Praise for the Davis Way Crime Caper Series
DOUBLE KNOT (#5)
“Powerfully heartfelt and knock-your-socks-off hilarious. I’m a fan!”
– Janet Evanovich
“Davis’s smarts, her mad computer skills, and a plucky crew of fellow hostages drive a story full of humor and action, interspersed with moments of surprising emotional depth.”
– Publishers Weekly
DOUBLE MINT (#4)
“Seriously funny, wickedly entertaining. Davis gets me every time.”
– Janet Evanovich
“[Archer] never fails to entertain with the amount of laughs, action, and intrigue she loads into this immensely fun series.”
– Kings River Life Magazine
“Davis has made her Way in this delightfully entertaining tour de force. The author’s descriptive and creative narrative pulled me in immediately in this fun-filled and action-packed drama that quickly became a page-turner.”
– Dru’s Book Musings
DOUBLE STRIKE (#3)
“Double Strike is special—funny, unique, and I love Davis.”
– Janet Evanovich
“Fasten your seat belts: Davis Way, the superspy of Southern casino gambling, is back (after Double Dip) for her third wild caper.”
– Publishers Weekly
“It reads fast, gives you lots of sunny moments and if you are a part of the current social media movement, this will appeal to you even more. I know #ItDoesForMe.”
– Mystery Sequels
DOUBLE DIP (#2)
“A smart, snappy writer who hits your funny bone!”
– Janet Evanovich
“Archer’s bright and silly humor makes this a pleasure to read. Fans of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum will absolutely adore Davis Way and her many mishaps.”
– RT Book Reviews
“Credible characters and plenty of Gulf Coast local color help make this a winner.”
– Publishers Weekly
DOUBLE WHAMMY (#1)
“Funny & wonderful & human. It gets the Stephanie Plum seal of approval.”
– Janet Evanovich
“Archer navigates a satisfyingly complex plot and injects plenty of humor as she goes….a winning hand for fans of Janet Evanovich.”
– Library Journal
Books in the Davis Way Crime Caper Series
by Gretchen Archer
DOUBLE WHAMMY (#1)
DOUBLE DIP (#2)
DOUBLE STRIKE (#3)
DOUBLE MINT (#4)
DOUBLE KNOT (#5)
DOUBLE UP (#6)
(March 2017)
Short Stories
DOUBLE JINX
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Copyright
DOUBLE JINX
A Bellissimo Casino Crime Caper Short
Part of the Henery Press Mystery Collection
First Edition | October 2016
Henery Press
www.henerypress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Henery Press, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Copyright © 2016 by Gretchen Archer
Author photograph by Garrett Nudd
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Digital epub ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-131-6
Kindle ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-132-3
Printed in the United States of America
DOUBLE JINX
I barely graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans with a degree in Early Childhood Education. It was a tug of war between me and the chancellor. He was like, no, hanging onto the diploma. I was in my cap and gown trying to wrestle it from him, like, give it to me. That was almost six years ago. My parents still can’t get through a holiday without reminding me they spent $350,000 on an education I came within one-tenth of a point of being denied. And, they add, it was a total waste of my time and their money, because in those six years I haven’t spent one minute with an early learner. Not one. My degree and I work at a casino.
I have an older brother. He’s a cardiothoracic surgeon.
My name is July Jackson. I wasn’t named after a summer month so much as my mother tried to spell Julie cute. An ongoing nightmare. When I was a baby she changed the spelling to G-U-I-L-I-E, then, J-O-O-L-Y, but she says it only made things worse. I think my parents, who were still so upset that Ross Perot wasn’t elected in 1992, smoked a lot of pot back then. A lot. The simple fact is I was born in October and my name is July.
My brother the cardiothoracic surgeon’s name is Cline.
“April!” My head whipped around. I was supposed to be alone, but a flustered witch on a broom was flying down the long empty aisle of Scary Rich slot machines headed my way. “May!” The closer she got the spookier her green makeup looked. “June?”
“Try one more time,” I said.
“July!” She leaned on her broom.
“Can I help you?” I couldn’t place her. I was having trouble keeping up with the casino guests’ identities because they were in different costumes every time I saw them. The witch could have been Betty Rubble last night at the Monster Mash and Little Red Riding Hood the night before at Eat, Drink, and Be Scary.
“Over there.” Her black talon nails flipped and waved. “Over there.” She was gasping for air. “Over there.”
“What’s over there?” I couldn’t see over there through the Scary Rich slot machines. There were fifty of them in back-to-back rows of twenty-five. The games were three feet wide, seven feet tall, and you couldn’t fit a toothpick between them. Not only were they huge, they were sonic-boom loud. And when the players lined up three Bubbling Billions cauldrons, something they’d been doing non-stop since the Biohazard Buffet at seven, the slot machines exploded with a blinding laser light show, enough to trigger a migraine, and I just about had one.
