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

Alabama.” We got out of there before she could ask one of us to walk on her back. Snap, snap.
    The bad news was, I couldn’t break into seven different storage facilities and track down the divorce docket. The good news was, neither could they.
    I had to cook up and backdate evidence proving Eddie the Rat lived in Alabama at the time of our divorce, then cook up and backdate evidence of him responding to their original request. Then I had to go back to Camden, slap down the proof, and get my divorce. So I could get married.
    From Alabama Power’s web site, I recreated an image of a four-by-six manila card payment-due notice. It was the same goldenrod postcard that I’d pulled out of my Pine Apple mailbox a hundred times. I downloaded the old dot-matrix font and produced an electric bill in the amount of $37.14 for March of 2008. I didn’t need to track down the perforated card stock to print it on; I only needed a copy. Next, I imaged a cashier’s check drawn off Pine Apple Savings and Loan and dated it three weeks later than the date on the postcard invoice. I stamped it PAID by overlaying a grainy stamp image. Last order of business, I downloaded and used a sloppy, masculine, handwritten font to address a #10 envelope to the Court Clerk, Camden County, from Edward Meldrick Crawford, Shady Acres Mobile Home Park, Slip 18, Pine Apple, Alabama. I overlaid the appropriate postage and USPS processing imprints for the day, then gave everything a seven-percent blur for age. Print.
    Like falling off a log. It took longer to eat the Pop Tarts than it did to prove Eddie the Rotten Snake in the Grass lived in Pine Apple at the time of our divorce. The difference is it’s perfectly within my legal rights as a tax-paying citizen to eat Pop Tarts. Making Eddie Crawford a former Alabama resident who responded to a court summons took breaking several federal laws.
    And that’s when I smelled someone else breaking the law.
    I threw open the office door to let Little Sanders have it, but slammed it closed faster.
    Honestly, I might kill Baylor myself.

NINE

      
    There’s Lick Skillet, Alabama, and then there’s Lickskillet, Alabama. Let me apologize on behalf of the state I was born and raised in for the confusion.
    There’s a place called the Lick Skillet Pizza Barn and Auction House at the intersection of Butter and Egg Road and Charity Lane in Hazel Green, Alabama, in Madison County. Alabamians mistakenly call the location Lick Skillet. It’s not. It’s Hazel Green. So it gets confused with the real Lickskillet in DeKalb County, about ninety miles east. The one I’m interested in is the latter, the home of Red, Missy, and Quinn Jennings. Lickskillet is so northeast, it’s a jump and a hop from both the Georgia and Tennessee state lines. The closest grocery store is seven miles of mountain pass down to Fort Payne, home of the Country Music Hall of Fame sensations, aptly named Alabama. Surely those guys are retired by now.
    Lickskillet is listed as a “populated place,” as opposed to a city or township, and backs into the Little River Canyon National Preserve. The area is dense, woodsy, mountainous, almost uninhabited, and a river runs through it, making it a great place to grow Christmas trees. (Right?) Honestly, Google Earth showed three things in, near, or around Lickskillet: the Jennings’ mansion, the Jennings’ Christmas tree farms, and the Jennings’ small private landing strip and huge airplane hangar. You can barely see any of it through the forest terrain. The Jennings’ lived way, way off the beaten path. And their son Quinn was on the other side of the door smoking a bowl with Little Sanders and between them, what looked to be a hooker.
    If I lost my job over this, and I very well may, Baylor was going down with me.
    I’m not so shocked that the boys were smoking pot, even at Thomas Sanders’s tender age, I was more shocked about the girl, and I was horrified they were in our offices. Under no