by G A Chase
Kelly filled Sere’s cup. From the woman’s frown and squint, Sere knew she hadn’t fooled her. “Cody’s boat was stolen. Not many people around here have the balls to take a man’s means of making a living. Though I can’t say I felt sorry for the asshole. Lord knows he’s poached enough other gator hunters’ lines in the past.”
Larry downed his coffee in two slurps as if the steaming liquid didn’t have any effect on his mouth at all. “None of those guys play fair. It’d serve Cody right if that boat was found at the bottom of the bayou. My bet is it was the Buford brothers.”
Kelly poured the thick batter onto the hot griddle and called over her back, “Not every conflict originates in high school, Larry.”
“Maybe not,” he replied while grabbing the coffee pot to refill his cup. “But I’ve yet to see one of those jocks set foot in my shop.”
“I’m not spending all morning dealing with your insecurities—especially not when we have a visitor.” Kelly returned from the stove and freshened Sere’s cup of coffee. “So tell me, hon, where did you get off to? If some dashing knight had swung into town and whisked you off on his white horse, I’d have heard about it.”
Sere got the message loud and clear: Someone’s always watching. “I found a comfortable spot to set up camp along the river.” Her answer had the advantage of not being a lie.
With her spatula, Kelly lifted the first round of flapjacks and slid them onto three plates. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, dear, but did you steal that boat? I’m only asking so I’ll know how to protect you.”
Larry slammed his fork down so hard onto his plate that Sere wondered how the thick porcelain hadn’t chipped. “That’s just rude, Kelly. Sometimes you can be awfully blunt.”
Sere didn’t turn away from Kelly’s penetrating stare. “Technically, I borrowed the boat. It’s back where it belongs. But to answer your question, yes. I did take it.”
“You don’t believe in lying, do you, hon?”
Sere took a mouthful of the heavily buttered pancake while she considered her answer. “I never saw much point in it. If I do something, I should have enough conviction of my action to not hide it.”
Larry waved a forkful of syrup-dripping flapjack at her. “That’s a good way to get yourself in a lot of trouble.”
“I’m not afraid of a good fight.”
Kelly leaned her hip against the counter with her cup in her hands. “And were you the one who busted up Bubba’s Bar?”
“Word travels fast.”
Larry pushed his empty plate toward Kelly and smiled. “Not much else to do out here but gossip. Jackson’s Bluff is only ten miles down the road.”
The road out front was beginning to seem awfully confining, and the first headlights of the day announced that people were starting to head out to work. Turn right, and ride into a mob of angry bikers, or turn left into oncoming pickup trucks with loaded gun racks.
She pushed her plate of half-eaten flapjacks aside while Kelly was refilling Larry’s plate. “I should get going.”
Kelly dumped Sere’s remaining food, rinsed the plate, and put it and her cup in the dishwasher so only two settings were left on the counter. “Probably a good idea. I should be getting my first customers any minute now. You can sneak out the back. Your gear is in the bathroom cabinet. We’ll distract anyone who might come looking for you as long as we can, but do yourself a favor, hon—don’t get caught.”
Larry took the renewed stack of flapjacks and pointed his empty fork back toward his shop. “When you get to the end of town, make a left away from the swamp. About fifteen miles down, you’ll come on the interstate.”
What makes you think I’m running? Concealing information wasn’t the same as lying, and she didn’t want to worry the two, who’d been so hospitable. She got up from the counter stool and put her hand on Larry’s shoulder. “Thank you both. Hopefully, the next time I pass through town, it’ll be a little less dramatic.”
The look of worry the mechanic and cook shared was enough to convey the message: People don’t forget wrongs done to them out here.
As Sere rode to the edge of town, she spotted the turnoff toward the freeway. She didn’t take it. Somewhere on the road ahead that meandered alongside the water, a denizen of hell might have pulled itself out of the swamp.
