I didn’t ask about my ex-ex-husband, because I couldn’t have cared less.
I hung up, fear in my heart for my current and forever husband, the father of my daughters, and looked up to see day breaking and the door of the Waffle House freezer. The outbuilding freezer beside the dumpster. No one had flipped on the Waffle House lights since we left, hours ago. I turned to Fantasy for an explanation as to why we were here again. She shook Seraphina’s keys that had been in her Waffle House pocket the whole time.
“What?” I asked.
“Let’s dump this art. Lock it in the freezer with the steaks. Then we’ll find Bradley.”
We secured the shrimpy art.
We found things in Bea’s car once we’d cleared it.
For one, a stack of muumuu dresses.
We were driving down Beach Boulevard tossing our filthy nasty clothes out the windows and struggling into muumuu tents—I held the wheel for Fantasy—and missed the blue lights. We didn’t miss the vehicle intercom.
“PULL OVER.”
“Well, shit.” (Fantasy.)
“TURN OFF YOUR ENGINE.”
She stuck her head out the window. The wardrobe change had loosened a big ring of green bell pepper and I watched it fall off her head and to the ground. She yelled, “I can’t turn the engine off! It’s hotwired!”
Dead air.
Then finally, “DO NOT EXIT YOUR VEHICLE.”
After a few minutes of the Biloxi Police Department running Bea Crawford’s Alabama plate numbers, I picked my head up from the headrest. “I’m going to check my email before they take my phone away.”
“I seriously doubt they’ll touch your phone, Davis.”
Front and center, in my inbox from Friday. Whenever Friday was. I read it, then passed the phone to Fantasy.
David.
(It’s Davis.)
Send a team to the penthouse to freshen the linens, fully stock the bars, and open the doors. Air, David, my home needs air. All terrace doors open for several hours a day, and carefully attended, as I don’t want to see one single love bug when I get there. Baby Davy and I will arrive on Sunday morning. I’ll need several, which is to say all, of the new condominium units as well, for Davy’s nannies, pediatrician, tumbling coach, and French teacher. It’s too hot here. And I can’t find anyone to balayage my hair.
Air kisses,
Bianca
“So, she’s coming home.” Fantasy looked up from my phone. “I wonder if that means Mr. Sanders is too. And what’s balayage her hair?”
“I think it’s when they paint your hair.”
“Paint? Haven’t we had enough paint?”
We watched in the rearview mirror as the police officer closed his car door. His flashlight bounced a path to us. He stood several feet away and shined it in our faces, then down our muumuu dresses, then all over the car, including the backseat.
“Hands on your heads and step out of the car, please.”
Fantasy said, “How am I supposed to open the door to step out of the car if I have my hands on my head?”
The officer took a Mother May I giant step toward us, pulled open Fantasy’s door, paled, gagged, then took off.
As we were peeling away, I said, “What a sissy.”
Fantasy said, “Good help is hard to find.”
We had to stay on the backroads, since all of Biloxi Police Department had our plates. No doubt they were frantically looking for us while we were frantically looking for my husband.
“Hey,” I said, as we passed a used car lot. “We need to trade this thing out.”
“We do need to ditch it.”
“Do you still have Seraphina’s keys?”
“Of course,” she said. “How are we going to get the art back without the keys to the freezer?”
“Let’s circle back to the Waffle House and borrow her car.”
Fantasy slammed it into reverse, made a three-point turn, and said, “Good idea.” She took a left on Wilkes Avenue, which ran parallel to Beach Boulevard. Three blocks east, she put Bea’s car in park. “Let’s cut through a few backyards on foot.”
“Right. Seraphina might be awake by now.”
Fantasy reached under the steering wheel and we finally let Bea’s car die, just as we met a German Shepherd with a really bad disposition. We cranked as fast as we could to close the windows with the vintage handles. The German Shepherd was (a beast) trying to eat through the car, rocking the big green tank in the process. Worst? We were trapped in lingering shrimp fumes.
“Should I hotwire it again?” Fantasy asked through her muumuu dress.
“I just thought of something.”
“What?”
“Daddy’s car has GPS.”
“Call him,” Fantasy said. “He’ll be able to tell us exactly where Bradley is.”
I speed dialed. When I was waiting on Daddy to answer and find my husband for me, Fantasy said, “If we’d have kept a case of Waffle House steaks, we could feed the dog and get him off our ass.”
“Well, we didn’t.”
The dog was losing his mind and destroying the paint job on Bea’s car. Not that anyone would notice.
“Daddy!”
I had to hang up for him to track his car.
The dog was literally foaming at the mouth on my side now. I could see down its throat. Fantasy and I were huddled in the middle.
She said, “This dog is rabid.”
“This is why I have a cat.”
My phone dinged in a message. It was a map with a pulsing blue dot.
Daddy’s car was less than a mile from where we were. It was at Regent Condominiums on Beach Boulevard. Why was Bradley at the Regent? We lived there before we moved to the twenty-ninth floor of the Bellissimo. I was trying to piece it together when Fantasy said, “Yeah. Blitz owns the Regent.”
Blitz had more money than China.