It was eleven o’clock Halloween night at the Bellissimo Resort and Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, where I’m the Holiday Host. I’d just holiday hosted the last round of the Scary Rich slot tournament in the former poker room, current haunted house, and the fifty costumed guests attending my event were supposed to be in the theater for the world premiere of Asylum, The Musical. I was supposed to be with them, but the people from casino accounting didn’t show up, so I had to stay behind and be accountants instead of going ahead and being a Holiday Host, which was bad, because I wasn’t even one accountant, much less two. Instead of them verifying the final scores and transferring the player winnings to the disbursement account, I was trying to verify and disburse and transfer. And my only experience with transfers was when I was a sophomore at Tulane and one of my suitemates was a transfer student from Ole Miss. I did okay with that transfer, except she was such an early bird, like, six o’clock in the morning early, but if I didn’t do okay with this transfer, it would be
bye-bye three million dollars. I was dead on my feet, late making the transfer, and the way things were going, I’d be lucky if I made it to Asylum before the curtain call, which wasn’t even the end of my night. From there, it was on to the Black and Orange Ball, featuring the Atlanta-based cover band, Hocus Pocus, where I’d award the tournament prizes. It was like Halloween would never end. And the last thing I needed was a witch on a broom.
“What?” I patted her arm to calm her down. “What’s over there?” Her teeth were Clorox white against the green.
“The zombie.” Her hair was shoulder length, dyed silver, and styled in perfect beach waves. She pushed a wave from her face. “I think he’s dead.”
He’d been very alive when the tournament ended thirty minutes ago. “No, he’s undead,” I said. “He just looks dead.” And he shouldn’t be here either, dead or alive.
“I don’t think so.” She sang the words.
I wondered where she was on the sobriety scale.
“He’s dead dead, real dead, all the way dead. He’s about to fall out of the chair dead.”
We heard a hard thud that sounded very much like a zombie falling out of a chair dead.
I dropped everything and took off, Witch and her broom hot on my trail. I rounded the corner to find a pile of zombie on the floor.
I was right; he looked dead. The witch was right; he was dead.
I ran for the double doors at the front of the haunted house. I rattled away, but they were locked. I used my cardkey, swiping the keypad. I threw open the doors to grab my security guards, but they were gone. There was no one guarding the haunted house! The two security guards assigned to my event had cleared the room of players and locked the doors after the tournament, which took forever, because Chewbacca, who came in either dead last or next to last in the tournament, couldn’t find his gold Versace watch. I thought it might be tangled up in his furry costume or at the bottom of one of the fifteen Mad Eye martinis he’d had, but it was nowhere. Then five minutes later, the security guards were back with the note from accounting. They locked me in again, assuring me they’d be right outside the door if I needed them. Well, I needed them! I closed the doors in a hurry, fell against them, and pulled out my cell phone. I didn’t know what to do or who to call. Security? 911? My brother the cardiothoracic surgeon? It buzzed with a text before I could decide. It was Traci, my assistant, who was saving me a front row seat at Asylum, The Musical. I read the message. This play is horrible. And borderline offensive. The opening number was actor orphans dancing around bunk beds singing “It’s a Brain Dead Life.” I missed most of it because everyone kept tapping me on the shoulder asking me who won the tournament. Where are you? Who won? How much longer?
Forever longer. Or never. Because the winner was dead.
I went to work for the Bellissimo on Groundhog Day three years ago. Before that, I applied for early childhood teaching positions and worked in the law library of my dad’s firm. One day on my lunch hour I was back at Tulane University—I had to either go back to school for my early adolescent certification and teach middle school math or look up obscure Supreme Court decisions for the rest of my life—when I stumbled on a Bellissimo Resort and Casino job fair and was hired on the spot. My first two weeks were orientation. Week one was the best vacation I’d ever had in my life. There were thirty-two new employees in my orientation class, and the first thing we did was check into our own gorgeous hotel rooms. We were issued employee ID cards that gave us unlimited slot and table play, another card for all-access passes to the hotel’s amenities like the restaurants and spa, and a third card that was good for five hundred dollars at any of the retail shops on the mezzanine level. This went on for a week, and by the end, I thought I’d died and gone to job heaven.
The second week was almost the opposite of the first.
We sat at conference tables under hot lights for ten-hour days and learned about the history of the Bellissimo, the hurricane evacuation plan, and the employee cafeteria. The most depressing of all the information was the location of the employee parking lot. It was, like, in another city. On the last day, a bald-headed man, and I mean so bald, talked to us about casino security. His name was Jeremy Covey. He was size XXL, times two, and he was wearing a red tie with a pickle on it. The pickle was playing a harmonica.
