Black Widower Read online

  Joellen was just being generous by letting him run out to his old life. But her generosity had limits, he understood. A responsible daddy didn’t leave the house in the middle of the night to roll around with alligators in the primeval goo. It just wasn’t grown up, and Leonard knew it was time to put on his big boy pants and get with the goddam program. No more bars and beers and good old boy carousing. That silly shit was at its end. This was the new, mature Leonard Tare. The solid citizen.

  Hell, there was even talk of Leonard running for mayor, next year. He’d been approached already by two townsmen. They liked their war heroes to take a high profile in Plank, Louisiana.

  When he approached the property, he saw a car parked about thirty yards from his dock. Before he turned into the dirt road, Tare turned off his headlights and coasted slowly toward the shack.

  Goddam kids! The hell were they doing out here this late? Did they want to take up residence in this swamp permanently?

  Goddam teenagers. They needed to be taught a lesson.

  Chapter 18

  Leonard goes into the shack for his equalizer. He makes sure there are two loads in the breech. Then he decides that he might need a little insurance if it isn’t a party of punks out on the dock, so he goes into his locked trunk that is covered by blankets and junk and he opens it and retrieves his M-16 which was illegally appropriated on his way out of Vietnam. He grabs a clip and inserts it, and he takes two extra clips along, in case this might be a poacher situation.

  He’s had problems with swamp rats with two legs in the past, and he hopes history won’t repeat itself. Last time, he got in a very short firefight with three of them. But they were poorly armed with their daddy’s old twelve gauge, and the firefight lasted only thirty seconds or so, and the three teenaged poachers wound up with a load in each of their drawers.

  The cops came and took them away for criminal trespass. They all three got six months’ probation, and Tare hadn’t seen a hair of their dumb asses, since.

  He opened and closed the door quietly, behind him. He took his hunting flashlight with him. It usually helped to blind them first. It was his way of gaining the advantage. Of course the light gave them something to aim at, but they were usually so startled that the war was over before it began.

  He trod softly toward the dock, and the flashlight remained unlit. What light there was came from the half-moon overhead, in the west. It was fairly dim, but Tare could see his own feet.

  When he got to the land’s side of the pier, he heard some muffled noises. He kept moving.

  Then he clicked on the light and saw two figures. One was upright, and the other lay on the surface of the dock, motionless.

  “Who the hell are you, and why are you trespassing on my property?” Tare called out.

  The beam was centered on the eyes of the tall, wide man who stood at the pier’s end.

  “You better mind your own business, hillbilly.”

  “That isn’t very friendly. Especially from a trespasser who’s about to get his ass shot off.”

  Leonard raised the barrel of the M-16 toward the tall man.

  “Now wait a minute. I’m not armed.”

  “That’s unfortunate for you, pardner.”

  He raised his hands as if in surrender.

  “What’s wrong with your friend, down there?” Tare demanded.

  “She’s just a little carsick. I thought if we stopped and got some fresh air. You understand, don’t you?”

  The big man took a step forward, and Leonard sent a warning shot over his head that made the whole swamp erupt in a screeched cacophony.

  “Not another step, pardner,” the ex-Seal warned.

  “You got this all wrong.”

  “Why isn’t she moving?” Tare asked.

  “She might be a little sicker than I thought she was.”

  “You mean she might be dead.”

  “No! She’s fine. She just got sick and threw up in my goddam car, and now she’s passed out on me.”

  “Maybe I ought to come out and just see for myself. You better raise those hands where I can see them.”

  The other man raised his hands as if he knew the drill.

  Leonard approached slowly. When he got to the prone woman, he directed the beam at her face. The tall man stood three feet behind her, at the far end of the dock.

  When Leonard looked up again, he saw the barrel of the .38 pointed in his face, right at his nose.

  “You’ll want to drop the weapon. Softly, now.”

  Tare laid the M-16 gas operated assault rifle on the deck.

  “Shit,” he thought to himself. “Now I’m dead, too.”

  Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.

  “Stand up.”

  “You’re Skotadi.”

  “You recognize me?”

  “Never saw you before in my life. This must be your second wife, I’ll bet.”

  “You ought to be in Vegas, hillbilly.”

  “Don’t call me that again.”

  “I don’t see how you’re going to stop me, stump jumper.”

  “I’m not crazy about that one, either. They’ll be coming for you, naturally. They’ll find out this lady’s AWOL, they’ll finally try the scene of the crime, the first scene, I mean.”

  “This’ll be the last place they check. And by that time you two will have met the wild life in the water, back there.”

  “You think you understand the swamp, Skotadi?”

  “Don’t need to. It’ll figure things out, all by itself.”

  He raised the .38 at Leonard Tare’s noggin.

  “I recognize you, hillbilly boy. Saw your picture in the paper. Saw you with the Big Man Himself in D.C. All fame is fleeting, cracker. Say hello for me in hell.”

  Tare heard the pistol being cocked.

  Leonard heard them in the water.

  “That’s an unhealthy place to be standing, Mister Skotadi.”

  “Your concern is heartwarming.”

  “They can move awful fast, pardner.”

  Tare heard the gentle sloshing sound, out on the swamp.

  “They can be on you before you have time to turn around.”

  “In a moment you won’t have to be so goddamned concerned about my welfare.”

  “I ain’t, Skotadi. I’m a little worried about that gal, lyin’ there.”

  There was a faint grunt, and it seemed to be getting closer to the end of the dock where the man with the pistol stood.

  “You’d better move, pardner.”

  Skotadi raised the pistol and pointed it flush at Tare’s head.

