Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper)

by Gretchen Archer

  I have no idea how much time passed before I began entertaining the idea that no one had heard the shot, no one was coming to get me, and my best move was to put as much distance between myself and this office as possible.

  I pulled myself up from the floor. So the gun had misfired. It shouldn’t have had a round in the chamber, and it certainly should have had the safety on. Even with all this justification, my legs were shaking so hard that covering the ten feet from the wall to No Hair’s desk was still difficult.

  I picked up the gun again, my hands still trembling, clicked the safety on and popped out the clip, well after the fact. I couldn’t get it out of my hands fast enough, dropping the clip in the drawer, and placing the gun beside it. I felt around in the dark for the three casino chips, swiped them, then closed and locked the drawer. I swallowed the little key.

  (No, I didn’t.)

  I ran, not bothering to lock up after myself with the new entrance and all, took the straightest path to the casino and once there, made my way to the closest bar.

  “Whiskey.” I white-knuckled the bar.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?” I asked. “I need some whiskey. Please.”

  The guy rolled his eyes and poured me a shot.

  I tossed it back.

  Edward Crawford wouldn’t win a million dollars today if Marci Dunlow was the early bird, worms and such. Then Bianca Sanders wouldn’t kill him, which was only fair. She could get in line behind me. I was here first.

  * * *

  I got in line. Knowing the video poker machines wouldn’t take the blue tokens, I made my way to the cashier cage, my throat and belly burning from the whiskey, and I was in good company. This was a popular spot.

  There were five cashiers behind a tall marble counter with gold bars up to the ceiling. I guess that’s why it’s called a cage. Every line was four or five people deep, and no one seemed to be in any manner of hurry. The whiskey wasn’t working yet, so I took deep measured yoga breaths, or maybe they were Lamaze, knowing that I had to calm down in order to finish this.

  My wanderings hadn’t put me in this particular queue before, and I noticed a kiosk of reading material cashier patrons could entertain themselves with while waiting. The racks were stuffed with pamphlets advising gamblers on how to go about saving themselves from the evil addiction. After picking one up and reading it in yet another attempt to distract myself from what I’d done, I’d summarize the message this way: If you can’t be reasonable about how much you lose, you don’t get to come back. So be reasonable. When I bored of reading, I took advantage of one of the standing anti-bacterial hand sanitizer dispensers planted at one-foot intervals. How can your hands be too clean when you’ve just fired a weapon?

  It was at this point, when I was just about calm, that it occurred to me that I hadn’t wiped down the gun.

  Damn.

  While I was trying to decide if I should go back and take care of the gun, imagining a crew of people examining the hole I’d blasted in the wall, the guy in front of me stepped away and it was my turn.

  The counter rose almost to my shoulders, but the cashier on the other side was barely taller than me, so we did the short-girl smile. With a quick survey I saw the reason for the bars: stacks of banded currency and racks of casino chips were everywhere. I placed the three blue chips on the counter between us. “Can I get money for these?”

  “Of course,” she smiled. “Whoa! Congratulations!”

  She spread out the three chips, displaying them for the seven hundred cameras that were trained on us, then scooped them up and tapped them twice against the counter. Her cash drawer popped open and bounced against her. She turned the chips over, pausing for the briefest of seconds, just long enough to catch my attention.

  “I’ll be right back.” She backed away, smiling, and took the $15,000 in casino chips with her.

  Before I could guess where she’d gone or why I was as nervous as a thirteen-year old at cheerleading tryouts, she returned with a man at her side. She smiled, he smiled, I smiled, we all smiled.

  “Do you have a player’s card?” he asked.

  “Yes!” I dug it out.

  “ID?” he asked.

  I pulled that out, too. I was passing this test with flying colors.

  A small plastic disk appeared. The cashier popped it open. “We need a thumbprint and index finger for anything over ten thousand,” she said.

  It sounded reasonable to me. And no risk, because my prints led exactly nowhere.

