Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 02 - Skeletons of the Atchafalaya (8 page)

Why would he have done that? That was the question.
On the other hand, why did he pick up the screwdriver?
Was he deliberately trying to smudge the prints, or was he
indeed trying to help, however clumsily? Perhaps he poisoned himself out of guilt for murdering his own father.

I paused outside Ozzy’s room. Reluctantly, I opened the
door and flipped on the light. A scurry of movement on the
nightstand caught my attention. A dozen two-inch-long water roaches scrabbled off the partially eaten ham sandwich.
I shivered. I hated cockroaches, noting with satisfaction that
a couple of the prehistoric creatures had drowned in the
half glass of Jim Beam. I studied the room once again,
hoping for a flash of intuition, or perhaps even divine revelation.

Nothing.

The same in A.D.‘s room.

Frustrated, I went back downstairs and climbed back up on the kitchen table. With a sigh, I closed my eyes and
thought back over my years with Blevins’ Investigations
back in Austin. I tried to remember all to which I had been
exposed. I knew my limitations as a private investigator. I
didn’t possess the instincts of Al Grogan, the top sleuth in
my boss’s stable of P.I.‘s back in Austin. I was becoming
more perceptive. After five years, I had to be. But, I wasn’t
in Al’s class.

One truth Al had taught me was that there is one unequivocal, indisputable, incontestable fact. Evidence does
not lie. It cannot be intimidated. It does not forget. It
doesn’t get excited. It doesn’t get bored. It simply sits and
waits to be detected, preserved, evaluated, and explained.

Witnesses may lie, lawyers may lie, judges may lie, but
not evidence. The last thought in my head as I drifted off
into a restless slumber was that I had to gather enough
evidence so that when it was interpreted, it would point to
the killer.

And if nothing else, I thought, I’ll e-mail all the evidence
to Al Grogan and sit back and wait for Austin’s own Sherlock Holmes to provide me the answer.

Slowly, I became aware of a hand on my shoulder, shaking me gently. Then a husky voice broke into my dreams.
“Tony, Tony.”

I jerked awake and stared up at Uncle Henry Broussard.
The deeply furrowed wrinkles in his sun-browned face reflected his apprehension. Outside, the gray light of morning
had replaced the darkness of night.

“What? What?”

In his lyrical Cajun dialect, he explained. “The radio in
the parlor, I listen. The storm, Belle, she is moving to Category Three. She be coming ashore later this morning west
of Marsh Island.” He paused, his face grim.

I listened to the storm whistling around the house, rattling the windows, from time to time sending slight tremors
through the house itself. “Marsh Island?”

He nodded.

“For sure?”

He nodded again.

I sat up. “That means it’ll come straight this way.” I did
a few fast calculations in my head. From the coast to here
would take about six or seven hours for the eye, and then
about that long again for the last of the wind to pass.
Twelve to fourteen hours longer, plus the surge.

Without warning, the lights flickered momentarily, grew
brighter, then went out completely. Uncle Henry and I
stared at each other in the dim light.

I looked in the direction of the generator shed. “The generator. Something’s gone wrong with it.”

Leroi stepped into the kitchen. “The freezer stopped.
What happened to the lights?”

“The generator.” I banged the heel of my hand against
my forehead. “It must be out of gas. Why didn’t I think of
that? It’s been running since yesterday afternoon.”

I jumped from the table and hurried to the door. All the
doors were shuttered and held in place with two-by-fours.
I reached for one, but Uncle George stopped me. “It’s too
bad out there, Tony. The wind‘11 knock you off your feet.”

“The generator is out of gas, Uncle George. That’s why
the lights went off. We’ve got to refuel it.”

For a moment, he stared blankly at me. Then he nodded
and opened the door.

The four of us, George, Henry, Leroi, and I stepped outside and caught the impact of the violent wind. It rocked
us on our feet.

George leaned close to me. “We’ll never make the generator shed in this wind and rain.”

“We have to,” I yelled.

Leroi shouted into the screaming wind, “Let’s go under
the house. Through the storage rooms. There’s a door on the
south side. It’s closer to the shed. Find some flashlights.”

Water was ankle deep in the dark storage rooms beneath
the house. I remembered my alligator boots. For a moment,
I hesitated, trying to shove the price of the boots from my
mind. Either that, Tony, or go barefoot, I told myself. Some
choice.

I clenched my teeth and stepped into the water. I kept
the beam of my light on the water ahead of me as we waded
toward the south door. I hoped my boots wouldn’t encourage a family reunion of their own.

George’s voice trembled when he spoke. “You-you
think there’s some snakes down here in all this water?”

I forced a laugh. “I doubt it. Probably all the alligators
ate them.”

Leroi groaned. “Thanks a lot, Tony.”

Henry snapped, “You boys, you hush up. Pay attention.”

The shelves were jammed with odds and ends, those useless items that you can’t bear to throw away, but that you’ll
never again use. I paid them little attention. I was more
concerned watching the water at my feet for snakes and
hungry alligators.

From the south door, we squinted through the horizontal
sheets of rain. The generator shed was barely visible.

Uncle Henry laid his hand on my shoulder. “Take this,
Tony.” He handed me the end of a cotton rope. “I find a
spool of it on the shelf. You boys is stronger than me and
George. We’ll stay here and feed out the rope. You tie it
off at the shed. That way, you don’t get lost on the way
back.”