She considered what she’d heard as she leaned her Triton into the gentle curves. Bikers weren’t always the best sources of information, but between traveling the backwoods of Louisiana during their free time and working outdoors during the day, the customers at Bubba’s Bar would have heard of anything unusual. Stories of monsters crawling out of the swamp were hard to suppress. Lake Pontchartrain might as well have been an ocean for the amount of contact people north of the lake had with the citizens of New Orleans. Bikers out for a Saturday ride would head north along the open empty expanses of roadway, not south into the big city. And since neither Kelly nor Larry had heard of any swamp monster wandering into town, she had to conclude her prey lay to the south. She had seventy miles to go before reaching Joe’s cabin—plenty of opportunities to listen in on rumors at the local watering holes or work off a little aggression.
Against the gray-blue of predawn, a cloud of rust-orange dust caught the light a mile ahead. The only people out this far and up this early would have to be the gator hunters working their way out to the swamp.
She swung the motorcycle into the first available parking lot to avoid the oncoming pickups. Strangers in small rural towns attracted suspicion, people gossiped, and she’d made herself a target with the bikers. It wouldn’t take a leap of creativity for some hick to connect the badass biker chick asking about borrowing a boat to the missing skiff. A beat-up truck coated in months’ worth of dust was parked in front of the shiplap shack. “Riley’s” was written above the front door of the shack in red paint. Bar or whorehouse?
When it came to fighting, Sere preferred her altercations to be inside, where she could keep track of her adversaries. Any opponent would have to enter or exit the arena through well-defined doors or windows. Every chair, table, and beer bottle was a potential weapon. Counters, walls, and hanging light fixtures made for useful launching sites. Outdoors, the variables were less in her favor. When they thought they wouldn’t be taking out a wall of booze with the blast, rednecks had a way of pulling their rifles out of their trucks as lustily as they might whip their dicks out of their pants and firing with the same piss-poor accuracy at any target in sight.
She pushed open the door and entered the establishment like a spider zeroing in on the center of an opponent’s web. A dude in camouflage cargo shorts and a green flannel shirt lay slumped over the bar. From the smell that hit Sere ten feet away, she guessed he’d been occupying the barstool for days.
“Anyone here?” She wasn’t looking for service, but discovering if Camo Boy was the only one to contend with would help her plan her inquisition.
To her surprise, the guy who’d looked to be in an alcohol-induced coma rolled onto his side against the bar. “What do you want?” he slurred.
“Information about the bayou. See anything strange crawl out of the weeds lately?”
He lifted the cell phone he’d been slumped over and showed her the screen. The bare light bulb of the dock’s butcher station had perfectly illuminated her sneaking away from the boat. “Just some no-good, thieving bitch who stole my boat.” He got off the bar stool and rose to a solid six feet tall, three hundred pounds.
“Easy, big boy.” Sere scanned the solid linebacker-style body for some sign of weakness. She could see she had been sorely mistaken in her first impression of the man as a broken-down drunk. “I didn’t steal your boat—just borrowed it. If you’ll get your jockstrap out of a knot and look inside your slip, you’ll find your toy right were you left it—up your ass.”
“Girl, you’ve got a funny way of asking for information.” He pointed toward the dust-encrusted window and her bike out front. “Maybe I’ll just go outside and tak
e those fancy saddlebags as my payment for the boat rental.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it.” My usual gymnastic attack isn’t likely to have much of an effect on all that mass, and without my knife, I’m down to focusing on his most vulnerable anatomy. Unfortunately, he’s probably still too drunk to notice a kick to the balls.
“Afraid I’ll mess up your precious panties and bras pawing around with my smelly meat hooks?”
“Something like that.” If an attack won’t work, maybe cunning will. I do still need information.
He pushed her out of the way with one hand and slammed the door open with the other. The Triton looked like a kid’s toy next to the mountain of a man as he drunkenly stumbled up to the bike. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
“I really wouldn’t do that if I were you.” She wasn’t really trying to stop him, but what she’d said was the truth.
