Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper)

by Gretchen Archer

  Two long blasts from a car horn in the parking lot had me raising the mini blinds an inch, then all the way. George. The software. I beckoned him up with my hand.

  He blinked his lights, like, No, you come down here.

  So I pointed at the floor beneath me, like, No, George, you get your lazy ass out of that cab.

  After the standoff, I won.

  He backed the cab into an empty parking place.

  “You want a cup of coffee, George?”

  He was uncomfortable indoors, shifting his weight, holding his black knit cap with both hands and declining to have a seat, but I could see him admiring my spotlessly clean digs.

  “I’m surprised you have coffee,” he said.

  “You and me both.”

  “You got anything stronger?” he asked.

  * * *

  George’s eyes were as black as coal, his skin a deep caramel color, his hair gray in half-moon patterns behind his ears, with a white splotch the size and shape of a postage stamp above his right eye, along his receding hairline. George was roughly my father’s age, but broken, where my father still had mischief and humor to spare.

  “I lost Morgan’s mother when he was four,” George said. “It was just us all those years. I saved twenty percent of every paycheck from the day that boy was born to send him to college, and I shouldn’t have bothered, because my boy was a genius, and the school paid him to go.”

  I refilled his short glass. I hoped George wouldn’t end up sleeping on Bradley Cole’s sofa. I knew all about loss, and if I were in his shoes, saying the words out loud, I’d end up on someone’s sofa. Probably Dr. Someone’s sofa.

  “He was always smart. You know that Rubik’s Cube game?”

  I nodded.

  “He could do that thing in three minutes flat.”

  I was impressed.

  George stared at the floor. Not another word passed between us for the next five hours. It was just five minutes, but when you’re sitting opposite a wound that raw, believe me, it feels like five years. Finally, he looked up.

  “Tell me about the Casimiros, George.”

  He rubbed his stubbly chin. “That bunch is barely human. More like animals.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  * * *

  It was me who slept on the sofa. I woke up so disoriented, my first thought was Bradley Cole had come home, and he was in the bed.

  “Bradley?” I listened. “Bradley Cole?”

  The details of how the night before ended wouldn’t come to me immediately. I ran to the window; George’s car was gone. There were no signs of the dinner he’d cooked—George is a great cook—and he’d even carried out the garbage. I must have fallen asleep, and George let himself out.

  I stretched, yawned, and logged into the Bellissimo system to find that my rotten ex-ex-husband had checked out.

  Goody-goody! Let the games begin!

  My inbox was full. There were emails from every website I’d ever visited, my sister, Websters-dot-com (Word of the Day), Joke-dot-com, (Joke of the Day), and Natalie.

  Davis, head’s up. We’re going to need you in Bones for a few shifts starting tonight. I realize this will spread you thin, but it will only be for a couple of hours, and just two, maybe three, nights. Stop by and pick up your uniform around lunch and we’ll talk. Thanks, Natalie

  What? Bones was an upscale fishery restaurant in the main lobby of the Bellissimo. I’d passed it several times, and had avoided passing it many more times than that. I don’t like anything about fish. Things that swim make me nervous. There’d been an incident when I was very young—I barely remember it—but from that point forward, fish had never been served at my house. A few shifts? A uniform? Did I not have enough to do? And I wondered if she expected me to play video poker in the Richie Rich room, then ask Hollywood to watch my poker machine while I changed into a waitress uniform and served up lobster tempuras. I don’t know the first thing about being a waitress. I couldn’t pour myself a glass of water without sloshing most of it on the floor. This would be cute.

  I was only half awake when I pulled the SimonHex software out of the thin jacket and popped it into my drive. It stumbled around, then gave me a prompt. Are you sure you want to load this? I’m sure. Do you want to register it now or later? There was no button for never.

  It was barely seven in the morning. I’d sit here until ten, and then I’d go into work and try to talk Natalie out of making me serve dead floppy fish.

  * * *

  It is a travesty of the highest sort that an institute of higher learning would hand out a license to kill in the form of a diploma, when the recipient—me, in this case—has no more idea what they are doing than the average fourth-grader. I daresay, even unarmed with a degree in Computer Science, a fourth grader would’ve had an easier time than I was having, which is to say I was as far out of my element as I’d ever been in my life. To successfully manipulate any program or a system, it has to make sense. Most do. This didn’t. I couldn’t pinpoint the rhyme or reason. I spent more time staring at the three computer screens than anything else, and the knock on my door scared the living daylights out of me.

  I jerked the door open. (I’ve got to stop doing that.) It was the dry-cleaning delivery guy. He’d picked up and delivered to me a handful of times since I’d moved in, and always late afternoon. He was an older guy, with a thick, ropey, protruding vein that separated one side of his forehead from the other.

  The words out of my mouth were, “What the hell time is it?”

  He stared at me, took a step back, shoved the plastic-covered clothes at me, and ran.

  “If you’re going to come early,” I shouted after him, “you could give a person a little warning.”

