Gator Bait (14 page)

Deputy Breaux stood in the doorway to his office, a stricken look on his face. “I’m so sorry, ma’am.”

“It’s not your fault,” the woman said. “I appreciate your efforts. I just have to get home. Tommy needs his nap.”

As if on cue, the little boy’s face contorted, his giant blue eyes almost squeezed shut, and he let out a wail that practically shook the walls. I cringed and forced myself not to put my hands over my ears. The woman hurried past us, giving Ida Belle and Gertie a nod as she rushed out of the sheriff’s department.

“What’s wrong with Laurel?” Gertie asked.

Deputy Breaux sighed. “She’s upset.”

“Doesn’t take a detective to figure that one out,” Ida Belle said. “What did you say to upset her?”

“Wasn’t so much what I said as what the shrimpers found when they went to pull up the sheriff’s boat.”

“Are you going to tell us?” Ida Belle asked, her impatience evident, “or do I have to pull it out of you one sentence at a time?”

Deputy Breaux’s brow creased and I could tell he was trying to decide if he should tell Ida Belle what she wanted to know or if he wasn’t supposed to tell. Finally, he must have decided that whatever he knew wasn’t confidential, or he was more scared of Ida Belle than the rules. Either way, he started talking.

“The shrimpers took a couple of roughnecks with them to help with the boat. One of them is certified to dive and had all the equipment and stuff. They lucked out because the place where the boat sank wasn’t one of the deepest parts of the lake, and he found the boat right where your coordinates said it would be…”

“But?” Ida Belle prompted.

“But there was more wreckage down there.”

Gertie shrugged. “There’s probably a hundred or more boats at the bottom of that lake.”

“It was
The Calypso
,” Deputy Breaux said.

Ida Belle’s eyes widened and Gertie sucked in a breath.

“I get the feeling I missed something important,” I said.

Ida Belle nodded. “
The Calypso
is…was Hank Eaton’s shrimp boat.”

“Laurel Eaton’s husband,” Gertie said.

“Oh! The woman who just left?” I asked.

They nodded.
 

“I take it he didn’t make it off the boat?”

“When he didn’t come in from shrimping one evening,” Ida Belle said, “we all assumed that was the case.”

“But it’s still a shock when you find out for sure,” Gertie said. “Kinda like losing them all over again. And Laurel so young and that baby with so many problems.”

“The baby has problems?” I asked.

“So sad,” Gertie said. “He was born with something wrong with his heart. Hank didn’t have medical insurance on them, and I heard through the grapevine that the medical costs ate up what little life insurance he had pretty quick-like.”

Ida Belle sighed. “Laurel’s an aide at the hospital. She had to drop out of college and couldn’t finish her nursing degree. They don’t pay much, but they let her off whenever she needs it to see the specialists in New Orleans.”

“People seem to disappear around here,” I said. “More than other places, I mean.”

“It’s bayou country, so not exactly surprising,” Ida Belle said. “Men have dangerous jobs in unpredictable terrain.”

“Besides,” Gertie threw in, “Malaysia lost an entire plane, so we’re not doing bad.”

“Did he normally shrimp in the lake?” I asked.

“Sometimes shrimpers push through the lake,” Ida Belle said. “The catch is smaller than the deeper waters, but the day Hank went missing, a big storm blew in. My guess is the storm carried his boat into the lake.”

Gertie nodded. “He could have fallen off the boat before it got to the lake, or hit his head and gone down with the boat like Carter did. Lots of things can go wrong when you’re caught on the water in a storm like that one.”

After my trip to the bottom of the lake to rescue Carter, I couldn’t think of a worse way to die than drowning. I felt sorry for Hank and his wife. The mental image of what must have happened to him would probably be rolling through her mind for a long time to come.

“You said they found the sheriff’s boat, right?” I asked. “Were they able to get it up from the bottom of the lake?”

Deputy Breaux nodded. “Took some doing, but they were able to get it up and attach it to some big blocks of Styrofoam, then drain it enough to tow it in.”

“Can we see it?” Fortune asked.

“No.”

“Jesus,” Ida Belle said, “this is no time to start playing the confidential card. We just came from voting and Celia’s standing at the end of Main Street telling everyone how incompetent this department is and how she’s going to replace every one of you as soon as she’s elected. Trust me, you need all the help you can get right now.”

Deputy Breaux’s face contorted with frustration as Ida Belle relayed Celia’s words. “I’m not saying no because I have some illusions about solving this myself or anything. Those damned Feds showed up when they pulled up to the dock with the boat. They said the boat was evidence in their case and they were taking it.”

Gertie mumbled a couple of curse words I recognized and a couple more I didn’t.

Deputy Breaux gave her an appreciative look. “I felt the same way, ma’am. I tried to tell them that Walter had a place for it in his garage where it would be safe and they could look it over, but they refused.”

Ida Belle sighed. “That would have been perfect. At least we could have gotten access on the sly.”

“And I’m sure that’s exactly what they figured,” I said. Especially now that they knew Walter was Carter’s uncle. “Did you see anything useful on the boat before they hauled it away?”

“What looked like a bullet hole in the side,” Deputy Breaux said, “but they wouldn’t let me close enough to check it out. I asked the men who brought it in about them, but all they said was it looked like gunshots. No idea what caliber, if it was even gunshots.”

“I don’t suppose you know where they were taking the boat?” I asked.

“Yeah, I overheard that one in charge on the phone. He was talking to someone at Southwest Storage.”

Gertie perked up. “That’s off the highway going toward New Orleans, right?”

“Yeah,” Deputy Breaux said, “but what does it matter? If they won’t let me inspect the department’s boat at our own dock, they’re not going to let me look at it somewhere else.”

