Double Agent

by Gretchen Archer

  “I’ve seen worse,” Bradley said.

  I had too.

  It was a mess, no doubt, the worst of which was a storm-ravaged displaced Sea-Doo, upside down and caught by the handlebars on a fallen tree, but every building we could see was standing, roofs intact, there were no power lines down, and the traffic lights up and down the boulevard were still blinking emergency red. The best? There was no standing water. Everything was drenched, and would be for a long time, landscaping was scattered, but the streets, in front of the Bellissimo at least, weren’t flooded. Which meant the ground level of the Bellissimo wasn’t flooded.

  “Can we make it?” I asked.

  “Are you worried about FEMA’s car?”

  “No,” I said. “But I’m glad we aren’t planning on going far just the same.”

  “Because we blew out the tires?”

  I pointed to the dash. “Because it has less than a gallon of gas.”

  After a right turn onto the boulevard, rocking and jolting—and we didn’t know in the dark of night what we were rocking and jolting over, it could have just been the blown-out tires—we took an immediate right for the six-lane Bellissimo entrance, dodging a small tree diagonally across three of the lanes. From what the headlights allowed, everything looked whole. And by whole, I meant the building was still standing.

  We thumped FEMA’s car up the inclined drive and turned to line it up with the front doors. Bradley put it in reverse and thumped back until the rear bumper met the low concrete wall of the Bellissimo fountain pool. He changed gears to D, then turned to me. “Okay,” he said. “Like the helicopter landing, Davis, head down, hug your knees.”

  “If you’re not head down hugging your knees, I’m not going to be head down hugging mine.”

  “If this goes wrong—” I could see his eyes by the dash lights, dark blue just then, the deep dark blue of denim “—someone has to raise our daughters.”

  “This car has airbags, Bradley.”

  “Right. Buckle up anyway.”

  “I am buckled.”

  “Buckle tighter.”

  “I’ve already lost all circulation below my neck. I can’t buckle any tighter.”

  He revved the engine.

  We kissed again.

  He floored it.

  I thought of Thelma and Louise as we entered the Bellissimo the same way promotional cars did: Through the only entrance without concrete barriers to prevent what we were doing from happening. The difference being when a Win-This-Mercedes was driven into the building, the expanse of glass front doors were open.

  We blasted through to the cacophony of four triple panes of twelve-foot-tall, hurricane-proof, tempered-glass doors shattering and raining down on and over FEMA’s car, like a million chandeliers falling, only to be slammed back by the exploding airbags when the front tires met the wall of sandbags inside, and fortuitous timing on the airbags’ part, because as soon as they deployed, the windshield imploded.

  The crushed hood of the car was only a foot into the building, partially wedged at an angle on scattered sandbags, and one wheel was spinning. But we were in, and we were miraculously still alive. Getting out of the car between jagged glass stalactites above our heads, a foot of crushed glass under our feet, then climbing over glass-confettied sandbags was trickier and more dangerous than busting in the front doors. We had no key to turn off the engine, I wasn’t about to climb under the hood again, so we left it running.

  * * *

  We used the point of the fireplace poker to pierce a hole in one of the glass doors at Rocks. And by we, I mean Bradley impaled the glass with the point of the poker while I hid behind him saying, “Be careful! Be careful! Please be careful!” Next, he stepped back, lined up, and gave it a homerun swing with the iron-handled end, landing it square on the pinhole. The door spiderweb shattered and glass flew again. At that point, our multitudes of unprotected skin cuts from driving in doubled. We examined each other’s faces by the residual headlights from FEMA’s car.

  “You’re good,” I said.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  We waded through the broken glass by the light of our glowstick.

  “July.” I sounded so loud in the quiet room. “It’s us!”

  We heard cries of relief from behind a door. We wove between the dark jewelry display cases to find July, Filet, and Filet’s cousin Broom locked in the small storage room behind the showroom. The cries were coming from Filet, who wouldn’t stop. (Crying.) July and I wrapped our arms around each other in a Titanic sort of way. We had millions of questions, but only asked one each. I told her Baylor was in Pine Apple waiting for the storm to pass, Bex and Quinn were there too, safe with my parents, and she told me she’d left No Hair’s wife safe and sound in the Dallas airport.

