Double strike a davis wa.., p.11
Double Strike (A Davis Way Crime Caper Book 3), page 11
“Check me over there, Baylor.”
Baylor hung out the passenger window. “You’re good.”
When we took exit 128 to Pine Apple, I said, “Listen, Baylor. It’d probably be best if I don’t run into anyone I know. Considering.”
He surveyed me and nodded agreement. “So you don’t want to try to ditch this car?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Smerle T.’s office was above the hardware store on Main Street. We took the back roads, which weren’t really roads at all. We took the back paths, and got rid of what was left of the paint on the Town Car. I rolled it to a stop behind the hardware store, then pulled the wet glob of Roll Tide poncho back on. So no one would recognize me. “See that car?” I pointed to a red Dodge Dart a hundred yards away. “There’s no doubt the keys are in it. Get all our stuff, get it running, aim it at Main Street,” I pointed, “and I’ll be back in three minutes.”
I climbed the back steps and quietly entered through the law office’s kitchenette. Smerle T.’s part-time secretary and full-time mistress JoElla was in the front room watching “The Young and The Beautiful” on an old portable television that looked like it weighed forty pounds. It had long silver antennas.
“JoElla? It’s Davis Way. Where’s Smerle T.?”
She didn’t tear her eyes away from the grainy daytime drama. “He’s at your daddy’s office,” she said, “complaining about you.”
“Did he leave anything for me?”
“He said,” and here she finally turned, got one look at me, and said, “holy crap Jesus, Davis. What happened to you?”
“Where’s that file?”
Her mouth hung wide open as she admired my new fugitive look.
There was a single stapled stack of papers on the desk between JoElla and the television. I took a giant leap, snatched it, then bolted for the back door. “Good to see you, JoElla!”
“He said you couldn’t take it, Davis!” She was on my heels. “Gimme that back here before I call the police!”
I turned at the kitchenette door and let her think about how stupid that was. Her brow furrowed as she considered calling my father to have him arrest me for taking my own divorce file from my lawyer’s office. I held it out. “Here, JoElla. Take it. But I’m calling Dusty.” Everyone in Wilcox County knew JoElla was doing everything but secretarial work for Smerle T. Except Jo Ella’s husband Dusty.
She looked like she’d seen a ghost. She reached for my arm instead of the file. “One of your eyes is purple, Davis,” she whispered.
Baylor revved the engine. I bolted down the rickety steps, poncho flying. JoElla shouted after me, “Smerle T. said if you showed up you couldn’t take that!”
Did he say anything about his car?
* * *
We parked the Dodge Dart at a meter on the street in Camden, a block past the courthouse.
The same court clerk was behind the desk who’d been there when Bradley and I were here Monday. She took note of our disheveled appearances, stretched her arms wide, then flipped them in a way that hyperextended her elbows. The noise was excruciating. “Rough day?” She rolled her arms back into their sockets.
I passed her the Eddie the Ass paperwork I’d cooked up, plus the divorce decree I’d swiped from Smerle T.’s office, and she studied it all way too long. So long, that I thought I’d lived through being gunned down in Lickskillet only to be locked up in Camden. I really should consider staying out of Alabama altogether and let things cool off. My phone buzzed. I gave it a glance. “Excuse me,” I said. “I need to step out in the hall and take this.” I gave Baylor a stay-put-and-watch-her look.
“Daddy.”
“Honey.” Daddy sounded tired. “Are you alive?”
“Yes.”
“Long story?”
“Yes.”
“When are you going to bring Smerle T.’s car back, and do you want me to send this one you left to Montgomery for processing?”
“I’ll get Smerle’s car back to him as soon as I can,” I said. “Tell him I said sorry, and don’t send the whole Town Car to the crime lab. If you could, Daddy, pull a slug out of it and have them run it.” It’s a miracle upon a miracle that I wasn’t able to reach up and pull a slug out of the back of my head for processing.
“Where were you, Sweet Pea?” Daddy asked. “What in the world happened?”
I glanced up and down the hall for nosy people, then through the doorway where the clerk was still studying the paperwork with a stern look on her face. “I was in DeKalb County, Daddy, and those people are crazy as all get-out.”
“Davis, stay out of DeKalb County starting right now.”
(No shit.)
“There’s a DEA task force sting going down there, right outside of Fort Payne, and you don’t want mixed up in that.”
No, I did not.
Wait a minute.
Had a division of the United States Federal Government just about killed me and Baylor?
“Good to know, Daddy. I love you.” I hung up my phone because the clerk had picked up hers. I rushed back in. “Do you have me ready?”
She dropped the phone and gave me the evil eye. “Here’s the problem.” She craned her neck until it clicked. Then the other way. Click, click. “This isn’t the address we sent the notification to. See here?” She flipped two pieces of paper and pushed them to me. “This here says Shady Acres, slip eighteen? But we sent the notice to Shady Acres slip thirty-two. These two should match.” She bounced a finger between the two sheets of paper. “I wonder why they don’t.”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Not a clue.”
“Something tells me you do.” She picked up the forged notice and held it up to the fluorescent lights. My life flashed before my eyes. As it had been doing. All. Day. Long.
