Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) Read Online Free PDF Page B

game goes black for a second, then it pulls right back up. It’s real quick.”
    “And you’ve seen this?” I asked.
    “Four times,” Maxine said.
    Mary held up four crooked fingers.
    I nodded. Go on.
    “The big guy leaves, then about twenty minutes later,” Mary said, “a really good looking young man comes and wins it.”
    “Every time?” I asked. “Same two guys every single time?”
    “About every three weeks,” Mary said, “like clockwork. We leave in the evening and the total is seven-thousand eight-hundred and some change. We come back the next morning and its reset back down to five thousand.”

    “We just can’t stay up that late,” Maxine said.
    “Does the good-looking young man work here, too?” I asked.
    “No,” Maxine said. “He’s from Alabama.”
    They said it on the same beat: “His name is Eddie.”  
    *    *    *
      
    Natalie Middleton was nowhere to be found, so I quit my new job in writing on a sheet of paper I tore off her monogrammed notepad. I told her I’d wait in my room until I heard from her. I left it taped to her coffee machine.
    She asked me to play the game (check), learn it (check, check), and figure out who was winning it (check, check, check). That’s where I quit. I couldn’t turn Eddie Crawford in. If I pointed one finger at Eddie Crawford, he’d point all ten of his at me. (Or would that be eight?) It wouldn’t get ugly; it would come out of the gate ugly. They wouldn’t hold Eddie ten minutes after he started spilling my secrets; they’d be slapping the cuffs on me . And my father had no jurisdiction in Mississippi. At the very least, I’d be out on the street. Finding a new job after I’d been fired from my last one had taken more than a year. Finding a new job after being fired from two would take, what? Ten? Thirty?
    This couldn’t be happening.
    It’s not that I didn’t want my sister to be right (which I didn’t) about this town not being big enough to hold both me and rotten, rotten, snake-in-the-grass Eddie Crawford. And it wasn’t that I was so thoroughly exhausted with Eddie Crawford tripping me up at every single turn. (For two decades.) (Which I was.) It wasn’t even the combination of the two. The problem was, and the reason I was out of there: this smelled like a trap. I only knew one thing about my new job: these people wanted me to figure out the whammy-whammy game, and that could only mean something fishy was going on with it. If the fishy odor was coming from my ex-ex-husband Eddie, I had a way bigger problem on my hands. Taking him down won’t be the end of him . It’ll be the end of me .
    Why would someone want to end me ?
    There wasn’t even a remote possibility that Eddie Crawford set this up. Eddie Crawford couldn’t set up breakfast. That meant it was either a nightmare of a coincidence (I don’t even believe in coincidence) or someone here was playing me.
    Best, all things considered, to never know.
    So much for my new start on life. I could find another job playing dress up and casino games (luxury accommodations included), that passed out cash and was on the beach.
    In about a million years.
      
    *    *    *
      
    After some liquid courage from the Five Star mini bar, I decided Natalie wasn’t going to call and the best thing to do was leave. She’d figure it out. During this decision-making process, though, I accidentally took a little nap. I napped through the night, and I’d have probably napped until noon if bells and alarms hadn’t started blaring like demented electronic roosters. The sirens were coming at me from all directions: the phones in my purse, the bathroom, the desk, and beside the bed.
    Dammit.
    I batted for the closest one.
    “Davis, be in my office in an hour.”
    I protested vehemently, but only after Natalie hung up. It was then that I remembered the previous day’s events and the fact that I’d quit my new job.
    I reached up and gently examined my head to see if it might have