Gator Aide Read online

  “YOU KNOW WHAT, SANTOU?

  “Until I find out there isn’t a tie-in between this dead gator and your dead hooker, I’m taking it for granted that there is—and I’m going to find out what it is. Until then, don’t even consider telling me how to do my job.”

  I shoved my way past the crowd of cops, but Santou caught up with me as I reached the door.

  “Hold on, Rachel. I don’t come up against much of this wildlife stuff. But you’re right. It’s your job, and if I was out of line, I apologize.”

  I didn’t comment as he shifted from one foot to the other.

  “What say we pool our information? You poke your nose around and learn something, you tell me, and I’ll do the same by you. Maybe you’re right—maybe there is a tie-in here.”

  “What makes you think I could possibly have access to any information you might want in my little old wildlife job?”

  Santou arched an eyebrow, acknowledging the dig. “Chère, you strike me as a wolverine. You got something in your craw, you won’t let it go till you’re good and ready. I’m placing odds it’s better to have you as an ally than an enemy.”

  I liked that.

  GATOR AIDE

  A Rachel Porter Mystery

  JESSICA SPEART

  To my husband, who believed in my dream.

  Thanks go to Ken Goddard for his help, encouragement, and quirky sense of humor, to Jo Tyler for her insightful eye; and to all the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service special agents who continue to fight against the odds.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author.

  Copyright © 1997 by Jessica Speart

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law or with the prior written permission of the author.

  Inside cover author photo by George Brenner

  Cover design by Pickle Group (http://www.picklegroup.com)

  eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  Published by the author

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-93010

  ISBN: 0-380-79288-5 (paperback)

  First Avon Books Printing: September 1997

  Contents

  Teaser

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Thanks

  Copyright Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  One

  The marsh air hung hot and heavy, providing the perfect breeding ground for a battalion of mosquitoes that dive-bombed my body as if it were a fast-food stop. The wooden seat of the boat added further to my discomfort, biting through my pants and into my skin, while the humidity permeated my shoes and clothing to lodge solidly in my bones. Closing my eyes against the darkness of a lazy overdue dawn, I let my mind wander, bringing homespun memories of the angry honk of horns, the persistent shriek of fire engines, and the relentless racket of garbage trucks clattering down streets like heavily armored tanks. Taking a deep breath, I filled my lungs with the gas emissions and stench of New York City. But in my heart I knew better. I was stuck in a pirogue in the marshes of southern Louisiana, listening to the demented cries of nutria—fifteen-pound rodents that would have been taken for overgrown rats in New York. Shrieking like women gone mad, they led the chorus as the marsh became alive with the sounds and sights of ducks, egrets, ibis, and herons. It was the start of another steamy day.

  Sitting in the small wooden boat, I tried to remember lines from off-Broadway plays, bit parts in soap operas, even the occasional commercial I’d been in that had somehow brought my life around to this, when I finally heard the sound I’d been waiting for. BOOM! The blast of a shotgun in the distance, followed by another volley reverberating in the morning air. Paddling through tall cordgrass, I tried to follow its echo, but a black Labrador saved me the trouble. Crashing through weeds and water, intent on finding its prey, the dog barely gave me a second glance as it picked up the duck in its mouth and, with a dumb smile plastered on its face, headed back to its master, anxious for a few words of praise. I was certain the dog had to be a female.

  Hidden away in the intricately woven one-man blind sat Billy Paul Cochrain. We had met under similar circumstances before. Dressed in camouflage fatigues and a duckbilled cap, he was just reaching for the duck when he caught sight of my boat and looked up to see me watching his every move. He quickly pulled back his hand.

  “Ain’t my duck.”

  Once again I had blown it. Worse yet, Billy Paul knew it, too, as the same stupid grin that the Lab wore now spread across his face. He patted the dog on the head as it insistently tried to ply him with the dead bird.

  “Jennifer, I keep telling you to leave them ducks alone.” He chuckled as he pushed the offering away.

  A female. I knew it.

  I’d been based in southern Louisiana for six months now. It was my first assignment as a full-fledged special agent for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. If I had known what I was getting into, I might have stayed in New York City with my defunct career as an actress. But at thirty-four years of age, you begin to panic. Not that far off from thirty-five, then forty, and finally menopause. I had thought it was time for a life change. My name is Rachel Porter, New York City born and bred.

  “What we do now, Porter?”

  Billy Paul grinned at me like an imbecile. I was asking myself the same question.

  “You wanna take me in?”

  I sighed deeply, thinking of the last time this had happened. It had been my first run-in with the senior resident agent, who also happens to be my boss, Charlie Hickok. I had hauled Billy Paul in, proudly presenting him to Charlie as my first bona fide poacher, and then waited for a few words of praise.

  “You got the ducks?” Charlie asked, as he tilted his body back into a chair that creaked in protest against his 235 pounds.

  One sad duck loaded with enough birdshot to resemble a piece of Swiss cheese had been my total body of evidence.