“Do you know who lives in slip thirty-two?” she asked.
I do. I certainly do. “No. Not a clue.”
“That’s who got this notice.” She pushed up her sweater sleeves. One at a time. She bent over the counter and got in my face. “And that’s who I need to be talking to. You have whoever lives at this address here give me a ringy-dingy, let that person tell me your husband lived in Alabama at the time of the divorce, and then I’ll try to help you.” She shook the forged document in the forger’s face. “It doesn’t make any sense that the one you’re bringing in here isn’t the one we sent. Where’d you get this?”
I snatched it out of her hands, scooped up my unfinished divorce, and ran before she could study it, or me, one more second.
“What just happened there?” Baylor was on my heels. We were ten feet from the Dodge Dart. “Who lives at the other address?”
“My ex-ex-mother-in-law,” I panted. “Bea.”
* * *
Baylor and I took the back roads from Camden to Biloxi at a clip, tearing through LeMoyne, Saraland, and Pritchard, but backing off when we crossed into Mississippi, because I’d have to jump through too many hoops to get out of a reckless-endangerment-while-driving-a-stolen-car-citation in a state where my daddy wasn’t on the payroll. We made it in the doors of 3B as Fantasy was leaving.
“Oh, holy mother.” Fantasy dropped everything she was holding. “What happened to you two? Baylor, did you beat Davis up?”
“No.”
“Davis, did you beat Baylor up?”
“No.”
“You lost one of your purple contacts.”
“I know.”
Baylor dropped into one of the bean bag chairs. “Those Jennings people are pot farmers, Fantasy. They have a whole mountain of pot. A whole mountain.”
Her eyes popped open in shock, then narrowed in concentration as she thought about it, then the pieces fell into place. “That explains why they’d hire a hooker to babysit their kid.”
Baylor couldn’t make the connection. “How?”
“That stuff kills brain cells, Baylor.”
He tried to look up at his own head.
“Is he lying?” she asked me. “Is there really that much pot?”
“Yes,” I said, “there is.” And Baylor was all but tipped over backwards, still trying to look up at his own head.
“I thought you two went to Pine Apple to get a divorce.”
“We did,” I said.
“How’d that turn out?”
“We’re still married.”
ELEVEN
@LuckyStrikePlayers #StrikePeek @9tonight #You’reGonnaLoveIt! #WaitTillYouSeeTHIS!
* * *
Friday morning all drug farmers, dingbat country lawyers, social media assistants, artillery support, car thieves, and federal agents chasing bananas had to take a breather, because Bianca Sanders was moving out of Jay Leno’s place. Three construction crews working three shifts alongside seven decorators, two project coordinators, four home stagers, and a representative from Sotheby’s in Santa Fe had, in just minutes outside of a week, put the Sanders home back together again.
It’s truly amazing what money can buy.
Physically, Bianca didn’t move a thing but her lazy butt to a limo, which took her to New Orleans for the day, away from the stress of the move, while Fantasy and I were “entrusted with her beloved possessions” and charged with “everything in its place by three chop chop”, and we were babysitting the dogs, because their trainers, handlers, and groomers were upstairs installing their new rooms. I ordered them each a T-bone steak, then lured them into a closet. For their own safety. Lest they get accidentally packed.
“Shouldn’t we cut them up?” Fantasy asked.
“The steaks?”
“Yes, Davis. The steaks.”
“That’s half the fun for dogs, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Those steaks are bigger than those dogs.”
“It’ll be fine.” I told them to take naps after lunch, they growled at me, I closed the door.
We wandered around packing everything that wasn’t nailed down.
“Let me ask you something, Davis. Shouldn’t this be Jimmy Fallon’s place now?”
We had a canvas laundry cart the size of a refrigerator in the middle of the room and we were lobbing things into it willy-nilly. “Yes.” I sailed a hardback Mommy Porn how-to reference manual of Bianca’s through the air and got two points. “To hell with Jay Leno.”
“Davis!”
“He’s moving on to another stage in his life, Fantasy. And in doing so, he has to give up everything? Even this place?”
“First of all,” she stretched her back, “this suite will forever be known as Jay Leno’s place, okay? Are you happy now? And second of all, are you still singing that song? No one is discriminating against you and I wasn’t discriminating against Jay Leno.”
I had a Louis Vuitton tote in my hand, probably worth a million dollars, stuffed with two million dollars’ worth of dog clothes that had just been returned from the cleaners laundered, ironed, folded, and labeled in teeny boxes. “I honestly think the minute I get married my job is going to get to this right here.” I shook the Louis Vuitton. “I will be in charge of the dog clothes. I’ll be put out to pasture just like Jay Leno. I’ll be nothing but Bianca’s slave and you’ll be mine.”
“I’m already yours,” she said. “Watch this.” Fantasy walked to a house phone and ordered us a pitcher of mimosas and several trays of food. “Whatever looks good. We’re in the mood for brunch. And chocolate,” she said. “Chocolate brunch.”
