Undercover Cruise (A Maggie McFarlin Mystery Book 2)

by Charisse Peeler

  *

  Maggie woke up as the sun made its way into the room. It felt like the ship was moving again. Hopefully they had found John’s body—or better yet, perhaps they had found him alive. Maggie pulled the covers as she turned then realized she wasn’t alone. A giant arm had flopped around her middle. She turned her head and faced Mike, who had climbed in next to her sometime during the night.

  The alcohol must have done a number on her, too, because she had never felt him climb in. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, and she was still asleep. Nope. He was lying next to her, and she was confused about what to do about it. She wanted to snuggle up in his arms, but she didn’t want to hope it was something that it was not.

  Finally, Mike stirred. He was smiling.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Good morning.” Maggie smiled back. “You okay?”

  “I’m good. Are you okay?” Mike asked with more of a concerned look on his face.

  “Why wouldn’t I be okay?” she asked.

  “You were pretty upset last night, crying and yelling. I didn’t know what to do.”

  Maggie panicked. “I what?”

  “I think you had a bad dream. I didn’t know if I should wake you up, so I just crawled in and put my arms around you, and you settled down.”

  “Wow, I don’t remember any of that.”

  Mike kissed her on the top of her head then rolled over and sat up, stretching his back. Maggie watched him as he stood in only his underwear.

  She turned over and shut her eyes tight, trying to burn the memory of his body into her brain and, at the same time, trying to remember what she could have been dreaming.

  She opened her eyes only when she heard the shower start.

  Maggie finally sat up to clear her head. She reached for the bottle of water Ralph staged on the nightstand every night. She drank it down, trying to quench the thirst she felt as well as ease her dry throat. It had been years since the night terrors—or at least years since someone other than her had witnessed them. Several times she had tried to record herself, but her utterings never made sense. She had gone to psychiatrists; they also had no explanation. It was embarrassing, but she usually just explained her terrors as a bad dream.

  “What’s headache powder?” Maggie asked Mike when he came out of the bathroom.

  “You’ve never heard of headache powder?”

  “No, and I’ve never heard of shagging, unless you were talking about, you know.”

  Mike laughed. “I will have to take you to the beach to shag.”

  “You said that last night, but I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s a type of dancing, Maggie.”

  “Being in the South is like being in a foreign country,” she said.

  “Technically, we aren’t in the South right now, and we are in a foreign country.”

  “Well, you got me there, big fella.”

  She smiled.

  Friday

  Chapter 20

  Bingo

  “Bingo starts in fifteen minutes, anyone interested?” Maggie asked the group.

  “I’m in.”

  David stood from where he had sat idly on the sofa next to Kimberly, who didn’t bother to look up or acknowledge the question. She just turned the page of the novel she was reading. She was halfway through. Maggie looked over at Mike, who was sitting at the small table in the kitchen, examining some documents. He waved a rude dismissal, hitting Maggie in the gut.

  “Let’s go,” she motioned to David, who followed her out the door. “I was under the impression that you weren’t much of a gambler,” she said once they had left the suite.

  “Bingo isn’t exactly gambling,” David said. “It’s still a game of chance, but someone in the room is going to win eventually. The only skill required is paying attention. No thinking involved.”

  “Honestly, David, you’re such a smart guy, I’m surprised you don’t play blackjack or something like that.”

  David laughed. “Funny you say that. I put myself through college playing poker.”

  “Poker?”

  “And occasionally blackjack.” He smiled. “But I was banned from casinos because they believed I was counting cards.”

  “Were you?” Maggie asked.

  The elevator opened. David extended his arm, allowing Maggie to enter. They stood silently facing forward as the elevator sank until it reached Deck 5. David and Maggie exited into a small crowd that had already gathered and was making their way into the theater. When they made it to the front of the line a young man said, “It’s five dollars each or five cards for twenty dollars.”

  “I’ll take five cards,” Maggie said. She fished a twenty dollar bill from her front pocket and handed it to the young man, who gave her five long cards and a pink dauber.

  “What’s this?” Maggie asked.

  “It’s how you mark your card. It’s like a giant highlighter,” the man said, looking behind Maggie at the line.

  “I’ll take five also,” David said, trading his twenty dollar bill for five cards and a green dauber.

  “You just wasted your money, I’m afraid,” Maggie said, smiling. “The winning ticket is right here.” She held up her cards.

  “We shall see.” David smiled and raised one eyebrow.

  They took a seat midway up the center section, where there was a convenient ledge to place the drinks they had requested as soon as they were seated.

  Maggie took a long sip of her Cabernet and took a deep breath. Relaxing for a few minutes felt good. The bingo was more popular with the passengers than the staff had anticipated, so processing everyone through the line took longer than expected. The delay provided Maggie the opportunity to find out a little more about David.

  “Where did you go to school?” she asked.

  “University of California, Riverside,” David said.

  “A west coast boy,” Maggie said. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “I grew up in Indio, California. My parents still live there today.”

