DOUBLE KNOT (23 page)

My mother was our only hope.

We had one flash drive in all of 704 and it was busy running the laptop. With the
Knot on Your Life hack, we’d lose the laptop, because we’d lose the flash drive. But
it was our only chance of keeping Bradley and Baylor from landing in Hawaii. A very
easy choice.

Mother came out of the gold bathroom and modeled for me. She struck several poses
in her red and white striped skirt and her navy twin set buttoned up to her chin.
On her feet, her high heels.

“Mother, you look precious.”

“If your daddy could see me now.”

I patted the ottoman. She scooted in beside a nail gun.

I gave her step-by-step instructions: which end of the flash drive was up, what a
USB port looked like, how and where on the machine to find and insert it.

She reminded me she taught me how to walk.

I studied the dressing room floor. I took my mother’s hands in mine and we studied
the gray carpet together. “I don’t think you’ll be in any danger, Mother, because
we’re only up against three people. One is on our deck in a trunk, we know where the
pilot is, and DeLuna is in the casino. He doesn’t know who you are, he won’t be the
least bit interested in what you’re doing, so I believe with all my heart you’ll be
safe.”

Mother’s hands showed her years more than her face, her body, or as I’d learned during
our time together on
Probability
, her spirit. They were rough from a lifetime of potato peeling and gardening, they
were thick with ropey veins ravaged by the recent barrage of hypodermic needles, and
her wedding rings were so loose on her spindly fingers the weight of the stones flipped
them under. I could only see the backs of the two worn gold bands representing my
parents’ lives together. Of which I wanted there to be more. I rolled the rings around
for her. We stared at the diamonds.

“Why are you telling me all this, Davis?”

We were closer than we’d been in decades. Three-point-four of them, to be exact. “I
need you to know I’d never let you do this if I thought I was putting you in the line
of fire. Daddy would never forgive me. I’d never forgive myself.”

“Well, let me tell you something, Davis.” She cupped my face in her hands. “It’s my
turn and I’m ready.”

“Oh, Mother.” My face dropped out of her hands.

“Davis, I get tired of being on the sidelines. You and your daddy always saving the
world and me at home ironing. I’m tired of ironing. I’m ready to live it up a little.
Everyone knows you and your daddy are made of the strong stuff, but the truth is I’m
made of strong stuff too.”

I knew. Deep down, I knew.

“But there’s one thing I have to say to you before I go, and I want you to listen
carefully.”

I prayed she wouldn’t tell me what she wanted me to do with her salt and pepper shaker
collection should she not make it back to 704. If for no other reason, I didn’t want
to be charged with telling someone Mother left them two hundred salt and pepper shakers.

“Look up here at me, Davis.” She scoped the dressing room to make sure we were alone.
“Don’t you breathe a word of me playing a gambling game to anyone. I mean it. If it
ever got back to my Sunday School class, I’d be done for. Out on my rear. This is
our secret.”

“You got it, Mother.”

* * *

Arlinda was dressed in today’s uniform, Set Sail: navy and white striped high-waist
hipsters, a bright red triangle halter top, white sailor hat. Jessica was wearing
Friday’s uniform, Walk the Plank, a one-piece rhinestone anchor with six-inch silver
heels. In a way, seeing Jess in a different outfit was a breath of fresh air. In a
couple of other very noticeable ways, it wasn’t. Jess was more Fantasy’s size, less
Arlinda’s. So her choice from the stash Arlinda threw down the wall to wear under
her fresh
Probability
robe wasn’t built for her.

We walked Mother and Arlinda to the door of 704, we, minus Jess. Guess what she was
doing in her rhinestone anchor suit and six-inch silver heels. Just guess.

“Mother, you have Poppy’s V2, our only way in and out.”

She patted her left pocket.

“And please don’t use the gun unless you have to.”

She patted her right hip. “I don’t plan on shooting anyone while I’m gone and don’t
make me shoot anyone when I get back.”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

She cleared her throat. “In one hour, exactly one hour, cut my pot roast off. Just
turn it off. By the knob.” She demonstrated. “On. Off.” She toggled her closed fist
on and off a few more times. “Do
not
lift the lid. Do you hear me, Davis?”

“I hear you.”

“It needs to sit for another three hours without anyone lifting the lid. It will keep
on cooking and it will make its own thick gravy if you don’t lift that lid. You’ve
all seen pot roast before and you can wait to see mine until I get back and serve
it. I’ve got tinfoil under that lid and I’ll know if you picked it up. I’ll be able
to see the marks in the tinfoil. Do not pick the lid up.”