She dialed housekeeping next. She had them pick up the laundry bin stuffed full of Bianca’s trinkets and sex manuals and deliver it all upstairs to the newly remodeled Sanders residence with a note to the Sotheby’s person: Bianca said put all this up where it goes.
We spent the next several hours at Jay Leno’s indoor pool.
“These mimosas are all orange juice.” Fantasy polished off another one.
“We’d better order more.” I did the honors.
“We need our vitamin C.”
Two pitchers of mimosas later, the subject rolled back around to my irrational wedding anxiety.
“You promise me, Davith?” Fantasy was propped on an elbow, stretched out on one of Jay Leno’s oversized pool loungers, when her chin fell off her fist. She stayed there, horizontal, and asked, “This has nothing to do with Bwadly? Nothing’sh happened?”
“Crush my eyes.” I was deep in another one of Jay’s oversized loungers. “Poke my heart out.”
“Then whass the problem?”
The problem was nothing and the problem was everything.
We may have accidentally dozed off when our phones woke us almost two hours later, dinging with regularly scheduled Strike It Rich propaganda, this time a mini movie, made up entirely of photobombs of almost-naked waitresses, courtesy of Little Sanders.
“Are those my boobs?” Fantasy was still on her back holding the phone above her head. “This is a good movie, Davis. X-rated, but good.”
“Thank you.” I eyed the three empty mimosa pitchers. “Did we drink all that?”
Fantasy was gently prodding about her head. “My face is numb.”
“What time is it?”
“Two o’clock.”
We both bolted up and said it together. “The dogs!”
I peeked in the closet, then slammed the door closed.
“Davis. Are those dogs dead?”
I couldn’t blink. Or breathe. “Not too much.”
She pushed me aside, cracked the door, and peeked for herself. She closed it as quickly as I had, then turned to me. “You’re bathing them.”
When Bianca found us at Jay’s indoor pool, she clapped gloved hands to her face. “My babies! Swimmy-swimmy! Puppy stroke!”
We called housekeeping about the closet.
* * *
Then I went swimmy-swimmy.
My hair caught fire. I jumped into the Bellissimo swimming pool to put it out in front of five hundred people, several dozen of them representing news outlets, so Bianca Sanders’s humiliation was well documented. GulfCoastNews(dot)com was first, posting the video of me tearing into the night with a foot of flames trailing from my head, arcing through the air in a cocktail dress and a perfect cannonball, then landing in the deep end of the Bellissimo swimming pool with a great big splash. It got seven thousand views on YouTube before we could get it down. I missed it at the time, because I was in the pool putting my hair out, but my Amy Medina phone had received instructions from Hashtag Elspie, somewhere close enough to know what was going on but not at the party, to Snapchat a photo only, because we wanted to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. (#Snapchat?)
The first problem was the dress Bianca had me in. She’s so cutting edge, she has to have it right off the runway, and I pray the day doesn’t come when naked is the new black, because she’ll have me going out in public naked. When I asked her to reconsider the dress, which was hideous and surely already a fashion don’t, she said, “No. YOLO, David.”
(It’s Davis. And what she constantly missed was that she wasn’t taking fashion risks based on the fact that she only lived once, when she was, in fact, living a double wardrobe life—her own, which was almost solid black, and through me, which was almost solid ridiculous.)
The dress was a peacock blue number. The fabric was a metallic Jacquard, and very little of it. It had peek-a-boo cutouts everywhere, so the only parts of my body that were covered were the ones required by law. The dress had no sides. Or front. Or back. And I had no leverage with her at the time, because she was aggravated with me already for being late. Any other time, I could go downstairs and change into something fit for public consumption from the stash of Bianca clothes I kept in the office, but there wasn’t a stash. She’d confiscated it days ago.
“If you’d been here on time, David, I might have considered it. Now it’s too late for me to choose something else; I’m no longer in the mood. Wear the Giambattista, and right this minute, before I’m so late Richard gets upset with me.”
Bianca Casimiro Sanders believed in arriving fashionably late or not at all, so her giving me a lecture on tardiness when I’d run in panting and apologizing was absurd. I sat through the sermon—she paced back and forth in front of me in a silk lounging getup covered in black feathers—wondering where the logic was in wasting what little time I didn’t have to get ready screaming at me.
“Are you even listening to me, David?”
“It’s Davis.”
“An hour of my life is lost waiting on you.”
I was twenty minutes late. Some days, like today, when I have three pitchers of mimosas for breakfast, I lose track of time.
She made several other moot points, and I wondered, for the millionth time, how Mr. Sanders stayed married to her. Her father owned this casino, and that had to be a big part of it, and then there was Little Sanders, the teenage terror tie that binds. From the outside looking in, though, it appeared that Mr. Sanders genuinely loved Bianca. He’d certainly put up with enough of her loose interpretation of their marital vows through the years. And they touched each other often, subtle stuff. He was often amused by her behavior. The rest of us weren’t.
“My time gone.” Her hand fluttered through the air. “Never to be retrieved.”
I took my lumps.
“If I start smoking again and it’s your fault,” she threatened, “you will be the one going under the knife. Not me.”
See? Not only is it not funny, it makes no sense, but Mr. Sanders would turn his head and smile at that.
