“Saving our jobs.”
And by saving our jobs, I meant saving my marriage.
* * *
I’d start with telling my husband everything going all the way back to what I read on my Incident Report the morning he left for Las Vegas. Then I’d bring him up to speed on where my team was and what we were trying to accomplish before eight o’clock the next morning when we were officially off the clock, which was, in a single thought, no more bloodshed, and hopefully finding the person who interrupted Sara Z. Stone’s financial rampage of the Bellissimo. Someone wanted the money all to themselves, that someone took her life, and that someone wasn’t Gray Donaldson. If he’d let me answer the one question—who was it?—and with his blessing, not behind his back, I’d walk away. I took a deep breath, stepped in the door, and took a seat across from his PA, Colleen.
“Davis?”
“Colleen.” I swallowed. “I want to apologize for being so unavailable to you this week.” She opened her mouth to let me off the hook, but I was tired of being let off the hook. I held up a hand to stop her. “No, Colleen, this is on me. I haven’t done my new job because I missed my old job.” I stood and took a step in the direction of Bradley’s door. “I promise I’ll make this up to you.”
“Davis—”
“No, Colleen, I mean it.”
My hand was on the doorknob.
“Davis—”
“Colleen, I’m serious. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “Mr. Cole isn’t in.”
I cracked the door to see for myself. I turned back to Colleen. “Where is he?”
“He left for the Penthouse half an hour ago to talk to you.”
But I wasn’t there. Who had he been talking to for half an hour? Our daughters? Not only did just one of them talk, they weren’t there. They were with July. Bea Crawford? Would it really take him half an hour to tell her she shouldn’t have been there? Bianca? With everything swirling around us, would he really stop what he was doing to talk to Bianca? Who else was in the Penthouse to talk to?
And just like that, I knew exactly who else was in the Penthouse.
I flew out the door.
I called July to confirm she had the girls. She did. She had Bex, Quinn, Baby Oliver, and, bonus, Goldendoodle Candy, all having a heyday at Play, which, since it was closed, they had all to themselves, and that put them, geographically, far from the Penthouse. I called Danish to confirm my mother was there. She was. Shaving chocolate mountains for Elvis hair. I called No Hair’s office to bring him up to speed, only to hear from his PA that he’d left his office more than half an hour earlier for Bradley’s.
Great.
They might both be in the Penthouse.
I stopped by Armageddon, which was to say my home, because I needed firepower, as my mission of saving my marriage turned to one of saving my husband’s life. And no telling how many others. The first thing I did was rush through and shoo everyone else out, and with that word: “Out,” I shouted. “Get out!” The hammering stopped, dripping paintbrushes were abandoned, and handheld electrical tools were powered down as everyone left. I slammed the front door behind them and went straight to the gun safe in Bradley’s and my bedroom. The Glock I’d used to burst the pipe that flooded my home wasn’t there. No telling where my A gun was. I settled for my B gun, my old friend, who I was to say goodbye to the next morning, my old Smith & Wesson Bodyguard issued to me by my old boss, No Hair. I loaded it on my way to the foyer to call the private elevator with a single destination: the Penthouse. When the door opened, without stepping in, I hooked my arm around and stabbed for the up button, then jerked my arm out before the door caught it. As the elevator rose, my phone rang. It was Fantasy.
“Make it quick.”
“We found it,” she said. “The connection. And you’re not going to believe it.”
My hand on the closed elevator door, I felt it stop. I didn’t hear it, or hear the door open, but I heard it being annihilated with what sounded like an assault rifle. “Let me guess,” I said. “Lurch?”
“How’d you know?”
“Because he just killed the Penthouse elevator trying to kill me.”
TWENTY-ONE
The first surveillance sighting of Lurch on Bellissimo property was caught by a Biloxi traffic camera eight months earlier. Dressed in head-to-toe Dickies, he picked his way through the aftermath of Hurricane Kevin, past cleanup crews and around construction sites, then entered the singed, drowned, and excavated Bellissimo lobby where we lost him, because at the time, we had limited power and no surveillance. We had just enough traffic cam footage to see the logo on his hardhat said Oden Construction, a Shreveport, Louisiana, manufacturer who sold ICFs, Insulated Concrete Form saferooms, saferooms that could withstand winds as high as 250 miles per hour.
