Gator Aide (11 page)

“Who are we looking for anyway? Anyone in particular?”

“Not we, Bronx. Me. You’re just along for the ride. Maybe learn a thing or two on the way. See if I’m wasting my time, or if there’s any hope of making a real agent out of you.” Charlie pulled out a Baby Ruth and proceeded to have his dinner. He threw me a Nestlé’s Crunch, and I joined him in the evening meal.

“I’m out after the most notorious outlaw in the country. One Trenton B. Treddell. He’s a wild man, Bronx. That s.o.b. has been getting away with murder for years. But I’m gonna catch his ass. I can feel it.” Charlie was on a roll. “Trenton’s been killing the shit out of wildlife for years. The man’s a downright game hog. But when I get hold of him, and you’ll notice I say
when
, I’m gonna eat his lunch for him.”

I’d heard about this from others who had worked with Charlie. Trenton Treddell was his Moby Dick. He’d been after the man for years. In fact, he’d been out chasing Treddell the night his wife finally left. The running joke in the Service was that someday Trenton would end up catching him. More than a few in Fish and Wildlife felt that was the only way they’d ever get rid of Charlie. A few had even suggested paying Trenton to do the deed.

“How long have you been after this guy, Charlie?” It seemed a reasonable enough question. But then, I was dealing with Charlie Hickok. Reasonable wasn’t a word in his vocabulary.

“Listen, Bronx, when you learn to do your job and become a real agent, then you can think about criticizing me. But until that day comes—and it seems like one hell of a long way off, if ever—you just set your fanny back and watch a pro at work.”

I never knew how Charlie was going to react until it was too late. The most volatile man I’d ever met, he was also a walking encyclopedia on the bayou and Cajun life. It all depended on whether or not he felt like sharing his knowledge with you. So far, he’d rather have worked with a trained baboon than with me. I closed my eyes again as he continued to mutter away. But a few minutes later, he was back into a loud harangue.

“I’m feeling good tonight. I’m going to show that sucker how the cow ate the cabbage. One of my missiles is coming, and it’s gonna hit ol’ Trenton right between the eyes.”

I made the mistake of yawning.

“Listen up, Bronx. This is a war zone out here.” He slapped at a mosquito that had left me for greener pastures. “Hell. I gave up my goddamn life for this job, and this is how the Service pays me back. If I had a good team of agents, I could clean up this swamp in no time. But it ain’t never gonna happen with the amateur material they keep sending me.”

“Right, coach. Possibly with a SWAT team you could get rid of all the poachers around. But since I’m the only team you’ve got, maybe it’s time you started making better use of
me
.”

I hadn’t come along to be insulted. Besides, the worst he could do was to relegate me once again to full-time duck patrol, and that was already a foregone conclusion.

“And since we seem to be clearing the air, Charlie, there’s something that’s still bothering me about that gator the other night. I just don’t think those bullets penetrated deep enough to kill it.”

“Something keeps bothering me too, Bronx. And that’s having some smart-ass Yankee female as a rookie agent. But it seems like there’s nothing I can do about it. You just gotta learn to live with the cards you’ve been dealt. And in these here parts, I’m king of the hill as far as catching outlaws goes. And the cards you’ve been dealt is to deal with me. As far as that gator is concerned, I don’t need no goddamn fancy-pants forensics lab to tell me what I already know. The gator was shot to death. That’s that. Period.
Comprende
?”

I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the ride. We were headed into Jean Lafitte Reserve near Barataria, famous for its pirates of past and drug smugglers of present. It consisted of nine thousand soggy acres of marsh, swamp, bayous, and wetland. A fortune in drugs had been smuggled in through here. Also a refuge for otter, mink, and nutria, it was teeming with gators. Lafitte was a national park considered taboo territory by poachers. Most wouldn’t dare to go near the place. For Trenton, it was a favorite hunting location.

Finding Charlie’s “lucky spot,” we parked and unloaded the mud boat. Not a sound was to be heard except for the slapping of water against wood. A sheet of black velvet covered the sky and dozens of stars peeked out through tiny moth-eaten holes. Pushing off, we entered the swamp, and soon even the pinpricks of light disappeared.

