The first thing I “didn’t need to know,” according to Bradley, was that the three convicted burglars I thought were trying to kill him in the vault were actually on the Paragon payroll, as contract consultants and technicians. They did their time and now they made a living showing one of the nation’s largest suppliers of banking security how to render their products and services even more secure.
“Conner Hughes trusts those men, Davis. He doesn’t take a single step without them.”
“And you knew this?”
“I’m talking, Davis. You’re listening.”
Another thing I “didn’t need to know” was the money inside Mint Condition was, as per the agreement Holder Darby made with the Gaming Commission on behalf of the Bellissimo and in conjunction with Paragon Protection for the Independent Bankers of Alabama Conference, genuine. Real money. Federal Reserve issue.
My actions had forced him to stop what he’d been doing, come clean with Conner Hughes about his trigger-happy in-house investigation team, and the results, he presented to me, indicated Paragon Protection was following every rule to the letter in every way, and the only problem, according to Bradley, was me.
“We’re lucky you weren’t thrown in the back of a patrol car and hauled off to jail,” he said, as mad as he’s ever been at me, “and no, I won’t be home tonight. I’ll be at dinner with Conner Hughes cleaning up the mess you made.”
Working together, after today’s events, he told me, was something we’d need to have a long talk about when he got home tonight. I blinked back tears. Up to that point I sat there and took it, but with that, I got misty.
It didn’t seem like a good time to tell him I actually was thrown in the back of a patrol car and hauled off to jail, or to tell him the bankers’ game was rigged. It was clear that the only way out of this mess for me was Cooter Platt.
* * *
Cooter, tall, willowy thin, with a mop of white curls and bright black eyes, had ears that bloomed out and wrapped around like soup ladles stuck on either side of his head. If ever a case could be made for cosmetic plastic surgery, it was Cooter Platt, who needed an ear job in the worst way. With those mighty ears, though, Cooter could hear the sun come up, he could hear hair growing, he could hear ants clap and cheer when they found a picnic. For his best trick, he could hear money. If you filled your palm with coins, then dropped them on a flat surface behind his back two at a time until they were gone, Cooter could give you a total.
“That’s four dollars and sixteen cents, little missy.”
And every time, he was right.
We didn’t have birthday clowns or giant waterslide parties when I was growing up in Pine Apple, Alabama; we had Cooter. He could turn a sheet of white paper into money, he could change a Dixie cup of red party punch into a silver dollar, he could whip his long spindly fingers around a one-dollar bill for thirty seconds, then hand you a five-dollar frog.
Cooter’s grandfather established Pine Apple’s one and only bank, Pine Apple Savings and Loan. Cooter had worked there since he could count and, now in his sixties, owned and managed the bank. He was attending the Alabama Independent Bankers Convention at the Bellissimo Resort and Casino. As it turns out, Cooter’s real name was Henry. I’d totally missed him on the list of conference attendees. I’m one of three people from Pine Apple who doesn’t have a nickname, and no one believes me. Davis is my mother’s maiden name. And the name on my birth certificate. There are two cashiers at the Piggly Wiggly, Pine Apple’s only grocery store. Their names are Cranberry and Trampoline. I’ve known them all my life. The names on their birth certificates are Cindy and Susan. Right now, I needed Henry. Known by one and all as Cooter. Call him what you will, he could get me into the conference, and once in, I could call on my special slot machine talents and win a roll of platinum coins. Because the coins were all I had left. If I couldn’t catch Paragon lying about something, I was up a creek.
“We have to find Cooter and get his badge.”
Fantasy and I were in 3B. She wasn’t saying she told me so, but she was keeping me company while I licked my wounds. She’s a good friend.
“And then what?”
“Play Mint Condition and win the platinum coins.”
“Are you trying to push Bradley all the way over the edge, Davis? How much do you think that man can take? And haven’t we had enough excitement for one day?”
