Angel Dance: A Shadow Council Case Files Novella: Quest for Glory Part 3

by John G. Hartness

  “Did you know it was this big?” I asked.

  “The guide who took me to the wrecked airboat told me it musta been at least twenty feet long based on the bite marks in the hull. I thought he was exaggerating. Ain’t never been no gator more than twenty feet long, according to the official records.”

  “I suppose this little fellow is making unofficial records, then,” I said. I thumbed on the flashlight on my own shotgun and aimed the beam at the water. The gator’s tail disappeared as it approached, and Evangeline jumped down from the pilot’s chair.

  “Be careful, he might have dove down to—” Her words were cut off as a huge THUMP came from beneath the boat, and the shallow craft rocked hard to one side. The airboat flipped, and Evangeline and I flew out in opposite directions. I held onto my gun but saw hers spin through the air, leaving her defenseless.

  I hit the water on my back and sank like a stone. I managed to right myself in the few seconds I had before making contact with the bottom and opened my eyes to find the alligator. The murky water made it very difficult to see anything, but the thrashing mass about eight feet in front of me looked like the most likely spot for my quarry.

  I took two steps toward the thrashing gator and raised my shotgun. The chamber was loaded, with five more slugs behind, so I stood on the bottom of the swamp and pressed the gun into my shoulder. I squeezed the trigger, and a cloud of bubbles issued from the barrel of the shotgun as it exploded in my hands. Pieces of the shattered barrel whizzed by my face, and a few fragments of shrapnelized Mossberg lodged in my chest, arms, and legs.

  I stared at the ruined weapon as the gator emerged from the cloud of silt and air bubbles that had hidden it from view. I dove to my right as the creature bit down on empty space that I had occupied seconds before, then skidded backward, falling to my rear and then throwing myself flat on my back as the gator spun around unbelievably fast and snapped hundreds of razor-sharp teeth shut right above me.

  The monster whirled around again as I scrambled to my feet, this time heading straight for me with its mouth open wide enough to fit half of my torso inside with one gulp. I jammed the gun between those massive teeth as its jaws slammed together, wedging the beast’s mouth open. The jagged edges of the destroyed barrel pierced the gator’s soft upper palate and its tongue, and the shredded metal stuck fast. The monster jerked its head back, bringing me with it, as I had not let go of the gun. It swam backward, dragging me along and thrashing all the way. Then it spun around, and I was forced to let go of the gun with one hand and reposition myself astride the beast’s head.

  The alligator swam through the swamp, thrashing and rolling and contorting and twisting to free itself from the thing biting its mouth and the nuisance on its back, but neither I nor my gun would be dislodged.

  The monster thrashed, but I held on. It rolled, throwing huge clouds of sand and muck into the water, but I held on. It worried me like a rag doll hanging from a St. Bernard’s mouth, but I held on. After almost a full minute of wrestling with this enormous predator, my strength began to flag. My arms felt leaden, my back and legs were battered and ready to give, and my lungs filled with mucky water and algae stirred up from the bottom of the river.

  The gator swam forward, shoving me back. I slid along the bottom of the swamp bed, leaving great parallel furrows in the brown water. I clung to the shotgun as though my life depended on it. It likely did depend on it, given the size of the alligator. For the first time in many years, I actually thought I might not survive a fight. Even battling demons with Harker, I always thought that I would eventually prevail. I was much less certain about the outcome of this battle.

  I felt the uncertainty morph within me into something different, something I had not felt in decades. I felt a prickle of fear, and a rush of excitement coursed through me. My lips pulled back in a fierce grin, and the muscles in my arms and shoulders grew taut with fresh, exhilarated blood. I shifted my weight and planted my feet, halting the creature’s forward progress. It thrashed from side to side, but the shattered barrel was jutting through the alligator’s snout at one end, and wedged tight between two teeth at the stock. The creature could neither open nor close its mouth, just flail wildly trying to free itself from the thing that pained it.

