Resolutely, Claudia turned back toward the teacher. He lay more quietly now, groaning. Somehow, she would have to move him, and now, quickly. Sloshing through the water, Claudia took two steps closer. It was difficult to focus without glasses and at first Claudia thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. But no. Something had moved. Not Flynn; there, just beyond him.
Claudia squinted for a closer look. She saw the water part three feet away. Something luminescent flared, then vanished.
In the second it took to understand what she was seeing, the alligator’s jaws clamped down on Flynn’s shoulder. He twisted and screamed. Claudia stumbled backward. A few moments later Flynn started to gag, his screams muffled by the water.
Paralyzed with shock, Claudia could do nothing but watch in horror. The beast’s great tail thrashed the water into foam. Mist swirled in primordial response. Something else, then: Robin’s voice, faint, raw and frightened. Claudia shook herself, and frantically navigated toward the bank, using the reeds as levers. By the time she found solid footing, the lake was still again except for the beating of her heart.
Numb, Claudia reached Robin at the same time she heard the distant wail of police vehicles. Could it only have been forty minutes?
She dropped on her knees beside the girl, murmured reassurance, held her briefly, fumbled at the cord. Robin shivered convulsively, could not stop crying. The moment the binds were off, she pushed her body into Claudia’s embrace.
Claudia marveled at how small she seemed, how fragile.
“Shh, there, baby, there. It’s all right now.” Claudia held her tightly, drinking in the smell of Robin’s hair. “It’s all over.” She tipped Robin’s face to her own. “It’s okay now. We’re going to go home in a minute.”
“You lost your glasses,” Robin said thickly, still snuffling. “You can’t see without them.”
Claudia laughed mirthlessly. “Yeah. I lost my glasses.” She cradled Robin against her, rubbing her good hand up and down her daughter’s bare arm, trying to warm her.
Across the lake, the reds and blues flashed. A second later, a spotlight threw out unnatural daylight. The chief’s husky voice barked through an amplified horn.
“Hershey! Hershey, you out there?”
Claudia stood, croaked an answer, cleared her throat and tried again. She called out a location, waited for the response.
“All right, Hershey. We’re coming. Just sit tight.”
The cavalry was on its way.
Leaning against the tree, her child nestled against her, Claudia sat tight and waited.
Chapter 33
The first day, she was too heavily sedated to do more than sleep. The second day, she was well enough to sit up and appreciate the pain. Two cracked ribs, eleven stitches to close the gash in her hand, skin swollen from insect bites, bruises the color of eggplant—a garden of injuries a long way from harvest.
Suggs’ was the first voice she heard. Claudia cracked an eye. He stood at the foot of the hospital bed, taking survey.
“About damn time you opened your eyes, Hershey,” he growled. “Got a truck load of cases piling up on your desk. Nothing fancy. Just a bunch of minor whodunits.”
“I can’t wait,” Claudia muttered through swollen lips. She groaned and shifted.
“You know you passed out on the boat?” Suggs picked at a fresh roll of mint Tums, held it out.
Claudia shook her head. She wanted a gallon of mouth wash.
She asked Suggs about Flynn.
The chief’s jaw tightened. “Well, Hershey, he’s not gonna hurt anyone ever again. He’s put the spirits to rest, his own and his mother’s.”
Claudia nodded and looked past the chief. She squinted and spotted Marty and Robin. Dennis stood beside them, a half-moon grin stretching his lips. She winked at him, then smiled feebly and gestured for Robin to come over.
“Hi, kid,” she said, taking her daughter’s hand. “You all right?”
Robin nodded. “Just a bunch of bug bites. I have lotion on them.”
“Marty watching out for you?”
Robin nodded, eyes downcast.
“Hey, what’s this? What’s the matter, baby?”
A tear formed. Robin shrugged, tried to wipe it away with a shoulder.
“Come on.” Claudia squeezed Robin’s hand. “Everything’s all right. Really, it is.”
