Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (34 page)

I couldn’t breathe.

“First and foremost,” No Hair went on, “she knew you’d figure out how Bianca was winning the money, something she couldn’t do herself, and couldn’t get out of the electricians.”

“I’ll tell you one thing.” I looked at both men. “I wasn’t being paid nearly enough for all this.”

No Hair snorted.

“What happened that night?” I asked. “Walk me through it.”

No Hair shifted in his seat. Poor seat. “It was my day off,” he said, “but I had to go in because we were having a little counterfeit chip problem.”

At this point, I tiptoed out.

(No, I didn’t.)

“Why’d you have to go in?” Bradley asked. “Why didn’t they just call Metro?”

“Because it was Salito Casimiro.”

Ah.

“I was on my way to lock up the chips in my desk, and I smelled Natalie’s perfume. I flattened myself against the wall and watched her put a gun in Paul’s desk.”

How in the world No Hair flattened himself against a wall was beyond me.

“I should’ve taken the gun with me,” No Hair said, “But I locked everything up in my own desk, and we all know what happened next.” He turned on me and thumped me on the head with his eyeballs. “When I told you to stay out of my desk, I meant it.”

No Hair went on to fill in the blanks that he could. Natalie, with her eyes and ears everywhere, knew I’d gone to No Hair’s office, knew I’d had the small gun accident, and watched me cash in the counterfeit chips. She saw her opportunity and sprang into action. She got the Sanders’ ball rolling by telling Richard his wife was getting ready to kill another boyfriend, then told Bianca that Richard was onto her. At the same time, she had Teeth pounding the nails in my coffin—erasing my alibi from the hard drive and calling in the casino dogs.

Several questions remained: When did the woman sleep? (I might have been the only one wondering that.) When did Teeth bite the big one? And the most important question—where was she now?

I looked away and whistled a little tune, “Taps,” I think. Natalie Middleton covered all her bases. Tag, Davis, you’re it. “Do we have
any
evidence against Natalie?”

“Not an ounce,” No Hair said. “Every scrap of film is erased, so we don’t have her planting the gun. And there’s only one camera that caught the shooting directly, but Natalie’s not in it for even a split second. All you see is who everyone believes to be Davis aiming, firing, and running.”

“We’re going to have to catch her,” I said.

“If she isn’t already long gone,” No Hair said. “She’s hit the game twice this week, stockpiling to make a run for it, because she has a brand new fly in her ointment.”

“What would that be?” I asked.

“You.” Bradley and No Hair said it at the same time.

I bent over double again.

“She didn’t count on anyone coming to your rescue, Davis.” No Hair’s voice was softer.

“Happy to help.” Bradley reached over and gently pushed my hair out of my face. He smiled at me.

*    *    *

We ordered food while discussing where to go from here, because No Hair was ranting about famine and hypoglycemia. I couldn’t have swallowed a bite of food if Natalie walked in, put a gun to my head, and demanded I eat. Bradley asked, “Not even a Pop Tart, Davis?”

When I’d been staring out the window at the Las Vegas Boulevard traffic long enough for Bradley and No Hair to think I might be contemplating jumping, No Hair spoke up.

“You’re not going to jail, Davis. We’ll find her.”

Her who? I needed both of them. I had to have Bianca to be cleared on the first charge, and I had to have Natalie or I’d go to jail for Teeth’s murder.

Before room service knocked on the door with food, Bradley’s cell phone rang in the bedroom with news.

A minute later, No Hair asked, “Is he speaking Spanish?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Go figure.”

“We’d better get moving.” Bradley appeared in the doorway, phone in hand. “She’s at Wild Bill’s.”

No Hair rose from his seat. The seat looked so relieved. “She’s there to get herself another payday.”

Just then Bradley’s phone rang again. He looked at the caller ID, then at me. “It’s Harrison County Department of Corrections.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Another line on my resume: fugitive from the law.

Meredith slept through a check-in, and that was strike three. Her first strike was stepping over the threshold to reach the newspaper at the elevator.

(“I swear it was not even two seconds.”)

She missed yet another hello-prison call when she was in the shower.

(“No one ever said, ‘Don’t take a shower.’”)

