Joanna Wayne - Alligator Moon

“You could be rich by now,” Dennis said. “Driving a Porsche, picking up high-class babes.”

“High-class babes don’t screw any better than poor ones, sometimes not as well. Besides, one successful Robicheaux is more than Beau Pierre ever expected to see.”

Dennis cracked his knuckles, a nervous habit he’d picked up from their grandfather. “I’m thinking of leaving Beau Pierre.”

The statement was the night’s first surprise and the first clue as to what had really prompted Dennis’s call. “I thought you and Guilliot were close as two crabs in a pot.”

“Guilliot’s all right. I just think it’s time I move on. Beau Pierre’s starting to feel more and more like one of Puh-paw’s old muskrat traps.”

“You didn’t knock up some local jolie fille, huh?”

“Nothing like that.” He stretched his legs under the scarred old table. “It’s just time I move on. That’s all.”

“You didn’t feel that way last time we talked.”

“Things change.”

“They changed real fast. This doesn’t have anything to do with losing a patient on the operating table, does it?”

Dennis choked on the beer he’d just swallowed, coughed a few times into his sleeve, then slammed his almost empty bottle onto the table. “You talking about Ginny Lynn Flanders?”

“Who else?”

“That wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t nobody’s fault. She just had a bad heart condition that had never been diagnosed. Guilliot’s gonna win that lawsuit easy.”

“I just asked.”

“Well, I just answered.”

Not honestly, John figured, judging from Dennis’s reaction. But he sure as hell wasn’t in a position to tell anyone how to live his life. “When will you be making the move?”

“Soon, but keep it quiet. I haven’t told Dr. Guilliot yet, and I want him to hear it from me first.”

“Good idea. Have you told anyone else?”

“Nobody I can’t trust. You ought to think about a change, too, John. You can’t live in that old trapper’s shack and avoid life forever.”

“I’m not avoiding.” He chased the lie with a swig of beer. “Where are you planning to go?”

“I’m thinking about Los Angeles. I got a buddy out there I went to medical school with. He says the field’s wide open. Lots of job opportunities and enough sun-bronzed hotties to make me forget my Cajun bellos.”

“Might not be as good as it sounds. The rules are different once you leave the bayou country. No buddies watching your back when the gators come after you.”

“I don’t think they have a lot of gators in Los Angeles.”

“Oh, they got ’em all right. Only the gators out there wear high-priced suits and designer shoes from Italy.”

“Maybe I won’t go that far.”

But he was going. John could tell the decision had been made. He’d liked to have asked more questions, but that wasn’t the type of relationship they had. He didn’t answer questions so he forfeited the right to ask them. Still, he hated to see Dennis leave town, especially if he was being driven out.

And that was a possibility he wouldn’t put past Norman Guilliot. “It’s your call, Dennis. Just make sure you’re the one doing the calling.”

The waitress stopped by their table again. “You want another beer?”

John looked at her again, letting his gaze take it all in, from the dark, straight hair that curved around her face and fell down the back of her neck to the perky breasts and hips that flared from the narrow waist.

She was a looker, and the way she was batting those eyes at Dennis, seemed like she might have changed her mind about wanting to party.

“Make mine a whiskey,” John said. His little brother was leaving town. Reason enough to hit the hard stuff.

DENNIS KEPT both hands on the wheel as he slowed and maneuvered the sharp turn. He shouldn’t be driving at all after so many beers, but it wasn’t far to the old house he’d rented from Guilliot’s nephew. Another mile or so and he’d be home.

His mind wandered back in time. Shrimping out in the bays with Puh-paw. And on Saturday nights Muh-maw would make the big pot of gumbo. And the stories Puh-paw would tell about trapping and hunting back in the good old days before there was such a thing as licenses and limits. They’d been terrific grandparents.

John and Dennis had different mothers; it didn’t matter much since Muh-maw and Puh-paw had raised them both anyways.

Dennis didn’t remember his parents at all. He’d been only two when their father had gone to jail up in Jefferson Parish. He’d never come home. He didn’t know that much about his mother. Muh-maw hadn’t let anyone mention her name in the house, but John had told him once that she’d run off with some guy from Lafayette.

Dennis nodded, then jerked his head backward, fighting sleep. He shouldn’t have taken those two pills back at Suzette’s, but he’d had a migraine the first part of the week and the thing was threatening to come back on him.

He gunned the engine, then threw on his brakes when he saw something lying across the road in front of him. The car left the pavement, skidded along the shoulder, then careened into the swamp before it finally came to a stop.

Dennis wasn’t sure what was on the road, but it had looked a lot like a body. Could be some drunk passed out walking home from a neighbor’s. Only there weren’t any houses along this stretch of road. He loosed his seat belt and opened the door. When he stepped out, his feet sank into a good six inches of water before being sucked into the mud. His good shoes, too.

He jerked at the sound of something swishing through the water behind him. A water moccasin? A gator? He spun around. Too late.

His head exploded, but Dennis never felt the pain or the blood and bits of brain spilling over his body. Never knew when he sank to the soggy swamp now red with his blood.

IT WAS HALF PAST EIGHT in the morning when Cassie padded to the front door of her fourth-floor condominium, stepped into the quiet hall and snagged her morning copy of the Times Picayune. She skimmed the headlines as she walked back to the kitchen for her first cup of coffee.

Drake and the Flanders case were beaten out for top billing by a three-car pileup on I-10, but they made honorable mention in smaller headlines about a third of the way down the page: Pierson Accuses Beau Pierre Sheriff Of Mishandling Evidence.

And whether he had or not—whether Drake believed he had or not—he could ride that horse for days. The bigger spectacle the pretrial hoopla, the less attention anyone actually paid to testimony or evidence once the trial itself got underway. And Drake was the master of spectacle.

Dr. Norman Guilliot was in for a fight.

Cassie dropped the paper to the kitchen table and poured the dark, chicory-laden brew into an oversize mug. But instead of taking it back to the table, she took it out on the balcony to watch the morning traffic of ferries, tug boats and barges along the muddy Mississippi.

The view from the balcony had been the factor that tipped the scale for buying this condo instead of the larger and more reasonably priced one on St. Charles Avenue. The view and the fact that she could walk the six blocks to work rather than take the streetcar.

She sipped her coffee and took in the sights. The ferry from Algiers to the foot of Canal Street passed a few yards in front of a slow-moving tanker heading downriver. A sleek cruise ship was docked at the River Walk and nearer the aquarium a much smaller boat was already loading tourists in shorts and sunglasses, their cameras around their necks and their cash stashed in fanny packs that hung under paunchy stomachs.

The activity was like a restless surge of energy, constantly moving, searching for the next bend in the river, the next port of call.