Louisiana Longshot (A Miss Fortune Mystery, Book 1) (10 page)

“Is this really the best thing to wear into the swamp?” I asked. “Can’t I just wear jeans and rubber boots?”

“Some places in the swamp is like quicksand. Looks like ground—then you step on it and sink a good three feet in the mud. If you was to wear the boots, you wouldn’t make it ten feet before one was stuck in a mud pit and long gone. For you to lose them waders, you’d have to step in something up to your waist.”

“I’m not going to need to run or anything, am I? Because these things really restrict movement.”

Walter’s brow scrunched together for a couple of seconds, then he shook his head. “I suppose a rogue gator is always a possibility. But given as how I already heard about your sprint to Francine’s yesterday, I’m betting money you’ll be faster than Ida Belle or Gertie. A gator can’t eat all of you, so from your perspective, running’s not really a worry.”

I stared at him, certain he was joking, but he merely lifted his paper and went back to reading the cartoons. Jeez. And I thought I was ruthless. Maybe he was angrier over Ida Belle turning down those marriage proposals than she imagined.

I hefted my supply box up on the counter. “Can I leave everything I don’t need right now and pick it up when we get back?”

“Sure. I’ll just put it behind the counter.”

“I don’t suppose you have some mirrored sunglasses, do you?”

“Yep. Most people going on the water prefer polarized, though.”

“I’m not planning on spending much time on the water, so mirrored are fine.” And allowed you to closely watch other people without them realizing what you were doing.

Walter rummaged through a drawer behind the counter and pulled out a pair of sunglasses. I stuck them on top of my head, then dug through the box, stuffing things I thought I might need into the camo pants pockets. I started to load the rifle, then stopped.

“I really appreciate you including a rifle in my gear,” I said, “but if I have to fire while running, a handgun would work better.”

Walter lowered his paper and stared at me, raising one eyebrow. “You been watching them cop shows on television?”

“Maybe?” I replied, hoping it would cover my faux pas of asking for weaponry that a librarian probably shouldn’t have the ability to use.

He narrowed his eyes at me, and I worried for a moment that I’d taken things too far.

“What’s a pretty young thing like you know about shooting a handgun?”

“Pretty young things who live in big cities can’t shop after dark without protection.”

He stared a couple of seconds longer, and I kept my gaze steady. Finally, he sighed and pulled a pistol from underneath the counter.
 

“I have to run a background check on you to sell you a pistol,” he said. “There’s no way I can get that check done in the next ten minutes, so seeing as you’re Marge’s family, I’m going to loan you my gun. But if you lose it, or shoot anything but a gator with it, I’m going to swear you stole it.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said as I put the rifle back in my supplies box and took the pistol from him. “I take it you know this Number Two?”

“Yep. Got a fishing camp out there.”

“Is there anything in particular I should watch out for?”

He snorted. “Yeah. You’re riding in the boat with ’em.”

 
I shoved the pistol in my camo pants and left the store before I changed my mind. I was way too close to agreeing with him.
 

Ida Belle was perched at the back of a tiny aluminum boat next to an outboard motor. Gertie sat on a bench in the middle, wearing a life vest and squinting at me as I approached the bank.
 

“Couldn’t we borrow a bigger boat?” I asked.
 

“A bigger boat won’t fit down the channel,” Ida Belle said.

“Are you sure this thing’s safe?”

Ida Belle waved a hand in exasperation. “Just get in and sit down up front. Unless you plan on dancing in here, the thing’s fine. And push me away from the bank, will you?”

I looked at the wobbly piece of tin and hesitated, then chastised myself. I’d seen plenty of boat launches on movies. I could handle this.
 

I untied the boat from a giant post, then pushed the front of the boat just a bit with my foot. The mud it was resting in must have been slick because the boat launched backward. Panicked, I leapt from the bank onto the flat shelf on the front of the boat, waders and all, and froze in a judo fighting stance.
 

Gertie clapped, grinning from ear to ear. “That was amazing. I figured you were going to flip over into the bayou, and then we’d have to fish you out and buy you new waders.”

Great. Twenty-five years of martial arts training had managed to entertain Mother Time in the bayou. My father would be proud.
 

“I thought the waders were waterproof,” I said. “Why would you have to replace them if I fell in?”

“They’re water
tight
,” Ida Belle said. “So as soon as you get in water over the waistline, they’ll fill up and you’ll sink like a stone. If that happens, you have to shed those waders and let them go. Then you’ll have to buy another set.”

“That happen a lot?”

“Probably more than you want to know about.”

“Hmmmm.”

“Are you going to sit down?” Ida Belle asked. “Or am I supposed to drive down the bayou with you up there looking like a Jackie Chan hood ornament?”

I hopped down into the boat and sat on the bench at the front. It was a good thing I did. Next thing I knew, Ida Belle twisted the throttle on the boat motor and it launched a good two inches out of the water and ten feet forward in less than a second. If my feet hadn’t been firmly planted on the bottom of the boat, I would have been face-first in the aluminum.
 

Gertie, however, did not fare as well. She flipped over backward off the bench, still clutching the shotgun, and shot out the lights on Walter’s pier. I looked back at the store to find Walter standing at the back door, shaking his head.

“I’m putting that on your tab,” he yelled as Ida Belle powered the boat away from the store.

I hoped Ida Belle had rich parents or had retired from a lucrative career. Otherwise, she might have to take Walter up on his proposal in order to clear her tab.

I rose and staggered the couple of steps to the bench to take the shotgun from Gertie, then helped her back onto the bench. “I’ll just hold on to this,” I said, nodding at the shotgun.

“It had already been pumped.” Gertie said and frowned at Ida Belle. “Who leaves their shotgun pumped?”