As he stuck his hand in her saddlebag, he turned to her and grinned. He reminded her of a school bully trying to steal her lunch. “Fuck!” He yanked his hand out of the gator skin bag. A two-foot-long rattlesnake had its fangs firmly implanted in Camo Boy’s wrist and was twisting its body up the man’s arm. “What kind of a sick bitch puts a snake in her saddlebag?”
“The kind that doesn’t like her shit messed with. You might want to sit down before the venom makes you woozy.”
He fell to his knees next to the bike and grabbed the snake’s head. “Get this fucking thing off of me.” The snake released but then resank its fangs back into the man’s arm.
“He doesn’t like being yanked around like that. The more you pull at him, the more holes he’ll make in your arm, each time injecting you with more of his venom. He’s not very old, so he’s got quite a lot of vigor.”
“What the fuck do you want, woman?” The mound of manly flesh was quivering like a little boy facing a session with his father’s belt.
Sere opened the matching saddlebag and let the other snake coil up her arm. She then pulled the hypodermic needle of antivenom from the pocket in the top flap. She held them both up for him to see his options. “Forgiveness for borrowing your boat and a little information.”
“Whatever you want, but for the love of God, get this fucking snake off my arm! I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
Sere put two fingers under the jowls of the snake still digging hard into the man’s forearm. Its flared head settled back, and the creature pulled out its fangs from the sunburnt flesh. Like a little puppy, the serpent snuggled his head against Sere’s wrist. She lifted it off the terrified man and draped it around her neck.
Camo Boy kept his arm exposed. “Fucking give me the shot before my arm falls off!”
“You swear a lot. Information first, shot second. And if I don’t like what you have to say, I’ve still got this other snake locked and loaded.”
“Do you honestly think I’m going to lie to you now?”
She let the spent snake coil back into the saddlebag, where it could get some rest. “I’m looking for information on anything unusual that’s been happening in the swamp.”
“You talking about the rumors of the Pleistocene gator? Bullshit yarns spun by tour guides after spending too much time in the sun.”
Sere considered directing his attention to her boots and saddlebags, but confirming the rumors wouldn’t do Lefty any good. Besides, that wasn’t the monster she was after. “I’m looking for something else.”
“Woman, give me the damn shot, and we can spend all day playing twenty questions. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Sere took the protective sleeve off the needle. “Very well.” She jabbed the point into his shoulder so hard he yelled nearly as loudly as when he’d been bit. “If I find out you’ve been lying to me, I will return.” She depressed the plunger, releasing the antidote into his arm.
He remained sitting against her bike. “Why is this so damn important to you that you’d steal a boat and threaten a man’s life?”
She looked out across the dusty road and toward the swamp. “Something’s coming, Camo Boy. And all your redneck guns aren’t going to do a bit of good against it.”
He rubbed his shoulder. “You’re not going to scare anyone with your campfire ghost stories. Me and the boys have faced some impressive creatures out there, but I haven’t heard of anything recently that couldn’t be explained. Every now and then, some city dude gets lost out there hunting for something to hang on his wall. A few days ago, I heard another of those idiots was spotted in the deep swamp.”
Andy? That’d be too easy. “Tell me about him.”
“Woman, I’m sure he’s gator food by now. I can’t imagine anyone surviving a night in the swamp alone, especially not someone dressed in a business suit.”
She opened her hand so the snake around her arm could lay its head on her palm and lick its tongue toward the man on the ground. “Up until two minutes ago, you couldn’t image this defenseless-looking woman having deadly creatures at her beck and call. That’s the problem with you rural dudes—no imagination.”
Between the snake venom, fear, and alcohol, he looked ready to pass out. She pushed him away from her bike with her foot and set her pet snake back in the saddlebag. Nothing left to learn here.
