Ida Belle got us to Number Two in record time. I could have had my eyes closed and known when we were within a hundred yards of the stinky island. Ida Belle had explained that the mud here was different from everywhere else and that was the source of the stink, but I was still skeptical. I had a feeling that a geological search would find a portal into hell somewhere nearby and that was the real source of the stomach-turning odor.
But the fish loved it. So the fisherman loved it.
Where there were fish, there were alligators, but since it had rained this morning, the water was still cloudy, and I didn’t spot any of our dangerous friends on the slope we used to dock the boat. There weren’t any other boats, either, but Cecil could have easily pulled his boat into the weeds and waded up the bank in a multitude of places around the island.
Ida Belle guided the boat up the slope and I tied it to a tree in case the tide came in before we got back. Ida Belle pointed to the trail to Cecil’s camp and we headed out. It wasn’t a very long hike, but it did present some challenges in the form of our reptilian friends. Alligators could be lurking in any of the tall grass, and sometimes you were on top of them before you knew it. If they felt threatened, they might charge rather than retreat. Normally, we’d talk a lot while walking through swamp grass because usually the gators would head off if they heard people. But we didn’t want to alert Cecil that we were coming, so we walked silently and very carefully, which made passage slower than usual.
We were a good ten minutes into the walk when Ida Belle drew up short and pointed to the roof of a structure peeking up over a clump of trees. I nodded and took point and we crept down the trail, keeping our eyes and ears open for any sign of Cecil. But so far, only the sound of the water hitting a bank off to my right and our own footsteps broke into the silence.
The marsh grass grew shorter the closer we drew to the camp, and eventually, we couldn’t squat anymore or we’d have been crawling. We made a dash for the trees behind the camp and ducked behind the brambles surrounding them. I inched to the side and peered around. There was one window on the back of the structure, and it was only a short twenty-foot sprint from where I was standing.
I signaled to Ida Belle and Gertie that I was going to make a run for it, then took off. I slid to a stop in the loose dirt behind the camp, then flattened myself against the wall under the window. At first, I couldn’t hear anything, then I made out movement inside. Feet shuffling across the wooden floor, a cup being placed on a counter. I gave Ida Belle and Gertie a thumbs-up and headed around the corner to the front door to confront Sinful’s latest disappearing citizen.
Cecil was standing on a screened front porch when I walked around the corner. He took one look at me and his eyes widened, then he glanced around, obviously looking for a way to flee. There were windows on the side of the camp and the one on the back, but things had a tendency to rust and fail out in the salt air and those windows were definitely the old kind. The odds that they even opened anymore were low. And even if they did, he had a good fifteen-foot drop to the ground, and I doubted he was in good enough shape to make that unscathed.
I must have been right with my speculation, because his shoulders slumped and he sighed.
“What do you want?” he asked as Ida Belle and Gertie emerged to stand beside me.
“Gina’s worried about you,” Ida Belle said.
“Gina needs to tend to her own life and stop wasting time on me,” he said.
“The police are looking for you,” I said.
“So let them look,” he said. “I’ll tell you the same thing I would tell them—I don’t know anything about Benoit’s death.”
“Someone saw you at the motel the night he died,” I said. “A stranger, who positively ID’d you and your vehicle.”
His cheek twitched and his eyes shifted slightly.
“Then that stranger is lying,” he said. “I played cards and went home when I lost my money. Didn’t go anywhere else.”
“Cecil, there are other suspects,” I said. “Maybe you confronted Brock, but he was alive after you left. If you saw someone else, you might be able to clear your name.”
“How the heck would I see someone when I wasn’t there?” he asked. “Now leave me alone.”
He stomped inside the camp, slamming the door behind him.
“Should we call Carter?” Ida Belle asked. “It was one thing to talk to him before, but now that there’s a warrant…”
I sighed. “I know.”
I stared at the camp for a bit, weighing my options, which were pretty much slim and none. Finally, I pulled my phone out.
“He’s lying,” I said. “He was at the motel.”
“But that doesn’t mean he’s the one who hit Brock,” Gertie said. “We need to find out who the woman was that was fighting with Brock later on.”
