Double blast, p.1
Double Blast, page 1
Table of Contents
Double Blast (A Davis Way Crime Caper, #12)
DOUBLE BLAST
DOUBLE BLAST
Gretchen Archer
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
EPILOGUE
DOUBLE WHAMMY | Gretchen Archer | A Davis Way Crime Caper (#1) | In case you missed how it all began...
One
Praise for the Davis Way Crime Caper Series
“Funny & wonderful & human. It gets the Stephanie Plum seal of approval.”
– Janet Evanovich
“Archer navigates a satisfyingly complex plot and injects plenty of humor as she goes....a winning hand for fans of Janet Evanovich.”
– Library Journal
“Davis’s smarts, her mad computer skills, and a plucky crew of fellow hostages drive a story full of humor and action, interspersed with moments of surprising emotional depth.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Archer’s bright and silly humor makes this a pleasure to read. Fans of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum will absolutely adore Davis
Way and her many mishaps.”
– RT Book Reviews
“A whirlwind ride, filled with clever solutions to seemingly outlandish problems and an indomitable heroine.”
– BookLife Editor's Choice Review
“Slot tournament season at the Bellissimo Resort and Casino in Biloxi, Miss., provides the backdrop for Archer’s enjoyable sequel to Double Whammy...Credible characters and plenty of Gulf Coast local color help make this a winner.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Davis Way is one of the funniest sleuths in crime fiction. You’ll laugh until you cry.”
– Valerie (V.M.) Burns,
Agatha, Anthony, Edgar, and Next Generation Award Nominee
“Hilarious, action-packed, with a touch of home-sweet-home and a ton of glitz and glam. I’m booking my next vacation at the Bellissimo!”
– Susan M. Boyer,
USA Today Bestselling Author of the Liz Talbot Mystery Series
“Seriously funny, wickedly entertaining. Davis gets me every time.”
– Janet Evanovich
“Fast-paced, snarky action set in a compelling, southern glitz-and-glamour locale...Utterly un-put-down-able.”
– Molly Harper,
Author of the Award-Winning Nice Girls Series
“As impressive as the amount of sheer fun and humor involved are the details concerning casino security, counterfeiting, and cons. The author never fails to entertain with the amount of laughs, action, and intrigue she loads into this immensely fun series.”
– Kings River Life Magazine
“Filled with humor and fresh, endearing characters. It's that rarest of books: a beautifully written page-turner. It’s a winner!”
– Michael Lee West,
Author of Gone With a Handsomer Man
“A smart, snappy writer who hits your funny bone!”
– Janet Evanovich
“Double Trouble was an awesome story and it is the best book in this engagingly entertaining series.”
– Dru’s Book Musings
“There is so much humor and relentless action that readers will be propelled through to the explosive finale.”
– Kings River Life Magazine
DOUBLE BLAST
The Davis Way Crime Caper Series
by Gretchen Archer
Novels
DOUBLE WHAMMY (#1)
DOUBLE DIP (#2)
DOUBLE STRIKE (#3)
DOUBLE MINT (#4)
DOUBLE KNOT (#5)
DOUBLE UP (#6)
DOUBLE DOG DARE (#7)
DOUBLE AGENT (#8)
DOUBLE TROUBLE (#9)
DOUBLE WIDE (#10)
DOUBLE DOSE (#11)
DOUBLE BLAST (#12)
Bellissimo Casino Crime Caper Short Stories
DOUBLE JINX
DOUBLE DECK THE HALLS
DOUBLE BLUFF
DOUBLE DEEP
DOUBLE HIGH STAKES
DOUBLE BLAST
A Davis Way Crime Caper
Gretchen Archer
DOUBLE BLAST
A Davis Way Crime Caper
First Edition | May 2024
Gretchen Archer
www.gretchenarcher.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Gretchen Archer, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Copyright © 2024 by Gretchen Archer
Cover design by The Creative Wrap
Author photograph by Garrett Nudd
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Paperback ISBN-13: 979-8-990295629
Digital ISBN-13: 979-8-9902956-0-5
ONE
The woman I was when I left my hometown of Pine Apple, Alabama, wasn’t the woman who retuned seven years later. I’d changed in ways I was aware of and in ways I would soon learn. For the most part, I looked the same, in spite of leaving Pine Apple alone, unemployed, and way down on my luck. I returned happily married with three children, somewhat gainfully employed, and keeping a steady, sometimes hectic, pace on life’s happiest path.
I couldn’t ask for more.
The somewhat gainfully employed part was about family leave. Formerly known as maternity leave. Either way, mine was over. I’d recently returned to work as an undercover casino spy, but barely. No more than ten hours a week tracking casino cyber cheats from my home office with the baby napping beside me. The happily married part was thanks to my husband, Bradley. Bradley Cole. The three children part was about my four-year-old identical twin daughters, Bexley and Quinn, and my new baby, Bradley Hudson Cole, Jr., who, so far, Pine Apple was calling Junior.
