by Bill Crider
GATOR KILL
A Truman Smith Mystery
By Bill Crider
Published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2011 by Bill Crider
Copy-Edited by Paulo Monteiro
Cover Design by David Dodd
Parts of the Cover courtesy of :
http://nitch-stock.deviantart.com/ &
http://orchidcore.deviantart.com/
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ALSO FROM BILL CRIDER & CROSSROAD PRESS:
AS JACK MACLANE:
Blood Dreams
Goodnight MooM
Just Before Dark
Keepers of the Beast
Rest in Peace
AS BILL CRIDER:
A Time for Hanging
Medicine Show
Ryan Rides Back
Nighttime is the Right Time
Dead on the Island
1
Some people say it's quiet and peaceful in the country at night. I guess they haven't been to the part of the country I was in.
Which is where?
About an hour or so west of Houston, in the river bottoms and marshy land around EagleLake. In that area, anyhow.
It was a hot, sticky September night, and my shirt was hanging on me like it had been doused with a bucket of water. I'd already sweated off most of the insect repellent I'd covered myself with earlier, and mosquitoes were singing all around me. I was tired of slapping at them, so quite a few of them were making a meal out of my tired old blood.
There were plenty of other noises besides the mosquitoes: about a million or so other kinds of insects, frogs, night birds, the wind in the cat-tails, an old bass hitting the top of the water, and now and then the bellow of a bull alligator.
"You ready to go?" Fred Benton asked me.
I gave him the standard Texas answer. "As ready as I'll ever be."
"Give 'er a shove, then," he said, and we slid the flat-bottomed aluminum johnboat off the bank and through some lily pads that brushed softly against the bottom and sides of the boat.
I jumped in the boat without getting my running shoes completely soaked, but Fred didn't seem to mind the water. He stayed by the side of the boat until he was out calf-deep, then threw one dripping leg over the side and climbed in. Then he stood in the front of the boat and poled us along with a ten-foot stick he'd cut himself from an oak limb.
It was a dark night, the moon hidden in thick clouds that hardly seemed to move in the light south breeze.
"Ought to be plenty of 'em out here," Fred said. "Turn on your flashlight."
I had a new black plastic flashlight with a halogen bulb, and I thumbed the big white knob forward. The beam leapt across the water, picking up the water plants and cat-tails, throwing shadows behind them. The water almost seemed to boil with life, its surface rippled by fish, minnows, bugs, and whatever larger things lurked beneath it.
It wasn't long before the light picked up the red and shining eyes of a gator, and then more and more of them. They were what Fred had brought me to see.
I didn't know what it was about seeing alligators like that, floating along in complete silence, their eyes and nostrils just above the water's surface, that affected me so, but it did. I got a distinct chill that had not a thing in the world to do with the way the soft night breeze was blowing against my wet shirt. Goose bumps lined my arms.
"Those are just the little ones," Fred said.
Fred was a guy who would know, having owned the lake we were on for a long time, thirty or more years, and he'd always been one to like alligators. He once told me that he felt like he knew them personally.
He was a big man, six-three or so and still very solid despite the fact that his stomach had a tendency to hang over his belt these days. His hair was still mostly black, with just a few strands of gray sprinkled around, belying his age, which had to be near seventy.
"I'm gonna catch one for you," he said.
I wanted to tell him not to go to any trouble on my account, but he'd already laid his pole down in the boat and crouched near the side. When we drifted close enough to one he wanted, he reached in the water and came up with it.
"You gotta hold 'em just right," he said. He had one hand behind the gator's head and one on its tail. "They got more strength in these tails than you'd think for. You let a big one get to swinging that tail, and it's goodnight, nurse. Here. Take him."
He stuck the gator out at me, and there was nothing to do but put down the flashlight and take him. Either that, or look like a sissy. Put one hundred men from Texas in that boat with Fred, and ninety-nine of them would take the alligator rather than risk looking bad. Men may talk about being more sensitive these days, more "in touch with their feelings," but the old macho games still matter to most of us. They still matter a lot.
Taking the gator wasn't so bad, since all I had to do was put my hands on the side of it opposite Fred's. He already had the grip. All I had to do was copy it.
"Folks are always surprised," Fred said.
I don't know how he knew I was surprised. He couldn't see my face. The moon was still concealed behind the clouds, and the flashlight was in the bottom of the boat.
But he was right. I was surprised.
"They always think that scaly old thing is gonna feel as rough as a cob," he said. "But it don't."
And it didn't. The gator's skin was surprisingly soft and smooth. Maybe that's why they made such good shoes out of them.
"How--” My voice cracked a little. The goose bumps on my arms were probably sticking up like pencil erasers by now. I started over. "How big is this one?"
Fred chuckled. "It's just a baby. Prob'ly not even two feet."
"Uh . . . you want him back?"
