She glanced, barely interested. “That’s Dr. Holloway.”
“Miles Davenport.” Then I read his job title aloud.
It took a minute for her feathered feet to hit the floor. She grabbed my laptop and saw for herself. When she looked up from the screen, her face was pasty white, her eyes darting everywhere, both absorbing the information and looking for a (weapon) way to blame it on me.
“He’s Long John Silver,” I said, more to myself than to her. “This man, Miles. He’s Long John Silver.”
“What, David? What?”
We stared at each other, both of us stunned and trying to process the information, when my phone buzzed beside me for the hundredth time.
Texts. All texts. All from Baylor.
I got porn on my phone.
I opened it.
It was spam about my fantasies.
But it’s our Fantasy.
I have four.
She’s more naked in every one.
Her legs are so damn long.
She’s with that man. You know. THAT man.
It starts in the coffee shop downstairs.
Then she’s next door to you in the Leno suite.
She’s naked in those.
It’s hard to believe Fantasy really has kids. She looks good.
Here comes another one. Cool.
I stared at my phone until it rang. The caller ID said Reggie Erb. Fantasy’s husband was calling.
* * *
The switchboard connected (me) Bianca to Conner Hughes’s guest room. He answered on the first ring, as if he’d been waiting on my call.
“Conner, this is Davis Cole. I’m—”
“I know exactly who you are. What do you want?”
He sounded angry, irritated, and desperate.
“Where is he? Is he watching you?”
After a long silence Conner Hughes sighed, an end-of-the-world sigh. “Yes.”
“Can he hear you?”
“Yes.”
“Can he see you?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know who I am?”
“Oh, yes.”
(Oh, no.)
“I’m on my way,” I said. “I’m coming to arrest you.”
The sigh again, the finish-line sigh. “Thank you.”
(I) Bianca called for gorillas with Rugers. I doubted Miles Davenport would let me knock on Conner Hughes’s door and walk off with him. I needed backup. While I waited, I called Cooter Platt. I told him it was good to see him again, say hi to Pine Apple for me, and asked how much money he’d won. In a rush of words, he told me he won ten thousand dollars during the semifinal round an hour earlier, bringing his total up to twenty-five thousand cash, and he was one of the three bankers who would play for the top prize tonight. If he won the platinum it would double his winnings. He told me it was good to hear from me, but he needed to scoot. He and his dopamine were on their way to the casino to warm up for the final round of Mint Condition.
Still waiting on the gorillas, Bianca in her dressing room trying to pull out her own eyelashes, I dialed Magnolia Thibodeaux. I shared snippets of my afternoon with her.
“If you don’t want to be charged in any of this, Magnolia, you’ll tell me.”
“I’ll answer your question,” she said, “and then I don’t ever want to hear your name again. I mean it. I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to think about you, and I sure don’t want you anywhere near me. Ever.”
“Done.”
“Holder Darby showed up here. She said there was a million dollars in it for me if Ty would write a letter to the governor and get that crook Christopher Hall out of prison before he died. I wrote the letter and I still don’t have my million dollars. Do you know where my million dollars is?”
I sure do. It’s at the St. Tammary Parish Sherriff’s office.
Bianca’s butler, a man I’d never seen in my life, showed the gorillas in. I stepped into Bianca’s dressing room to tell her I was leaving, and walked in on her tugging her extra seven pounds into black leggings and a sleeveless black silk tunic.
“David. Give me a gun.”
* * *
I made a big show of pounding on the door of guest suite 2632. “Open up, Hughes.” Two gorillas and their Rugers covered me.
Conner Hughes threw open the door. “What’s all this about?” His fists shot out. Cuff me, please. “This is outrageous!” He feigned indignation and at the same time, gave a slight nod to the door across the hall. Guest suite 2631.
When we turned the corner for the elevators, he fell against a wall. “Lock me up. Throw me under the jail. For God’s sake get me away from him and out of here.”
I swept out an arm, after you, Mr. Hughes. When the elevator doors closed, I said, “We need to talk first.”
One gorilla stayed back and out of sight with an eye on the door of room 2631. The other gorilla escorted us to the basement level, where we took the back roads and alleyways to the secure holding cells below the casino.
“Have you eaten?” We took seats across from each other in an interrogation room.
“I haven’t eaten,” he said, “because I can’t eat. I can’t eat; I can’t sleep; I can’t breathe.”
I called Plates, the family-style restaurant in the casino, and ordered the house special—a bowl of white bean and ham soup beside an overflowing platter of fried chicken tenderloins, slaw, green beans, copper-penny carrots, mashed potatoes and gravy, buttered cornbread, with chocolate cake for dessert, plus his-and-hers pots of coffee.
He ate every crumb while I sat across from him with my laptop, delving deep into public records, going as far as the World Wide Web would let me, gathering information about Miles Davenport. Every few minutes I jotted a note, and every few minutes Conner Hughes groaned.