“I won’t pick up the lid, Mother.”

“And that goes for you too.” She aimed at No Hair and Fantasy. They surrendered. “And
when So and So wakes up, you tell her too.”

“We will, Mother.”

I turned to Arlinda. “You understand the risk you’re taking? Stepping out the door?”

“I do,” she said.

“Way more than Mother,” I said. “He doesn’t know Mother. No one on the ship knows
Mother. He knows you, surveillance knows you, and security knows you.”

“I understand.” She patted her sailor hat, tipped forward on her head, obstructing
as much of her face as possible.

“Number one, Arlinda, is my mother.”

She nodded.

“Oh, poo,” Mother said. “I can take care of myself.”

“Get in and out of the casino with Mother and Mr. Blackwell as fast as you can.”

She nodded.

“Good luck.”

And they were off.

TWENTY-THREE

“It was a simple plan.” No Hair broke the silence that settled over the salon after
the door closed to 704. “Lock us up, steal the money.”

“Did you hear that?” I asked my babies in a shaky voice. “A simple plan.” A simple
plan that had their father forty thousand feet over an ocean at the mercy of a felon
pilot. I was so glad the babies didn’t know, couldn’t know, I hoped they’d never know.

“It’s only been,” No Hair looked at his watch, “forty-eight hours.”

“It feels like forty-eight years.” But he was right. It was only two little days ago,
almost to the hour, when I walked through the door of 704, No Hair was captured, and
the cabin door on
Bellissimo One
closed with Bradley and Baylor inside. It was a simple trap, was what it was, and
we fell right in it.

“What do we think happened on the plane?” No Hair asked gently, quietly.

“Just like in the movies,” Fantasy said. “She incapacitated the pilots.”

“How’d she get on the plane in the first place?”

“Impersonated a crewmember?” No Hair said. “Caught the flight attendant before wheels-up,
took her out, then took her place?”

The three of us had years of speculative conversations about perps behind us—their
motivations, their methods, their maneuvers—but never with stakes as high as these.

“I wonder
how
she incapacitated the pilots,” Fantasy said. “There were two of them and one of her.
Plus Bradley and Baylor.”

“She held them at gunpoint,” No Hair said. “She had to have.” His voice trailed off
in time with the last drops of blood draining from my face. “Davis.” He leaned my
way. “You said it yourself. Brad isn’t in a position to overpower her. He can’t fly
a plane. What you have to focus on is the fact that she has nothing to gain by harming
him. She has to have Brad to get the money. He’s in one piece, Davis. She needs him.”

No Hair was right. There was no better way to walk away with two hundred million dollars
than to have it handed to you by the man in charge of the money.

No Hair took a steadying breath of non-submarine air. “How’s this going to happen,
Davis, with the plane?”

A welcome shift from problem to solution.

I explained if all went according to plan, which was entirely dependent on Arlinda
recruiting Fredrick Blackwell, the plane would change courses. “One phone call to
the FAA and the plane will be located. Blackwell will ask ground control to activate
the automatic flight mode, let him at the controls, then divert it. Colby Mitchell
won’t be able to override him, at which point Bradley and Baylor can subdue her, and
the plane won’t land in Hawaii.”

Any number of things could go wrong. The thought of which was making me woozy. The
odds weren’t necessarily in our favor.

The mission could be easily accomplished, the Gulfstream 650 equipped with automated
flight plan and landing aid systems. But not by me, because I didn’t have the credentials
to divert a paper airplane. Fredrick Blackwell did. And Arlinda Smith was directly
above us trying to convince him to put those credentials to good use, as in save the
day. Interrupting an aircraft in flight is serious business—the business of terrorists,
and Arlinda might not be able to convince Blackwell to
listen
to her, much less risk his career by taking part. Chances were he’d never heard a
story in his life like the one he was hearing now. She had one shot at recruiting
him—his wallet. In the least amount of time possible, she had to tell him he’d been
swindled and prove it with fifty jackpots. Maybe, just maybe, he’d help. If not, Mother
and Arlinda would be back soon. My husband would land in Hawaii. We’d have pot roast.
We’d dock in the Caymans, DeLuna would walk off with the money, and that would leave
Bradley and Baylor—where? I could barely breathe and apparently Fantasy couldn’t either.
She leaned in to say something, but before she could get it out her short shorts surrendered
with a loud rip. She held up an excuse-me finger, banged into furniture backing out
of the salon, and No Hair came very close to cracking a smile.

