“But I didn’t mean anything by it.” Vree sounded pitiful. “I was just trying to understand.”
And there it was. GameCorp would catch Rod J., and justice would be served, but since he wasn’t the one who breached their system, they’d never understand.
“I was confused!” Vree said. “I get confused!”
They’d be confused. In a million years, Rod J. wouldn’t be able to explain what happened.
“Davis!” It was Vree. “Please come back!”
Only I could explain it.
“Davis!” It was Vree again. “I’m sorry!”
If I could hack GameCorp’s ATMs and make off with a small percentage of their convenience fees for two days, imagine what a real cyberpunk could do.
“Davis?” My sister sneaked up behind me and tugged my ponytail.
GameCorp’s security was all about the cash. They hadn’t bothered to secure the fees.
“Shake it off,” Meredith said. “She really didn’t mean anything by it.”
Honestly, who was to say ATMs worldwide weren’t just as vulnerable?
“Vree’s forever saying things better left unsaid. You know that, Davis.”
I’d need to leave Rod J.’s laptop with the money. It would be a roadmap for GameCorp’s security-management programmers, who could eliminate the threat faster than I’d uncovered it. Then they could develop the program for other ATM owners, sell it, and be richer than they already were.
Maybe then, I could sleep.
* * *
I spent the next ten minutes on the home screen of Rod J.’s laptop.
I typed, “Dear GameCorp,” first. Then I spelled out, in bits and bytes, where their system was weak and exactly how it’d been compromised. I suggested they build firewalls along the convenience-fee route, then went on to suggest they develop and patent the program. The last words I typed were, “Seven dollars for a casino convenience fee is ridiculous. Please consider lowering it.”
My work done, I reclaimed my seat at the kitchen table with newly acquired determination to make things right for everyone—Rod J., GameCorp, and myself. To Vree, puffy-eyed and red-nosed, I said, “It’s okay, Vree. You weren’t wrong.”
“I would never hurt your feelings, Davis. Ever. I mean—”
“You were right, Vree. I stole the money.”
“And you’re going to replace it.” Fantasy slapped the table. “Let’s go.”
“You don’t understand,” I told her. “We can’t just go. The hacked ATMs are all over America, and we can’t get all over America and back tonight. Half of the glitched ATMs are in Vegas.”
“Where are the other half? Surely there are a few closer than Vegas. Where’s the closest one?” Meredith asked.
“There are two here,” I said.
“Here, where?” she asked.
“Here Biloxi. One is downstairs.”
“That’s a no-brainer, Davis,” Fantasy said. “Let’s sneak into Human Resources, get engineering uniforms, bust into the ATM like we’re repairing it, dump the money and be done with it.”
“We can’t,” I said. “We can’t bust into an ATM. We need a key. That’s problem one.”
“Keys, piece of cake,” Fantasy said. “You distract, I’ll nab.”
“Distract who?” Vree sniffed. “Nab what?”
“We’ll distract a High Limits slot attendant,” Fantasy said. “You can always hear them coming, because their keys jingle. One of the keys they carry is a GameCorp universal ATM key, which is what we’ll nab, because the only way into an ATM is a key, dynamite, or a nuclear bomb. It’d be best if we went the key route. Between me and Davis, one will distract and the other will nab.” She turned to me. “If there was ever a night to nab a key off a slot attendant, tonight’s the night. You know they’re running their legs off paying out IGT jackpots. We can have a key in five minutes, tops. We get the key, go to an ATM, dump the money, and then go to the Smucker Show.”
“How is all that money going to fit into an ATM?” Vree asked.
“Casino ATMs are big, Vree, in big cabinets so you can’t miss them,” I said. “Inside, they’re ninety-percent nothing. One little data line, one little printer, one little cash tray. There’s plenty of room.”
“The money will fit,” Fantasy said. “They’re serviced every six hours, and we’ll fit it in there so it falls all over the technician’s feet when he opens the cabinet. The search for Rod J. will start two minutes later.” She turned to me. “Where’s the glitched ATM we’re going to fit it in?”
