Soldiers of Fortune (10 page)

“Yeah,” Ida Belle said. “She’s fit to be tied with Nelson lording over the place. The idiot has already ordered new office furniture complete with a five-thousand-dollar chair covered in alligator skin. The taxpayers are going to have a stroke.”

“Did he say anything about investigating the explosion?” I asked.

Ida Belle snorted. “Please. Myrtle asked him if he wanted her to get the sheriff’s boat gassed up so he could take a look, and he told her he wasn’t interested in hassling people over moonshine.”

“But he can’t be sure it was moonshine unless he looks,” I argued.

“You and I know that,” Ida Belle said, “but Nelson is beyond lazy. Myrtle said he spent all day yesterday alternating between eating funnel cake and sleeping on a cot in the jail.”

“Someone should have closed the door and locked him in,” Gertie muttered.

“Well, if he spends all his time sleeping, he won’t be in our way,” I said. “Hopefully Marie’s audit will be over soon, and Nelson will be following Celia out the door.”

Gertie held up crossed fingers.

“So did you come up with a plan?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Ida Belle said. “We’re going to take the boat out to where the explosion happened and see if we can find a clue.”

I’m not sure what I expected. Realistically, there wasn’t anything else to do but poke around, which was the whole point of the boat. But I guess I was hoping they’d have something more. “That’s it?”

Gertie put her plate on the table and took a seat. “We can stop and talk to any fishermen we see—ask them who they’ve seen in that area lately.”

“That won’t seem suspicious?” I asked. “What if it gets back to Carter that we were asking questions?”

“We won’t ask them about the explosion,” Ida Belle said. “We’re not fools. We’ll say we had some problems at the Sinful Ladies Society cough syrup manufacturing site and want to know if they saw anything that can help.”

“Exactly,” Gertie said. “And because it’s moonshine, it falls under Sinful code of silence.”

“Is that one of those weird Sinful laws?” I asked.

“No,” Gertie said. “That’s Southern law. You don’t ever rat out a man’s moonshine operation. You’re better off sleeping with his wife.”

Ida Belle stopped eating for a moment, her fork frozen in midair, a piece of omelet dangling from it. “You know what? Sheriff Lee’s still is in the same area as the explosion.”

“Does that make a difference?” I asked, not sure where she was going with that bit of information.

“Only in the sense that we can ask him who he’s seen in the area,” Ida Belle said.

“Do you really think we should question the sheriff?” I asked.

“He’s not the sheriff anymore,” Gertie said. “And besides, he’d have to remember we talked to him before he could cause us any trouble with it.”

Hmmm. She had a point. Sheriff Lee’s memory was longer than his brother’s, who still couldn’t remember who I was despite spending a good twenty minutes in a boat with me only days before, but the good sheriff was light years past his best time of mental acuity.

“He’d also have to remember if he saw anyone to be helpful,” I pointed out the flaw in their argument.

Gertie sighed. “True.”
 

“Then I guess we have a plan,” I said. “Do you guys need to go home and grab rubber boots or something?”

They both stared.
 

“We keep rubber boots in the trunk of Gertie’s car,” Ida Belle said. “No good Southerner is caught without access to rubber boots.”

“Or firearms,” Gertie said. “Besides, your message said you’d solved the boat problem, so we dressed for the event, and I grabbed my emergency boating backpack.”

“What exactly does an emergency boating backpack contain?” I asked.

“Bottled water, flare gun, hunting knife, tool kit, small hatchet, protein bars, fishing line, rope, plastic cups, and a bottle of champagne.”

“You lost me at champagne.” And “small hatchet” was a bit concerning.

“For if your boat breaks down,” Gertie said. “Do you want to wait for rescue drinking water or champagne?”

She had a point. “I have a box of Wheat Thins. Haven’t even opened it yet.”

“Oh, that would go nicely. We should throw it in.”

“If you two are done with the grocery part of the morning,” Ida Belle said, “I’d like to get going.”