In her wake, Jess sleeping it off, No Hair and I talked about what had transpired
from our different perspectives in the two short days. He stepped into a Zoom at three
o’clock on Saturday afternoon and woke up in the submarine with a note on his chest,
his luggage, and a hardback copy of
The Old Man and the Sea
.

I asked if he’d read it.

No.

He had luxury accommodations, provisions, and no way out except for portholes he could
barely fit an arm through. The hatch was secured from the outside and the escape hatch
Fantasy had gone through to get to him had been disabled from inside. He said it would
have taken dynamite to open it. I asked about the panoramic viewing windows I’d seen
in
The Compass
and he pointed out he could have knocked them out all day, then electrocuted and
drowned. The viewing windows were below the waterline, which made sense, because I
hadn’t seen them at all, and, his note had warned, wired with live electrical. His
note said attempts at escape would be met with deadly consequences, his own, in fact,
and besides, he said, he was waiting on me to save him. I told him I’d been waiting
on the same thing:
him
to save
me
. I told him they’d thought of everything here too, except Burnsworth. They hadn’t
planned on Burnsworth. No Hair studied his lap at the mention of his name and Jess
jumped into the conversation for the first time with, “So, gross.”

Look who was up.

Twenty minutes had ticked away since Arlinda and Mother left. We had no computer and
no way in or out. We still had DeLuna’s V2, but that was it. To keep from losing my
mind, I poked behind the black bow tie to look at tonight’s menus. It would seem we
had the only pot roast on all of
Probability
.

No Hair asked me how Mother had been holding up.

Like a champ, I told him.

“She’s so retro,” Jess said.

No Hair studied her. “This whole time, you had no idea?”

“I have ideas,” she defended herself.

“Let’s hear your ideas,” he said. “What’s your story, Jessica?”

“My story? I’m a narc?”

No Hair’s head jerked.

I tore myself away from the V2, where I was behind the full moon reading about the
Tropic of Cancer, 23.5 degrees south latitude, and said, “Jessica has narcolepsy,
No Hair.”

We gave it two minutes.

“You fall asleep at the drop of a hat and you’re married to a crook,” No Hair said
to Jess.

“Right,” she said. “He’s a bastard dirtbag.”

“How long?” No Hair asked.

“All day long.”

“What?”

“He’s a bastard all day long.”

“How long have you been married to the bastard?”

“A year.” She smoothed the rhinestones across her flat stomach. “But I’m so done with
him.”

Understandable. I clicked the wind rose app on the V2 to see that we were less than
four hours from the Caymans. I couldn’t wait to see dry land.

“How did you two meet?” No Hair asked.

“Who two?”

“You and your husband.”

“That was a bad day.”

“Where was this bad day?” No Hair asked.

“The bank.”

I listened to the exchange and it occurred to me that in all this time we hadn’t bothered
to scratch below the surface with Jessica, to ask her these questions. In our defense,
we’d been busy. Jessica told No Hair she was an only child raised by a single father.
Which explained a lot.

“Let’s back up, Jessica,” No Hair said. “Where did you meet him?”

“My father?”

No Hair cleared his throat. “Your husband.”

“So, the
bank
.” Jess looked at me curiously, as if to say
this one’s a little slow
.

“The
bank
?” No Hair gave me the
same
curious look about her, the difference being he hid it.

She leaned in, spoke slowly, and raised the volume. “Max. Worked. At. The. Bank.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” No Hair asked.

She turned to me. “Is he making fun of me?”

“No, Jess.”

“What did your husband do at the bank?” No Hair asked.

“Portfolios,” she said. “He came up through the ranks of investments, assets, loans,
credit, debt, and collections. He landed in portfolios.”

My head snapped up.

“Hybrid and speculative,” Jess explained.

She spoke with the poise and authority of a guest on the evening news. My mouth dropped
open. Had we stumbled upon a subject Jess was knowledgeable in and comfortable talking
about? And that subject was
banking
? How could being married to a banker for a year make her that fluent? Maybe I should
have seen this coming?

“Which bank?” No Hair asked.

“So?” She didn’t understand the question.

(Welcome back, Jess.)

“You said you met your husband at a bank.”

“Right.”

“Which bank?” No Hair asked.

“My father’s.”

“Which bank is your father’s bank?”

No Hair was truly struggling through the conversation, much as I had struggled with
Jess before I spent two days locked up with her.

“
The
bank,” she said.

No Hair gave up.

“What’s
the
bank, Jessica?” I stepped in.

She threw her hands in the air. “Elima. Bank Elima.”

Just like that. As if we knew, should have known, or should have figured out by now
that with Max the DeLuna half of DeLuna-Elima Securities, she was the Elima half.

