Baylor went into Best Buy with Bradley’s Visa and was back eight minutes later with a laptop and five pre-charged burner phones. The Visa took a $3,200 hit. Baylor passed the Visa to July, who was on her way to the Target next door for two car seats. Mother said, “I wouldn’t shop at the Target. A terrorist bought them, closed down the ladies’ rooms, and burned all the Bibles. But since you’re going, get Davis some underpants.”
The car went deathly silent as we processed the Target news.
Baylor stopped breaking into impossible phone packaging long enough to say, “Gross.”
Bradley said, “Watch it.”
Bex let out a little whimper and reached for me. “Maaaaamaaaaa.” Which triggered Quinn. “Maaaaaaa.”
I said, “Trade places with me, Baylor.”
“No way.”
“Okay, then.” I looked over my shoulder. “You nurse the babies.”
Bradley and his burner phone got out and stood beside the car to check in with the shift manager at the Bellissimo and the control tower at Million Air, while I sat in the relatively roomy driver’s seat with two nursing babies.
“I’d rather be in Target with the terrorists than watch this.” Baylor slammed the car door and stomped off.
Fantasy had the backseat to herself. She’d fired up her burner phone and began tapping out a long angry message.
“This is the cheapest phone in the world,” she said. “The keys stick.”
Maybe not so angry.
“Do you know Sherry?” Mother asked.
The tapping stopped.
“She’s the girl inside your phone. Just tell her what you want to say and she’ll type it for you.”
The tapping started again.
“Who are you typing to?” Mother asked.
“I’m telling my husband Davis blew my Blitz cover and I’m going to be late.”
“I should call my husband too.” Mother held out her cell phone. “Davis, dial your daddy’s number for me.”
“With my nose?”
Fantasy’s open palm appeared in the air between the two front seats. She dialed for Mother. Quinn blinked her beautiful blue eyes at me, while Bexley patted my hair.
My girls were so warm.
Mother was on the phone. “Was the taxicab nice? Did it smell nice?”
Yes, Mother. First things first.
“Samuel,” she said. “Tell Bea to tell them where the pictures are.” Then, “Since when is Bea worried about making Davis mad? Was she worried about making Davis mad when she called the school board and told them Davis was giving all the other children the pink eyes?”
Fantasy snorted.
“Or when she got on the Piggly Wiggly loudspeaker and told the whole wide world Davis had become a woman?”
Fantasy was stomping her foot and slapping her leg.
Mother said, “Don’t dare go back to Davis’s house. It’s like a war zone with dead bodies and all the pictures ripped off the walls. She’s never going to get it dried out good. The mold is probably already growing.” Then, “Maybe Bea went on the Marie Osmond diet. Where they ship you the diet food in the mail? I wouldn’t eat food out of the mailbox, diet or not.”
Soon enough, July and Baylor made it back with Evenflo convertible car seats, two Baby Einstein Take Along Tunes toys, and bright purple and school-bus yellow zebra-striped leggings for me. Which didn’t match my pink t-shirt or my Burberry rain boots at all. She said, “They were all I could grab.” I told her they’d work and pulled them on in the Target parking lot. Bradley’s Visa took an $800 hit.
We rearranged to accommodate the car seats, which put Baylor on the bump in the middle of the backseat with July on his lap and Fantasy crammed into the small cargo space behind them. She said, “I’m going to fall out of this car.” Bexy and Quinny found the big fun button on their Take Alongs that filled the car with flashing lights and Mozart. They didn’t hit the buttons at the same time, so it was like dueling Mozarts. Baylor said, “Please let me and July out.” Fantasy said she was suffocating. Somehow, she wrangled out of her gold jacket and hit Baylor in the head with it. He said, “I’m not holding your stuff, Fantasy,” then hit me in the head with it. I reached over Mother, lowered the passenger window, and Fantasy’s Blitz jacket landed somewhere on I-10.
