Gators and Garters (A Miss Fortune Mystery Book 18)

by Jana DeLeon

  “I sometimes feel like I’ve lived two, so that would work out fine,” Ida Belle said. “Shall we try to wade through this mess?”

  I pulled gloves out of my backpack and handed sets to Gertie and Ida Belle. “I wish I had thought to bring trash bags,” I said. “We could have cleaned up as we went along. I hate to think of Molly’s backyard turning into a battlefield for wildlife.”

  “The food will be gone soon enough,” Ida Belle said. “The paper, unfortunately, will blow away with the first decent wind.”

  Thunder boomed so loud I almost jumped, and I looked up and saw storm clouds rolling over the top of the cypress trees. I stared at the sky in dismay.

  “Or it will get beaten into the ground by a torrential rainstorm,” I said. “I thought the forecast said no rain.”

  “Heat thunderstorms,” Ida Belle said. “They come up fast and leave fast, but they can be a doozy.”

  “I remember,” I said. “I just keep hoping Mother Nature will forget about them. We’d best get to work before anything useful is destroyed.”

  We took off in three different directions, picking up and scanning anything that looked like a piece of an envelope or statement. Small containers that still had shipping labels. Basically, anything that might have a name on them. I’d located a ton of shipping boxes and several envelopes but all of them were addressed to the catering business. I figured that would be the case but still, Molly had to have a personal bank account, legal documents for her business, tax filings, and the like. But it was probably our luck that none of those things had been mailed in the past week.

  I reached the edge of the marsh, close to the bayou, when I heard something moving through the brush. It didn’t sound big, so I assumed it was another raccoon. I left my pistol in place and crept into the line of cypress trees, hoping to snag an envelope I’d spotted clinging to the top of a bush. The bush had thorns, so I carefully reached up on my tiptoes and leaned forward just a tiny bit where my fingers barely clenched the corner.

  I heard the noise again, this time from the bush I was perched above, but now it sounded like something bigger. I snagged the envelope and shoved it in my pocket, then took one slow step backward, pulling my pistol from my waist as I went. Before my foot touched the ground, the bush exploded with action and the source of the noise rushed out at me.

  Rats! Huge rats!

  Chapter Eight

  I turned around and ran like I was going for a gold medal in the summer Olympics. I hated rats. I’d seen them clinging to too many bodies when I was overseas and if I never saw one again, it would be too soon. I glanced back, hoping to see empty grass but instead, the entire horde was racing right behind me. What the heck was happening?

  I fired over my shoulder as I ran, hoping to scare them back into the marsh, and Ida Belle and Gertie whirled around, their eyes huge as they surveyed the current and ridiculously awful situation that was transpiring.

  And also hurtling right at them.

  “Run, Fortune, run!” Gertie yelled, and I had a flashback to that Tom Hanks movie she’d had me watch. I had the advantage of two good legs but the disadvantage of more pursuers, and they apparently weren’t scared of gunfire.

  Ida Belle and Gertie must have approved of my reaction because they set off toward the house in front of me, but it didn’t take me long to catch up. When we reached the driveway, I stuck my pistol back in my waistband and did a flying leap, pulling myself up onto the top of Molly’s van. Then I dropped and reached down to help haul Ida Belle and Gertie up.

  I felt my knees burning and realized the top of the van was probably about two thousand degrees due to the sunlight that had just disappeared behind the storm cloud. We all stood there and watched the flood of nutria as they caught up, then breathed a sigh of relief as they continued past the van and across the driveway into the marsh on the other side.

  “What the heck was that about?” I asked.

  Ida Belle shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  “It looked like a crazy scene from one of those Jurassic Park movies,” Gertie said. “You know, where all the plant eaters suddenly race off because a meat eater has arrived.”

  I stared at Ida Belle and her eyes widened. We whipped around to look back at the trees we’d fled, just in time to see a huge mama bear with two cubs come racing out of them.

  “It’s T. rex,” Gertie said.