"Tell you what. I'll let you put him in the water."
There he went again, doing me favors I hadn't asked for.
"Uh--" I said.
"It's easy. Just don't get in a rush."
Not much chance of that, I thought. In my hands the gator strained against me.
"Just ease him down," Fred said. "Soon's you get him in the water, let go real quick."
Could I say, What if his mother comes by and bites my hand off? Of course I couldn't. That would make me look bad.
So I lowered the gator over the side, and almost at the instant he touched the water I let go. There was a slight splash and he was gone. The moon, slipping out from the clouds for a moment, reflected off the ripples.
Fred reached in the pocket of his old blue cotton work shirt and dug out a crumpled package of Camels. The ones without filters. He was the only person I knew who still smoked those things. Then he came up with a kitchen match, which he popped into flame with his thumbnail, a stunt I had always admired.
When he lit the cigarette, he said, "I just wanted you to see this." The coal of the cigarette moved as he waved his hand to indicate the area around us.
"It's been an education," I said.
"I thought it might be. You city boys don't get to see things like this just any old time."
"Hardly ever
," I said. I reached over and got the flashlight, turned it off.
"So what do you think?"
"It's a great place. Especially if you like alligators."
"Well, I like 'em. How about you?"
"Maybe they grow on you," I said.
He shrugged. The boat rocked gently. "I wouldn't know about that. I think I've always liked 'em."
He smoked for a minute in silence. I sat there and listened to all the sounds of the night.
"Those old Spanish explorers didn't know what to make of 'em when they came over to this country," he said finally. "Called 'em el lagarto. Means 'the lizard.' They look like lizards to you?"
"Not exactly," I said.
"Me either. But I guess it's as good a name as any."
He smoked some more. "Your daddy used to like 'em. Brought you out here to see 'em when you were just a kid."
I vaguely remembered the trip. We were living in Galveston, and my father had gone hunting somewhere near EagleLake on some land owned by Fred Benton. Goose hunting. EagleLake is the Goose Hunting Capitol of the World, according to its boosters. Fred and my father had become friends. Later, one summer, he had taken me and my sister to see the alligators.
"Not here, though," I said.
"Naw, not here. I don't guess I'd bring a little kid out here. Too much excitement. Might fall in and let a gator eat him. Took you to one of the smaller lakes."
Fred's land was covered with lakes, some of them man-made, some of them natural. The natural ones had been there a long time. "Forever," is the way Fred put it.
My sister and I had seen some big gators, looking like black logs in the water. One of them had pushed himself up on the land and was lying across the trail where we were walking. That was the one I remembered best.
To me, he had looked as big as a railroad car lying there, the black skin dry from the hot air, the knobby back looking as impenetrable as armor plate.
He didn't move at all, not even to open his eyes, though he must have known that we were there.
We stood and looked at him for a while, then turned and went back another way. No one, not even the adults, wanted to try walking around him and risk passing within reach of that toothy mouth or that thick tail.
I asked Fred if he remembered it.
"Sure I do," he said. "That was a pretty good-sized gator, probably ten feet long. Not a really big one, mind you. But pretty good-sized."
I shook my head. If anyone had asked me, I would have bet that alligator was a world's record. Twenty feet at least.
"He didn't seem much bothered by us as I recall," I said.
"No wonder. Those big ones, they don't have any natural enemies. Except for man. Once one of 'em gets to be that size, well, he's whipped and eaten ever'thing he's ever seen. Not afraid of the devil himself by then. I've heard of 'em chargin' cars, but I don't know if there's any truth to stories like that. People like to make things up."
I didn't have any trouble believing him. I'd dealt with a lot of lies in my time, one way or another.
"Do they ever bother people?" I said.
"Not much. Like I say, folks like to make things up, so there's stories. But as far's I know there's never been anybody in this part of the country that's got hurt. There's old Harley Tabor, but you got to disregard about half what he says and forget the other half."
"What's his story?"
"Well, Harley went bank fishin' one time in some of those lakes back in here. Had his favorite dog with him, a little border collie named Joe. He says he was fishin' along, catchin' a few bass here and there, mostly little ones, and then he got ahold of a really good one, six or seven pounds. Put up quite a fight on his little old spincast reel, a dollar-ninety-eight Johnson, I think he said. Anyhow, he had it about whipped and was gettin' it to shore when this bull gator came up out of nowhere, like a German submarine. That's the way Harley put it--like a German submarine. I think Harley was in Europe durin' World War Two and crossed the Atlantic on troop ships a couple of times. Anyhow, the gator clamped down on that fish and wouldn't let go. Harley, bein' a stubborn type of a guy himself, wouldn't let go either."
He stopped talking and mashed out his Camel in the bottom of the boat, dug out another one, lit it.
