“Honestly, Davis,” Vree said. “Princess loves them. It’s like she speaks their language. I can tell you right now she won’t hurt them.”
She who wouldn’t hurt them started showing off for them. She rolled over, begged, played dead, and did a full back flip.
They roared.
We all did.
Meredith was trapped in Houston, we had a dead body on ice in Fantasy’s bonus room, Bootsy was missing, and we were harboring an oil sheik’s seeing-eye dog. We had no plan, solid or otherwise, to scare up a million dollars for Greene Gully’s procedure, and there we stood, laughing at my girls, who were laughing at a crazy dog, who was laughing back.
It was like a miracle and a horror movie at the same time.
Fantasy broke the spell when she said, “We need to call housekeeping.”
“Why?” I asked.
“We can’t take this one out.” She pointed at Harley, still watching from his safe place behind Vree.
“Take him out is exactly what we need to do,” I said. “We need to take him out, down the hall, and return him to his owner.”
“You think? What are we going to say when his blind owner asks where the caregiver is? Are you going to tell him she’s dead, or am I?”
“Couldn’t we just say we found his dog and get the half-million dollars?” Vree asked. “Then we’d only need the other half-million. Which, when I say it out loud, sounds crazy. I mean, I’ve never even seen a million dollars in my life, or a half million either. I can’t believe I’m even talking about that much money. How would we get it here? I mean, would it be a check? Or cash? If he gives us cash, would we need a suitcase or a forklift? I have no idea what a million dollars looks like. If you add up all the money I’ve ever seen, like seen seen in real life, with my own eyes, it probably wouldn’t even be ten thousand dollars. I’ll tell you what I have seen. Those money trucks. You know the ones? The bank trucks full of money? Gooch says that’s his dream car, one of those money trucks. He says it all the time. ‘Get me one of those for my birthday, Vreebee, fully loaded.’ Then he punches me in the arm to make sure I got the joke. Which I always do. Fully loaded, like, he means, full of money.”
Fantasy and I had been using the time to think.
She said, “We have to figure out what happened to the caregiver before we hand over the dog. Which means we need housekeeping.”
“How is housekeeping going to help?” I asked.
“They can bring turf. A mile of it.”
“You know what I think would be a good idea?” Vree asked. “Find one of those money trucks, steal it, then drive it to Houston.”
“Vree,” Fantasy said, “keep your day job. You’d never be a good criminal. We wouldn’t make it ten feet in a bank truck.”
“What are we going to do with turf?” I asked.
“I don’t really have a day job,” Vree said.
“Set it up on your balcony or something,” Fantasy said. “This is a big dog. He’s going to need to go out.”
“For sure,” Vree said. “There’s this service in Montgomery just for dog owners who live in apartments with balconies. I think most apartments have balconies. Newer apartments do for sure. The company is PupPup Lawn—”
Fantasy stopped her. “Has anyone ever hit you over the head with a shovel, Vree?”
“What? No. Why would someone hit me over the head with a shovel? If someone was swinging a shovel, I’d get out of their way. A shovel! That’s it! We could bury the lady in your backyard, Fantasy. Take turns digging, drop the old lady in there, then take Harley back and get the money.”
Fantasy asked me if I had a shovel.
“No, I don’t have a shovel. Why would I have a shovel?” She was right, though, and not that we should hit Vree over the head with a shovel. She was right that we needed to know what happened to the caregiver before we returned Harley. We needed a little time, and time was something we had very little of. She had to clock in and be downstairs for the first round of the Deputy Dog slot tournament, followed by the first round of the dog-show competition, which I also had to be downstairs for. Either of us not being where we were supposed to be would be the same as dragging No Hair and Baylor into it, and two of us hiding a dead body and a wanted dog were enough.
Turf on the balcony it was.
“Mrs. Cole,” the housekeeping supervisor answered. “How can I help you?”
“I called yesterday.”
She clicked on a keyboard. “I see that.”