  “Flatten!” Ida Belle yelled and dropped down onto the hot metal.

  I dropped beside her, cringing as the metal burned through the thin cotton I was wearing. I tucked my arms behind my back and kept my head lifted, noticing Ida Belle and Gertie were doing the same. We looked like a lineup for handcuffs on one of those reality cop shows. But the burns could be fixed with some aloe vera. Maybe a skin graft. A single bear claw across your body left it shredded beyond repair.

  “Why don’t these things ever happen in the winter when we’re wearing jeans and jackets?” Gertie asked.

  “These things aren’t supposed to happen at all,” I said. “I’m starting to believe in curses. On me, one of you, this town, the local wildlife…something is clearly wrong.”

  “It’s just another day in the bayou,” Ida Belle said, looking completely relaxed. I swear, if she were a smoker, she would have pulled out a cigarette and lit up.

  “How is it there’s a killer bear coming right toward us,” I said, “and you’re lying there like we’re sunbathing, but you were scared to marry Walter?”

  “I wasn’t scared,” Ida Belle said. “I just wasn’t ready.”

  “Well, it wasn’t because you hadn’t found your perfect dress,” Gertie said.

  “Shhhhh,” Ida Belle said. “She’s getting close.”

  We all went silent and I heard the bear lumbering toward us. I prayed that she’d go past with her cubs, chasing the trail of tasty nutria. Did bears eat nutria? Now that I wasn’t able to ask, I desperately wanted to know. But at least we’d solved the mystery of how the trash cans disappeared. Mama probably hauled them into the woods to give her babies a snack. And with Molly running a catering business at her house, I imagined her trash cans had a fair share of goodies.

  The bear slowed and I silently cursed. Could she smell us? Probably, right? Heck, it was July in southern Louisiana. Humans could probably smell us over in Mississippi, and it didn’t help that we were all wearing gloves that had been holding stinky paper. I looked at Ida Belle and now I could see the worry in her expression. We were sitting ducks. Pistols might take the bear down, but how quickly? And we couldn’t outrun her, so making a dash for the boat was out. I could send a text but if she decided to attack, no one would get here in time to help. And where was that rain that kept threatening to come down? At least that would help with the smell thing, not to mention the burning skin thing.

  Deciding it was better, at least, to let someone know where to start looking for bodies, I eased my phone from my pocket to send Carter a message that we had a life-and-death emergency at Molly’s house, knowing full well that if we lived through this, I’d never, ever hear the end of it. That whole trailer hitch story of Ida Belle’s wasn’t even going to fly.

  But just as I started my text, Mama Bear decided she knew the location of the enemy.

  Her roar coursed through my body, making my hair stand on end. Then her entire weight hit the side of the van and she started pushing. I spread my arms out, trying to maintain my balance, and my cell phone slipped from my hands and fell to the ground. With every hit by the bear, the van swayed farther and farther to the side, then violently rocked back in place. It was probably the first and only time in my life I gave serious consideration to the monumental importance of a luggage rack on a minivan.

  I heard a worried cry and glanced back to see Gertie losing her balance and tipping to the side, almost rolling over the rack bar. The van rocked back into place and she flopped back on top, but part of her body was over the rack bar. Another push like that one and things would be dire. I had to do something
but had no idea what. I couldn’t even keep my pistol in my hand with all the rocking, much less get off a perfect shot, and a perfect shot was exactly what was called for because anything less would just piss her off long enough to reach me and shred me like tissue paper.

  Then I ran out of time to decide.

  The bear hit the van so hard that I thought it was going to topple completely over. It held suspended in midair for what seemed like minutes. I stretched my pinkie finger over, because it was the only thing I could risk moving, trying to get every bit of weight I could shifted to bring the van back down. That whole pinkie thing must have worked because finally, the van left its stationary hold and crashed back down upright.

  Unfortunately, Gertie did not make it with the van.