  Broom was stretched out on the carpet lasagna snoring, and in all the excitement, we each tripped over him at least twice. Filet, in his white chef’s suit, was covered in flour, dirt, and Secret Sauce. When he stopped crying, he started babbling. “Filet!” He beat his chest with an open palm. “Who is my person!” Then he launched into his native tongue, absolutely none of which anyone understood. It was impassioned, at warp speed, mostly consonants, and accompanied with a multitude of hand gestures, maybe even Vietnamese sign language or Vietnamese charades. The little chef had a lot to say. A whole lot. The general gist of which, if I had to interpret based on pitch and passion, was, “The devil made me do it.” Through it all, Bradley very patiently, and many times, said, “Slow down, Filet. English, please, and slow it down.”

  Somewhere along the line I’d lost my watch. I grabbed July’s wrist, and by glow of the dial, saw it was 11:50 on Friday the thirteenth. In ten short minutes, we would have survived the day. We’d made it to Pine Apple, saved our family, locked up FEMA, made it back to Biloxi, into the building, and rescued July, Filet, and Broom. All we had left to do was find a way to the thirteenth floor and take down Emergency.

  Well, that, and survive the storm.

  We caught a much-welcome break when Filet’s two-way radio beeped in the dark.

  We had communication.

  “DAVID!”

  I slid down the dark wall I was closest to, dabbed at blood on my wrist from one of my many cuts, and if I’d had the energy, I’d have laughed.

  TWENTY

  We absolutely didn’t want anyone on Disaster to know where we were.

  Well, we did, and we didn’t.

  While it would’ve been nice to let No Hair and Fantasy know we were safely in the building and we’d freed July, Filet, and Broom, we didn’t want Emergency to know. And we absolutely did want dry clothes.

  We stepped over the broken glass and out of Rocks—Filet and I dragging a sleeping Broom between us—to the lobby, and by the headlights of FEMA’s car, stumbled our way to the gift shop at the other end of the lobby near the elevators to the hotel tower, Necessities. Bradley opened the door the same way he had at Rocks, piercing the glass with the point of the fireplace poker to create a fissure, then the rest of us stood back while he took down another barrier between us and deliverance from Hurricane Kevin.

  We lit a candle, then banged our way to the coolers first, guzzling room-temperature bottled water, with Filet trying to pour an energy drink down sleeping Broom’s throat. It mostly ran down the front of his Storm uniform.

  “Mop.” Bradley finished a second bottle of water. “His name is Mop, Davis. If we don’t accomplish anything else, I want you to survive this storm knowing the man’s name.”

  I think it was at that point, having made it that far, it occurred to me we just might make it to the other side of Hurricane Kevin. It was also at that point it started raining again. The rain was unusually loud, railroad-crossing loud, considering how far into the building we were, but then I remembered the front doors were open. The driving rain had no choice but to echo through t
he entire Bellissimo lobby, because there were no front doors to close.

  We left Necessities armed with several keyring penlights each. We hooked them on our clothes, we carried them, we had extras in our pockets. In the storage room behind the service desk we found a shopping cart used to roll inventory around the service halls. We used it to roll Broom, his legs and arms splayed and flopped over the sides, to our next stop, Threads, where we busted through another glass security door.

  It would be the sound I associated with the storm more than any of the others—not the shot ringing out in the casino the first morning, Filet and Bianca’s two-way radio habits, the helicopter, Danielle singing, the vicious winds, violent lightning, or the relentless rain. It would be the sound of breaking glass that would take me back.

  * * *

  Bradley and I changed out of our wet and war-ravaged clothes, Filet, out of his filthy chef uniform, July out of her Hawaiian travel clothes, and Filet lobbed a stack of clean clothes on Broom for him to change into when he woke up. If he woke up. And all I can say about how we looked when we left Threads was that we were wearing clean dry clothes.

