by Sean Black
The alligator was still there. Unmoving.
Maybe it was asleep. Its eyes didn’t give anything away, and it still hadn’t moved, not even an inch.
She thought about abandoning her plan, and starting straight across. Something in her hind brain stopped her. Something instinctive and deep-wired that went back generations told her to stick to her plan and get to the pop ash tree, rather than making a mad dash for the road in one go.
She started to take her next step. Her weight shifted from her good leg to her bad. The jolt brought her up short. It was all she could to stop herself sitting down.
Since she had been a toddler, cruising along, using her mom’s couch and coffee-table for support, Cressida had never had to think about walking, any more than she thought about breathing. Now it was all she could think about as she squatted, her ass touching the surface of the water. She reached out and leaned against the underside of the car for support.
She tried again. This time she made it a full two steps before collapsing, her butt not quite touching the muddy ground.
“Damn it,” she shouted.
Tears of frustration welled in her eyes. How could she get out if she couldn’t take more than two steps without falling?
The ’gator was still there. With every second that passed she was growing more accustomed to its presence. Slowly, second by second, her primal fear was receding.
She had started to resent it being there, watching her, not coming after her but not leaving either.
“Why don’t you get out of here?” she shouted at it, slapping the water with an open palm.
The slap brought movement. The alligator’s eyes seemed to roll over, and suddenly it moved, sliding its nose into the water, its powerful tail flicking out, propelling it forward.
It was headed straight for her. There was no doubt about that.
She could see the gnarly ridge of its back as it glided through the swamp water.
She freaked, stepping back towards the car, raw fear pushing out the agony every time she used her bad leg. Not daring to look back, she pushed off as hard as she could with her working leg, grabbing for the top of the car. Her fingers found the lower sill of the driver’s door, her nails working into the tiny gap between the sill and the door. There was the sound of splashing to her right. From the corner of her eye she caught another greeny-black shape dropping into the water from wherever it had been hiding unobserved.
Cressida began to haul herself up. She found the door handle, her hands slick and greasy from the swamp. Finding a strength she hadn’t known she possessed she managed to tighten her grip around it. She hauled herself up, her free hand finding what had been the roof of the car.
Legs flailing, using every ounce of energy she had left, she pulled herself onto the car.
The two ’gators cruised in toward the spot where she had been standing then suddenly changed course and began to swim away.
She lay there and tried to catch her breath. Tears came and soon she was sobbing, her chest lurching up and down, unable to stop herself.
A few minutes later, the same large ’gator was back on the bank, sunning itself as the heat cranked up and the sun broke through the trees. She could feel the metal of the car starting to heat. She was spread across it, like an egg thrown onto a hot skillet.
She couldn’t climb back inside without having to haul the driver’s door open. She could do that, if she wanted, but she would be cooked either way so she stayed where she was. She scanned the swamp for a sign of the other ’gator, but it, too, had disappeared.
You were right, she told herself. You are going to die here. This is where they’ll find you, if they find you at all. Out here in this God-forsaken swamp, half eaten by bugs, flies swarming over your dead body.
Just like your great-aunt. The woman you came here to get justice for.
47
The Ford swept to a stop outside Adelson Shaw’s house, gravel flying up from the tires. Brake lights flared. Ty got out and ran up the porch steps, taking them two at a time.
He went to pull the front door open. It was locked. He fumbled in his front pockets for a key, but came up blank.
He pounded on the door. As he waited he scanned the area outside the house. There was no sign of the rented Honda Civic here either. Or anywhere on the roads he’d driven to get there: he’d taken a high-speed loop through Darling on his way, half hoping to see it parked outside the diner where he’d eaten.
He could hear the old man’s voice from inside. “Okay, okay, don’t make me have to buy a new door.”
Ty could see him coming down the stairs. First he saw his slippers, then hairless bare ankles, and then the hem of his dressing-gown.
Adelson reached the foot of the stairs and walked toward the door, still mumbling. He saw Ty standing there and froze, eyes wide.
Ty squared his shoulders, his head tilted down. “Come on, open up.”
Adelson didn’t move. “Listen, she’s not here.”
Ty was in no mood. Everything about Adelson’s reaction to seeing him raised a red flag.
“Can you open up?” he asked, doing his best to keep the rising anger from his voice.
“I told you, she’s not here.”
“I don’t want to have this conversation through the door. Just open up.”
Adelson stared at him. He didn’t move.
Ty’s hand reached up to his holster. “Listen to me. If you don’t open this door I can only assume it’s because you have something to hide, and that means I’m coming in.” His hand settled on his SIG for emphasis. “So, what’s it to be?”
Adelson shuffled to the door and unlocked it. He shrank back as Ty walked in. “I told you the truth. She’s not here. Look around if you don’t believe me. I don’t have anything to hide.”
Ty closed in on him, towering above him, letting Adelson experience his physical presence. Part of him felt bad about intimidating an elderly man, but there was a time for niceties and this wasn’t it.
“She may not be here, and you may not know where she is, but saying you don’t have anything to hide is stretching the truth.”