  I decided to hang the clothes up, and unfortunately passed a mirror on the way. I was wearing Bradley Cole’s bathrobe over his Milk: It Does a Body Good T-shirt. Hopefully I had underwear on, but I didn’t check. My new-blonde hair was literally standing on end all over my head, and I’d accidentally smeared yesterday’s mascara all over my face in the process of reading the backwards version of the binary forms of the slot machine’s brains. I looked like scary hell. No wonder the guy had run. Honestly, it’s a wonder he hadn’t screamed.

  There were three computer chips, all soldered to the motherboard inside the slot machine. Two contained the game data, and the third was a random number generator. It popped right off, and, as it turned out, wasn’t so random a number generator. That made good sense to me, because if it was completely arbitrary, the casino wouldn’t be able to guarantee that they would make money. Interesting, certainly, but I tossed that chip aside. I was more interested in the two that contained the game data written by Morgan George, Jr.

  It took forever to get them off the motherboard. Their almost permanent adhesive was probably a security feature; otherwise savvy tech types would open slot machines, snap them off, and replace them with their own. It wasn’t easy to remove the chips unscathed either, I’ll tell you that. When I finally had them in my hand, I felt like I was holding kryptonite.

  They were straightforward programs, both 110Gs, just like you’d find on any personal computer, and, as it turned out, simple code, just a lot of it. After I reversed the language with the SimonHex, I found a semblance of map: X = X. Every blue moon, X = Y, and that would be when the player wins a little. I was looking for X = Z, the jackpot, and I think I found it. I didn’t stop to do the math, but my guess was the jackpot sequence occurred no more often than once every gazillion entries, because in all that, I only found it once.

  What I eventually found were five incidents where X = B. B for Bingo. That’s what I was looking for. I think. When decoded, the software was long strings of 1s and 0s. Thousands of long strings. Young Morgan George had, every bazillion bits of code, left half a space, five different times. I also stumbled upon five inverted Vs, each about the size of a gnat, in the 700-page binder he’d written that supported the software, supplied by the deceased’s father
that I had to have a magnifying glass to see. Bradley Cole didn’t own a magnifying glass that I could find, so I used a clear drinking glass full of water, passing it back and forth along each page. On page 128 and then again on page 452, I accidentally dumped the glass of water all over the binder, thankfully missing everything else, but the fact remained, I shouldn’t be trusted in a restaurant.

  The problem was that the bleeps in the program language and the pencil marks in the damp binder didn’t line up. Nothing said, “Here, Davis, these two go together.” The code referenced hexadecimal numbers that, when triggered, located a specific combination of five of the fifty-two card values. And that was just the first time the player pushed the deal button. It happened all over again when the player decided which cards to discard and then pushed the deal button again, bringing the second computer chip into play.

  And get this: it happened five different times on both chips. Five spaces, five inverted Vs, times two chips, that’s ten total. I took a guess because there was only one thing I could think of that could happen five times in the game: the wager. Morgan George, Jr. had written something in the program that sent it on a different path based on the size of the bet: one, two, three, four, or five coins. It was all I could come up with short of tracking down a fourth grader to do the honors for me. My best guess was that between wagers, the program kicked into another gear. I honestly couldn’t come up with anything else.

  No wonder I looked like the crazy cat lady. My brain was fried. Had I even eaten? It had to be noon. It could, I glanced out the window to see the sun in a weird place, be even later. I looked for a clock. Five-thirty! In the afternoon! I raced to the bedroom and dug my cell phones out of my bag. I had seven missed calls from Natalie.

  I took the world’s fastest shower, pulled my wet hair back, and raced to the Bellissimo in my own car. If my day hadn’t started on the sofa, maybe it would have ended differently.

  SIXTEEN

  Natalie hadn’t quite known what to say. “Are you afraid of fish?”

  “Well,” I stumbled, “live fish, certainly. It would be safe to say I’m afraid of live fish. I don’t even get in swimming pools.”

  She sat back and crossed her arms. “Davis, there aren’t live fish in swimming pools.”

  “You never know.”

  I was trying to talk her into letting me be a waitress in one of the other restaurants. I wanted to talk her into letting me off the waitressing hook altogether, but seeing as how I’d stressed everyone out by being so MIA all day, I thought it best to shoot for a closer star. The No Fish star.

  “We’re not talking a permanent position, Davis,” she said. “Salito Casimiro, Bianca’s brother, is on his way to Biloxi. They always have dinner at Bones and I need you there. I need to know exactly what they say to each other. The easiest way to do that is for you to be on the staff. If you’ve had no waitressing experience whatsoever, you need to work a few shifts until you’re comfortable.”

  “Again, Natalie, I’m not opposed to waitressing. I’m just opposed to fish.” As anti-fish as I am, though, her interest level in “exactly what they say to each other” piqued my interest, too (why’s she so concerned?), but not enough to hang out with things that swim. She had me on the fish fence.