  “So what on earth took you to Salisbury, North Carolina?”

  “I had a friend in college from Charlotte, and when I was looking for a job, my search included a fifty-mile radius. I honestly had no idea what I was getting into, but I ended up liking it.”

  “It’s so far from your family.”

  “My family prefers it, I’m afraid. I wasn’t such a good boy in my youth. My mother said I was too smart for my own good. School was boring, and I couldn’t keep myself out of trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Maggie asked.

  “Mostly hacking. I was the first student to be expelled for breaking into the school’s database and changing grades. Real amateur stuff, and I was caught pretty easy.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Ten.”

  “That’s pretty young to be hacking. You must have been smart.”

  “It always seems crazy to punish kids that young for using their brain. Maybe the schools should recognize the genius and refocus the kid in a different direction. The punishment could be staying after school so they can figure out how to make the system un-hackable. I don’t know if that would have worked, but kicking me out of school just gave me more time to get in trouble.”

  “It seems like a big deal, but not that big of a deal, if you ask me.”

  “Nah, the real problem happened in junior high. I had this gym teacher, a real A hole. He loved to torture the kids who weren’t athletically inclined, if you know what I mean.” He drank the last of his mojito and signaled the server to bring two more, noticing Maggie’s wine was almost gone.

  “Okay, so what did you do?” Maggie sat at attention, figuring the conversation was going to get interesting.

  “It’s pretty bad, looking back at it now, but I might have set him up as a child molester. He made it to the sex offender register. It was bad.”

  “No, you didn’t!”

  “I did. The coach was arrest
ed, fired, and almost divorced. I basically ruined his life. Even when he was exonerated, some people assumed his guilt even when he was proved innocent. I think it’s easier for people to believe bad things about people rather than see the good in them.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “I didn’t think so at the time, because I was looking for revenge, but now looking at it from an adult perspective, I feel bad, even though he was a real jerk.”

  “How did you get caught?”

  “My big mouth. I couldn’t stand not getting the credit for such a feat. I had to hack into the police database, his personal computer, and the FBI’s child pornography Special Agent system. It took coordination, and no one would have ever known, but I shared it with some of my gaming buddies, one of whom just happened to be one of those undercover cops trying to catch real child molesters. The next thing you know, an FBI task force storms our house, confiscates all the electronics and takes me to kiddy jail. Let me tell you, that is no place for a geek.”

  “Wow, David. That’s horrible.”

  “I was a stupid kid using my brain to get back at that sadistic prick of a gym teacher.”

  “But you almost ruined his life!”

  “I know, but I was only fourteen, so they weren’t too hard on me. The worse part was that the cops were sure I had an accomplice. The prosecuting attorney put my poor parents through the wringer. They even had to take an extra mortgage on their house to cover the attorney fees.”

  “Yikes!”

  “My parents emigrated from Mexico as children, and both worked hard. My mother still works in housekeeping at a resort in Palm Springs, and my father owns a very modest landscaping business. They didn’t have the money to put me in boarding school, so they put me somewhere much worse.”

  “Juvie?”

  “Ha! Worse. They made me live with my abuela.”

  “Abuela?”

  “My grandmother on my father’s side. She raised six boys and was proud that no one ever spent a night in jail. Her small home, located in a very rural area of Riverside County, was electronics free. The nearest neighbor was too far for me to tap into their internet. Her telephone was the kind with a dial. Have you ever seen one of those?”

  “Unfortunately, I have. I even remember party lines.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind,” Maggie said, “please continue.”

  “My abuela was a taskmaster. ‘Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,’ she would say, or something like that. You didn’t talk back or question her authority in any way. She might have been under five feet tall, but she could wield a broom like Bruce Lee, and her aim with a slipper was sharper than Nolan Ryan’s.”

  He pointed to his head. Maggie nodded in understanding.

  Below them, Jules took the stage. “Welcome all to B-I-N-G-O, Bingo!” Jules wore her standard white uniform. Her hair was pulled into a close bun at the back of her head. “Are you ready for your first letter-number combination?”

  The crowd yelled loudly and applauded.

  Jules pulled a lever on the bingo cage that delivered a ball into a chamber. She pulled the ball out and announced, “B-4.” She stood at the edge of the stage with a microphone in one hand and the small white ball in the other, holding it up as if the audience could see it from that far away. An electronic screen behind her lit up with the same square she announced: B-4.

  Maggie and David punched their cards in the upper left corner. David looked down on his phone and hit a few numbers then put it into his pocket. Jules continued to call a few more letter-number combinations; G-59, O-74, B-13, I-21, B-10, O-70, B-2.

  “I just need one more.” David showed Maggie a card that was missing just N34.

  Maggie looked down at her cards and took another drink of wine. “I’m not even close.

  Jules continued calling out the combinations: “G-55, N-42, I-20, N-34.”

  “BINGO!” David yelled. He stood straight up, almost knocking over his drink, which was sitting on the ledge in front of him.