  I let go of the gun, releasing the huge reptile. It spun around in a flash, and I lunged for its back before it escaped. My fingers gripped the scaly spines at its front shoulders, and I was hauled off my feet as the alligator swam toward the far shore, dragging me with it. I pulled myself up along the creature’s back, slowly climbing closer and closer to my goal, fighting the rush of the water as the gator swam at enormous speed. It slammed into the riverbank with its snout, trying to dislodge the gun from between its jaws. When that didn’t work, it lurched up out of the water and rolled on the bank, its tremendous weight crushing me into the earth as it lay on its back and writhed from side to side. I held on, though I both felt and heard ribs cracking under the beast’s onslaught.

  The alligator righted itself, and I pulled myself farther forward, until I finally sat astride the thing’s shoulders, with its head and snout in front of me. I punched downward with one fist, caving in its right eye with a single blow. I slammed my left fist into the other eye, blinding the creature and sending it into another paroxysm of pained thrashing. I leaned forward, pulled my right fist back, and pounded its head and orbital socket again and again until finally I felt the bone crunch beneath my blows.

  I unclenched my bloodied and battered fist, made a tight spike from my fingers, and jammed my hand into the alligator’s eye socket. My hand met resistance inside the orbital socket, but I leaned forward, wrapping my left arm around the alligator’s snout and pressing forward with my entire body weight. I shoved my hand in and in, harder and harder, until finally, with a resounding crunch, I shoved my hand through the monster’s eye socket into its brain. The beast gave one last mighty shiver, then collapsed, its brain mangled by my fist, dead.

  The alligator slumped to the ground, and I rolled off to the side, slamming into the mud and the reeds with a splash. I lay there, staring up at the green canopy, listening as the sounds of life came back to the swamp as our mighty battle, so enormous to me and the gator, was forgotten by the other creatures almost immediately. A smile crept across my face as I lay there cataloging my injuries. I counted three broken fingers; one dislocated pinky; innumerable scratches, scrapes, and cuts; four broken ribs; and what felt like three loose teeth. And one shotgun, dead on the scene.

  “Adam!” I heard Evangeline’s voice calling for me from somewhere nearby.

  I groaned, then when making that much noise proved to not be harmful, I called out, “Here!”

  “Where are you?”

  “Can you see the gator?”

  “Yeah, I see him. He looks dead.”

  “That’s because he’s dead,” I replied. “I’m lying next to him.”

  “You two need some alone time?” the nun asked. I frowned for a moment, then understood her question and laughed.

  “Ouch. Don’t make me laugh,” I said.

  “It only hurts when you laugh?” Evangeline asked, now standing over me. She was soaked to the skin, but looked otherwise unhurt.

  “No, it hurts no matter what I do, but it hurts in extra places when I laugh,” I said.

  She walked around the gator, inspecting the monster’s corpse. “Adam, what in the holy hell happened to your shotgun?”

  “I tried to shoot the alligator with it.”

  “While you was underwater?”

  “Yes. It seems that was a poor choice.”

  “You, my friend, are a master of understatement. But, and I will admit that I’m almost afraid to ask, but I’m going to anyway…how exactly did you kill that gator? It looks like you reached in its eye socket and yanked its brains out.”

  I lay there for a moment trying to come up with a less barbaric way to phrase it. It didn’t exist. “I reached in its eye socket and yanked its brains out.”
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  Evangeline looked down at me for a long few seconds, then said, “I’m gonna go get the boat. You lay there until you feel like you can stand up, then you go wash that arm off. You are not dripping gator brains all over the bottom of my boat.”

  That sounded like an absolutely fantastic idea.

  14

  Several hours later, I was in Madison’s battered church bus headed back to New Orleans with the sun setting over the swampland all around me. I had spent an entire day with Evangeline, hunting a giant alligator, killing said alligator, and then cleaning alligator brains from under my fingernails. When I left, Madison and her two-man security detail were gearing up for a marathon bridge session with Evangeline, a bottle of whiskey sitting in the center of the table with the cap tossed somewhere into the far corners of the shack. I felt the irony of leaving my friend the voodoo priestess in the care of my friend the nun, but they seemed to be fast friends.

