by Shari Hearn
As I rounded the corner I approached the house of Peter Noel, lit up with his midnight prayer meeting. Once I had snuck up and looked in the window and saw a group of men sitting around a table. Maybe it was the stacks of poker chips, but something told me the cards they were holding weren’t biblical flashcards.
Ten minutes later I had finally reached my destination—the park bench at the rec center. Kneeling beside the bench, I pulled a small flashlight from my jeans pocket and checked the area for powder used to lift a print.
“It’s already been processed.”
My pulse quickened. I whirled around toward the sound of the voice, though I didn’t need to see him to know who it was.
Carter stood several feet away, wearing black jogging pants and a black T-shirt. He held up his hands to block the flashlight. “Do you mind pointing that somewhere else?”
I turned the flashlight off and stood. “Have you been following me?”
“No, just out for a run. So, do you think Stinky Labatt will ever figure out Missy has a boyfriend? Or do you think he even cares?”
“You have been following me.”
“Not technically. I was parked outside Ida Belle’s house when I noticed you leaving.”
“And yet you’re right here. Which means Ida Belle and Gertie are left unprotected.”
“With the firepower those two carry? Besides, I called Deputy Breaux to ask him to relieve me while I followed you to see what you’re up to.” He looked down at the bench. “Did those two talk you into coming over here to collect prints? Because that would be taking interfering in a police investigation to new heights.”
“Collect prints? Like, fingerprints?” I asked, feigning ignorance. “First you accuse us of taking bomb fragments, and now you think I’m here to collect fingerprints? You think very highly of our skills, Carter. Why would we want to collect prints from this bench anyway?”
“Because it’s the perfect spot for someone to activate a timer.”
“Huh, I never thought of that. You might be right.”
“So, if I frisked you or checked your backpack, I wouldn’t find some dusting powder and tape?”
It had occurred to me to try to lift a second set of prints. But with a mole in the sheriff’s department we could call to find out the results, I decided not to bother.
“I’ll let you frisk me if I can frisk you first,” I said, my lips upturning slightly. Oh, God, that is the dumbest flirt line ever.
But it worked. Carter opened his arms wide. I stepped within inches of him and patted down his biceps, normally not a body part one pats down. But an interesting one, nonetheless.
“Not bad,” I said. “You must lift weights.”
He shrugged. “It’s one way to keep in shape.”
I could think of a few other ways for his body to stay in shape, and I was dangerously close to suggesting myself as his personal trainer.
“You know,” I said, running my finger across his lips, “I once read about a man in prison who hid a shank in his mouth. He was able to make an escape because of it. You wouldn’t mind if I gave you a more thorough pat-down, would you?”
He grinned. “I would expect it. I mean, you never know what dangerous weapon I might be hiding inside my mouth.”
I took his face in my hands and guided it down to mine. His lips didn’t need much prodding to open.
I had no idea how long we were lost in our kiss. Seemed only a second. And forever.
Until…
“Get a room!”
We both jumped. I was so startled I think I bit Carter’s tongue.
“Ow.”
“Sorry.”
“What the hell?” Carter took out his flashlight and shined it on Cookie, sitting in her motorized wheelchair several feet away. “What are you doing out here, Miss Cookie?”
“What?”
Carter shouted the question again.
“I was out for my late-night stroll. The battery in my chair gave out. Who’s the skank?”
“I’m not a skank.”
“What?”
“I’m not a skank!”
Somehow it sounded worse as a scream.
“Oh, the Yankee. Same difference.”
“Miss Cookie, you shouldn’t leave your house without a replacement battery.”
“What?”
Carter let loose a stream of cuss words.
“Carter…” I motioned with my head toward Cookie.
“Oh, she can’t hear what I’m saying anyway. She refuses to wear a hearing aid. Honestly, we could be plotting a murder and she wouldn’t hear it.” He looked back down at Cookie, who continued to cast her 100-year-old glare at me. “Wasn’t tonight your night out at the Swamp Bar?” Carter yelled.