His name wasn’t Junior.
After deciding to name the baby after his father, my husband and I agreed we didn’t want two Bradleys under the same roof. That would end up Big Bradley/Little Bradley sooner rather than later, especially since our little guy was giving all indications (recently reinforced at his five-month well-baby checkup where he scored in the sixtieth percentile in height) that he might lean closer to his mother’s slighter stature—I’m five foot two and a half—than his father’s greater height. Which was a solid six feet. The girls looked like their father: long, lean, sun kissed, with sky-blue eyes and golden curls. Our son looked more like me: almost a redhead, almost brown eyes, and probably wouldn’t be the biggest boy at T-ball. Our plan all along had been to call the baby by his middle name, Hudson, which was my mother-in-law’s maiden name (it was the South; we passed down names like family photo albums full of faded history, like chipped and cracked Christmas dinnerware brought over on the Mayflower, like ancient threadbare quilts), but Hudson didn’t and wouldn’t stick. Mostly because his big sisters had trouble with it. Or maybe they just didn’t like it. The day we brought him home from the hospital the girls called him Baby Huddle. We corrected them. “It’s Hudson.” They corrected us. “It’s Huddle.” Which quickly turned to Puddle. Which was shortened to Puddy. Which somehow became Puddy Bubby. And that wasn’t going to work.
Puddy Bubby Cole?
I couldn’t send a child to kindergarten named Puddy Bubby Cole.
No telling how that would turn out.
It was my father, who was the very reason I was home, to fill in for him at my old job as Pine Apple police officer while he and my mother ticked off an item on their bucket list—they were really out of town because of potato salad—who’d first called the baby Junior. “Bradley Cole, Jr.,” he’d said while rocking his ten-hour-old grandson. “Junior.”
“Oh, Daddy,” I’d said from my vacation bed, which was really a hospital bed, but if you’ve ever been nine months pregnant while chasing four-year-old twins, you’d understand that a night in the hospital was a vacation, “don’t call him Junior.”
“Why in the world not? Junior is a fine name. It carries weight.”
“It carries the weight of Beryl. Or Wilbur. Or Luther.”
“Those are all fine names, Davis.”
“They’re old man names, Daddy.”
“What do you want me to call him? Is it Houston?”
“Hudson!”
“I’ll never remember that,” he’d said. “Junior it is.”
I’d have put a stop to it right then and there had my vacation door not filled with baby blue balloons. Behind the balloons were Hudson’s big sisters, there to meet him for the very first time. And I didn’t think about it again until almost six month
“His name isn’t Junior,” I called back.
“Whatever you say, Davis! And welcome home!”
The children and I crossed Banana Street, and I didn’t ask if they wanted to walk two blocks north and see the ratty efficiency apartment I’d lived in before I moved to Biloxi, Mississippi, where I landed a dream job on an undercover casino security team, on the beach, no less, right before I met, fell hard for, then married their father and went on to call half of the twenty-ninth floor of the five-star Bellissimo Resort and Casino my home. Although I did take a right off Main Street after crossing Banana to The Front Porch—part general store, part antique, collectible, and curiosity shop, and noontime hot spot thanks to the old-fashioned lunch counter—to pick up my deputy. The girls ran ahead, squealing, “Aunt Merri! Cousin Riley! Granny Dee!” All of whom lived above The Front Porch. My younger sister and only sibling, Meredith, her daughter, Riley, plus our grandmother and my deputy for the next two weeks, Granny Dee, lived on the second and third floors of the restored antebellum where my father was born.
Pine Apple was full of history.
Some good.
Some not so good.
I backed the stroller up three steps and pushed through the front door of The Front Porch. One foot in, I almost put the stroller in reverse. The air inside was spicy. Like the inside of a habanero pepper. I leaned over the stroller to see if the baby’s eyes were watering. “Meredith.” I batted through prickly air on my way to the lunch counter in the kitchen, which seemed to be the source of the hot and heady perfume, and there was my younger sister, wearing an apron featuring a huge bottle of Texas Pete Hot Sauce and not delicately eating a chicken wing. At eight thirty in the morning. “Meredith.” My throat burned. “What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to win the chicken wing cookoff.”
“Could you crack a window while you’re at it?”
Bex and Quinn scrambled onto counter stools patiently waiting for root beer floats, which was how my sister greeted them, with carbonation, sugar, and a cherry on top. Bex coughed and Quinn had her shirt pulled up over her nose. I threw open the kitchen door so the baby could breathe, then backtracked to prop open the front door. To let the scorched air out and fresh air in. Just in time to watch a food truck roll down Main Street.