  I could see she didn’t know which way to go, either. She tapped out a tune on her desk with her fingers. “Just try it tonight.” She turned to her computer and her fingers flew across the keyboard. “They’re barely booked,” she said. “It will be, I promise you, a piece of cake.”

  Fish cake? Pass.

  I rose reluctantly, and put my bravest smile on. With best foot forward, I entered her secret lounge and changed into the uniform, your basic black and white getup, pants this time, topped off with a narrow black necktie. Unfortunately, there was another wig involved, and this one looked closer to my actual hair than any of the others, just not as long. To mix things up, I guess, Natalie had supplied blue-tinted contact lenses for my waitressing gig.

  “I love the transformation,” she said.

  I tried to smile.

  “You can do this, Davis!”

  I took a deep breath and tried harder to smile.

  Ten minutes later, I entered the side door of the restaurant’s kitchen, and two minutes after that, they called 911. I went into anaphylactic shock. It would seem I’m so highly allergic to shellfish, and there was such a large amount of it in such a small space, that my respiratory system shut down. I don’t remember a bit of it, except seeing a long stainless-steel table covered with plates of upside-down orange-red creepy-crawlies when I pushed through the kitchen doors. The next thing I knew, I was in room 410 of Biloxi Memorial Hospital. I sat straight up in the bed and yelled, “Bradley?”

  My mother, in a stiff plastic chair beside the bed asked, “Who is Bradley?”

  * * *

  “You know, Davis,” my mother said, “I really thought you were on track for possibly the first time in your life. I just don’t understand,” she flipped through a magazine, her reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose, “why you’d dye your hair or tell your father that you were on a security staff if you were working in a restaurant.”

  “Mother,” I tried again, “I’m not working in a restaurant.” For some reason, I was slurring my words, like I’d had several chocolate martinis. And I needed sunglasses. My eyes felt like they had gravel in them.

  “I know it wouldn’t be easy, but you could wait tables at Mel’s if that’s what you want to do with your life, and be closer to your family.” She let the magazine fall into her lap. “We could use your help with Riley, you know. And your father would surely, at some point, forgive you, and need your help at work.” She picked up the magazine again. “You couldn’t be making that much money working in a restaurant.”

  I pulled a pillow over my head. There were so many things wrong with what she’d said that there wasn’t even a place to start.

  “Is this about Eddie?” she demanded.

  I moved the pillow an inch so I could see her. “Mother.” She looked up. “Do you really want me to move back home?”

  The answer was in her silence.

  “Mother.” She looked up again. “How is Daddy?”

  The answer was in her smile.

  I pulled the pillow over my head again.

  “Knock, knock!” I heard a muffled voice. I peeked out and saw Natalie’s feet. I knew they were her feet because I recognized the brown leather boots from my first day on the job. I stayed under the pillow. I listened to the boots cross the floor.

  “You must be Mrs. Way.” Natalie’s muffled voice reached me, and so did my mother’s cooing.

  Here’s where my mother turned on the charm to the point of me trying to tell anyone about how she really operates and them finding it hard to believe. Finally, my mother shut up, but not before working the conversation around to telling Natalie that she had an unused college degree because of me.

  Natalie made the appropriate noises while Mother droned on, and when Mother finally took a breath, Natalie asked, “How’s our patient?”

  “Oh, goodness gracious,” my mother gushed, “I’m not sure what Davis was thinking! She knows she’s allergic to shellfish!”

  I shot out from under the pillow. “Like hell, I knew it!”

  Natalie’s head jerked back and she clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “If I’d known, Mother, I wouldn’t be here!”

  I saw my mother’s sly smile. I looked to Natalie’s shocked face. My mother—try to believe me—loved me getting caught with my pants down, and from the glint in her eye, I knew it was happening. I just didn’t know how. Was I naked? I peeked. Almost, but no. Had I grown two heads? I’d better look. I jumped out of the bed and found the reflective box over the small sink. I almost passed out; the backs of my knees caved.

  Two normal heads would have been a huge improvement over the one head I had. Enormous cherry-red welts covered the entire surface of my face, crept down my neck, and
I could see them on my chest through the thin bed sheet someone had half tied on me. My lips were deep, blood red, almost black, swollen, and cracked. The area between my forehead and my nose was so blown up that my eyes appeared to be little recessed dots in the back of my head, and there was an ugly gash above the left one. For the second day in a row my blonde hair was standing on end, like it desperately wanted away from my scalp. I wasn’t going to use the shampoo from the New Orleans stylist one more time. That stuff was toxic. It turned my hair into runaway straw during the night.

  I whimpered into the mirror, drowning kitten sort of noises.

  * * *

  Wouldn’t you know it? Bianca Sanders and her brother didn’t even eat dinner at Bones. I could have died a fish death, and all for naught. Natalie casually dropped that bomb over the phone while I was snipping off my plastic hospital bracelet with a toenail clipper. To make it all better, she gave me some time off. (She didn’t want me at work until I could be seen in public and said public not run and scream.)