  “We have a possible winner,” Jules announced. “Everyone sit tight while we validate the card.”

  The young man who had been distributing the cards earlier climbed the stairs that led to the railing in front of where Mike and Maggie were sitting. A second young man stood alongside him. David handed over his lucky card. One of the young men read off the punches while the other typed into an iPad. The man holding the card held it up and announced, “We have a winner!” He then doled out five $100 bills into David’s eager hand.

  “Congratulations!” Jules pronounced from the stage. “Don’t be disappointed, everyone, we will continue to play the cards you have—but to win, you must have all the squares that make an X across your card.”

  David sat back down, folding the bills in half and placing them in his front jeans pocket.

  “Great job,” Maggie said. Five hundred bucks. You’re rich.”

  David smiled and took a drink from his glass. “Thanks.”

  “You’re a lucky guy,” Maggie said.

  “Am I?” David laughed and took out his phone. Maggie saw what looked like a picture of his BINGO card on his phone screen.

  “No way you manipulated that,” she said quietly, looking around. “I thought you said it was a game of chance.”

  “It used to be a game of chance when the balls were simply ping pong balls in a cage that you cranked by hands, but each of those balls is individually electronically marked, so when one of the balls is placed in the tray, it registers up there on the screen and the caller reads it off their I-pad. It was an easy algorithm to break. I just hijacked the signal of the balls on my card and I say Bingo!”

  “So, you just cheated at BINGO?” Maggie asked in a low voice, barely louder than a whisper.

  “It’s called using tools to your advantage, not cheating,” he said, not even showing an ounce of guilt. “No harm, no foul.”

  “I’m surprised you don’t play the lottery,” Maggie said.

  “Too much attention.” He smiled. “There are way easier ways to make money.”

  That’s interesting, Maggie, thought, but decided to drop it. David’s skills were impressive. She decided not to focus on how he could have pulled the whole thing off…or was he just lucky.

  “Have you ever played BINGO before?”

  “Ha!” He smiled. “I have but not to win very much. The secret is always to stay invisible. People don’t notice small takes from quiet people.”

  Did he just admit that he is a thief? It was the first time Maggie considered David as a real suspect. But would he take money from an old lady?

  “How do you think Kimberly won at the slot tournament the other day?”

  “There is no way you were able to hack into a casino’s slots. Their security is better than Fort Knox.”

  “That’s true most of the time, but when they set up a slot tournament, they bypass the main security, and they let the wheels just go. It doesn’t need to track winnings by machine, but each machine does have a code that I tapped into.”

  “I can’t believe you helped her win,” Maggie said.

  “I’m not going to help her win the finals. I thought she just needed something to be happy about, and I think it worked. She’s been in a great mood.”

  “I don’t know, David; cheating is cheating.”

  “Who did it hurt? It was just a stupid game. All chance. It doesn’t matter to anyone.”

  Maggie fell silent. It wasn’t her job to judge other people; but what David had done was manipulative, even to Kimberly, who thought she had won fair and square.

  “I just think you could use your talents for good,” Maggie said.

  “Exactly.” David agreed, but Maggie realized that David’s good and her good were very different goods. If he was willing to manipulate a slot machine for Kimberly, what else would he do? Of all the people who could bypass the red flags at the bank, David seemed the most likely candidate.

  “You seem way too sma
rt to be working in a small-town bank in the middle of North Carolina. It makes me wonder why you aren’t working for law enforcement or some high tech company?” Maggie tried not to sound like she was interrogating him.

  “Money isn’t everything, Maggie.” He turned to her and looked straight into her eyes. “There are more important things in life.”

  “BINGO!” someone yelled from the balcony above them.

  The numbers were quickly verified, and the winner was paid her cash.

  “I guess that’s it,” Maggie said, standing and stretching her back and neck. She wanted to talk to David some more, but with the crowd quickly filtering out of the auditorium and Jules wrapping things up onstage, the opportunity had passed.

  Chapter 21

  Art Auction

  “Can I ask you a question?” Maggie said as she followed David out of the auditorium and through the main corridor.

  “Sure, ask away,” he said, not turning around. Maggie hurried to his side.

  “Do you like Kimberly?”

  “Yeah, she is very likable.”

  “No”—Maggie shook her head,—“do you like like her?”

  David smiled as he continued to walk. “Are you asking me if we are having some illicit affair, or am I falling for her flirty help-the -damsel-in-distress routine?”

  “I guess I’m asking both?”

  They passed a bar called the Dolphin, where David stopped. Every seat was occupied. All the patrons were in the middle of a group trivia contest. He motioned Maggie to stand next to him then leaned on the divider at the bar, not answering her question but distracted by the announcer’s questions.

  “Billy Joel,” David whispered to Maggie.

  “Before the cruise,” Maggie said, resuming her questioning, “did you and Kimberly hang out?”

  David didn’t answer Maggie. He was now focused on the next question. “What is the most popular single of all time?” the announcer asked.