Bradley said, “That’s it.” And just the way he said it, everyone stopped everything except Chopin, who was double blaring from the Take Alongs. Blitz was a mile and a half to our left and the Bellissimo a mile and a half in front of us. Bradley continued south, took the Bellissimo exit, but instead of turning left for home, he went right for the beach. He drove Mother and Daddy’s car for several more miles, quiet miles, except for Vivaldi on the Take Alongs, then pulled into a deserted public parking lot for beachgoers, put it in park, and turned to me. “Get out.”
“What?”
“Get out,” he said. “Get out of the car.” He popped the back hatch and looked in the rearview mirror. “Fantasy? You too. Get out.”
Rossini was on the Take Alongs.
“Get. Out. Both of you.”
My husband always said what he meant and meant what he said, and sometimes he said it in such a way as to encourage immediate compliance. Right then was a very good example.
The next thing we saw were taillights as Bradley pulled away with our twins, my mother, Baylor, and July. Leaving me and Fantasy in an empty parking lot on the beach at ten o’clock at night, five miles from home. We watched, silently, as he put it in reverse and backed up twenty feet. The front passenger door opened.
Fantasy and I said, “No!” at the exact same time.
Thankfully, my mother was not kicked out of the car to be stranded with us. But she did lean out and drop the laptop, the laptop cord, and one burner phone on the sandy sidewalk.
The driver window came down and Bradley’s open palm appeared.
I had no idea why.
Fantasy rolled her eyes and trudged to the car. She pulled her .38 from her waistband and placed it in Bradley’s hand.
And they were gone.
Fantasy gathered the goodies Mother dumped on the street and kicked up sand on her way back to me. She said, “Well.”
I said, “Well.”
She said, “Do you have any money?”
“I don’t even have a bra on. Don’t you have money?”
“I did,” she said. “In my jacket. The jacket you threw out the window.” She checked her pants pockets and came up with a $500 Blitz poker chip. “I’ve got this.”
A lot of good that would do us. We were eight miles from Blitz. We could see it; we couldn’t get to it to cash in the chip. “Where’d you get it?”
“A tip,” she said. “Some guy going into Hyatt’s office gave it to me.”
So she was private security for the big boss in the executive offices, a locale Bea and her spyglasses hadn’t had access to.
We looked up and down the dark deserted beach, our eyes settling east, the Bellissimo far far away. We could see one set of lights on between there and home. I said, “Waffle House?”
She said, “I could use a cup of coffee.”
Twenty-Three
April was bearing down on us, just days away, and about halfway through it the heat from the Gulf days would linger after the sun went down. We weren’t there yet. By the time we walked the half mile to Waffle House, I was half frozen. And I’d have given anything for one of July’s scrunchies, because the wind whipping off the water wrecked my hair. Instead of halfway down my back, my red hair had been tossed around so violently it was up and out, about a foot in every direction. I tried to comb it with my fingers. Fantasy said, “Stop. You’re making it worse.”
She wasn’t in any better shape than I was, worse, in fact, because she only made it two feet on the sidewalk before she gave up her four-inch work heels and ca
rried them, only to take two more steps and slice her foot open on a bottle top. Or a switchblade. Or a Jedi lightsaber. I didn’t see her step on it; I only saw her cartwheeling through the night and landing in sand; her foot was gashed. I didn’t know if I should tell her she’d ripped out the seat of her pants in the process or not.
Not.
We made a bloody trail to a beach bench. As it turned out, feet bled a lot. After five minutes, both of us were covered in blood and sand. In the end, we ripped off one of the sleeves of her white oxford shirt and bundled it around her foot. She rolled up the one pant leg and limped the rest of the way on her blouse bandage.
I said, “You didn’t button your shirt right when you put it back on.”
She looked down. “I only have one button left. What happened to my buttons?”
We limped down the sidewalk toward our Waffle House beacon. When we finally made it through the door, all forks dropped. Finally, the waitress very unconvincingly said, “Welcome to the Waffle House.”