We only ordered one of those.
We didn’t see the same late-fortyish, six-foot-eight-inch tall, slump-shouldered, bulbous-nosed man with the deep-set eyes and protruding brow for six weeks, when the Bellissimo’s surveillance system was up and running again. When we found him the second time, he was the Sanders’ new live-in butler. We had to assume he went from Job A to Job B via Sara Z. Stone, Esquire.
Bad move on her part.
Big mistake.
Lurch’s Penthouse job consisted of opening and closing the front door. He wore a tuxedo from eight in the morning until eight in the evening, granting entry and exit to the kitchen staff, the housekeepers, horticulture specialists, maintenance workers, techy types, pool cleaners, personal attorneys, celebrity doubles, and Saks Fifth Avenue’s White Glove delivery team, while keeping everyone else out in the Sanders’ absence.
Connection One, Personal Attorney, Sara Z. Stone.
Connection Two, Celebrity Double, Clone.
Fantasy found that between the two women, they’d keyed themselves in and out of the Penthouse a total of 412 times between the Bellissimo’s reopening on Valentine’s and Bianca’s return just a few days earlier. It would seem the three of them—Sara Z., Clone, and especially Lurch—had made themselves quite at home while she was away.
Baylor spotted Lurch on surveillance in the March edition of the Bellissimo employee digital newsletter. He was tracking Gray Donaldson’s ax-throwing proclivities when he noticed Lurch lurking in the shadows behind a group of spectators cheering on the Bellissimo Bullseyes against the Hard Rock Hatchets.
Connection Three, Casino Credit Manager, Gray Donaldson.
Then Baylor found Lurch again, while tracking Connection Four, Megan Shaw, through the Bellissimo the previous Friday night, the night she cashed the first wire, the night she wandered the Bellissimo halls with five million dollars, the night she didn’t pick up Baby Oliver at Play, the night she disappeared. Everywhere Baylor saw Megan that fateful night, he spotted Lurch. Lurking in the shadows. Sometimes ahead of Megan, at other times behind, but there at her every turn.
“I watched every inch of that footage, Baylor,” I said. “Several times. I didn’t see Lurch once.”
“He was one of the Elvises, Davis.”
Elvii, Baylor.
* * *
Baylor, Fantasy, and I stared at the empty black spinner suitcase Lurch returned in the glass-strewn elevator. Then we stared at the elevator. He might have been a really bad shot, or maybe he didn’t like the mirrored ceiling, but with a closer look at the ravaged car, I realized I’d have probably lived through the ride had I managed to steer clear of the glass shower. The realization led to the cautious hope, combined with fervent prayers, that my husband and everyone with him was still alive. If Lurch hadn’t aimed to kill me, he probably hadn’t hurt them. Yet. And that would be because he still wanted something. The killing would begin when he got it.
We couldn’t very well storm the thirtieth floor, or sic the SWAT dogs on it either, because we didn’t know how much of ou
r system Lurch had infiltrated. He’d been alone in the Penthouse for eight long months, long enough to put a plan in place to thwart Sara Z. Stone’s get-rich-quick plans the hard way, the ax-to-the-head way, so certainly long enough to know the systems that ran the Penthouse well enough to keep us out. What we could do was secure everyone else: my children, Baby Oliver, July, and my mother, dragged from Danish against her will. Which left my husband, Bianca Sanders, and our boss for the next twenty hours, No Hair, unaccounted for.
It wasn’t hard to figure out where they were.
We used my dining room table, temporarily relocated to the vestibule at the main elevator landing, as Command Central. The Penthouse blueprints covered it. The empty black spinner suitcase sat in a chair of its own.
“Why does Lurch want money?” Fantasy asked. “Isn’t ten million dollars enough? How greedy is this guy?”