A food truck?
In Pine Apple?
In huge flaming letters, from the front bumper to the tow hitch, the converted Airstream trailer with Mobile County license plates read, WINGS ON WHEELS. At the end of the logo was a dancing chicken. The dancing chicken was on fire. I watched as the truck slowed in front of Pine Apple Bank & Trust. Then parked. Half in the street, half on the bank’s lawn, straddling the sidewalk. Anyone with banking business would have to walk around, through, or over the food truck. Having not unlocked the police station door yet, I had my first official task—a parking violation. It might be my only official task for the next two weeks, because not much happened in Pine Apple. If there was even a remote chance of anything happening, I wouldn’t be there singlehandedly representing all law and all order with two feisty girls and a baby. Basically, I was a warm body to answer the phone for two weeks.
If it rang.
Back in the kitchen, I said, “Meredith, is it a coincidence that a chicken wing truck from Mobile just rolled down Main Street and parked in front of the bank?”
Pushing root beer floats larger than their heads across the lunch counter to Bex and Quinn, Meredith said, “Probably not.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means they’re probably in the chicken wing cookoff. And they’re here to set up.”
“It’s a week away.”
“It’s less than a week away.”
“Whatever. Why would a chicken truck be setting up so early?”
Meredith shrugged. “Getting a head start?”
“Do you call blocking the entrance to the bank getting a head start?”
“Tell them to move.”
“I will,” I said, “after you tell me when the potato salad cookoff opened to out-of-towners.”
“Mobile is two hours away, Davis. That’s not exactly the other side of the world. And it isn’t a potato salad cookoff anymore. It’s a chicken wing cookoff.”
I knew that, but the combination of the words potato, salad, and cookoff were so burned into my brain, they were the words that spilled out of my mouth. All our lives, and before that, probably going back to prehistoric times, Pine Apple ushered in summer and honored the three Wilcox County heroes who’d sacrificed their lives for our country in three different wars by hosting a Memorial Day Celebration. It started with a pancake breakfast and street fair on Saturday morning, ended with a parade and fireworks show on Monday, but the real deal had always been the potato salad cookoff on Sunday afternoon. Every year the same fifty women entered the competition and every year the same woman won. Our mother. She’d won so many times she could wallpaper the living room with her potato salad ribbons. A little tired of it, and on the heels of the previous year’s cookoff getting out of control with the other forty-nine entrants trying too hard to knock Mother off her potato salad throne, one with a Creole Crawfish Potato Salad that tried to kill everyone who came within ten feet of it, the Pine Apple Women’s Society almost unanimously voted to stop with the potato salad and usher in a new tradition with a chicken wing cookoff.
My mother was the single holdout vote.
She refused to enter a chicken wing cookoff on principle, that principle being chicken wings weren’t edible. More trouble than they were worth. And only consumed by people who weren’t raised right and didn’t know any better. Worse, she’d said, chicken wings would attract a rowdy crowd of beer-guzzling sports enthusiasts. Was that how we wanted to honor our fallen heroes? Mother stomped out of the meeting, yelling over her shoulder, “Why not just have a chicken feet cookoff? Or chicken lips?” She marched straight to the police station where she announced to my father that she had plans for Memorial Day. She was going on the Niagara Falls honeymoon he’d promised her almost forty years earlier. He could go on their honeymoon with her or stay in Pine Apple and eat chicken elbows alone.
Which was when he called me.
The baby was six weeks old at the time and I was beginning to feel like myself again. Partly because I was only seven pounds away from being back in my jeans, but mostly because our new little guy had slipped into our lives so easily. He was the happiest, easiest, cuddliest baby ever. He almost never cried, slept through the night like an angel, and our daughters absolutely adored their little brother. We felt complete. Complete enough for my husband to consider an offer from his alma mater to participate in an alumni teaching fellowship for two weeks at Texas Law, which was actually the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, but everyone called it Texas Law. And with sports betting soon to be on the ballot in the Lone Star State, Texas Law turned to its most successful casino attorney alum for the inside scoop on gaming.
My husband.
“If I accept, I’ll be away on Memorial Day, Davis.”
“What did we do last Memorial Day, Bradley?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Go. It will look great on your resumé.”
“My resumé? Do you know something I don’t? Should I be looking for a job?”
Hardly. He was president and CEO of the Bellissimo. And he made running a billion-dollar casino resort look like running a lemonade stand.
That afternoon, my father called. Could I possibly fill in for him for two weeks in May? The last two weeks in May? “Your mother’s having one of her spells.”
“What about?” I’d asked.
“Potato salad and chicken knees,” he’d answered.
“Do chickens have knees?”
