as a very wanted and very deadbeat dad. (Wanted by the authorities, his many baby mamas, and his seven offspring.) (And he was only twenty-six years old.) Another time it was Payroll, dressed in green jumpsuits from Horticulture, so we could speak to the payroll clerk behind a row of potted plants we were there to mulch, who’d taken it upon herself to triple her own salary. And two weeks earlier, it was the Olympic-sized Bellissimo pool, dressed in Pool Server bikinis with matching sarongs, so we could have a chat with the passed-out sunburned frat boys who’d used fake IDs to play slot machines all night the night before. So while we had Bellissimo uniforms galore, and could sneak all over disguised as employees, we hadn’t quite gotten around to replacing our mix-and-mingle-with-the-general-public-incognito wardrobes. It was one thing to pass ourselves off as entry-level employees, as quickly as entry-level employees came and went with a staff of forty-five hundred. It was quite another to work incognito. To disguise our true identities in street clothes. And we hadn’t been in any big hurry to restock our incognito street clothes, because it was proving harder and harder to fool management. Since our reopening, we’d been recognized three times. Once with a cart full of empty luggage, trying to check into the hotel. (Because someone at the front desk was passing out unoccupied hotel room keycards to their buddies.) We weren’t in front of the desk for a full minute before someone behind the desk said, “Aren’t you the boss’s wife?” And that forced us to go to greater and greater lengths to hide our true identities, an equally slippery slope, because neon purple tinted contact lenses and pink wigs attracted too much attention the other way. Management didn’t recognize us so much as anyone they knew, but the crazier we looked, the more they recognized us as mental-hospital escapees. About the only thing we could successfully pass ourselves off as anymore were old lady slot-machine players. (Which was fun.) (But old lady makeup was hell to get on and even heller to get off.)
So the incentive to restock our undercover wardrobes hadn’t really been there. And that day, for the first time in forever, we needed to work undercover. But we couldn’t work undercover until I opened the lockdowned door, which was proving difficult, in spite of the fact that I’d written the program and installed the softwa
re myself. Yet there I sat, having trouble hacking through my own work.
“Davis!”
“What?” I yelled across the bullpen.
“Do we want designer chic or dead serious suits?”
“I don’t care.” Then I did care. “On second thought, dead serious.”
“I don’t know why I asked,” she yelled across the bullpen. “We don’t have either. We need to go shopping. Put that on our to-do list, Davis, we need to buy clothes. Maybe we need to forget going undercover and try Lost and Found again in what we’re wearing. Follow the money trail backwards.”
“If I can’t get us out of here, how is it you think we’re going to get in there? If the money’s locked up in Lost and Found, it’ll be safe until we can get in.” I yelled. “Why do you want to switch gears? Why do you want to follow the money trail backwards?”
“Because we don’t have suits.”
“And you think we’re going to find suits in Lost and Found?” Speaking of backwards, I changed directions. I was trying to hack through the lockdown door from the inside. It wasn’t working. I rolled my chair to the next computer and logged on to try to hack through from the outside. “Isn’t my gray pinstripe in there?”
Double Trouble Page 10