  The man and woman exchanged a rapid-fire non-verbal communication of some sort, and I had a feeling they were about to tell me that for whatever reasons, they weren’t cashing these chips for me, when he nodded, giving her the go-ahead.

  She dropped a healthy stack of the green stuff into the top of a bill counter, depressed a button, and cash started flying on her side of the bars.

  Before the man stepped away he asked, “Where will you be playing, Miss Dunlow?”

  I pointed in the wrong direction, but these two, not to mention previous events, had me flustered. “Behind the waterfall,” I said.

  She placed the cash in front of me, and I grabbed it. The man smiled, the cashier smiled, I smiled. I backed away.

  “Hey!” A lady I plowed into protested.

  “Sorry.”

  I turned and quick-stepped to Private Gaming.

  NINETEEN

  It happened so fast.

  A different young man was hosting the Big Bucks Room, Hollywood’s weekend counterpart, I guessed, and this one more Broadway than Hollywood. He took one look at me, almost fell over, reached up and pressed his hidden earpiece, where apparently someone behind the curtain informed him that I was not Bianca Sanders, and then they probably told him to get it together.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Dunlow,” he said breathlessly, his face Christmas red.

  “I’ll need a bottle of water and a Bloody Mary,” I breezed by him, “extra olives.”

  “Certainly.”

  Not for the first time, I wished this could wait until tomorrow, when I could run it all by Natalie and have some backup, but to quote Mr. Sanders, this iron was hot. I couldn’t call her, because I’d left my phone in No Hair’s desk. With Teeth now another notch up on my probably-a-bad-guy list since he was apparently hiding things for Bianca and Eddie, there was no one on property to assist me.

  If I hadn’t found the chips, I wouldn’t be here at all, because I’d tapped out Marci Dunlow’s line of credit the night before, and that couldn’t be helped until, again, I could get with Natalie. Finding the chips was almost a sign, and if I didn’t do this right now, backup or no backup, Miss Nevada and Mr. Alabama would be cashing in. Since one of the elements was obviously timing, with thirty-seven minutes passing between Bianca glitching the power and Cartier Eddie winning, I had to get going. It was now or never. If I could win it, first of all, it’d be fun, and second of all, Eddie wouldn’t.

  I sat at the fourth machine and said, “Here goes nothing.”

  A waitress arrived with a tray. I took the drinks then shooed her away with a hundred-dollar bill. I knocked back half of the Bloody Mary, finally had something for breakfast that wasn’t alcoholic (two olives), then reached for the water. I twisted off the lid, perched the bottle on the edge of the machine, then elbowed it.

  “Uh-oh,” I said aloud.

  I let about half of the water loose before righting the bottle, hoping it would be enough to find the little button, and apparently it was, because almost immediately the video poker machines winked at me. I downed the rest of the Bloody Mary, hoping vodka and whiskey weren’t a bad mix, and hoping no one in surveillance got winked at too. I noted the time, I tried to breathe, and the peppery tomato juice burned through me, causing me to hallucinate about Pine Apple. I missed home.

  My arms felt like they weighed a hundred pounds each as I gathered my purse and Bloody Mary dregs, then traded the seat at the fourth machine for the ninth, the one Eddie won on. I pul
led a half inch of hundreds from the nice stack, loaded the machine one by one, and let the music of the game calm me down. It had been eight minutes.

  The next twenty minutes flew by. I had another drink, relaxed a little more, began winning back some of the money I’d lost the night before (whammy this you crazy game), and watched the clock.

  Broadway was a squirmer. He left me alone for the first fifteen minutes I was there, thank goodness, because he might have taken issue with me dousing the carpet, but more and more, it felt like he was hovering.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked him on one of his many trips by.

  “What’s that?” I swear the boy almost jumped out of his skin.

  “Where did everyone go?” I asked.

  He shrugged, his eyes dancing all over the room. “It’s Sunday afternoon, you know. Not much going on.”