  Hickok shook his head in disgust. “That’s it? Then you ain’t got him. Don’t bring me any more of these puny, dumb-ass, nitty-picky cases wasting my time like I got nothin’ else better to do.”

  Billy Paul’s face had lit up like a jack-o’-lantern with a candle stuck inside as Charlie waved him out the door.

  “You just learned your first lesson here, Bronx. One duck out of season ain’t worth the trouble it takes to write it up.” I hated it when he called me Bronx. Charlie knew that. I had carefully explained that I’m from Manhattan, but he didn’t much care.

  Glaring at Billy Paul now as I tried to wrest the duck from the Lab’s mouth, I could see that he’d just begun his morning round of hunting. There would be no other ducks inside his boat.

  “This is a warning, Billy Paul. The next time I catch you, I’m hauling you in.”

  “Anything you say, ma’am.” Still grinning, he rowed away, with Jennifer splashing in the water after him.

  The only thing I hated worse than being called Bronx was being referred to as “ma’am.” It made me feel older than I wanted to be. I’d learned a lot in my first six month
s here. I’d finally discerned that even when you catch someone red-handed, hunting an obscene number of ducks far over the legal limit, it didn’t mean they were going to jail. It would have been mind-boggling if they even received a fine. Southern Louisiana meant dealing with country parishes, which meant local judges, small-town district attorneys, and rural lawyers. If they weren’t related in some way to the defendant, it didn’t much matter. The local lawyer won every case anyway. It was easy. They were all fixed.

  Hauling the pirogue onto land, I dragged it into the weeds before jumping into my VW bug and heading off. Pink fingers of light jabbed into the blue of receding night as I bumped along a rutted road badly in need of repair. I had thought New York City streets were rough until driving down here.

  Considered a demon speedster by friends and family alike, I was at home with my hand on the horn, daring taxis to pass me. While the West Side Highway is considered a motorist’s nightmare, I knew most of the potholes that never got fixed. A New Yorker’s badge of pride comes with being able to drive from Fourteenth Street to the George Washington Bridge while keeping their car in one piece—unlike outsiders, who hit hole after hole, knocking out tires and denting frames. City kids lie in wait for the uninitiated to pull off the road, where cars are stripped with such speed and fury that the owners are barely even aware of what’s happened. This was general knowledge, and something I had been smug about all my life. No ruse could get the better of me—until I hit Louisiana and learned firsthand how it felt to be a greenhorn. Down here, road signs are considered unnecessary and directions given are as marginal as my grandmother’s recipes.

  My secondhand car didn’t help. Taken in by appearances, I had thought it seemed too good to be true when I stumbled across it for sale. An inveterate bargain hunter, I was sure I had lucked into the steal of the century. I had. A large chunk of my hard-earned savings was legitimately stolen by the slickest car dealer south of New York City. My turquoise car was quickly turning to rust. But the major problem was the stick shift. Namely, that I’d never driven one before. Since buying the VW, which had 125,000 miles on the odometer before my foot even touched the pedal, my life had become a series of double clutches. I was a big-city rube, no two ways about it. After a night of sitting on a hard plank of wood in the middle of the water, my car, with its bad springs and thinly padded seat, offered little consolation. But I’d had a tip on some illegal duck hunting that might be taking place near Des Allemandes this morning. Besides, I needed to dry out for a while.

  My life hadn’t always been like this. After a twelve-year romance with an acting career that had lurched along almost as badly as my VW, I’d spent five months as a wildlife inspector at JFK Airport. It seemed I had the right qualifications for the job. None. Just two weeks of training was all that was needed. I had envisioned sifting through passengers’ souvenirs while ferreting out wildlife contraband. Instead, I found myself digging through boxes of snakes and lizards on cold, dirty warehouse floors and clearing shipments of tropical fish to be rushed to the nearest pet store.

  I had known there would be a problem when I decided to quit acting: what to do with my life now? Tired of worrying about frizzy hair while competing against every other actress in New York to sell GLAD Wrap, I had begun to cringe at the thought of one more audition where I was expected to be younger, shorter, prettier than I ever had been or ever could be. The relief of no longer turning myself inside out to deal with the demands of agents and casting directors was almost more than I could handle. I nose-dived into a three-month depression that found me spending my days at the Bronx Zoo, eating box after box of Crackerjacks. Twenty pounds, three months, one boyfriend, and two shrinks later, I discovered that what I related to best were animals. But I still needed a challenge, something in which my competitive nature would know no bounds. I found my calling one night watching an Audubon special on TV that focused on the illegal wildlife trade, and one man’s exploits in fighting it—Charlie Hickok, Fish and Wildlife agent extraordinaire. This was what I aspired to be. I figured after all my years of dealing with the horrors of showbiz, taking on the poachers of the world would be a breeze.

  Five months into the job as a wildlife inspector, I applied for special agent, and after sixteen weeks of hard training at the Academy in Glynco, Georgia, I was rewarded by making the grade. At the time, I could think of little else than my good luck. Even better, I had been immediately granted the posting I’d requested—to work under Charlie Hickok in Slidell, Louisiana.

