DOUBLE KNOT

by Gretchen Archer

  Max DeLuna still had plenty, the money he’d already stolen, and I took care of it next. I had no idea how to allocate it, which left one option: trigger the jackpots. On all fifty machines. Give them two and a half million each from DeLuna’s account and call it a day.

  There was no way in the Bellissimo system backdoor, so I went in the front: my name, my password. I wiggled my way into the mainframe and went into the Knot on Your Life software and changed the payout on all fifty machines. Instead of the machines giving and taking, Even Steven, as my mother said, I set them to give. I cranked up the payout code from fifty to one hundred percent.

  It’s better to give than to receive, Max DeLuna. Everyone knows that.

  Clock ticking, I made it to the final screen, my very last cyber chore before we sent Arlinda to the casino to recruit Fredrick Blackwell. I entered the new payout codes into the fifty slot machines, and there, I hit a wall. The Knot on Your Life software wouldn’t take the new payout codes. The machine payout percentages couldn’t be changed remotely, a safeguard, so clever hackers couldn’t bring down the house from the comfort of their cruise ship dressing room ottomans. A security feature of land-based casino slot machines I was well aware of, but I had no idea it would apply to the Knot on Your Life machines in the Probability casino. The final step had to be completed manually on the ship just like it had to be completed manually on the casino floor. A gaming regulation I never dreamed would apply to a bank of machines with a one-week shelf life operating on international waters.

  One of us had to do it. Live and in person.

  Not only would it return the money to the rightful owners, all fifty jackpots hitting at once might be the fastest way to convince Fredrick Blackwell to help, in addition to sending DeLuna into a tailspin and providing the cover we needed to reroute Bellissimo One. The Knot on Your Life machines were about to hit the motherlode, and it would have to be my mother who hit the load. The software would have to be installed live, directly into the lead slot machine’s brain, the one slot machine that told the other forty-nine what to do, and my mother was the only candidate. She was the only face Max DeLuna didn’t know.

  My mother was our only hope.

  We had one flash drive in all of 704 and it was busy running the laptop. With the Knot on Your Life hack, we’d lose the laptop, because we’d lose the flash drive. But it was our only chance of keeping Bradley and Baylor from landing in Hawaii. A very easy choice.

  Mother came out of the gold bathroom and modeled for me. She struck several poses in her red and white striped skirt and her navy twin set buttoned up to her chin. On her feet, her high heels.

  “Mother, you look precious.”

  “If your daddy could see me now.”

  I patted the ottoman. She scooted in beside a nail gun.

  I gave her step-by-step instructions: which end of the flash drive was up, what a USB port looked like, how and where on the machine to find and insert it.

  She reminded me she taught me how to walk.

  I studied the dressing room floor. I took my mother’s hands in mine and we studied the gray carpet together. “I don’t think you’ll be in any danger, Mother, because we’re only up against three people. One is on our deck in a trunk, we know where the pilot is, and DeLuna is in the casino. He doesn’t know who you are, he won’t be the least bit interested in what you’re doing, so I believe with all my heart you’ll be safe.”

  Mother’s hands showed her years more than her face, her body, or as I’d learned during our time together on Probability, her spirit. They were rough from a lifetime of potato peeling and gardening, they were thick with ropey veins ravaged by the recent barrage of hypodermic needles, and her wedding rings were so loose on her spindly fingers the weight of the stones flipped them under. I could only see the backs of the two worn gold bands representing my parents’ lives together. Of which I wanted there to be more. I rolled the rings around for her. We stared at the diamonds.

  “Why are you telling me all this, Davis?”

  We were closer than we’d been in decades. Three-point-four of them, to be exact. “I need you to know I’d never let you do this if I thought I was putting you in the line of fire. Daddy would never forgive me. I’d never forgive myself.”

  “Well, let me tell you something, Davis.” She cupped my face in her hands. “It’s my turn and I’m ready.”

  “Oh, Mother.” My face dropped out of her hands.

  “Davis, I get tired of being on the sidelines. You and your daddy always saving the world and me at home ironing. I’m tired of ironing. I’m ready to live it up a little. Everyone knows you and your daddy are made of the strong stuff, but the truth is I’m made of strong stuff too.”

  I knew. Deep down, I knew.

  “But there’s one thing I have to say to you before I go, and I want you to listen carefully.”

  I prayed she wouldn’t tell me what she wanted me to do with her salt and pepper shaker collection should she not make it back to 704. If for no other reason, I didn’t want to be charged with telling someone Mother left them two hundred salt and pepper shakers.

  “Look up here at me, Davis.” She scoped the dressing room to make sure we were alone. “Don’t you breathe a word of me playing a gambling game to anyone. I mean it. If it ever got back to my Sunday School class, I’d be done for. Out on my rear. This is our secret.”

  “You got it, Mother.”