“Bradley and Mr. Sanders may trust Paragon with their lives, but I don’t trust them at all,” I said. “The platinum coins in the game have to be ours.” I had Holder Darby’s paperwork spread out on the table. “And that’s Paragon’s endgame. To sneak out of here with our platinum.”
She shook her head. That’s all, just shook her head.
“This is my last resort, Fantasy.” If Paragon didn’t steal the platinum from our vault, then everyone’s right and I’m as wrong as I’ve ever been in my life.”
Of course, there’s still Magnolia. I hadn’t given up on her.
For now, though, I thought it best to take a different approach at nabbing Paragon, one that might not end in divorce. The Cooter Platt approach. Track down Cooter, borrow his banker badge, and get into Event Hall B while Bradley is at dinner with Conner Hughes, and get my hands on some platinum. It would be real, ours, and I’d be off the hook.
This was my only shot at redemption.
How hard could it be?
* * *
“Are you sure, Davis? Are you sure you want to do this?”
I wasn’t sure of anything this week. “It can’t hurt,” I said. “I know Cooter. Cooter knows me. If this doesn’t pan out, at least I’ll know I turned over every rock.”
“If this doesn’t pan out, Davis, the people from Paragon are going to be throwing rocks at your head.” She patted my leg. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.” No.
“You’re making me miss my family,” she said.
I washed the blonde out of my hair while Fantasy scanned Cooter’s face into our facial recognition software. It took her way less time to find him entering room 1940 than it did for me to get back to red hair. I found her studying Cooter’s picture.
“What is wrong with his ears? Is it a birth defect thing?”
“No, and that’s so mean. He just has big ears.”
“Dumbo.”
“Let’s go.”
We rode a few elevators, because that’s what we do, then knocked on the door of 1940.
“Cooter? Are you in there?”
We waited a decent amount of time (two seconds), then Fantasy jimmied us into Cooter Platt’s empty ocean-view room.
“How do you do that?”
“My BP card.” She flashed it, then slipped it into her back pocket.
It’s her superpower.
“What’s this?” Fantasy held up a mason jar full of clear liquid.
I unscrewed the lid, sniffed, then went blind for three minutes. “It’s Pine Apple moonshine.”
“Put the lid back on it,” Fantasy said. “The fumes are making me dizzy.”
I nabbed the two glasses on a tray beside an empty ice bucket. “It’s good.” I knew I could use a sip of something about now. I hate going to jail.
“I’m not drinking out of that glass, Davis. Those things are filthy. Don’t you watch ‘Dateline’?”
I held up the mason jar. “This will kill anything those glasses can throw at us.”
Cooter Platt keyed himself in three hours later. Fantasy and I were passed out in his bed.
* * *
Something was going on with my foot and wouldn’t stop. I slung an arm out and lobbed it across Fantasy’s head. “Shtopth kicking meeth.”
“Whaaaaa?” Somehow, she managed to get up on her drunk elbows. Then screamed.
“Hold on there, little lady!” (
Cooter. Who had been shaking my foot.) “This is my hotel room.”
I peeled one eye open, to see Fantasy lunging for Cooter, but she wound up spread eagle face down on the floor.
“Cooter?”
Cooter Platt’s ears spun my way. “Davis? Davis Way?”
“Coleth.”
“What?”
“Cooter.” I flopped back on the bed. “I got marrieth.”
“You and Eddie again?”
“Nooooooo. Hell, noooo.” I pulled a pillow over my face, then slung it right off, because someone had filled it with bricks.
“You girls have been dippin’ in the sauce.” He held up his almost empty jar of moonshine. “Oh, boy, there’s a headache comin’ your way, Davis Coleth.”
I tried to pronounce my married name again for him. No luck. From the floor, Fantasy said, “Oh my God shomeone hepp me up.”
