Gator Bait (13 page)

“Except us,” Ida Belle said.

“We’re special,” I said.

“We have to figure this out fast,” Ida Belle said, “but I have no idea where to look next.”

“If Deputy Breaux can get Carter’s boat up, maybe it will tell us something.”

Ida Belle gave me a single nod and we picked up our pace.

It sounded good, but I couldn’t help feeling the boat was a real long shot. I didn’t know how deep I dived to rescue Carter, but I did know it wasn’t the bottom of the lake. I had my doubts they could even get the boat up from the bottom, and even if they managed to, I wasn’t convinced it would give us answers that led anywhere.
 

But I’d get those answers. If it was the last thing I ever did.

###

While Ida Belle went to snag a pair of shoes, I called Gertie and asked her to pick us both up at Ida Belle’s house. She pulled up at the curb a couple minutes later, just as Ida Belle emerged wearing a pair of navy flats that didn’t quite match her turquoise-and-black dress.

“I know,” she said as she grabbed her purse. “I threw my only pair of black shoes in the bayou. Unless you count my motorcycle boots.”

“Probably not a better look than the navy.”

As I reached for the door, Gertie burst inside. We both stared at her in dismay.

“Why didn’t you change clothes?” Ida Belle asked.

The dress was bad enough before, but apparently Tiny had gotten a piece of the tutu skirt. A big hunk was missing out of the back, exposing Gertie’s camo underwear.
 

“The zipper is stuck,” Gertie said. “I think it got stripped when I jumped onto the transformer.”

“So cut it off,” Ida Belle said.

Gertie looked horrified. “I’m not going to cut up my homecoming dress.”

Ida Belle threw her hands in the air. “High school was barely invented when you bought that dress. Put it out to pasture where it belongs.”

Gertie put her hands on her hips. “All I want is one day in the dress. Then I’ll store it so that I can remember it when I’m old.”

“You’re old now!” Ida Belle said.

Gertie stalked past her. “I have to pee.”

She stomped down the hall, the tutu swinging back and forth over the camo undies.

Ida Belle sighed. “She could have at least changed underwear.”

“Look at the bright side,” I said. “If Celia’s downtown, we can get Gertie to stand in front of her.”

Ida Belle’s lower lip quivered and I could tell she was trying not to smile, but finally, the mental picture of Celia staring at Gertie’s underwear-clad bottom shining in Celia’s face won out and she broke out in a grin. “That would be stellar.”

“What would be stellar?” Gertie asked as she entered the living room.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just talking about the election.”

“Let’s go grab Fortune some shoes,” Ida Belle said, “and get to the church to vote.”

“You vote in the church?” I asked as I followed them outside. “Doesn’t that go against the whole separation of church and state thing?”

“We used to vote at the library,” Gertie said as we climbed into her car. “But they only have one bathroom—for men and women. The Catholics put in new bathrooms with five stalls each a couple years ago.”

“Show-offs,” Ida Belle grumbled.
 

I started to ask why the Baptists didn’t put in more restrooms, but decided against it. Everything in Sinful had some convoluted and often completely illogical reasoning behind it. Asking questions about how the town operated was like asking why Santa Claus was late delivering gifts.
 

We made a quick stop at my house and I snagged some sandals, then Gertie directed her car downtown. I did a double take when we inched to a crawl blocks away from Main Street to avoid the sea of people walking in the middle of the road. And everywhere I looked, there were more. People on the sidewalks. People on lawns.
 

“Where did all these people come from?” I asked.

“There’s thousands of houses out in the bayous,” Gertie said. “Most of them aren’t much to speak of, but people live in them.”

“A lot of the men work construction in New Orleans or on oil rigs in the Gulf,” Ida Belle said. “When they’re home, they tend to prefer their recliner, beer, and television remote. They’re not out much for us regulars to see.”

“Apparently, everyone puts down the remote and the beer to vote,” I said.

“Of course,” Ida Belle said. “These men ask to be home specifically at election time. We take voting seriously here in Louisiana.”

Gertie nodded. “If only our elected officials took it as seriously as the voters do. We tend to elect a bunch of fools.”

“Everyone does,” I said, “but then my opinion of politicians isn’t all that high.”

“You’ll have to revise that if Marie is elected mayor,” Gertie pointed out.

“Goes without saying,” I agreed. I pointed to a large gathering at the end of Main Street opposite the church. “What’s going on down there?”

Ida Belle rose on her tiptoes to look over the crown and frowned. “Nothing good. I see Celia standing on a park bench. Her mouth is open, which means trouble.”

“She’s not supposed to be campaigning within six hundred feet of the election place,” Gertie complained. “We should get a tape measure.”

“Waste of time,” Ida Belle said, “but we should probably go see what she’s up to. We can vote afterward.”

We headed down the street, threading through the mass of men talking about sports and women pushing strollers and clutching screaming children. Finally, we made it to the end of the street where someone was handing Celia a microphone attached to a small amplifier on the ground next to the bench.

“Something has got to change,” Celia boomed into the microphone, causing the amplifier to screech.
 

“Sorry,” she said, lowering her voice about a hundred decibels. “This was always a safe town filled with good people, and look what has become of it. We’ve had more crime this year than we have my entire lifetime.”

“Maybe if you were five years old,” Gertie yelled.

Celia leveled her gaze at Gertie, flinching a bit when she took in Gertie’s outfit. “And what is law enforcement doing to protect us? ‘Nothing’ is the answer.”

“You’re still alive and mouthing off, aren’t you?” Gertie yelled.

Celia glared at Gertie, then continued her rant. “Sheriff Lee is so old he falls asleep reading people their rights.”

“I’ll give her that one,” Gertie grumbled.

