The power flickered four times, sizzled, popped, then died.
A hand found mine. My husband’s.
“Generator?” It was Sandy, asking in the pitch dark.
“Disabled when we’re on lockdown,” Bradley said.
Thank goodness for standard-issue service Maglites.
Sandy’s beam followed Danielle, up and thumping away.
“There’s nowhere to go, Danielle.” My voice echoed through the black casino. “You might as well come with us.”
“Cell towers are already down,” Emergency said. “We have no service.”
“Let’s go downstairs,” Bradley said. “We’ll be safer underground.”
Emergency lifted the trapdoor slowly, then aimed his Maglite at the narrow wooden steps.
“Danielle! You’d better get back here,” I yelled. “I’m counting to three. If you’re not here, we’re going downstairs without you, locking the door behind us, and leaving you in the dark casino alone. During a hurricane.”
* * *
We cleared the slot machine graveyard and were single file through what felt like a cave, making our way to the holding cells and the exit behind them, when Bradley’s and my two-way radios blared.
“David. David? DAVID!”
Bianca Sanders.
“David?”
“Answer her,” Bradley said. “She won’t stop until you do.”
“Bianca?” I said. “You need to change channels.”
“I’ve had quite enough of your channel business, David. You’re the one who gave me this ancient transmission device. And would it kill you to say hello?”
“Hello, Bianca. You need to change channels.”
“David, I can’t sleep, and my cellular telephone is inoperable. I was speaking to my somnolent therapist, Dr. Carey, and the line went dead. You know her. She has man hands. I need a new telephone.”
“Bianca.” I sighed to beat all sighs. Ever. “You don’t need a new telephone. All cell service is down right now. You’re speaking to me over a two-way radio. Thirty people are listening to you because you’re on the emergency channel.”
“And what channel would you have me on, David? This is an emergency. I prefer to sleep through vicious weather and I can’t.”
“Take one of your pills.”
“I can’t find them.”
“Count sheep.”
“David, are you listening to me?”
“Everyone is listening to you, Bianca.” And my name is Davis.
“I’ve misplaced my Ambien.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Dr. Carey told me to take to Xanax instead, and I’ve misplaced my Xanax. I need you to go upstairs.”
“Does she get that it’s noon and there’s a hurricane?” Sandy whispered.
“She doesn’t care,” Bradley said.
From the radio, we heard, “I’ll go.”
“Who was that?” Sandy asked.
Bradley and I said it on the same beat, “Chip Chapman.”
Sandy snapped her fingers. “I need his autograph.”
I pushed the green button. “Bianca, I can’t go upstairs. The power is out.”
“It most certainly is not.”
“You’re on Disaster,” I said. “You’re on generator power. The rest of the building has lost power and there is no elevator service to your home.” If, with whatever mayhem the storm was wreaking, she had a home left.
“Is something wrong with your legs, David? Have you heard of stairsteps?”
Head Storm Mark Perry jumped in. “If you all don’t mind…”
“I most certainly do mind, young man. You’re rudely interrupting a private conversation between the owner of this casino and her assistant. What is your name?”
Nothing from Mark Perry.
I’d have been happy to point out I wasn’t Bianca’s assistant, but instead I thought it best to (shut her up) try to solve her immediate problem. So I asked thirty people, “Where were your sleeping pills when you saw them last?”
She told thirty people, “On my nightstand. Along with my Klonopin, my Valium, my Xanax, and my LaViv.”
“What’s LaViv?” Sandy whispered.
“Wrinkle pills,” I whispered back.
“Bianca,” I said, “you need Miller. He’s the Storm medic.”
“Go for Miller.”
“Miller,” I said, “do you have anything that could help Bianca sleep?”
“Excuse me, David. Don’t speak of me as if I’m not here.”
“Excuse me, Bianca.” It was No Hair. “Do you understand you’re talking over an open channel? Everyone here is listening?”
“Well,” Bianca said, “can someone listening go to my home for my Ambien? Raucous weather makes me sleepy.”
“Then why doesn’t she go to sleep?” Sandy asked.
I pressed the green button. “Bianca? Could you please change the channel on your radio?”
“Why, David?” she asked. “So you can ignore my pleas for help elsewhere?”
“That’s it.”
We had no idea who barked it—male, gruff, quick and clipped—but our two-way radios died.
We were in a hallway of the dark dungeon beneath the casino with a storm raging above and all around us with absolutely no communication.
Honestly, I was a little relieved to be free of the two-way radio.
Sandy and her Maglite led, Emergency and his Maglite brought up the rear, Bradley and I were in the middle, Danielle between us. Single file, we batted our way to the casino drunk tank.
Sandy trained her Maglite on a metal chute in our path. “Watch your heads.”
We wove around it.
Emergency asked what it was.
“The main laundry chute,” Bradley said.
Finally, we passed the dark interview rooms in front of the drunk tank. We shuffled in and found seats on the cots Eddie the Idiot and Danielle spent Wednesday night on, and I was so tired, I didn’t even care that I might be sitting where he’d slept.