“Oh, I wasn’t—” Gertie started and Ida Belle jabbed her in the ribs.

“The whole thing was weird, really,” Deputy Breaux said. “After you called and asked about the boat, the only people I talked to were the shrimpers and the roughnecks they had helping. I asked them all to keep it quiet, and I don’t have any reason to believe they didn’t.” He frowned. “But they’d no sooner docked when those Feds showed up. Like someone had alerted them, but I have no idea who it could have been.”

“That is weird,” Ida Belle agreed. “I can’t imagine a Sinful resident who would willingly go into cahoots with the Feds, especially when things involved a local.”

“Celia would,” I said.

Everyone stared at me, their dismay apparent, then everyone spoke at once.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Figures.”

“That woman is a disease.”

Gertie covered her mouth with her hand. “Did I say that out loud?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it wasn’t as bad as what I was thinking.”

Deputy Breaux’s expression shifted from aggravation to worry. “Does the doctor think Carter’s memory will come back soon?”

“He has no way of knowing,” I said. “Hopefully, it will start coming back the more the swelling goes down, but there’s always a slim chance he never remembers.”

“That would be bad,” Deputy Breaux said. “I know Sheriff Lee is supposed to be in charge, but everyone knows Carter is running the department. If Celia got him fired, she wouldn’t have to bother doing the paperwork on me. I’d resign before I’d work for anyone she picked out.”

“Of course you would,” Gertie agreed.

I gave him an approving nod. Perhaps Deputy Breaux wasn’t quite as foolish as he appeared to be. “Let’s just hope Carter remembers soon and the whole mess is wrapped up.”

“And that Celia isn’t elected mayor,” Gertie said.

We exchanged looks, but apparently no one wanted to verbalize their thoughts on Celia in charge of Sinful. I had a feeling that only Celia’s cronies would fare well if she took over, and even then, only if she felt like it. Everyone else’s life as they knew it would be changed forever, especially mine. If Celia got control, I had no doubt she’d make good on her promise to run me out of town. I couldn’t risk my cover over the ravings of a crazy woman. If Celia came after me, I’d have to request extraction.

Which meant leaving Sinful—and Carter—for good.

“So what’s the deal with the storage facility?” I asked after we exited the sheriff’s department. “I figure you two know where it is, right?”

Gertie perked up. “It’s just up the highway. Maybe a twenty-minute drive.”

“Then I guess we’re talking a night trip?”

“Whoo-hoo!” Gertie hooted, causing a flock of pigeons to launch off a bench. “Road trip.”

Ida Belle frowned. “There may be a problem with the storage facility.”

“What kind of problem?” I asked.

“It’s owned by Big and Little Hebert.”

“Oh,” I said, mulling over this particular piece of information. We ran across Big and Little during a recent trip down investigative lane. They were part of a mob family based in New Orleans, and according to the rumor mill, worked the loan shark end of the business for the area. But we really had no way of knowing what all they had their fingers in.

Then I started to smile, and the more I thought about it, the more it tickled me.

“So,” I said, “the ATF just parked evidence in a storage facility owned by mobsters.”

Gertie began to giggle, and finally a grin broke through Ida Belle’s stern expression.
 

“Okay,” Ida Belle said, “I can see the hilarity on the part of the Feds, but any plans we had of visiting that facility need to be considered from all angles. We have no way of knowing what the Heberts are using the facility for, but my guess is that some of it is the kind of business they don’t want anyone to know about.”

“Which means really good security,” Gertie said. “Like maybe dogs.”

“Or that Hulk of a security detail they had at their office,” I said.
 

“The bottom line,” Ida Belle said, “is it’s not the church or the sheriff’s department or someone’s home. If we do this, we have to be prepared, and armed.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “So where do we start?”

My cell phone signaled that I’d received a text and I pulled it out to check. It was from Carter.

Can you come back to the hospital as soon as possible?

I frowned and showed the text to Ida Belle and Gertie. “What do you think he wants?”

Gertie grinned. “You have to ask?”

Ida Belle waved a hand in dismissal. “Your mind is always in the gutter lately. The man is hardly in any condition for romantic liaisons, and even if he were, the hospital is hardly the location for such things.”

“Especially with his mother in the room,” I added.

“Ick,” Gertie said. “You two really know how to spoil the mood.”

“So hospital dating aside,” I said, “any other thoughts?”

Ida Belle nodded. “My guess is he’s trying to remember.”

“And he thinks I can help? I don’t see how.”

“You were the only other person on the lake Saturday evening. You might have seen whatever it was that troubled Carter. You just wouldn’t have known something was amiss.”

I stretched my mind back to that evening, trying to focus on our boat ride to the island and the things I’d seen along the way. “I just don’t see how…”

“It’s a long shot,” Ida Belle said, “but in that hospital bed with a memory that’s not working properly, it’s also the only thing Carter has.”

“It must be killing him to just sit there,” Gertie agreed. “Carter was never the sort to watch things happen.”

“So what do I do?” I asked.

“Go,” Ida Belle said. “Tell him everything you can remember about that night. I know it’s grasping at straws, but there’s always the slim chance it will jar something in his memory—something that we can use to get to the bottom of this.”

“And if you see he’s having a thought,” Gertie said, “then you will have to lure it out of him.”

“True,” Ida Belle said. “His natural inclination will be to keep anything he recalls from you, especially given our past involvements where we weren’t supposed to be involved.”

“So I get to be charming, too? This is looking like more fun by the minute. Hey, I wonder if what he wrote on his laptop would jar his memory?”

“Maybe, but you can’t risk telling him about it,” Ida Belle said. “It would compromise everything we did today and put you right back in an uncomfortable spotlight. As soon as he’s released from the hospital, Carter will check for notes. We’ll know soon enough if what he wrote jars his memory.”