Cooter’s room, like all the conference attendees’ rooms, was a mini suite. He led us to chairs at a round dining table that seated four, closed the drapes for us, hit the mini bar up for all the bottled water it held, and got Fantasy a cold wet hand towel to drape over her face. Her whole face. She was splayed out in the chair, long legs sprawled, head tipped all the way back, wet towel across her face, ready to be waterboarded.
“What’s up with that rotten moonshine, Cooter?”
“It’s pure grain alcohol, Davis. You should have learned the Pine Apple Moonshine lesson in high school.”
Fantasy peeled back half of her wet towel. “What the hell ish up with your ears?”
“Fantasize!” I tried to kick her. I wound up on the floor. Cooter rushed to help me, but I waved him off and crawled up on my own. “I got thish.” I stopped to rest halfway to the chair. Maybe I didn’t got thish.
We stayed in Cooter’s room until we sobered up. For the next two hours, Fantasy and I both took cat naps mid-sentence several times, inhaled two pots of room service coffee, and shared a triple order of room service fries (to soak up the moonshine), and finally, around six o’clock, we sobered up enough to walk.
We didn’t want to walk, ever again, but if someone held a gun to our heads, we could’ve. A few of the exchanges during those lost hours:
“Why do we do this to ourselves?”
“So your ear deal is about your grandmother marrying her first cousin? She did that? Really?”
“I can’t get this licorice out of my throat.”
“Your daddy knows exactly how to get in the vault. He’s my backup.”
“Is there a cricket in here?”
“Davis, your grandmother took Cyril somewhere and got him Botox. Now the poor old thing can’t close his eyes all the way and his mouth is just plain ole crooked.”
“It was a very private wedding. Just us, Mother, Daddy, Meredith, and a few others.”
“I might be hallucinating.”
“My legs hurt so bad, I can’t see ever shaving them again. Ever.” (Cooter.) (Kidding.)
“This is one beautiful place, but I had some red chicken on a salad earlier that tasted like fish.”
“My husband is a black man. Black men just don’t have the ear hair problems white men do.”
“The vault people invited me here. Then my name got picked to play that money game. I won five hundred dollars last night.”
“You’re going to have to come get me, Bradley, or call me a cab. I can’t drive.”
“Seventeen.” (Fantasy said that for no good reason whatsoever. Several times.)
“I’m not sure I’d want to put firecracker chili on top of those fries on top of that moonshine, little lady.”
Never again, and I mean it this time, I will never drink again. Ever. I’m giving up everything: carbs, alcohol, gambling, Pop Tarts, Tuesdays, all forms of laundry, and Molly Ringwald movies. I saw the light and I don’t ever want to see it again. I hit rock bottom and it hit me back. I was three hundred sheets to the wind.
Fourteen
“Davis.”
I was in my own bed, post brain surgery. Or maybe I’d been shot between the eyes. I might have walked into a swinging wrecking ball. Something.
Bradley gently placed an ice cold washcloth on my forehead.
“I’m leaving for work. You’d better sleep awhile.”
I peeled one eye open, saw my husband’s elbow and a lion. Someone had smashed the lion’s nose in. Bradley kissed the top of my head, which did two things: One, it told me he wasn’t still angry with me, and two, it broke my brain. I didn’t remember anything else until much later. It was daylight, and someone was biting my hair. The bedside clock said it was nine o’clock on Wednesday morning and the cat was trying to pull my hair out of my enormous head with its gigantic teeth.
After twenty minutes of an ice cold shower, I thought I might—might—live. I stumbled back to the bed, reached for the house phone, and speed-dialed housekeeping, valet, and the front desk before my finger found the room service button.
“This is Calinda Wilson, Mr. Cole’s assistant. He needs four big blue Powerades and a bottle of Excedrin Super delivered to his residence on twenty-nine. And he wants the Excedrin Super without the lid. Keep the lid.” I didn’t have the energy to track down any painkillers and even if I did, I sure didn’t have the wherewithal to line up arrows. “And bring a large bucket of ice. Leave it at the door and do not ring the doorbell.”