We fell into a booth.
A drunk three booths away said, “Heh heh.”
Fantasy’s head whipped around. She said, “Watch it, mister. I’m in a mood.”
The waitress, Seraphina, poured us coffee. From a safe distance.
I broke the silence. Actually, Bradley broke the silence, dumping us in a parking lot on the side of the road. I broke it again at Waffle House. “You go first.”
“No,” she said. “Go ahead.”
“No, Fantasy, you first.”
“Oh, no, Davis. After you.”
Our Waffle House audience waited patiently.
Finally Fantasy, on a big sigh, pushed our coffee cups out of the way. “Davis, I couldn’t see you and I couldn’t talk to you. If I’d been in the same room with you or even heard your voice, there would’ve been no way for me to not tell you. I had to stay away from you so I could do my job. I couldn’t lie to you.”
Her words rang true.
She reached for my cold hands. She held them in her warm ones.
“Bexley and Quinn are gorgeous, Davis, and such sweet babies. I can’t believe the mother you’ve turned out to be. You’re exactly the mother I sit around thinking you are a hundred hours a day. You, Bradley, the girls—” She stared out the Waffle House plate-glass window. “Your family is beautiful.”
I burst into tears.
She said she was sorry. She should have told me. I said I was sorry. I should have been brave enough to walk out my door, face her, and make her tell me. I told her I thought she was mad at me because No Hair fired her. She said she thought I was mad at her because she quit. I told her I thought she blamed me for Blitz. She asked if I could stop a train. Because that’s what it would’ve taken to stop Blitz.
We worked our way through the napkin dispenser making up the time we’d lost.
The drunk slapped his table and said, “You two get a room.”
When the Waffle House cleared out, for the most part, we moved to the counter and sat on side by side stools because we couldn’t find an outlet for the laptop cord at the booth. The drunk was asleep, as was our waitress, Seraphina. The only other Waffle House employee, the cook, Joe Joe, told us he’d be right back, he was going to his car to smoke a joint, and if we needed anything to help ourselves, but the third waffle iron had a short in it and burned the top of the waffles, so be careful. Fantasy rummaged around the back room and pilfered herself a man’s double-knit Waffle House uniform shirt while I hacked the closest internet I could find. Third try, the password 12345 worked. Fantasy ditched her shredded Blitz uniform and wore the Waffle House shirt like a mini dress. She smelled like bacon.
We were on our second pot of coffee, and I was close to breaking through the firewall at Equitable National. We’d gotten that far: the common denominator was the bank. The federal government, in their efforts to build a case against Equitable for corruption and misconduct, tax evasion, fraudulent trade practices, insider trading, misuse of corporate property, identity theft, securities and commodities fraud, kickbacks, and money laundering had covertly placed themselves in key positions within the bank, then recruited Stuart Vaughn and Robin Sandoval. When Mr. Sanders bought the Falcons, he unwittingly put the Bellissimo directly in the crosshairs of the federal investigation against Equitable National.
How?
The feds had eyes on Equitable’s client, Blitz, Inc., and their enormous casino operations in Mississippi. When Mr. Sanders showed up in Chicago, the feds identified him right away as the blind trust who’d donated the land, and there he was popping up on the radar again. They decided he must be working for or with Blitz, when the truth was he was only having his eyebrows manwaxed.
“What about the art?” I asked.
“This isn’t about the gallery art, Davis,” Fantasy said. “It may have started there, but now it’s all about the frames. What Blitz really cares about is distributing the frames, because the frames are wired with a surveillance system called Speak Up.”
Speak Up. I remembered calling Capital Defense and Security when Bex and Quinn were newborns and demanding they get House out of my house. A lady had said those words to me—speak up. I thought she meant she couldn’t hear me. As it turned out, that wasn’t what she meant. And I thought of all the frames—frames frames frames—everywhere. Bea had six on the wall just from playing Hang It Up.