“No it’s not,” Robin blurted. “It’s all my fault. Look at you. I almost got you killed. Nothing would’ve happened if—”
“Hey, hey,” said Claudia. “We don’t know what would’ve happened no matter what, huh? There’s no point in looking back, kiddo. We’re here. We’re alive. Now come on. Show me some teeth.”
Robin sniffled, offered a small smile.
“Ah, that’s better,” said Claudia.
A moment passed, then another.
“I . . . so you’re not mad at me?” Robin picked at her polish with a fingernail. Fluorescent green this time. “I mean, at least not much?”
Claudia hooted. “Hell, yeah, I’m mad at you! And yes, much! But not because Victor Flynn took a poke or two at me.” She tapped a finger against Robin’s hand and asked softly, “You know why, don’t you?”
“I know,” Robin said simply. “I know and I’m sorry.” She sought her mother’s eyes. “So I guess I’m probably, like, grounded for life now, huh?”
Oh yeah, that. Claudia groaned inwardly and propped herself on an elbow. “This is important to know? Right now?”
Robin made a face. “Well, you know . . .”
“All right,” said Claudia, trying to focus. She toyed with Robin’s hand. “The truth is I haven’t really given it a whole lot of thought yet,” she said. “But I do know that grounding you didn’t seem to work that well. So I don’t know. It might be that I’m going to have to find something more imaginative, or maybe just more direct.”
“Like what?” Robin persisted.
Claudia pursed her lips in thought. She beckoned Robin closer and whispered something in her ear.
Robin blanched, slipped her hand out of Claudia’s and backed a step away.
“Oh, come on,” Claudia teased. “What are you worrying about? I won’t even be out of bed for a week. I won’t be up to speed for another couple days after that.”
She watched her daughter retreat and smiled to herself. Well, better that the kid be chased by nightmares of her mother than nightmares of Victor Flynn. Claudia sighed and closed her eyes.
They’d do just fine, the two of them. Just fine.
– THE END –
For my husband, John C. Caramanica, Jr.,
a man astonishingly undaunted by dreamers
Chapter 1
He would take some getting used to. First, there was that hair—a red so vivid it looked painted on. Then there was his walk, a bouncing gait that seemed to propel the top half of his body faster than the rest of him. Of course, it could’ve been that he was simply wobbling out of balance because of the heavy backpack anchored to his shoulder. From a distance, Claudia couldn’t tell and she tried to push aside the uncharitable thoughts that were already forming as he angled toward her through the Indian Run police station.
“Lieutenant Hershey! Greetings! Hi! I’m Booey Suggs, or just plain ‘Boo’. My uncle told you about me, right? I can’t believe I’m actually meeting you! You’re even taller than you looked on TV. This is superlative. I’ve never been up close to anyone famous before.”
“And you’re not up close to anyone famous now,” Claudia said. She shook the knobby hand Booey thrust at her and made herself smile. If he was a puppy, his tail would be wagging so hard his body would spin. “Nice to meet you,” she added.
“Oh, me too, me too! That homicide you worked last fall? Brilliant! It’s what made me think about maybe becoming a police officer, a detective. My uncle told me—”
“What he told me is that you’re keen on being a documentary filmmaker,” Claudia said swiftly. “He said you’re talented with a camera.”
“He told you I’m talented?” Booey said, pleased.
She nodded. The filmmaker part was true. She steered the boy toward her office, ignoring the amused expression on the dispatcher’s face.
“Well, I am considering filmmaking too,” Booey said. “When I’m done with my internship with you—”
“It’s not exactly an internship,” Claudia said. “It’s unofficial and it’s only two weeks. Just to give you a feel for detective work, which you’ll find is about as exciting as reading a phone book.”
Booey shrugged, bounced along beside her. “Well, anyway, when I’m done here, then I’ve got something lined up with a film company that mostly does Southern documentaries. Over in Orlando.”
“Good for you,” Claudia murmured. They’d reached her office, which had been converted from a utility closet a few weeks earlier. As closets went, it was plenty big. As an office . . . well, except when people used the stained sink in the corner to get water for the coffee pot, it made up in privacy what it lacked in size. “Sit.” Claudia pointed at a metal chair beside her desk, then shuffled through a few incident reports on her desk. Lunch had come and gone. She had an afternoon to fill and no earthly idea what to do with him—and this was only Monday.