Then the nap.

(“I heard it, but I thought it was one of Riley’s toys.”)

They hauled her in only to find out she wasn’t me.

(“Jail people don’t
listen
. I told them I wasn’t you a million times.”)

Bradley was also in a bit of trouble, but he lied to give us more time. “Look,” he said. “My place has windows. She climbed out one while I was asleep.”

Someone on the other end yelled at him.

“Have you seen her?” Bradley demanded. “She could get out of the peephole of my front door if she wanted to.”

The person on the other end yelled at him a little more. He winked at me.

“That’s exactly what I’m doing. Give me forty-eight hours.”

I was listening and pulling on clothes at the same time. I eyed the wig.

Not a chance.

The limo ride to Wild Bill’s wasn’t nearly as much fun with No Hair along.

“Did it take this long to get there yesterday?” I asked Bradley.

For the most part, we rode in silence, each of us examining our own personal worst-case-scenarios. Bradley, I’m sure, was in fear of being stripped of his license to practice law, I knew I was in more trouble in Harrison County, Mississippi than ever, and No Hair loudly lamented our leaving before room service arrived, thus putting him in grave danger of missing two meals in a row for the first time in his life and subsequently starving to death in a limo.

We were all concerned about how it would go down when we were face-to-face with Natalie Middleton. There were three of us, one of her, and No Hair was packing.

Still.

When we weren’t riding quietly with our individual demons, we were on cell phones: I talked to Daddy and an enraged Meredith, Bradley to his boss and then one of the other attorneys he worked with, and No Hair caught Mr. Sanders up, who sent me greetings, apologies for my troubles, and assurances that my job was safe (big whoop at the moment), and then No Hair called Mrs. No Hair, which was borderline nauseating. He actually blew smacky kisses to the woman over the phone. Then he whispered sweet nothings, and I do mean nothings: “No, I love
you
more. No, you don’t, I love
you
more. I don’t want to hang up first.
You
hang up first. No,
you
.” I rolled my eyes so far back in my head, I almost fell out of the limo. Bradley found it, as was his peaceful and accepting nature, quietly entertaining.

Soon enough, we were there. The driver stopped a block away this time.

“I’m not hiking through the woods,” No Hair said.

“There are no woods in Nevada, No Hair.”

“You really better watch yourself.” His finger was in my face.

“Hey, kids,” Bradley said, “be nice. Let’s stay focused here.”

The three of us looked at each other as we approached the entrance.

No Hair zeroed in on Bradley. “You’re the only one she doesn’t know,” he said. “You go to the game. That’ll get her, because she doesn’t want anyone to accidentally win it before she does.”

“No!” I grabbed Bradley’s arm.

“What’s she going to do?” No Hair asked. “Shoot him in the middle of the casino?”

“He’s right,” Bradley said. “She isn’t going to do anything.”

I was a nervous wreck.

“We’ll hold back,” No Hair said to me, “so she won’t see us.”

“You think?”

He actually growled at me.

During this tête-à-tête, we’d crossed most of the casino floor.

“No worries, guys,” I said. “She’s not going to see us.” I took another step. “We’re too late.”

As we approached the bank of machines, Bradley and No Hair could see there wasn’t anyone on the game, every seat empty.

“Maybe she’s not down from her hotel room yet,” No Hair scanned the area, “we’d better pull back so we don’t run her off.”

“She’s gone,” I said.

They both looked at me.

“Look at the total.” I pointed to the LCD display above the nine machines.

The progressive jackpot was $500,403. Make that $500,408.

“It resets at half a million. She already won it.”

*    *    *

“No way.”

“Davis,” Bradley said, “come on.”

“I’m not sitting in the same room with him, Bradley. Period.”

“You married him twice. You can’t sit in the same room with him once?”

We were in a large conference room at the Grand Palace. Most of the chairs were occupied, and most of the occupants were on their phones.

No Hair was devouring several pounds of raw cow, two heads of lettuce drowning in fragrant lumpy white stuff with a pound of yellow cheese grated on top, and a baked potato the size of my foot, another pound of cheese on it. He was washing it down with a gallon of milk.

