I had to get a haircut. My hair was enormous.
“Where’s the witch?” He fast-forwarded the movies, and there I was, a big blur of blonde, going a hundred miles an hour in every direction, zipping from Scary Rich to Scary Rich, and after what felt like seven hours of watching me, we finally found Esmerelda at machine fourteen.
“No hat,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“She told you she was looking for her hat, right?”
“Right.”
He pointed her out on all four frames. “No hat.”
I’d been so tricked.
“Watch her.” He backed up the video and slowed it down, and we watched Esmerelda steal a man’s wallet right out of his back pocket.
“Chewbacca’s watch,” I said.
“What?”
“One of my guests couldn’t find his watch.”
Baylor zipped through more video. “She picked everyone in there clean. We’ve got to find her. And her zombie friend.” He turned off the movies and pulled up my guest list.
“But he’s dead,” I said.
“I bet he’s undead,” Baylor said. “Find him on the list.”
“He’s—” I traced the line of guests on the screen with my finger, then turned to look into the endless pools of brown behind Baylor the married man’s long eyelashes. “—Haywood Newkirk.”
“Okay, now find her.”
I didn’t need to because I already knew. “Her name is Esmerelda.”
“That’s a great witch name.”
“That’s what I said!”
I swear he felt it too, which kind of broke my heart, that he’d be this way with me when he had babies at home.
“Esmerelda what?”
Back up. He didn’t feel a thing and he wasn’t being any way. He was a married man, we were at work, and this was probably the last time I’d ever see him. He leaned in to the computer screen to get a better look, and I tried to breathe him in as discreetly as possible, since I’d never be this close to him again.
I wasn’t discreet enough, because he said, I barely heard it, “Married.”
Which was no easy way to break the news to me, but then again, I’d only known him a half hour and it’s not like he’d misled me. “I figured.”
“To each other,” he said.
“Who is?”
“These two,” he said.
“Who two?” Was he saying he wasn’t married? I put a hand on his arm, and there was a lot of arm, hammer hard, plus his dark sweater was real cashmere. “Who are we talking about?”
“Esmerelda.” He pointed to the list of my guests on the computer screen. “Esmerelda Newkirk. She’s married to your zombie.”
I was like, what?
“Let’s go.” He shut down the computer, grabbed my hand again, and we flew past the double stroller.
I wondered why he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
We rode an elevator I didn’t even know existed. It stopped on the fourteenth floor. The hotel hallways were always freezing cold. Or maybe I just had the shivers. I definitely had the scared-to-death shivers, but now I had the ice-cold shivers too. Baylor knocked on the Newkirks’ room door while I shivered. “Housekeeping.”
I whispered, “Why don’t you say security?”
He whispered back, “Because I don’t want to get shot through the door.”
I was like, right.
Then he whispered, “You do know this is really the thirteenth floor, right?”
I didn’t know that.
Next he whispered, “Do you want my sweater?”
I was like, yes, take it off. I shook my head no.
He tried the housekeeping ruse again, no luck, no answer, so he used his keycard in the keypad. The light blinked green. He looked me straight in the eye. “Stay here, July. Don’t move a muscle until I tell you it’s okay.” Then he pulled a gun from underneath his sweater. A big black gun.
I flattened myself against the wall and held my breath.
Forever and a day later, when I was just about to turn blue and pass out from not breathing, he called out to me from way in the hotel room. “July! Need some help.”
I sucked in air and ran for him.
When I found him, he said, “Meet the Newkirks.”
Haywood and Esmerelda Newkirk, the real Newkirks, were trapped inside the big shower of their guest room. He was dressed as a life-sized squirt jar of mustard and she was dressed as a life-sized squirt jar of ketchup. Not only did they have hand towels stuffed in their mouths so they couldn’t call out, they were back to back and roped together, with their hands tied between them. No telling how long they’d been like that, with their movements restricted to turning small circles inside the shower, because whoever tied them up like that and put them in the shower ran a metal bar through the handles on the outside. So the only way out would have been to knock through the safety glass, and clearly you couldn’t knock through safety glass tied up back to back wearing condiment costumes or they wouldn’t still be there.
The next ten minutes were a whirlwind of undoing what had been done to the Newkirks, and as soon as we freed them they started yelling at each other.
“This is your fault, HAYWOOD!”
“When was the last time it wasn’t my fault, ESMERELDA?”
There were four of us in a hotel bathroom and they had the loudest voices I’d ever heard. She stripped out of her ketchup costume, then, in pink lace undies, started wailing on her husband. She latched herself on his mustard back and tried to kill him. She was shouting unmentionables and he was trying to get her off his back, yelling things like, “Whoa! Stop! You’re going to knock my ear off!” Baylor and I backed to the open doorway, not wanting to be too close in case one of her punches missed his ear and flew our way, and this went on until Baylor waved his big black gun and told them to shut up.
