John Miller - Too Far Gone

“Girls, let’s go see Aunt Janie,” Emily interposed.

“My sister was supposed to have her first communion Sunday,” Emma told Alexa. “I was going to wear a white dress, too, and watch her eat Jesus in front of everybody. Now I can’t because the church might get blown down.”

Madge nudged her little sister. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Emma.”

“I do too,” Emma said, nudging her sister playfully. “I’m going to be an FBI lady arrester when I grow up.”

“She is not,” Madge said to Alexa. “She’s just saying that because you’re one.”

Alexa told Emma, “You can be whatever you like.”

“Yesterday she was going to be a gymnast and get a gold medal,” Madge said. “And before that it was a nun and a teacher and a doctor and a high diver…”

Emma smiled. “When I’m an FBI, I’m going to arrest Madge and put her in jail for being mean to me.”

“That’s silly,” Madge said. “You can’t arrest your own sister.”

The words uttered by an innocent child shot through Alexa’s heart, and she felt her smile melt.

“Okay, girls,” Emily intervened. “Tell Agent Keen good-bye and go get your bags. We’ll leave you two to your work.” She kissed Michael on the lips before following the girls out.

“Something wrong?” Manseur asked Alexa. “You look like somebody just walked across your grave.”

“Nothing,” Alexa replied. “Just thinking about something. You have wonderful women around you.”

“I do at that,” he agreed.

She looked down at the phone numbers in front of her and fought to focus on them.

“They’re very competitive, my two. But they sure love each other,” Manseur commented.

Swallowing, she murmured, “Sisters can be very competitive.”

Alexa felt Manseur’s eyes on her, and she wondered if the detective knew what had happened between her and her sister. That she had arrested Antonia and charged her with a dozen serious federal crimes. She had no idea how widespread that particular knowledge was, because cops swapped more gossip than hairstylists.

Leland wasn’t a happy camper, because Doc had come up with yet another requested task, which was accompanied by a threat that he’d take back the new boat. While Doc was explaining how simple his transportation job was going to be, Leland was considering how he could beat the little jerk to death and let the crabs and gators handle the required disposal of his remains. It was just that simple, and ownership papers or not, he’d just keep the boat. Anybody showing up to take it away would be sorry.

Doc was still fussing with his fancy device, measuring with his roll-up ruler, fussing with this wire and that one and scurrying up and down the ladder here, moving it and climbing up into the rafters like a fussy little rat. He did remind Leland of a rat…or a nutria.

The man in the duct-tape suit moved his head once and Leland saw for himself that he was still alive. Leland found it puzzling how some people were so much harder to kill than others. This one was sort of fragile-looking, and he’d been hit hard enough to kill him outright, but here he was not dead.

Doc had been talking on the phone to the woman he was always talking to and making silly sounds and kissing the little phone after he closed it. Leland thought about the pipe he had in the boat that he used to bash critters that he found alive in his traps, and to finish off the garfish he caught before he threw them back in the water for gator food. Gars were useless as balls on a cow. You couldn’t eat them because there were so little meat and too many little bitty bones in them. Plus they ate other fish you could sell, their teeth were like straight pins, and they were mean little suckers.

Once, when Leland was a little boy, he had been sitting on the camp’s dock with his feet in the water, wiggling his toes, when a two-foot-long gar had taken a good bite on Leland’s foot. When Leland jerked his foot to free it, the gar flip-flopped so hard that some of the fish’s teeth broke off right in his foot. Worst part was the foot had gotten infected and, before his daddy finally decided to take him to a doctor, it turned black as a moonless night and the doctor almost had to cut it off. His daddy told the doctor to take it off, but the doctor wouldn’t do it just so Jacklan Ticholet could get back to his camp sooner.

Leland had hated gars since the day he was bitten. He enjoyed catching them and opening up their jaws and wedging a stick in there so they couldn’t ever close their mouths again and they starved on account of it. It was more satisfying than just killing them outright with the pipe. It gave the sneaky mean bastards something to think about while they died-knowing who had done it to them.

Leland sometimes thought about his daddy, who had been a swamper and moonshiner. Leland didn’t know anything about his real mama, because his daddy never talked about her but to say she was a slut who’d spread her legs for anybody she saw. His stepmother hadn’t been any better, and a drunk too.

Leland’s daddy had made him help out with fishing, crabbing, trapping, and making clear liquor from the time he was real little, and he’d learned everything by being hollered at and having the crap knocked out of him as they went about it. His daddy’s favorite thing was making, selling, and drinking moonshine. Leland couldn’t hardly remember a single time when his daddy wasn’t sipping from a jar or a milk jug.

If Leland’s daddy had to go to town, he’d leave Leland locked in the cabin while he was gone. Sometimes he came back when he said he would, but other times he would be gone days, till, stinking drunk, he’d come stumbling in, collapse on his bed, and snore like a mill saw. Sometimes when Leland was hungry his daddy would make him drink whiskey to help him forget about his empty stomach, but Leland never liked the taste or how it made him feel.

Leland grew up without going to any schools, but he knew everything there was to know about the swamp, the bayous, and the lakes around there. He knew where to find the things that you could sell and how to catch them, how to clean them, and how to cook what you needed to eat.

When his stepmother killed his daddy, Leland had taken his body to the landing and got Moody the store owner to call the sheriff to come and fetch his body, which was the last Leland had heard about that. The sheriff had gone to visit his stepmother. She told the sheriff truthfully she’d done it and explained it was self-defense. But of course the sheriff, who said he just needed to talk to her, put her right in jail. Leland had gone to her and his daddy’s place, picked out the things worth keeping, like the Nylon 66. 22 and some food, then he’d gotten in her hound dogs and a one-eared cat, and set that cabin full of critters on fire. That done, Leland motored out a ways so the heat didn’t hurt his skin and drank some moonshine in his daddy’s memory while he watched that cabin burn to the ground. He hadn’t done it because Alice Fay shot his daddy dead. He knew if she hadn’t shot him, he would have done it himself. He burned her cabin because he knew she’d figure out that he had gotten all his father’s goods instead of her.

He was fifteen then and he had waited for months, but nobody had come to take him away from his cabin, and so Leland just went on doing what he’d been taught to do, because there wasn’t anything else he knew how to do, or wanted to try. His father’s boat was one he’d traded liquor for, and when the motor got used up, Leland just went to a fishing camp when there weren’t any people around and stole a good one, which he painted black so it looked just like the old one he’d thrown off in the lake. He never got in trouble for doing that, so he figured rich people didn’t spend time looking for their missing motors, just bought another one.