Double Agent

by Gretchen Archer

  Daddy was calling for backup.

  “Just checking on you, Butter Bean.”

  “We’re good, Pops. We’ll see you soon.”

  And that was when the Disaster generator went down.

  SIXTEEN

  Sandy Marini stumbled to the Weather One camera and turned on the light. She landed the camera on one end in the middle of the cafeteria table so the light at the other end hit the low ceiling and spread a dim glow around the room.

  Bradley was up and pacing.

  I stared straight ahead trying to imagine what could possibly be happening in Pine Apple.

  Danielle said, “I don’t understand. What’s wrong?”

  No Hair held a hand out to her.

  “What?”

  “The weather phone.”

  She passed it to him, he passed it to Fantasy. “Get the television man on the line.”

  She looked in the direction of the bunkroom, where television man Chip Chapman was out like a light, then back to No Hair, her face a question mark.

  “Atlanta, Fantasy. The man in Atlanta.”

  Thirty seconds later, Joe Blain was on the other end.

  “Do you have hurricane hunters?” No Hair asked.

  “The Air Force has hurricane hunters,” Joe Blain said. “I have hurricane chasers.”

  “Hunters, chasers, I don’t care,” No Hair said. “I need some wings.”

  “Would propeller blades do?”

  “Send them.”

  “What’s in it for me?” Joe Blain asked.

  “Super Bowl numbers.”

  I didn’t catch the rest of the back and forth that ensued, because I was working too hard to catch my breath, but I did catch the gist: Cable One had two all-weather helicopters in the air: one south of the storm off the Florida coastline and the other thirty miles northeast of Biloxi. But all-weather didn’t necessarily mean all kinds of weather, and Cable One couldn’t help us go south, east, or west, because of lingering pop-up thunder cells. Thunder meant lightning and lightning meant strikes. Fly above or around a hurricane? Yes. Thunder and lightning? No. It would take the helicopter eighteen minutes to land on our helipad, it could hold three passengers, and those three had better get ready for the roughest ride of their lives.

  Everyone around me started moving. And fast.

  Sandy Marini passed her Maglite to one of the formerly underweared gaming agents and asked them to take Jenn Chojnacki and let us have the room. Fantasy was in the hallway, yelling at her husband through the open vault door. I caught snips. “—Jackets! Phones! Ammo!—” No Hair left to find his dark way to the control room, specifically the generator behind it. Strobes from cell phone flashlights raced across the walls and ceiling.

  And that was when the two-way radios squawked for the very last transmission before our in-house communication system went the way of the generator and shut down.

  “Hellllooooo?”

  He sounded like a wounded animal.

  The two-ways cut in and out.

  “…to the aaaaallllllls?”

  Make that a dying animal.

  “—the boxeses—”

  Static.

  “—the velvetses—”

  Way more static.

  “—the manses—”

  “What in the world?” Sandy asked.

  “—pleases helpses to Filet, who is—”

  “—his person.” Sandy Marini’s head dropped. Then popped right back up. “Why would he have eaten his own spiked lasagna?”

  Why, indeed.

  But I couldn’t worry about Filet and what he did or didn’t eat, because my husband and I were running for the helipad. Fantasy held open a red raincoat I shoved my arms into, then she landed a Bellissimo tote bag in the middle of my chest. I hugged it and ran. At the end of the concrete tunnel I came to a screeching halt, paralyzed, my husband still running with his hand out, yelling at me to move, but I stayed planted where I was and looked up at the ominous sky. It was just like Fantasy had been saying all along—rain. Water falling from the sky. A lot of water, swirling all around me and pooling at my feet, but water, just the same. I lifted my face to the shower, sending up a prayer for my family’s safety, for ours. Baylor came thundering from behind, scooped me up, threw me over his shoulder, ran, instinctively ducked us clear of the whirring helicopter blades at least ten feet above our heads, then landed me in the open helicopter door. He climbed in behind me. Bradley buckled me. We couldn’t see out for the pitch-black sky and the rain hitting the helicopter from all sides. We took off, straight up, like helicopters do, for our daughters.