“What now?” Emergency asked.
“We wait for a break in the storm and make a run for it through the back door,” Bradley said. Which must have sounded like a good idea to Danielle. Except for the wait-for-a-break-in-the-storm part. The holding cell door clanked shut, followed by the pounding of footsteps running down the hall for the exit door.
Danielle locked us in the drunk tank.
I’d no sooner sat for what felt like the first time since my feet hit the floor dark and early that morning than I was up again. Fists wrapped around cell bars, I yelled at Danielle at the top of my lungs, something I’d spent way too much of my life doing. “Danielle, get back here! There’s nowhere to go until the storm lets up!”
* * *
We were armed. We shot our way out.
We had no communication, but we still had flashlights.
I knew the layout, where we were and the general direction we were headed, as did Bradley, and to a lesser extent, Sandy. Emergency was lost.
“Could someone—?”
Bradley used as few words as possible to explain we were on our way to the door that led to the concrete tunnel parking pad used by Gulfcoast Laundry Services, Banks Security, and Biloxi PD.
“Danielle?” I yelled in the dark. “Stop right where you are.”
“If the drive goes from above ground to below,” Emergency said, “wouldn’t it be almost vertical? What’s the slope?”
“Twenty percent,” Bradley said. “It’s steep.”
“And that’s our way out?” Emergency asked. “Climbing a concrete hill through raging rain? Does the parking pad have a water runoff system? Will it not be overwhelmed with rain water?”
“It has a water pump system, and hopefully it’s not overwhelmed
yet,” Bradley said. “If it is, we have a much larger problem. If she manages to open the door, she’ll let the water in.”
“DANIELLE! PLEASE! DON’T OPEN THE DOOR!”
“Danielle!” Bradley joined in. “Stop where you are! We have to wait for the rain to slow down!”
“How much farther?” Emergency’s Maglite disappeared down the hall.
Muffled thunder roared above us, then not so muffled, in fact, not muffled at all, as Danielle, trying to make an escape, ignoring every plea of ours to stay on this side of safety, cracked the door. Even underground, the thunder was deafening, flood water rushed down the hall, drenching us to our ankles immediately.
We heard the door slam. And not closed. The door slammed against the back wall, wide open. Soft black daylight filtered down the dark hall, marked by flashes of lightning.
“DANIELLE!” I screamed over the thunder, pushing past Sandy. “DANIELLE!”
Danielle Sparks didn’t answer.
The exterior door, propelled by the force of rushing water, had slammed Danielle into the concrete wall, and from there, she must have fallen facedown into the torrent. Emergency, in a burst of superhero speed, got to her first, but not knowing where he was in the dark monsoon of blinding water coming in the door horizontally, couldn’t locate her. Shoving him aside, it took me (an eternity) at least a full life-or-death minute to find a foot that had to be Danielle’s. The rain was coming at me from all directions. I couldn’t see or hear through it, I tasted asphalt, and odd objects, including something sharp and metal, bobbed and bounced and banged against my legs. Somehow, Bradley hauled Danielle up, passed her off to me and Sandy, and we sloshed and slugged our way down the long, pitch-black, flooded hall with Danielle’s limp body between us, then landed her on a cot in the holding cell, while Bradley and Emergency fought to close the door as the squall raged on.
“She doesn’t have a pulse, Davis.”
I was halfway through thirty chest compressions, counting aloud.
“I just stuck my finger down her throat all the way to her toes, Davis. Her airway isn’t obstructed.”
Twenty-nine, thirty. I shoved Sandy out of my way.
The roaring white noise stopped, a flash of light flickered across Danielle’s gray face, and my subconscious registered that the exit door had closed, trapping the storm out, my husband and Emergency were sloshing our way. I tipped Danielle’s head back, pinched her nose, pulled her chin down and gave her two of my breaths, immediately returning to chest compressions. “One, two—”
I didn’t recognize my own voice.
I felt the pressure of my husband’s strong hand supporting the middle of my back.
Sandy tried to hold my sopping wet hair out of my face.
Emergency held the light.
“—twenty-nine, thirty.”
I tipped Danielle’s head back.
I could taste my own tears.
I cried all over Danielle, passing two more breaths of my life to her.
“Let me take over, Davis.”
I shoved Sandy off with an elbow and stopped counting. “You! Will! Not! Die! On! My! Watch! Danielle! Sparks!—” and it was on my seventh round of CPR, my arms leaden, I could not feel my hands and I could no longer see, that Danielle Sparks’s body bucked, she coughed, choked out rain water, then took a ragged breath.
I held her while she cried.
* * *
We made our way back down the hall, past the laundry chute, through the slot machine graveyard, and up the trap door steps by the glow of one Maglite, the other having been surrendered to the storm, Bradley carrying Danielle in his arms. We took cover in the safest place we could think of, under a craps table in the middle of the casino. We huddled there, sopping wet, shivering, and silent, waiting for a break in the rain when it would be safe enough to try the basement exit again. I didn’t have words for limp Danielle yet, and she hadn’t yet reached the point of being able to communicate with ragdoll me. She flailed, gasped for air, cried out, and fell into me every two minutes.
