Boy, did I tiptoe out.
I made my way to the bunkroom for the first time on wobbly knees and stopped short, because my heart, which had barely recovered from finding Bianca passed out, broke in two. Against the back wall in a clear garment bag was a wedding dress. A wedding dress I knew. It was hanging forlornly on a silver hook in the bunkroom of the thirteenth floor of the Bellissimo. I scanned the room and found Baylor, who’d been watching me. He said, over the communication Storm he was tucking in, “She said choose.” He stood. Hands on hips. “She said it was the storm or her.”
The edge of the bunk bed I was closest to, full of a Storm I didn’t know, caught me. Hurricane Kevin had claimed three lives, almost four, fifty million dollars, the next five-to-ten of Jug’s life, and Baylor’s marriage.
I was ready for the storm to pass.
FIFTEEN
The only food we deemed safe enough to consume was what my mother had dragged from our twenty-ninth-floor home. Filet could easily have boobytrapped the entire Disaster food supply before he made his getaway, so on top of everything else, we had starvation to worry about. From the small suite kitchen behind the vault door, No Hair stood at the two-burner stove and made eighteen grilled cheese sandwiches. Two entire loaves of bread and every slice of Bex and Quinn’s Organic Valley American Singles. Baylor ran off with six. Fantasy’s sons ate another six. I hadn’t eaten a bite since Fantasy and I created our should-be-famous chipotle chicken cheddar wraps the day before—I broke line behind her after a quick cold shower and a much needed change of clothes. I ate two grilled cheese sandwiches in competitive-eating time, washing them down with a gallon of coffee.
I had to stay awake.
Fantasy, leaning against the small kitchen counter, had a sandwich in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. She’d gone to the control room, where we still had satellite internet—satellite internet I’d probably spend the rest of the day and into the night using to chase down Filet, Broom, Jug, and our money—to look up information on the effects of mixing Ambien and Xanax.
“It says here,” she said through melted cheese, “don’t mix them because they do the same thing. They’re both central nervous system depressants. The general advice is take one or the other. If Filet dumped all the Ambien and all the Xanax, depending on their weight and how much they ate, it’s entirely possible some of our lasagna lunchers won’t wake up for ten to twelve, maybe even twenty hours.” She took another bite. “I was there.” Another bite. “That lasagna was devoured.” She chewed. “The Storms who’d been cutting trees?” She bit. “Three huge servings each.” She chewed. “Nighty-night.” She swallowed.
I wondered if there was any leftover lasagna.
I wouldn’t mind ten to twelve, maybe even twenty hours of nighty-night.
When I woke up, I’d have survived the storm.
Fantasy dropped the drug results down on the counter. “How does she talk her doctors into giving her seven hundred pills at a time?”
“It’s a hundred at a time,” I said, “and I don’t know.”
“Test, test.” It was Baylor. He’d reactivated the two-way radios.
Fantasy pushed the green button on hers. “You got it, Baylor. On your way in here, stop by the bunkroom and get a radio off a sleeper. Davis lost hers.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m good. Ask him if Bradley’s still on the phone with Mr. Sanders and ask him what the weather radar looks like.”
“I saw it a minute ago,” she said. “It’s raining.”
Baylor walked in and landed an unwelcome radio in front of me. I pushed it aside. “Is Bradley still on the satellite phone?”
“He is.”
“What does the radar look like?”
“Purple,” he said.
Purple. Purple wasn’t good.
“The whole Gulf,” Baylor said, “purple.”
“It’s raining,” Fantasy said. “Water is falling out of the sky. The ducks and frogs love it. It’s fine.”
The four of us settled around the table.
“So your girl almost drowned?”
No Hair was wearing a fresh, louder, and brighter, if that was even possible, Aloha shirt. I needed sunglasses. I had to close one eye to look at him, and I wanted very much to close the other eye too. “I’m not sure I’d call her my girl, but yes, she almost drowned.”