In the end, she said, “July, don’t invite us to this party next year.” And he said, “This was delivered earlier.” He handed a folded note to Baylor. I leaned in to get a better look and my heart almost stopped when I saw the handwriting. I knew who wrote the backstage pass invitation for the Newkirks to meet the cast of Asylum, the Musical. The note said someone would arrive to escort them. Then Mrs. Newkirk said a zombie and a witch showed up and escorted them to the shower stall, where they’d been trapped for three hours. Mr. Newkirk said, “It was three and a half hours, Esmerelda.” Then she said, “Well, excuse me, Father Time.”
I was trying to breathe. I leaned into Baylor and whispered, “We need to go.”
He whispered back, “Yeah, they’ve got this.”
She said, “It’s like you don’t have a brain, Haywood.”
Then he said, “What would I do with a brain, Ez? I have you to do all my thinking for me.”
Baylor reached out and took my hand. We made a run for it. In the hallway, he said, “It makes you not want to get married, you know?”
Was he or wasn’t he?
He punched the button to call for the secret elevator. “Back to the haunted house.”
Then I said, “No, we need to go to the theater.”
I turned on my phone and took a quick peek while we ran. Which is something I promised myself I would stop doing after I checked a message while I was on a run once and wound up in a fight with the sidewalk. The sidewalk won. Wouldn’t you know it? I had a stack of messages from Traci and two voicemails, both from my brother the cardiothoracic surgeon. “Not now, Cline.”
“Who?” Baylor pushed through a door and we were in the brightly lit service hall that ran behind the theater. The door clanked closed.
“My brother.” I reached out and stopped Baylor. “Can we talk for a minute? I need to tell you something.”
“About your brother?” he asked. “Can it wait?”
I shook my head.
He looked around and scratched his neck. “For a minute.” As soon as he said it, I slid down the wall to sit on the linoleum floor and catch my breath. He bent over, palms to knees. “I don’t want to leave you alone, July, but we have very little time to find them and a lot of places to look. We need the zombie and the witch. If we find them, we find the money. If we find the money, we find the accountants and the security guards. If we find the zombie, the witch, the money, the accountants, and the security guards, I get brownie points.”
My Bellissimo brownie point days were so over. “Just give me a minute.”
He gave me a minute. “Are you calling your brother?”
“No.” I was texting. “Traci. My assistant.”
“Now?”
“Right now.” I looked up. “And I mean right now.”
He slid down the wall and sat beside me. He leaned in close and read the messages too. “Why is your assistant so interested in the transfer?”
“Exactly.” I stared into his eyes as hard as I could. “Why?”
He held his hand out and I gave him my phone. He backed up the messages and read through. He passed my phone back to me and said, “Don’t let on.”
I said, “Don’t worry.”
The last message Traci sent hit my phone ten minutes earlier when we were still in the Newkirks’ hotel room. I’m getting in a panic, July. The musical is almost over. WHERE ARE YOU? They just finished “Send In the Clones,” and you have never in your LIFE seen scarier clones than these. And the thing is, I really need you because I’m not feeling so hot. I’m in the front row and I got sopping wet during “Slashin’ in the Rain.” When you EVER get here, would it be okay if I called it a night? Can you handle the Black and Orange Ball without me? Is everything okay?
Baylor said, “Text her back.”
I did. Everything’s fine now. I lost a couple of guests, then I lost my tablet while I was looking for them. So I gave up looking and had to find a computer to make the transfer.
She had to be sitting with her phone glued to her eyeballs, because it didn’t take her two seconds to respond. Is it done?
I sent a message back. Almost.
It was deathly quiet in the hall. Baylor said, “This is bad.”
I agreed.
Baylor’s head was tipped close to mine. “Tell her you need ten more minutes.”
“Which gives us five.”
I tapped out the message.
Baylor reached for his ankle and came back with a little gun. “Do you know how to shoot?”
I shook my head.
“Do you know how to point?”
I nodded.
He popped the clip out of the gun and passed it to me.
I couldn’t remember being this scared or this calm before. It was an amazing sensation, the adrenaline mixed with quiet confidence. The adrenaline was from what was about to happen. The calm was from him.
We circled around to the back of theater and stepped in as the curtain was rising for the final number. Two lions were onstage. I grabbed Baylor’s arm. “That’s them!”
“Who them?”
“The lions,” I whispered. “They’re not lions. They’re the zombie and the witch. Look at the small lion’s feet.”
He squinted. “Lions don’t wear witch boots.”
“Exactly.”
I watched him think. His dark eyes flashed while he tried to figure out how to be five places at once. “There.” He pointed behind us. “I’ll go up and you go down.” Up was the theater control room. Down was the stage. “I’ll block all the exits and call for backup.”
I nodded.
“You’ll be safe in the crowd, July.”
I felt safe right there.
He gave me a quick hug, and I fell all the way in. I was like, please don’t ever end, Halloween. He pulled away and tugged my wayward curl that had fallen in my face again. It went bounce. He said, “Let’s do this, July.”
I made my way down the wide carpeted steps by the glow of the dim aisle lights. I reached the stage as the lions started singing “Can You Feel the Blood Tonight?” Traci was in the middle of the first row, so I was like, excuse me, pardon me, all the way to her and she saw me coming for a mile. When I took my seat beside her, she whispered, “Way to miss the whole show!”
