Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  From the darkness beneath the car she heard movement, a heavy drag across the concrete as if her assailant jockeyed for position on elbows and knees.

  From inside the house came wild barking. Taco going ballistic. Anna realized she must have screamed when she fell.

  “Out,” she commanded. “Hands first.” Her own hands were shaking. The crack to her elbow had robbed her arm of strength. Whoever was under the car said nothing, and she swallowed the desire to empty the magazine into the darkness.

  A kid. Who but a kid would crawl under a parked patrol car? She could see the headlines now: “Lady Ranger Shoots Local Boy Thirteen Times.” Bracing the Sig-Sauer with her knee, Anna freed her hand and wrestled the radio from her belt. Three calls, no answers. She hated handhelds. They only worked when they weren’t needed. That or Randy Thigpen had rolled over and gone back to sleep.

  “You under the car,” Anna tried. “You’re beginning to scare me. I get scared, I shoot. Neither of us wants that. Come on out now.”

  Nothing. Then a thrashing sound and the disturbing note of nails scratching on cement. Fragmented pictures from a childhood filled with campfire stories about escaped lunatics with hooks for hands flickered through her mind.

  Anna eased to her feet. Her left ankle hurt but it wasn’t broken; it would hold. Taco was going mad. His barks had escalated into a frenzy, and she could hear thumping. He was hurling himself against the screen. She’d never known a pet dog to go after anyone like that. What triggered him, she didn’t know, but it made the hairs on the nape of her neck stiffen.

  The carport was narrow. With the Crown Victoria in it, there was just room on either side to open the doors. Anna didn’t relish walking that close to whoever was underneath, but she couldn’t stay trapped in the back in darkness. If the assailant was armed, he could easily move close to the wheels and kill her. Dying in a carport in Mississippi was not appealing. In a sudden leap, Anna made the hood of the Crown Vic and scrambled to the top of the cab.

  A wrench of metal and a crash came from the house. Barking as if he was possessed by the ghost of Cujo, Taco came around the corner hackles raised, lips pulled back. He had lost any resemblance to the goofy house pet Anna inherited when Frieda died. Snarling, he rushed at the end of the car, his glossy coat shiny in the beam of the flashlight on the floor.

  So fast Anna scarcely saw it, something shot from beneath the undercarriage and she heard a loud snap. Taco screamed, and Anna screamed. Gray-green scales rushed through the narrow beam of the flashlight. Taco cried, high and desperate, then was snatched beneath the car.

  Anna could feel pounding up through the metal. The alligator—it had to be an alligator—was whipping the dog from side to side. The screaming continued.

  “No,” Anna yelled. “No.” She slid from the cab to the floor at the rear of the car. The gun was useless. Firing, blind, into concrete she’d as likely kill her dog as the alligator. The tail that had knocked her feet from under her whipped out, an angular scaled muscle the size of a man’s leg. Without stopping to think, Anna dropped the gun and grabbed the tail in both hands. Digging her heels in, she pulled. The alligator had claws, long and yellowed like a grizzly’s. Over the cries of the dog, Anna could hear them scraping along the pavement.

  Its back legs were out. Flecks of black, then red in the light, splattered onto the cement. Taco’s blood.

  “Let go of him, Goddamn you.” Anna hauled back. Another two feet of ridged beast was dragged from under the bumper. The alligator turned, Taco clamped in jaws ragged with teeth and red with blood. Anna threw herself on the animal’s back. It thrashed beneath her with a strength she could not have imagined. Behind her was the tail, in front of her the jaws. Both deadly to soft human—or canine—flesh. Holding tightly to one leathery foreleg, she ripped the pepper spray from her belt. Stopping her breath and turning her head away she sprayed it into the eyes of the gator.

  A primeval roar came from its throat. It began to thrash with such violence Anna was thrown to one side. She kept rolling to get clear. Then she was on her feet. The alligator was wild. Roaring and snapping at the air, the tires of the Crown Vic, but it had let go of Taco. The dog lay in a pool of blood made shockingly red by the light of the flash. He whimpered and twitched the way dreaming dogs do. The way dying animals do.