  I heard the impact and jerked my head back to see she was gone but had to give her enormous props for not making a sound when she went. Other than hitting the ground, that is, and that one couldn’t be helped. If we all lived through this, I was going to have to tell her just how impressed I was. But I couldn’t linger on top of this carnival ride any longer.

  I jumped up, yelling at Ida Belle to cover me then get to the boat, and leaped off the top of the van as far from the bear as I could get without drawing her attention to Gertie, who was on the opposite side from the bear. Mama Bear took one look at me, stood on her hind legs, and roared. If I had not been trained to mock death, I probably would have had a heart attack right on the spot. She was absolutely terrifying.

  Since I couldn’t run for the dock without coming too close to the bear, I took off down the driveway to the road. There had been another house about a mile away. I didn’t think I could outrun a bear for a mile but I was about to find out. In any event, I needed to draw her away long enough for Ida Belle and Gertie to get safely to the boat.

  I heard a gunshot behind me and glanced back but all I saw was fur and teeth bearing down on me. I cranked up the speed and pulled my pistol from my waist, then I fired over my shoulder. I couldn’t afford to slow down and aim and I really didn’t want to have to kill the bear. But if things came down to me or her, we were going to be calling social services for those cubs. I fired again and glanced back but it hadn’t slowed her one bit. In fact, she was gaining on me. And I didn’t have any more turbo left to crank in.

  I heard an engine racing behind me, clearly straining to keep up with its driver’s demands, and a second later, Molly’s van flew past me. The back door swung open and I saw Gertie staring down at me, a tie-down strapped around her waist. Ida Belle hit the brakes, and I dived into the back of the van, did a quick roll, then grabbed the back of the passenger seat as Ida Belle floored it.

  The bear had just reached the van and had the door in her giant paws when it launched forward. The sound of twisting and scrunching metal filled the air and with a final roar, the bear ripped the door clean off and then stood there, holding it up like a game show display.

  “Got it!” Gertie yelled and triumphantly waved her cell phone.

  Then Ida Belle hit a huge hole in the road and the strap that had secured Gertie to the side of the van came loose. She stumbled toward the opening, flinging her phone backward and trying to find something to grab on to. I leaped forward, snagged the strap, and yanked her to the bottom of the van.

  She sat up and shook her head. “Do you know how much makeup I’m going to need to cover the bruises on my thighs for the wedding?”

  “Wear longer clothes,” Ida Belle said. “No one wants to see your thighs.”

  I looked behind us and saw that the bear had managed to ditch the door and was coming after the van again.

  “That is one determined bear,” I said. “She’s still coming.”

  “We’ve got another problem,” Ida Belle said and started honking the horn.

  I peered over the dash and saw Carter’s truck approaching and since neither he nor Ida Belle showed any sign of slowing and the road didn’t exactly hold two larger vehicles side by side, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  “Hang on!” Ida Belle yelled.

  I grabbed Gertie’s strap and hugged the passenger’s seat, hoping I had the strength to keep both of us from bouncing out of the van. The van swerved to the right and Gertie and I slammed against the side. Ida Belle yelled for Carter to move as we went by, and I looked back to see his truck throwing up grass and dirt from the side of the road. Then he must have reached the bear because the truck swerved hard to the side, hit the ditch, then flew into the woods. The bear stopped running, looked at the truck, and decided either she’d accomplished her goal or we were no longer worth her time. She turned around and sauntered off into the woods on the other side of the road.

  Ida Belle slowed to a stop and looked back at me. “I guess we have to go check on him, right?”

  “We can’t exactly head back to Sinful in a stolen van,” I said, just noticing the windshield was gone. “In a stolen, really broken van. What happened?”

  “I shot out the windshield so I could hot-wire it,” Ida Belle said. “We weren’t going to leave you. You’re fast but you wouldn’t have outlasted that bear.”

  I sighed. “You got a good story for this one? Because that whole trailer hitch thing isn’t going to work.”

  Ida Belle shrugged. “He can’t prove anything.”

  “You mean besides trespassing and grand theft auto?” I asked.

  Ida Belle waved a hand in dismissal. “It was an emergency situation. These things happen.”