Adelson didn’t say anything. He smelled of bourbon and vomit. The odor came off him in waves. His eyes were bloodshot and his skin had the florid, blotchy pallor of a drinker. “I have pills I need to take,” he said to Ty. “You can make us some coffee and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
He started to walk toward the kitchen. Ty followed him.
“She was here,” he continued, “but she ran out.”
“Ran?” said Ty, the tone of menace he’d been unable to suppress a moment ago creeping back into his voice.
Adelson walked into the kitchen and headed to a counter, where he picked up a color-coded plastic pill organizer. “Okay, she left,” he said, popping open one of the compartments and palming the contents.
“Where’d she go?” said Ty, arms folded in front of him.
“She didn’t say.”
Ty walked over to him. As Adelson lifted the pills to his mouth, Ty grabbed the old man’s wrist, hard enough to get his attention but not so hard he would hurt him. “Where’d she go?” he repeated.
Adelson looked down at his hand with the pills in it. “My heart medication’s in there.”
Ty stared at him.
“She went to speak with Mimsy Murray.”
Ty kept hold of the old man’s wrist. “Why would she do that? We’d just been there for dinner.”
“Maybe she had some new questions.”
Ty asked again, “Why?”
Adelson let slip an audible sigh. “We talked about some stuff.”
Ty’s expression suggested Adelson should continue.
“Let me have my pills and I’ll tell you.”
Ty slowly released his grip. Adelson walked over to the sink, filled a glass with water, and swallowed his pills.
“I don’t have all day,” Ty told him.
“You think five minutes is going to make a di
fference?” said Adelson, reaching over and hitting the button to start a coffee-maker on the counter. “Of course you do. You’re young.” He motioned for Ty to sit down at the small circular kitchen table. “Why would five minutes make any difference after more than forty years?”
Ty wasn’t going to sit down and talk in circles. Regardless of what Adelson had just said, he needed to find Cressida King, and fast. The forty-year stuff and beyond could be dealt with after that. And Ty intended on making sure it was dealt with, one way or another.
“I need to know where she is. So I can find her. So I can ensure she’s safe,” Ty said, leaning over the table. “This isn’t a game, Mr. Shaw.”
Adelson looked up at him, eyes moist. “Believe me, I know that better than anyone around here.”
“So she went to see Mimsy and then what?”
“She didn’t come back. Not that I heard, and I don’t think her bed was slept in either.”
“You tell her what happened to Carole Chabon?”
“Some of it.”
“Which was?”
Adelson traced a circle across the table top with the end of his index finger. “You’re right. You’d better go see if you can find her, Mr. Johnson.”
“I thought you said five minutes wouldn’t make a difference.”
Adelson stared at him, blinking, but not saying anything.
Ty leaned in close to Adelson’s ear. “You and everyone in this town better pray I find her, and that when I do, she’s okay,” he murmured.
Ty walked out of the kitchen, leaving Adelson sitting there. He bounded up the stairs, turned at the top, and threw open the door that led into Cressida’s bedroom. Indeed the bed hadn’t been slept in.
He opened her suitcase and checked through the clothes she hadn’t unpacked. Then he checked the drawers and the closet for dirty laundry, trying to remember what she had been wearing.
As far as he could tell she hadn’t changed, apart from ditching her heels.
He didn’t see any signs of a struggle. No blood.
He rushed down the stairs. Adelson was waiting in the hallway.
“I told you she wasn’t here.”
“I have a hard time taking people around here at their word,” Ty shot back.
He flung open the front door, walked out, slamming it behind him. He ran down to the Ford, got in, gunned the engine and took off.
* * *
Adelson watched him leave. He had hoped he’d be dead and gone by the time this came tumbling out in all its wretched detail. But now, watching all this unfold, part of him was glad that he was around to see it. To see Mimsy get what was coming to her. If she did, of course. Others had tried, and it hadn’t ended well.
Still, in all of this, old loyalties died hard.
He picked up the phone to call Mimsy and let her know what was headed her way. He punched in the first few numbers then stopped.
No, he thought. Maybe let the storm headed her way arrive without warning. Give the other side a sporting chance for once.
He put the phone on the side table and went back into the kitchen to pour himself a fresh cup of coffee and try to shake off his hangover.
48
Ty’s display of anger had been for Adelson’s benefit. Inside, he was as cool as a man could be, given the circumstances. He had to be in control of himself. But he couldn’t let anyone here know that. Not yet.
He needed to use the presentation of anger to help him find Cressida. Or, rather, he suspected, help him push someone into telling him where she was.
For now he had to assume she was alive. He wasn’t naive enough to believe she was. There was every chance she’d already met the same fate as Timothy French. But for now this was his working assumption.
Believing he was searching for a living, breathing Cressida King would take him to the same places as looking for a corpse. If, at the end of his search, she wasn’t alive, he would deal with it. The same as he’d dealt with other tragedies. And if she was dead, he thought, as the Ford rolled down the narrow swampland road, there would be a price to pay for those responsible. He would see to it.