I stuck the empty gun in her ribs and said, “Way to steal three million dollars.”
She jerked as if to bolt just as the sound system went down and the house lights went up. The crowd was like, what? Traci went for her tote bag. I kicked it out of her reach, tipping it over in the process, and Esmerelda’s witch hat fell out, spilling wallets, room keys, Chewbacca’s watch, jewelry galore, and a silver gun that skidded to my feet. Without taking my eyes or the gun off her, I reached down for it. Then I had two guns. Me. July Jackson. Holiday Host. Holding two guns on one assistant. She slumped back in defeat, then threw the lions under the bus, pointing and yelling, “They made me do it! It wasn’t my idea at all, July! It was them!”
Them needed to go back through wardrobe. They pulled off their lion heads so they could see to make their getaway. Her beach waves were flat, her face had lost its green, and he was barely a zombie, way more alive than not, and that’s when I recognized them again. He was the Easter Bunny at my All Your Eggs In One Basket event and she was the Chicken Photographer. My guests sat on his lap with their Jelly Bean martinis while she took their pictures, like at the mall, and that meant these three were behind the missing gold egg. This wasn’t their first holiday heist.
Realizing it was over, the lions shot off in opposite directions, him stage left and her stage right. They didn’t get far at all. The security guards assigned to the haunted house came flying down the wide theater aisles from out of nowhere, leapt onstage, and tackled the zombie and the witch to the floor.
Baylor was totally out of breath when he got to me.
So was I.
His eyes spoke a language all their own, and somehow I knew it. His asked if I was okay and my eyes answered back I was. He gently took the guns from my shaking hands and tucked them somewhere behind. He stretched his arms past me, got a handful of Traci’s shirt, and the next thing I knew she was airborne.
Traci said, while she was being handcuffed, “All you had to do was transfer the money, July.”
Like this was all my fault.
When the Scary Slot tournament ended, while I was adding scores and waiting on the accountants, Traci was busy detouring them to the control room behind the theater, where the zombie was waiting. With a gun. He made them write down the account numbers and transfer instructions, then duct taped the two of them to one director’s chair and locked them in. Traci thought I’d get the instructions and she’d be rich in five minutes. When she wasn’t, she tricked the security guards into rescuing the accountants, but instead, took them prisoner in the theater control room too. After all that, I still hadn’t made the transfer, so she sent the zombie to do it for me. He couldn’t get my tablet away from me, so he called the witch for backup. He took my tablet while we were with Blue Blazer, and she swiped the note out of my pocket when she drunk hugged me.
And that’s when I met Baylor.
It wasn’t until four in the morning that Traci, the zombie, and the witch were stuffed into the back of Biloxi Police Department squad cars and whisked away. Baylor and I watched the taillights from the loading dock behind Food Services.
At the exact same time, we turned to each other and said, “Well?”
Then we said, “Jinx!”
Then we said, “Double jinx!”
He told me I’d done an impressive job and I said, you too.
“It’s my job to take care of problems like these, July, but it’s not yours. So really, you did the better job.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say so I didn�
�t say anything.
He said he was hungry and asked if I wanted to get breakfast. Then lunch. Maybe dinner too. He asked if I had plans for Christmas.
I looked at him, probably for the last time, by the last glow of the Halloween moon. “Don’t you need to get home?”
“What for?”
“Your wife and babies.”
He got a big kick out of that. “You must have me mixed up with someone else.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Someone else with a big baby stroller.”
He was confused for two seconds. “The stroller in the office? That’s my boss’s. She has babies. I can’t even find anyone I want to hang out with more than once, much have a baby stroller with.”
“Me either.” But I was like, unless I just did.
Then he said, “Unless I just did.”
Stay tuned for when Super Secret Spy Davis Way meets July Jackson in the next DOUBLE Crime Caper, DOUBLE UP, headed your way from Henery Press. Here’s a peek…
I found out about their chance meeting when he called to tell me he was dying.
“Of what, Baylor?” At the time, I was trying my hardest to coax two three-month-old angels into taking a much-needed nap. I may have been a little short with him.
“See, Davis? That’s just it. I don’t know. Cancer, maybe? Like a brain tumor? Or maybe I’m having a heart attack?”
“You’re twenty-seven years old. I doubt you’re having a heart attack.”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“Then why are you calling me? Call a doctor, Baylor.”
“And say what?”
“What you just said to me. That you’re dying.”
“I can’t say that to a doctor.”
“Then why would you say it to me?” Like talking to the wall.
Warning him I didn’t want the gory details, I asked what his symptoms were. He told me he couldn’t sleep, think, or eat. He got my attention with “eat.” Baylor could put a buffet out of business. He could empty a refrigerator in twenty minutes. He had a Taco Bell Supreme Party Taco Pack every single day of his life to hold him over between lunch and dinner. Then it occurred to me it was the week after Halloween. “Baylor, did you go trick or treating?”
Double Jinx Page 3