“That’s our second problem,” I said. “Location, location, location.”
Meredith yawned.
“What are our choices?” Fantasy asked.
“One is the cage.”
Fantasy shook her head at the ceiling.
“What?” Vree asked. “Like a bird cage? Like a hamster cage? Like a cat cage?”
“The cash cage,” Fantasy said. “It’s the banking center of the casino and the ATM is dead bullseye in the middle of it. There are cameras covering every square inch. Cameras, and wall-to-wall people.”
“Ah,” Vree said. “One time I was at the bank depositing Gooch’s insurance check from when Gator Moore rear ended him, and—”
Meredith interrupted. “I don’t understand. You’re not taking money, you’re giving money. So what if someone sees you? And what is up with that dog and Madeleine Albright?”
“The cage ATM won’t work. Where’s the other one?” Fantasy asked.
I took a deep breath. “In the men’s room.”
“No,” Fantasy said.
“Yes. It’s the ATM at the cage or the ATM in the men’s room, Fantasy. Those are our choices.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I was picking from a list of general locations in our zip code. I chose casino and lobby,” I said. “I didn’t know the casino ATM was the cage or the lobby ATM was the men’s room until five minutes ago.”
“Why would someone put an ATM in a men’s room?” Vree asked. “Do all men’s rooms have ATMs? Gooch has never come out of a men’s room with money. That I know of. I mean—”
“Which lobby men’s room?” Fantasy asked. “Like the lobby men’s room behind valet or the lobby men’s room behind Beans?”
“What’s Beans?” Vree asked.
“The coffee shop.” Fantasy and I said it on the same beat.
“What difference does it make?” Vree asked.
Meredith yawned again.
“Same as the cage, Vree,” Fantasy said. “Traffic. It’s crowded tonight. The valet men’s room will have a revolving door. In and out. Too much traffic. The men’s room in the coffee shop won’t. Which one, Davis? There are five lobby men’s rooms.”
“No,” I said. “Just one.”
“Five,” she said. “Counting the one behind Rocks. Five.”
“What’s Rocks?” Vree asked.
“The jewelry store in the lobby.” I turned to Fantasy. “I never said the ATM was in a men’s room in our lobby.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Whose lobby?”
My head thunked down on the table. “The Resort.”
“Which resort?” Meredith asked.
“The Last Resort.” Fantasy’s head hit the table too.
“Wouldn’t that be even better?” Meredith asked. “Your chances of being recognized at another casino are considerably less. Right?”
“Well,” Fantasy said to the table.
“Well,” I said to the table.
“You two sit up,” Meredith said. “What’s wrong with the Resort?”
“Everything,” Fantasy said. “It’s a dump, the likes of which you can’t imagine. I roll up my windows when I drive within a mile of it. I don’t want to set foot in it, much less get within five miles of a men’s room there.
”
“It can’t be that bad,” Vree said.
“Vree,” I said, “their slot machines take government-assistance checks and their buffet takes food stamps.”
“That buffet filled three hospitals last Thanksgiving,” Fantasy said.
Meredith shivered. “Don’t say hospital.”
I asked Vree if she remembered Shoney’s.
“Shoney?” She gave me a blank look. “Did we go to high school with her?”
“It’s an old restaurant,” Meredith said. “There was one in Greenville by the mall. They had a fat boy holding a cheeseburger in the parking lot.”
“Hot fudge cake,” Vree said.
“That’s the one,” I said. “They used to have hotels. About a million years ago. After Hurricane Katrina ripped through Biloxi, one of the only things left standing was the old Shoney’s Inn. It’s been sitting empty for decades, before and after the storm, until two mobster shrimpers got a small-business loan and opened the Last Resort Casino six months ago. The fifty-year-old dilapidated restaurant is now a casino. The fifty-year-old decrepit hotel rooms are now, well, fifty-year-old decrepit hotel rooms. It’s nasty.”