Age-old cypress trees slid by as we made our way through a watery maze. A bullfrog croaked in angry protest at our presence. Sounds are always different at night. The tiniest noise in the swamp becomes magnified a hundred times, until every bit of space hums with its own peculiar song. But soon even the noise died down, making it all the more frightening. Charlie loved the swamp, which was something I’d never yet understood. Even during the day there was always an eeriness to it. At night it was terrifying. Every tree became sinister, every animal was threatening. It was here that bodies were dumped and left to rot. People swore that spirits wandered among the cypress trees at night, with curtains of Spanish moss their only camouflage.

This was one of those suffocatingly hot Louisiana nights when not even a breeze dared invade the area. A swarm of mosquitoes danced about my head in a frenzy of midsummer madness, buzzing inside my ears like a radio that hadn’t been tuned. Charlie began to scratch and slap, muttering an occasional curse under his breath. He finally broke the silence.

“It’s so quiet you could hear a damn gnat scratch its ass.”

Except for him, he was right. Charlie directed the boat down different fingers of the swamp that shot off without any rhyme or reason. When I finally spoke, it was in a whisper.

“How do you know where to find him?”

“What the hell you whisperin’ for, Bronx? Afraid a ghost’ll hear you comin’?” Hickok could smell fear and immediately zeroed in on mine. I silently hated him for it. “I can find him ’cause we been doin’ this for years. The man knows where I am, and I know where he is. It’s sorta like a game of hide-and-seek.”

The idea was so ludicrous that it broke the tension for me. “And you haven’t caught him yet?”

“Listen up, Bronx. This man is the best there is at what he does. I’m gonna get him. There’s no two ways about it. But he’s dangerous in that he has no fear. It’s a test of skills that’s takin’ place here.”

I had the sneaking suspicion that if Charlie ever caught Trenton, there wouldn’t be much in life for him to look forward to. From where I sat, I could sense his adrenaline flowing. In turn, my own began to pump a mile a minute.

“There’s the sucker now!”

I looked around madly but saw nothing in the darkness of the swamp.

“Nice and slow, we’re gonna sneak right up behind him.”

As if he were doing the opening step in a mating dance, Charlie eased along until I could just make out the marsh ahead. Another boat sat with a lone figure in it. Even in the darkness, I could tell the rig was twice as big as our own. A huge engine attached to the back purred in anticipation of our arrival. It wouldn’t be much of a race. We were in a stock Chevy thumbing our nose at Mario Andretti in one of his Formula cars.

Charlie glided our boat slowly forward, feeling his way as tentatively as a debutante at her first ball. But there was no sneaking up on Treddell, who turned to watch our approach. He stood up, and his looming figure cut a shadow across the moonlight, causing my heart to clench.

Charlie goosed the throttle, and we flew toward Treddell’s boat with a lurch. As we picked up speed, so did Treddell. When Charlie unexpectedly slowed, so did he. A cat-and-mouse game ensued, a pure and simple tease. Trenton would allow us to get tantalizingly close, then quickly pull away, conducting a series of figure eights, twists, and turns that would have made an ice-skater proud. Charlie tried to follow suit, nearly causing our boat to capsize and landing my heart in my throat.

What must have been less than fifteen minutes seemed like a good hour as Charlie and Trenton played their game. Looking over at Charlie, I saw him in his element—a man determined to win or to kill me trying. I gripped the sides of the boat until my knuckles ached.

Suddenly Treddell threw his boat in reverse, nearly causing us to crash. Throwing back his head, he let loose a devilish roar as he took off again, abruptly veering off to the side. He hightailed it into a tall patch of cordgrass and cut the engine. His boat bobbed seductively, the grass around his craft swaying as if it were a skirt buffeted by a breeze. I held my breath, waiting for the next move, when I heard the faint whisper of a laugh glide across the water toward us.

Having held out as long as he could, Charlie finally blasted the engine, 150 horsepower sending us cutting through tall grass toward Trenton. The hull barely skimmed the surface as we flew atop the marsh, and the motor screamed with glee. Water whipped up and razor-sharp grass slashed against the side of our boat like miniature daggers as we approached him. My pulse sped along with the engine, caught up in the excitement of the chase.

Trenton waited until the last moment before letting loose, his boat rising out of the water as if it were about to unfold a pair of water wings. An expert in building airboats, he had mounted 220 horsepower to the rear of a light pontoon craft which hit close to seventy miles an hour, leaving us far behind.

