Double Up

by Gretchen Archer

  “Who caught what?” Bea asked.

  “It’s exactly what I thought, Bea. Blitz was trying to pass off forgeries as genuine art, and one of the winners took the art to an expert who told them they were fakes. Blitz got caught and had to shut it down.”

  “You lost me ten minutes ago.” Bea peeled the lid off her tumbler, tipped her head back, and went for the spinach dregs. When she came up for air (her teeth were green) she said, “But I’d say chances are someone got their number and they had to pull the plug.”

  Part of me wished I’d been the one to shut down Blitz’s art ring, and another part of me was relieved the Bellissimo’s hands were clean of their scam. For one, it got Bea Crawford out of Blitz, so that worry was off my plate, and more than that, at the end of the day, caught is caught. But why close the doors on the casino’s largest profit center, high stakes?

  Before Bea left, we went to my office where I had her call Blitz and ask for an explanation as to why the Masterpiece promotion ended so abruptly. She sat in the gold paint chair across from me, her phone between us on speaker mode. The hold music for Player Services was Kanye West’s “Gold Digger.” She rattled off her Blitz Bux player card number to a player’s club rep who answered, and I chewed a thumbnail while the rep verified Bea was a registered player.

  “What’s your PIN number, ma’am?”

  Bea said, “It’s J, U, A, N.”

  (Juan? Don Juan? The Italian housekeeper?)

  “Excuse me?” the lady said.

  “I know,” Bea said. “He’s a illegal immigrant and they can’t spell worth a flip.”

  “Excuse me?” the lady said.

  “Juan,” Bea told her. “He’s not from here. He can’t spell.”

  “I just need your PIN number, ma’am,” the player services rep said.

  “Don’t you have a telephone?” Bea asked. “Match up the letters with the numbers.”

  While this was going on, I grabbed a Post-it note and scribbled the numeric translation of Juan and put it in front of Bea’s nose. She said, “Lady, it’s five, eight, two, six.”

  After confirming Bea was Bea, the player services rep transferred her to a casino host. The hold music was the Gatlin Brothers’ “All the Gold in California.” The host picked up, made it through Bea’s extended and convoluted Masterpiece tirade, including accusations and pointed threats, then explained to Bea the promotion only lasted as long as the art did. Of the thirty gallery pieces, three players acquired ten works of art each, with the last collection awarded Friday evening. The promotion was over. She apologized to Bea for the bad timing, but told her to enjoy her Hang It Up suite for another week on them and stay tuned for the next wonderful Blitz gaming adventure.

  I put my hand over the phone and whispered. “Ask her about high stakes.” I moved my hand away.

  “Say.” Bea leaned all the way in. “Do you have hot steaks?”

  The casino host said, “I beg your pardon?”

  Bea rolled her eyes.

  I went for the Post-it notes again, and scribbled the word “high,” and waved it at Bea.

  She made OK fingers. She had a teeny piece of spinach between her two front teeth. “Lady?”

  The casino host said, “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Do you have high steaks?” Bea asked. “Like thick cuts that sit up high on the plate?”

  This stumped the host.

  I put everyone out of their misery by ending the call.

  “Well, how do you like that?” Bea leaned back in the gold paint chair.

  I didn’t.

  “We should have asked her why the gold room closed down while we had her on the phone.”

  I rubbed the space between my eyebrows.

  “So?” Bea asked. “What’s my next spy job?”

  “Sit tight for now.” And maybe floss. “I’m sure something will pop up.”

  Sixteen

  Tuesday morning, three days before Wheels Up, something popped up.

  After breakfast—BREWING COFFEE! BREWING COFFEE! BREWING COFFEE!—I loaded Bexy and Quinn in their stroller and we went upstairs to tour the penthouse. I wanted to make sure Housekeeping had everything ready for Friday night when the Wheels Up grand prize winner arrived to stay there. Yes, I was haunted by the ghosts of the Sanderses, every time, especially this time now that their furnishings weren’t under white canvas wraps—and no, I didn’t get misty about it. I didn’t have time for misty, and Mr. Sanders said so himself, it was a new day.

