by Jana DeLeon
I glanced back and saw the bear running behind us at a scary pace, his mouth open and about a million teeth glistening in the moonlight. We turned on the afterburners and rounded the corner just a couple feet behind Margarita, but with the bear right behind us, we couldn’t afford to take her down. Instead, I ran right up to her and wrenched the pistol from her hand before sprinting after Junior.
He wasn’t that far ahead—maybe twenty yards—and I was closing fast. He was quick but he lacked endurance. His pace was slowing. He rounded a corner and I prepared to tackle him as soon as I had him in my sights, then I heard a loud thump. I slid around the bend in the road and saw Junior slumped over the hood of a truck. I heard a roar and turned to see the bear rounding the corner behind me.
I raised my pistol to fire, knowing I had one chance to shoot the charging animal between the eyes. But before I could get off the shot, there was an enormous boom behind me and the bear dropped. I spun around and saw Young Huck standing next to the truck holding a rifle and grinning like he’d just won the lottery.
“Whoot!” he shouted. “I’m gonna have me some good eating for a long time.”
I ran over to Junior and grabbed his arms, twisting them up behind his back. “You got any rope?” I asked.
“Of course I’ve got rope,” Young Huck said. “What kind of man do you think I am?”
“The kind who killed a bear and saved the day.” Ida Belle’s voice sounded behind me, and I turned around to see her walking just behind Margarita, her pistol trained on the back of the woman’s head. Gertie was following close behind, completely soaked but looking entirely too pleased.
“You were right!” she said.
“Maybe,” I said, and looked at Margarita. “Why did you do it?”
Margarita glared at me. “You have to ask?”
“No. I guess I don’t.”
“Hooch didn’t deserve that money. He owed everybody he’d ever met, but he owed me the most. Those coins would have given me the life I should have had. Instead of one scrimping and barely getting by raising his son by myself.”
“Hooch was a loser,” I agreed. “Everyone knew that. But what I really want to know is how you convinced your boy toy to go along with this harebrained plan.”
“Boy toy?” Gertie and Ida Belle both stared at me.
I pointed a finger at the man I’d just tied to Young Huck’s bumper. “I don’t know who this is, but it’s not Hooch’s son.”
“You’re sure?” Gertie asked.
I nodded. “The facial features aren’t right and he’s no artist. When I met him in the café, I noticed his socks didn’t match. One had a red stripe. One had green.”
“He’s color-blind,” Ida Belle said. “Then who is he?”
I shrugged. “Probably one of the biker guys that Margarita likes to hang with. Remember Carter said their hotel room was broken into. One room. At first, I thought he was shy and slightly embarrassed about his lousy father, but that wasn’t it at all.”
“He was scared they were going to get caught,” Ida Belle said. “And embarrassed that he was dating a woman old enough to be his mother.”
“He was not embarrassed,” Margarita argued.
“Look at that,” I said. “Accuse her of murder and she doesn’t care. Accuse her of robbing the cradle and she gets defensive.”
“So what do we do now?” Gertie asked.
The sound of an approaching vehicle had us all throwing our hands up to block the headlights. The vehicle stopped behind Young Huck’s pickup and when the headlights went off, I saw it was Carter’s truck.
He walked up to us and took it all in—Margarita and Junior tied up, the dead bear in the middle of the road, Gertie soaking wet—and he did the one thing I never expected.
He started to laugh.
Gertie looked over at me, her eyes wide. “He’s gone stark raving mad. We’ve finally pushed him over the edge.”
He looked at her and shook his head. “If I were going to lose my mind over the stunts you guys pull, it would have happened a long time ago. Maybe I’m so exhausted I’ve given up. Or maybe I’m so relieved to have these two in custody that I’m not thinking straight.”
“You don’t look surprised,” I said.
“That’s because I’m not,” he said. “While I was at the hospital with Deputy Breaux, the New Orleans police were executing a search warrant on Margarita’s house. Guess what they found inside?”
“Cyanide?” I asked.
He nodded. “And a box of Twinkies with two of them missing.”