  Skirting the blind and flailing alligator, Anna scooped Taco into her arms. Hearing her footsteps, the beast turned and charged with lightning speed she’d never associated with the giant reptiles. She had the advantage of sight. Seventy-five pounds of dog clutched to her chest, she jumped clear. The gator continued his blind charge until he was halfway up the walk to the house.

  Not waiting to see where he went next, Anna retrieved her gun and bundled herself and Taco into the driver’s side of the patrol car. Jamming it in reverse, she stepped on the gas. If the alligator had come back and she ran over the damn thing, so be it.

  A good thirty yards out of the drive, she stopped and caught up the mike to the car radio. “Five-seven-nine, five-eight-zero. Five-seven-nine, five-eight-zero. Randy answer the damn radio.”

  He did and Anna blessed his worthless hide for being there. “Call Fisheries and Wildlife. I’ve got a crazy blind alligator in the yard. Tell them to get animal control here to kill it or capture it before it hurts somebody. Tell them it’s got pepper spray in its eyes and is in a foul mood. You get up here and check out that report of an accident north of Rocky. And give me the name of a vet.”

  Silence followed. It seemed excessive to Anna but was probably only a few seconds.

  “The name of a veteran?” Randy asked.

  “A veterinarian.”

  “Hang on.” More silence. Gentle rain. Taco laid his head on her thigh and licked fingers wet with his blood. The old poem of Rags licking his master and dying came to mind and Anna felt tears sting her eyes. She had let Frieda die. Killed her. Now she’d killed Frieda’s dog. In the glare of the headlights, she could see the alligator. It was throwing its head from side to side trying to escape the bum of the pepper spray. Anna’s own nose and eyes burned from the stuff. Aerosols were not a weapon of precision. “You’ll live,” she hissed to the gator. “Unless my dog dies.” Even as she said it she knew she would wreak no vengeance on the alligator. It had merely been doing what alligators do, without conscience, without malice, without blame.

  Was that how it was with Danielle’s murderer? Was he a human animal, a broken person, a psychopath or a sociopath as blameless as the alligator?

  “Five-eight-oh?”

  “Five-eight-zero,” Anna replied. Her hand was sticky with blood and the mike adhered to her palm.

  “Fisheries is on the way. I’m on the way. Here’s the name of a veterinarian. David Christianson. A guy the Fisheries works with. I’ll call him. He’ll meet you there.”

  Anna listened while Randy gave directions to Christianson’s office. Randy was calm, efficient and didn’t waste time with questions. And he didn’t brook racism, at least not against fellow rangers. Too bad he’s such an asshole, Anna thought uncharitably, and flicked on blue lights and siren.

  Christianson was waiting when she arrived. She’d covered the twenty miles to Raymond in fourteen minutes. Enough adrenaline flowed through her veins that when she lifted Taco from the seat he seemed to weigh no more than a kitten.

  The vet introduced himself as David. He could have been near forty but he was utterly boyish. And though it was the middle of the night, downright cheerful. Either because he loved them or, more likely, to calm Anna—she was shaking and trying to hide it by grabbing the exam table—he chatted on about his kids and his practice while he quickly sorted through the damage to Taco. Anna learned about his boys, his practice and his wife’s part-time job at the Episcopal church. Then he said: “It’ll be touch and go. The gator got him by the right rear leg, maybe punctured his liver and his spleen. I can operate. It’ll cost around six hundred bucks and Taco may not make it.”

  “Do it,” Anna said. />
  On her way out, she stopped in the doorway of the examining room. “Your wife works at a church?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Does she pray for dogs?” Anna asked on impulse.

  Christianson smiled his boyish smile. “Why do you think my recovery rate is so high?”

  The surgery would be a long one, and though he told Anna she was welcome to wait, she would be doing no favors to anyone by hanging around.

  Crusted with canine blood, depressed and aching from shoulder to hip, she limped to her patrol car. Rain had turned to mist. She breathed the fine droplets into lungs that felt burnt out. Too much screaming for one night. Too much breathing in pain and blind fear: hers, Taco’s, the alligator’s.