  The girls and I rode the private elevator that passed between the penthouse and twenty-ninth floor back to our foyer, went out the front door, took a left, and toured the Celebrity Suite. Everything there was perfect, ready, and waiting on Wheels Up too.

  I went without July and/or Bea.

  Just me. And my girls.

  Who were tired of room inspections and wanted out of the stroller. I pushed them home again and we played one of their favorite games—Quilt. I plopped them in the middle of a king-sized quilt my Granny Dee gave us for a wedding gift and dragged it back and forth across the travertine floor in the main hall to the soundtrack of endless squeals and giggles. We played Quilt until July arrived at five ’til ten, and just in time, because Mama had work to do. July scooped up the babies, and I took off for my office behind the kitchen to complete my final Wheels Up chore, notifying the Mississippi Gaming Commission the Bellissimo would be conducting an in-flight tournament, a chore I’d put off until the absolute last minute, and my final Blitz chore, tying up the last Masterpiece loose ends.

  The Gaming Commission took fifteen minutes. The first minute was me glossing over the Wheels Up details and the other fourteen were the gaming agent, Jasper Sharkey, chewing me out for not notifying him sooner—circumventing procedure and protocol, skirting gaming laws, rules weren’t made to be broken. “We need to know these things beforehand—” he went on. And on. I didn’t interrupt to tell him I would’ve called much earlier had any part of me wanted them to know beforehand, or that I wasn’t asking for a thing in the air Blitz wasn’t already doing on the ground.

  Finally, he said, “Shoot me the game. I’ll stop everything, just for you, Davis, and try to get back with you before Friday.”

  “I can’t shoot you the game, Shark.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m still tweaking it.”

  Because I didn’t want him, or anyone he worked with, or anyone else to have access to Wheels Up before it went live.

  “Do you even have a game, Davis?”

  I sure did.

  He told me he’d sign off on it, just this once, but my game had to be loaded in the Falcon’s system and verified immediately, tweaked or not. “And you’d better not have any tricks up your sleeve.”

  I said, “Never.”

  “I’ll let it slide for one weekend tournament only—” which was all I needed, so I tuned out the rest and was already on my computer pulling up Blitz’s Masterpiece page when I said, “I’ll get it loaded, Shark. Thanks.”

  Then onto the last of my Blitz business.

  I took a look at the three Masterpiece winners, who I didn’t expect to come across as your average casino patrons, and I wasn’t disappointed. They looked like extras off the set of Casino Royale, and more than that, they looked like they’d been hand chosen to win the fine art. All three were demurely pleased, in refined and reserved ways, one wearing an ascot with a finger to his noble chin, and it became very clear that I’d been spinning my wheels.

  These people knew their art.

  It could be I wanted to catch Blitz at something, anything, so much so that I’d scammed myself over a blob of gold paint on a tiger top.

  It might be time to let it go.

  I gave the winners five additional minutes each. The first was an insurance mogul from California, the next an heir to a shampoo fortune fro
m New York, and the last was the recently retired CEO of a pharmaceutical empire who lived in Florida. I set up Google alerts on them, so should Mr. Sanders ever ask where his art took off to, I’d be able to tell him.

  Not my problem anymore.