  * * *

  Arlinda was dressed in today’s uniform, Set Sail: navy and white striped high-waist hipsters, a bright red triangle halter top, white sailor hat. Jessica was wearing Friday’s uniform, Walk the Plank, a one-piece rhinestone anchor with six-inch silver heels. In a way, seeing Jess in a different outfit was a breath of fresh air. In a couple of other very noticeable ways, it wasn’t. Jess was more Fantasy’s size, less Arlinda’s. So her choice from the stash Arlinda threw down the wall to wear under her fresh Probability robe wasn’t built for her.

  We walked Mother and Arlinda to the door of 704, we, minus Jess. Guess what she was doing in her rhinestone anchor suit and six-inch silver heels. Just guess.

  “Mother, you have Poppy’s V2, our only way in and out.”

  She patted her left pocket.

  “And please don’t use the gun unless you have to.”

  She patted her right hip. “I don’t plan on shooting anyone while I’m gone and don’t make me shoot anyone when I get back.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  She cleared her throat. “In one hour, exactly one hour, cut my pot roast off. Just turn it off. By the knob.” She demonstrated. “On. Off.” She toggled her closed fist on and off a few more times. “Do not lift the lid. Do you hear me, Davis?”

  “I hear you.”

  “It needs to sit for another three hours without anyone lifting the lid. It will keep on cooking and it will make its own thick gravy if you don’t lift that lid. You’ve all seen pot roast before and you can wait to see mine until I get back and serve it. I’ve got tinfoil under that lid and I’ll know if you picked it up. I’ll be able to see the marks in the tinfoil. Do not pick the lid up.”

  “I won’t pick up the lid, Mother.”

  “And that goes for you too.” She aimed at No Hair and Fantasy. They surrendered. “And when So and So wakes up, you tell her too.”

  “We will, Mother.”

  I turned to Arlinda. “You understand the risk you’re taking? Stepping out the door?”

  “I do,” she said.

  “Way more than Mother,” I said. “He doesn’t know Mother. No one on the ship knows Mother. He knows you, surveillance knows you, and security knows you.”

  “I understand.” She patted her sailor hat, tipped forward on her head, obstructing as much of her face as possible.

  “Number one, Arlinda, is my mother.”r />
  She nodded.

  “Oh, poo,” Mother said. “I can take care of myself.”

  “Get in and out of the casino with Mother and Mr. Blackwell as fast as you can.”

  She nodded.

  “Good luck.”

  And they were off.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “It was a simple plan.” No Hair broke the silence that settled over the salon after the door closed to 704. “Lock us up, steal the money.”

  “Did you hear that?” I asked my babies in a shaky voice. “A simple plan.” A simple plan that had their father forty thousand feet over an ocean at the mercy of a felon pilot. I was so glad the babies didn’t know, couldn’t know, I hoped they’d never know.

  “It’s only been,” No Hair looked at his watch, “forty-eight hours.”

  “It feels like forty-eight years.” But he was right. It was only two little days ago, almost to the hour, when I walked through the door of 704, No Hair was captured, and the cabin door on Bellissimo One closed with Bradley and Baylor inside. It was a simple trap, was what it was, and we fell right in it.

  “What do we think happened on the plane?” No Hair asked gently, quietly.

  “Just like in the movies,” Fantasy said. “She incapacitated the pilots.”

  “How’d she get on the plane in the first place?”

  “Impersonated a crewmember?” No Hair said. “Caught the flight attendant before wheels-up, took her out, then took her place?”

  The three of us had years of speculative conversations about perps behind us—their motivations, their methods, their maneuvers—but never with stakes as high as these.

  “I wonder how she incapacitated the pilots,” Fantasy said. “There were two of them and one of her. Plus Bradley and Baylor.”

  “She held them at gunpoint,” No Hair said. “She had to have.” His voice trailed off in time with the last drops of blood draining from my face. “Davis.” He leaned my way. “You said it yourself. Brad isn’t in a position to overpower her. He can’t fly a plane. What you have to focus on is the fact that she has nothing to gain by harming him. She has to have Brad to get the money. He’s in one piece, Davis. She needs him.”

  No Hair was right. There was no better way to walk away with two hundred million dollars than to have it handed to you by the man in charge of the money.

  No Hair took a steadying breath of non-submarine air. “How’s this going to happen, Davis, with the plane?”

  A welcome shift from problem to solution.

  I explained if all went according to plan, which was entirely dependent on Arlinda recruiting Fredrick Blackwell, the plane would change courses. “One phone call to the FAA and the plane will be located. Blackwell will ask ground control to activate the automatic flight mode, let him at the controls, then divert it. Colby Mitchell won’t be able to override him, at which point Bradley and Baylor can subdue her, and the plane won’t land in Hawaii.”

  Any number of things could go wrong. The thought of which was making me woozy. The odds weren’t necessarily in our favor.

