Free Double Whammy (A Davis Way Crime Caper) by Gretchen Archer

easily.
    “And don’t get a jackhammer,” he said through chocolate. “If you’re going to get something, get a multi-tool, like a Gerber.”
    Gibberish. “What?”
    He swallowed and caught my eye in the mirror. “You think you’re going to break into the safe, right?”
    I blinked.
    “Don’t think they’re going to let you lug a power tool into a hotel room. Get a multi-tool, like a Swiss Army knife, that you can slip in your pocket. But it won’t work. All you’re going to do is tear the thing up.”
    I had one angry foot out in the rain, and I quickly pulled it back in. “How do you know that, George? How do you know any of this?”
    He shrugged one shoulder.
    I got out, slammed the door as hard as I could, and ran through the biting rain.
      
    *    *    *
      
    Twenty minutes later, we pulled up to the entrance of the Silver Moon Resort and Casino, a shrunken Bellissimo, and the only other show in town that bragged on their website about the foolproof S700 Protectaguards. A bellman craned his neck our way. George waved him off, because he didn’t need any help with his bags. “Are you going to get out or are you going to sit in my car all night?”
    My new goal in life was to slam the car door so hard that it fell off. Of course, if I were successful, it would probably land on me.
    The bed begged me to get in, the thick white comforter screaming, “I’m soft! And I smell good!” and I complied, for two dreamless hours I don’t remember a second of. The rest of the time I tried to break into the S700 Protectaguard safe with no luck whatsoever. None of the ninety-three tools that jutted out from the eight-pound thing I’d purchased at the hardware store, including the two-tine fork, fazed the safe. The only thing I managed to do was scratch the hell out of it and ruin most of the appendages on the tool.
    “So?” George asked the next morning.
    “I’m late, George. Get going.”
    The next night, I dialed the hotel operator after an hour-long blistering shower. “My safe won’t open.” She transferred me to the security office.
    “Have you forgotten your code?” a man asked.
    “No,” I lied. “It just won’t open. It’s stuck.”
    “What’s in it? You might have jammed the door.”
    At which point my mind began racing. The safe was empty. I had a little more than forty dollars in cash, which wouldn’t impress them much.
    “We’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said.
    I looked across the room to my purse. My wedding rings were somewhere in the bottom keeping company with lint, year-old peppermints, and loose change.
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
    EIGHT
     
     
      
    There’s a framed photograph of my first birthday celebration at my parents’ house, on the shelf of a bookcase in the upstairs hallway, right outside of Meredith’s old room. In it, I’m barely balanced on roly-poly legs in the middle of the dining room table at ground zero of a cake and frosting explosion. It looked like fun, and I wish I could climb on a table and eat birthday cake with both hands again, although I wouldn’t smear it in my hair this time. On one side of me are my parents, my father beaming, my mother glazed over. On the other side is my mother’s childhood friend, Bea Crawford, her eighteen-month old son Eddie in her lap. So I never actually met Eddie, he just always was. Eventually he became, out of small-town boredom, my boyfriend, and I was sort of dating him when it was announced I was pregnant (again, out of small-town boredom) at the ripe old age of sixteen. It was my mother, the keeper of the inventory of feminine hygiene products, who broke the news to our family at breakfast one morning, and none too gently. I was as stunned and slack-jawed as my father and sister were. In retort, I threw up everywhere, providing my mother with the proof she sought.
    “See?” my mother demanded.
    No one wanted to see.
    “I knew it,” she spat.
    My mother was thrilled at this new development—her