  I set my phone on the center console of the van and pressed a button. “Dennis, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, I can hear you, but you’re a little muffled. What did you do to your phone this time?”

  “I wrestled an alligator. The phone was in my pocket. I am surprised it still works.”

  “It better work,” he said. “That case cost me a hundred bucks.”

  “You steal all your money from Harker, or corporations you don’t like,” I pointed out.

  “Doesn’t mean I want to overpay for stuff,” he replied. “What do you need?”

  “Do you still have surveillance on Jermaine?”

  “Thunderlips?” he asked. “Yeah, I’ve got him.”

  “I think he only calls himself ‘Thunder,’” I corrected.

  “I know, I was…never mind,” Dennis sighed. I smiled into the windshield. Frustrating my electronic friend was fast becoming an enjoyable pastime, almost on par with making Quincy wonder if I understood his feeble attempts at humor. Most of the time I did, I just didn’t think he was funny. That made it better.

  “Okay, I’ve got eyes on your guy,” Dennis said. “He’s at the club, cleaning up. He’s booked to play starting at ten tonight.”

  “Is there anyone else there? And have you seen them before?”

  “There’s a couple of touristy looking guys in khaki cargo pants, looking like soccer dads. There’s a young couple making out between bites of crème brûlée, a homeless dude sitting at the end of the bar with his head down, and one guy in an expensive suit sitting alone with his back to a wall. He’s not there for the food or the hurricanes, I can tell you that much.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He’s got an untouched po’ boy in front of him, a glass of water he hasn’t touched, and his head is on a swivel. He’s trying real hard not to look like he’s watching Jermaine, but he picked a table with an unobstructed view of the entire joint.”

  “Does he look familiar?”

  “Yeah, it’s the same dude that sat next to you the other night.”

  “Martin,” I said, remembering the man, his graceful movements, and the spot of dark red, almost brown on the cuff of his shirt. “I do not trust that man.”

  “Me neither, but I don’t trust anybody. Call it a side effect of getting murdered by a homicide detective, but my trust level is shot to shit.”

  “Understandable. My own caution is an outgrowth of being chased from my home by a rampaging horde of villagers with pitchforks and torches,” I replied, remembering the smell of smoke pouring into my home, driving me farther up the narrow, winding staircase until I reached the roof of my father’s manor house. I could hear the chants of the mob below me, the crackle of the flames and the shattering of windows from the heat as the only home I had known was consumed in the fire that threatened to devour me. I felt the rush of water envelope me as I dove from the roof into the rushing river far below, then the crushing impact as I crashed and bounced into the rocks as the current swept me away.

  “Hey, Adam!” Dennis’ voice yanked me from my reverie, and I focused once more on the present, and the immediate future.

  “Yes, Dennis?”

  “You with me, buddy?” There was honest concern in his voice, the usual snark gone.

  “Yes, I apologize. I was lost in memory for a moment. Is there anything else happening?”

  “Nah, just Thunder straightening up, waiting on the bar customers, and every once in a while going over to the stage to polish his horn. And, man, am I glad that is not a euphemism for something else. Is Madison all squared away? Evangeline has her place so damn locked down I can’t even get a satellite image of the place.”

  “Yes, Madison is safe. But if the camp is blacked out, how did you find it in the first place?”

  “I looked for the black hole in my net. There’s a blackout zone a half-mile in diameter that I figured was centered on Evangeline’s camp, so I pointed you to the middle of it.”

  I thought for a moment. “What if it had been something else? Something unfriendly?”

  “Well…that would have been bad,” Dennis admitted. “But it wasn’t, so we’re good, right? Good deal. Talk to you later, pal!” He disconnected the call before I could point out the errors in his logic. And he was right, it had all worked out, so there was no point in harassing him about it now.

