by Sean Black
He didn’t have far to go, or long to wait. Mimsy heard him slam the front door and appeared from the side of the house with that dumb old shotgun she loved so much.
She saw him, without a care, clue, or firearm, and didn’t even bother to raise the gun.
A dumb move on her part.
He kept his left hand nice and loose by his side, and hooked the thumb of his right hand, nice and casual, into his front pocket, ready to move round and reach for the gun if he had to.
“Mimsy,” he said.
“RJ.”
This was Mimsy all over. Good manners, even as she planned on putting a bullet into him right here on his own property.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“Yeah, we sure do,” he said. “I’m kind of busy, though, so you’re going to have to walk with me.”
He started toward the pond. Curious George was up near the fence that separated the big pond from the one where Bertha was tending her hatchlings. Curious George, always where the action was, always wanting to be in on everything.
Mimsy raised the shotgun. RJ ignored her. If she’d come here to kill him she could have hidden her car better, snuck up on him, shot him through the window. It wouldn’t have been too hard, and he would never have known about it until his brains were shooting out of his skull and splashing all over the wall.
“Go on, shoot me in the back,” he said, still walking. “They’ll probably bring back the chair for you.”
He could hear her, stomping behind him.
“Hold up, RJ.”
“I can walk and listen,” he said, all casual. “Been married long enough to have those two down.”
“How much did you tell the sheriff about what happened out there?”
He kept walking up to the ponds. He stooped down and grabbed an empty plastic bucket that was lying next to the fence.
He turned as she jabbed the shotgun between his shoulder blades.
“She shot Lyle. Blew his jaw clean off. I’ll take a polygraph to prove I’m not lying.”
“Good. You do that,” he told her. “Then you won’t need me.”
“You could tell them that Ty fellow made you go out there. Forced you. At gunpoint.”
That was it. He started to snicker. Had she somehow convinced herself that she could talk her way out of this? If she had, she was more delusional than he’d thought. “Yeah, that’s what I’ll tell them. It was all the big black dude’s fault. Usually works, right?”
He turned back around and, swinging his bucket, set off again for the pond. He wanted to get a better look at the new arrivals. New life among all this bad history. It had to be a good thing. We’re born and we live and then we die. Humans, ’gators, everything on earth.
“How do you think Sue Ann will get on in Lowell, RJ? You know what her nerves are like. She wouldn’t last a month among all those animals.”
Lowell was one of the largest women’s detention centers in Florida. It had a fearsome reputation as a rat-and-bug-infested hell on earth, with countless unexplained deaths among inmates.
RJ stopped dead. Mimsy had been looking for a reaction and now she was going to get one.
“Yeah, that’s got you thinking, hasn’t it, RJ?”
He turned back to face her. His right hand moved from his pocket, to his back. He was watching Bertha, up close near the fence, standing guard as her hatchlings scurried after each other in the grass at the edge of the water.
“It surely has,” he said, bringing the SIG up before she could get the shotgun to her shoulder or her finger on the trigger.
“Put it down, Mimsy, or so help me I’ll kill you right where you stand.”
She hesitated. “You wouldn’t dare.”
He didn’t say anything. He started to squeeze the trigger.
“Double-action trigger on this baby,” he said to her. “But did I already have it good to go? That’s what you have about one second to guess.”
She knew enough about guns to follow what he meant. Either this squeeze would simply ready the gun to fire, or he’d shoot her.
“Take it easy, RJ. I was just saying.”
She lowered the shotgun.
“Put it on the ground and step back,” he instructed her.
She did as he’d said. He reached down, and picked it up, covering his free hand with his shirt sleeve to keep his prints off it.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said, moving behind her, and jabbing her with the shotgun barrel. She hesitated.
He poked her again, harder this time. “Move it.”
“What are you doing, RJ? Going to feed me to one of your ’gators?” she sing-songed.
“Nope,” said RJ. “That wouldn’t be sporting, now, would it?”
“So where are we going?” she asked.
“You and me are going to have a wager, Mimsy.”
He pushed and prodded her up to the second pond. As they walked toward it, he noticed Bertha, gathering up her newborns in her mouth and hurrying into the longer grass on the far side of the pond. True to his name as well as his nature, Curious George positioned himself at the fence so he could take in whatever the show was.
RJ and Mimsy got to the second, smaller, pond that held Bertha, who was now well hidden on the far side.
Mimsy stopped at the gate that led into the enclosure. “Well?”
Even at gunpoint she didn’t appear to take him seriously. She viewed him as a joke. He’d always known that. Someone to push around, and do her dirty work, just like Lyle. Just like everyone in Darling. And as soon as they’d outlived their usefulness, she disposed of them.
“Take off your clothes,” he said. “You’re going swimming.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“If it was good enough for that reporter, it’s good enough for you. Odds are better too. There’s only one ’gator in that pond, and she’s as old and slow as you are.”
“Go to hell, RJ.”
He pointed the SIG at the ground in front of her and pulled the trigger. The shot buried its way into the ground a few inches short of her left foot.