“And you’ll like this even less,” she said. “Hyatt lives in your old condo.”
Of all the bad news, the Regent news was almost the worst.
“But there’s good news,” she said.
“What?”
She had to yell over the German Shepherd, who had jumped on the hood. “They don’t allow pets!”
She hotwired Bea’s car again and we got going, and just in time, because if we’d stayed much longer the German Shepherd would have given himself a heart attack. We got the windows down as fast as we could.
Twenty-Seven
We parked in front of the Regent at seven in the morning, just as the sun rose over the Bay. I had an hour before the girls woke up, and if I hadn’t been busy rescuing their father, I would have spent the hour in a carwash letting it slap me clean. For their sakes.
“Now what?” Fantasy asked.
“Pop the trunk.”
“I’m not sure the trunk pops. And what if it has more seafood in it?”
“Wouldn’t we already know?” I asked. “Wouldn’t you be choking to death? And she could have a shotgun back there. Or a sledgehammer.”
What she had was Mona Lisa’s sister.
We hadn’t taken the time to inventory the art. We hadn’t taken the time to even give it a glance. But I recognized the piece in the trunk. It was the one 60 Minutes loved so much. Under Mona Lisa’s sister we found a crowbar, a spare tire, a case of 10W-30 motor oil, one quart missing, a wrench the size of a baseball bat, and two Stryker Accu-Lite crossbow arrows. We each took an arrow. I grabbed the wrench; she took the crowbar.
I said, “Let’s go.”
She said, “Pull up your muumuu dress. You’re flashing everyone.”
The condos were built around an interior parking garage, and we were good and sick of parking garages. Dead on our feet, we were all manner of filthy, we smelled like a two-woman landfill, we might as well have be
en wearing bed sheets with head holes, and we were brandishing deadly arrows. We knocked the doorknob off the maintenance entrance to the parking garage with the crowbar. We used the wrench to beat the third-floor elevator panel to death, which opened all the private elevator doors on the third level. We made a mad dash for number seven, which would take us straight to 307, where Bradley and I used to live and where Mr. Blitz lived now.
The elevator opened to the foyer. We jumped out and assumed warrior stances, arrows at the ready. My old kitchen table was to our right, and sitting at the head, strapped to one of our old kitchen chairs, was Denver Johnson Sandoval. There was no sign of Hyatt Johnson.
Bradley was on the house phone in our old kitchen, but his head whipped around at the sound of the elevator doors, and he had Fantasy’s .38 aimed at our heads.
He lowered the gun slowly.
His mouth dropped open.
“Davis?”
I dropped my arrow.
Fantasy slumped to the floor.
Sandoval bucked in his kitchen chair.
Bradley said, to whoever he was on the phone with, “They’re here. I think it’s them.”
Sandoval went to jail, booked under criminal solicitation of a felony/homicide charges. So far. There would be many more, for him, his cousins, and his grandfather.
Our first stop was the Urgent Care on Pass Road, where a nurse wearing multiple medical masks over her nose and mouth put twelve stitches in Fantasy’s foot and gave her an antibiotic with a name so long she couldn’t even read it.
“What are these?” Fantasy shook the plastic bottle. “They look like horse pills.”
The nurse pinched her masks tighter. “Just take them ’til they’re gone if you want to keep that foot.” Bradley’s Visa took a $435 hit.
From there, we went home—me, my husband, my best friend in the world, and Mona Lisa’s sister in the back of Mother and Daddy’s car. When we stepped out of the elevator on the twenty-ninth floor, it was to crates. Crate after wooden crate after crate in our vestibule marked MRS. RICHARD SANDERS.
We wove through blindly, banging into crates.
Bradley held the front door open for us.
We had a welcoming committee in the foyer of my mother, my father, Baylor, July holding both girls, one on each hip, Bea Crawford, and a man no taller than me with a Pancho Villa mustache and wearing a Bellissimo housekeeping uniform next to her.
Don Juan, the illegal alien Italian housekeeper.
Mother slumped a little. Daddy held her up.
Bea Crawford said, “What the fudge?”
Baylor’s head dropped. His shoulders shook. He doubled over.
Bexy said, “Maaaaaaaa?” Quinn said, “Maamaamaa?”
As if they weren’t sure if it was me or not.
I blew them a kiss, I think I blew them a kiss, mentally I blew my girls a kiss before I took a left for the master bedroom. Fantasy walked straight to the guest wing.
Scalding blistering hot showers later, she took one end of my life sofa and I took the other, the girls climbing all over us.
We slept the rest of the day.
“It’s extortion,” I said.
“It’s blackmail,” Fantasy said.
“It’s a federal offense,” Bradley said.
“It’s a good thing they didn’t have cameras on me and July,” Baylor said.
“Shut up, Baylor.” Fantasy and I said it on the same beat.
It was almost eight o’clock on Saturday night. Fantasy and I had slept the day away on my life sofa. Someone, probably my mother, put pillows under our heads and covered us with blankets. I halfway remembered stirring to nurse the girls twice, or maybe three times, but for the most part, we slept. When we woke for good, I sat up and said, “Coffee!” to the ceiling and nothing happened. House was gone.