She looked entirely too energetic for this early and I was glad breakfast had been relatively light. I had a feeling the airboat ride was going to be more like a roller coaster and less like a pleasant drive in a Cadillac.
 

“Last potty break before we leave,” Gertie said and headed for the downstairs bathroom. I put the plates in the dishwasher and five minutes later, we were headed for the boat.

Chapter Six

“I call shotgun,” Gertie said.

“No way,” I said. “Ida Belle needs a navigator with good vision, and don’t even start with that lie about you not needing new glasses. Besides, it’s my boat.”

“She’s got you on both counts,” Ida Belle said. “Besides, the last thing we need is for you to fall off the seat and break a hip or something.”

“Breaking hips is for old people,” Gertie said. “I have decided that I am middle-aged.”

“Ha!” Ida Belle said. “Middle-aged for what, a tortoise? Your walking speed would indicate that’s the case.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Sheriff Lee and his brother probably owe Moses a trip charge, so it’s not exactly impossible.”

“Either that, or they’re zombies,” Gertie said. “Like real sophisticated ones. Not like those idiots in
The Walking Dead
.”
 

“Even if Gertie’s mind is middle-aged,” Ida Belle said, “her hips are still ancient and she has a tendency to land on them, so my point still stands.”

“But—” Gertie started.

I held up a hand to stop the argument. “Just get in the boat. Even if you have the hips of a twenty-year-old, what you will never have is your name on the boat lease. My boat. My seat.”

“Fine,” Gertie said as she climbed into the boat and flopped down on the bench in the middle. “But you could at least let me give it a whirl on the way back.”

Ida Belle rolled her eyes and stepped into the boat.
 

“Tell you what,” I said as I untied the boat from the docking post, “if you’re good while we investigate, I’ll let you sit in the big-girl seat on the way back.”

Gertie shot me a dirty look.
 

“Hey, you’re the one who wants to be thought of as young,” I pointed out. “I just deducted a few more years.”

I shoved the boat back and took a running leap inside, landing in a perfect crouch position in the front of the boat.
 

“Your hips can’t do that,” Ida Belle said.

Gertie sighed in grudging admiration. “True.”

I made my way onto the high seat next to Ida Belle and adjusted my sunglasses. “Let’s do this.”

Ida Belle started the boat, and the giant fan whirled to life. “Hold on,” she said, and pressed her foot down on the accelerator.

At that moment, I got a full education on what those bars on each side of my seat were for. The boat practically flew out of the water, pinning me back in my seat. Gertie, who hadn’t been gripping anything, flew backward and landed in the bottom of the boat, directly on those hips Ida Belle had expressed concern about earlier. I looked over at Ida Belle, who shook her head but didn’t reduce speed. Gertie tried to crawl back onto the bench, but we were going so fast, she couldn’t manage it. Finally she gave up and gave Ida Belle the finger before sitting in the bottom of the boat.

I clenched the hand bars as if my life depended on it, and I was fairly certain it did. The boat moved so fast up the bayou that my cheeks flapped, even though my mouth was closed. My sunglasses pressed into the bridge on my nose, making it ache, but I thanked God I’d put them on. If I hadn’t, my eyeballs probably would have leaked out my ears. The houses and trees along the bayou started to blur and tears squeezed out of the corners of my eyes.

Then we hit the lake and Ida Belle accelerated to something like warp speed on the
Millennium Falcon
. I swear, I could feel myself getting younger, maybe even thinner and taller. I saw boats flash in my peripheral vision but couldn’t make out any details. If we were ever going to question people, we were going to have to slow down to at least the speed of sound.

“Hard right!” Ida Belle yelled and jammed the steering stick forward. The boat spun around so quickly, it was if it were floating on air rather than water. I tried to appreciate that the ninety-degree turn had just been accomplished with no reduction in speed, but fear prevented me from giving it the props it deserved. When my vision cleared a bit and I could make out the terrain in front of me, all I saw was land.