  Sunup was still hours away. It occurred to her that since coming to the heart of Dixie she’d yet to sleep through the night.

  Back on the Trace, heading south, she radioed Randy. He answered immediately. Instead of being impressed by his alertness, she suspected he was camped out in his vehicle letting somebody else do his work.

  “No accident north of Rocky,” he said. Anna knew that; she’d driven the Trace from Rocky to the turnoff for the tiny town of Raymond.

  “It had all the earmarks of a crank call,” she said. “Did the Fish and Wildlife guys get my gator?”

  “They’re just on him now. He’d gone around back of the house there and was flopping and snapping like mad. It took ’em a while to get him to come on down from the edge of the woods. You oughta be here about the time they get some lines on him to load him up.”

  “Good,” Anna said. “I’m looking forward to saying good-bye.”

  “He’s a little bitty fella,” Randy drawled.

  “Not when he’s in your shirt pocket.”

  Illuminated by the headlights and flanked by large men, the alligator looked considerably smaller than Anna remembered, around six feet from snout to tail. The pepper spray had worn off or the alligator had worn down. The animal was relatively subdued. A rope on a long stick had been looped around its neck and its movements were being more or less controlled by a sizable black man in the forest green of the Mississippi Fisheries and Wildlife Service. A second man, also in green, was backing a half-ton pickup across Anna’s sodden backyard to collect their catch.

  She pulled on rain gear, not to evade the mist but to cover the blood on her shirt and pants. Later she would talk about Frieda’s dog—her dog. Under the glinting eye of her new employee, she didn’t want to risk tears. Nobody had ever laid down their life for her before, not like Taco had.

  “Are you the new ranger?” the man holding the alligator called as she walked into the high beams of Randy’s car, pulled around behind her house to shed light on the reptile recovery.

  “That’s me.”

  “Your little buddy here put up quite a struggle. You sure you shot him with pepper spray and not methamphetamines?”

  “Whatever’s government issue is what he got,” Anna said. She walked nearer, wanting to see the animal. Whipping its body suddenly, it lashed its tail.

  “Easy, boy,” the Fisheries man said, and, “I think he likes you.”

  “He sure liked my dog,” Anna said. Then, before anyone could ask, she changed the subject. “They often come up and get in carports, under houses, things like that?”

  “First time I’ve ever heard of it around here. You’re a ways from any body of water big enough to support a guy this size. He’s probably six or seven years old. But during mating season, they’ll go a long ways across country sometimes.”

  “Is it mating season?”

  “Nope. June and early July.”

  The truck stopped and the other Fisheries man got out. He was white, gone to fat around the middle the way once-muscular men tend to do in their fifties. Still, he looked powerful and had the deeply lined face and firm jaw that suggested years of facing problems head on.

  “This is Pete. I’m William,” the man with the alligator said.

  “Anna,” Anna completed the field introductions.

  Leaving William to amuse the alligator, Pete leaned against the truck. He pulled off his ball cap and scratched through thinning hair. “What I’m wondering,” he said with a drawl, “is how you came to be pepper-spraying a law-abiding alligator in the middle of the damn night?”

  There was no malice in his words and Anna laughed. “It’s a long story,” she said.

  “Well, I’m all ears, and William here’s paid by the hour.”

  Anna told them. They laughed, gave her a bad time about wrasslin’ gators for a new career, but they knew their alligators, and she could tell the men were genuinely pleased she was alive and unharmed. At least Pete and William were. When she’d finished, Ranger Thigpen lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke, and said with the slick sharp edge of a person who’s not really kidding: “I can’t believe you actually jumped right down on that alligator’s back.”

  The Fisheries and Wildlife guys smelled a challenge. Pete went silent. William cast about for something to say but only managed introductory noises.

  Anna looked at Thigpen and felt nothing. “Neither can I, Randy. Neither can I.” The other men laughed. Thigpen joined in. A test had been passed, points scored, and Anna was sick of the game.

  “I’ll get his tail. You watch yourself, William.” Pete dropped the tailgate. In a quick jerking movement, William hauled up on his pole, momentarily choking the gator as he lifted. Pete grasped the tail. In two seconds the alligator was in the truck bed, and the tailgate was closed.