  * * *

  It wasn’t first, second, or even fifteenth class.

  It was cargo. And very tight cargo quarters. Probably only different in altitude from Baylor’s, No Hair’s, and July’s wedding dress’s ride in the back of a Humvee the day before. That realization in and of itself was a shock, the timeline of it all, that we were only thirty-some hours in. It felt like thirty-some days. Plus. And to think two days earlier, the words Hurricane Kevin had only been spoken in my presence once that I could remember. There I was, mere hours later, soaked, stuffed in a helicopter, and racing through the driving rain to my family with Hurricane Kevin chasing me.

  While my preference would’ve been for the pilot to keep his eyes on the road, or let the copilot do the talking, it was the man in the left seat at the controls who turned his head all the way around to yell at us, as if we hadn’t been yelled at enough.

  “Last minute evacuation?”

  “Something like that,” Baylor said.

  “The girl,” the bearded pilot said. “The nutcase. Were you all with her when she gave the weather report a little while ago? Was she something else, or what?”

  She was something else, all right. And she was “or what” too.

  “She’s hot,” he said, “like train-wreck hot, the kind of hot you take home, but not to mama.”

  I was sitting right there. Then I was rolling right there. Rolling, pitching, bucking, and for sure, was going to have seat belt bruises.

  “It’s going to be bumpy till we get out of the rain.” He casually grinned, just another day at the office. “Hang on to your hats.”

  Thankfully, he turned his attention back to the controls, because it wouldn’t help at all if we died in a helicopter crash.

  Baylor leaned forward, and he didn’t have to lean far, to tap on the copilot’s shoulder. That one—both men were covered in heavy jackets and headgear; all I noticed was the one on the left had a beard and the one on the right, a mustache—was bent over a tablet featuring our favorite hurricane. “What’s it look like?” Baylor asked.

  The mustache man pushed the microphone of his headset above his head. “Eh,” he said, “I’ve seen better, and I’ve seen worse. We’ve got a strong headwind slowing us down, but the same strong headwind is slowing down Kevin too.”

  So we’d read the weather reports accurately. On that score, anyway.

  I leaned in. I yelled over the roar of the rotors. “How did you see the Weather One report?” I asked. “How were you watching?”

  “We’re under ten thousand feet,” the mustache man said. “We lost cell tower service when we got close to you—” he picked up his phone “—but we’ll get it back any minute. Cell phones, tablets, you can watch a movie if you want.”

  I did not want. Because I was busy digging in the bag Fantasy shoved at me on the way out. At the same time, Bradley pulled his cell phone from his pocket and tried it. Having cell service didn’t help disabled phones. He slid it back in his pocket. I finally wrapped my hand around a phone at the bottom of the bag. It wasn’t mine. It was the phone I’d taken from the dead fake officer’s pocket the day before in the casino. The man who’d let Eddie the Idiot out of the drunk tank. The man who’d browbeaten Danielle with the bu
tt of a pistol. The man who’d left the bloody trail through the casino, bled out at the Day of the Dead slot machines, and was currently on ice.

  I pushed the power button.

  He’d missed nine calls from the same number in and around the time he’d died.

  As soon as I could get Jug Dooley away from my family and in the backseat of a squad car on the way to a state facility, I’d dial the number.

  Baylor leaned over to look. He held his hand out. I passed the phone.

  Ten minutes into the flight, the panic breaths I was sucking in to accompany my panic attacks had slowed to every tenth inhale, and we were almost out of the rain. When we finally cleared it, just north of Mobile, Alabama, and I could see through the windshield, I took comfort in being able to see more than my hand in front of my face, all the way to the ground even. Everything normal below, other than the southbound lanes of I-59 were empty. Aside from that, it looked very much like the lower Alabama as I knew it, and every inch of it took me closer to my daughters and my family.

  Eleven minutes into our flight, we had cell service.

  The mustachioed one asked where, exactly, we were going.