  “You must be expecting something,” I poked at the screen, holding two tens.

  “How’s that?”

  “The two men at the entrance,” I tipped my head.

  When I’d arrived, there was the usual one tuxedoed greeter. The next time I looked up there were two large suits, one dark gray, the other dark blue, flanking the waterfall. They looked almost menacing from behind, and they were most definitely packing, one a leftie, his shoulder-holster bulge on the wrong side. I assumed they were Bianca’s Welcome Wagon, and what seeing them said to me was hurry.

  “Oh,” he said, “those guys.” Broadway looked at everything but me, probably because my resemblance to you-know-who was too creepy for him to deal with. “We’ve got VIPs in the building.”

  I didn’t tell him I’d just run into his VIP, right before I took out a wall.

  Turning back to the machine, checking the time, I was almost too numb from earlier events to be the least bit excited when I began the sequence of play that would—God help me—hit the jackpot. I just wanted it over with and out of there.

  With the one-credit and two-credit bets behind me, my stomach near the floor, I reached to place the three-credit bet as someone invaded my space from the left. A large hairy hand flew in front of my face and slapped the screen of the slot machine. With his other arm crooked, he pushed against my chest, separating me from the game. I didn’t hear or see the two suits behind me, the ones who’d been at the entrance, until they unceremoniously jerked me out of my chair.

  * * *

  My world was reduced to three solid walls, one wall of dark window, a steel door, a long table, and four metal chairs. I’d been here before with the brother/sister safe-cracking team, the Duprees, but on the other side of the glass.

  At first, the only thing I could come up with was I’d been yanked off the game so I wouldn’t win it before Bianca and Eddie the Rat got the chance to, but as more and more time passed, I began imagining worse scenarios.

  What worse, though? I hadn’t done anything.

  Except blow out a wall.

  Which isn’t worthy of all this.

  I was left alone in the room with my hands cuffed behind my back to stew about it for long stretches. A woman who wouldn’t speak to me carted me off to an adjacent restroom that smelled like sick at regular intervals, and four different times the guy who’d smacked my poker game with his furry paw came in and asked me my name.

  “Marci Dunlow.”

  “How about any aliases? A middle name? Maiden name?”

  “Discretion,” I answered.

  “Marci Discretion Dunlow?” He slapped the table with his open palm, and we both jumped, me and the table. “This will go so much easier for you,” the man said, “if you’ll cooperate, Marci Discretion Dunlow.”

  For the first three hours, I felt stronger about cooperating with the man who signed my paychecks than I did this idiot. It was the one directive I’d received from Richard Sanders, and it would take the fourth hour of leaving me in the room alone to decide that the only way out was to tell them my name. By that time, I’d convinced myself that Richard Sanders had never imagined this scenario when he’d insisted that I remain anonymous.

  Or was he behind it all? Was this a test?

  I might have been losing my marbles.

  I devoted a small portion of my miserable time in the room coming to the decision that I absolutely had to start getting along better with my mother, and that distracted me a little. I was amazed at how caged-animal I felt by being bound. Things itched that I couldn’t scratch—my ears, my nose, an ankle. At one point I was convinced that a stray eyelash was underneath one of the Bianca-green contacts, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it but try to blink it away.

  My emotions flew between rage, stone-cold fear, and disbelief. Any second, I expected someone to rush in and apologize for this mix up, but the second didn’t come. At the end of the fourth hour, my chin on my chest, having cried myself into a fog, Furry Paws was back, and he brought friends. Three suits filed in behind him, and one of them mercifully uncuffed me.

  A new guy sat across from me. “I don’t know what to call you,” he said.

  “Marci Dunlow.”

  He leaned in. “We both know you’re not Marci Dunlow. We need your name, young lady.”

  We all waited an indeterminable amount of time for me to cave. There was no air in the room, and the only sound was the scrape of one chair. I got the words out in a whisper, but they all heard me.