He started by asking us to vote for the person who enjoyed the first week of orientation the most, which was hilarious, because we’d all enjoyed it the most. He wanted to know if anyone had ordered room service and thirty-two hands shot up. He asked if anyone had swiped the little soaps from their hotel room and thirty-two new employees squirmed. The product line was Gilchrist and Soames of London, it smelled like paradise, and I still had a two-day supply of shampoo, which for me, was a gallon, because I have a lot of hair. A lot. In my defense, the housekeeper, who knew I was part of the orientation group, gave them to me the day I had to check out. She barely spoke English. “You take.” Shampoo, shampoo, shampoo. I tried to give them back. She said, “You take. Is free. For you.”
Mr. Covey said, “Let me show you something.” The lights went down and we watched a movie. Starring us. Hundreds of pictures flew by, no one escaped, and every shot was more revealing than the last. I couldn’t breathe when I saw one of me taken Tuesday, when I’d sneaked outside, not a soul in sight, to take a call from my brother the cardiothoracic surgeon so I could ask him to quit calling. Cline, who absolutely did not approve of my new job, just wouldn’t stop letting me have it, and the surveillance camera caught a very sad shot of me.
Mr. Covey made his point.
After lunch, he went around the table asking us to describe how it felt to win. Across the board, we loved how it felt. Then Mr. Covey went back around and asked us how it felt to lose. One guy, who lost more than $100,000 playing roulette, cried. And it wasn’t even real money. Or his. In the end, we understood: winning didn’t feel as good as losing felt bad.
Mr. Covey explained there were three things at the Bellissimo: money, alcohol, and dreams. There would be times the three collided, and when it happened with a guest, ninety-nine out of a hundred times it turned out just fine. The casino guests, for the most part, knew what they were doing. They knew how much money they had to gamble with and when they forgot, the ATMs reminded them with two red words: insufficient funds. The players went home, licked their wounds, thought about the Gilchrist and Soames exfoliating body wash, and came back again and again to give it another try. It was another story entirely, Mr. Covey said, when money, liquor, and dreams collided internally, within the Bellissimo family, because that led to greed. Greed, he said, led to incidents and situations. He strongly advised us to avoid both. An incident, by his definition, was when money went missing. He said, “If you’re involved in an incident, rest assured you’ll be on my radar, and sooner or later, my team will get to the bottom of it.” A situation, he said, was an aggravated incident. When money went missing and his phone rang. He told us when we saw him again, it had better be in passing. Because if we found ourselves in a situation, someone was going to prison.
Here I stood, three years later, with a witch, staring at a dead zombie, who was getting deader, if that was even a thing, and I had a situation. Which meant someone was going to prison.
“Let’s go—” I realized I didn’t know the witch’s name.
“Esmerelda.”
What a perfect name for a witch. “Come on, Esmerelda.”
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“For help.”
We stepped out of the haunted house poker room into the commotion of the main casino floor. It was smoky, crowded, and loud. For sure, I had a headache coming my way. I swiped the haunted house doors locked, securing the dead zombie. I took a right toward a bank of Quartermania slot machines instead of a left toward a long line of blackjack tables, Esmerelda on my trail.
“How’d you find him?” I asked over my shoulde
r. “Why were you looking for him?”
“I wasn’t,” she said. “I was looking for my hat.”
“Your hat?”
“You know,” she said. “Black, wide-rimmed, pointy? Have you seen it?”
I shook my head. “Who let you in to look for it?”
“The men at the door.” She was struggling to keep up with me. “Can you slow down a little, April? I’ve had a few. Where are we going?”
“It’s July,” I said, “and to find someone in charge.” We rounded the corner on a bank of Quick Hits Platinum slot machines.
“In charge of what?” Esmerelda asked.
“Dead people.” Weaving around guests, ticket cash-out machines, and a bright orange Audi RS7 full of candy corn, to be given away at midnight to the person who came closest to guessing how many pieces of candy corn were inside, I finally spotted a blue blazer. Blue blazers meant Bellissimo security. And the only thing about this blue blazer that said awake was the fact that he was mostly upright. Other than that, he seemed to be in a trance, holding up a Mad Money slot machine with his shoulder. “Help.” I grabbed his blue sleeve. “I’ve got a—” I couldn’t get the word out, “—problem. I’m July Jackson, Holiday Host. I’m hosting the Halloween event?”
He tipped his head, like, so? And when he tipped his head, I think the top of his hair slid to the left. He wore Austin Powers eyeglasses and had giant teeth and slippery hair.
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