“The two men you sent? I need them back. And I need them to stop by landscaping on the way.”
“I didn’t send any men,” she said.
“You did. They were here.”
“I see where you called, Mrs. Cole. Nuclear waste spill, straight bleach. But I also see where the work order was transferred.”
“By whom to where?”
“That, I don’t know.”
“Two men from housekeeping came to my home.”
“They weren’t my men,” she said. “I’m not sure what happened. I show the work order transferred to another department, but I don’t know which one. I have you calling and placing the order, then twelve minutes later, before I could dispatch anyone, the work order was gone.”
If those men weren’t from housekeeping, where were they from? Where were they, period? The last time I saw them, they were on their way to repossess Bootsy. Had Bootsy Howard done something to those men?
In the two minutes it took the housekeeping supervisor to unravel my life just a little further, Princess did it again. She tunneled out of the Pop N’ Play. One minute she was in it, the next she was out. And between Bexley and Quinn.
I held my breath; Fantasy held me back.
They sat across from each other on the floor, four Mini Melissa Mary Janes touching, their little legs forming a diamond. Princess ran in it. From one to the other. They raced. They played hide and seek. They traded toys. I drew the line at thumbprint cookie sharing. The three of them were having the time of their lives.
The three of us? Me, Fantasy, and Vree?
Not so much.
Then Princess kept us up half the night.
It was going to be a long week.
* * *
Monday morning, bleary eyed, we gathered over breakfast on the terrace. Three women, two toddlers, one Harley, and one Princess. Fruit parfaits, whole grain waffles, K9 Natural Lamb Feast, and manicotti, extra sauce.
“She’s been dead twenty hours.” Fantasy checked her watch. “That we know of. There’s been a dead body in my house for twenty hours. We’ve got to do something.”
“Do you think she’d fit in the refrigerator?” Vree asked.
Fantasy and I just looked at her.
“If you took out all the shelves and vegetable bins? Like when you clean your refrigerator? I mean—”
Still, we just stared.
Vree shrugged an apology.
“We need to call the police before they call us,” I said. “Our prints are all over that room.”
“It’s my house, Davis.” Fantasy poured more coffee, then passed the carafe to me. “We can explain our prints.”
“You checked her for a pulse, Fantasy. How are we supposed to explain your prints on her neck?”
“All the more reason to get her out of my bonus room.”
I poured, then passed the coffee to Vree. “We need to know if she died of natural causes or…something less natural.”
“Like Bootsy.” Vree poured.
Bex and Quinn said, “Boo, boo, boo.”
“Bootsy must have cast a death spell on her,” Vree said. “How will we know? I mean, it’s not like we can ask her. ‘Lady, did you have a stroke or did Bootsy do this to you?’”
“Which is why we need a doctor,” I said.
“A doctor we have dir
t on,” Fantasy added.
“A dirty doctor?” Vree said. “How about a crazy doctor? Would that work? Don’t come to Pine Apple sick, Fantasy. I’ll tell you that right now. Our doctor is deranged. One time—”
“Let’s say we had a dirty doctor,” I said. “What would we do with him? Her? It? The woman’s already dead.”
“We’d have him, her, or it determine the cause of death,” Fantasy said. “That way we’d know which direction to take. If she died of natural causes, we call it in and be done with it. If she died of unnatural causes, well, that’s a different story.”
“Altogether,” I said.
“What would be so different?” Vree asked. “Isn’t she dead either way?”
“The difference is, if she was murdered, we’ll be suspects numbers one, two, and three,” Fantasy said.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Because there’s a price on her head, Davis. And we have the dog. Which makes us look twice as guilty. It will look like we killed her for the reward money. The police will start digging and figure out fast we actually need the reward money.” She pointed at me. “Suspect.” She pointed at Vree. “Suspect.” She turned her finger on herself. “Suspect.”
Vree said, “Then we should blow up your bonus room.”