Who owned Capital Defense?
Click click.
Julius Gill. Which meant nothing.
“They get a frame on the wall,” Fantasy said. “From there, they steal identities, acquire credit card numbers and debit card PINs, learn savings and brokerage account numbers, safe combinations, security codes, and gather blackmail material. It was designed by one of the Johnson grandsons, the engineer grandson, and after the first Speak Up installation, which we now know was you, they loved it so much they wanted a mini version in every home in America. They built a sweatshop under the casino to pump out hotwired frames for the sole purpose of moving Speak Up around the country, and they’ve already raked in a ridiculous amount of money.”
A Johnson grandson designed Speak Up? Who was Julius Gill’s mother?
Click click.
Eva Johnson Gill.
Which meant something. It meant Capital Defense was part of Johnsung.
“How are they distributing the frames?” I asked.
“They’re selling them at Patterson.”
“Patterson Department Stores?” A shopping mall anchor. My mother called it New Sears. Who was at the helm of Patterson? Click click. Tristian Gaither.
Could it be?
Tristian Gaither’s mother was Francis Johnson Gaither.
That was two.
“They’re selling hundreds a day,” Fantasy said. “Three weeks after the buyer hangs the pretty bird picture they learn their accounts have been hacked. They never make the connection between the birds on the wall and going broke. Davis? Are you even listening to me?”
“Every single word.” I was going for three, so I backed up, to the eye of the storm. Who owned Equitable National Bank?
Click click.
The Chairman of the Board was a man named Roman Curtis.
Who was his mother?
Faye Johnson Curtis.
“Fantasy.” I looked up from the laptop. “This is so much bigger than Blitz. It’s the entire Johnsung Corporation.”
I turned the screen and let her look at the long line of businesses the SEC had listed as registered to Johnsung Corporation. Including Blitz, Inc., Capital Defense, Patterson Department Stores, and Equitable National.
Which was when we realized if we’d been working together, we’d have reached this conclusion so long ago.
“How do they get the frames to the stores?” I asked. “Blitz is a casino. A casino can’t ship lamps, bath towels, bird pictures, or anythin
g else so totally unrelated to gaming to department stores without the gaming board noticing. How are they moving the frames?”
“That,” she said, “I haven’t figured out. I don’t think it’s UPS. But my job is to stand outside of Hyatt’s office all day every day. I catch snips of phone calls and watch his girlfriend and his cousins come and go. That’s it. I’m nowhere near shipping and receiving.”
“Who else comes and goes?”
“The usual. The same people who come and go in and out of Bradley’s office. Accounting, marketing, casino bosses, the bus drivers.”
Both our mouths dropped open. We said it on the same beat. “The buses!”
Blitz kept the roads hot with their junket buses, and the passengers were only allowed one carry-on bag. No luggage. Because the luggage compartments were full of Speak Up on the way to Patterson stores.
Two motorcycles roared into the Waffle House parking lot. Fantasy slid off her stool, poked sleeping Seraphina the waitress’s shoulder, held out an open palm, and said, “Keys.” She poked her again. “Seraphina. We’re over here saving the world. We don’t need company.”
Nothing.
Fantasy dug Seraphina’s keys out of her Waffle House pocket and made it to the door just as bikers approached. The lock clicked decisively as she turned it and said, “Closed. Sorry.” She took her stool again, tossing Seraphina’s keys on the counter. “What are you doing now?”
“I’m trying to set up locators on the Johnson grandsons.”
“How are you finding them?”
“I’m in the Social Security database.”
“Are they all there?”
“I’m up to fourteen. I can’t find the monk.”
“There’s a monk?”
At three a.m., we turned off the parking lot lights, because Fantasy was sick of telling people we were closed. To everyone who beat on the door demanding to know why a twenty-four-hour restaurant wouldn’t let them in, she said, “The health department shut us down. Roaches the size of gophers. Don’t come back here. Ever.”
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