Feeding Gators: Book 1 in the Shiner's Bayou Series

by Gen Anne Griffin

  “Gracie, I-.”

  “No.” It was her turn to cut him off, the frustration clear in her voice. “For once in your life, shut up and just let me talk.”

  Cal didn’t say a word. After a moment’s pause, Gracie took a deep breath and started talking again.

  “I’ve been praying you would come get me since the day Addison and my folks dropped me off at college. I’ve played our reunion over and over in my head, like a DVD on repeat. You would come to see me, and I’d look ravishingly beautiful. You would apologize for the fight we had in March when you got drunk and broke up with me. I’d forgive you and run into your arms, and we’d kiss and make up, right there in the middle of the campus.” Gracie let out a loud, frustrated sigh. “You never make things easy on me, Cal.”

  “I’m sorry?” He didn’t know what to make of her rant. He didn’t know why she kept saying that he had been the one to break up with her. He hadn’t. She had dumped him.

  “No, you’re not. That’s the whole problem. I thought you’d be sorry, and you’re not. You’re still you – not some fantasy prince on a white horse. You aren’t apologetic. You aren’t charming. You’re pissed off and stubborn as a mule. Same as always.” She looked directly at him, tears pouring down her cheeks. “You finally came for me, and it’s not a fantasy; it’s last March all over again. It’s me needing you to listen and you not hearing a word I say.”

  Cal didn’t say anything. Her words burned him like a branding iron on bare flesh.

  “We needed you Friday night. David and I needed you. Badly. ” Gracie had her hands knotted together in her lap. “You want to sit there in the driver’s seat, all high and mighty. You want to sit here and tell me how we didn’t try hard enough to be honest with you. What do you think David was trying to tell you when you knocked the shit out of him and broke his nose?”

  “I don’t know,” Cal admitted. “Would it make you feel better if I said I wished now that I’d just let him talk?”

  “It’s too late now.” Gracie glared at him, her eyes flashing with anger. “The damage is done. Just like last March. You blew up without letting me finish what I was trying to say to you. You destroyed us because it was easier for you to be angry than it was for you to have to listen to something you didn’t want to hear.”

  Cal took a deep breath, trying not to let his face show how much her words stung. “I’m sorry, Gracie. I swear with God as my witness. I am sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t fix our relationship,” Gracie said, visibly swallowing the lump in her throat. “Sorry doesn’t undo the fact that when I needed help the most, it was David who was there for me. Not you.”

  Cal felt like she’d slapped him across the face. He didn’t know what to say. Sorry was inadequate. She was right about that much. He reached across the truck and held out his hand to her. He was afraid she wouldn’t take it, but after a minute, she placed her cool palm in his. He squeezed her fingers gently.

  “I would take it all back, if I could.”

  “I would take a lot of things back if I could,” Gracie told him, her anger appeared to be dissolving rapidly.

  “I wish I could just pull you into my arms right now and hold you forever,” Cal spoke the words softly but clearly. “I want nothing more than to make everything right between us, Gracie.”

  “Then make it right,” she said.

  “I want to, but first I need the truth from you. I went to your dorm room, babe. I was going to wait on you there. Your roommate told me she thought you were a murderer. She said some guy went on a date with you last Friday night, and no one has seen or heard from him since.” Cal looked across the truck at her, desperately hoping she would deny the story.

  “Brittany is a bitch,” Gracie stared down at their intertwined hands as if she were suddenly afraid to look up at him.

  “Agreed. But she didn’t make up that missing guy, did she?” Cal asked.

  “No, Austin is missing,” Gracie hesitated on the last word.

  “He’s not missing if the Coastal County Sheriff’s Department has his body,” Cal said.

  “What?” It was Gracie’s turn to be stunned speechless. She whimpered involuntarily. “No. No way. There has to be some kind of mistake. David swore up and down that no one would ever find him.”

  Cal cursed under his breath. “David screwed up. Twitchy Eddie found the body.”

  “No.” Gracie was shaking her head fiercely. “No way. He’s too careful.”