  I left Madison’s church van in the public parking lot that her people designated, then proceeded on foot to the French Quarter. The club was busier by far than Dennis had described, but I still found an empty table with little trouble. I placed my back to a wall, making sure I had clear sightlines to both the stage and the man who introduced himself as “Martin.”

  He still sat at a table alone, an untouched sandwich and drink before him. I observed a waitress walk over to him, reach for his glass to clear it, and him wave a hand to stop her. A folded bill and she nodded and walked off, shaking her head at his behavior but obviously content to ignore him as long as he continued tipping.

  I sat, ordered a drink, and kept watch on the room. Jermaine ducked out from behind the bar as his replacement showed up, then a few minutes later, he stepped onto the small stage, drawing a smattering of applause from the crowd.

  “Hey, y’all,” he said, leaning down into a microphone before him. “I’d like to thank y’all for coming out tonight. We gonna play some old stuff, some new stuff, and a few originals. I hope you all have a good time. So now, without any further ado, I’m Thunder Travis, and these are my Lightning Bolts!” He pressed the trumpet to his lips and blew out the first few notes of an upbeat jazz number. The band picked up the rhythm, and they were off to the races.

  Thunder and the Bolts played the crowd as much as they played their instruments, dropping into slower, cooler jazz when the crowd was thin, pumping things up when the crowd was hopping, and generally keeping everyone in the room dancing, drinking, or at least tapping toes for the next two hours. Everyone but me, that is. Everyone but me and the businessman in the corner, who kept his head on a swivel as if he were waiting for someone in particular to show up.

  After a long set, Jermaine leaned into the mic and said, “Thank y’all! We’re gonna take a short break, but we’ll be back in twenty minutes or so. If we don’t give Ellis a break every couple hours, he sobers up, and the last thing you want in a jazz band is a sober drummer!” The crowd laughed along with the drummer, a stout bald white man in his fifties, who waved at the crowd with a big grin on his face.

  The band stepped off the low stage and wove through the crowd toward the bar and the restrooms, accepting congratulatory backslaps and handshakes as they passed happy drunken revelers. Jermaine paused at the end of the bar to exchange an elaborate handshake and hug with the homeless man I had seen in the park the day before. He’d been sitting on the same stool sipping water through the entire set, eyes closed and swaying in time to the music.

  I turned my head to resume surveillance on “Martin,” only to find his chair empty and his table cleared. I scanned the room but could not see him through the throng of
people. I stood, and my height made it a simple thing to spot the man in the expensive suit near the stage. I saw “Martin” pick up Jermaine’s trumpet from the stand on the stage, tuck it under his coat in a horrible attempt to mask the thing, and start for the door.

  I moved to intercept and cut off his route in the middle of the crowd. “I don’t think that belongs to you,” I said, nodding at the oddly misshapen lump beneath his suit coat.

  “This is none of your business, freak. Get out of my way before you get hurt.” His voice was low and gravelly, with an inhuman growl behind it.

  “I’ve been hurt before,” I said. “It all heals. And that doesn’t belong to you.”

  “You are meddling in things beyond your ken, mortal,” he hissed, and now it sounded as though his tongue was forked, the sibilance taking over his diction.

  “There is at least one misconception in that sentence,” I replied, then punched him in the face. He staggered back and crashed into the clumped humanity behind him.

  “That’s for running out on my sister, you dick!” I bellowed, advancing on the well-dressed man as he struggled to get back to his feet and hold on to the trumpet at the same time. I threw an uppercut that lifted him off his feet and flung him back through another clump of people. I stepped into the punch, swinging from my heels and putting nearly my full strength into the blow. If he were human and merely a trumpet thief, that punch would have decapitated him.

  It didn’t. He flew back, his arms flying out from his body as he lost consciousness for an instant. The trumpet flew from his hands and landed in the arms of a woman in the crowd, who turned and set it on the bar. The man struggled to his feet, shoving away the hands of people trying to help. His eyes glowed red for a brief second, then he rocked his head from side to side and gave me a nasty grin.