  The grunting got louder, and the tall man was about to turn, but he swiveled back to Leonard Tare.

  “War hero,” he spat at Tare.

  “Are you deaf, fool?”

  There was a churning noise behind the man with the pistol, and Skotadi finally yanked himself around.

  It came out of the water like a gray-black bolt of fury, and it had Skotadi by his top half, and the man screamed like a rabbit in the talons of a hawk, and the gator pulled him down into the water in a blur, and there was a small surge of swamp that erupted onto the dock.

  Then he was gone. He was swallowed into the murk, and all that remained was the gentle sound of sloshing swamp water.

  Another beast rose out of the water and was headed toward the prone woman.

  Tare grabbed his weapon from the pier and triggered a burst from the M-16 that blew the creature back into the bayou.

  The swamp came alive with primal bellowing and screeching, and he figured he’d caught the gator more than once. It sank back into the water noisily, and Tare wasn’t about to check if it had gone belly-up.

  He dragged Skotadi’s wife or whoever she was back to the truck, and he picked her limp body up and hoisted her into the cab, sitting her upright as best he could. She slumped against the passenger’s door after he closed it.

  When he got in himself, he checked and felt for a pulse. It was slight, but it was there. And he could fe
el just a trace of her breath against his fingers when he put them beneath her nostrils.

  He started the truck up, laid a strip on the blacktop when he backed up, and then he burned some more rubber bulleting down the deserted highway.

  The closest hospital was thirty miles outside of Plank in a small town called Beaumont. It was more of a clinic than a hospital, but it was the only place Leonard could think of to take her. When he got her inside, they weren’t set up for anything like this pretty woman who couldn’t even blink her eyes.

  So they put her in their only ambulance and sent her to Jefferson Parish, where there was a full-grown facility, a real hospital. Leonard, of course, went along for the ride.

  *

  The State Police and Jimmy Parisi and his partner Doc Gibron, whose real name was Harold, Tare learned, all showed up in Jefferson, about eighty minutes after they got Carrie Skotadi to the hospital. Tare was amazed that Parisi and his partner showed up as quickly as they had, and then he heard about the Lear jet that was costing Chicago a fortune.

  “Now your boss won’t have your ass,” Leonard smiled at the two Chicago cops.

  The doctor came out and said they’d figured out the drug that had induced the paralysis. It was an exotic potion called curare, he said. Headhunters in the Amazon used it on their poisoned arrowheads and on their spears.

  “She would’ve seen them tearing her up,” Leonard said.

  The doctor only nodded.

  “Terrible,” the ER man said. “What kind of animal would do a thing like this?”

  “His name means ‘darkness,’” Parisi said.

  The physician shook his head and walked away from the three men.

  *

  Leonard was there when Carrie Skotadi regained use of her arms and legs, but she’d be in the hospital for a while. Mostly, she’d need some counseling, the psychiatric kind, Tare learned.

  He drove back home to Joellen. He’d been on the phone with her constantly, and now he was out of change. It was time to be with her again, in the flesh.

  *

  There was no trace of Derek Skotadi for the Louisiana State Police to recover. The gator that took him never surfaced, and they dragged the bayou for its carcass, but nothing was ever found. The local alligator hunters tried to bag the one that killed the Vice cop, but when they slit open their catches, nothing slithered out that had been human.

  Leonard Tare had retired from the business. His property went up for sale on a Monday, one week later.

  Chapter 19

  I’m real wary of getting myself too deeply involved with Jackie Bishop. We have a lot of fun together, but that first dumping made me a bit leery of her. She seems like she’s on a steady keel, but I won’t be buying her a ring any time soon, and she hasn’t been hinting about going up to a higher level in the relationship.

  Our caseload is overloaded, as always, but at least Skotadi is off the board. There was no body to bring back to the city, of course, but I’ll take Leonard Tare’s word that the Vice dick is not among the living. You would think his wounds were a bit too grievous for him to have survived.

  But I’d still like the physical evidence so we could truly put that son of a bitch to rest.

  Leonard calls me, two weeks later.

  “She’s gone, and I don’t think she’s coming back. Ever.”

  “Who, Leonard?”

  “Jennifer. Skotadi’s first wife. The foggy lady who used to be camped out on my dock.”

  “You mean that thing you saw hasn’t come back?”

  “I been out there three times since Skotadi got himself served as dinner. Not a sign of her. She’s headed out for parts unknown, Detective.”

  “I suppose that’s good news.”

  “I’m selling the property, and it ought to be a little easier without her hanging around anymore.”

  He tells me about the Academy and about how big his wife Joellen’s getting, and I wish him luck and tell him to keep in touch. Then we hang up.

  I feel compelled to make this last stop. I come alone because I don’t want Doc supposing that I’ve gone all superstitious or spiritual or supernatural on him.

  Skotadi’s house has a for sale sign out front, and I have no idea who put it up. Perhaps the bank foreclosed on him when no one made payments. I don’t know the particulars.

  But I brought along my own magic bag of B & E tools. I’ve watched Doc pop enough locks illegally, and I think I picked up the talent for it. It’s another sin of mine that I’ll have to settle in confession.

  I come over here at dark because things like this are always better carried out at night.

  I’m in in a matter of seconds, and you can tell the place is vacant just by the scent and by the silence.

  I make a beeline for the bathroom and the shower stall, and I find nothing inside. There’s not a wisp of fog. Nothing.

  After a while, I leave. I’m convinced that whatever it was supposed to have been has gone ‘to parts unknown,’ just as Leonard Tare explained. The haunt is over.

  Everyone’s just where they should be.

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