DOUBLE MINT Read Free Page B

who might be responsible?”
    Yes, I did. You bet I did. I knew exactly who was responsible.
    “Do you want me to contact the Treasury Department?”
    “No,” my husband said. “We’ll handle it.”
    We locked the door behind him, then took shaky steps to the only seating in our foyer,
     an Igloo cooler the size of a steamer trunk.
    “We’re not moving home in two weeks, are we, Bradley?”
    We met almost three years ago when I first moved to Biloxi. Two years later, on our
     wedding day, he accepted the casino manager position at the Bellissimo and we moved
     here. That was nine months ago.
    He pulled me in. I buried there. “Probably not.”
    “Maybe we’ll be one of those happy childless couples.”
    I could feel his chin on my head. “We’re going to have ten babies.”
    Let’s not go overboard.
    “What’s up with the cat, Davis?”
    I looked at my hands. Scratched all to hell. No telling where the cat was.
    “The cat story is a long one.”
    I felt him nod. “Maybe later.”
    (Later.) “Bradley?”
    “Yes?”
    “I don’t really know what platinum is .”
    “Yes, you do.” He reached for my left hand. “Your wedding band is platinum. It’s a
     precious metal. The missing platinum was minted into commemorative Bellissimo coins.
     Like gold or silver coins, but these are made of platinum.”
    “Why would the Bellissimo have so much platinum?”
    “Just an asset, Davis,” he said, “part of our portfolio. The vault has gold and silver
     too.”
    “For a rainy day?” I asked.
    “For a rainy day.”
    He traced a deep scratch across the back of my hand.
    “Four million dollars is how many coins?” I asked. “Bigger than a breadbox?”
    Bradley stretched his legs until his shoes ran into a cast iron tub large enough to
     swim laps in. “Platinum is like pork bellies, traded on the stock market. And the
     value fluctuates. An ounce of platinum is worth anywhere from fifteen hundred to two
     thousand dollars, depending on the market.” His shoes tapped the iron tub. “Any way
     you look at it, four million dollars is two thousand coins or better.”
    “Like dimes?” I asked. Because two thousand dimes seemed stealable. I remembered a
     story in the news years ago, when a trucker hijacked her own eighteen-wheeler full
     of dimes. She went to Vegas and hit the Strip with a Dooney & Bourke bucket bag full
     of dimes. She parked herself between two ten-cent slot machines and went to town.
     When she ran out of dimes, she went back to the dime stash in her hotel room and loaded
     up her Dooney & Bourke again. Busted before the day was out. No one has that many
     dimes.
    “Much larger than dimes,” Bradley said. “They’re measured on the Troy scale, Davis,
     and they’re the size of silver dollars, but heavier.”
    How does he know all this? How do I not know all this? Who is Troy?
    “So the platinum didn’t walk out of the vault.” I have a beautiful collection of purses—Louis
     Vuitton, Gucci, and a Chanel—and not a one of them could hold two thousand coins.
    “No,” he said. “It didn’t.”
    Mr. & Mrs. Bradley Cole, sitting on an Igloo cooler in the foyer of their home, quietly
     considered the ramifications of a vault breach. And in that contemplative moment I
     realized this heist, regardless of where it started or how it ended, wasn’t so much
     the missing platinum or even the value of the missing platinum—let’s face it, four
     million bucks in the broad spectrum of casino economies wasn’t all that much money—as
     it was that the platinum was discovered missing on Bradley’s watch.
    “Have you told Mr. Sanders?”
    “I just got off the phone with him.”
    “Who did this, Bradley?” I held my breath while waiting on his answer.
    “Me.” He threw his hands in the air. “Richard and I are the only ones with vault access,”
     he said, “and he’s not here.”
    Wrong answer.
    “Start at the beginning,” I said. “When’s the last time you knew the