Double Up
Page 21
We listened to each other breathe.
“What are we talking here?” Baylor asked. “Whips and chains?”
Fantasy kicked him with her good foot.
“What about Speak Up?” I asked. “Aren’t they going to face charges for Speak Up?”
“They will. Down the road,” my husband said. “The feds have them there.”
“If they can prove anything,” Fantasy said. “The Johnsons’ cleanup crew has a cleanup crew. They don’t leave a trail or witnesses.”
We were minutes from Hyatt Johnson’s press conference.
“One more thing,” Bradley said. “I want you all to hear it from me.”
My heart beat a little faster. How could this possibly get worse?
“He’s demanding we sell.”
“Who he?” Fantasy asked. “Mr. Sanders?”
“Elias Johnson.”
“The grandfather?” Fantasy asked.
Bradley nodded.
“To him?” I asked.
He nodded again. “Johnsung will be the new owners of our casino for fair market value, so there’s that. Richard and Jeremy are on their way.”
Mr. Sanders owned the Bellissimo, Bradley and No Hair were officers, so signing the Bellissimo over to Johnsung would take all three signatures. And this was a good example of why sleeping all day was a bad idea.
It was the end. And it had come at the hand of House.
“We get our lives back, Davis. We’ll walk away with more money than we can spend and the digital files that document our personal life. We’ll start over, we’ll raise our daughters, and they’ll never know or have to pay a price for what happened here.”
Where would we go? What would we do?
Twenty-Eight
The Armani showroom didn’t have as many Armani suits as the Johnsung Corporation. Channel Thirteen’s Sunnie Chapman had the exclusive live interview with the Armani-suited patriarch and mastermind behind all the success, Elias Johnson, on the steps in front of the Blitz Casino and Resort’s main entrance. Eighteen of his twenty-two grandsons stood tall in an Armani semicircle behind him. Which meant three grandsons hadn’t been able to drop their criminal enterprises on a dime and get to Blitz to show the world just what kind of force the Johnsons were. And that left one grandson, who, I assumed, wouldn’t wear Armani pants and wasn’t invited. In the middle of the half-moon of black suits, beside Hyatt, was our Falcon pilot, Denver J. Sandoval. Released on bail and all charges dropped for lack of evidence.
Sunnie Chapman, in a luminous metallic halter dress, looked great against the wall of Armani. In front of her, spilling across the Blitz entrance landscaping, was the live audience—starting with gold. Gold jackets, gold bikinis, gold everything. The Blitz family. The staff who would enter the casino first when it reopened in a half hour. Behind the gold staff, in the outer parking lots a full city block from the main entrance, were the casino patrons watching the live broadcast on jumbo screens while waiting for the reopening.
The Ferris wheel lights had never been brighter.
We entered the living room quietly, but Bex and Quinn scrambled out of Mother’s and July’s laps, teetering our way and announcing our arrival. They stayed all of two minutes before they scrambled back to Mother and July. Who had Gerber Applepuff cookies.
“Land sakes,” Mother said. “I thought you all were going to talk all night. We ordered pizza from the Mookie’s. It’s in the kitchen. Want me to get you some?”
“No!” Fantasy and I said it together. “No!” We said it together again.
Daddy caught my eye, asking if everything was okay. I reassured him with a glance back it was. More like it would be, once we signed our souls over to the Armani devils on the television.
“You missed it.” Bea Crawford was in Bradley’s chair. “They just showed you two on TV again.”
“Yay,” Fantasy deadpanned, as she dropped to take a seat beside her husband.
I wondered if Bea’s Speak Up Blitz frames were off the walls of the condo. I wondered why Don Juan the housekeeper was in my home. I wondered where in the world Bea’s rotten rotten rotten son was, because I halfway remembered someone, Mother maybe, telling me he was in Biloxi.
Daddy rose from my life sofa. “Here, Sweet Pea, have a seat.”
We settled all over the living room as Sunnie put the last of Blitz’s morning excitement to rest. The official word was backwater from the Bay had found its way into the Blitz fountain—a terrible fluke and D’Iberville Water Works was deeply apologetic. As was Blitz. So much so that tomorrow morning, when the fountains were turned on again, sparkling and fresh, the aerators would be pumping pure clean air into the casino, and the fountains would be spilling one thousand carats of loose precious stones into the crystal pools on the casino floor—don’t miss it.
“Oh, we won’t!” Sunnie assured Elias.
A cheer rose from the parking lot mob.
Richard Sanders arrived. His teeth were still Ben Affleck’s, but his hair was back to salt and pepper. He made his rounds quickly and quietly, since everyone was glued to the drama on the television, finally finding me beside Bradley on my life sofa.
I stood to hug him. We didn’t really say anything because there wasn’t anything to say.
He made his way to Fantasy. He held her at arm’s length. “I just saw you on the news!”
She took a swat at him.
On the big screen, Sunnie and her microphone had moved past the grandfather to Biloxi’s Man of the Year, Hyatt. The screen was split. Half showed Sunnie and Hyatt outside, in front of the massive gold entrance doors, and the other half showed three men inside the casino.
