Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) (26 page)

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.”

“There’s a reason for that! Please! Contact my father, he’ll explain everything!”

“We’re trying. We’ve had to send agents to Pine Apple, because no one will answer a phone there.”

That struck a fresh new terror in my heart.

“We did get through to the last number you gave us,” he glanced at a slip of paper, “Mel and Bea Crawford, and when we asked if they knew a Davis Way, they disconnected, and the line has been unavailable since.”

Oh, God, save me.

“And you’re not Marci Dunlow, either,” he said, “because she doesn’t exist. Who are you? This is your last chance, and if you don’t give me your name, I’m booking you as Jane Doe. With all you have ahead of you, trust me, you don’t want to go in the system Jane Doe.”

I had no idea what time it was, but I’d been in this room forever. I was cold, starving, and I’d cried so hard, I think I was dehydrated. At this point, I was truly willing to tell them anything—where and when I lost my virginity, where and when Bradley Cole lost his (I’d read the details in a letter from his high school sweetheart when she tried to start things up again after seeing him at their ten-year reunion), or even about the time I’d locked up my old nemesis Danielle Sparks for no good reason other than I couldn’t stand her.

I’d spilled all the beans, told them everything, yet not one of them believed me and there was no one to back me up.

I took one last huge breath. “What is it, exactly, that you’re going to charge me with?” I asked. “I’ve told you who I am, why I’m here, and where I got the casino chips. If someone who looks like me shot Mr. Sanders, you need to be looking at his wife. I work here, and I’m a former police officer.”

I searched the faces for any traces of consideration, and found none.

The Gaming Commission representative who’d been manning the door the entire time crossed the room slowly, bent over, and put the tip of his nose almost up against mine. “One last chance,” he said. “Why did you shoot Richard Sanders?”

“I didn’t.”

“Where did you get them?”

“Get
what
?”

“The counterfeit chips.”

“Jeremy Covey’s desk! Call him!”

“Jeremy Co
ven
is unavailable.”

“Ask George Morgan.”

“There is no George Morgan.”

“Morgan George!” I shouted. “Morgan George!”

“Who’s deceased!”

“What about Mary and Maxine? The little old ladies in the casino?”

“We’ve looked ten times. There are no little old ladies!”

Was it Sunday? The Lord’s Day? Holy shit!

“Do you see a pattern here?” He stood, towering over me. “There is no Marci Dunlow, no Davis Way, no little old ladies, no George Morgan, no Morgan George! There is no cab! We finally heard back from Bradley Cole, and he said he thought his renter was a woman named Anna Merriweather, who, by the way, DOESN’T EXIST!”

Now a sudden-onset expert at crying, tears dropped off my chin that I didn’t know were coming.

“You have the opportunity to help yourself here if you’ll tell me who you are and where you got the counterfeit chips.”

“From Jeremy Co
ven
’s desk.”

“Before or after you shot Richard Sanders?”

“I. Didn’t. Shoot. Richard. Sanders.”

“Do you think we’re idiots, Miss Doe?”

“At this point,” I screamed, “I do! And stop calling me Jane Doe!”

The man shook his head in a tsk-tsk way, and motioned someone in at the same time. The door cracked open, and a female police officer entered.

“Stand up,” my interrogator demanded.

I couldn’t. There was no way my legs were going to hold me.

The female officer took two steps and helped me by jerking my shoulder out of its socket, wrenching me upright.

“Jane Doe, you’re under arrest—” Jane’s Miranda Rights followed.

I launched into a panicked screaming blubber. “My father! Why won’t you call my father?”

Gaming Commission Two looked straight at me as I was being cuffed. “The chief of police in Pine Apple,” he said, “who you claim is your father, has had a massive heart attack, and that, apparently, has made the whole town unavailable.”

The room began spinning around me. I heard a woman’s piercing scream, then everything went black.

TWENTY

It might have been hours, it could have been days later, when I woke up cuffed and shackled to a hospital bed. My left side was cuff-free, but connected to hospital apparatus. I was alone in the room, but saw an officer stationed outside of the door.

I turned, as best I could maneuver, toward the wall.

“Daddy.” I said the word, but no sound came out.

There was no clock, the television screen was dark, and nothing was within my reach, not even a sip of water. My inclination was to scream, but I stifled that into the thin pillow. I stared at the wall, putting the pieces of the nightmare together, and I stayed that way, frozen, until a nurse, accompanied by a female police officer, entered the room.

“Oh,” the nurse said and stopped short of the bed, the officer almost piling into her. “You’re awake.”

The officer turned away and spoke into her headset.

“Do you have any information about my father?” I begged her.

A look of confusion slid down her face, and she began flipping through the chart she was holding, as if the answer might be in there. “Your
father
?” she asked.

The officer’s raspy voice filled the room. “No chitchat.” She opened the door and stuck her head out to speak to the other officer, as the nurse began fiddling with the IV in my left arm, then strapped a blood pressure cuff around my bicep.

The nurse, probably in her late forties, had an ample midsection along with ample everything else, and she hugged my arm into her warm middle while she pumped the bulb of the blood-pressure gauge.