On the drive from the motel he had tried to drag up the details of the note that had been left on the windshield outside Mimsy’s. He would get to her, and soon, but the obvious place to scope out first would be the RV where she’d been asked to meet this anonymous source. Ty couldn’t recall the precise details, and in any case they had never made it there, or even checked it out, because they’d been stopped by the cops. But he remembered one key detail, and that would be enough. At the bottom of the sketchily drawn map there had been a sign for an alligator farm. He’d glanced only briefly at the note, but that detail had stuck with him.
He knew Darling was right on the very edge of the Everglades. But he couldn’t imagine there would be many alligator farms in the area. He pulled out his phone and checked for a signal. The display showed a shaky two bars. It was enough to open Google, type in the town, then search for alligator farms. Within a couple of seconds he had his answer, and a pin on a Google map showing it was just two miles from where he was.
“God bless the internet,” he murmured, pulling a U-turn and heading back down the road toward the farm. From what he could tell, the meeting point was about three hundred yards north-east of the farm’s perimeter.
As he drove Ty kept his eyes peeled. For the Honda. For Cressida. For anything that his partner Lock referred to as “the absence of the normal, the presence of the abnormal”. That single phrase had saved them, and their principals, on more than one occasion. Ty figured it would serve him equally well now.
The drive didn’t take more than a couple of minutes, even after he passed the turn-off to the RV point and had to double back. The place where Cressida had been set to meet whoever had left the note was the dead end of an old dirt track surrounded by a wide circle of cypress trees.
Ty had to say that if he was going to arrange to meet someone to share information this would not have been a spot he would select. There was one way in and one way out. It was overlooked. There was plenty of cover for someone to observe any meeting without being seen.
He stopped the SUV, got out and took a look around. There was no sign of the Honda.
Five minutes later he had scouted out the immediate area, including the cypress trees. He hadn’t seen anything. No cigarette butts, no trash, no clothing. It was pristine.
He got back into the Ford, made a tight five-point turn, and headed back down the track. At the end, he turned onto what passed as a main road. He was headed back toward Mimsy’s, but he saw a faded old sign for the alligator farm—or ‘ranch’, as the notice, rather grandly, had it—and on a whim decided to ask the owner if they’d seen or heard anything out of the ordinary the previous night.
It was a long shot, but once in a while a long shot came in. It would take five minutes.
He made the turning, and the SUV trundled down the rutted track, and through an open set of metal gates.
Ty had never been to an alligator ranch before. For a whimsical second he had visions of cowboys on horses corralling herds of alligators, ready for branding. The reality was more mundane: a run-down single-story wooden house, a couple of barns, and a large chain-fenced area that held one large and a couple of smaller freshwater ponds.
He couldn’t see any alligators. They must have been in the water, or lurking in the thick vegetation at the far side of the ponds.
One thing immediately caught his attention. A pickup with a Confederate-flag bumper sticker that he recognized as the truck driven by the weird-looking redneck guy, who’d seemed to be stalking him and Cressida when they’d first arrived in Darling. Maybe this was one of those long shots that would come in.
He pulled around the pickup, parked side on to one of the barns, got out, and walked toward the house. It didn’t look like anyone was around. The blinds were drawn, and he didn’t see any movement inside.
Using an old trick to give him plausible deniability
, Ty walked up to the front door. He didn’t knock. Instead he waited about twenty seconds, turned around, walked back, took a look at the front of the house, and then went to the barns.
If anyone came out in the meantime, he would claim he’d knocked at the door, and when no one answered he’d figured they might be working in one of the barns.
In truth, a barn next to last night’s RV point was as good a place as any to stash a reporter.
The door of the first was slightly open. He pushed his way through, and softly called, “Hey, anyone here?”
Inside there was a jumble of old car parts and some large chest freezers. He walked over, and opened them up, bracing himself in case they revealed something grisly. They were both close to empty, apart from a couple of bags of unspecified meat, and in the second, some frozen rabbits. There was a work bench at the far end with cabinets underneath for tools, a lawnmower, and some other gardening equipment.
Ty moved on to the second smaller barn. He used the same drill. Call first, then enter. Plausible deniability.
The sight that met him this time was a little different. Bars suspended from the ceiling with chains that ended in meat hooks. Three dead alligators were suspended from the hooks, their white bellies facing him. They ranged from five to eight feet in length. Ty walked over to them, drawn by the somewhat macabre sight. He reached up and touched the first, running his fingertips over the cold body. A glassy black eye stared back at him.
There was a dripping sound, and he looked down to see drops of blood splashing onto one of his boots.
The barn door squealed on its hinges and he turned around. Spooked – he hadn’t heard anyone approach – his hand went to his SIG, ready to draw.
He immediately recognized the man in the trucker’s hat standing just inside the barn. He had shoulder-length white hair, and a long white beard. It was the man he’d seen in Darling. The man who had been watching him from his truck, and then Cressida. The only difference was that now he was sporting some fresh bruises and the beginnings of a black eye.