Chapter 4
I called Ida Belle and told her I had an emergency and would pick her up in five minutes.
She was standing on the sidewalk in front of her house when I pulled up, the Back to the Future SUV parked squarely in the middle of her driveway.
She was staring at it like a little girl who’d just been given a pony on her birthday.
“If you stare any longer,” I said, “you’re going to start drooling.”
She turned around and grinned before heading over and hopping into my Jeep. “I can’t help it. That thing is awesome.”
“Well, as much as I hate to add to your extreme speed excitement for the day, we need to make a trip into the bayou on the airboat.”
I didn’t think it was possible for her to look more excited, but she managed it, which was more than a little scary for me, the passenger.
I was decent at driving the airboat, but didn’t have near close to Ida Belle’s skill, and no way would I ever match her knowledge of the surrounding bayous and channels.
“What’s the emergency part?” she asked.
I told her what Carter said about the alligator poacher and how I planned on using this instance to test my ability to be an investigator.
“I know we’ve solved some crimes in the past, but a lot of it feels like we were just rushing into the fire.
I need to find out if I can logically pursue an investigation without getting shot at or arrested. ”
Ida Belle shook her head. “It’s going to be hard to manage both of those. Would you settle for one or the other?”
I considered it for a moment. “I’m more accustomed to being shot at, so I guess we should avoid being arrested.”
“Given that you’re dating a deputy who knows your real identity, and mine and Gertie’s, and the fact that we’re always in the fat middle of his business, I think it might be easier to avoid being shot.”
“Even in Sinful?”
“Let me think on it and I’ll get back with you. So what’s the plan then?”
“I figured we should try to find where the poacher is setting his next group of lines. There’s a lot of ground to cover and Carter can’t manage it all, not even with Deputy Breaux helping.”
Ida Belle nodded. “Plus, it’s not a good idea to leave Sheriff Lee to handle Sinful alone for very long, especially when we don’t know what Celia might do next.”
“She’s been suspiciously quiet lately,” I agreed. “It makes me nervous.”
“It should. So where do you want to start looking?”
“That’s where you come in. You know these bayous better than anyone. The poacher is moving around, but he has to have a home base, right?”
“Which in this case would be wherever he launches his boat, so could be a launch or he could live on the bayou.”
“Exactly, but I figure he’s not going to stray too far from that location because then he increases the risk of being seen. And I’m taking a leap along with Carter that the guy who almost shot Hot Rod could be the poacher, who made a bad shot at a gator.”
“That’s good thinking,” Ida Belle said. “So if we start with the areas closest to where Hot Rod was fishing, we might find new lines.” She pulled out her cell phone. “Let me call Hot Rod and find out where he was exactly.”
The call took a bit longer than I would have liked as the conversation segued into Ida Belle’s love for the new SUV and potential upgrades and a possibility of even more horsepower, but she finally disconnected.
“Got it,” she said. “It’s only a fifteen- or twenty-minute ride from your house.”
Which translated to ‘should be thirty minutes’ if anyone but Ida Belle were driving.
I pulled into my driveway. “I assume you’re packing.”
Ida Belle raised one eyebrow.
“Never mind,” I said as we climbed out of the Jeep and headed inside. “Let’s grab some binoculars and a couple of bottles of water. Anything else you can think of that we need?”
“Flamethrower? Helicopter? Cannon?” Ida Belle said.
“That sounds like a list Gertie would give me.”
“The difference being that she’d attempt to get them.” Ida Belle frowned. “Actually, I think she has a flamethrower.”
“I don’t want to know, and if she’s forgotten she has it, for God’s sake, don’t remind her.”
I went into the pantry and grabbed two pairs of binoculars that I kept handy on the shelf while Ida Belle grabbed some waters from the refrigerator.
Then we headed out the back door to the airboat.
I couldn’t help but smile when I looked at the boat, and Ida Belle looked like she’s just been crowned queen of England.
I wondered if she had to choose between the airboat and her new SUV, which one would win out.
The airboat had been a bit of an issue all the way around.
First off, I’d been given the boat by Big and Little Hebert, the local branch of a Louisiana Mafia family, for assisting them with an investigation.
