He clenched his jaw muscles and forced himself to put both hands into the gory mess and stopped again—not because of a flashback this time, but because he felt something out of place.
Against the protest of his nostrils, he leaned over to look at what he was feeling. When he’d removed the intestines and stomach from the animal, he’d scooped them out in one big handful, but now, he saw the stomach more clearly and it was distended in an odd shape. What in the hell had that gator eaten?
Damn it. Cole pulled a sharp, medium-length blade from the sheath hung onto his belt and tried to avoid inhaling while he slit open the stomach. What he saw sent him staggering a few feet away. He had to process it before he could look again, but processing it wasn’t easy. He dropped to his knees and fought the urge to barf up his breakfast.
Other unrelated scenes flashed through his mind. Blood, so much blood. Pooled on a tile floor. Soaked into carpet. Covering two hands clutched together.
Back in the present, Ryan.
He wasn’t squeamish, but he was careful to prepare when he knew there was a chance the flashbacks would hit him. The gator stomach had caught him unawares.
Taking a deep gulp of fresh air, Cole maneuvered part of the makeshift head wrap around so that it covered his nose and mouth, got to his feet, and reluctantly faced what he’d found.
It was a human arm, with a watch still attached to what was left of the wrist. The flesh had come about three-quarters off the bone, probably dissolved by the powerful acids in the gator’s stomach. Shreds of a couple of layers of clothing surrounded it. Thanks to the clothing, as well as the cool water and sluggish nature of the gator’s digestive system this time of year, the arm was better preserved than it would’ve been if the attack had happened during the summer or fall. Plus, gators didn’t chew their food if they could swallow it whole, so the limb was still fairly intact.
Closing his eyes, Cole reached his gloved hand beneath the arm to make sure there were no other surprise snacks in the gator’s system. He pulled out a mostly disintegrated frog, a bit of Styrofoam, and a zippered sandwich bag containing something that looked like black pepper, probably lost or thrown off some litterbug’s boat.
Finally, however, he found his quarry: a three-pronged snare known as a treble hook, lodged firmly in the wall of the gator’s upper stomach. So Mr. Gator had already been dying from the hook even as he swallowed his final meal of a tasty human arm. That meant he should be safe to cure and eat, although Cole’s taste for gator had dulled in the last few minutes.
He sat back on his heels, pondering his next move. The right thing? That was an easy call. He’d drive his old red pickup up the highway toward Chauvin and phone the sheriff or the game wardens’ office since he didn’t own a phone and didn’t plan to. He could be a responsible citizen, whatever the hell that meant these days. In return, he’d probably be blamed for killing the gator. God knew how the arm would figure into things.
Cole wanted none of that bullshit. It wasn’t like the arm was of any use to whoever had lost it, although he hoped the poor son of a bitch had survived. At this point, turning it over to the cops wouldn’t help anything. Wasn’t like they could arrest the gator, so they might go after him instead.
Done deal.
Cole recovered the bin, set it in the hole, then looked down at the gloves, thinking. He wanted no fingerprints pulled from inside them just in case this whole cluster was ever found, so he threw them aside until the hole had been filled and tightly packed down with muddy soil. Then he took the gloves, walked about twenty feet east, and cleared a spot of leaves and loose dirt. Again he dug, but not so deep. With the gloves inside the hole, he retrieved a match from the boat and set them afire. The burning yellow rubber smelled almost as bad as the gator and sent up small puffs of black-tar-scented smoke. Once they were charred, he refilled the hole with mud and packed it down.
Now he just needed to get home and get the gator cut up, cured, and ready to freeze. The animal’s death wouldn’t be a total waste.
He couldn’t say as much for the poor guy who’d lost his arm.
CHAPTER 4
Damn, but the last twenty-four hours had been spent in lunatic city. Mac Griffin turned his black department-issued pickup onto a dirt road south of Dulac, looking for the turnoff to the home of the senior nuisance-gator hunter of the parish. Mac had only been in Terrebonne—hell, he’d only been out of the fine state of Maine—for a little over a year, but he’d learned enough to know that Ray Naquin was well respected around these parts.
