by bow, frankie
“I guess it’s good to take precautions.” I didn’t mention that I’d recently seen a cougar with my own eyes. It was well out of town, I figured, and there was no point in getting people more panicked than they already were.
Toby came back and placed two tall black cans of energy drink on the counter, along with a package of pepper jerky, a bag of dried fruit, and a tin of mints. As Walter was ringing him up I sensed someone standing behind me.
I took a quick glance over my shoulder and recognized the reporter who had been sitting with Celia at Francine’s. He was holding a copy of the New Orleans paper.
Male, five foot two, early fifties. High percentage of body fat and low fitness level. Dark hair, what’s left of it, and café au lait complexion indicate Creole ancestry. Threat: negligible, unless you’re a plate of beignets.
I nodded and smiled at him, to let him know I’d seen him.
He nodded back. He seemed jolly, which struck me as strange. In my experience, journalists tend to wear a hunted look. On the other hand, I don’t run into many small-town lifestyle reporters when I’m out in the field.
“Morning Mister Santiago,” Walter greeted the man.
“Aw please. Call me Nick.” The reporter’s accent sounded local.
When Toby and I were almost out the door of Walter’s General Store, I paused.
“Just a minute,” I said to Toby. “I thought I heard a text message come in.”
I held the phone up, pretending to look for the non-existent text, and surreptitiously snapped a photo of the man who was calling himself Nick Santiago.
On the walk back to Marge’s house, Toby asked all about me—where I was from, how long I’d be in Sinful, how I liked the quiet life of a librarian, and speaking of that, what did I think of the trend toward open-access scientific journals? Just my luck. The only time I meet guys who actually seem interested in asking me about myself and my work is when I’m on an undercover assignment. I answered his questions as well as I could, and steered the conversation to his research. He talked about his investigation into diseases of metabolism. A lot of it was outside my expertise, but he explained it in a way that I got the general idea. He even made it sound interesting.
He accompanied me all the way to the front door. Right before I stepped inside he kissed me on the cheek.
It wasn’t a romantic kiss. Just a friendly one. So there was really no reason for the pressure of his warm lips on my cheek to turn my insides to melted wax.
I sighed and went inside. I wasn’t going to see Toby again. He didn’t seem terribly interested in Justin’s “discovery,” and he hadn’t said anything about coming back to Sinful. Not that I wanted to get myself into yet another romantic entanglement. But our brief conversation had made me realize how much I missed the intellectual challenge of my job. Sure, in the past few weeks I’d had demands on my physical agility and marksmanship. But I missed discussing the particulars of a new assignment with the analysts, learning about the convoluted history and politics of whatever war-torn failed state I was about to visit, even processing events with the Company shrink afterwards.
Toby LaRoquette stimulated me. Intellectually, I mean. He was like Marge’s library, in a much more visually pleasing package.
Ally’s gumbo had made for a filling lunch, but that didn’t keep me from stopping by Francine’s for dinner. Ida Belle and Gertie had reached a pause point in the Sinful Ladies’ Cough Syrup distilling process, so they were able to join me. Ida Belle brought along the depressed Justin, making a party of four.
Ally was working the dinner shift, so she stopped by our table to catch up on the latest news. Justin gloomily told her about his conversation with Professor Toby LaRoquette.
“He said that thing I found was just like one dead baby mountain lion or li’dat,” Justin said sadly. “An’ he didn’t wanna help me wit’ the research for my thesis. He said he didn’t wanna make any waves or attract any negative attention. If that’s what it’s like to work at a university, I dunno if that’s what I wanna do.”
“Speaking of attracting attention,” I said. “There’s our reporter friend again.”
The man who was calling himself Nick Santiago was sitting by himself in a corner booth, busily typing on a small laptop. Harrison had put a rush on my request and run Santiago’s photo against the database of bad guys. No hits, so maybe that was good news. Or maybe it just meant that this guy hadn’t been added to our database yet. And posing as a reporter was a perfect cover if you wanted to go nosing into people’s secrets.