He’d licked his dishes clean at the same time I’d seen enough. I closed my computer. “Conner, I need to hear the story. The whole story, from the beginning.” His eyes kept darting to the door where he could see the gorilla’s back through the glass pane. “You’re safe here,” I said. “He can’t get to you.”
“You don’t know this man,” Conner said. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
Twenty-Two
On a cold January night in 1915, Gilda Goddard gave birth to twin sons, Henry and Charlie, weighing in, according to the chicken scale, at just under four pounds each. The whole time her husband Mercy, in the next room, whose shift started at sunup, wished his wife would pipe down. The town obstetrician, Dr. Lawrence, buttoned his heavy overcoat and said, “Fine looking boys you have there, Mercy. They were in a hurry. Those boys will go places.”
The Goddard’s lived in one of the seven hundred cookie-cutter homes that made up Horn Hill, Alabama, built by Horn Hill’s only employer, Alabama Coal & Iron. Rent was $8.05 a month, deducted in equal parts through the month from the miners’ cash paydays on Fridays at noon, a penny extra on the last Friday of the month. Two months out of the year, because of how things fell on the calendar, no rent was deducted on the last Friday of the month. It was called Fifth Friday and the townspeople partied.
Other features of the lively town of 3,200 at the time of Henry and Charlie’s birth: a company store, churches, parks, theaters, a medical clinic and schools, all built by Alabama Coal & Iron.
The twins were born into one of Alabama’s most bustling industrial towns and they died within weeks of each other eighty-seven years later in the same town. Horn Hill population, recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau, at the time of their deaths was one hundred and eighteen. But no one believed it, unless the count included stray dogs.
Henry and Charlie, in their late teens, married sisters and went on to produce, between them, seven children, including Henry Jr., the first Goddard to
graduate from college with a degree in geology, and Little Charlie, who went into the textile business, and single-handedly saved Horn Hill when he put the town’s out-of-work coal miners back to work in his yarn and finishing factory. Horn Hill made a quick transition from coal to socks. Things were looking up in the ’40s and booming in the ’50s, but Japan jumped into the sock business and Goddard’s Textiles boarded up in 1959, owing the United States government more than a million dollars in back taxes. That was the last of Horn Hill.
Around the same time, Henry Jr., a science teacher at Horn Hill High, to take a break from the menstrual synchrony between his wife and three daughters that was driving him crazy, signed on for a year-long exploration dig looking for nickel and chromium in central Montana. Henry Jr. and sixteen other modern-day prospectors set up camp along the Smith River, a tributary of the Missouri running through central Montana. After six weeks, Henry Jr. received word from home that Goddard’s Textiles, in spite of all of Horn Hill’s and Little Charlie’s efforts, had closed its doors. Horn Hill’s population was splitting in half daily, the residents fleeing for (food) work.
At the end of six weeks, it was obvious to Henry Jr. and his fellow geologists there was neither nickel nor chromium in central Montana. They’d found a little copper and a lot of marijuana, but no metals. They kept looking, because if they threw in the towel, their next exploratory gig would be hard to come by, not to mention they’d all lose their grant opportunities and tenured jobs at the various universities and energy companies they represented. So they dug in to wait it out.
At the end of six months, the geologists were starved for female affections, stoned out of their minds, and expert fly fishermen. The whole time, Henry Jr., who had no use for funny cigarettes or fish, worked the exploratory grid alone.
At the end of the year when the team gave up, packed up, and returned home to shave their beards and resume life with running water, Henry Jr.’s trunks were loaded down with what he thought was silver.
Back in Horn Hill, he took to his basement lab and found that the rocks he’d lugged home weren’t silver at all. They landed on number seventy-eight of the atomic scale. While the others had been getting high and perfecting their overhead casts, Henry had quietly stumbled upon what would, thirty years later, be named the world’s richest known deposit of platinum.
He locked the front door, pulled the living room curtains, and sat down his three teenage daughters. He passed out the platinum and gave them this advice: “Do not marry a dreamer like your daddy, because you’ll always be hungry. Do not marry an industrialist like your Uncle Charlie, because you’ll always be looking over your shoulder. The only thing I can think of that will give you girls a comfortable life and a good night’s sleep is money. Marry bankers.”
And they did. The girls packed up their daddy’s advice and their raw-platinum dowries and moved to Wilcox, Morgan, and Blount counties, where the men they married established financial institutions in the small Alabama cities of Pine Apple, Pumpkin Center, and Susan Moore. All three families still owned the small banks and all three banks still held the pure raw platinum—the size of a dinner plate, the weight of a grown man, with a combined street value upwards of twenty million dollars—in their vaults.
Aside from trusted family members and a combined handful of local law enforcement officials, the only other people who knew the platinum existed in the small Alabama banks were the few people left from Horn Hill who were old enough to remember, including Holder Darby, and the president of the company who built the vault drawers still containing the precious metals. The man sitting across from me. Conner Hughes.