“Who are you talking to?” Fantasy sat up on her end of the sofa.
“No one.”
“Do you still feel like you need a shower?” she asked.
“Maybe four more,” I said.
“Me too.”
We stretched, yawned, and made it to upright positions. I could hear and feel traffic and people in my home, mostly from the kitchen. It was always the kitchen.
“Should we get up?” Fantasy asked.
We heard Bea Crawford.
“It’s a virus! Davis got a virus!”
“No,” I said. “Let’s stay here another minute.”
“What’s Bea talking about?”
“I have no idea.”
Guess who scooted up?
“Did they hear you?” Fantasy asked.
“They have radar.” And they smelled so good.
Bex and Quinn settled between us. Bex stood on the soft cushions on wobbly baby legs and pointed out the window. She said, “Biiiiiiiis!” Quinny said, “Bisbisbis!”
“What are they saying?” Fantasy asked.
“Blitz.”
Blitz looked the same as it had since the day it opened. As if nothing had happened. The casino lit up the night sky and the glory that was what the Johnsung Corporation built stood proud.
“Where’s Reggie?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She patted around Quinn, in her lap, until she found her phone in the pocket of whoever’s clean clothes she was wearing. She clicked it on and scrolled through messages. “Reggie is here.”
“What?”
“A message from three o’clock says he’ll meet me here.”
“Ah.” Fantasy’s husband was part of the kitchen noise.
“I guess he doesn’t have radar.”
“I guess not.”
“Uh-oh,” she said.
“What?”
“I found what Bea’s talking about.”
Fantasy tilted her phone my way and I saw a picture of us. Wanted for questioning. Reward for information leading to our whereabouts. The officer who pulled us over on Beach Boulevard had a body cam. The camera caught us in the front seat of Bea’s car right after we’d changed into our muumuu dresses. Fantasy’s muumuu dress was mostly pink and the theme was Hawaiian sunset. Mine was mostly green and featured the words “Aloha” and “Mahalo” going every which way in several hundred fonts. Fantasy had a bell pepper sitting sideways on her head, and for some reason I had a bare leg in the air with a rain boot on the dash. We were wide-eyed with surprise, and our faces wore something else, maybe fatigue, and a little something more, maybe insanity. We looked like war. We looked like desperation. We looked like fugitives, and not from the law, from the human race. We looked like Thelma and Louise if someone had strapped Thelma and Louise to the front of a bullet train then sped through a hurricane, a swamp, then a nuclear waste dump.
“How do you like that?” Fantasy said. “We made the news again.”
We fist bumped over the girls.
Bexy looked at Fantasy’s phone and said, “Maaaamaaaaaa.” Quinn’s blonde head popped over and she said, “Maaamaaamaaaa.”
“And in other news,” Fantasy was still clicking away on her phone, “two federal agents were released from Biloxi Memorial with minor injuries from a car accident. The agents had no comment and the police can’t find the car. More breaking news. Hyatt Johnson is giving a press conference in a few minutes before high stakes reopens with the latest in gaming technology.”
I grabbed her phone and read it for myself.
Shocked didn’t do me justice. Nor did stunned, staggered, or thunderstruck.
When I’d passed out earlier, I thought I’d wake to every Johnson in America behind bars.
What happened?
I looked up from the blow to see my husband’s face. “Hey,” he said. “We need to talk.”
They’d had cameras in our home for ten months.
That’s what happened.
Bra
dley, Baylor, Fantasy, and I tore away from the kitchen crowd to discuss it privately.
“Their offer is this, Davis,” Bradley said. “They’ll return all digital files to us in exchange for Wheels Up. They want the game, and the technology behind it, or our lives will be uploaded to a cable reality station.”
“One of the cousins is Real Reality,” Fantasy said.
“The show?” I asked.
“The whole channel,” she said.
And Hyatt Johnson was ready to make Bradley and me the stars of Real Reality. Our life. Our very private life. Our daughters. For all the world to see.
Bradley said, “They have four thousand hours of video, Davis.”
And once again, Blitz held all the cards.
“Why are they asking for Wheels Up when they already have it?” I asked.
“They want the copyright,” he said.
Baylor said, “It’s a cool game.”
“As if they’re not going to be closed in ten minutes?” I asked. “Why aren’t they all in jail, Bradley? We’ve got them. We have so much evidence on Blitz they shouldn’t even have their gold lights on.”
Bradley studied the floor. When he looked up he said, “It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“How?” I asked. “How does it get more complicated than murder?”
“Davis, honey,” he said. “They have security footage of you absconding with the gallery art after you contaminated their casino fountain. They had to evacuate fifteen thousand guests and fifteen hundred employees because of the shrimp.”
Oh.
Well.
“But, Bradley, we have security footage of Robin Sandoval’s murder on the roof of this building.”
“No, we don’t. They went into our system and deleted everything from last night.”
(Last night?)
(It would take me a week to know what day it was.)
“What’s the bottom line, Bradley?”
His eyes met mine. “We meet their demands or you face charges of destruction of property, possession of stolen goods, loss of income, and our daughters live the rest of their lives with thousands of hours of video footage of their parents at their fingertips.”
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