2 Double Dip Read Online Free PDF Page A

employees by having adequate ventilation, air-purification systems, and mandatory clean-air breaks.
    One thing has kept me going. A few times a week, since the start of this mess, Bradley has snuck in and woke me up with kisses, sometimes five or six hours after I’ve climbed into bed alone. He doesn’t turn on a light and we don’t say boo to each other. We skip all formalities and preamble. In the wee hours of the morning, we recharge our relationship batteries. These are the only times it doesn’t feel like Mary Ha Ha is in the room with us.
    One night Bradley snuck in and almost recharged Granny Dee’s batteries. I honestly didn’t know my grandmother could move that fast, hit that hard, or scream that loud. The next morning, he left a note: Davis, let’s look for a bigger place.
    We found one. A really nice one. Moving Day was hours from now. I wished my boss’s wife hadn’t shot herself in the foot. I wished her personal assistant wasn’t missing. I wished I didn’t have to play in a slot tournament instead of moving. More than anything, though, I wished Bradley and I had been paying a little more attention to formalities and preambles.

FOUR

    Fantasy and I went through passed-out Bianca’s pockets.
    “I found her key.”
    “Good,” I said. “I found three hundred dollars and an earring.”
    “Let’s see the earring.”
    I held it up.
    “Pass.”
    We left Bianca sleeping on our sofa and rode the elevator to the Sanders’ place a mile above us.
    “We should have changed clothes.” I fanned the front of my fishy Plethora Buffet uniform.
    “Stop, Davis. You’re stirring it up.”
    The Sanders’ home was palatial, beautiful, and empty, as far as we could see. The staff that should have been there had probably scattered during the shootout. We snapped on gloves and tiptoed through, keeping our eyes peeled for dead bodies and the like.
    “The mystery of Bianca Gets a Gun is solved.” Fantasy pointed. “She borrowed yours.”
    It was my gun. A girl knows her gun. “Damn.”
    Downstairs in our closet we have a hidden vault drawer in the middle of the shoe racks where we keep our guns and ammo. Just in case. Apparently the hidden vault drawer isn’t hidden enough. We were two feet into Bianca’s dressing room when Fantasy spotted my Smith & Wesson Bodyguard 380 on the floor beside the chaise lounge. So Bianca had gone downstairs and helped herself to my gun. No big surprise. She’d helped herself to my ex-ex-husband last year. She could have him, but it’s not nice to take someone’s gun. Not that I ever said Bianca Sanders was nice.
    I took the right and Fantasy dropped to her knees on the left side of the long chair. We used our gloved fingers to comb through the thick carpet for the brass casings that eject from the gun as it’s fired. With six in the clip and one in the chamber, Bianca could have pulled the trigger up to seven times.
    Fantasy rose from her side of the chaise with four casings.
    I had three.
    “Let’s go.” Fantasy shook the empties in her closed palm like they were brass dice. “We have to find all seven rounds.”
    The dressing room had three doors. We’d entered from the hallway. Another door led to the Sanders’ bedroom, and the third door led to Bianca’s office, a deceptive designation because Bianca didn’t do anything that remotely resembled work. The wall spaces between the three doors each held Jackson Pollock abstracts. In a dressing room . The ones to the right and left of the office door each had .380 blowouts. We admired the two mutilated paintings.
    “Who shoots art?” Fantasy asked.
    “She double tapped this one,” I said. My painting had twin blasts.
    “I’ve got one,” Fantasy said.
    We found the fourth and fifth rounds embedded in the baseboards on both sides of the office door. I stretched out on Bianca’s chaise lounge, aimed a finger gun just above my feet, and determined the one to the right seemed, trajectory wise, to be the most