“No!” she shouted back. “I go on Tuesdays and Fridays. Half off beer night on Tuesdays and ladies play free pool on Fridays.” She looked back at me. “You should bring the skank there someday.”
“She’s not a skank!”
Cookie looked at Carter. “Well, you going to be a gentleman and wheel me home?”
“Go,” I said to him, “before I kill her.”
“Another time, then?” he asked, hope filling his eyes.
“Definitely.”
He grabbed Cookie’s wheelchair. “Come on, Miss Cookie.”
“Hey,” I said as he turned Cookie’s chair around, “you don’t have to park outside our houses. We’re fine. If we notice anything out of the ordinary, we’ll give you a call.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
Of course, we expected the unordinary, so anything to us was ordinary. “Promise.”
He nodded. “Just stay out of the sleuthing business. For once let me do my job.”
I knew he was frustrated at our continual interference with his police work. The problem was, his position as deputy meant he had to do things by the book. Ida Belle, Gertie and I didn’t have his restrictions. And time wasn’t on our side. Not with a potential killer gunning for Gertie and the possibility of the ATF getting involved and discovering my true identity. I needed to get into the Swamp Bar and do some snooping around without anyone noticing me.
I watched as Carter wheeled Cookie down the street. Suddenly the idea came to me. And I thought it was a good one. I broke out in a run back to Ida Belle’s house. Smiling all the way.
“You want to go to the Swamp Bar dressed as who?” Gertie asked after I burst inside and revealed my plan.
Ida Belle shook her head. “No one will ever buy you as that old relic.” She got up from the table and went into the kitchen for more coffee.
“Why not?” I asked, following her. “Gertie has all those old lady getups in her hidden storage closet. People are used to seeing Cookie in the Swamp Bar. They know they can say anything in front of her and she won’t hear it. I can go tomorrow night.”
Gertie came in with her coffee mug, holding it out for Ida Belle to fill. “Cookie goes on Tuesdays and Fridays. It would be unusual for her to show up on a Thursday night.”
I shrugged. “I’ll just make up some story about being really thirsty or something.”
Ida Belle filled Gertie’s mug. Shook her head. “I don’t like it.”
“All I need is the right makeup and a motorized wheelchair. If Fred’s inside and makes a slipup, I’ll be sitting right next to him to hear it. I bet I could even lift one of Fred’s glasses to get a print. And no one would even notice.”
I could tell by Gertie’s smile my idea was winning her over. “I think it could work.”
“How are we going to make Fortune look like Cookie? It’s not like the old-lady disguises we used to put on back when we were younger. The people at the Swamp Bar already know Cookie.”
“You said people just ignore seniors.”
Ida Belle nodded. “Most of them, yes, but there are a few people at the Swamp Bar who actually look out for Cookie. If one of them’s inside tomorrow night and can tell you’re a fraud, it’s all over.”
�
�Then we have to make sure she’s a dead ringer for Cookie,” Gertie said, smiling. “And I know just the person who can make that happen.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“What?” I screamed into my vanity mirror, scrunching my face as if I had stepped in a pile of dog poop.
I reached over to my laptop and pressed play on one of the downloaded videos of Gertie’s funeral. On the video Cookie screamed “What?” to her daughter, Delphine, her face scrunched like… well, like she had rolled her wheelchair through dog poop.
“What?” I screamed again.
After four hours of imitating Cookie, I had her voice and facial expressions down pat. Pretty amazing, considering I had all of five hours of sleep the previous night and Cookie was 72 years older than me. The old-lady clothes Gertie and Ida Belle gave me helped, a pair of polyester slacks and a T-shirt with I Brake for Bingo Games spelled out in sequins.
You still have it, Fortune, I thought, flashing my reflection a thumbs-up.