  “Maybe in Sinful,” I said.

  Gertie nodded. “Remember the time Lester thought he was being chased by rabid raccoons and stole Sheriff Lee’s horse? Everyone headed downtown to watch him circle around, trying to get the horse to go faster. Sheriff Lee was limping after them, yelling at the top of his lungs.”

  “So what was chasing him?” I asked.

  “A couple of dachshunds,” Gertie said. “He was drunker than Cooter Brown.”

  “Who is this Cooter Brown you keep mentioning?” I asked.

  “It’s a saying,” Gertie said.

  I shook my head, no longer trying to keep up. “We might as well head back and face the music before Carter adds assaulting law enforcement vehicles to our crimes.”

  “I’m still going with the trailer hitch story,” Ida Belle said. “Trust me on this one. Carter is not going to throw me in jail when I’m about to marry his uncle.”

  “Oh, that’s a great angle,” Gertie said. “Shame we can only use it once, but there you go. Instant out.”

  I didn’t think for a minute it was going to be instant or out, but I was happy to let Ida Belle take the lead. God knows, I couldn’t come up with anything better and the truth was definitely not the way to go.

  Ida Belle managed to get the van turned around and we headed back for the site of the bear-versus-truck showdown. Carter was out of the truck and frowning at it, probably trying to figure out how he was going to get it out of the ditch when he had two flat tires. This was not going to go well.

  “What the heck were you thinking?” he asked as we pulled to a stop.

  He strode up to the driver’s door and glared at Ida Belle.

  “We were thinking if we slowed down that bear was going to climb into the van and have us all for lunch,” Ida Belle said. “She ripped the door clean off. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t for fun.”

  He stuck his head in the window and looked back at the missing door and then Gertie and me. We waved and smiled. He didn’t smile back.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “And why are you in Molly’s van? Why is that bear chasing you?”

  “We went out in the boat to look for Molly,” Ida Belle said. “I’ve known the statistics on such things since before you were born so don’t start preaching them to me. I wasn’t ready to call it quits so we didn’t. While we were out, I wanted to stop by Molly’s place and take a look around her driveway to see if that’s where my trailer hitch came loose. It’s missing and I’ve already checked everywhere else that we
drove yesterday.”

  “You expect me to believe that something wasn’t secured properly on your SUV?” Carter asked. “Your SUV? That thing you value more than life itself?”

  “I let Scooter borrow the hitch last week and didn’t check it when he put it back,” Ida Belle said. “I know that’s not like me, but the next two weeks are going against a lifetime of digging my heels in, so cut me some slack here.”

  Clearly Carter had no idea how to respond to the ‘I’m planning a wedding’ excuse. Not when it was coming from Ida Belle. If I hadn’t been worried about the destroyed van, the trespassing, the bear returning, Molly being missing, and probably a couple things I’d forgotten, I would have laughed at his expression and given her a high five for her ingenuity.

  “Fine,” he said, apparently not wanting to take on a bride, especially this bride. “So how did you end up stealing and destroying a van while being pursued by a bear?”

  “Trash was scattered all over Molly’s yard,” Ida Belle said. “We looked around, figuring it was raccoons and maybe we could scare them off and try to pick some of it up before it blew all over, but the trash cans were nowhere to be seen. We walked toward the tree line, since the wind was out of the south and we thought they might have blown that way, when a pack of nutria came bolting out at us.”

  “A pack of nutria?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I was not amused. You know how I hate rats, and there was a hundred of them—”

  “Not a hundred of them,” Ida Belle interrupted.

  “Okay, two hundred,” I said, even though there had probably been twenty at the most. “They were all running straight for us, so we got the heck out of there. We just made a bit of a miscalculation thinking the nutria were running at us when in fact—”

  “They were running from the bear,” Carter finished.

  “She has cubs,” Gertie said. “You know how territorial they can get. She probably pulled those trash cans into the woods and when the nutria tried to pick up an easy snack, she got after them.”