“If there really was a woman,” Ida Belle said.
“If there wasn’t, that will leave Cecil out to dry,” Gertie said. “I know Carter won’t quit there, but that doesn’t mean the DA won’t take it and run.”
“She’s not wrong,” Ida Belle said to me. “But I still don’t see that you have a choice.”
I nodded. “After he takes Cecil in, I’ll tell him about Sledgehammer. At least that way there’s another good suspect in the mix. Maybe the DA will prefer focusing on a known criminal with a much better motive for killing Brock than a local with no criminal record.”
And that’s when we heard a boat engine fire up. We whirled around just in time to see Cecil shoot out of a clump of marsh grass in a small bass boat.
“He did not crawl out of a window and jump from that height,” Gertie said.
Ida Belle pulled some grass to the side and looked under the camp. “Trap door in the middle. I can see the ladder on a piling.”
I shoved the phone in my pocket and started running. “My boat!”
Cecil may have given us the slip and gotten out of the camp, but there was no way he could outrun us in that small boat and he knew it. The only way for him to get away clean was to leave us stranded.
I could hear Ida Belle and Gertie pounding behind me. Unfortunately, I heard Cecil’s boat engine cut off, then back on just seconds later. He’d reached the landing. I burst out of the grass and onto the shoreline, but I was too late. He’d untied the boat and pulled it far enough from the shore that I couldn’t risk swimming to get it.
Then I saw him lift his gun. He was going to shoot my boat!
I pulled my nine from my waistband and heard Gertie gasp as I aimed and fired.
Right into his boat motor.
“Put that gun down or the next one goes into you,” I yelled.
He looked at me and apparently believed everything I’d just said because he put his arm down. Then he slumped down on the back bench, and I saw his shoulders heave. I pulled out my cell phone and called Carter.
“I found Cecil,” I said.
“You what? Where?”
“He’s currently floating in a boat off the west side of Number Two.”
“Is he alive?”
“He is right now, but if he tries to shoot my boat again, he won’t be. You better get out here before he gets stupid or I change my mind.”
“I’m on my way.”
Gertie shook her head as I shoved my phone back in my pocket.
“For a second there, I thought you were going to shoot him when you first pulled your weapon,” Gertie said.
“For a second there, I was going to cheer her on if she did,” Ida Belle said. “You don’t shoot a boat. Good Lord, what’s happened to decency in this town?”
“Who does that boat Cecil’s in belong to?” I asked.
“Cooper,” Ida Belle said.
I sighed.
“Well, this puts a damper on everything, doesn’t it?” Gertie said. “Now he has to do all his talking with the DA and he’s dragged Cooper into his tomfoolery.”
“I think Cooper was already in the thick of it,” I said.
“You think they partnered up?” Gertie asked.
I shrugged. “In this particular case, either Cooper lent his boat to Cecil or Cecil stole it.”
“It doesn’t look good either way,” Ida Belle said. “And now you have to tell Carter about Sledgehammer.”
I pulled my phone out and accessed the tracker. Relief coursed through me when I saw the flashing dot at a diner up the highway.
“How mad do you think Carter’s going to be?” Gertie asked.
“On a scale of one to ten?” I asked. “Fifteen.”
Ida Belle walked over to a log and sat down. “If we hadn’t put our nose into this mess, we wouldn’t have found out about Sledgehammer, and you wouldn’t have that recorded conversation with his boss. Without that information, the DA would just move for charges right away on Cecil, and RJ would be freed up to leave. She’d skip right back to Nashville to sign that contract with Sledgehammer hot on her tail.”
“And Cecil would be left holding the bag,” Gertie said.
“For all we know, the bag might be Cecil’s to hold,” I said.
Ida Belle shook her head. “This whole thing has turned out to be a way bigger mess than even I anticipated. And I anticipated quite a bit.”
I plopped down on the log next to her. I had to agree.
Carter must have been at the sheriff’s department and the boat must have already been gassed up and ready to go, because it was only thirty minutes before I saw him headed toward us. Both boats were drifting away from Number Two with the outgoing tide, but with the alligators starting to cruise around for their evening meal, I hadn’t worried about Cecil making a swim for my boat. It was too far away from him to risk it.