Ally glanced over at the man. “Oh, that’s Mister Nick, from the paper. Listen, much as I’d love to stand here chatting all night, I better take your order. You’re my favorite customers, but you’re not my only ones.”
“What’s in today’s seafood platter?” I asked. I’d noticed that much of the local cuisine seemed to consist of dragging a stick along the bottom of the bayou, grabbing anything that moved, and throwing it in the deep fryer. I’m not a picky eater, but if I’m about to crunch into something with a shell and eye stalks, I like to have advance warning.
Ally checked her notepad. “Tonight it’s catfish, crab cakes, and shrimp. Catfish is fresh.”
“Sounds great. I’ll take the seafood platter.”
Everyone else chose the seafood platter too. Ally went back to put in our order, and Justin excused himself to wash his hands.
“So this Nick Santiago,” I motioned with my head toward the squat man at the far booth, “What if this reporter thing is a cover?”
“For what?” Gertie asked. “If he was working for you-know-who, wouldn’t he have grabbed you already?”
“I’m thinking he’s with one of the oil companies. Toby was telling me they’re a little sensitive about their public image.”
“Are they ever,” Ida Belle said.
“I know, right? I’m sure they don’t want it to get out that that specimen Justin found might be a result of the oil spill.”
“If those companies don’t like getting bad publicity for the terrible things they do,” Gertie said, “then they should stop doing terrible things,”
I glanced over at Santiago again. He calmly sipping coffee and concentrating on his little laptop.
“It’s funny,” I said. “I’m used to being on the same side as them. Generally their interests have been aligned with ours. You know a village is harboring bad guys, and what do you know, it happens to be a good place to lay a pipeline. They’ll go right in and do the dirtywork. I never did like that part of the job, honestly. I mean, it was always necessary to the mission, but…”
“Fortune, dear,” Gertie said, “we were in Vietnam. You don’t have to tell us. Oh, here comes Justin. Maybe we should talk about something else.”
“I’ll take it. Justin, we were just talking about getting used to life in a small town. How are you liking it here? It must be quite an adjustment moving to the South.”
“Not really.” Justin slid into the booth next to Ida Belle. “It’s more like home than I expected. Way more haoles than I’m used to, sorry, I mean Caucasians, but the weather’s about the same.”
“It’s this humid where you’re from?” I said.
“Oh. Yah. Guarantee. Don’t forget, Hawaii’s the South too. South Point, on the Big Island, is the most southern part of the United States.”
“I’m still not used to that,” Gertie said. “I keep thinking it’s forty-eight states.”
“Yeah, you still remember the original thirteen,” Ida Belle said.
“Are you from a small town too?” I asked Justin.
“Except for Honolulu I think they’re pretty much all small towns,” Justin said. “Mahina’s about forty thousand.”
“That’s a booming metropolis compared to Sinful,” Gertie said.
Ally brought our seafood platters over and we dug in. Fried fish, shrimp, and crab cakes were heaped next to salty hot fries and sweet cole slaw. The fried items were too hot to eat right away, so I started w
ith the cole slaw.
After we had spent a few minutes wolfing down our dinners, Justin said,
“I talked to Nakamura.”
“Who?” I said.
“That’s his advisor,” Ida Belle explained. “She’s on Hawaii time, so she thinks it’s just fine to call us in the middle of the night.”
“I already told her eight thirty was too late for us, Aunty Ida Belle,” Justin said. “Anyways I got my cell phone working now, so it’s not gonna happen again. She’ll text me direct.”
“When did you talk to her?” I picked at the remaining French fries on my plate. I was already full, but you don’t leave a man behind.
“I called her right after you left with LaRoquette.”
“I didn’t leave with him. I just walked him down to the General Store. Anyway, what does she think?”
Justin sighed. “Nakamura agrees with him. She thinks I should stick with collecting the nutria droppings. Since that specimen turned out to be some kinda cat, it wasn’t part of my program.”
“It’s good to stay focused,” I said.
