Double Up with Gretchen Archer

Chapter One teaser:

“What’s going on in D’Iberville, Davis?” My immediate supervisor, Jeremy Covey, a tank of a man—former Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, current head of security at the Bellissimo, future unemployment-benefit recipient—took his seat at our weekly roundtable on that long ago fateful Monday morning.

“Football,” I announced. “We’re getting a football stadium.”

“Stadium?” No Hair asked. (Jeremy Covey was egg bald, which is why I called him No Hair.) (He said bald was the new black.) “Just a stadium?”

“Well, surely a team too,” I said. “What do you think they’ll name it? The Biloxi Gamblers?”

“Has it been announced we’re getting a football team?” My husband, Bradley Cole, didn’t look up from his P&L, which, at the time, was all P. “I haven’t heard a word about a football team. That’d be big news, Davis.”

I dug for the thin notes I had somewhere in my spy bag and introduced them to Elias Johnson, the Johnsung Corporation, the Semi-Pro Football League of America, and Blitz, Inc. Then I rattled off Hyatt Johnson’s vital and record-breaking statistics. “Football,” I said. “What else would it be?”

“I remember that Dallas game.” A goose walked over No Hair’s grave. “The bottom half of that boy’s leg was going the wrong way.”

Bradley looked out the conference room window and across the Bay. “Football?”

The room grew still as we quietly contemplated tailgate parties. At least that’s what I quietly contemplated.

“Anything out of the ordinary on the land purchase?” my husband asked.

“The blind trust is still blind.”

“How’s that out of the ordinary?” he asked.

“Don’t you want to know who owned it?”

“Does it matter?”

“I think it does,” I said. “A mystery man sits on a prime tract of land for decades, turns down a thousand offers, then for some reason, up and sells?”

“What if it was a mystery woman?” No Hair asked.

Bradley was back in his P&L. “Obviously, the seller wants to remain anonymous.”

I poured myself a cup of coffee. “A woman would never sell a bird sanctuary to a football team.”

“If she needed the money, she would,” No Hair said. “Whoever sold that property needed cash. Find someone around here who needed a quick ten million, Davis, and you’ll find the person we can thank for a football team. We’re going to need sky boxes.” He jotted himself a note. “And a corporate suite.”

“We don’t need a corporate suite.” Richard Sanders, owner of the Bellissimo, blew in the door and around the conference table dropping thick glossy folders in front of everyone. “We need deck shoes.” He took his seat and smiled. “We’re going on a cruise.”

It was the first we’d heard of a cruise and the last we heard of football for a long time, because from that moment on, our energies, waking hours, and capital gains were devoted to the Bellissimo’s quarter-billion-dollar investment in a luxury floating casino, the S.S. Probability. That’s a quarter billion. But it was Mr. Sanders’s money. And he could spend it however he wanted, or, as it turned out, lose it however he wanted.

The cruise ship experiment almost put the Bellissimo under, and it wouldn’t go away. In the aftermath of the maiden, and only, Bellissimo-sponsored voyage, the books bled red. We were operating at a loss for the first time since the doors opened. The adventure was behind us, thank goodness, but far from over, because we were defendants in a class action lawsuit opposite forty-eight plaintiffs suing the Bellissimo for “abstruse winnings.” And the irony there was that the forty-eight plaintiffs could buy our operation with the loose billion-dollar bills they pulled out of their pockets and threw down with their Rolls Royce keys at the end of the day. Yet they were suing us, because we couldn’t verify what they’d won or lost in the Probability casino. Thus the abstruse winnings.

Which, ahem, also turned out to be my fault.

My point? We’d known for a year that Blitz bought the Bay. Three months after the papers were signed, we lived in a dust cloud when they brought in fifty bulldozers and cleared the land. A month after that, it was the lead story at five for a week when Blitz bought every Katrina Cottage the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency had been trying to unload for ten years, shipped them in, dropped the mini-houses in the parking lot of a long-defunct Kmart in the next-door town of Gautier, then moved in a construction crew of twelve hundred.

Blitz built a Company Town.

They put La-Z-Boys, Netflix, and pool tables in the empty Kmart.

Why?

I couldn’t begin to answer that question before Blitz made their most disconcerting move: They closed the construction site. They built a twenty-four-foot-tall privacy fence around the fifty-two acres, and another interior privacy fence near the waterline at—I assumed—the stadium site. Visibility zero, guards posted around the clock, and the property just happened to be in a thin strip of nearby Keesler Air Force Base’s no-fly zone, so we couldn’t even get an aerial peek at what Blitz was doing behind the black fences. We never saw it coming because we couldn’t see it coming.