  There were certainly other wardrobe options in the building, starting with the fact that July and I had closets stuffed full at our respective residences, her in her twenty-fifth-floor condo and me in my twenty-ninth-floor home, but we couldn’t get to them. Nor could we take the time or energy to lob the buggy full of Broom up the mezzanine steps, then roll him down the long dark mezzanine walkway to break into Four, the golf shop, or Love, the tennis shop, for sportier wear. A nice alternative for me and July would have been heavy-duty workout wear from Namaste, the spa retail shop on the second floor. And a nice alternative for Bradley, Filet, and Broom would have been anything from Catch, the men’s deep-sea fishing shop near the boat docks, which carried cargo pants and long-sleeved shirts, but we couldn’t get to the spa level without elevators, and the only path to Catch was through the casino, still on lockdown, and the casino doors would laugh at the fireplace poker. We’d have taken the stairs (all the way to Disaster), but the locked security stairwell doors on the first two levels were solid steel, a safety precaution for our hotel guests, and we didn’t have any dynamite. Somewhere on Disaster, probably in our suite, Bradley and I had stairwell passes, along with the four security Storms, but we couldn’t get through the security doors to get to the security Storms or our passes. That would get us through the security doors. We were stuck in the lobby, our only resources were in the lobby, and that meant the only clothes we had access to were at Threads.

  So formal wear it was.

  Bradley chose a tuxedo shirt over gray slacks. He added wingtips.

  Filet, jabbering away in his native language, pulled a suit off the racks. A herringbone three-piece suit. He paired it with a red silk shirt, a black satin bowtie, and $1,800 Saint Laurent shearling booties. He chose an equally outrageous outfit for his cousin Broom. Should Broom wake up and want out of his energy-drink-soaked filthy Storm suit, he’d be changing into navy mohair trousers, a bright yellow wool turtleneck, a cashmere Glen Plaid overcoat, and black patent leather ankle boots.

  We were in Threads no more than ten minutes, all stripping and dressing at once, the whole time Filet saying, “Is the very mostest nicesest of clotheses. Very to the beautifuls.”

  July and I had three choices: full-length formal, cocktail, or designer jumpsuits.

  We went with the jumpsuits.

  Mine was an ivory chiffon halter, chosen because it was only two sizes too big, as opposed to ten or twelve, and because the fabric was stretchy. I found a small pair of sewing scissors next to a pincushion in the desk drawer under the cash register and hacked a foot of chiffon off each leg. And by hacked, I mean I sawed a small cut in the fabric, then ripped. I pulled an $800 leather belt off a mannequin and wore it as a holster. July’s outfit was an orange silk geometric print—a detachable skirt over a romper. She detached the skirt and went with the romper. Our only shoe options were heels, more heels, or $2,200 Manolo Blahnik embellished flats. We couldn’t find July’s size quickly enough in the ludicrously expensive flats, so she wore the white leather slip-on sneakers out that she’d worn in. Unlike my shoes, that had been to hell and back that day, hers were relatively dry. And intact. I held penlights for her, she held penlights for me, the whole time, we talked.

  “What happened?” Clothes were flying over my head.

  “Grace and I took a direct flight from Honolulu to Dallas.”

  “Then?” I’m pretty sure I was stomping around on a $5,000 beaded mini dress that had slipped from its hanger.

  “We landed in Dallas early this morning and couldn’t get anyone on the phone,” she said. “Baylor didn’t answer, No Hair didn’t answer, you didn’t answer, no one answered, so we called the Biloxi police department. They gave us Captain Marini’s cell phone number, and she didn’t answer. We called the police back, who said as far as they knew, everyone here was safe. They said stay in Dallas until the storm passed. A county-wide curfew was in effect, driving would be deadly, and all roads in were closed.”

  I zipped her and she zipped me. “Then what?” I asked.

  “Grace went to the Marriot desk to get us a hotel room, and I went to the American Airlines desk and bought a ticket for a flight from Dallas to Monroe, Louisiana.”

  “Grace didn’t want to risk it?”