“And don’t get discouraged,” Gertie added. “You’ll find plenty of nutria droppings around here.”
“Oh, nah, I’m not discouraged. Talking to Nakamura was pretty motivating. She said don’t get distracted, cause when my part of the grant money runs out I’m on my own. Guess I needed to hear that.”
Justin gazed at his empty plate, as if he were considering telling us more.
“Did she say anything else?” I prompted.
“Just one thing that was kinda weird. She said she was kinda afraid to send me down here at first.”
“Why?” I was keeping Santiago in my peripheral vision.
“Snakes?” Ida Belle asked.
“Nah, nah, not the snakes. She said when she was in grad school, she heard about these researchers down here back in the 1950s. They were a husband and wife, she thinks. They found a specimen they couldn’t identify, course DNA analysis wasn’t available then. They thought they’d found something, a new species or li’dat.”
“That was long before the oil spill,” I said.
“They’ve been drilling in the bayous since the 1920s,” Ida Belle said. “Don’t let ‘em off the hook that easy.”
“Anyways, she said the researchers took all kinda notes, but it never got published in a scientific journal. Cause it was just this one of a kind thing, they couldn’t get it past peer review. And they didn’t have a camera with them, or a refrigerated container, or anything like that. There was no evidence, just their memory of it.”
“So why was your advisor afraid to send you down here?” I asked.
“Cause they never published anything after that,” Justin said.
“It ended their scientific careers?” Gertie said.
“That’s the best case scenario,” Justin said. “Alls anyone knows is, no one ever heard from ‘em again.”
I saw Ida Belle and Gertie exchange a glance. Justin didn’t notice it.
Ida Belle, Gertie, Justin and I waddled out of Francine’s Diner, leaving Nick Santiago still typing away in the corner booth, probably on his twentieth cup of coffee. If he was surveilling us, he wasn’t being very subtle. Maybe he was trying to send us a message.
Or, maybe he really was a newspaper reporter, trying to soak up some small-town color for the features page, and Francine’s was the only place in town where he could park himself and drink coffee while he wrote. It’s not like Sinful had a Starbucks.
Geez, being paranoid was exhausting.
The fading daylight brought a welcome drop in temperature, and made the humidity more bearable. Ida Belle complained briefly that we were keeping her up past her bedtime, but she seemed to be enjoying the cool evening walk as much as the rest of us.
Our conversation turned to LeRoy Thibodeaux, the man who’d been found mauled to death in the woods.
“We get wild boars back home,” Justin was saying. “But it’s pretty easy to avoid ‘em. Long as you stay away from the piglets. An’ you can hear ‘em coming. They don’t sneak up on you.”
If only my enemies could be like wild boars, I thought, warning me in advance by crashing through the underbrush before they struck. No, in my line of work it’s the harmless-seeming ones you have to look out for. The dorky graduate student. The cheerful general-store owner. The sweet waitress who befriends you and moves into your house.
This was ridiculous. There was no end to how paranoid I could get. When I got home I’d take a hot bath and go to bed early. I needed some rest. It wasn’t healthy for me to dwell constantly on the worst possible—
Oh, I forgot one. The charming college professor.
Justin thought he had gotten in got in touch with a professor from the university, but what if the call, or email, whatever it was, had been intercepted? Ahmad’s organization certainly had that capability. What if there was really a Toby LaRoquette, but the man who came to Sinful was an agent of Ahmad’s, selected for his hypnotic charm? If that was the case, though, why didn’t he just put a bullet in me as soon as we were alone? Or kidnap me, I thought with a shudder. After all, the price on my head was higher for me alive than dead.
My companions had moved on from talking about boars to trading recipes for regional delicacies. Justin had just finished describing how to eat raw ‘opihi, which I gathered was some kind of sea snail, and now Ida Belle was giving a tutorial on the best way to pick shot out of a squirrel.
“Hey, Justin,” I interrupted. “Sorry to interrupt, but I was wondering. How did you initially get in touch with this Toby LaRoquette?”