  I leaned up and told him to put us down on the baseball field at Pine Apple High, then gave him sketchy coordinates. It would be a three-quarter-mile race through Alabama woods in what was quickly turning to dusk to get to my parents’ house, but landing anywhere closer would have Daddy’s phone ringing off the hook.

  And all we had going for us was the element of surprise.

  Five minutes later, I learned the surprise wouldn’t be Jug’s.

  It was, in fact, ours.

  Baylor had his phone in one hand and the fake officer’s in the other. He tipped his so we could see it. It was a picture of Laverne Goosed. FEMA.

  “What about him?” Bradley asked.

  Baylor shook the fake officer’s cell phone. “All the missed calls on the dead man’s phone are from him.” He shook FEMA’s picture.

  Daddy hadn’t called for backup with Jug.

  He’d called for backup with FEMA.

  * * *

  We still needed Jug and we needed him first.

  If we could find him, we’d use him as FEMA bait. There were too many ways blasting into my parents’ house full of our children with guns blazing could go tragically wrong. There was only one right way it would go with Jug: FEMA would separate from everyone else to speak to Jug. We found FEMA at the Biloxi police station. He had to be the person who’d let Jug out of Biloxi PD’s lockup twice. He’d want to know—and away from the crowd—why Jug was at the door. Not to mention we needed Jug anyway; his fingerprints were on the cash carts. He might know where the money was. Bottom line, we needed Jug. But first, we’d have to find him. And quickly.

  I dialed my ex-ex-mother-in-law from Baylor’s phone. For one, she lived across the street from Jug. For two, hers was the only non-family Pine Apple number I knew by heart. And it wasn’t that it held a special place in mine, it was that it was impossible to forget. I dialed the area code I’d grown up with, then 666-MELS. As in Mel’s Diner, my ex-ex-in-laws’ restaurant. The worst restaurant in Pine Apple, in Alabama, in America, and on planet Earth.

  “BEA! IT’S DAVIS!”

  “Davis who?”

  I closed my eyes in frustration, immediately lost all equilibrium, so I opened them again quickly to keep my gaze on the horizon. Regardless of what the whirlybird did, I focused on the thin shadowy line of Alabama in the distance.

  “Did you see Danielle on the TV?” Bea asked. “Was she in a wreck? She looks like she’s been in a tornado.”

  “HURRICANE, BEA.”

  “Did you call to argue with me about the weather?” she asked. “What do you want? I’m waiting on Danielle and Bacon to be back on the TV.”

  “I’M CALLING ABOUT JUG.”

  “Where’s Eddie?” Bea asked.

  “ASLEEP. I’M CALLING ABOUT JUG, BEA.”

  “What about him?”

  “IS HE HOME?”

  “Eddie?”

  “JUG, BEA. JUG.”

  “Hold on, nosey.”

  I held on while Bea, without a doubt, waddled to her kitchen window. “Yeah, he’s home. Why are you so interested in Jug? Your husband run off? And now you’re after Jug?”

  It was already taking everything I had to keep it together. Bea was about to be the last straw. Bradley tipped my chin his way. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s just Bea. Everything will be okay.” His pained blue eyes did more to settle me than the horizon. I locked mine with his and used them for a lifeline.

  “GOTTA GO, BEA.”

  We landed twenty-one minutes later, twenty of them debating if we should attempt contact with No Hair and Fantasy. In the end, it was a three-way vote no. One, it would be close to impossible to call, given the limited operable communication device choices they had on Disaster, and two, there was someone there who we didn’t want to hear what we would be calling to say, and we had no way of knowing who would be privy to our conversation. Laverne Goosed in his FEMA jacket left the Bellissimo seven hours earlier. He hadn’t changed the casino lockdown code that trapped us in the casino because all three lockdown devices were at the Bellissimo and he wasn’t. He couldn’t have disabled our two-ways from the road; he was out of range. He would have been settled in Pine Apple when the lasagna was spiked—he didn’t do that either—and there was no way, from my parents’ house, FEMA could have disabled the Disaster generator an hour earlier. Put it all together and it added up to us still having hurricane heist boots on the ground in Biloxi, and we didn’t know whose feet were in them. For all we knew, it was Jenn Chojnacki. The list of who it wasn’t was short. Obviously, Fantasy’s husband and sons weren’t part of a grand nefarious scheme to put everyone to sleep while they made off with millions. Nor were No Hair, Fantasy, Bianca, or Danielle. No Hair and Fantasy for obvious reasons. Bianca, because she had no motive. And it wasn’t Danielle because she couldn’t organize the world’s smallest closet. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance she’d organized what we were in the middle of.