“She injected the cyanide in the Twinkies,” Ida Belle said. “That’s genius. All she had to do was drop them in Hooch’s boat and wait for him to die. He could never turn one down and since he was drunk half the time, he wouldn’t remember whether he bought them or not.”
“There were wrappers blowing out of his boat, remember?” I said.
“So who is this guy?” Gertie pointed to the man who’d posed as Junior.
“Nobody,” Carter said. “But he’s about to be a long-term guest of the state.”
“Where is the real Junior?” I asked.
“Dead,” Carter said. “Car accident two weeks ago. There’s still a lot of details I have to work out, but I have more than enough for the ADA to press charges. I’m sure we’ll be able to fill in the blanks as we go. Speaking of which, I need to get going now or my luck, the state police—who were supposed to be here hours ago—will show up and try to take all the credit.”
“Uh,” Young Huck interrupted, looking completely and utterly confused. “You don’t have a problem with me keeping the bear, do you? I shot it legit. It was charging.”
“That’s true,” I said. “He saved all of our lives.”
Carter looked over at Young Huck. “Then looks like you’ll be eating bear meat for a while.”
“Whoohoo!” he yelled. “I’ll just fire up my winch. I went ahead and secured it in the bed of my truck…just in case.”
“Uh-huh,” Carter said. I’m sure he knew Young Huck had been out trying to nab that bear ever since it had torn down his front door, but he wasn’t about to try to prove it.
“What about us?” I asked.
“I’ll deal with you three tomorrow,” he said. “If I were you, I’d go home, wake up Ally, and celebrate.”
Best. Plan. Ever.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The celebration lasted well into the night. I’d awakened Ally as soon as we got back to my house and filled her in on everything that had happened the last few days. When I was done, she hugged everyone, then cried, then hugged us all again and cried some more. We ate and drank whiskey and when Ida Belle and Gertie finally left, the sun was already starting to peek up over the bayou.
Ally had the dinner shift at the café, so she didn’t have to climb out of bed early. I didn’t have any work obligations at all, so there was no reason for me to be up before noon either. But I still was.
At 8:30 a.m., I was sitting out back in a lawn chair, holding a cup of coffee and watching the fishermen head out. The storm the night before had been a front moving through, so a cool north breeze had dropped the temperatures down a good fifteen degrees. It was also keeping the mosquitoes away.
“I thought I might find you here.” Carter’s voice sounded behind me. He slid into the chair next to me. His chair.
“Normal people would be asleep,” I said.
“I never could sleep,” he said. “Not right after a mission. Too much adrenaline. Too much excitement. It took me a bit to come down, but once I did…”
I nodded. That was exactly it. Right now, my mind was still cataloging everything that had transpired. But by midafternoon, I’d be out for the count.
“How did things go with Margarita and her lover?” I asked.
“He rolled on her.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. When we took off after them last night, he hauled butt. Didn’t even glance back once to see where Margarita was.”
&n
bsp; “He was in it for the money all right.”
“Where did they get the letter?” We’d dropped the document off at the sheriff’s department on our drive home the night before.
“Margarita got it at Junior’s apartment.”
“But why would Junior have the letter? I can’t believe Hooch was going to share his fortune with the son he never cared about.”
“I’m sure he wasn’t,” Carter said. “But I just got off the phone with that coin dealer. He said that Hooch had brought the items in and he’d done an appraisal but that he wasn’t interested in selling. When he mentioned the appraisal to a longtime customer, the guy offered top dollar. Hooch hadn’t left any contact information but a cell phone number, which had been disconnected.”
“Probably didn’t pay his bill.”
He nodded. “So he did a basic search in the area.”
“And he found Junior,” I said, all of it making sense now. “Then sent the letter to him, thinking it was Hooch.”
“Exactly. But Junior had died in a car wreck a couple days before.”
“How come that didn’t show up when you were trying to locate him?”
“The accident was in another state. The databases just haven’t been updated yet. I figure after he died, Margarita must have been at his apartment going through his things and found the letter.”
“She must have lost it when she realized Hooch had something that valuable,” I said.