  Next, and hopefully my final Blitz chore ever, I downloaded the previous weekend’s surveillance of Robin Sandoval from Bea’s phone and spy glasses—I had more photographs of the woman than her mother did—then began quickly clicking through. I was tired of Robin Sandoval and ready to move past her too. The time stamp told me I was looking at Friday morning, and I found exactly what I expected to find and exactly what I’d seen for four weeks. Robin grabbed a double Salted Caramel Mocha Frappuccino at ten ’til nine. She opened the gallery at nine, then poked on the computer behind a big gold desk until ten. She occasionally answered the gallery phone, and more often, she sent and received messages on her own phone. At five after ten, she stopped by a foxed mirror and swiped on mango-tinted Clinique Superbalm Moisturizing Gloss, went out on the casino floor to say good morning to the Hang It Up players, often including Bea Crawford, then it was back to the gallery and her computer by ten thirty. The only disruption to her morning routine was when she greeted the occasional gallery guests, strolled and perused Mr. Sanders’s art with them, then told them how to go about acquiring the art. Some bit, some didn’t. After lunch—one of two salads from one of two casino food court restaurants Monday through Thursday, with Friday’s lunch behind the closed doors of an unoccupied guest room with a pit boss named Carter Gerrardi who looked like Zorro—the single most interesting thing about Robin Sandoval: I knew something was up with the Sandovals when I met them—she went upstairs to the Masterpiece Salon above the gallery, where she stayed until she backed her Mercedes Maybach out of the employee parking garage at dark-thirty. Every day the same, except for Fun Lunch Fridays, and all in all, I was glad this would be the last time I’d watch Robin Sandoval live her Blitz life. I clicked through Saturday’s surveillance double time.

  Click click. Back up.

  I dialed. “Where are you?”

  “I’m out front of the Hard Rocker,” Bea said. “Just finishing up my morning walk. Right now I’m four and a half miles with a twelve minute splitter. Why?”

  “I’m going through your weekend Blitz pictures and it looks like Robin had a security escort all day Saturday.”

  “Come again?”

  “In every one of the pictures you took of Robin on Saturday, she had a gold jacket with her.”

  “She did? How do you know?”

  “Because it’s in every picture you took, Bea.”

  “How do you like that?” she said. “I missed it, but my spy glasses caught it.”

  Almost five weeks of Robin surveillance, and this was the first time she’d ever been assigned a security detail. And after the Masterpiece promotion had already ended. Why would the curator of a closed gallery need security?

  “Think,” I said. “Surely you noticed. Out of a hundred shots, I can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman. It would be great, Bea, if you could ever get a face in the camera frame, instead of always elbows and knees.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what, Davis. How about I stop and take a selfish with them? How about I say, ‘Davis Way is spying on you. Say cheese.’”

  I drummed my fingers on my desk. “Do you have any afternoon plans, Bea?”

  “It sounds like I do now. You want me to go back to the Blitzer?”

  Chances were, with the gallery closed, Robin wouldn’t be there, with or without security.

  “Yes,” I said. “Nose around for Robin and see if they’ve reopened high stakes. But what I really want is for you to find the security guard who was with Robin on Saturday and bring me a decent photograph of him or her.” There was something familiar about the shoulders-to-knees gold jacket images. Something about the posture, the frame, and the countenance. It wasn’t like I closed the case one minute and reopened it the next, but it wouldn’t hurt to cross this final Blitz T and dot this last Blitz I.

  “I’m on it.”

  And I was on Wheels Up. Which turned out to be a very good thing.

  At the stroke of midnight Tuesday, which might as well have been high noon for Bexley and Quinn, I let Bradley sleep while I rocked the girls and read Way Down Deep in the Deep Blue Sea. Several thousand times. It occurred to me, when the little boy in the book discovered the sunken treasure chest for the four hundredth time, I didn’t have Wheels Up flying over water. At all. I hadn’t dropped a river, a lake, or even a pond into the graphics of the game. If I hadn’t grabbed my laptop and two apple juice bottles, then worked on the play rug in the nursery with the girls crawling all over me until they finally fell asleep at three, Wheels Up wouldn’t have saved the Bellissimo. Wheels Up might have been the bitter, and possibly tragic, end.

  Rubbing my tired eyes, I retrieved the graphics files and dropped in bodies of water, then I pulled up the master game menu to code in a dramatic water landing feature worth a $5,000 bonus, and fifteen minutes later in the middle of a deep yawn as I had my mouse hovering over “SAVE,” I spotted it: a broken line in the sequencing.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  I stared at the broken line like I was the first car on the scene of the pileup. Like the person who called in sick the day the gas line under the building exploded. Like the person who sat up in the bathtub after the tornado to find everyone and everything gone. I was utterly and completely terrified at the close call.