My path had crossed the Heberts’ several times and in every case, they had surprised me with their commitment to certain values that I hadn’t anticipated in mobsters and with their sense of humor concerning some of my more colorful escapades.
I know it was a bad idea to be involved at all with the local criminal element, but I couldn’t help but like the guys.
They were a complete departure from the Hollywood depiction.
Additional problems with the airboat involved my using the boat to interfere with Carter’s investigations, Ida Belle’s race-boat-driving techniques, and Gertie’s adventure on an inflatable alligator that ended badly for Carter and even worse for the alligator.
But no matter that drama seemed to cling to it like glue, I wasn’t about to get rid of it. I simply liked it too much.
I snagged my life jacket from the storage bench as soon as I got in the boat.
Ida Belle rolled her eyes and climbed onto the driver’s seat.
Normally, the implication of being a sissy was one that brought out the fighter in me, but this was one of the few times people were welcome to think whatever they wanted.
No way was I setting foot in the airboat with Ida Belle unless I was wearing a vest. I could swim just fine, but unconscious people usually aren’t great at the backstroke.
With Ida Belle’s driving, the chances of a good crack on the head were higher than I’d like.
I zipped up the vest, then jumped out of the boat, untied it, and shoved it off the bank.
I hurried to my seat next to Ida Belle’s and my butt had barely made contact with the vinyl before the engine roared to life and the boat leaped forward, pinning me in the seat with no chance of escape.
We tore down the bayou, the houses on each side of the bank nothing more than a blur.
I could hear the occasional shout, probably from a fisherman unhappy with the wake, but I couldn’t actually focus on anyone.
When we reached the bay, she made a hard right.
I clutched the arms of the seat and braced my legs against the footrest, trying to maintain my position.
Ida Belle whooped as the boat slid sideways on top of the water and doubled down on the throttle as soon as we were going straight again.
I began to wonder if a nice boring career down at the DMV was a better long-term plan.
It was a twenty-minute ride to the place where Hot Rod had been fishing. It felt like half that from one perspective and in another way felt like double. Ida Belle killed the engine and pointed at a section of the bank.
“This is about the spot where Hot Rod was fishing,” she said. “The shot came from that direction.”
I scanned the bank, but it was impossible to see through the trees and brush to the water on the other side. “The shooter had no clear view of Hot Rod.”
Ida Belle nodded. “Which makes the theory that he was shooting at something else and missed a good match.”
“Let’s take a look at the other side.”
Ida Belle fired up the boat again, and we pulled around the end of the bank and into the other small body of water. She glided to a spot down the bank a bit and killed the engine again.
“This is probably directly opposite where Hot Rod was,” Ida Belle said.
We were about fifteen feet from the bank, and I checked the trees lining the bank. About ten feet down from where we were I spotted a rope dangling from a tree limb that hung over the water. “There,” I said.
Ida Belle eased the boat over to the line and grabbed it. “It’s fairly new, and this end has been cut.”
“Why not take the whole line?”
“He was either in a hurry or thought it wasn’t worth the effort.”
“But he wanted the hook, so he cut the end.” I frowned. “If he was shooting at a gator and missed, then that means he came back here after almost shooting Hot Rod to collect the gator and the hook.”
Ida Belle nodded. “Risky.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Hot Rod said he called it in to Carter that night. The poacher could have run into Carter on a return visit.”
“Or an angry Hot Rod,” I said. “There’s plenty of people in Sinful who would have sat right there on that bank and waited for him to return.”
“True. So what’re your thoughts? Crazy? Stupid?”
I shook my head. “Maybe stupid crazy?”
“We’ve got plenty of that around here.”
“So how do we narrow them down—the boat engine?”
“It’s a place to start. That and alibis for the time of the shooting.”
But was it a place to start? I wasn’t convinced.
“That can’t be the best option,” I said.
“I can’t take every crime that occurs and then eliminate Sinful residents one at a time based on some piece of evidence.
We’re talking about thousands of people when you take into account all those outside of city limits.
By the time we waded through all of them, the criminal would be gone or have covered it up.
And what if the poacher isn’t local? Then we just spent weeks or months spying on people and creating weird reasons to visit and quiz them.
It’s not like we can question everyone like the police.
No one has to talk to a private investigator. ”