The last time I had this challenging a role was two years ago when I pretended to be a Russian engineer in his thirties who was selling nuclear waste to an arms dealer in Yemen. The one thing I hated about pretending to be a man was wrapping my breasts flat against my chest, which wasn’t an issue in that assignment because the Russian I was imitating had one bad case of man boobs. But he also couldn’t pronounce his “r’s” clearly, something he was known for, and when I slipped and said “ricochet” as clear as a bell, my slipup almost proved to be my downfall. Luckily I was faster on the trigger than the arms dealer.
I heard banging coming from my front door downstairs. Probably Ida Belle and Gertie here with my wheelchair, the same model as Cookie’s. I ran downstairs, almost tripping over my cat, Merlin, who decided curling up in the middle of the staircase would be a good idea. I was beginning to wonder if Merlin wasn’t some sort of cat assassin and I his number-one target.
When I opened the door Ida Belle shoved the wheelchair through the doorway and then stepped into the living room. The wheelchair was loaded down with an overstuffed trash bag. Either a dead granny was hidden inside, or the head of hair popping through the top was one of Gertie’s old-lady wigs she brought over for my disguise.
“Tell me you have coffee,” Ida Belle said, racing for the kitchen.
“Second pot of the day.”
Gertie followed through the doorway, yawning, and handed me a plate of coffee cake before dropping her purse inside the door. “I brought sugar.”
Her eyes were punctuated with dark circles beneath them. When I left Ida Belle and Gertie at 1:00 a.m. they were both hunched over laptops, trying to track down an exact duplicate of Cookie’s wheelchair in one of the many medical supply rental stores in New Orleans.
“How much sleep did you get last night?” I asked Gertie.
“About four hours.”
“Well, you did a great job finding the right one.” I inspected the wheelchair, which looked exactly like the one Cookie rode in the photos and videos, down to the My other ride is a Harley bumper sticker, as well as assorted decals of grinning alligators. “This looks just like Cookie’s.”
“It should,” Gertie said. “It is Cookie’s.”
“You stole her wheelchair?” I didn’t care for the old crazy lady, but stealing her wheelchair seemed unnecessarily cruel.
“Her duplicate chair,” Gertie said, correcting me. “With all the decals in the same spots. After searching the internet for an hour, I remembered she bought two.”
“Won’t she notice it’s missing?”
“Probably not. She keeps it out in Delphine’s shed, and once I heard Delphine complaining her mama wasted money on buying a duplicate when she never uses it.”
Ida Belle came out of the kitchen carrying two cups of coffee. “Unfortunately Delphine had one of her bouts of insomnia last night, and when that happens she stays up reading in her bedroom till all hours.” Ida Belle handed Gertie a cup of coffee.
“She says she reads ‘historical fiction,’ like she’s some college professor or something,” Gertie said. “Honestly, Delphine must think we’re all fifty shades of stupid.” She blew over her coffee.
Ida Belle grabbed the plate of coffee cake from my hand and made her way to the sofa and sat. “She usually has a hard time tearing herself away from a book. And unlike Cookie, Delphine has excellent hearing. Since her bedroom window’s just a few feet away from the shed, we had to wait a good hour after she turned her light off to break in. That was about three this morning.”
“I’ll have to ask Bev at the library what book she checked out, because I looked in her window a few times and she had the biggest smile on her face.” Gertie took a sip of coffee, then nodded her head toward the wheelchair. “Well, go ahead, try her out. We charged the battery for you.”
“What?” I shouted, screwing my face up like Cookie’s.
Ida Belle laughed. “Pretty good.”
“Pretty good? I’ve been practicing for hours to get Cookie down.”
“Her sour face is the hardest,” Gertie said. “I think you’d have to go a few weeks without a bowel movement to get that look right.”
I sat in Cookie’s chair. Honked the bicycle horn.
“Pull your head down into your shoulders,” Ida Belle said, bringing her shoulders up in demonstration. “Make it look like someone hammered your head down into your chest cavity.”
Gertie nodded. “Again, lack of bowel movements would help with that too, so if you haven’t had one today, resist the urge.”
“Can we stop talking about movements, please?”