“He missed out on the ten million dollars.” My voice was two octaves higher than it should have been. Probably because my throat was constricted. And that was nothing more than my throat’s proximity to my constricted heart. “He had to have. He missed out on the first five million dollars because we found it before he could, then he missed out on the ten million because Sara didn’t have it.”
“Then where’s the money?” Fantasy asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She either wired it somewhere else or passed it off to someone else.” I looked up from the blueprints I’d been studying and caught Baylor’s eye. “This is his last stand and he wants money. Take the suitcase to the vault and fill it.”
He didn’t ask how he was supposed to requisition enough cash to fill a suitcase or what I intended to do with it. He and the suitcase rose and left without a word.
“Fantasy, what do we know about Lurch?”
She clicked away on her laptop. “He’s not in our system at all,” she said. “Nowhere. We don’t even know his name.”
I grabbed for my phone and opened Maps, then typed in Oden Construction. The fastest route to a phone number. Seven minutes and an emailed photograph later, Oden Construction confirmed Lurch didn’t work for them, had never worked for them, and one lone employee, Oden’s payroll clerk, said she might recognize him, or rather, she might know his mother. But she couldn’t put her finger on his mother’s name and she couldn’t be sure. I gave her my contact information and asked her to call if she remembered.
Fantasy said, “There you go. He didn’t work for Oden Construction, so he worked for Sara Z.”
“Something’s not right,” I said. “For one, Shreveport? Given everything we know about Sara Z., Shreveport hasn’t come up one time. There’s no connection.”
“Why do we need a Shreveport connection?”
“Because you have to know about an opportunity to seize it, Fantasy. From that far away, how’d he know?”
“The whole world was watching television coverage of the storm.”
“I’m not buying it,” I said. “He had to have an inside man.”
“He did,” she said. “Sara Z.”
“If that’s true,” I said, “she would have killed him instead of him killing her. She wasn’t an idiot. She surrounded herself with pawns, not players, and Lurch is turning out to be a very strong player. What Sara Z. was stealing from us, he was trying to steal from her. Lurch didn’t work for Sara. He worked against her.”
“Then he’s acting alone.”
“He had to have help somewhere,” I said. “No one sits at home in Shreveport, Louisiana, watching the weather and says, ‘I’m going to stage a coup at a billion-dollar casino by pretending I’m a butler.’”
“Okay.” She surrendered. “He was working with someone. Who?”
“Let’s find a way up there and ask him.” I looked at the elevator behind me. Where was Baylor? I looked at the blueprints in front of me to search for safe entry to the Penthouse that just wasn’t there, on the blueprints, anyway. “The only clear paths are through the front door, the backdoor, or the emergency stairwell.”
“You take the front door, I’ll take the backdoor, Baylor takes the stairs.”
“Fantasy.” I looked up from the blueprints. “One of us wouldn’t make it. We have to find another way in.”
“There is no other way, Davis.”
“There has to be.”
Baylor stepped off the elevator rolling the black spinner suitcase. “I figured out how we can get in the Penthouse.”
We turned. We waited. Then the three of us said it on the same beat: “The roof.”
The only way to the roof, short of scaling an exterior glass wall, and none of us had superpowers to scale a glass wall three hundred feet in the air, or requisitioning one of the four Bellissimo Eurocopters to drop us on the roof, which, even if we had time for, wouldn’t work, because Lurch would certainly see us coming, or call Premiere Skyline, our window washing contractors, and ask for emergency scaffolding, which we absolutely didn’t have time for, was through my house.
Baylor leaned over the blueprints. “We make like the pigeons,” he said. “Look where the old heat and air unit is.” He tapped the blueprints. “And here’s where the new one is.” His finger slid to a balcony area on the blueprints that was the new ductwork home for the new heat and air unit. Directly above my kitchen. “Davis, climbing the ductwork above your kitchen is the fastest and easiest route to the roof.”
“How do we get to the ductwork?” Fantasy asked.
“We take down my kitchen ceiling,” I said.