“Do you know what a perfect storm is?” he asked.
“In meteorological terms?”
“In general.” Conner Hughes’s eyes were bloodshot and bleary. “Miles Davenport was in the right place at the right time to learn of me, Paragon Protection, and this conference on the same day Holder Darby received devastating personal news. All three events. At the same time.”
“And this created a perfect storm?”
“We’re living it,” he said. “We’re in the middle of a perfect storm.”
Yes, we are.
“Who approached you first, Conner?”
“She did. Holder Darby. In her office.” He pointed skyward in the general direction of the executive offices. “I was here to sign the final paperwork on the conference when she broke the news.”
“So she’d already offered you up to Miles Davenport?”
“Me, you, some crazy bat in New Orleans, your husband,” Conner said, “three Alabama banks, and the black girl.”
Fantasy.
“Holder Darby shoved him straight down all our throats.”
“What did she say would happen if you didn’t cooperate?” I asked.
“She said they’d go after my biggest client.”
“In what capacity?”
“Miles Davenport would wipe them out.”
“Their vault?”
“The bank, the vault, everything,” he said. “It was my choice. Contain it to this week, this conference, your little vault and three insignificant Alabama banks, or help them rob First American in downtown Chicago.”
“Why?” My hands were in the air. “Why?”
“For a liver.”
* * *
Miles W. Davenport, MD, had his medical license yanked by the Maryland Board of Physicians when two of his post-op kidney transplant patients died after he switched the donor kidneys, giving Patient A Patient B’s kidney and Patient B Patient A’s kidney, and didn’t even know it, because fifteen minutes after he changed out of his scrubs, he was backing his Jaguar out of his reserved parking space. Post-op was for interns. They located him that night, floating around Lake Montebello on his fifty-foot Bruckmann yacht with three hookers and a blood alcohol level of .14.
After the trial, and as part of his malpractice and gross negligence plea bargain with the state, he was admitted to the Rosewood Center, formerly the Asylum and Training School for the Feeble-Minded, in Ownings Mills, Maryland, where he lived for the next three years being treated for alcoholism, prescription drug abuse, depression, antisocial personality and obsessive-compulsive disorders.
When he was released from Rosewood, he moved back to Baltimore to serve out the next five years of his sentence, fetching lunch and dry cleaning for the doctors who made up the Comprehensive Transplant Team at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. His job paid minimum wage, barely covered the rent on his efficiency apartment, and was all the way around humiliating.
Dr. Randal Holloway, who would bank a hundred thousand cash to transplant some crazy Southern casino woman’s eyelashes, plus get a badly-needed week off, sent the office errand boy Miles Davenport to the Bellissimo Resort and Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi on a pre-op fact-finding mission, where Holder Darby, who was to escort the crazy Southern casino woman’s organ transplant representative, met him at the front door. Because Holder needed an organ transplant. For Christopher Hall. And she was willing to do whatever it took.
“What did she offer him?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly how it went down,” Conner Hughes said, “and I don’t even care, but his first payday was when she arranged for him to do the eyelash surgery. They used that money to set up everything else. In exchange for the liver transplant, she agreed to help him rob the Bellissimo vault.”
“Which is where you came in.”
“Exactly. Lucky me. I had to show him how to rob the vault.”
“I’ve been waiting for the vault to be robbed all week, Conner.”
“Oh, I know.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “We all know. You’re lucky he hasn’t killed you and your husband. You’ll be very lucky if your friend makes it out of this with her life.” I felt a jolt of electricity course through my body.
“Keep talking,” I said. “I need to know everything. When will he attempt to breach the vault again? Tonight?”
“Oh, no,” he said, “they’ve given up on the vault. They had to call off the first attempt because your husband had emptied it. They regrouped. The plan was to hold a gun to your husband’s head and have him hand over the contents, but when they got him in the vault alone you showed up. And all hell broke loose.” He leaned across the table. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused?” he asked. “Do you have any idea?”
I’ve heard one or another version of these particular words my whole life. It got old.
“Who is they?” I asked. “The techs who work for you?”
“They don’t work for Paragon.” He was quick to correct me. “Those thugs are straight out of prison. They’re Davenport’s men.” He ran a hand through his thick gold mane of hair. “But all they have left now is my money and the platinum in the Alabama banks.”
“Your money?”
“Mint Condition. I supplied the money for the game.”
“And he plans on walking off with it? How? And when?” I began gathering my things.
“Tonight. As soon as the tournament is over, when everyone in this building, including him, is at the Dionne Warwick concert and while his crew is robbing the Alabama banks.”
“How is his crew going to be here to empty the machines and hit three Alabama banks at the same time?”
“I’m supposed to empty the machines.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a lone key. It was short, squat, silver, and it opened slot machines. “And deliver the money to his room.”
I held my hand out, then wrapped it around the key he placed in the middle of my palm.
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