Justin opened his mouth to answer when a snarling shape shot out of nowhere and sent Justin sprawling. I instinctively grabbed at the back of my waistband, but Ida Belle was quicker on the draw. Bang—a warning shot.
The big cat had its feet planted on Justin’s chest, and didn’t even notice.
Bang! A spray of gravel and broken shells exploded next to Justin’s head. The creature turned slowly to Ida Belle, baring its teeth.
Bang! A splotch of red appeared on the animal’s shoulder.
The cat slowly stood up and loped away, slightly favoring its left foreleg.
We all knelt around Justin. Ida Belle felt his neck for a pulse.
“Weak,” she said. “Probably shock.”
“Good thing you didn’t shoot the boy, Ida Belle.”
“Course I didn’t shoot him, Gertie. I know what I’m doing. Poor kid’s sure had a run of bad luck.”
“Getting an ambulance is going to take forever,” I said. “I’ll call Ally. She should be getting off her shift about—”
“Oh look,” Gertie exclaimed. “Aren’t we in luck? Here comes Carter’s truck.”
Chapter Nine
The E.R. intake nurse took one look at Justin and parted the waters for him. He got to go in ahead of the Swamp Bar fight casualties and the drunken night-time fishing accidents.
Justin was worse off than we’d thought at first. He’d hit is head when he’d fallen, and blood soaked through Carter’s brown blanket in shiny black blotches.
“Thanks for the ride, Carter,” Ida-Belle said. “Maybe you can give Fortune a lift to her house so she can get Marge’s jeep and come back here, and we won’t be stranded.”
“No problem,” Carter said, unenthusiastically.
Carter hadn’t asked us a single question on the way over. It was as if he had given up on the idea of the three of us ever telling him the truth. The irony was that this time Ida Belle, Gertie, and I had nothing to hide, for a change.
Neither of us said anything as Carter pulled out onto the road. When we were up to speed, he finally spoke.
“So Uncle Walt said he saw you at the General Store today.”
“M hm,” I said.
“Guess he sees you more than I do anymore.”
I wondered whether Walter had told Carter that I’d come walking in with Professor Dreamy, and if so, whether that had made Carter jealous. I h
ave no patience with jealousy. It makes me feel like a toy that two toddlers are fighting over.
“I don’t want to be a pest,” I said. “I know you have your hands full. You’re still recovering from the most recent attempt on your life, you’re trying to stay in Mayor-Elect Celia Arceneaux’s good graces so she doesn’t get into a snit and fire you, and now with the big Hamster Hootenanny or whatever it’s called coming up you have to worry about wild cougars coming in and gobbling up the tourists before they can spend their money.”
Carter laughed. “Fortune, you got one heck of a smart mouth for a beauty queen. I thought you all were supposed to smile sweetly and wish for world peace.”
“I never claimed I was any good at being a beauty queen.”
“Is there anything else you’re not telling me about this animal attack?”
“I wish I could tell you something useful. We were walking out of Francine’s, on the bayou side of the road, and this big cat came lunging out from the bushes, straight at Justin. It didn’t let up until Ida Belle shot it in the shoulder. Thank Heaven for Ida Belle.”
“Do you think Justin could tell me anything?”
“Like what? What would you ask him? ‘Do you know why this wild animal might have wanted to harm you?’”
“Look, Fortune, I’m doing what I can here. You don’t have to be sarcastic.”
“There was one thing I noticed. That guy that calls himself a reporter, Santiago, was hanging out at Francine’s right before the incident. And he’s been popping up everywhere, asking questions. He seems suspicious to me.”
“Well, unless you think Santiago turned himself into a cougar and ran out after you, that doesn’t help me.”
“Who’s being sarcastic now?”
“Sorry.” Carter slowed the truck and pulled into the driveway of Marge’s house. “Here we are.”
He sat and looked at me. “Fortune, when you’re up to it, I’d like to have dinner again. You just let me know when.”
I couldn’t process this right now. I had to get back to the hospital.