Like most Wildlife and Fisheries agents, Mac loved animals, so he respected any guy who caught gators that were spending too much time around humans and hauled them away in the back of his truck. The nuisance guys would relocate the animals to an isolated area so they could finish out long, happy lives eating things that didn’t walk on two legs and possess opposable thumbs. Naquin would only kill the gators if they were already injured or had killed someone or, more likely, had become someone’s pet when they were four inches long. Once they grew four feet long, a gator pet had become a danger because it had no fear of humans and was strong enough to tear off an arm or leg.
But Dave Grummond, or what was left of him when Mac and Jena had found the guy, wasn’t the only person killed recently by gators. Four attacks in two months was a downright epidemic—six attacks if you counted the two in Lafourche. Between rampaging gators and the Black Diamond drug spreading crazysauce through the parish drug culture—and beyond it, into the high schools and suburbs—Terrebonne law enforcement had its hands full. And nobody had a clue how to stop either problem.
Mac wanted to be on the drug task force, but he told himself that being on aggressive-gator duty was of equal importance to a greater number of people.
He reached the turnoff and found Ray’s house, one of the few on Shrimpers Row that sat on high enough ground to have brick siding and not need to stand on stilts. Still, even his house had a couple of old waterlines that circled the brick like bathtub rings a few feet from the ground. Ray’s house had taken water before, probably during Hurricane Gustav, which had pretty much dunked the whole parish. Even Houma had flooded.
Nobody was home, so Mac settled in to wait. He hadn’t called ahead. One of the first lessons drilled into him by both senior agents in his unit—Gentry Broussard and Paul Billiot—had been that he’d learn more by showing up and listening instead of making an appointment ahead of time and running his mouth.
Personally, Mac thought just showing up raised his chances of getting his head blown off, but despite the motormouth reputation he had in the Terrebonne unit, he’d learned to keep his ears open and mouth shut when the situation called for it. He’d also found most people, even the ones carrying guns, turned surprisingly docile when approached by the wildlife agents.
It was the ones who turned hostile—maybe a quarter of them, all armed—that made wildlife agents’ jobs so dangerous.
Finding Dave Grummond’s body hadn’t been the weirdest part of the evening either. He’d met Gentry and his fiancée, singer-songwriter Celestine Savoie, in a Houma club that Ceelie was scouting as a place for a regular gig. Mac had been pushing The Aquamarine as a good spot for her; it was one of his favorite clubs. The crowds weren’t hard drinking or rowdy, and the place was developing a good reputation for up-and-coming artists. Ceelie’s voice was smoky and sexy—not that he’d be sharing that opinion with her overprotective fiancé—plus she was a damned good songwriter.
The club had been a perfect pick, and both Ceelie and the manager had exchanged business cards and talked about possible nights for her to play. The call from Jena was what had thrown the night into weirdness. Jena’s brother had gotten his hands on some Black Diamond, and she had called Gentry.
Mac might be Jena’s partner now, but he got it. They didn’t know each other that well yet, and she and Gentry were tight.
Despite his reputation as the unit’s skirt chaser and class clown, however, Mac saw more than people thoug
ht. He could tell Jena was second-guessing herself and her decisions. She was a good agent, and everyone knew it—except her. He’d seen the self-doubt before they found the body yesterday, and he’d heard it in her voice when he and Gentry arrived at her freaking mansion outside Chauvin last night after dropping Ceelie off at home. Gentry had hoped Jackson would be back early enough so he could talk him down, but the kid hadn’t shown up by two in the morning, and both he and Mac had early shifts. To Jena’s credit, she didn’t seem to mind that Gentry had brought him along.
Mac’s new partner had been in pain, both physical and emotional. She didn’t know whether to turn Jackson in so the DEA agents could pump him for information on where he got his hands on the drugs or whether to cover for him. Gentry finally took possession of what sure looked to be Black Diamond, placed the sandwich bag inside one of his own evidence bags to preserve any fingerprints, and promised to be present when Jackson was questioned.