Fantasy and I looked at her again.
“I mean, you know, get rid of the evidence.”
Still, we just stared.
“Don’t you watch CSI, Vree?” Fantasy asked. “There is no getting rid of evidence. The woman has teeth. You can’t blow up teeth.”
Vree ran her tongue along her teeth. “Well, how can I help?”
“You’re helping with the dogs,” I said. “That’s enough. Let us worry about the rest. Unless you have a million dollars.”
Vree sighed. Fantasy tapped her chin. I wondered what my life as a divorced single parent would be like after Bradley found out.
“Let’s do this,” Fantasy said. “Let’s deal with the dead woman first. After that, we’ll go straight to work on the Meredith situation. I say, as far as priorities go, the dead woman in my bonus room trumps the live sister in Houston.”
It was familiar territory for me. I was the mother of twins, who often needed my immediate attention in the exact same way at the exact same time. I was torn the same way then, forced to choose between concentrating my energy in my sister’s direction and giving the woman in Fantasy’s bonus room the respect she deserved.
“What about Bootsy?” Vree asked.
Bex and Quinn said, “Boo, boo, boo.”
“We’ll get to her after the dead woman and Meredith,” Fantasy said.
I covered my face with my hands and talked through them. “We’re in so much trouble.”
“We’re not in trouble yet,” Fantasy said. “We didn’t kill the lady. All we did was find her. We’re just not going to say when we found her. And we’ll hit the Slipper for the money to save Meredith, at which point, Davis, we’ll be in trouble.”
“Who are we going to hit?” Vree asked.
“What,” Fantasy said. “What are we going to hit. We’re going to hit Silver Slipper. A casino up the street.”
I came out from behind my hands.
“We don’t even have time to hit the Slipper. We’d have to do surveillance first. It would take days of watching how they move the money to find a way in, if they even have one. I haven’t heard of a Slipper heist as long as I’ve been in Biloxi, which says to me they know what they’re doing.”
“Then we hit The Last Resort,” Fantasy said.
“The Last Resort probably doesn’t even have a million dollars.”
“What is The Last Resort?” Vree asked.
“The name says it all,” Fantasy said.
“Are we really going to rob a casino?” Vree asked. “Like machine guns and ski masks? Why don’t we talk Meredith out of giving her blood away instead? Would that be cheaper? Like, not cost a million dollars?”
“Meredith doesn’t want to be talked out of it,” I said. “She wants us to come up with the money and loan it to Gully. She’s convinced he’s going to pay us back.”
“Where is Meredith?” Fantasy asked.
“In a suite at the Four Seasons close to the hospital.”
“Bubbs.” Vree collapsed into a sob.
“Go.” I’d made the offer nine times the day before, and I felt certain my tenth offer just then wouldn’t be the last. “I can make one phone call and have you in Houston in an hour, Vree.”
“I can’t leave you like this, Davis!”
“She’s right,” Fantasy said. “Who’d take care of the dogs? I don’t know a thing about dogs. What do you know about dogs, Davis?”
“I have to stay and help,” Vree said. “At least until we find Bootsy. Because if we don’t find Bootsy, Gooch will be furious with me. One time Bootsy—”
Bex and Quinn said, “Boo, boo, boo.”
“See, Fantasy?” Vree pointed at the highchairs. “They’re babies, and even they think Bootsy is a witch.”
“No, they don’t,” I said. “They’re trying to say her name.”
And we were right back where we started. In forty-eight hours, the only thing we’d really accomplished was relocating Meredith and Bubbles, so we were breathing, but we still had no idea what to do about or with the dead body, what to do about or with the dogs, where Bootsy was, who the housekeepers worked for, and we certainly didn’t have a million dollars.
TWELVE
Bradley called a half hour later. He sneezed, I blessed him, then he said, “How are things?”
“Quiet.” I didn’t lie. It was quiet in the kitchen pantry. Which was where I hid to take his call. It was anything but quiet outside of the pantry.