“I’m sure. She hates Hooch with a passion, and the thought of him skipping off with a fortune when she scraped by to raise their son was enough to put her over the edge.”
“So she plotted to killed him,” I said, “which would have been the easy solution if Junior had been around to claim his inheritance, but with Junior dead, she had a problem. Did she really think she was going to get away with having her boyfriend pretend to be her son?”
“If I hadn’t refused her entry to Hooch’s house, she probably would have. Think about it. The only people who knew about the letter were her and the coin dealer. If I’d let her in Hooch’s house on Sunday when they arrived, she would have left with what she came for in a matter of minutes.”
“I guess so.”
He grinned. “The irony is, all she would have left with was a couple bucks.”
“Why? I thought the coins were worth a lot of money.”
“It wasn’t the coins that Hooch took to be appraised. All that was in that plastic container was regular ol’ quarters.”
“Then why were they in a container at all?”
Carter shrugged. “Maybe to mislead anyone that came looking? Our friend Hooch might not have been as foolish as we thought he was. Not all the time, anyway.”
“If not the coins, then what did he have appraised?”
“Stamps. In particular, one printed during the First World War called an Inverted Jenny. It’s very rare and worth a lot of money.”
“The letters! We found a box of letters from one of Hooch’s ancestors but we figured he had them because he never threw anything away.”
Carter raised an eyebrow. “I did not hear that part about you finding anything in an active crime scene.”
“Oh, right.”
“But I’m sure you’re correct. Hooch was too lazy to throw anything away. The thing is, about a month ago there was a television special on rare stamps on the History Channel.”
“Hooch saw it and recognized the stamp as one he had in his hoarder collection.” I shook my head. “And Ricky? What will happen to him?”
“He’ll face charges for attempted B&E at Hooch’s place and for successful B&E at the motel. We found the items he’d stolen at his rental house. The biggest charge will be the assault on Deputy Breaux, but it could be worse. He could have been charged with murder.”
“I feel sorry for him,” I said before I could change my mind.
“You?”
“Yes, me. I can feel sorry for people. He had a crappy human being for a father and his mother was clearly not one with good judgment. But she was the only person he had and she died too young. He came to Sinful looking for a family.”
“And instead, he got Hooch.” Carter sighed. “Yeah, I guess I feel a little sorry for him too. But if it makes you feel any better, once the courts sell those stamps and settle Hooch’s debts, Ricky will inherit everything that’s left. He probably won’t serve much time on a first offense, maybe even none if he pushes for a good deal with the ADA for his testimony about the letter.”
“That’s something, at least,” I said. “What about Ally’s window?”
He shook his head. “We might never know which one of Sinful’s awesome residents pulled that stunt. But I don’t think Ally has anything to worry about.”
I looked over at him. “So, are we good?”
“You mean about you and the terrible twosome sticking your noses into police business?”
I nodded.
“I’m not going to say that I like it, but I understand. You had to protect Ally.” He looked out over the bayou and was silent for several seconds, then he looked back at me. “I don’t expect you to be someone else. I mean, I would love it if you toned things down some, but I don’t think people really change. Not deep down. Not people like us, anyway.”
“The leopard doesn’t change its spots.”
“There’s a lot of truth in that.”
“So you’re okay with me sticking my nose in because it’s against my nature not to. Is that it?”
“I won’t say I’m okay with it, and I have to ensure my job is protected or this town isn’t.”
“Meaning if you have to arrest me, you will.”
“Without prejudice.”
“I would expect nothing less. I’m glad we cleared the air on this.”
“Why? You planning on becoming a permanent pain in my law enforcement backside?”
He was joking when he said it. He thought my interest in this case was only because of Ally. But I knew better. Ally was the fuel, but the fire was already burning before he’d thrown her in jail.
“Maybe. But with a little more authority.” I pulled out the envelope that had been tucked under my leg and handed it to him. He opened it up and pulled out the contents, then his jaw dropped.
“This is a PI license,” he said.
I grinned. “Fortune Redding. Act II.”
* * *
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