She straddled the Triton and kicked it to life. When she reached the edge of the parking lot, a rifle bullet tore through her leg. Sere looked over her shoulder as she tried to maintain her balance on the unstable motorcycle.
A woman was standing in the doorway of Riley’s with a smoking gun cradled in her arm. “I don’t put up with other bitches molesting my customers,” she yelled.
4
Sere twisted the Triton’s handgrip as far as it would go to get clear of the crazy woman and her rifle. Goddamn, that hurts. She reached down to feel the hole that had been punched into her leg. Blood soaked her jeans and was filling her gator-skin boots. She flexed her toes. At least I’ve still got enough of my muscles working to use the foot brake.
She sat back upright on the motorcycle and shifted up through the gears. Tough scrapes were nothing new. She still remembered the first time she’d fought injured.
Joe had towered over young Sere—but then, at ten years old, everyone towered over her. “Get up.”
“I can’t. You hurt my arm.” She lay on the brick-covered courtyard behind the Scratchy Dog club in hell, cradling her broken limb.
“And that affects your ability to use your legs?”
“I hate you.” She meant it.
He uncrossed his arms and moved a foot closer to her. “And I love you. Now, get off your ass.”
She watched every movement of his body. By approaching her and expressing his emotions, he gave her the advantage. She rolled gingerly onto her good arm. With one hard backward kick, she landed her heel against his knee, bending it completely backward. He fell with a scream and a thud but rolled over, laughing, while grabbing his dislocated leg. “Nicely done. I barely saw that one coming.”
“Bullshit. You haven’t let me have a free kick since I was seven. If you’d seen it coming, you would have defended against it.”
He pulled hard at his calf while twisting to get the leg to lie straight. “You’re getting better at reading people, Sere.” Using her name was one of his highest compliments.
She’d blushed slightly at gaining a moment of respect from her mentor. “My arm still hurts, though.”
“You can’t always rely on me or Professor Yates to be around to heal your booboos,” he’d said. “Sometimes you’ll have to fight hurt.”
Sere gunned the throttle as a way of distracting herself from the searing hole in her leg. “Fair enough, old man. But why the hell did you have to up the pain quotient now that I’m back among the living?”
A loud, high-performance howl responded to her engine noise like a bird calling back to its mate.
“Fuck! Outrunning that goddamned Duc again is not on my day’s agenda. I’ll bet anything that bitch with a gun called Bartend
er Smooth the moment she saw me enter her pathetic excuse for a bar.”
Raw determination had gotten her out of some bad situations in the past, but her body didn’t function in life the way it had in hell. The road ahead grew fuzzy. The motorcycle between her legs no longer obeyed every one of her impulses. And the Ducati was getting louder. Within five minutes, it would be on top of her.
Joe’s words rang in her memory. “There will come a time, girl, when all your skills won’t mean shit. When that moment comes, find a place to hole up. Instinctively, we all understand that nothing is more dangerous than a cornered hurt animal. Let that inherent nature work for you.”
Sere turned off the narrow highway and into a patch of tall grass. She plowed through the stalks until she could no longer see the road behind her. With her good leg, she held the bike up long enough to pull off the saddlebags and tossed them back along the route she’d cut through the field. The two snakes slithered out and took up defensive positions alongside the newly formed path. With one leg no longer functional, the only way for her to get off the motorcycle was to let it fall onto its side and squeeze out from underneath it.
She lay behind the downed motorcycle and pulled her chest onto the side of the seat to watch and listen from a protective position. “I can still fight, goddamn it.” But her bravado didn’t pump any additional strength into her leg or blood into her veins.
The rider of the Ducati didn’t even have the decency to drive past the field in a veiled attempt at not noticing her exit from the road. The loud roar of the monster ceased at the asphalt. “I’m coming in there. Don’t shoot me. I come in peace.”
Like you’d tell me if you were going to attack? “I don’t have a gun, but that doesn’t mean I’m unprotected. For your own good, don’t come any closer than ten feet from me.”