Free Double Strike (A Davis Way Crime Caper Book 3) by Gretchen Archer

degrees out.
    She had me in a white mink hooded cape with dyed ermine tips that looked like mutant beetles crawling all over it. The fur was buttoned at my neck and flared out six feet just past my butt. The hem of the dress hit a smidge below the fur, and Bianca’s a big believer in the bare leg look. I was wearing a mini dress and a massive fur coat that could barely clear a doorway on top of bare legs. On my feet, solid white six-inch platforms. It was nothing short of mortifying to be ordering a blooming onion in this blooming outfit.
    I shed the coat, but wouldn’t let the waiter hang it (Bianca would kill me if a waiter breathed on it before she got to shock the public wearing it), so I climbed out of it, rolled, then wadded the thing and held it in my lap, which was about as comfortable as trying to sit at a long, skinny dinner table with my arms wrapped around a bale of hay.
    “What is it you do, exactly?” Anne Cole’s tone was suspicious and accusatory. “I thought you were on the casino police force.”
    And that’s when my niece Riley, sitting directly across from me, sent her large glass of chocolate milk flying.
      
    *     *     *
      
    “It’s so nice to meet you? Right? This place is perfect for us? And you’re, like, Head Bitch? Right?” Missy Jennings ended every statement on a lilt, so everything sounded like a question. And she was the second person I’d met in one day with ink-jet black eyes. “Red plays the tables? And I like the slots? Right? And this is way closer to home than Vegas? So we went online and here we are?” Jazz hands, and a totally veneered smile. Her husband, Redmond Jennings, also totally veneered, plus pickled in aftershave, paid absolutely no attention, but knew to smile in agreement when his wife took a breath. Like just then. Bianca would have picked up her steak knife and gone for the woman’s jugular. Like just then.
    “And where is home, Missy?” I asked.
    “Girl?” she waved a hand through the air. “We’re from a spit in the road in Alabama? Right? You’ve never heard of it?”
    (Try me?)
    They looked too young to be parents of a high school senior, and they looked too young to have the kind of money they were wearing. Missy had ten pounds of jewelry on her person, Red, fifteen. Honestly, they looked like they’d just had talk-show makeovers, everything mannequin matchy-matchy. He wore designer jeans and ostrich cowboy boots, a silk sports coat over a stiff, starched tuxedo shirt unbuttoned for as far as I was willing to look, with ropes of gold chains resting on a shag carpet of wiry chest hair. (Totally grossing me out.) She wore everything, I mean everything, she could get on her person. There was big hair, false eyelashes, double-pierced ears, and a charm bracelet with seven hundred noisy charms. She wore four layers on her top half—silk teddy, oversized designer T, cashmere scarf, and matching cardigan sweater—all tissue thin and the same shade of olive green. And on her bottom half, a short, bouncy (olive green) peplum skirt over olive green leggings, and olive green suede booties. I had the feeling there might be a price tag somewhere between them they’d forgotten to snip off ten minutes ago.
    We were in Chops, the steakhouse, one of the twelve eateries at the Bellissimo. We had reservations at the fanciest of the Bellissimo restaurants, Violettes, but I’d changed it last minute, needing a darker and less populated venue, one where the chances of Bianca having her picture snapped was less likely, since I was wearing chocolate milk all over her new fur. And speaking of price tags, Meredith had poked on her phone while I’d smashed the chocolate milk deeper into Bianca’s fur with a stack of Outback Steak House napkins. When she found it on Saks’s website she flipped her phone around, showed everyone, and gave us the good news. “Thirty-eight thousand dollars.”
    I let go of my thirty-eight-thousand-dollar chocolate-milk panic