Hers was never a marriage; it was always a merger.

“Jessica?” I was on the edge of my sofa. “Did you not think to mention that your father
owns Bank Elima?”

“No.” She ran her hands down her long brown legs. “Because he doesn’t.”

“You just said he did, Jess.”

“So.” She picked at white linen. “My father died.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She found a white linen thread and pulled it.

“Jessica, who owns the bank now?” No Hair asked.

She looked up. “Me.”

Just like that. And that’s why she was with us. She owned the bank.

Jessica the Bank Owner hit the hay. Or the white linen, as it was.

No Hair scratched his bald head.

My eyes dropped to my lap, where, in the shuffle and shock of Jessica’s news, I’d
accidently opened the mailbox on Max (dirtbag) DeLuna’s V2. My mail was sitting in
my lap. My
Probability
email had been forwarded to DeLuna’s V2 and it was front and center on the small
screen.

* * *

Thirty excruciatingly slow minutes had passed since Mother and Arlinda left 704 for
the casino when I found my email. Fantasy returned wearing clothes that fit. “What’d
I miss?”

“Jess owns the bank and I found my email.”

“Jess owns a bank?” She looked at Sleeping Beauty. “That’s hilarious.”

“For real,” I said. “Jessica owns the bank in Hawaii.”

“I’ll be damned. That solves the mystery of why we have custody of her.” She sat beside
me and leaned in to peek at the V2 screen. “Look at that. Davis, it’s your email.”

“I know. I have mail.” I shook the V2. “This is how he was taking care of correspondence
for me. On his own V2.” I scrolled to find four. I skipped the three from Bianca to
read the one from Bradley that hit my inbox at four thirty on Saturday. We’d barely
said goodbye, he’d just boarded the plane, and we’d just lost our V2s.

Davis,

I think we forgot something. I think we missed something.

Stay safe for me and I’ll stay safe for you. I love you.

He knew as soon as
Bellissimo One
took off.

I traced the words with my finger, back and forth, then forced myself to move on.
I clicked open the first email from Bianca. It arrived Saturday evening at seven when
I should have been prancing around in her Vera Wang jumpsuit at the Welcome Aboard
party. “Listen to this.” I read it aloud to No Hair and Fantasy. And Jess, who owns
a bank, but she wasn’t listening because she was asleep.

David, you have ABANDONED in my hour of need. I have dialed your number no less than
two hundred times. You’re fired. Don’t even waste your breath trying to save your
or your husband’s jobs. Which is not to say I don’t fully expect you to fulfill your
obligations between now and your certain UNEMPLOYMENT. The photographs of me had better
be
Life Magazine
cover caliber, every single shot, or not only will you be unemployed, you’ll find
yourself in the middle of a breach of contract lawsuit YOU WON’T WIN.

In the meantime, I insist that you contact Dr. Durrance on my behalf. I am too ill
in general, and especially with her, to attempt civil conversation. She claims I am
not progressing toward dilation or effacement. Whatever in the world that means. Dr.
Durrance also claims Ondine is floating. Whatever in the world she means by that.
You refusing my telephone calls leaves me with no one to run INTERFERENCE for me in
these, the final hours of my gestation. You have FORSAKEN me. I am left without a
soul on this planet who has MY BEST INTEREST at heart.

There’s Richard, of course, but my marriage is none of your business.

Not that I’ve seen a TRACE of him because he is too busy doing YOUR HUSBAND’S JOB.
Which is YOUR FAULT.

I need you to call Dr. Durrance immediately. She is demanding I have an ultrasound.
Something about covering all the bases and by that, I’m certain she means covering
HER OWN bases, which aren’t my concern. I researched this MYSELF, as you are NOT TAKING
MY CALLS, rather, I assigned the task to this slovenly nurse you saddled me with,
you know the one, the unibrowed holistic healer Buddhist tofu person with the thick
calves and bulbous earlobes, and she concurs that medical imaging is NOT NECESSARY
as all my vital statistics, as well as Ondine’s, are PERFECT and there’s no need for
alarm or RIDICULOUS IMAGING PROCEDURES. David, you know I won’t let myself be subjected
to ULTRASONIC VIBRATIONS unless LIVES ARE AT STAKE, and although you’ve chosen to
ignore me, for which you will pay dearly, I INSIST you contact Dr. Durrance and explain
this. You know barbaric and unnecessary imaging leaves me with blurred vision and
a metal taste in my mouth for days. I refuse to put myself through it this close to
Ondine’s birth. I simply don’t have the energy and my nerves can’t take it.