  “From what Addison told me, he went out Saturday night and dumped the body out of the bed of his truck in the middle of Ray Johnson’s back pasture in plain view of Twitchy Eddie. That’s not being careful.” Cal sighed, his urge to fight dissolving as he came to terms with what David and Gracie had done. “Reckless idiot.”

  “No,” Gracie shook her head. “Wait. Saturday night?”

  “Saturday night.”

  “We went to Italiano’s on Saturday night,” Gracie frowned, her mind running in a million different directions. “Ask Addison. He saw us in Canterville.”

  “Where did y’all go after dinner?” Cal asked, pressing her for details.

  “Home,” she said. “We didn’t go anywhere. At least, I didn’t.”

  “David did,” Cal cursed again. “He took the truck and -”

  “No. He didn’t.” Gracie held up her hand to silence Cal. “The Toyota never moved after we got back to his house Saturday night.”

  Cal hesitated, his brow furrowed. “Are you sure?”

  “I was doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen. He parks that truck right outside-”

  “The kitchen window,” Cal frowned, nodding. “It’s godawful loud anyway. You would have heard it crank up.”

  “He went out on the creek,” Gracie filled in the part of the story she knew Cal would ask for next. “He came back soaking wet. Without the boat.”

  For a moment the two of them just sat in the truck and stared at one another.

  “He took your boy’s body out onto the bayou itself,” Cal frowned thoughtfully. “Eddie doesn’t have access to the bayou. Not as far as I know.”

  “David didn’t tell me what he did with Austin’s body,” Gracie admitted, her voice barely above a whisper. “I didn’t ask. I just want to pretend the entire thing never happened.”

  “David and I have talked about-” Cal appeared to shake himself out of his stupor and realize he was saying the wrong thing, because he changed his words abruptly. “Well, it’s not important. But if David used his boat to hide a body, then I know how he did it.”

  “Why would he hide the body somewhere Eddie could find it?” Gracie didn’t try to hide her confusion or her fear. “If Eddie found the body, we’re screwed. How are we going to get David back out of jail?”

  “I don’t know, Gracie,” Cal felt genuinely frustrated, and for the first time in a long time, he also felt genuinely scared for his friend. “I reckon it depends on how he killed your little boyfriend in the first place.”

  “David didn’t kill Austin.” The words were out of Gracie’s mouth before she realized it.

  Cal shot her a harsh, disbelieving look. “He hid the body, Gracie. He got rid of the car. I helped him do it.”

  “He got rid of the body and the car,” Gracie repeated, swallowing the misery and doing her best to look Cal in the eyes. “He did it to protect me.”

  “What?” Cal couldn’t hide his shock as he watched Gracie crumble.

  “I killed Austin. Me. Not David. Me.” Gracie burst into tears.

  Cal didn’t mean to pull Gracie to him when she started sobbing in the passenger’s seat of his truck, he just did it. She came to him without hesitation, clinging to his chest and soaking his shirt with tears as he struggled to come to terms with the words that had just come out of her mouth.

  Gracie was the killer? It seemed too ridiculous to believe.

  “Gracie, you need to tell me what happened.” He forced the words out of his mouth as she looked up at him through her tear-fill
ed eyes. He could see the fear clearly in her turquoise eyes. Cal tightened his grip on her shoulders, pulling her even closer to him. She snuggled back down against his chest.

  Cal closed his eyes and leaned back against the seat of the truck, trying to force himself to take a couple of deep breaths. If David hadn’t killed Austin then Cal knew Gracie was telling the truth. It was pretty simple, really. There weren’t too many people David would feel obligated to protect as he had, hiding the car and sitting in jail on a murder charge for a murder he hadn’t committed.

  “You’re going to hate me,” she whispered without raising her head off his chest.

  “Gracie, tell me.”

  “I can’t stand having you mad at me.”

  “I don’t think I’m capable of hating you,” he told her tiredly. It was the truth. Even when David had said they had hooked up behind his back, he had been hurt, but he hadn’t had it in him to hate either one of them. He was exhausted. His emotions had run the gauntlet and then died in his lap.