  “I didn’t want her to risk it,” July said. “I didn’t tell her. I texted her after I boarded.”

  “How’d you get here from Monroe?”

  She rented a Suburban and drove in, a four-hour drive taking seven, the last ten miles a full hour, pulling off the road several times because she couldn’t see through the rain. “It was rain,” she said, “just rain. But so much of it.”

  From the men’s side, we heard Bradley. “Any day, girls.”

  Filet chimed in. “Any dayses, girlses.”

  We looked, leaving Threads with our price tags, penlights, and pushing a buggy full of Broom, straight-up like Halloween. And we left Threads way worse than we found it.

  Next, we made our way back through the lobby to Danish, where we destroyed yet another set of Bellissimo Resort and Casino glass doors, then emptied the bakery case of bagels, croissants, and cherry turnovers. There was nothing to drink in Danish, so Bradley busted into Beans, the coffee shop next door.

  The pastries weren’t fresh; they were the best food I’d ever tasted.

  Filet landed a pan of two-day-old cinnamon rolls, the frosting dry, yellowed, and cracked, on Broom’s new outfit. So when Broom woke up he could work his way down the stack, eating, then getting his couture on.

  Our next stop was Décor, the only shop left standing in the lobby, the only one left to vandalize. Bradley and I still had guns and we had the fireplace poker. Filet and July needed to be able to defend themselves in the dark too, and other than the dull sewing scissors, we hadn’t turned up anything remotely resembling a weapon except for a few pairs of spiked heels on display in Threads. Bradley, with his poke-pierce-pummel routine, had us in the glass door of Décor in under a minute. By that time, we were so good at breaking and entering, we knew how to position ourselves to steer clear of the flying glass. We could have busted ourselves all the way through the building if we had a jackhammer to get through to a stairwell. We could have busted ourselves all the way home to the twenty-ninth floor. If the building still had a twenty-ninth floor.

  Dressed, fed, and armed with several lengths of decorative light-fixture chains, we left Décor, Filet dragging the chains like Marley’s ghost, and any minute I expected to hear him say, “the bahs and humbugses.” We collapsed on the marble mezzanine stairway midway through the lobby and took a breath, wondering what our next move might be.

  July checked the time. “It’s twelve thirty.” She looked up from her watch. “October fourteenth. We lived through Friday the thirteenth.”

/>   It felt, very much, like a victory.

  “We have to go back to Rocks,” Bradley said. “We left the two-way radio.”

  “We have to go back to Threads,” I said. “I left FEMA and Emergency’s IDs in the back pocket of my jeans.”

  “Hello?” Filet shook his chains. “We go back to storeses with beautiful flowerses and pictureses. We lefted Filet’s cousins.”

  * * *

  After another trek through the lobby, then in and out of the dark lobby stores, we made our way back to the mezzanine staircase a second time with the two-way radio, the two IDs from the back pocket of my jeans, and Broom in his buggy just as FEMA’s car gave up. No more headlights. We sat in an oddly shaped circle on the first three marble steps with the loud rain and the quiet two-way radio. Seven of our penlights had already burned out, so we cut down to one each. We looked like the oddest of candlelight vigilers.

  The time had come.

  Before we made our next move, if we even had a next move, we needed information from Filet. Which would probably be as easy as catching light, sneezing with our eyes open, or surviving a hurricane.

  First, I painstakingly, and by painstakingly, I mean for ten of the longest minutes of my life, established that had Filet known the lasagna was spiked, he wouldn’t have tasted his Secret Sauce with every stir, which he shouldn’t have been doing anyway, and furthermore, had he known, he wouldn’t have let his cousin eat four servings, including the two servings he’d set aside for himself. Which went a long way in explaining how Broom was sleeping so soundly. Filet didn’t know who spiked the sauce. And neither Filet nor Broom had any idea the carefully orchestrated work orders they’d carried out since clocking in Thursday morning had anything to do with anything else, other than after the storm, their wives and children would come to America.

  I lined up the IDs on a step, side by side, and aimed my penlight.

  “Is this man your boss?”