The room service person wanted to argue with me.
“Mr. Cole, for your information, does not have an ice maker, and even if he had fourteen, he still wants a large bucket of ice. Okay?”
Mr. Cole—who, by the way, does have an ice maker, an ice maker that is exactly one-fourth of the big red monster refrigerator, but it doesn’t work, because the ice bin, which is the size of a bathtub, is nothing but a solid slab of cloudy gray ice perfect for hosting individual women’s figure skating events—left a note by the coffee pot.
What in the world did you get into last night? You fell off the bed twice (remember?) and talked in your sleep all night. On and on about crickets. Baylor called and left you this message: He’s stolen Eddie’s car. I suppose, Davis, when you feel up to it, you can explain why Baylor seems so pleased with himself for stealing Eddie’s car. I smoothed everything over with Conner Hughes last night, so all is well and I’m not upset. Call me and let me know you’re okay. I love you, even drunk you. Super drunk you. Ridiculously drunk you.
I called Baylor before I called Bradley.
“Baylor.” I couldn’t see out of my left eye, and I couldn’t feel anything below my knees. My head weighed four hundred pounds and I could taste Windex. “Where is your truck?”
“My Ford?”
“How many trucks do you have, Baylor?”
“One?”
“That’s what I thought. Where is it?”
“In the parking lot.”
Like talking to a wall.
“I have a very important question for you, Baylor. Listen up.”
“Okay.”
“How did you get to Tunica yesterday?”
“I drove your car.”
“What?”
“Mine didn’t have any gas.”
The days of banging phones against things were over, because cell phones couldn’t handle the abuse. And if I tried banging my head against the wall, it would explode. So I kept going.
“I told you to hide his car, like in a cornfield. Not steal it.”
“I mixed that up.”
“Did it not occur to you, Baylor, that when he sees his car gone and my car there, he’s going to figure out who has his car? And what am I supposed to drive?”
“Do you need to go somewhere?”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
This c
ould have been worse. I didn’t know how, but things could always be worse. Just then, it popped into my brain how they could be worse. “Where’s the counterfeit money, Baylor?”
“Oh, right.”
It will be the end of the world as I know it if Eddie Crawford finds a million counterfeit dollars in my car. The very end. Curtains. It’s been real. Sayonara.
“I brought it back.”
And with his words, I collapsed in a hungover heap. “Where are you, Baylor?”
“In the office,” he said. “I’m taking a nap till you and Fantasy get here.”
“Go back to Tunica. Do it right this time. Hide Eddie’s car, somewhere he can’t find it, and bring my car back.”
I texted my husband: Sorry about last night. I’m good. I’ll NEVER drink moonshine again.
He texted back: I’m covered up. We’ll talk later.
Then the phone rang. “David. Get up here right this minute.”
* * *
I thought I might freeze to death.
For one, I’d taken an ice shower, dressed quickly, and made my way to Bianca after drying only three of the red hairs on my head. I still felt, four Super Excedrins in, moonshiney, and the noise of the hair dryer proved too much. For another, Bianca had it like a meat locker. And it wasn’t just me. Her manservant of the day (she went through butlers like I went through phones) had a wool scarf around his neck and fingerless white gloves on his hands. It wasn’t one degree above fifty, and Bianca was flushed, drinking a tall glass of ice water, and half naked. Muscles everywhere.
“David.” She pointed to the most uncomfortable chair in the room. Cold white leather with no arms. I could feel her jungle green eyes on my back as I took my assigned seat.
“What is wrong with you?” She was lounging on a white leather sofa with her Yorkshire terriers, waiting for someone to feed her grapes and fan her with banana leaves. Her dogs good-morning growled at me and I, under my breath, growled back. “I called you to talk about me,” Bianca said, “how I feel, and somehow you’ve managed to make this about yourself.”
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