“They’re in the gold room,” Bea Crawford said.
“Sì?” Don Juan, jammed in next to her, his head reaching all the way up to her shoulder, said.
The three men were playing my game.
“Those are Hyatt’s henchmen,” Fantasy said. “They do all the dirty work. The one with the flat face is the one I chased over here.”
I took a good look at the man on the screen who’d murdered Robin Sandoval.
“No telling what the body count is between the three of them,” Baylor said.
Mother covered Bexley’s ears with her hands.
July, across from Mother in a tuxedo chair having her curls rearranged by Bex’s sister, smiled at Mother, then kissed the top of Quinny’s head.
Sunnie kept it up on the television. “Tell us about Takeoff, Hyatt.”
“It’s revolutionary, Sunnie. No one in gaming has ever seen anything like it.”
“And it’s yours?” she asked.
“My team developed it,” he lied. “And we own the technology for it. You can’t fly a plane at any other casino in the world except Blitz.”
Sickening.
“The reveal was last night, correct?”
“Yes and no,” Hyatt told her. “Our sixteen inaugural players were late arriving, and our unplanned activities of this morning pushed the Takeoff launch to tonight.”
A camera cut to the VIP stage beside the grand gold entrance, where my sixteen players would have (Wheels Up) Takeoff to themselves for a full hour, before general public admission when the casino reopened.
“Those are my sixteen players,” I said.
“Let’s have a sneak peek,” Hyatt said.
Sunnie loved the idea.
Hyatt’s henchmen, the only three souls inside Blitz, wouldn’t even turn away from my game long enough to wave at the satellite camera. It would seem they liked flying (Wheels Up) Takeoff even more than they liked killing.
“Davis, your game is unreal.”
It was No Hair.
“Shh!” came from everywhere.
He went straight for Fantasy. And here, I had to say, in spite of losing everything Bellissimo, it hit me that I h
ad my husband, my daughters, my family, and my friends. With No Hair’s arrival we were whole, and No Hair and Fantasy were blocking the whole television.
“Move!” came from everywhere.
“What is the band playing downstairs at Stir?” No Hair asked.
“Shh!” came from everyone.
“Oh, that’s my kid Eddie’s boy’s band,” came from Bea Crawford. “They have cold-drink koozies.”
“Sì?”
I sighed.
We watched the man who’d pushed Robin Sandoval off the Bellissimo roof calling out a mayday on his headset, and the remote cameraman cut away so all of Harrison County wouldn’t be left with the image of a plane crashing, even a virtual crash, on their brains. Not good for ratings. And Blitz had given everyone quite enough to look at for this news cycle with the fountain fiasco this morning and the big reveal tonight.
“Look at that cockpit.” Baylor said it like he wanted at the pilot controls. And why not? The game was outstanding, designed so everyone would want to fly it.
“Baylor?” Fantasy said.
“I know. Shut up.”
“I was going to say that’s Davis’s cockpit.”
Fantasy was right. It was. It was my game and my design, including the cockpit cabinet we’d never have the chance to build.
Henchman Two landed in virtual Milwaukee and scored a bonus. The Johnson grandsons on the gold steps clapped.
“Hey.” Baylor looked up from his phone. “This is streaming live on CNN.”
Daddy looked up from his phone. “And Fox.”
I asked how they’d cleaned the fountains so quickly.
“Oxygen scavengers,” Baylor said.
“What are oxygen scavengers?” I asked.
“Think gasoline,” Bradley said.
“They filled the casino with gasoline?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t that smell worse than dead shrimp?” Mother asked.
No more shrimp for me. Ever again. No waffles, no pizza, no shrimp.
Bradley said, “The chemicals are permeating the building absorbing the shrimp odor. Supposedly, the smell of one cancels out the smell of the other.”
We watched Hyatt’s killers fly my game.
Mr. Sanders was sitting next to me. “Davis, this is amazing.”
I tried to smile. “Thank you, Mr. Sanders.”
He waited a beat. He whispered, “You had two rooms they didn’t have access to?”
“Right,” Bradley whispered over me. “The sitting room outside of our bedroom and the girls’ nursery.”
“We did most of our talking in the sitting room for that very reason,” I told Mr. Sanders. “We didn’t have to watch what we said in there. But I wrote the game in my office, which they did have access to.”
“And your office is where?”
“Behind the kitchen.” I pointed.
“Too bad your office wasn’t one of the rooms they weren’t watching.” Mr. Sanders was glued to the screen watching Takeoff as he said it. “Because the game is brilliant.”
“I can’t believe I wrote Blitz a game.”
“I don’t think anything short of a miracle could stop what will happen tomorrow,” Mr. Sanders whispered to our huddle of three, “but would there be any chance, down the road, for you to prove you wrote the game?”
“It’s on the hard drive of my laptop,” I told him. “So, yes. I could take them to court and prove I wrote the game. But clearly, it’s on theirs too.” The three killer pilots were killing my game, one having just earned a $5,000 bonus for Sully landing on virtual Copper River in Alaska. “It’d be a he said, she said through months of litigation. If this had happened yesterday, we could challenge them. I had the script on whiteboards in my office, which would prove without a doubt the game was ours, but our sprinkler system washed the whiteboards clean.”