Leroi and I looked at each other. He nodded. “You noticed Uncle Henry didn’t say we were smarter, only
stronger.”

I shrugged. “We’re the ones going out there, aren’t we?
He must be right,” I replied, remembering a hurricane when
I was a teenager. The rain literally engulfed us. I couldn’t
see Grandpa’s old pickup six feet away in the driveway.
While this storm wasn’t that bad yet, it would get that way,
especially if the eye came through here.

I stuck the flashlight in my pocket.

Leroi wrapped the rope around his wrist several times
and then we plunged into the storm, me leading the way,
Leroi holding onto my belt.

I’d heard the old folks talk about the peculiar sounds
generated by a great storm. They were right.

The wind wailed like a great beast in its death throes,
piercing my ears with deafening shrieks. The howls came
from every direction, punctuated by the sharp cracks of
snapping limbs. It reminded me of the unearthly screams I
had always imagined Grendel’s mother made when Beowulf cut off her head with a sword forged by the gods.

The rain battered us from every direction, sending us
stumbling and sliding to our knees, stinging our faces.
Clinging to each other, we managed one step at a time until
we reached the metal shed housing the generator.

The door was partially open, and when I threw it back,
a five-foot alligator lunged at me.

My heart lurched into the heart-attack range. With a
scream, I threw myself backward into Leroi, kicking out
with my boot at the same time. “Alligator, alligator,” I
yelled, hitting the ground and rolling over and over, at each
moment expecting to feel the gator’s jaws close about my
foot. I remember thinking that at least I wore my boots. I
prayed his teeth couldn’t penetrate the leather, even though
I knew better.

I struggled to my feet and hastily looked about me. There
was no sign of the reptile.

Now, a five-foot alligator isn’t all that fearsome, not with
about half of him being made up by tail, but when suddenly, without warning, four feet away, he’s staring you in
the face in the middle of a hurricane with his jaws agape,
all you can think about is vacating the premises as fast as
possible.

Suddenly, Leroi appeared out of the rain. I jumped and
screamed again.

“Hey, it’s me. Only me.”

I closed my eyes and dropped my chin to my chest. “You
scared the dickens out of me.”

“What was that all about back there? What happened?”

He was standing only a couple inches from me. I shouted
into the rain. “Alligator. You didn’t see it?”

His eyes grew wide. He yelled. “Don’t lie to me, Tony.
I’m scared to death of alligators. This is no time for jokes.”

Sweat mixed with the rain coursing down my face, stinging my eyes. The attack had shaken me. “Hey, I’m not
kidding. When I opened that door, he was standing on his
tiptoes ready to go.”

Leroi looked around hastily. “Where he is then? You
think he went back in the shed?”

Tentatively, I eased toward the open door, planning on
keeping it between me and the interior of the shed. “We’ll
find out,” I yelled above the howling of the wind.

Leroi grabbed my belt, hugging up against my back. I
slapped his hand away. “Listen, if I start running, you better
not be in my way.”

“You don’t worry about me,” he shouted back. “You
move one muscle, and I’m back up on the veranda.”

At least we understood each other. I kept my eyes on the
ground ahead of me. Best I could tell, all that lay before
me was ankle-deep water.

I reached for the edge of the door and on tiptoe, peered
around it, expecting to see the aggressive little alligator
defending the shed. All I saw was water. “I don’t see him.”

“Be sure.”

“How can I be sure?” I looked around at Leroi. “He isn’t
in the doorway, but he could have gone back inside.” I had
forgotten all about the flashlight in my pocket. The only
explanation I had for forgetting was that when that alligator
jumped at me, my short-term memory outran my feet to
the door.

Leroi muttered.

“What did you say?”

“I said I sure wished I was back in Opelousas.”

With a rueful grin, I replied, “I sure wish I was back in
Opelousas too.”

He laid his hand on my arm. “Let me up there. I got an
idea.”

He stepped around me and yanked on the rope. George
and Henry played it out. Leroi rolled up several loops, then
tossed them into the dark interior of the shed.

“What are you doing?” I shouted.

“Spooking him out.”

“With a cotton rope?”

He looked around at me in disgust. “You got a better
suggestion?”

I studied the situation a moment. With a shrug, I said,
“Throw the rope.”

He did. Three more times.

“Nothing happened,” I shouted.

“I’ll try again.”

Six more times we tossed the loops back into the shed.
Nothing.

“Maybe we’re okay,” I said into Leroi’s ear.

He nodded, stepping around the door and easing forward.
“I’ll feel around the corner for a light switch.”

“Be careful.” I stayed right at his back. Then it dawned
on me that the light switch would do no good since the
generator wasn’t running.

Before I could stop Leroi, he felt around the corner, running his hand up and down the wall. Suddenly, he screamed
and jerked his hand back. “Snake, snake, snake!”

Leroi stumbled backward, slinging his arm, trying to dislodge the black water snake slithering down it.

Believe it or not, my cousin actually levitated.

Impossible? Well, there was no other explanation as to
how one second he was in front of me, and half a second
later he was ten feet away, and that tiny water snake was
hanging in midair in front of my face.

I promptly levitated in the other direction.

The snake splashed down in the water and slithered into
the storm, probably relieved to have escaped two idiots
throwing ropes around.

Uncle Henry shouted from the house. “You boys all
right?”

Leroi shook his head. “I’m not going in that shed.”