“Are the owners mobsters or are they shrimpers?” Meredith asked.
“Both,” Fantasy and I said.
“Who in the world goes there?” Vree asked.
“Three kinds of people,” I said. “People down on their luck, people who have nowhere else to go, and money launderers. Which brings us to our third problem.”
“This had better be our last problem,” Fantasy said.
“It is.”
“What, Davis?” Vree asked. “What’s our last problem?”
“We have to clean this money.”
“What’s dirty about it?” Vree asked.
“Davis is right,” Fantasy said. “The sheik’s money in the ATM won’t work. It will lead straight back to him. If we dump it in a hacked ATM, the sheik will go down with the secretary.”
“We have to clean it before we dump it.”
“How do you clean money?” Vree’s head was spinning. “Febreze? Lysol? Clorox Clean Up?”
Fantasy finally stood. “The Last Resort it is. We can launder the money and dump it at the same…dump.”
“How can I help?” Vree stood.
“You don’t have to, Vree,” I said. “You’ve helped enough.”
“But I want to. I really do.”
“Vree,” I said, “it’s risky. Sometimes we get into…sticky situations. What Fantasy and I do isn’t always easy.”
“Or by the book,” Fantasy said.
“Please.”
“Okay, Vree. You can be our money launderer and our getaway driver.” I looked at my watch. “Let’s hit it.”
* * *
It was our first plumbing gig.
Our secret spy days had seen me and Fantasy in many disguises. We’d infiltrated restaurants disguised as waitresses, most recently because a thousand dollars a day of Kobe beef was sneaking out the back door of Chops, the steak house. It was the sous chef doing the sneaking. We’d worn horticulture aprons and drowned fake plants with water canisters for hours on end, waiting on the right, or wrong, person to walk by. We’d worn front desk, concierge, housekeeping, valet, and pool bikini uniforms. We’d dressed up as old ladies and played penny slots; we’d dressed up as new socialites and played five-hundred-dollar slots. But we’d never been plumbers. I kissed my sleeping babies one more time, hugged my sister tight, then we hit the Bellissimo janitorial supply room. Hard.
We dressed in gray Dungaree pants and matching short-sleeved shirts, the only uniforms we could find without the Bellissimo logo. Mine didn’t begin to fit and smelled like motor oil. Fantasy’s fit fine and smelled like sawdust. We had Vree dressed as a mob boss wife—short black dress, stiletto black heels, push-up bra, big hair, blood red lipstick—and she smelled like birthday cake.
Fantasy and I stuffed our hair into Biloxi Shuckers baseball caps and hid our faces behind welding goggles. I didn’t want to say anything, but Fantasy didn’t look like a plumber at all.
“Davis,” she said, “you don’t look a bit like a plumber.”
“I think you do,” Vree said.
I thanked her.
“What is this?” Fantasy’s fingers were wrapped around a black handlebar above a giant circular sandpaper machine.
“It doesn’t look very plumbing related,” I said. “Skip it.”
“What’s a flood remediation machine?” Vree was bent over a black box-shaped contraption with a funnel on one end and a fifty-foot hose on the other.
“I have no idea,” I said. “But it sounds like it sucks up water. We don’t need it.”
“What do we need, Davis?” Fantasy asked.
“Plumber hammers? Plumber nails? Pipes? Sinks? Bathtubs? I don’t know.’”
“Drano,” Fantasy said. “We need Drano.”
There was no Drano.
Fantasy shook a plunger at me.
“No thank you,” I said.
She shook it at me again.
I took the plunger.
And to think how much fun everyone was having in the casino.