“Deputy Breaux is likable enough. So is Daffy Duck, but I don’t see anyone asking him to join law enforcement.”

I leaned toward Ida Belle. “I’m confused. Did she just call Deputy Breaux stupid or funny?”
 

“I think she was going for stupid,” Ida Belle said.

“That was rude,” I said. Deputy Breaux wasn’t any Einstein and he wouldn’t make it in law enforcement in a big city for a day, but calling him out as an imbecile in front of the entire town was a special kind of unpleasant. “I hope his mother didn’t hear that.”

Ida Belle pointed to a horrid-looking woman standing next to the park bench and holding a “Vote for Celia” sign. “That’s his mother.”

“The one nodding?”

“Yep.”

“Jesus.” From now on, I was going to make an effort to be nicer to Deputy Breaux.

“Right now,” Celia continued, “Deputy LeBlanc is in the hospital, a victim of yet another criminal that he failed to catch.”

I felt a flush run up my face. “He was shot and almost drowned, and you have the nerve to complain about him, you ungrateful bitch.”

The crowd went silent.

Celia locked her gaze on mine. “Maybe if he was concentrating on his job, instead of making time with Yankees, we wouldn’t have any crime in this town. We didn’t before you came.”

“You can’t blame Fortune for anything going on in this town,” Ida Belle said. “Everything that has happened since she’s arrived started years before she got here.”

“Maybe so,” Celia said, “but the first thing I plan to do as mayor is clean house at the sheriff’s department. This town needs law enforcement that will keep us safe. Men that criminals fear so much they won’t even try to get away with something in this town.”

“You mean criminals like your daughter? Or the former mayor?” I asked. “Or were you only referring to criminals not related to you?”

There was a collective intake of breath and the entire crowd froze, only their eyes moving back and forth between Celia and me. Celia turned white, then whiter, then the blood rushed back into her face and turned her as red as a tomato.

I waited for the twinge of guilt I should have felt, but it never came. The part about Celia’s daughter was a low blow, but I was tired of hearing her vitriol. Carter wasn’t responsible for criminals choosing their way of life, and no law enforcement officer, no matter how scary, was going to turn criminals straight. It was a ludicrous thought and highly insulting to every man and woman who worked to protect the general population.

Finally Celia gained her voice back and she pointed a finger at me. “When I win this election, I’ll make it my first order of business to find a way to get you out of this town. You may not have committed any of the crimes here, but I know bad luck when I see it. It wasn’t here before you arrived. The solution for returning this town to normal seems clear to me.”

I stared at her, trying to understand how anyone could be so superstitious and stupid and downright mean, but it escaped me. Even worse, some of the residents were starting to study me as if Celia might be onto something.

Gertie drew herself up straight and glared at Celia. “Fortune saved your life. If she hadn’t been here, you would have died. That seems awfully lucky on your part, although some of us might have a differing opinion.”

Ida Belle shook her head at Celia and spun around, grabbing my arm as she went. “Let’s get out of here. This can only get worse, and we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
 

I hesitated a moment before setting out after her. Finding the man who’d tried to kill Carter definitely took priority over Celia and her nonsense, but I was worried about this election. If Celia was elected and made good on her promise, Carter might be released from the hospital to unemployment. I shuddered to think of what Celia would deem a suitable replacement. I was certain no one else in Sinful was better qualified to manage the town than Carter. And anyone who wasn’t a Sinful resident would be at a gross disadvantage.
 

“Where’s Marie?” I asked. “Shouldn’t she be down here duking it out with Celia?”

Ida Belle shook her head. “Marie would never do something like that. She’d consider it crass.”

“Well, maybe she needs to consider getting a bit of crass,” Gertie said. “She might need it to beat Celia.”

I worried that Gertie was right, and Marie’s refusal to fight dirty could result in her losing the election. With Celia in charge of Sinful, all kinds of things would change, and not for the better. Celia just thought things were bad now, but if she fired Carter, I had no doubt things would go from bad to way, way worse.

Chapter Nine

Gertie and Ida Belle made quick work of the voting, skirting the locals who tried to hold them up with questions about Carter and Celia and anything else they wanted gossip about. In an attempt to avoid the nosiness, we took the long route to the sheriff’s department, making a beeline for the bayou behind the row of shops on Main Street and working our way back toward the other end of the street where the sheriff’s department was located. We wanted to check with Deputy Breaux about the boat and to see if he’d discovered anything of use.
 

When we walked in the sheriff’s department, Myrtle gave us a halfhearted wave before dropping her hand back onto the desk. She looked exhausted.
 

Ida Belle frowned. “You look like you’ve been up all night. Where’s your backup?”

Myrtle nodded. “Sick. And I have been up all night, but I can’t leave Deputy Breaux to handle everything. Between Carter, the Feds, and the election, this town’s a madhouse. You guys been to see Carter?”

“We went this morning,” Ida Belle said.

“How’s he doing?” Myrtle asked.

“Good, considering how things could have gone,” I said.

“Did he say what happened?”

Ida Belle shook her head. “The concussion is causing memory loss. It’s probably not permanent, but for now, he’s as much in the dark as the rest of us.”

“Unless Deputy Breaux has found out anything useful?” I gave Myrtle a hopeful look.

She shook her head. “Between the election fights he keeps having to break up and those Feds who keep trying to force him to do anything but his job, he’s had his hands full. Even if there was something to be found out, he wouldn’t have had time to listen to it.”

“Did he send someone to try to recover the department’s boat?” I asked.

Myrtle frowned. “Oh yeah. That’s the current round of issues. You’re not going to believe—”

The door to Deputy Breaux’s office flew open and a young woman carrying a baby hurried out, tears streaming down her face. “I can’t hear any more of this,” she said. “If you find a…you know, let me know.”