I knew exactly how she felt.
It had scared me just as much as it had her.
I held Danielle; Bradley held me.
The sounds of the storm and Danielle’s recovery were suddenly interrupted by the police radio we didn’t realize we still had when it dried enough to operate on Sandy’s shoulder. The first crackle came through and someone’s head, not mine, hit the underside of the craps table.
We caught bits of communication, relaying news nowhere nearly as close in urgency to the nightmare we’d just lived through: minor flooding, abandoned vehicles, a chest-pain bus call to one of the shelters, and apparently a woman wouldn’t stop calling about a dog standing in the middle of the road.
“Lady,” the dispatcher said, “if you’re that close to the dog and you can see it through the rain, open your door and call it into your house.”
“But what if it has rabies?”
“That’s your decision to make, lady, but stop calling us about the dog.”
“Landline telephones must be working,” Bradley said.
“If they’re telling someone to open their door, it couldn’t be that bad yet,” Sandy said.
“It’s that bad,” Emergency said.
“You don’t get hurricanes in Jackson,” Sandy told him. “What you saw downstairs was flash flooding. The parking pad is below sea level.”
“Open that door during the wrong rain,” Bradley said, “and water will find its way in.”
Everything about that rain had been wrong.
“How long have we been here?” Sandy asked.
“Ten minutes.” Emergency tried to shake storm water out of his watch. “Or ten hours.” It was a gold-faced Movado. Like the ones we sold in Rocks.
Bradley loosened his grip on me. “I’ll be right back.”
If he left my side, we might all die. I tried to pull his arm off.
“Let me get Danielle water, Davis. I won’t be gone even a minute.”
She spoke for the first time, her voice weak and raspy. “I’ve had enough water.”
We waited out another round of thunder.
“I’m sorry, Davis.”
I didn’t ask for what.
“I’m sorry, Davis, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” each sorry heavier, going further back in time.
“It’s okay, Danielle.”
“And I really do love Eddie.”
Why did she have to drag him into it?
Then the near-death-experience rambling confessions began. Buried in them was her side of the story. Buried in that was the timeline of events.
Jug checked into the Bellissimo at four on Monday afternoon and started drinking Pain Killers at ten after. The next morning, having lost every dime he had at a roulette table, he left the Bellissimo to hock his nose ring. (Who would give Jug a thin dime for his nose ring?) He didn’t make it a block before he was pulled over and thrown in City lockup, where he stayed, until he met a man who said he could release him without charges and would pay him a thousand dollars if he’d somehow find his way back into our lockup and jimmy our dungeon door on his way back to city jail.
“For a thousand dollars,” Danielle said, “Jug would go to jail ten times.”
“Who was the man, Danielle?” Bradley asked.
“What man?”
“The man who released Jug from city jail and offered him a thousand dollars.”
Under her breath, Sandy said, “Ay-yi-yi.”
Emergency shifted positions.
We took a thunder break.
“The man, Danielle.” Bradley gently prodded her along. “Did Jug know him?”
“He was drinking Pain Killers. He didn’t know anybody.”
Bradley tried another question. He asked her who hit her in the head. The head still buried i
n my shoulder.
“The door,” she said.
“Not just now,” I said. “He means yesterday. In the casino. When you and Eddie were on your way to get Bacon in your room.”
“What was the question?” she asked.
“Who hit you,” I said.
“Oh, him? A man.”
“The same man?” Bradley asked.
“As who?” Danielle asked. “I don’t know. I was drinking Zombies.”
We took another thunder break.
When it subsided, I tried again. “What happened when you woke up yesterday?”
She didn’t answer. Probably trying to place yesterday.
“You woke up downstairs in the drunk tank,” I reminded her. “A man let you out.”
“The man who was taking us to get Bacon.”
“Right.”
“He hit me in the head with a gun.”
Ah.
“Who shot him?” I asked.
“I was down,” she said. “I don’t know. But I think he was trying to shoot Eddie.”
Understandable. And he didn’t do a very good job of it.
Bradley asked, “Where is Jug, Danielle?”
“Around here somewhere,” she said, “or maybe not.”
A single clap of thunder shook the walls.
“Danielle?” I had to know. “Did you really lose your memory?”
“A whole day,” she said, “gone. I don’t know if it was the Zombies or the pistol whippin’.”
“Do you remember going to your hotel room with Fantasy to get Bacon?”
“Nope.”
“The medic? Miller?”
“Who?”
We stopped asking questions. It was easier to dig information from her ramblings and piece it together. Ten stormy minutes later, we’d pieced Jug, in his quest for a thousand dollars, lost his swim trunks in our pool, landed in our lockup—there are less offensive ways to land in our lockup—and when his City transfer arrived, jammed our downstairs door lock pad with his nose ring. (Gross.) Back at City, the same man offered to spring Jug a second time, and an additional thousand dollars for the use of his van, three if he’d help load it, and four if he’d sneak back through our building and turn on a tub faucet.
Double Agent Page 14