“Milk?” I asked.

No Hair swallowed. “Calcium, Davis, vitamin D. You should try it.”

“When’s the last time you had that cholesterol checked, No Hair?”

“Excuse me, guys.” Bradley scooted my chair down the table with me in it, then put his, with him in it, between me and No Hair.

The General Manager of Las Vegas Grand Palace was there, accompanied by two note-taking staffers. Representatives from the Four Seasons, and the Casino Manager from Mandalay Bay were there. Four of Las Vegas’ boys in blue were there, huddled in a corner, waiting to take me into custody for extradition to Mississippi. Three representatives from the Nevada Gaming Control Board had arrived. Bianca Sanders and Eddie Crawford were on their way from the Casimiro’s Mother Ship, the Glitz Resort and Casino, half a mile away.

“The second he walks in and sees me, he’ll make a run for it anyway,” I said. “So,” I waved a
whatever.
“It doesn’t matter.”

A nosy policeman spoke up. “Don’t worry, ma’am. We won’t let him get away.”

After being told for two hours that Bianca Sanders was unavailable, then a tad under the weather, she was given a choice: come in and talk of your own free will or we’ll come get you, and you’ll be wearing handcuffs while we talk. Word was returned that she’d finally agreed, yet she didn’t arrive for almost three additional hours.

When her limo finally pulled in and the entourage escorted up, the sun had set, and all the details had been worked out, which was fine, because Bianca hadn’t been invited to work out details anyway. She was there to have discharging a firearm in public, fleeing the scene, withholding information, and hindering an investigation explained to her. According to Mississippi, charges against me wouldn’t be dropped until charges against her were filed. Eddie Crawford was just a wart on her ass—we had to look at him until she decided to cut him off.

State Gaming Boards shut down Double Whammy Deuces Wild progressives across the map starting in the northeast: Atlantic City, Detroit, and Philly, then Tunica, Biloxi, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge. There were two banks in California; they’d been unplugged, along with the Wild Bill’s machines, just for good measure. Bellagio’s were roped off, just like Wynn’s.

The only game in town, coast-to-coast, was Mandalay Bay’s.

Four plainclothesmen were in place.

One of the Four Seasons’ representatives closed his phone and addressed the assembly. “There’s still no sign of her. The last time her hotel door opened was nine o’clock this morning when she rode in one of our limos to Wild Bill’s in Primm.”

We all knew the rest of the story. She’d instructed the driver to wait for her, that she’d be no more than an hour, but she never returned to the limo.

Wild Bill’s reviewed every inch of surveillance footage. One of the last images of Natalie Middleton was of her stepping into the main cage office to be paid her jackpot of more than $1.2 million dollars. She requested the payment in $50,000 cash and the balance in electronic transfer, which cost her a $5,000 cash tip, but would cost Wild Bill’s a fortune when the Gaming Board finished with them over the no-no. She’d presented—get this—Marci Dunlow’s identification, but with her likeness, not mine, on the Arizona driver’s license. (Note to self: find out if there really is a Marci Dunlow somewhere.)

There was no footage of her leaving the main cage office, but the cashier, two witnesses, and the casino manager all told the same story: Natalie/Marci asked for directions and was shown out a side door to the adjacent restrooms, where a camera clearly caught her pushing into the ladies’ room, and from there, she disappeared. She never exited the restroom.

They continued pouring over the footage, but it looked as if Natalie Middleton had simply evaporated.

Everyone turned to the three of us.

Well?
Twenty faces asked.

Before we could issue any possible explanations or suggest any options, Bianca Casimiro Sanders burst in. While I was in the process of picking myself up off the floor, she was in the process of scanning the room. She found me.

“You only wish you looked like me.”

No, I most certainly did not.

Then she said, “Your ex-husband is an idiot.”

Now that, I couldn’t argue with.

TWENTY-SIX

Bianca Sanders was traveling to Las Vegas for her father’s 70th birthday. The male passenger on the flight manifest (I’d hacked) was not Eddie Crawford, it was her and Richard Sanders’ thirteen-year-old son, Thomas. The Casimiro family was gathering from all over to celebrate.