  “I don’t know.” Baylor raised his voice over the helicopter noise. “She did a pretty good job with your high school reunion. The slot machines, anyway.”

  “About Filet. I’m not so sure—” Bradley’s thoughts were interrupted by the mustached copilot, who turned around to chat as the helicopter took a hard left for Pine Apple. They couldn’t wait for us but told us how to contact them directly if we needed them again. Hurricane Kevin, fighting the high-pressure system we’d been flying through, was still over open water. The storm chasers’ assignment was to stay on the north side of it. He told us they were headed west to check out the supercells that were forming at the mouth of the Mississippi, but they’d be able to get back to Pine Apple quickly if we needed them again. “We have a two-hour window to get you back to Biloxi. Two-ten tops. One minute later and the hurricane will be too close and too strong to land in.” Two minutes later, Bradley, Baylor, and I dropped from the open helicopter door onto solid ground, where night was officially falling.

  I led. I knew the woods.

  “Hey!”

  My feet kept pounding.

  “Hey! Look!”

  It was Baylor. Pointing at an old school bus parked beside the red brick building where I’d learned long division.

  “Think it runs?”

  From the edge of the woods, Bradley stopped, palms to knees, catching his breath.

  “I can hotwire it.” Baylor took off for the bus.

  He didn’t have to hotwire it, the keys were in the ignition, and twelve minutes later, he pumped the questionable brakes to a shrieking stop on Shady Grove Lane, kicking up an Alabama dirt road dust cloud that looked like we’d dropped an atomic bomb between the rows of mobile homes. Front porches lit up and screen doors squeaked open. Including Ju
g Dooley’s.

  His porch light was a bald bulb swinging from a thin wire.

  “Hey, Davis.”

  Hey, Davis? Like he wasn’t the least bit surprised to see me after days of wreaking havoc on my home and workplace, endangering my children, jamming door locks with nose rings and emptying cash carts? And all he had to say, seeing me hanging out a school bus window in front of his trailer two hundred miles from where I lived, was, “‘Hey, Davis?’” Was it something in the Pine Apple water? Did Jug’s mother drop him on his head once a day until he was…was she still dropping him on his head once a day?

  “Hey, Jug.” No need to let on. “Have you had dinner?”

  Jug stood on his porch, shirtless, which was so much worse than the helicopter ride, with a forty-ounce Pabst Blue Ribbon in one hand and scratching his big hairy belly in circles with the other. “Why are you driving the school bus?”

  “I’m not.”

  (I wasn’t. Baylor was.)

  (And Bradley had slipped out the passenger door and was circling the bus on his way to Jug’s beat-up van.)

  Jug took a long pull of beer. “What kind of dinner?”

  “My mother made pot roast.”

  He scratched his belly. “How long will I be gone?”

  Five-to-ten with no parole, I didn’t say. “Why, Jug? Are you busy?”

  “I’m watching the TV. Danielle’s famous. And the pig is twinkering on the computer.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He scratched his belly.

  Baylor drummed the steering wheel. “We’re on the clock, you know.”

  “Do I have to dress up?” Jug asked.

  Like that was an option. “I’d put a shirt on.”

  Jug thought about it, long and hard. “K,” he finally said. “Let me get a shirt on.”

  He stepped back in his trailer, I checked my Glock, and Bradley popped the back doors of Jug’s black van wide. He whistled once, shrill and intense, to get our attention. Baylor and I turned to look.