“Next one goes into your foot, and then I work my way on up until you get in that water.”
Her mouth fell open.
“One length over and back. You make it back, you can have your clothes and be on your way. Or you can keep your clothes on for all I care. But they’ll slow you down.”
She looked from RJ to the perfectly calm pond and then back. “You want to humiliate me.”
No, thought RJ. “Yes,” he said. “I want you to feel a little of the shame I’ve felt all these years, with you bossing me and Sue Ann and Lyle around like we’re peasants.”
“Very well then,” she said. “You think I haven’t been in swimming holes with ’gators around before?”
Not with ’gators that have young to protect you haven’t, thought RJ.
He took a set of keys out, and unlocked the gate. She stepped through, smirking at him. He closed the gate behind her and watched as she took off her clothes until she was down to her underwear. “This how you get your kicks?” she sneered.
The irony of the question seemed to be lost on her. She was the one who had taken Cressida King to Devil’s Pond and thrown her in. She could have shot her, but she hadn’t. She had wanted to watch her die there for her own sick amusement.
“Over to the side, and back.”
“And you’ll let me go?”
“I’ll even give you a towel to dry off,” he said.
She looked at the pond. It was maybe eighty feet to the other side and the same eighty back.
She didn’t move. She appeared to be weighing something in her mind. She turned back to face him. He kept his eyes up: there were some things he didn’t want to see, not at his age, and Mimsy Murray in her underwear was one of them.
“I make it over and back, I want you to tell the sheriff that girl shot Lyle. Which she did.”
“But I wasn’t there,” said RJ. “I only heard the shot.�
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“Then lie.”
RJ was through with lying, but Mimsy wasn’t to know that. “Okay,” he said. “Deal.”
She seemed pleased, like she’d got one over on him.
She walked the last few steps to the edge of the pond, and dipped her foot in. She shivered a little, then eased herself down and into the water. Anyone round here who swam in the wild knew better than to dive in when there could be ’gators around. Splashing got their attention.
She was neck deep in the water now. She pushed off the bottom, and began to swim in steady, ladylike strokes, keeping her head above the water.
“This is the easiest bet I’ll ever win,” she announced.
“There and back,” said RJ, watching the reeds and grass on the far side.
Bertha was still hunkered down out of sight. But she would be watching this strange interloper, RJ was sure of that.
Mimsy seemed to tire a little. She found a second wind, and moved from a breaststroke to a crawl. Her arms pummeled the water. Her legs kicked up and down, creating lots of disturbance.
The grass began to move on the far side. Bertha was crawling forward, placing herself between her hatchlings and the strange creature coming straight towards them.
Oblivious, Mimsy kept coming. She was twenty feet from the other side. Then ten. She was coming faster, making more noise, the splashes getting louder.
She reached the bank, and climbed out. She held her arms up, triumphant.
“You’re going to lose, RJ. Get that towel ready for me.”
As she crouched down, ready to dive back into the water, Bertha lunged from behind her, taking down Mimsy at the back of her knees, and pushing her off balance and into the water. The ’gator followed, snapping her massive jaws, and clamping around Mimsy’s ankle.
Mimsy let out a shriek, and twisted round to see what had hold of her. Bertha kept moving, tightening her grip around her ankle, and pushing forward, moving Mimsy out into deeper water.
With the woman’s ankle firm in her jaws, Bertha pointed her snout down, and dove, taking Mimsy with her, under the surface. The water churned, legs, arms flailing.
Bertha’s tail flicked fast as she took Mimsy out further. Then she let go of her. Mimsy re-surfaced for a second, screaming for help. Then Bertha was back, taking her around the waist this time, and pulling her back down.
RJ looked over at Curious George. He was at the hatch that separated the two enclosures. He butted his snout against it, increasingly agitated by the sounds and smells of the carnage as the water frothed red.
Finally, after a few more seconds, the water began to still. Bertha resurfaced. Mimsy’s body floated lifelessly in the water. One of her legs had been sheared at the knee, and a huge chunk of her torso was missing. Her arms extended straight out.
RJ walked along the narrow concrete gangway to the hatch, and lifted it up. It was time for George to satisfy that curiosity of his.
* * *
RJ sat alone in the cab of his pickup truck and smoked a Marlboro, savoring the taste of the smoke. He reached down to his cell phone and opened up a music app. You could get pretty much any song by any artist for a monthly fee. He usually listened to seventies and eighties rock.
Lynyrd Skynyrd, Van Halen, Creedence Clearwater Revival.
This didn’t seem like a time for any of that music. He tapped a name into the search box. Billie Holiday. Then he scrolled down to the song he’d had playing in his head for a while now. He smoked his cigarette, closed his eyes and listened to the saddest song ever written about a strange and bitter crop.
76
Four days later
* * *
Wearing a sober grey suit that his girlfriend, defense attorney Carmen Lazaro, had picked out for him, Lock walked out of the courtroom and into the corridor. Ty sprang off the wall, and the two men shook hands. Carmen followed a few steps behind, with the Miami counsel Ty had retained to expedite matters as quickly and painlessly as possible.