  “It was my fault,” Gracie whispered into his chest. She looked at him, her eyes filled with misery. “I didn’t mean to kill him. I was just trying to get him away from me.” She quietly filled in the details as she explained exactly how she had wound up alone and scared in the car with Austin Putterling. Cal felt his own anger building up as she spoke. Austin was lucky he was already dead because if he hadn’t been, Cal would have killed him now.

  Cal sighed and tightened his grip on Gracie. “You accidentally killed him and then you went to David for help?” he asked. “Why? Why David?”

  “David answered Addison’s phone.”

  “Oh shit.” Cal recalled Addison complaining about losing his phone again. He must have left it at David’s trailer.

  “I didn’t know what else to do, so I told him what happened. He said for me to come home and he’d take care of everything.”

  “Shit.” Cal stared ahead at the traffic that kept blowing past them on the road.

  “I’m scared Cal. I’m tired, and I’m scared, and I just want things to go back to the way they used to be.”

  Cal nodded and squeezed her hand. “Goddamn, I wish David had told me what the fuck was going on.”

  “You weren’t listening.”

  “If he’d told me he had to hide a body, I would have listened Gracie. You know that.” Cal frowned at her as she shook her head.

  “No, you wouldn’t have,” she said with a sigh. “He tried to tell you, and you weren’t having any part of it. You wouldn’t listen to him.”

  “I’m listening now,” he said, knowing the words were hollow.

  Gracie pulled back away from him and shifted so that they were eye-to-eye. He could see the hurt in her strained expression. “We needed you, Cal. I needed you. Really bad.”

  “I’m sorry.” He had to force the words out of his mouth. Apologizing wasn’t something Cal did very often, and never on this scale. He put his head in his hands, unable to shake the sense of impending doom that was hovering over him like a Twitchy Eddie shaped cloud.

  “I’m going to fix this,” he told her. The determination in his voice was clear. “I’ve got to go back to Shiner’s Bayou and fix this. Somehow.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Gracie surprised him with the force in her words.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said after a moment. “If the cops up here are already investigating you for Austin’s disappearance then David was right. It’s going to look bad if you leave.”

  “If the Coastal County Sheriff’s Department has Austin’s body, I’m screwed either way.” Gracie shook her head at him. The haunted look in her eyes sent another shot of guilt down into Cal’s chest. “I hate it here, and I want to go home.”

  “Gracie.” He started to try to talk her out of putting herself at any more risk, but she stopped him with a firm shake of her head. The palm of her hand was resting against his chest.

  “I’m going to have to confess,” she said. “I can’t just let David take the blame for murdering Austin.”

  “You’re not confessing,” Cal shook his head. “Right now we still don’t know what’s happening. There’s a chance you may still get away with it.”

  “Cal, don’t be ridiculous. Eddie saw David dump the body,” she chewed her lip thoughtfully, a troubled expression on her face.

  “Maybe not,” Cal chewed his lower lip for a minute. He’d put together everything everyone had told him during the last few days, and a few details just weren’t matching up. He picked up his phone. He dialed Addison’s work number. No answer. He dialed the Sheriff’s Department. The dispatcher told him Addison had already left for the day. Cal hung up irritated.

  “What’s was that about?” Gracie asked him.

  Cal opened his mouth and then closed it again, lost in thought. “I don’t want to get your hopes up,” he told her. “But I swear to God, Addison told me Eddie was trying to get David charged with a hate crime in addition to the murder.”

  “What?” Gracie stared at him in total shock. “How would that even work?”

  “Gracie, was Austin old?” Cal asked. “Because I keep thinking Addison said the body Eddie found was an old homeless man.”

  “Austin was your age, rich and preppy. You saw his car.”

  Cal smiled for the first time since he’d heard about Austin. “I need to talk to Addison,” he told Gracie. “Let’s just say I don’t think you’re going to be needing to confess to murder just yet.”