“Covering for him isn’t going to help anybody, especially Jackson,” Gentry had told Jena.
She’d looked relieved once the decision was made, but her fingers shook when she handed over the drugs. Her face was so pale, the scars stood out more than usual.
Any further worries about Jena were interrupted by a spray of mud as a silver long-bed pickup skidded to a stop in the drive next to him. Ray Naquin might be respected, but Ray Naquin, Mac decided, was a smartass, based on nothing more than the way the man pulled into his own driveway. No, the opinion was based on more than that. Gentry said Ray had been hitting on Jena pretty hard before she got shot but hadn’t been sniffing around since.
So he was an asshole, in addition to being a smartass.
Mac took his time before exiting the truck, letting the gator hunter wait for him as he flipped through a notebook and pretended to look at citations, then got out as if in slow motion. He’d already made note of the detached garage with the padlock, and assumed it held a boat since Ray didn’t have one attached to his truck.
“How’d I rate a personal visit from one of you state boys?” Ray asked the question before Mac could bother to introduce himself. Which was okay. Mac knew Ray was a jerk and Ray knew he was a state wildlife agent.
Still, he’d follow protocol. He pulled out a business card from his uniform shirt pocket and held it toward the hunter. “Mac Griffin, Wildlife and Fisheries. My partner and I found the body of that missing fisherman yesterday, and looks like it was a gator attack. Since we’ve had several in the last couple of months, I thought I’d check in with you. If anybody knows about an uptick in aggressive gators, that’d be your area of expertise. I hear you’re the best.”
Ray nodded, a small smile and a friendlier expression replacing his former scowl now that he realized he was being sought for his advice and expertise and not because he’d done something wrong. Which made Mac wonder why he thought LDWF might be looking for him.
The hunter had light stubble, brown eyes, blond-streaked brown hair just over his collar, and tanned skin that would turn tough as leather by the time he was in his midforties. In the meantime, he had about ten more years to enjoy the tattooed, outdoorsy bad-boy look women seemed to like.
Mac envied the bad-boy vibe. He’d probably appreciate his own youthful looks when he reached forty and looked thirty, but since the department policy prohibiting facial hair had forced him to shave his beard and expose his baby face to the world, complete with the dimple in his chin, he looked about eighteen. When he’d been eighteen he looked fourteen. In other words, he couldn’t win.
“Come on in.” Ray gestured toward the house. “Want a beer? No, guess you can’t do that since you’re in uniform, or are you even old enough to drink? Want a Coke?”
Definitely an asshole.
“Coke’s good.” Mac followed Ray into a house that proved looks could be deceiving. The outside of the house and the lawn were well tended except for the water rings. Inside, the house had been cleaned sometime in the last decade. Maybe. It held the vague, soured odor of vinegar and bleach, probably an occupational hazard of someone who spent a lot of time cleaning off the stench of alligators and other swamp denizens.
Mac perched on the edge of a brown-plaid sofa, scanning the arsenal sitting around him: a shotgun on the table that Ray had brought in with him from his truck. A pistol lay on the counter, and a rifle was propped in the corner. A wooden gun rack with a glass front hung next to the fireplace and seemed awkward and oddly formal surrounded by the chaos of the room. The other tools of the gator hunter’s trade sat on the Formica kitchen table: what looked like a twelve-pack of heavy-duty silver duct tape, a pile of zip ties, and a few knives.
“Here you go.” Ray returned from the kitchen holding a bottle of Miller Light for himself and a can of Coke for Mac, and took a seat at the nearest edge of the matching sofa. It had been piled with papers, which Ray shoved out of the way. Mac had his own stack of overdue paperwork, so he recognized a backlog of official forms when he saw one. He and the asshole had at least one thing in common; they were paperwork procrastinators.
“So you’re wantin’ to know if I’ve seen more aggressive gators than usual?” Ray took a swig of beer and leaned back. “Not really. I mean, we’ve had a few attacks in the last month or two, but I think it’s because the winter has been so mild. The gators are more active now than they usually are this time of year, and people aren’t being as cautious as they should be.”