"Made the gator mad, I guess, and it decided to go after Harley. That's the way he tells it. Says the gator came chargin' up on the bank, showin' all its teeth, makin' a funny noise like a hiss."
"Like a snake?" I said.
"Louder'n that," he said, taking a drag on his cigarette. "I've heard 'em."
"So what happened? The gator eat him?"
Fred laughed. "Not quite. But almost. Those gators can move fast when they get on the ground, faster'n a horse, a lot faster'n a man. But just for a short distance. Then it's all over. Harley said he was so scared that he broke the world's record for the hundred yard dash. But the gator would've got him anyway if it hadn't been for the dog."
"The dog fought the gator off?" I said. It made a nice picture, like a story you might see in Readers Digest, a heart-warming bit of Americana.
"Naw," Fred said. "Nothin' like that. The dog was too scared to move, so the gator stopped to eat him. Gave old Harley the lead time he needed. He says that gator didn't hardly slow down, though, just scooped up the dog in one big mouthful and kept on comin'. Harley says he's lucky to be alive today, and that he owes it all to that dog."
"You believe that?" I said.
"Ain't nobody seen that dog from that day till this," he said.
There wasn't anything I could say to that. Fred mashed out his second Camel and stood up, the pole in his hands. He started poling the boat again, and soon we were back to where we'd started. He managed to pole us up onto the bank so that I didn't have to get wet when I stepped out.
After we'd pulled the boat completely out of the water, he said, "Well, what do you think?"
"About what?" I said, though I knew perfectly well what he meant.
"About the case. You gonna take it, or not?"
"I don't know, Fred."
In spite of what I'd seen, and in spite of Fred's obvious affection for his scaly pals, it was hard for me to take him seriously.
No one had ever hired me to find the murderer of an alligator before.
"Let's walk on over to the Jeep," he said, and we started walking, with me making a few futile swings at the mosquitoes that still buzzed around me.
"Until I read about you in the papers," he said, "I didn't even know you'd moved back to Galveston, much less what you did for a livin'."
"The papers got it a little bit mixed up," I told him. "Mostly I'm just a house painter these days. Even when I was an investigator I didn't get involved in things like what happened in Galveston."
"If you were an investigator once, you could be one again," he said. He was just as stubborn as Harley Tabor.
"Why not let the game warden do something?" I said.
"Bullshit. That Jack Burlingame ain't worth two cents. He hates gators, wouldn't care if they was all killed off."
"Aren't alligators in season anyway?"
"Sure, for the next two weeks. But you got to take 'em legally, and that means you don't leave the carcass on my land. And it means you got to have my permission to hunt on my land, and a lot of other things. Which whoever did this didn't have."
What really galled Fred was that someone had killed a gator, skinned it, and left the meat to rot right there on his property. Also, there were no signs of legal activity, which would probably have included a stake in the ground, so Fred believed that someone had shot the gator while it was swimming--and that was an illegal act.
"When I was an investigator, I usually just looked for missing people," I said. "I didn't go around looking for people who murdered alligators."
"What's the difference? If you're lookin' for somebody, you're lookin' for somebody."
"There is a difference," I said. "There are ways to trace a missing person. Somebody like you want me to find, well, it's not the same
."
"Clues, huh?"
"Not exactly, but that's close enough."
The trail we were on wound through some trees and then opened out on a field. The Jeep was parked there. It was an old Willys, old enough to have been driven in Europe by Harley Tabor during the Second World War according to Fred, though I doubted it. It looked more like one of the models from the late 'fifties to me. Whenever it had been built, it was still reliable.
"Made in America by Americans," Fred said. "And you don't need to plug it into some damn computer to find out what's wrong with it."
We climbed in and Fred cranked it up. Then we were bouncing across the field on the way to the road.
"Well?" Fred said.
"All right," I said. "I'll give it a try. But no guarantees."
"That's good enough for me," he said between bounces.
I don't know why I accepted, really. Maybe because I didn't have any houses to paint at the moment. Maybe because I finally realized it was time to try to work my way back into the world a little bit.
"I hear they found your sister," Fred said.
"Yeah," I said. "They found her."
That, too.
2
My sister's name was Jan. She disappeared.
That's why I went back to Galveston, trying to find her. That was what I was supposed to be good at--finding people--but I didn't find Jan. Long after I'd given up hope of seeing her again, I stayed on the Island, hoping I'd get word of her, thinking I'd find a clue to lead me to her.
I never did.
It shook me, and I blamed myself. So I stayed on, doing odd jobs, painting houses mainly, making enough to get by, and then I got involved with a couple of childhood buddies. Dino and Ray.
Dino's daughter had disappeared, and he wanted me to find her.
I did, but things didn't work out as well as they might have. Like me, Dino had been Born on the Island. BOI, most people said. And now we found ourselves locked into strange patterns that saw me give up my profession and saw Dino become almost a recluse.