“You’re going to have to stop making a habit of this,” Lock said to his partner.
Ty shrugged. “Wasn’t part of the plan.”
“Come here,” said Lock, throwing his arms around him and pulling him in for a hug. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to you in time.”
“I’m sorry I messed up your vacation.”
They stepped back. “Call it even?” Lock asked.
“Sounds fair.”
Carmen linked her arm with Lock’s, happy to see the two of them reunited and Ty a free man. “Why don’t we go get something to eat? Ty, you’re always hungry.”
“True dat.”
“There’s a little place nearby where you can get deep-fried alligator, if you can believe that,” said Carmen, poking a finger into Ty’s ribs.
“How about steak?” said Ty. “You don’t have to worry about what a cow’s been eating before it’s slapped on your plate.”
“Or vegetables,” said Carmen, who had already started to steer Lock to eating more greens, which Ty found disturbing.
“Yeah, let’s not get carried away, sister.”
* * *
A half-hour later the three were settled into a booth at Red, The Steakhouse. Carmen watched in wonder as Ty ripped through a prime ribeye that even a ’gator might have struggled with, and a side of Florida creamed corn alongside another of Parmesan Tater Tots.
Lock had ordered a bottle of red wine to celebrate Ty’s freedom, and was tucking into a NY Strip with Béarnaise sauce, while Carmen had gone for the mouthwatering house salad of candied walnuts and goat’s cheese on a bed of baby greens.
Lock raised his glass in a toast. “Tyrone Johnson, one-man army.”
They clinked glasses.
“Damn, this tastes so good,” said Ty, slugging down some of the hundred-dollars-a-bottle Cabernet Sauvignon.
“So what was the good word from these overpriced Miami attorneys?” Lock asked Carmen.
“They’re not overpriced if you walk free.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Ty, looking up briefly from his food.
“Firing the gun is going to be tricky, but not insurmountable. They think, after everything that happened in Darling, putting a black ex-Marine in the dock is going to be a bad look.”
“In other words, political correctness rules the day,” said Lock.
Ty hoisted his glass. “I’ll drink to that too.”
Lock topped him up and signaled for the waiter to bring them another bottle.
“There’ll be a bunch of hand-waving and it’ll get buried and go away would be my guess,” said Carmen.
“Okay, Tyrone, so no more guns in libraries or walking out of hospitals butt naked,” said Lock.
“I make no promises,” said Ty.
77
After a short period at the University of Miami Hospital on 12th Street to get patched up, and have an MRI to assess the damage, Cressida had been transferred to the Baptist Hospital of Miami to recuperate until she was well enough to make the trip back to New York.
While Lock and Carmen headed to the airport to fly back to Los Angeles, Ty checked in at the Baptist Hospital reception. With Mary Elizabeth Murray dead, any immediate threat to Cressida had receded.
He took the elevator up to the floor she was on, carrying flowers, a takeout bag he’d procured from the restaurant, and a couple of books he’d picked up for her at Barnes & Noble. He checked in at the nurses’ station and they took him down to her room.
She was sitting up in bed, her leg in a cast, a laptop propped on a table. Other than a few scrapes across her face, she looked pretty good, all things considered. She smiled when she saw him. “My savior,” she said.
“Savior’s part of the job description. You writing your article?” he asked her.
“Book proposal,” she said, lifting her cell phone and angling the screen so he could see her flooded inbox. “Haven’t even been able to go through all the offers yet.”
“I can imagine,” he said
&n
bsp; The news story of how a young black reporter had gone looking for the killers of her great-aunt was gold, and it had taken no time for it to go national. Ty had done everything he possibly could to minimize any mention of his involvement.
“So what did you bring me?” Cressida asked.
“You assuming this is all for you?”
“Wait, don’t tell me, you wander hospital corridors with flowers.”
He laid out what he’d brought on the bedside locker and the bed. “Flowers are for you. I was going to get orchids but I didn’t want you having flashbacks.”
She didn’t laugh.
“Sorry, grunt humor. I forget.”
“It’s okay.”
He put down the bag with the food. “Lunch, from one of the best places in Miami.”
“Thank you.”
“And two books. I wasn’t sure if you’d read them so the receipt’s inside the first if you want to switch them when you get out.”
She took the books from him, and looked over them. The first was a history of the civil rights movement called Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch. The second was Invisibles by Jesse Holland, a history of black slaves who had worked in the White House.
“Thanks. These are great. I’ve been meaning to read the Branch book for years. Never got round to it.”
“Well, when you do . . .”
She laid the books next to her on the bed. “Thank you. For everything. I really mean it. And I’m sorry if I wasn’t completely upfront with you at the start.”
“Apology accepted. I’m glad it all worked out.”
That part was true for Cressida and Ty. For people in Darling, the next months were looking strained. The FBI office in Miami had opened an investigation into the recent and historical deaths. Divers had found the remains of Timothy French at the bottom of Devil’s Pond after the National Guard had secured the scene so they could get down there safely.
Skeletons, both literal and figurative, were being dug up.