  The players would’ve never known; it wouldn’t have affected the game. The Falcons, on the other hand, would have known, because accommodating for the broken line in the code would have required an enormous amount of electricity. It would have increased the current flow to the plane’s electrical circuits to the point of overload, which would’ve been a disaster. And by disaster, I meant international headline tragedy. I repaired it with shaking hands, checked every other line sequence twice, and then a third time. When I was absolutely positive I had it right, I logged into the Falcon’s operating system and took down the old version of the game, then reloaded the new one, securely resetting the password. I slammed my laptop closed, lay down between my girls, and cried myself to sleep. Regardless of what I blamed it on—mommy brain, too much of my attention pulled away from Wheels Up and given to stupid Blitz, writing my first game alone with no backup—I’d almost missed it.

  In my dreams, plane after plane after plane crashed.

  Wednesday morning, two days before Wheels Up, Bradley found his girls, all three, curled up and fast asleep on the play rug in the nursery, the morning sun streaming over us. I woke when he brushed my hair from my face. He was wearing a gray pinstripe suit with a perfect white oxford shirt and a sky blue tie that matched his eyes. With his help untangling me from our babies, who slept on, I sat up and told him what had happened during the night.

  “But you found it and repaired it,” he said.

  “That’s not the point,” I whispered. “The point is I almost missed it.”

  “Davis. Honey. Your game wouldn’t have crashed the Falcons. That’s not how electricity works. You installed Wheels Up into, basically, a tablet.”

  He was right.

  “If you send too much power to an iPad or a Surface, it shorts out the tablet. Not the whole house. Now, if the game were on the casino floor in a slot machine cabinet and a power surge caused it to overheat, there’d be a problem. Sparks would fly and the slot machine would catch fire quickly. But in this case, even if you hadn’t caught it and repaired it, the Falcons wouldn’t have known the difference in the game shorting out and one of the passengers turning off his cell phone.”

  He was right. He was exactly right, and I was limp with relief.

  “Replace the old version of the game with the new version, Davis, and no one outside of this room will ever know.”

  Baylor had loaded
and password protected the game into the Falcon system Tuesday afternoon so Shark at Gaming would get off my back, and it took an act of Congress. Actually, it took July asking for Baylor to stop what he was doing and go to the airport.

  (“You go load it, Davis.”)

  (“I can’t,” I told him. “I don’t have time.”)

  (“You don’t have time? I’m the one who doesn’t have time.”)

  (July stepped in. She whispered sweet nothings and he agreed to go to the airport for me.)

  (I loved July.)

  “You have to reload the game, Davis,” Bradley said. “It’s in two days. Wheels Up is in two short days.”

  “I did.”

  Slowly, Bradley asked, “How?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How, Davis, did you reload the game?”

  “I didn’t go to the airport in the middle of the night, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said. “But I did take care of it.”

  He eyed me suspiciously. “I didn’t know you had access to the Falcon’s operating system.”

  “I don’t.”

  He said, “Hmmm.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What, Bradley?”

  I knew what. He was suggesting I shouldn’t be hacking airplanes.

  “Did you test it, Davis?”

  I’d just told him I didn’t go to the airport in the middle of the night. How could I have tested it? He only asked to point out the painfully obvious; the uploaded patch needed to be verified on the Falcon’s system. Either I had to take it for a spin, or unlock it and let someone else. The worry of making national headlines with four crashed jets was off the table, only to be replaced with the worry of the game shorting out ten minutes into the flights. I’d put a lot of time and effort into the game and the players had invested heavily in it. For it to die an early death before the Falcons even reached cruising altitude would be devastating. And I had no intention of unlocking it and asking the crew to test it. For one, I’d have to have a conversation with pilots about broken data lines, electrical surges, and me hacking the Falcon operating system during the night. For nine hundred and ninety-nine others, I wasn’t about to let anyone else at Wheels Up before it went live.