Something tickled my fancy.
“That’s how they got the game?” Mr. Sanders asked. “Off whiteboards?”
I nodded to the beat of a distant drum barely beating in the back of my brain.
Bradley whispered over me. “They stole it through a framed picture of the girls behind her desk, copying every line of her game off the walls.”
A little alarm went off in me, making me squirm.
Channel Thirteen’s Sunnie Chapman welcomed fourteen million ABC News Now cable viewers to the broadcast as something knocked hard on the door of my brain. I whispered in Bradley’s ear, “I need to talk to you.”
We slipped out. Bradley followed me through the kitchen where I led him on a windy way around the pizza to my office.
“Davis, what?”
I didn’t know how to say it; I didn’t know where to start.
“Sit down.” He pulled up the gold paint chair. “You’re white as a sheet. What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t close my mouth, wanting to tell him, but I hadn’t completely formed the thoughts or the words enough to get them out. He waited with only the patience he had.
“Do you remember the morning you found me sleeping in the nursery with the girls?”
Bradley nodded. His eyes narrowed. His face paled. He remembered.
I didn’t have to say another word, even though, for a change, no one was listening.
It was the morning after I found the broken line in the Wheels Up code. I repaired it on my laptop in the nursery, where no one was watching or listening. Then I hacked the Falcon operating system and reloaded the game in the dark of night, again, from the nursery. I never repaired the broken line on the whiteboards, nor did anyone know I’d hacked the Falcons to upload the repaired version of the game. Blitz had no idea there was a new Wheels Up program to steal. An updated program without a broken line sequence. That would cause a power surge. Then short out.
Bradley said, “Davis, they’ve pumped chemicals through every inch of the building. If the game sparks—” His words, and their full implication, hung in the air between us. “We have to tell them.”
“How?” I asked. “Who at Blitz would listen? And how do we tell them fast enough?”
We heard it first—a distant muffled boom.
We flew out of the office, past the pizza, and into the living room. We saw it live through the window before the image hit the television.
The Moravian star teetered.
Then it rocked.
Then it blew straight up into the night, where it seemed to float above the Blitz Resort and Casino until it exploded, raining slow-motion balls of fire, scattering the panicked and quickly dispersing crowd below. A camera caught and followed the Johnsons tripping and stumbling as they fled their own catastrophe, trampling their own employees to save themselves. They cleared the entrance just in time for us to watch, horrified, as the gold glass exterior of the building turned fiery red at the casino level. Then the boil gathered steam and speed as it traveled up forty floors of the hotel tower to blast from the roof like a volcano. Flames escaped the open roof, forty stories into the night, while below, at ground level, thousands moved en masse, pushing away from the imploding building and onto the streets.
Bradley’s was the first voice to break the horrific trance. He was on the phone with the mayor’s office offering any and all Bellissimo support just as a city-wide alarm rang out. Emergency vehicles began swarming toward the disaster from all points. It would take the resources of our entire community to aid and assist through the night as Blitz left Biloxi even more dramatically than it had arrived, taking the three murderous Takeoff players with it.
I turned back once on my way out the door to help.
Was this my fault?
No.
It wasn’t.
No part of me could have anticipated a disaster of this magnitude and no part of me facilitated it. I wouldn’t hold myself responsible for what they did to themselves.
&nb
sp; It was the last time I ever saw Blitz from my living room window.
About the Author
Gretchen Archer is a Tennessee housewife who began writing when her daughters, seeking higher educations, ran off and left her. She lives on Lookout Mountain with her husband, son, and a Yorkie named Bently. Double Whammy, her first Davis Way Crime Caper, was a Daphne du Maurier Award finalist and hit the USA TODAY Bestsellers List. Double Up is the sixth Davis Way crime caper. You can visit her at www.gretchenarcher.com.
The Davis Way Crime Caper Series
by Gretchen Archer
Novels
DOUBLE WHAMMY (#1)
DOUBLE DIP (#2)
DOUBLE STRIKE (#3)
DOUBLE MINT (#4)
DOUBLE KNOT (#5)
DOUBLE UP (#6)
Short Stories
DOUBLE JINX
(A Bellissimo Casino Crime Caper Short)
Sign up for Henery Press updates
and we’ll deliver the latest on new books, sale books, and pre-order books, plus all the happenings in the Hen House!
CLICK TO SIGN UP
(Note: we won’t share your email address and you can unsubscribe any time.)
We’d love to hear what you thought about this book. No matter how brief or how long, reader reviews make a difference. Thank you!
Henery Press Mystery Books
And finally, before you go...
Here are a few other mysteries
you might enjoy:
LOWCOUNTRY BOIL
Susan M. Boyer
A Liz Talbot Mystery (#1)
Private Investigator Liz Talbot is a modern Southern belle: she blesses hearts and takes names. She carries her Sig 9 in her Kate Spade handbag, and her golden retriever, Rhett, rides shotgun in her hybrid Escape. When her grandmother is murdered, Liz high-tails it back to her South Carolina island home to find the killer.