Charlie followed Trenton’s zigs and zags as best he could, as Treddell’s airboat churned up water and weeds that blew back in our faces. Up ahead, the marsh became impenetrable but for a narrow channel that cut through in the shape of a horseshoe. With only one entrance in and one exit out at the opposite end, it led onto a lake of open water.

Entering the canal, Trenton barreled ahead in a race to the other end as we followed behind. The wind picked up, and I found myself squinting into a thin mist of water that hung like a sheet of fine rain. But the breeze also carried a pungent aroma that had precipitously crept into the night air. An odor which was unsettlingly familiar, and blasted an alarm siren inside my brain.

Shielding my eyes against the oncoming spray, I peered at what seemed to be a group of swaying orange figures in the near distance. Dancing on top of the water, they stretched their long, lithe limbs up toward the sky, high-kicking like a chorus line of leggy Rockettes. It wasn’t until we drew closer that the figures converged into a fiery wall of flames, and the biting sting of smoke hit our eyes.

Charlie stared for a moment in disbelief before the impact of what we faced hit him.

“Holy shit! That bastard’s set a blaze that’s coming right at us!”

Trenton had reached the other side of the horseshoe, dumping his spare gasoline along the way. After that, all it had taken was one simple match to turn the canal into a roaring death trap. Charlie threw the throttle into reverse, not bothering to try to turn the boat around. The motor choked up, and for a brief instant I felt sure we were about to go up in flames as the fire came roaring toward us, an angry critter out of control. The heat of the flames greedily licked the night air, the hot breeze a furnace eager to engulf us. The crackling of fire on water sizzled in my ears, and my skin prickled from the heat, as our engine caught hold and we sped backward through the waterway. In a game of touch-and-go, Charlie’s mud boat and the roaring fire kept a steady pace. My fear froze as the flames picked up speed, but Charlie miraculously swung the boat out of the canal with only a few yards to spare.

Charlie had gone in search of a race, and Trenton had more than obliged. Smoke ripped through my lungs, and tears stung my eyes as I looked back to see Trenton’s craft parked at the end of the horseshoe, a sentinel standing guard. His motionless figure peered out from thick, black billows of smoke. Looking like Lucifer personified behind a screen of sinuously dancing flames, he began to laugh, a deep, menacing laugh that rang out through the night, echoing off the edge of the swamp to encircle us before slowly fading away as the fire continued to crackle. We sat in silence, watching the night burn, the roar of Trenton’s motor now no more than a ghostly whisper.

Charlie cursed a nonstop blue streak out of the marsh, into the swamp, past dead cypress trees, and beyond ghosts that knew well enough to stay out of his way. He cursed until we reached shore and loaded the boat back onto its hitch. A crimson hue rose up from the swamp and burned the velvet sky, eclipsing the stars. I held my silence until we were almost home.

“I want to thank you for that lesson on how to catch outlaws, Charlie. It’s been a night I’ll never forget.”

“Not one word, Bronx! You hear me? Not one word of this to anyone, or you’ll be out on duck patrol so long you’ll forget what another human being looks like.” Charlie was in the blackest mood I’d seen yet. “We got our asses whupped tonight. We got ’em whupped good. That ain’t nothing to be proud of.”

I wondered if something inside him had finally snapped. “Does this mean you’re giving up?”

“Hell, no! I’m only just starting. The important thing is to be a poor loser, and that’s exactly what I am. That’s the only way to win, Bronx. Don’t you ever forget that.”

It was a lesson I’d spent my entire life learning. It was what had me sitting in a pickup truck weaving through the bayou night. It also gave me a window into Charlie Hickok’s soul. Neither of us could walk away from a challenge. Sometimes, it was the only way I felt I really existed at all.

“We did get close, Charlie.”

Charlie pulled his cap down with a tug.

“Coming close don’t count in nothin’ but horseshoes, Bronx.”

He had a point. I just wasn’t sure what it was.

Charlie’s mood didn’t lighten up
over the next few days, and, as a result, I found myself once more back out on fulltime duck patrol. He sent me off with a few words of wisdom.

“Listen up, Bronx. You signed your life over to this outfit. That means you hit the road, you stay on the road, you catch the bad guys, and you stop ’em dead in their tracks.”