“She’s your girl forever now, Davis,” Baylor said. “After you save someone’s life, they owe you theirs.”
“Pass,” I said. “Besides. I’ve had her forever already.”
“Maybe saving her life released you,” Fantasy said.
It was a pleasant thought, if a pleasant thought could be had during a hurricane, quickly dispelled by the unpleasant two-way radios.
“Yoo-hoo!” It was our Weather Girl Jenn. “It’s time!”
Jenn Chojnacki was about to make her television debut.
Fantasy stood. “This should be cute.”
We filed down the Disaster hall to the great room to watch, me behind No Hair. I stayed close to him because his shirt was helping me stay awake. We poked our heads in the door to see Jenn perched on a barstool in front of the slot machines, all live and scrolling animated pineapple screen savers. Jenn was wearing a short, silver, sequined bodycon dress, barely street legal, and there was no way she had anything on underneath it, because there wasn’t enough underneath to accommodate anything. The cordless microphone was in her lap, which was to say on her bare legs. She’d paired her two ounces of sequins with red cowboy boots that looked too big, and she was wearing all the makeup in the world on her face. All the makeup on Disaster, for sure. Her blonde hair was stiff, spiked, and spilling from the crown of her head in a palm-tree ponytail. Beside the barstool was a makeshift orange-crate cradle lined with bath towels. In the cradle, a very sleepy pig. A pig whose face had been washed. A pig wearing a silver headband with a giant silver bow between her ears. All four pig feet still straight in the air.
“Wow,” Fantasy said. “Who dressed her?”
“Which one?” Baylor asked. “The girl or the pig?”
“Either,” No Hair said. “Both.”
I knew exactly who’d dressed them.
It was a look I’d seen off and on since Kindergarten.
Captain Sandy Marini had a bulky studio camera propped on her right shoulder. She turned around. “Oh, hey.” The bright camera light hit us in our faces.
We ducked.
“It’s not on.” Sandy checked her watch. “We don’t go live for three minutes.”
Danielle Sparks came stomping through the kitchen door wearing all the accessories we’d seen on the Weather One producer—she must have raided him in his sleep. Her storm-runoff matted hair was stuffed into his Weather One ballcap, the bill pulled low to cover her bruised forehead, and atop the cap, a headset with a wrap microphone. She had a Weather One ID lanyard hanging from around her neck, and in one hand, the producer’s clipboard, in the other, she was wielding a black Sharpie.
Bradley joined us at the doorway. “Oh, boy.”
“Did you talk to Pine Apple?”
“I did.” He kissed the top of my head. “The girls are doing fine, your mother is cooking a pot roast, our dog is chasing their cat, and my mother is in the next town over with FEMA.”
“Camden?” There were several next-towns-over from Pine Apple. “Why?”
“Throat drops.”
Knowing my father in Pine Apple would be Bradley’s second satellite phone call after Mr. Sanders in Norway, it had passed through my brain during my third rectangle of grilled cheese to slip him a note. I didn’t, because my grilled cheese sandwich would’ve been gone when I got back, but if I had slipped him a note, it would’ve said, “Ask FEMA to nose around Jug’s trailer.” I nixed the idea for two reasons: one, I didn’t want to ask Daddy to nose around Jug’s trailer
, because he was busy with his granddaughters, and I also didn’t want to explain to him why I’d asked FEMA, instead of asking him. And the second reason I didn’t was because my ex-ex-mother-in-law, Bea Crawford, who lived in the trailer across the street from Jug, would unload double-digit rounds from her twelve-gauge shotgun into FEMA, then my father, who was busy with his granddaughters, would have to clean up the mess.
“What did Richard have to say?” No Hair asked.
“What could he say?” Bradley answered the question with one of his own. “I’ll lay it out for Gulf Shelter Insurance when their agent wakes up from the lasagna, meet with Gaming to see what the charges and fines are after the storm passes, and the minute the phones are back up, I’m firing the employment agency.”