  “It’s Way,” I rubbed my wrists. “Davis Way. My name is Davis Way, and I work here.”

  The one closest to the door stepped out, and the other three and I listened to each other breathe for another long stretch until he returned.

  “That’s not anyone’s name who works here,” he announced, letting the door slam behind him. “I don’t think that’s anyone’s name at all.” He was the most menacing of the four, a gray-haired Fed-looking guy. He resumed his post against the closed door. “So this is how you want it to go, young lady?”

  “I don’t want any of this. You asked my name, I told you.”

  There was silent communication between the men, a throat clearing, a cough, a few long sighs, and some whimpering, but that was me.

  “Okay,” the one sitting in front of me said. “So be it.” He introduced himself, saying he and gray-hair were with the Gaming Commission, which threw me, and the other two, including Furry Paws, were detectives with the Biloxi Police Department.

  “What’s your name?” Gaming Commission One, sitting directly across from me, asked.

  “Davis Way,” I said.

  “Try again,” Biloxi Detective One said.

  “My name is Davis Way. Call Natalie Middleton, and she’ll verify it. Call her,” I begged. “I work in Security; I started six or seven weeks ago.”

  “Young lady,” Gaming Commission One tapped his fingertips together. “Every employee on three shifts of the security staff has been brought in, along with every department head we could round up.” He tipped his head toward the two-way mirror. “And not one of them could identify you. None has ever heard of Marci Dunlow. I can run this new alias by them, but I have a feeling they’re not familiar with Davis Way either.”

  “Okay.” I tried to breathe. “The only one here today is Teeth. And his real name is either Jeremy or Paul, Covey or—” I couldn’t come up with it “—something else.”

  “Paul Bergman,” Gaming Commission Two supplied, “and we brought him in first.”

  Son of a bitch. Terror grabbed me about the neck and strangled the very life out of me. I tried my best to process the information: Teeth threw me under the bus. No more wondering who he played for; he was on Team Teeth.

  “Young lady,” Gaming Commission One said, “I don’t know how to phrase this delicately, so I’ll just put it out there.”

  He waited until I looked directly at him.

  “Your appearance has startled everyone.” And he didn’t mean it in a good way. “Are you possibly under psychiatric care?”

  “Excuse me?”

  A picture of Bianca Casimiro Sanders appeared
on the table, and by all accounts, it was a shocking resemblance, even to me.

  “Think about it,” he said.

  He was giving me the option of playing the Crazy Card, but instead, I played my Ace. “Call Richard Sanders,” I said. “He’ll explain it all to you.”

  “Well,” Biloxi Detective Two laughed sarcastically, “it’s not a very good time to call Mr. Sanders, now is it?”

  “Right,” I nodded for dear life. “He went to see his son, but he’ll be here any minute. He’s always here on Monday.”

  “He’s in surgery,” Detective Two got in my face, “and you’d better hope he makes it.”

  “What?” It came out on a huge woof of air.

  They all stared at me.

  “Is he okay?”

  Gaming Commission One settled back in his chair. “Why don’t you tell us? Is he okay? While you’re at it, tell us your name.”

  “It’s Way! Davis Way!” I insisted. “And how would I know if he’s okay or not?” My jaw dropped as his implication hit home. I scanned the other accusatory faces. “Surely to God you don’t think I shot Mr. Sanders! I was in the casino! You people dragged me out of the casino! I didn’t shoot anybody!”

  Gaming Commission One leaned in. “I never said he was shot.”

  My lungs collapsed.

  “We’ll get to that in a minute, young lady. For now, let’s talk about the counterfeit chips.”

  It went downhill from there.

  * * *

  They left me alone for another hour, then burst back in. I don’t know what I did during the hour, other than watch the clock tick and pray.

  “Miss—”

  “Way. It’s Davis Way.” I’d said it a million times.

  Gaming Commission One reached up and scratched an ear, sighing deeply.

  “One more time,” he said. “We have Davis Way’s prints, and they’re not yours.”