“Uh-uh, you’re Cookie now. And if it’s one thing Cookie talks about, it’s bodily functions,” Ida Belle said. “Why do you think no one wants to sit next to her in church?”
Gertie swallowed a gulp of coffee, and then agreed, “No kidding. If there’s anything that’ll kill your appetite for Francine’s pudding, it’s hearing Cookie talk about her mucus.”
“What else does she talk about?” I asked as I circled the sofa and coffee table in the wheelchair.
Ida Belle rolled her eyes. “She goes on and on about how she was crowned Miss Sinful in nineteen thirty-two, and how the next year Babette Doyon cheated and won the pageant. She was Celia’s mother, just FYI.”
I popped a wheelie. “A thief in Celia’s family? Why, I’m shocked.”
A knock at the door commanded my attention.
“That must be hair and makeup,” Gertie said.
“So early? It’s only ten o’clock. I’m not going to the Swamp Bar till eight.”
“You’re going to be transformed into a relic of the industrial age. That takes time and heavy-duty prosthetics and makeup.”
I stood to go answer the door, but Ida Belle stopped me. “Uh-uh, from now on, no more walking. Use the chair.”
She was right, of course. For the next several hours I had to live in Cookie’s world. I sat back down and drove over to the door, banging on it with the front of the chair. These things definitely were harder to maneuver than they looked. I did a four-point turn, ending up at a forty-five degree angle, with the door at my side. I grabbed onto the doorknob and turned it, then moved forward, pulling the door open.
“Hello.” A man’s voice surprised me. I just assumed Gertie would send for Ally or someone from the hair salon. The look on my face must have been one of confusion.
“We brought in someone from outside Sinful,” Gertie said.
Ida Belle nodded. “Loose lips and all.”
I spun around in the chair and watched as a man in skinny man jeans and purple T-shirt entered the room.
Six foot two. Lanky. Mid-thirties. Fine blond hair, about three-inches long. Took him an hour to style it to look like he woke up five seconds ago. Threat-level: Low.
“Well, well, well,” he said, eyeing me, “Miss Fortune. I knew I’d finally get my hands on you.”
“Do I know you?”
His voice went up several octaves, becoming breathy. “You don’
t recognize me?”
“French Fry?”
“The one and only,” he said in his normal voice, deep and rugged, sounding like a voiceover for a truck commercial. “I teach an early-morning class on mortuary makeup in New Orleans. The college isn’t big on me showing up in drag.” He leaned back, put his hand on his chin, and squinted at me, as if somehow that would change what he saw. “Hmm-hmm. I can work with this.” He opened his eyes wide. “Though I don’t know why Gertie insisted I bring latex prosthetics. You don’t need any of that. Just my expert hands, some of the finest French makeup, and a styling brush will do.” He smacked his lips. “When I get done with you, Fortune, men will be worshipping at your feet.”
Gertie held out her hand. “Oh no, French Fry. We don’t want her to look glamorous. Toss me my purse, honey. It’s over there by the door.”
French Fry looked down and spotted Gertie’s enormous Pullman-sized white purse. He bent down and lifted it, holding it at arm’s-length from his body as if it contained biohazardous material.
“Oh my,” he said, pursing his lips. “How many anemic cows were sacrificed for this thing? What on earth do you have in here?”
“Stuff.”
He turned his head and leaned his ear closer to it. “What’s that?” He looked at Gertie. “Your purse is pleading with me to shoot it and put it out of its misery.”
Ida Belle laughed. “I told you something was living inside that thing.”
French Fry shuddered. “Honey, don’t look now, but America’s Most Wanted seasons one through five are hiding in this thing.”
Gertie pulled herself up from the couch, stormed over to French Fry, and yanked her purse from him. She opened it and rummaged inside before pulling out a bundle of photos. “Here.” She slapped them into his open palm.
He looked down at the photos and gasped. “What is this?” He took a closer look. “It’s that old biddy from your funeral.”
“Do you think you can match me with the photos?” I asked.
“We brought wigs and clothes too,” Gertie said.