“Holy crap!” I yelled as Gertie let out a shriek in the bottom of the boat.

Ida Belle lifted her foot from the gas pedal and the boat dropped into the water and slowed by two-thirds of its speed. I lurched forward, clutching the hand bars so tightly my knuckles ached. Gertie fell over and rolled into the bench. I felt my shoulders and arms tighten and then release as the boat glided onto the bank and to a full stop.
 

Gertie flopped around a bit and finally got upright. She glared up at me. “Still happy you let her drive?”

Ida Belle waved a hand in dismissal. “What are you complaining about? We got here in one piece and a quarter of the time it would have taken in a bass boat.” She climbed down from the driver’s seat. “Let’s go find some evidence before someone sees us.”

I jumped off my seat and blinked several times to put some moisture back in my eyes, and followed Gertie off the boat. “Which way?”

Ida Belle pointed to the right. “There’s a trail this way.” She reached into the bottom of the boat and lifted her shotgun. “I don’t have to tell you to be on alert. Even if the lab and its remaining live workers have cleared out, there could also be a still back here, and people are fiercely protective of their still locations.”

I pulled out my pistol and followed Ida Belle onto the trail. “Could someone who already had a still on this island have been responsible for the explosion? You know, if they thought someone else was encroaching on their space?”

“Anything is possible,” Ida Belle said, “but my understanding is that meth production is a risky proposition as far as explosions go.”

“Definitely,” I agreed as I pushed a tree branch to the side. “I’m just thinking out loud, wondering if we have a drug manufacturing issue only or manufacturing and murder.”

“Let’s hope it’s just the first option. We don’t need any more killers in Sinful. We could probably handle an idiot drug manufacturer who blew himself up.”

“Except that the idiot would have associates,” I said. “The cooker is never the distributor who is never the salesman.”

Ida Belle sighed. “Then I’m going to keep hoping they were just opening up shop and the rest of the crew weren’t from Sinful.”

I completely understood her desire for the bad guys to be from anywhere else but Sinful, but someone picked the location for the lab, and that someone had to know the bayous and channels around Sinful. That didn’t mean they were a full-time, card-carrying resident of Crazytown, but they probably had been at some point.

Ida Belle drew up short, and I slid a little in the loose dirt. I touched her on her shoulder and she pointed to the left where charred lumber peeked over a group of dense foliage. I turned around to Gertie and gestured to the lumber. She nodded and lifted her pistol up with both hands. I thought for a moment she had been watching too much
Law & Order
again, but then I got a good look at her gun and almost had a heart attack. It was a Desert Eagle .50 AE. Not only would a single shot blow a hole through a mountain, the gun weighed over four pounds. It was no wonder she needed two hands to lift it.
 

“Please tell me you don’t have a round chambered,” I whispered.

“What good would it do me if I didn’t?” Gertie asked.

Clearly, I hadn’t been aware of things that should have been included in grace. “If you shoot me, I swear I will come back and haunt you forever.”

Gertie took one hand off the pistol to wave it at me, and the hand holding the gun dropped to her side. I reached out and grabbed the weapon from her. “Give me that. Take mine.” I shoved my nine-millimeter into her palm. “If you fire this thing out here, you might create a hole that sucks up the entire town.”

Ida Belle peered around me and saw the Desert Eagle. “Have you lost your mind? Good Lord, another ten steps and you probably would have fallen hands-first into the swamp. That thing is half your body weight.”

“I was doing fine until bossy pants got involved,” Gertie said.

“You’d have been yelling carpal tunnel tomorrow,” I said.

“Or not guilty by reason of stupidity,” Ida Belle said.

“Fine, fine, you’ve made your point.” Gertie waved the nine-millimeter toward the burned timbers and Ida Belle and I both ducked. “Can we get on with it?”

We turned around and started down the trail again. When we got to the group of bushes right in front of the charred timbers, Ida Belle stopped and parted the seared shrubbery with her shotgun. She peered through the bushes, then looked back at us. “I don’t see anything moving.”