(What employment agency?) “What employment agency?” I asked.
Before he could answer, Danielle stomped through the rec room. “You.” She aimed her Sharpie at Emergency. “Get over here.” She redirected the Sharpie to a chair in front of Weather Girl Jenn, who was tightening her palm-tree ponytail to the point of lifting her eyebrows another inch.
Emergency had been recruited for cue-card duty. It looked like the formerly underweared gaming agents had been recruited to write the cue cards. One was poring over the printout of the email Weather One sent, the other transferring the information in large block letters to blank paper, then passing them to Emergency.
Danielle, after all she’d been through, was having the time of her new-lease-on life, directing the weathercast in ripped-to-shreds, filthy-beyond-belief jeans, a men’s flannel shirt over a fifteen-year-old Pine Apple High t-shirt that had barely survived CPR, and she was barefoot. She couldn’t have cared less.
“LIGHTS!”
She was surely heard over the storm and across three counties.
“CAMERA! ACTION! THREE! FOUR! ONE!”
The spotlight on the camera immediately caught every sequin of Jenn Chojnacki’s silver bodycon dress, turning the great room into a discotheque.
Jenn froze.
Her mouth dropped open, her eyes grew saucer wide, she went limp on the barstool, and one of her cowboy boots slid off her foot and clunked to the floor.
Danielle, between cameraman Sandy and cue-card Emergency, flailed her arms wide enough to land a jet.
Jenn Chojnacki had yet to blink.
The producer’s satellite phone, hooked on Danielle’s filthy jeans, rang.
She grabbed and blindly threw it behind her head, wedding-bouquet style.
Lucky me, I caught it.
“Answer it,” Fantasy whispered.
“I’m not answering it.” I hot-potato threw it to Baylor.
Who answered it.
We could hear Joe Blain screaming through the small speaker.
Jenn Chojnacki had stopped breathing and she’d lost her other boot.
“Hey, you!” Baylor snapped his fingers at one of the Storm-suited gaming agents, then mouthed, “Get her a drink.”
The gaming agent drew a very blank look.
Baylor tipped his head back, held a crooked hand above his open mouth, and mimed guzzling—gluck, gluck, gluck.
The gaming agent jumped up and grabbed the first bottle he found. Jim Beam. The bottle was bigger than Jenn Chojnacki’s dress. He leaned, so as to stay out of the camera’s eye, and reached a white arm out to pass the bourbon to Miss Stage Fright.
I’d seen that same move on surveillance video. The white-sleeved arm that opened our dungeon security door the morning before, giving the fake officer entrance, while Fantasy and I were one level above dropping the slot machines.
It was a Storm arm in the surveillance shot.
Was it Filet’s? Or Broom’s?
I needed to be in the control room at the computers, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the broadcasting fiasco.
Jenn Chojnacki, still gape-mouthed and staring straight into the camera, twisted off the lid, tipped back the Jim Beam bottle, took a long pull, and fell off the barstool backwards for her efforts. She landed on the great room floor in front of the megatower slot machines with a thud, legs spread in a wide V, bare feet flailing. The cordless microphone rolled across the floor.
Danielle threw her hands in the air, stomped forward, and stood in front of the barstool. She took a deep breath. One of the previously-underweared gaming agents retrieved the microphone from the floor and passed it to her.
Oh, no. No, no, no.
Fantasy hid behind a hand. Baylor dropped his shoulders, hid his face, and shook the way people do before they laugh so hard they can’t breathe. No Hair turned around—he couldn’t watch. Bradley said, “This can’t be happening.”
It was.
“Hey,” she said to one hundred million people. “I’m Danielle. I’m from Pine Apple, Alabama.” She pointed a finger at the camera. “And let me get this out of the way real quick.” She stabbed her finger at the camera. “I’m coming for you, Jug Dooley. You better run.”