  “Here comes the fun part,” Pete said. “We’ve got to get the noose off his neck.”

  “Hold up your hands, Pete,” William teased. “Ten fingers. We’ll count again after you’ve done it.”

  “Can I watch?” Anna asked suddenly.

  “Sure. Climb up top the cab where you won’t get et,” William said.

  Anna scrambled over the hood and lay on her belly across the cab so she could look directly down on the alligator. He was still young enough to be beautiful. His features were well cut, the ridges on his back sharp, the yellow stripes on his tail not yet faded.

  William maneuvered the gator around till his nose was in the corner made by the tailgate and the side of the truck bed, then pushed the pole close to the creature’s head and fed out a little rope. Pete pressed against the side of the truck behind the alligator. Balanced on the balls of his feet in case he needed to retreat in a hurry, he reached over the side to pull the noose loose with deft precise plucks. “Hey, ho,” he said with a spark of discovery. ‘Tighten your line up, William. We’ve got another little hitch in tonight’s operation: ’

  William tightened the rope as Pete left the back of the truck to retrieve something from the cab. He returned with a flashlight that he trained on the animal’s neck. “This boy’s already got a collar on. Lookit.” Anna craned forward but Pete and William, bending over their captive, blocked her view.

  “Looks like clothesline,” Pete said.

  “Probably is. It’s cinched down plenty tight. No wonder he was so cantankerous. Hold him still.”

  William pulled the line tight and shoved the pole down on the alligator’s throat.

  Pete slid his glasses up on top of his head the better to see close up. “They got it knotted.” Having dug a pocketknife from his trousers, he opened it to the smallest blade. “Hold him,” he said again.

  The alligator twitched his tail but was otherwise quiet in the occasional way of wild things that seem to realize they are being helped.

  “Got it. Turn him loose.”

  William slipped the loosened noose from the alligator’s neck. The beast whipped around with such speed Anna squawked and slid off the cab onto the hood. He wasn’t attacking; he just wanted to hide his head under the metal toolbox that ran across the rear of the bed. Evidently he’d had enough of humankind for one night.

  “Clothesline it is,” Pete said, and held up what he’d cut from the gator’s neck. “That answers why t
his boy was in your carport umpty-ump miles from any decent water.”

  “Clothesline?” Anna repeated stupidly.

  “Here. A souvenir.” Pete draped the line around her neck. It was the common cotton variety, white with a thin thread of blue; the sort of line that was bought by the yard at most hardware stores.

  Anna was tired. Sliding from the cab to the hood had hurt her bruised elbow. Climbing from the hood to the ground stressed the ankle the alligator had whacked with his tail.

  “Somebody’s idea of a joke,” William said. “About six months back me and Pete had to go get one out of the bathtub in the women’s dorm there at Mississippi College.”

  “It’s hard on the poor old gator,” Pete said, sounding positively fond of the animal. He restored his glasses to the bridge of his nose and adjusted the earpieces. “Since we don’t know where this boy’s from and you’ve developed a personal relationship with him, you want him?”

  “How do you mean?” Anna asked guardedly.

  “We can turn him loose in Big Bayou Pierre. That’s a good habitat for a fella this size.”

  “You can even name him,” William said, and because he didn’t sound like he was kidding, Anna laughed.

  “We’ll call him Will Peterson,” she suggested.

  “Unless he gets into trouble,” Pete said. “Then we’ll call him Boots.”

  They left with the alligator. Randy left to sleep. His shift didn’t start till four. Anna walked back around to look in the now-empty carport. She’d left the Crown Vic parked behind her Rambler in the drive. It would be a while before she’d be willing to walk into the dark in that particular spot.

  Taco’s blood showed black in the hint of light fighting through the clouds to the east. There was a lot of it. Too much for a dog to lose.

  An alligator placed under a car.

  A ranger called out on a false alarm.

  A dog mauled.

  Not Anna’s idea of a practical joke. Somebody wanted the lady ranger to go home. Or to the hospital. Trouble was, Anna didn’t know if the enemy was “us” or “them.”