“Just let him hang out with you, Hershey,” Chief Suggs had said when he sprang the Booey thing on her a few hours earlier. “He’s my brother’s youngest boy. Just graduated from high school and he thinks he wants to be a cop—that or a documentary movie mogul of some kind. He’s got his own car, one of them little VW bugs, so you don’t need to pick him up or drop him off. Just take him on calls. Let him listen in on interviews. Give him some forms to fill out.”
“If he wants to be a cop, he should do two weeks on patrol,” Claudia said. She resisted asking about the kid’s silly-ass name, which she already knew would never flow easily off her tongue. “He’d probably love riding around in a police car.”
“Nah. He wants to be a detective. He clipped every story that was written about your psychic murders last fall.”
“They weren’t ‘my’ murders and they weren’t psychics,” Claudia said flatly. “They were mediums.”
“Whatever. The kid thinks you’re some kind of mental giant. ’Course, that’s what he said. Could be he’s just got the hots for you. And anyhow, it’s of no matter. He specifically asked if he could be assigned to you.”
“Oh, come on. Can’t you just tell him that it’s not possible? Tell him anything you want. You’re the chief of police.”
“My brother doesn’t give a rat’s ass that I’m the honcho, Hershey. He only cares that I owe him five hundred bucks, which I don’t happen to have right now. I’m buyin’ down my debt by lettin’ Boo ride with you. Out here, barter is still part of the free enterprise system. You’re comin’ up on two years here. I’m surprised you don’t know that by now.”
Actually, it was a year and a half. Claudia supposed Suggs was close enough, though. And yeah, she knew about barter in Indian Run. She knew a lot about the small Florida town by now. She knew that living in the dead center of the state meant you’d never catch a breeze in the summer. She knew that cows took forever to cross a road and were impervious to car horns. She knew that half the streets weren’t marked, that fishing tournaments were enough to close stores on a Sunday, and that no one would smile at you if you didn’t smile first. She also knew that Indian Run wasn’t immune to murder.
What she didn’t know—not when she moved down from Cleveland and really, not even now—was why she stayed. Her daughter Robin said it was just part of Claudia’s miserable stubbornness. Maybe.
“Look, Chief—and this is nothing against your nephew; I haven’t even met him yet—but if I have someone with me everywhere I go, it’s just going to slow me down,” Claudia argued. “I’ll have to explain everything. Whatever I do will take twice as long as it should.”
“Hershey, Hershey . . . that’s pretty lame, even for you. It’s summer. What’re you working? A shoplifting or two? A vandalism? Stolen wallet? What’s so hot that Boo’s gonna get in your way?”
He had a point.
“Besides, Hershey, Boo’s a good kid. Granted, he could stand a little toughening up, sure, but that’s just the physical side. Book-wise, the kid’s wicked smart. He can probably recite every word in the dictionary backwards and damned if he doesn’t know every one of the ‘begats’ in the Bible. He’s affectionate, too. He’ll grow on you faster than kudzu on a telephone pole.”
And that was that. Booey was on a metal chair, beaming at Claudia, waiting. His knees were crossed and one foot was jetting up and down. She sighed and plucked a stolen vehicle report from the stack.
“My original idea was to show you some of the administrative part of police work,” she said, “but I don’t know . . . maybe I’ll save that for later.” In close proximity, his jiggling would make her nuts in five minutes. “There’s this local businessman, the guy who owns a used car lot on the edge of town. He called in this morning. Looks like an old El Dorado got boosted from his lot. I guess we could head on over there, talk to the man and . . .”
Claudia didn’t bother finishing. Booey was already shooting out of his chair. It scraped against the concrete floor like fingernails on a blackboard. Claudia shuddered and made a mental note to remind Suggs that he’d promised to order cheap carpeting for the closet. The office.