“I do,” Ida Belle said. “I sprained my wrist last week, and it’s delayed my response time.”

Gertie’s frown cleared. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

I was beginning to see the validity in Walter’s warning.
 

“So, how far is it to Number Two?”

“Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes with the bayou this smooth,” Ida Belle said as the boat slammed over a wave, jarring my teeth.

“And Harvey’s camp is on the bank?” Please. Please. Please.

“Not right now. The tide’s out, so the water level will be too low to pull all the way up to his pier. We’ll have about a quarter-mile walk to get around to it.”

I didn’t even bother to hold in the sigh. It felt like an entire day had already passed, and yet we still had to walk in sludge, find Marie, convince her to return to Sinful, drag her back if she didn’t want to go, come up with a reasonable explanation for her disappearance to Number Two, and find someone else to blame for Harvey’s death.
 

I’d disabled a nuclear warhead with less effort.

Chapter Eight

I smelled Number Two before I saw it. I’d like to say that’s because I was facing backward in the boat, but the reality is, the aroma of N2 wafted across my nose before we’d even rounded the narrow channel to get a clear view.

I blanched and saw Gertie pull the Mentholatum from her pocket. I remembered Walter had given me some and pulled the container from one of my camo pants pockets. I swiped my finger in the gel and dabbed a bit in my nostrils, then inhaled a little.

And almost passed out.

Ida Belle rounded a corner, and I turned around to see what in the world could create such a stench. I was appalled to see an island of mud and cypress trees about a hundred yards away across a small lake, filled with stumps. There wasn’t a breath of air, which meant that stench was literally permeating over a hundred yards away from the source. Ida Belle cut the boat speed down to almost nothing and began to weave in and out of the stumps.

I was beginning to see the wisdom of Marie hiding out there. No one in their right mind would want to set foot on the place.

I dipped my finger in the Mentholatum again, this time pulling up a wad of the gel, and shoved the entire thing into my nostrils. I sniffed again to test, then drove my entire nose into the bottle.
 

“It isn’t usually this bad,” Gertie said.

“Why is it this bad now?”

“Because it’s summer. Heat tends to ripen the aroma. No one comes here much until cooler weather. The speckled trout are huge.”

“I don’t care if the fish are covered in gold. I wouldn’t come here ever.”

“If you’d been to one of our all-night fish fries after a day on Number Two, you’d change your mind,” Gertie said.

“Not unless you had a mind-numbing amount of beer, I wouldn’t.”

Ida Belle snorted. “Of course there’s beer. Who has a fish fry without beer?”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “Southern Baptists?”

Ida Belle waved a hand in dismissal. “That’s only in front of other people. The Sinful Ladies don’t count.”

Gertie nodded and smiled. “Do you know why you always take two Baptists fishing?”

“I have no idea.”

“Because if you take only one, he’ll drink all the beer.” She laughed so hard, she doubled over on the bench.
 

Ida Belle rolled her eyes. “That joke is as old as Gertie, but it never ceases to tickle her.”

“So, let me get this straight,” I said. “You have all these religious rules, like no drinking, but you only observe them in front of other people?”

“Yeah, that pretty much sums it up,” Ida Belle said.

“But doesn’t God see it?”

“Oh hell,” Ida Belle said. “God doesn’t care about drinking beer. All those rules were made up by people trying to prevent you from doing something really wrong. Drunks make stupid decisions. If you don’t drink, there’s less chance of doing something stupid.”

I saw her point in a very broad way, but as I’d managed to do plenty of stupid things completely sober—this exact moment being one of them—I decided to let the whole thing drop. Religion was by and large constructed by men, and I had yet to find a man who was logical. Deconstructing religious rules would definitely be a journey into madness.

“Almost there,” Ida Belle said. “Fortune, grab that pylon at the dock and pull us alongside where the ladder is.”

I turned around and almost got a face full of wood. If I hadn’t had the reflexes of a trained killer, that’s exactly what would have happened. Instead, I threw my hands up in front of my face and pressed them against the pylon. When the boat came to a stop, I reached for the rope and tied the boat off to the dock.
 

“Good job.” Ida Belle nodded approvingly.

“A little more notice would have been nice,” I replied.

“Bah. I’m keeping you on your toes. You never know when you might have to move fast out here. Doesn’t do any good to get complacent.”

“Trust me, I plan on moving at the speed of light out here.” I started up the ladder and got the top of my hip waders caught on a loose board. Ida Belle and Gertie just stood there, watching me struggle with the rubbery material and the piece of rotten wood until I finally wrenched the entire piece from the dock.
 

“Okay, maybe the speed of sound,” I said as I climbed onto the dock.

“Maybe we should have told her there was a bowl of banana pudding on the other side of the island,” Gertie said.
 

I reached down to grab the shotgun Gertie handed me, not even bothering to argue. I hadn’t run down Main Street yesterday for banana pudding. Until yesterday, I didn’t even know what real banana pudding was. I’d run down Main Street because I couldn’t stand walking away from a challenge. All I cared about was finishing first. The pudding had turned out to be the icing on top, but it wasn’t the reason I’d carried tennis shoes into church.

I put the shotgun on the deck and went to extend my hand to Gertie, but found she was already stepping onto the deck, with Ida Belle close behind. Apparently, they were schooled in the fine art of hip-wader climbing. I consoled myself by thinking I’d probably made it easier for them by removing that rotten piece of wood.
 

Before I could make a move for the shotgun, Gertie swiped it up and gave me a look that said she wasn’t going to part with it easily. I wasn’t about to get in a wrestling match with an old woman carrying a loaded weapon, especially on an island of dung. With my luck, she’d shoot a hole in the boat and we’d be stuck here.