“Thanks.” Serenity got to her feet and pulled her phone out.
“What are you doing?” said Doom.
“Calling the police.”
“No.”
Doom put her hand on the phone.
“Doom, Joe’s in trouble. It’s time for the cavalry, even if that leads to you and me and the library paying the price when everything comes out. I can’t play games with this.”
“You’re not playing games. Look, if you call the police, what will they do?”
“They will jump on this with both feet. And a lot of guns. Which is good.”
“Unless Don Juan was telling the truth about things being fixed. Even if he wasn’t, they’ll send a swarm of cops down here. You think those guys in there will tell them anything?”
“No.”
“Damned right. And, if Joe is still alive, they will send orders to kill him and hide the body as soon as the police get here.”
“Joe’s got friends on the MPD. People we can trust. And there’s an FBI guy I can trust.”
“What if you’re wrong? Say one of them says or does something to make his boss suspicious. Don Juan says we’re messing with something bigger than him. You don’t have any idea where their tentacles reach. You’d be signing his death warrant—if he’s still alive.”
“Don’t say ‘if.’ He’s got to be alive.”
“Then let’s keep him that way. We can’t wait on other people, certainly not for bureaucracies. You and me. They don’t expect us,” Doom said.
“With good reason. Don’t you remember how we wound up on the pavement?”
“Yes, they sucker punched me and I fell on the muddy boots of the guy who was holding you. I could have taken him.”
“You missed the point. Why did he have muddy boots? Think about it. Imagine you’re the muddy boots guy. You work in the middle of your boss’s hoity-toity restaurant. When you come to work every day, do you come in looking like you’ve been wrestling with hogs and track mud on your boss’s carpet? Of course not.”
“So?”
“The only way you do that is if your boss knows why you’re muddy. Approves it. Ordered it. Muddy Boots was there when Joe got there, then he took Joe somewhere.”
“Great. Now all we have to do is go back and ask them where he took Joe.”
“No.” Serenity marched over to the Bigfoot truck. “Look at that. Mud. Wet mud. Hasn’t rained here in days.” She reached up and pulled off something that looked like a corndog. “Cattail. This truck’s been down by the river.”
“The river, with all that yucky swamp grass? And rumors of alligators?”
“More than rumors. Before your time, the river authority decided that the way to get rid of all of that swamp grass was to bring two hundred alligators up from Florida to eat it all. When it turned out, after a few years, that the alligators didn’t like to eat the grass, the river authority gave up. They trapped two hundred alligators and took them back to Florida. See anything wrong with that logic?”
“Not as long as the alligators didn’t get jiggy and have any alligator babies.”
“Exactly. So every now and then there are stories about alligator sightings. The biggest one keeps getting reported around Beaver Dam Creek. Know what they call him?”
“The alligator has a name?”
“Uncle Ernie.”
sixty-three
the swamper
SERENITY AND DOOM sat in the parking lot of the Shell convenience store.
“There’s only one way into this swamp,” said Serenity. “And one way out. They’ll be watching that one way.”
Doom fiddled with a black ski mask. “Lead the way,” she said.
“Don’t put that thing on yet, sitting here at a convenience store. We’re going into the swamp down that torn-up road we just passed. It’s actually called Space Age Boulevard, or was. Forty years ago a flim-flam man announced that he was going to build an amusement park named Space City in the swamp there. It was going to be bigger than Disney, and he sucked in half of North Alabama as investors.”
“What happened?”
“What happens to most folks who put their hopes in swamp land? They lost everything.” She paused. “Pray that’s not us.”
“Wonder if Shell has an AK-47 for sale?”
“Probably not. But in Alabama, you never know.” She hesitated. “They might have a couple of flashlights, though. Why don’t you go get us a couple? Maybe some bug spray, too.”
“Couple of superhero capes wouldn’t hurt either.”
“Yeah. I’ll wait here.”
Serenity watched Doom walk away. When Doom opened the store door, Serenity reached up and switched off the dome light and slid out the door. Then she crouch-walked to the road, keeping the car between Doom and herself. When there was a gap in the headlights, she ran across the road and disappeared into the swamp. She patted her purse to feel the gun inside, and put as much distance as she could between herself and Doom.
This was no place for a superhero.
sixty-four
dinner for a favorite uncle
THERE’S A REASON why people don’t go on romantic walks in a swamp, thought Serenity. At the moment, she was pulling herself out of a pool of foul-smelling water that a tree root had propelled her into. As she sat up and brushed the mud away from her face, she heard the buzzing of a swarm of mosquitos happy to have found a fresh meal. Great, just great.
She heard noise behind her, turned, and saw Doom’s light bouncing around. Getting closer, but coming from the road off to her right, while Serenity stayed in the swamp.
She looked ahead and saw something blink. It looked like Doom’s light glinting off something in the swamp.
No. She stepped to the side—avoiding the tree root this time—and the flickering light didn’t change. Orange, not white like a flashlight.
Someone had a fire up ahead.
Serenity stepped deeper into the woods as something slithered away from her.
Snakes, she thought. Snakes and spiders and… She put the thought aside and focused.
Making quiet progress through the edge of a swamp was slow. Much slower than the crashing of Doom and her light. By the time Serenity got close enough to see the fire clearly, Doom’s light was also clear, but through the woods behind her and off to the side.
At first, Serenity only saw the fire, which was in a small clearing on the edge of a watery part of the swamp. Two more steps, and she saw a figure slumped against a cypress root ten feet from the fire.
Joe. Head down. Dark spots on his shirt in the eerie orange-and-black firelight. Dark spots on his face. No movement.
She bit her lip to keep quiet and hold back her tears.
Then she heard Doom yelp somewhere behind her, and she jumped. More yelling from Doom, but Serenity waited. It was easy to follow the sounds and the light now as Doom was dragged into the firelight by a man in camo with a rifle in one hand and Doom in the other.
He threw her down at the fire. “Oh, shut the hell up.”
Doom kept yelling demands at him and Serenity silently agreed with him.
“Mr. Hammer,” Doom yelled when she saw Joe.
“Yep. For now. Gator food once I get done tenderizing him.” He hit Joe in the face with the butt of the rifle and Joe groaned.
Joe groaned! He was alive.
“Reckon he’s tender enough for ol’ Uncle Ernie. In any case, if there’s hikers like you out here, it’s time I let Ernie take care of him, and you, and get the hell out of Dodge.”
He walked to the edge of the water, to a log that extended from the bank out into the water. Then he picked up a stick the size of a baseball bat and began to hit the log in a slow rhythm.
“You ever see a trained gator, honey? He knows we don’t call him unless we’ve got something good for him. Two course meal tonight. He’ll take you both and tuck you under some tree root down in the deep, and let you age along with all your brothers and sisters he’s got out there. Or I guess, from his viewpoint, entrees and side dishes.”