Carter must have decided that since Cecil obviously wasn’t going anywhere, he’d acquire my boat first and then have an opportunity to chew us out without Cecil overhearing. Because that’s exactly what he did.
“What the heck were you thinking?” he asked. “You knew I had a warrant out for Cecil before you ever came here. And since Gertie’s camp is in the other direction and Ida Belle’s fishing camp is on the other side of this island from Cecil’s, I’m sure you didn’t stop by here to check on it.”
“Yes, we were looking for Cecil,” I said. “We stopped by to check on Gina earlier and she was worried about him. We thought it was a crap thing to do to her, so we came out here to see if we could find him and convince him to go in.”
“Obviously that didn’t work out,” he said.
“Obviously.”
“You weren’t afraid he’d make a swim for your boat?”
“If he had, I would have put a hole in it out of principle.”
Ida Belle gave me an approving nod. “It’s like you were born here.”
“Did he say anything?” Carter asked.
“Only that he was never at the motel,” I said.
“And you believe him?”
“Not necessarily, but there’s something else you need to know. You know that gun-waving-Mercedes guy?”
Carter narrowed his eyes. “The one you claim not to know.”
“Oh, I don’t know him, but I know about him. He might have been a Louisiana native, but he’s not anymore. He’s an enforcer for a drug dealer in Nashville called Payday. Word is Brock sold product in the clubs he and RJ played and didn’t pass the profits back up the line.”
Carter stared at me for a moment, then cursed and stomped around for a bit.
“And you spied on this guy?” he said finally, staring at the three of us as if we’d lost our minds. “And you.” He looked at Gertie. “You stole an emblem off a drug enforcer’s Mercedes? All three of you have a death wish.”
“I was just trying to get some evidence that he killed Brock so we could clear things up for Cecil and Gina,” I said.
“You know how it’s going to be for them,” Ida Belle said.
Carter threw his hands up. “Of course I know, but Cecil isn’t helping matters running away. And unfortunately, drug enforcer or not, the Mercedes guy was telling the truth.”
“You have another witness?” I asked.
He nodded. “Cecil took the back way out through the neighborhood and passed by probably the only convenience store in the area with a working security camera. Lucky for me, it’s not aimed properly on the pumps and was instead pointing at the street. It was him. No doubt about that.”
“But that doesn’t mean he killed Brock,” I said. “Maybe he confronted him, but he’s not the guy who put the knot on his head. That could have been Sledgehammer.”
Carter’s eyes narrowed at me when I mentioned the blow to Brock’s head and then I remembered I wasn’t supposed to know what the ME had said.
“Who told you—” he began, then cut himself off. “Sledgehammer?”
“I have an audio file you’re going to want,” I said. “He’s watching RJ. I think Payday expects her to settle Brock’s debt.”
“With what?” he asked. “RJ’s broke.”
“She is now, but there’s a TV producer interested in licensing that song of theirs for a series.”
Carter put his hands on top of his head and squeezed. “You know what—I’m going to get Cecil back to Sinful and book him. When I’m done, I’ll come by your place and you’re going to tell me everything. In the meantime, I need the three of you to go home and stay there.”
“Our own homes or Fortune’s?” Gertie asked.
Carter whirled around without answering and headed back to his boat. He didn’t even glance at us as he pulled away.
“That went well,” Ida Belle said.
“About as well as I figured it would,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ida Belle said. “Carter is just frustrated because you have a way of getting information before he does. And given his ambivalence concerning the Heberts, he’s going to try on mad for a while.”
“Looks like it fit him pretty good,” Gertie said.
“Well, there’s no point in worrying about it now,” Ida Belle said. “Let’s get home and into the shower and then we’ll see what we see.”
We headed over to my boat and climbed inside. I watched as Carter started back toward Sinful with Cecil in his boat and pulling Cooper’s boat behind him. I was sure Ida Belle would give them a wide berth when she passed, but I was equally sure I’d feel his disapproval, regardless of the distance.