The weather angle was something that Mac, at least, hadn’t considered, and it made a lot of sense. “You see any pattern in where these gator attacks have been?”
The four attacks that Wildlife and Fisheries had handled directly had been near the eastern edge of the parish, like yesterday off Pointe-aux-Chenes. But Ray saw gators whose paperwork would go straight to division headquarters in Thibodaux or even to Baton Rouge and not to the Terrebonne unit unless there was a problem that might involve law enforcement.
“Have you had to put down any gators for aggression that haven’t actually attacked anyone yet? Any aggression calls we might not know about?” The state had more than sixty licensed nuisance hunters but only two worked in lower Terrebonne, one of whom was semiretired. So Ray was the man to ask.
Ray sipped his beer and propped his feet on a coffee table piled high with hunting magazines. “None that I can think of, but, man, you wouldn’t believe the calls I get, ’specially as people hear about more gator attacks around the parish. It’s just gonna get worse since you found the Grummond guy’s body, especially if it’s confirmed he died as a result of a gator attack.”
He set his beer bottle on the floor beside the sofa. “I mean, some lady’s poodle disappeared and she was abso-fuckin-lutely sure it had to be a gator even though she hadn’t seen one. One guy spotted some bubbles in the bayou near his favorite swimming hole and I spent two friggin’ days chasin’ after air bubbles that turned out to be a turtle.”
Mac smiled. “So you’re getting more calls but not more gators?” Add drama queen to Ray Naquin’s list of attributes.
“I’m getting more calls because folks are hearing rumors about gator attacks. I haven’t seen more aggressive gators. Just more paranoid people.”
“The last two attacks were down on lower Bayou Pointe-aux-Chenes,” Mac said. “You had any calls out that way?”
Ray reached beside him and dragged a pile of papers onto his lap. “Damned paperwork.” He rifled through the stack. “One of our hysterical dog owners lives east of Chauvin off Highway 665, not too far from where you found that Grummond guy. She’s called several times claiming to see a gator nearby, but I been out there at least twice and I ain’t seen nothing. Plus, it’s just one of those places that gives you the creepin’ willies, y’know?”
Actually, no. Mac had gotten a few willies with some up close and personal bear encounters in Maine, but it was hard to figure what would creep out a tough dude like Ray Naquin. After all, the guy caught angry gators for a living. “What’s so creepy about the place?”
Mac nodded. Why not? Maybe they’d luck out and find the gator that ate poor Dave Grummond’s arm, although that wasn’t likely. The arm was probably digested by now. “You get to sell the gators you have to put down?”
The licensed nuisance hunters had a lot of leeway. If they deemed a gator dangerous to humans, they didn’t need a state-issued tag in order to kill it like gator hunters did during the one-month season. All the nuisance-gator hunters had to do was file some paperwork and they got to keep the profits.
As long as people wanted to buy alligator boots and shoes and purses, gators would bring in big money.
Ray’s boots—which appeared to be alligator themselves—came off the table and hit the floor with a thud. “If you’re hintin’ that I’m putting down gators just for the money, th—”
“No, no, no. Relax, man.” Mac held up a hand in a gesture of peace. Jeez, but this guy was touchy. “I just wondered if you had a particular seller you took them to. A seller might know if there were any other gators being brought in from one of the neighboring parishes.”
Ray relaxed. “Yeah, sorry. It’s been a long day already and it ain’t even lunchtime.”
Mac thought that, long day or not, Ray had overreacted, another indication that he bore watching. Still, the guy seemed to have a good reputation and the LDWF nuisance-alligator program had a great track record.
He wasn’t letting the question go, however. “So is there one particular seller you work with, or do you spread the business around?”
Ray’s tense shoulders visibly relaxed. “I spread it around. Take some up to Thibodaux, some to a place over in Bourg, whoever’s closest to where I catch the gator. This time of year, though, I usually take ’em to Gateau’s. It’s a bigger place, on the east side of Houma.”
Black Diamond (Wilds of the Bayou Book 2) Page 4