  The mission could be easily accomplished, the Gulfstream 650 equipped with automated flight plan and landing aid systems. But not by me, because I didn’t have the credentials to divert a paper airplane. Fredrick Blackwell did. And Arlinda Smith was directly above us trying to convince him to put those credentials to good use, as in save the day. Interrupting an aircraft in flight is serious business—the business of terrorists, and Arlinda might not be able to convince Blackwell to listen to her, much less risk his career by taking part. Chances were he’d never heard a story in his life like the one he was hearing now. She had one shot at recruiting him—his wallet. In the least amount of time possible, she had to tell him he’d been swindled and prove it with fifty jackpots. Maybe, just maybe, he’d help. If not, Mother and Arlinda would be back soon. My husband would land in Hawaii. We’d have pot roast. We’d dock in the Caymans, DeLuna would walk off with the money, and that would leave Bradley and Baylor—where? I could barely breathe and apparently Fantasy couldn’t either. She leaned in to say something, but before she could get it out her short shorts surrendered with a loud rip. She held up an excuse-me finger, banged into furniture backing out of the salon, and No Hair came very close to cracking a smile.

  In her wake, Jess sleeping it off, No Hair and I talked about what had transpired from our different perspectives in the two short days. He stepped into a Zoom at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon and woke up in the submarine with a note on his chest, his luggage, and a hardback copy of The Old Man and the Sea.

  I asked if he’d read it.

  No.

  He had luxury accommodations, provisions, and no way out except for portholes he could barely fit an arm through. The hatch was secured from the outside and the escape hatch Fantasy had gone through to get to him had been disabled from inside. He said it would have taken dynamite to open it. I asked about the panoramic viewing windows I’d seen in The Compass and he pointed out he could have knocked them out all day, then electrocuted and drowned. The viewing windows were below the waterline, which made sense, because I hadn’t seen them at all, and, his note had warned, wired with live electrical. His note said attempts at escape would be met with deadly consequences, his own, in fact, and besides, he said, he was waiting on me to save him. I told him I’d been waiting on the same thing: him to save me. I told him they’d thought of everything here too, except Burnsworth. They hadn’t planned on Burnsworth. No Hair studied his lap at the mention of his name and Jess jumped into the conversation for the first time with, “So, gross.”

  Look who was up.

  Twenty minutes had ticked away since Arlinda and Mother left. We had no computer and no way in or out. We still had DeLuna’s V2, but that was it. To keep from losing my mind, I poked behind the black bow tie to look at tonight’s menus. It would seem we had the only pot roast on all of Probability.

  No Hair asked me how Mother had been holding up.

  Like a champ, I told him.

  “She’s so retro,” Jess said.

  No Hair studied her. “This whole time, you had no idea?”

  “I have ideas,” she defended herself.

  “Let’s hear your ideas,” he said. “What’s your story, Jessica?”

  “My story? I’m a narc?”

  No Hair’s head jerked.

  I tore myself away from the V2, where I was behind the full moon reading about the Tropic of Cancer, 23.5 degrees south latitude, and said, “Jessica has narcolepsy, No Hair.”

  We gave it two minutes.

  “You fall asleep at the drop of a hat and you’re married to a crook,” No Hair said to Jess.

  “Right,” she said. “He’s a bastard dirtbag.”

  “How long?” No Hair asked.

  “All day long.”

  “What?”

  “He’s a bastard all day long.”

  “How long have you been married to the bastard?”

  “A year.” She smoothed the rhinestones across her flat stomach. “But I’m so done with him.”

  Understandable. I clicked the wind rose app on the V2 to see that we were less than four hours from the Caymans. I couldn’t wait to see dry land.

  “How did you two meet?” No Hair asked.

  “Who two?”

  “You and your husband.”

  “That was a bad day.”

  “Where was this bad day?” No Hair asked.

  “The bank.”

  I listened to the exchange and it occurred to me that in all this time we hadn’t bothered to scratch below the surface with Jessica, to ask her these questions. In our defense, we’d been busy. Jessica told No Hair she was an only child raised by a single father. Which explained a lot.

  “Let’s back up, Jessica,” No
Hair said. “Where did you meet him?”

  “My father?”

  No Hair cleared his throat. “Your husband.”

  “So, the bank.” Jess looked at me curiously, as if to say this one’s a little slow.

  “The bank?” No Hair gave me the same curious look about her, the difference being he hid it.

  She leaned in, spoke slowly, and raised the volume. “Max. Worked. At. The. Bank.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” No Hair asked.

  She turned to me. “Is he making fun of me?”

  “No, Jess.”

  “What did your husband do at the bank?” No Hair asked.

  “Portfolios,” she said. “He came up through the ranks of investments, assets, loans, credit, debt, and collections. He landed in portfolios.”

  My head snapped up.

  “Hybrid and speculative,” Jess explained.

  She spoke with the poise and authority of a guest on the evening news. My mouth dropped open. Had we stumbled upon a subject Jess was knowledgeable in and comfortable talking about? And that subject was banking? How could being married to a banker for a year make her that fluent? Maybe I should have seen this coming?

  “Which bank?” No Hair asked.

  “So?” She didn’t understand the question.

  (Welcome back, Jess.)

  “You said you met your husband at a bank.”

  “Right.”

  “Which bank?” No Hair asked.

  “My father’s.”

  “Which bank is your father’s bank?”

  No Hair was truly struggling through the conversation, much as I had struggled with Jess before I spent two days locked up with her.

  “The bank,” she said.