“Auto theft! That’s got the potential to be big, right? I read somewhere that stealing cars isn’t just about joy riding. The article said a lot of car thieves are actually part of sophisticated rings. They even have lists of exactly what kind of cars to steal. The cars get stripped, the parts get sold.” Booey hefted his backpack to his shoulder. “You think that’s what’s going on here, Lieutenant? I remember this one movie where—”
“Tell you what . . . Booey.” Claudia still had trouble with the name. “Let’s just hold off on speculating until we’ve talked to the victim.” She glanced at the report. “Mike Gorman. Gorman’s Autos. We’ll ride on over and see if he’s got anything illuminating to add to the officer’s initial report.”
Two weeks, Claudia reminded herself. She only had to put up with him for two weeks. She tucked her .38 Colt revolver into her trouser holster, shrugged into her jacket, grabbed a portable radio and headed for the parking lot, trying to ignore the kid’s eyes following her every move.
Claudia’s police-issue car, an old Cavalier that no longer evidenced style or substance, sat just beyond the reach of shade from a small knot of trees outside the police station. Heated by a late-June sun, the steering wheel would be almost too hot to touch. That was just one more little detail Claudia hadn’t considered when she settled on Florida.
She yanked the driver’s door open and peered over the hood at Booey, struggling with his own door. “You have to lift up on the handle a little,” she said. “The passenger side didn’t work at all before, but it got fixed a few months ago—more or less, anyway. Now it just takes muscle. You’ll get used to it.” She waited for him to get in and settled with his backpack before she started up the engine, wishing the car thief had scrounged the Cavalier instead of the El Dorado. She pulled onto the street and headed north, toward the outskirts of the town’s small commercial district.
“So what exactly are you toting around with you, Booey? That bag looks heavy enough to be holding a set of encyclopedias.”
Booey leaned enthusiastically toward Claudia. “Actually, this is better than encyclopedias. I’ve got all kinds of stuff—a laptop, a cell phone, a digital camera, a Palm Pilot . . . you know, electronic equipment so I can have quick access to anything I might need.”
“What? No fax machine?”
Booey looked at her, puzzled.
“Never mind,” Claudia said. She was about to ask why he thought he’d need electronics with him when her portable crackled and the dispatcher’s voice came on. “Lieutenant Hershey? You got that radio of yours turned on for a change? I got one for you.”
Claudia fiddled with the squelch button and gritted her teeth. She couldn’t get Sally to talk in code no matter how hard she tried. “Yeah, Sally. I’m on. What’s up?”
“Animal control called right after you left. They got a call out to old Wanda Farr’s trailer. Two guys went out. They want an officer to meet them.”
“Farr? You talking about the old cat lady?”
“That’s a 10-4, Lieutenant.”
“They don’t need a detective to help them pick up cats, Sally. By the way, nice code.”
“Thanks. This isn’t just about cats, if you get my drift.”
“What? Neighbor problems again?”
“No. Shoot . . . hang on a sec’. Let me look this one up.”
Claudia vaguely heard Sally shuffling through papers.
“Okay, I got it. My drift is that they think they might have a Signal 7 out there because, quote-unquote, ‘Something smells funny here.’ That’s what the animal control guy said. He said they haven’t gone in yet, but that there’s—”
“All right, all right, Sally. I got it now. I’ll head on over.”
“You know the location?”
“Ten-four.” Everyone in town knew the location. Farr’s trailer was one of a handful near the railroad tracks that bisected the oldest of Indian Run’s communities from the newest. Complaints about the woman periodically came from both.
Claudia clicked off and swore softly.
“What was she talking about?” Booey asked. “What’s a Signal 7?”
“It means there’s a dead body.”
“A murder?” Booey’s foot started tapping. “Shouldn’t we go faster? Don’t you have a siren you can put on your roof?”
“Don’t get excited, Booey. A ‘5’ is a homicide. A ‘7’ is just a dead body, usually from natural causes or maybe an accident. The woman Sally mentioned is about a hundred years old. From what I hear, people’ve been taking bets on when she’d die for the last ten years. Sounds like maybe she just did. Anyway, we’ll make a welfare check and see what’s what.”
The Claudia Hershey Mysteries - Box Set: Three Claudia Hershey Mysteries Page 26