  “Good luck, kid. You’re gonna need it,” were the parting words of the agent who handed me my ticket. At the time, I hadn’t known what he meant.

  I found the field near Des Allemandes that I’d been searching for. Scattered with rice and a few inches of water, it was the perfect poacher’s situation, with a levee providing near total concealment for hunters. Parking my VW out of sight, I made my way to the field, hunkering down low. The last thing I needed to do was surprise a group of angry rednecks with little tolerance for wildlife officers, who would dare tell them what they could or could not shoot. A female agent had recently been killed by a hunter who disagreed with her on the matter. I wasn’t bucking to notch the number to two.

  At six o’clock in the morning, the heat was already pressing down, a hot iron on the board of land below. Geese were swarming in like locusts, settling among the tall water grass to feed on grain for the coming of winter. I let my mind traipse across the water, wondering what I would be doing right now if I were anywhere but here, when six figures suddenly rose out of nowhere, their rifles trained on the unsuspecting flock. All hell broke loose as the men fired convulsively into the crowd, making it impossible to distinguish between the cries of the geese and the continuous gunfire that roared as if war had just broken out. The still-dark sky grew darker as the birds rose en masse in an attempt to fly away, but carcasses tumbled back to earth as fast and furious as the rain that tore loose from storm clouds above. The hunters reloaded quickly after each round, and the mingling of gunfire and honks of fear ripped through the air with all the fury of thunder. Flapping in the field, crippled geese frantically struggled to get away from the men, who now ran in after them, shooting until they had no more ammunition left, only to continue the carnage by wringing the necks of those birds they could reach. A battleground of dead and dying littered the field as a haze of gunpowder burned through my lungs. More than anything, I wanted to run out, flash my badge, and haul the poachers in. But I knew that would accomplish little more than to leave Louisiana one less wildlife agent to contend with. The state’s unofficial motto flashed in my brain like a neon sign gone berserk: “If it flies, it dies. If it flies, it dies.” Not only anything that flies, but also walks, swims, or crawls is considered fair game. Furious at being able to do nothing, I set out to at least make their escape more difficult. Drawing near the other side of the levee, I found two dented pickup trucks half-hidden in a group of cypress trees. Pulling out my Swiss Army knife, I carefully slashed each tire, taking the time to write down the license plate numbers before leaving. I had hoped the gesture would make me feel better. Instead, I felt as impotent as the geese that had tried to fly away.

  This was duck patrol. It had been my assignment since the day I landed in Louisiana. It wasn’t just the fact that Charlie Hickok was out to make life miserable for every waterfowl poacher around—he was also out to get rid of me. That I was not what he had expected was painfully obvious from my first day on the job.

  “Goddamn! I ask for a man, and they send me a goose. What the hell am I supposed to do with some city girl?”

  What he had done was to stick me out in the marshes day and night. Whenever I set foot in the office, my presence was announced by a series of dude calls that emanated from whereabouts unknown. I had been warned that women agents were few and far between, viewed only as necessary quotas to be filled. Like everything else in this world, breaking down barriers to notoriously male-dominated jobs was no Virginia Slims ad. But I had come
to learn that Charlie Hickok was a name feared by both trainees and seasoned agents alike, while a posting to his station was generally reserved for those viewed as dispensable. More agents had resigned under Charlie Hickok than in all the rest of Fish and Wildlife combined. It was enough of a challenge to make me stay.

  The windshield wipers on my car fought the downpour of rain, nearly blotting out the bullet-riddled signs for Nehi that dotted the countryside like giant gumdrops. Pulling into the first convenience store along the road, I placed a call to the local office of Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. They had the manpower available to pick up the hunters if they felt so inclined. The problem lay in the fact that, more often than not, that wasn’t the case. The phone rang ten times before someone finally bothered to answer.

  “Yeah?”

  “If you head on over to Lac Des Allemandes, you’ll find six poachers with about two hundred dead geese.” Giving the officer a description of the pickup trucks and their license plate numbers, I found myself listening to dead silence on the other end.

  “I don’t think they’ll get too far anytime soon. Their tires have all been slashed.”

  The silence deepened as I beat my nails against the mouthpiece before finally receiving a reply.

  “Just who is this?” requested a deep Southern voice.

  I had a feeling their office didn’t get too many of these calls. First of all, I didn’t sport the local accent. Even more suspicious, I was a woman.

  “Merely a concerned citizen.”

  I hung up and headed back out into the rain. Times were hard in Louisiana, and, as usual, graft was rampant. Priding itself on having more poachers per capita than anywhere else in the U.S., Louisiana considers outlawing a time-honored tradition, just as much as down-home politics is a way of life. All a poacher needed was to be a registered voter, have a quarter, and pick up a pay phone, and any hunting charges would soon enough be dropped. I’d already been told it was crazy to try and fight the system. That had only intrigued me all the more.