We transferred the ten shrink-wrapped stacks of money, plus everything Bradley and I had in our home safe, four thousand dollars, and everything I had in my secret cash cookie jar, six hundred and seventy dollars, into the larger of Vree’s hot pink rolling suitcases. We stuffed the plumbing hammers and Rod J. Sebastian’s laptop in a canvas bag we found in the janitorial supply room. I rolled the suitcase while Fantasy dragged our plumber hammer bag to the loading dock. Vree drove her car around and was waiting on us. She popped open the back hatch and we loaded up.
“Do you have plenty of ammo, Davis, or are you planning on hitting someone with the computer?”
“Yes, I have plenty of ammo,” I said. “But I don’t plan on shooting anyone. And I need the computer. GameCorp needs what’s on it, and I’ll need to shut down the Resort’s surveillance. I surrendered my laptop to a yellow-eyed dog, thank you.”
“Do you honestly think the Resort has surveillance?”
“You never know.”
We slammed the hatch and climbed into the backseat.
It was a quiet ride to The Last Resort.
“Take a right, Vree,” I said. “We’re here. See the fat boy with the cheeseburger?”
Vree peered out the windshield. “You’re kidding, right?”
Half of fat boy’s head was gone. All of the cheeseburger was gone. A faded vinyl banner over the fat boy’s red-checkered overalls barely said, THE LAST RESORT CASINO.
We counted four people sleeping around the front door. One lobbed over a metal canister ashtray, two on a sagging wooden bench, and one stretched out on the ground.
“Keep going straight, Vree. The parking garage is past the building.”
She said, “This is the ugliest place I’ve ever seen. I mean—”
“Here we are,” Fantasy said. “This is the parking garage. Pull in.”
“There’s a tree growing out of it.” She inched forward. “There are lots of trees growing out of it.”
There were no lights in the two-story parking garage. Lots of scraggy vegetation, no lights. I’d never seen anything spookier in my life. My whole life.
We passed a wrecked Jeep Liberty and a twenty-year-old Lincoln Town Car missing a door. We drove by an old Ford Bronco with everything past the cab chopped off down to the wheel base, and an unrecognizable beat-up car Fantasy said was a Gremlin. “That thing must be forty years old.” The used and abused car lot continued to the second level, where we found a diamond in the rough. A shiny white Volvo XC90 hiding between a rusty truck and what might have been the very first Ford Taurus off the production line. “Would you look at that?” Fantasy said. “There’s my
car.”
Vree braked. “How did your car get here, Fantasy?”
I closed my eyes and let my weary head fall back. It was going to be another long sleepless night. “I’d say Rod J. Sebastian drove it here.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Vree backed into a parking place opposite Fantasy’s car and killed the lights. Then it was pitch black. Black black. We locked the doors.
“Does anyone have a lighter?” Vree asked.
“I’ll turn on my phone flashlight,” I said.
“And what?” Fantasy asked. “Draw attention to us?”
“We have to sit here until we figure out what to do, Fantasy.”
“Why don’t we go sit somewhere else until we figure out what to do? This parking lot is freaking me out.”
Vree, in the front seat, started praying. “Now I lay me down to sleep—”
“Vree, pray with your eyes open,” I said. “You’re our lookout.”
Her eyes popped open. “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
“How are you so sure Rod J. is here, Davis?”
“Who had your car last?”
“The brothers.”
“And where are the brothers?”
“In jail.”
“At some point, Fantasy, they passed off your car to Rod J.”
“If I should die before I wake—”
“Here’s another example of a dumber than dumb criminal,” Fantasy said. “He could be in Aruba by now. If I left an oil sheik to drown, I’d run like the wind.”
“We should have dropped everything and chased him down when he fell off the grid Tuesday,” I whispered. “Or Monday. Or Wednesday. Whatever night he disappeared from the emergency room.”
“Well, we didn’t,” Fantasy said. “We were busy.”
“—I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
“Davis, why is he still here?”
“The dog collar, Fantasy. He wants the collar.”
“Amen.”
“The brothers hid it somewhere,” I said. “They stole it from my house and hid it. The cousin either doesn’t know where, or he knows where and he’s laying low until he can get it.”
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