* * *
After ten minutes of securing equipment, which was an arsenal from No Hair’s office and a ten-foot extendable ladder from my living room, we stood in my kitchen, a ceiling away from brand new twenty-four-by-eight-inch ductwork that would lead us to the roof.
“On one.” We each had Kel-Tec PMR-30 semi-automatic pistols. “And let’s not shoot each other.” I counted down. On one, we unloaded ninety rounds into my kitchen ceiling. In just over one minute, we destroyed one of the only functioning rooms left in my home, and we were all but deaf from our efforts. Deaf, and covered in sheetrock, insulation, and a fine white dust.
We made it through the tight squeeze of ductwork and to the roof through a process of awkward pushing and clumsy pulling, and what did we find after almost electrocuting ourselves powering down the new heat and air unit to crawl out to the roof? Tomatoes. Bright red ripe tomatoes. Row after row of ten-gallon buckets bursting with tomatoes on two-foot-tall stalks. Behind the tomatoes, two bright red harp seals were sticking out from under the shell of the Penthouse’s old heat and air unit. We inched closer to the harp seals. We could barely see, our vision having not yet made leap from dark ductwork to blinding sunshine.
“Are those ginormous water balloons?” Fantasy was riding Baylor piggyback style, having ditched her Valentino slingbacks in the ductwork, because traction wasn’t a Valentino slingback attribute, and the heat from the roof immediately and severely scorched her feet. “I’ve never seen water balloons that big.”
“Those are red parachutes,” Baylor squinted, “left by flying Elvises.”
“It’s Elvii, Baylor,” I said. “And those are Bea Crawford’s legs.”
I ran.
They weren’t harp seals, ginormous water balloons, or parachutes. They were the backs of Bea Crawford’s blistered legs. Bea, who I’d totally forgotten about, and who absolutely shouldn’t have been on the blazing roof wearing her ridiculous farmer shorts with no protection from the sun, was facedown passed out, the top half of her under the cover of the old heat and air unit, which left the bottom half of her exposed. We knew she was alive because the closer we crept, the louder the snoring was, but barely audible over the jet engine rumbling from her vast midsection. Maybe. The noise I heard could have been her legs sizzling in the sun. I scanned the roof—how’d she get there? And did she decide to take a nap after watering the tomatoes? S
urely not. Even Bea knew better. It made more sense that however she’d arrived was no longer an option for her to return. She’d been locked out of the Penthouse. Lurch knew she was on the roof and had left her there to fry. Had Bea not sought what shelter the aluminum casing offered with the garden hose on, wrapped around her neck and trickling down her back, she’d probably be dead.
First, we tipped her over with a thud, then stood over her, shielding the front of her legs from the sun. Baylor passed the garden hose to Fantasy, still on his back, who lobbed the weak stream on Bea’s legs. I leaned in the aluminum shell and shook her. “Bea. Wake up.”
Fantasy asked, “What’s that all over her face?”
“I think she’s been eating tomatoes,” I answered.
Baylor asked, “What’s she doing here?”
Great question.
TWENTY-TWO
If the mercury was reading in the high nineties off the roof, which was conservative, given that the forecast had temperatures well into the low hundreds for Thursday afternoon, the roof was twice that. The good news was, as high in the sky as we were, we had a brisk ocean breeze, which was to say there was an abundance of scorched air for our lungs. The bad news was, we weren’t dressed for the Sahara Desert—our skin was mostly exposed; we had no headgear; the soles of Fantasy’s feet were badly burned; I’d have killed for sunglasses. On the other hand, we had water. And Bea Crawford. Who really, really, really shouldn’t have been there.
We propped her up, which took every ounce of combined strength the three of us had left, then gently shoved her—maybe not so gently, because nothing about, concerning, regarding Bea Crawford was gentle work—farther into the heavily pigeoned aluminum shell as best we could, considering she was larger than the shell. We aimed the tepid stream from the garden hose on the crown of her head until she came all the way around. She spit, she spewed, her eyes cracked open. “Lookit the back of my legs, Davis.” Her first intelligible words after a long string of gobbledygook. “They’re stinging like the dickens. I feel like I got a suntan on my backside.”
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