After breakfast, we made a chore list. Locating Bootsy was the easiest, so we tracked Fantasy’s iPad again only to find Bootsy had turned the Volvo around. Fantasy’s Find My iPad app pinged a dot in Mandeville, Louisiana, headed east. We were east. Was Bootsy coming back to Biloxi? Was there someone here she’d forgotten to sprinkle death dust on? If she wasn’t on her way to Houston, where in the world was she on her way to? Since we didn’t have a clue, we moved on to our next item—the procurement of a refrigerated storage unit for temporary dead-body storage until we could determine cause of death, because at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. We couldn’t just leave the poor woman in Fantasy’s easy chair. Nor could we find a refrigerated storage unit that wasn’t smackdab in the middle of downtown Biloxi, where there were webcams on every corner, and we didn’t need documentation of us hauling a dead body into a refrigerated storage unit, so we started a new search for a refrigerated truck. (“Like an ice cream truck?” Vree asked. “I love ice cream trucks. Remember when we were little, Davis, and—”) We’d wasted the half hour before that racking our brains for a doctor, a medical examiner, an EMT, a mortician, or even a Girl Scout with her Corpse Badge who owed us a favor, couldn’t drum one up, which looped us back to temporarily relocating the caregiver’s body. Just until we could take care of a few other pressing matters. The vote was two-to-one. Fantasy wanted the dead woman out of her bonus room, and Vree sided with her. (“I mean, gross.”) I didn’t want dead body charges on my record, so I voted no. Fantasy said, “Not reporting her death, if we’re caught, is a misdemeanor. A fifty-dollar fine at most, unless she’s a public threat, and I don’t see a dog’s caregiver as any kind of public threat. I see it as a private threat. Very private. Like in my bonus room private.”
I argued not reporting the body was one thing, but moving it was quite another. Moving it would constitute abuse of a corpse. Far past a misdemeanor, very against the law, up to a year in prison, not to mention wrong, just wrong, using phrases like “…everything good and decent and right in the world,” when my phone rang. “It’s Bradley.” I jumped up and made a run for the pantry.
“Everyone try to be quiet.”
“Quiet? It’s never quiet,” he said. “It couldn’t possibly be quiet with Meredith’s friend there, Davis. What’s going on?”
Blood swaps, dead bodies, witches, lost dogs, and ice cream trucks. I thought it best to steer our conversation in a different direction. “The dog show is going on, and Bex and Quinn love it.”
“Jeremy tells me two dogs didn’t register, Vree’s is one of them.”
I should have chosen a different direction. If No Hair told him Vree’s dog wasn’t in the show, then he told him Hiriddhi Al Abbasov’s wasn’t either. A subject I most definitely did not want to discuss with my husband, considering Hiriddhi Al Abbasov’s dog was in our living room. “Vree’s dog missed the deadline.”
Totally true.
“Davis, I talked to Baylor. Have you seen him? Have you talked to him?”
“No,” I said. Another true answer. I hadn’t seen or talked to Baylor and I didn’t want to see or talk to him. Fantasy and I had spent years teaching Baylor everything we knew, and now all he did was use it against us. Baylor would take one look at us and know we had the oil sheik’s dog. “Why?” I asked Bradley, knowing why. If No Hair hadn’t told him there’d been a dognapping, Baylor would’ve.
That was it. My marriage would soon be over.
“Because they’re running in circles,” Bradley said. “There are dogs all over the property, including a missing dog surveillance can’t find, and between the missing dog and the dog show, I’ve taken no less than ten dog calls. I don’t know how I let marketing talk me into a dog show at the Bellissimo, but I can tell you this, Davis, it will be item number one in my exit interview. Don’t let a dog in the door. Not only the dogs,” he said, “a couple checked in yesterday.”
What did a couple checking in have to do anything? Where was he going with this? Hundreds of couples checked in every day. “And?”
Double Dog Dare Page 11