  *

  Addison ignored the rain that was beginning to fall as he plunged his four-wheel drive truck down a badly maintained dirt road.

  The Ramirez family compound consisted of three horribly decrepit trailers held together by duct tape and plywood salvaged from the dump. Riley’s battered Mustang and 20-year-old Ford F-150 that had clearly seen better days were parked in front of the one on the right, a looming, aching double-wide with a visibly patched roof.

  Addison wondered if the money to patch the roof had come at his own expense.

  Addison seemed to recall there being nine or ten Ramirez kids the last time anyone had counted. Most of their fathers were no-name truck drivers who spent a night at the local truck stop and went on about their ways, blithely oblivious to the offspring they had fathered. All the kids shared the Ramirez surname courtesy Momma Juanita, a 300-hundred-pound wonder in neon spandex who prowled the local truck stop and would do anything a man wanted for $15.

  Riley was the second oldest child, and it was common knowledge that he stole whatever necessities the brood required that he couldn’t afford to buy legally. He was also something of a con-artist, coming up with a series of schemes he spent most summers trying out on unsuspecting tourists who traveled to Coastal County for the largely under-rated, unmarketable beaches. The PR folks who had been recruited by the town council a few years ago had put it wonderfully bluntly when they’d told Mayor Harmony that no one wanted to vacation on a beach that had more alligators sunbathing than humans.

  Still, the campgrounds and fleabag bed and breakfasts were devastatingly cheap and always drew in a fair amount of business for Riley to scam.

  He parked the truck and stormed up to the trailer door in the rain, beating against the wood until whoever was inside watching TV finally relented and opened the door.

  “Listen here you dirty son-of-a-b...” Addison trailed off and stared at a small-boned, doe-eyed girl with hip length brown hair and round owl glasses. “Where’s Riley?” he demanded as she shyly stepped back into the trailer and gestured for him to come in out of the now pouring rain.

  “He’s in Mamacita’s trailer,” the girl said in a voice barely louder than a whisper. “The sink broke again.”

  Addison glared at the largest trailer, a good 50 feet of heavily falling water away from where he was standing now. He considered asking the girl to go get him, but he didn’t see any real reason to make her miserable and wet other than his own spite.

  “You’re welcome to
wait on him,” she said so quietly he had to strain to hear. She wouldn’t look him in the eyes; instead she stared down and off to the side. From what he could see of the parts of her face that weren’t covered by the waterfall of hair, she was pretty enough, if a little on the plain side.

  He guessed she was about twelve or thirteen, but as he moved towards a battered loveseat he was almost certain had been picked up off the side of the road somewhere, he noticed that the array of books and papers on the battered coffee table were upper level chemistry. He reevaluated her slender, boyish figure and decided she was probably in high school.

  “Would you like some tea or Coke?” she asked timidly. Everything about her was quiet and nervous, and he wondered if she knew what Riley had been up to lately.

  “Any kind of caffeine is good by me,” he said, feeling sorry for intimidating her as she took a can of off-brand Coke from the refrigerator and brought it to him.

  “Thanks,” he told her, feeling like a heel as she quietly settled down on the sofa and picked her textbook back up.

  “I have a test tomorrow,” she explained. “I hope you don’t mind, but I need to study.”

  “Go right ahead,” Addison said. He stared around the inside of the trailer searching for distraction. He found it in the cleanliness. He’d expected the trailer to be a dump inside, but if cleanliness was next to godliness, someone in this battered place was pretty darn holy. The tile floors were so clean the grout shone; there were pictures neatly hanging on the wall depicting the Ramirez clan in different decades.

  He was considering asking her about the picture of a beautiful redhead and a dark-haired man posing in front of a classic Corvette in the mountains somewhere when the trailer door bounced open, and Riley came bounding into the room, a con-artist’s grin already in place on his face.

  *

  “This is the worst case I’ve ever seen actually assembled against someone,” Keisha Blackmon, assistant public defender for the tri-county district, pursed her carefully outlined lips and wrinkled her nose as if she had just caught a whiff of the back of a trash truck.