And now the Bellissimo was going under.

Thanks to me.

If I’d been doing my job, I could have stopped it. Or at least slowed it down. At the bare minimum, we could have been prepared. To say I felt responsible was to say there were stars in the sky, the desert was hot, and Bill Gates had a little money in the bank.

There was a reason I’d dropped the ball so hard. In fact, there were two.

The day my husband and I stood on our terrace and watched through binoculars as bulldozers mowed down the Bay was the day we found out we were pregnant. The day the news broke that Blitz bought hundreds of tiny houses from MEMA was the day after Bradley and I learned we were having twins. The day the construction crews rolled in from all over the southeast to occupy Kmart Estates just happened to be the day our general operations and casino manager, Bryant Ramsey, walked off the job. He left a note on his desk: Sanders, Cole, and you too Covey, I’m thrilled to inform you I’m resigning as of this minute. Consider this bridge burned. And when the fences went up, which was when I should’ve dropped everything, I couldn’t drop anything, because I was six-months pregnant with twins cruising the Caribbean on the S.S. Probability.

What happened next would prove to be the worst day ever for the Bellissimo Resort and Casino and the very best day ever for Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Cole. The day the privacy fences came down and the scaffolding shot up, the day Blitz could no longer hide the fact that they weren’t building a football stadium, was the very day our twins were born. Bradley and I became parents to two perfect babies on a Friday morning in July, and the Biloxi Sun Herald headline read, “A Forty-Story Football Stadium? We Don’t Think So.”

From my living room on the twenty-ninth floor of the Bellissimo, I spent the rest of the year breastfeeding, truly, around the clock, and looking through my Celestron 127EQ PowerSeeker telescope watching Blitz build out their hotel-resort-casino. Billboards went up across the Southeast: Blitz. The Best Play.

Question: What was your most memorable moment at a casino? Was it a life-changing jackpot? Did you see Wayne Newton at the Flamingo’s Paradise Garden Buffet? Did you check into your casino hotel room and find baby sharks swimming in the bathtub? (It happened to Davis Way.) If you’ve never been to a casino you can still play. Tell us why you’ve never stayed up all night playing Double Diamond Deluxe. And call Gretchen. Tag along the next time she’s off on a casino research mission. (Hard job. Hard, hard job.)

Random winner will receive a full autographed paperback set of the Davis Way Crime Caper Series. Doubles Whammy, Dip, Strike, Mint, Knot, and Up. US entries only, please. The giveaway ends March 22, 2017. Good luck everyone!

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You can read more about Davis in Double Up, the sixth book in the “Davis Way Crime Caper” series.

On behalf of USA Today bestselling author Gretchen Archer and the entire Henery Press crew, welcome aboard flight Double Up. Fasten your seatbelts for non-stop action as stiff competition blows into town and the resulting turbulence threatens to take down the Bellissimo Resort and Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi. Super Secret Spy Davis Way Cole, who lives on the twenty-ninth floor of the hotel with her CEO husband and newborn twins, takes it hard. If the casino goes belly up, she won’t be a stay-at-home mom because she won’t have a home. Not to mention her husband won’t have a job.

Davis can’t find a way to stop the inevitable end of the Bellissimo life she loves until her ex-ex-mother-in-law shows up, unexpected and definitely uninvited. Davis makes the best of a bad Bea Crawford situation and recruits her for a little corporate espionage work, which would’ve been great, had Bea not turned out to be the world’s worst spy.

Ever.

Seatbacks and tray tables in their upright positions as we prepare for a bumpy ride with babies, bankruptcies, besties, and shrimp. (Shrimp?)

Enjoy your flight.

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About the author
Gretchen Archer is a Tennessee housewife who began writing mysteries when her daughters, seeking higher educations, ran off and left her. She lives on Lookout Mountain with her husband, son, and a Yorkie named Bently. Double Up is the sixth in the Davis Way series published by Henery Press. She’s a USA Today bestseller, and her short story, Double Jinx, available at all eReader retailers, has been nominated for an Agatha Award. Connect with Gretchen at gretchenarcher.com.

All comments are welcomed.

Double Up is available at retail and online booksellers or you can ask your local library to get it for you.