Both satellite phones started ringing, Disaster’s and Weather One’s.
“This is my pig, Bacon.”
Sandy leaned hard right for a closeup of Bacon sawing logs in her orange crate. Behind Danielle, Jenn Chojnacki pulled herself up, then sat crisscross applesauce, one hundred million viewers getting a very good look at her dayglo orange bikini undies, then batted for the Jim Beam bottle.
“So this hurricane.” Danielle kicked the barstool out of her way, shuffled, shot a hip out, propped a fist on it, then ripped the Weather One cap off her drowned-rat head. The chaos that was her hair escaped and the bedlam that was her forehead took center stage. “The hurricane? I was in it. You want to know about the hurricane? You’re looking at it.”
Emergency shook a sheet of paper to get Danielle’s attention.
Danielle grabbed it, squinted, then threw it down.
“It’s bad,” she said to the camera.
Emergency passed her a second sheet of paper. She squinted harder. She threw it down.
“It’s real bad,” she said to the camera.
Emergency passed her a third piece of paper she examined, turned upside down, then dropped. Jenn Chojnacki caught it as it floated by.
“Wind shears.” Jenn tipped the bottle back.
“Wind shears!” Danielle repeated to her Super Bowl-sized audience. “Did you hear that?” She lunged at the camera. “We have wind shears!”
“High pressure.” Jenn read a piece of paper on the floor to her left, then took another swig.
“High pressure!” Danielle told the camera. “Did you hear that? High pressure!”
“Upper level forces.” Jenn found another piece of the weather puzzle, then took a long pull of the whiskey.
“Upper level faces!” Danielle yelled in America’s face.
“Forces.” Jenn swung the Jim Beam. “Forces.”
“FORCES!” Danielle screamed at the camera.
Bradley took a step back into the hall. “I can’t watch this.”
I was having a hard time watching it too, because having known Danielle Sparks my entire life, I’d just learned she couldn’t read.
Had Danielle been so bad to me all those years, or was it the other way around?
* * *
The good news came from the forecast only we were privy to, because the Super Bowl-sized audience’s takeaway from the live Bellissimo broadcast wasn’t the weather. Collectively, we tried to decipher the weatherspeak in the email from Weather One Central. Hurricane Kevin, having been met by an upper-level high pressure system from the north, was still wreaking havoc over open waters, giving up nothing in intensity, but stalling because of the high-pressure pushback. That meant two to three additional hours of outer bands of rain for us, and with them, an extended timeline for landfall, somewhere between eight and nine o’clock. And if we were interpreting what we
were reading correctly, there was a sliver of hope the direct hit would be west of Biloxi, good news for us as well, but not as good as the additional-hours-before-landfall news. We would need the time because of the bad news. From my father.
We were around a cafeteria table, including the pig in her orange-crate cradle, partially cleared of doped lasagna by the formerly-underweared gaming agents. The satellite phone didn’t have caller ID. When it buzzed in front of Bradley, he hit the speaker button.
“Brad.” It was my father, sounding way too cheery, given the circumstances. “Is Butter Bean with you?”
Every electron in my body fired. My father had called me Sweet Pea all my life. He’d never once called me Butter Bean. Bradley caught my eye. He heard it too.
I swallowed hard. “I’m right here, Daddy.”
“I told you I’d call,” Daddy said.
He hadn’t. He’d asked me to stay in touch with him.
I ripped the Sharpie from Danielle’s hand and landed it on a sheet of weather forecast. On it, I wrote SOMETHING’S WRONG.
Jug Dooley? Was he back in Pine Apple? Had he snapped?
“Are the girls okay?” It took everything I had to keep my voice steady.
“They’re fine and keeping their Papa busy. I can’t do much else when all my girls are with me.”
Daddy was telling me something was very wrong in Pine Apple, it involved my entire family, and not only could he not resolve it without compromising them, he couldn’t speak freely either.
Double Agent Page 16
