Lethal Bayou Beauty (9 page)

“It’s a fair trade,” Gertie said.

I stared out the window at the muddy bayou that cut across the backyard and weighed all the options. I didn’t like appropriating Sandy-Sue’s property, but I could probably get the agency to pay her back for the cost of the gun when this whole thing was over. The thing that bothered me the most was the many unknowns surrounding this Sorcerer. For all we knew, he could be part of the intelligence community himself, or even worse, someone who made his living trading information to the wrong people. If he was dialed into the arms community, there was a chance he knew about the price on my head.

“We need this information,” I said finally, “and if we move forward with this Sorcerer thing, I want to be there to get a read on him. But I have a concern.” I told them about my fear of an arms community connection.

“Which would be a completely valid concern if you remotely resembled the way you described your appearance before coming to Sinful, but unless he has facial recognition software, I doubt he’d recognize you all ‘girled’ up.”

“Actually, I was ‘girled’ up during the failed mission, so any pictures would be of me then. I had a handler for the girl end of things,” I explained.
 

“What did you look like for the mission?” Gertie asked.

“I had waist-length brown hair and brown contacts. I also had these fake teeth things that gave me a slight gap in the front and this horrid bra that shoved my boobs under my chin. I had a cleavage cleft the size of most people’s butt crack.”

“What kind of clothes did you wear?” Ida Belle asked.

“Tight and clingy. Would have shown every ounce of extra fat if I’d had any. And the most ridiculous shoes—like balancing on stilts—but they make a good weapon in a pinch.”

Gertie raised her eyebrows. “Were you supposed to be a prostitute? No, don’t answer that. The less we know about your real life, the better.”

“Probably true,” Ida Belle said, “although the shoes-as-a-weapon thing is intriguing. Anyway, it sounds like you looked completely different than now. Throw on one of those Ellie May sundresses and a pair of sandals and pull your hair into a ponytail like you always do and you’ll look like any other hometown girl.”

I mulled it over for a moment, but couldn’t find a flaw in Ida Belle’s assessment. “Okay, so it’s a plan. Do you know where this Sorcerer lives?”

Ida Belle nodded. “According to my intel, he lives in Mudbug. It’s about an hour from here.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Your intel?”

Gertie shook her head. “A kid she plays
Call of Duty
with says one of their regular group is The Sorcerer.”

Finally, a pop culture item I was familiar with. I’d played
Call of Duty
at Harrison’s place on many occasions. “And you think this kid knows what he’s talking about?”

Ida Belle shrugged. “I’ll put an online call for a meet with this regular. If he doesn’t turn out to be capable of what we want, the only thing we’ve lost is time and a tank of gas.”

“All right,” I said and rose from the table. “Then I guess we’re going to see if The Sorcerer can work some magic. I’ll go upstairs and become a girl. You two figure out how we’re going to get to Mudbug, since Gertie wrecked her car and I refuse to ride in the Corvette with all Ida Belle’s rules.”

Gertie jumped up, looking perky. “I got an idea about that while we were jogging over.”

Ida Belle rose from her seat, looking as skeptical as I felt, but it was their job to work it out. “I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes. How long will it take for you to fix the car?”

“Oh, only five minutes or so,” Gertie said, “but it will take me the other ten, at least, to jog back to my house.”

“You have got to start working out,” Ida Belle said as they headed down the hall.

“I work out.”

“Knitting is not a workout.”

Chapter Seven

I was still grinning when I ran upstairs to change. The front door banged shut as I flipped through the sparse selection of girl clothes hanging in my closet. Finally, I pulled a white sundress with pink roses on it out of the closet. It looked like the item least likely for me to wear either as myself or as my prior undercover persona.

My hair was in reasonably good shape, so I pulled it back in a ponytail as Ida Belle had suggested and plugged in the curling iron. While I was waiting on the curling iron to heat up, I put on some moisturizer and a bit of lip gloss. Despite my considerable dexterity under normal circumstances—normal for me, anyway—I still hadn’t mastered putting on the eye stuff without poking myself in the eye, so I left it off.
 

I flipped the ends of my ponytail around the curling iron, making sure I didn’t leave it on long enough to burn the hair off. Who knew those things got that hot? I took one final look in the mirror before slipping on some pink sandals, then snagged a pistol from Marge’s secret stash, careful to avert my eyes from the full-length mirror in her bedroom. I was afraid my appearance would nauseate me, and I really needed to eat breakfast. When you agreed to escapades with Ida Belle and Gertie, you never knew what you might get. It was always best to maintain your energy level at its peak.

I was just finishing scrambled eggs when I heard Gertie’s Cadillac pull in my drive. At least, the engine sounded like Gertie’s Cadillac, but an odd clinking sound accompanied it now that I hadn’t heard before. I tossed my dishes in the sink, grabbed my purse, and headed out the door.

Then stopped and stared.

One glance was all I needed to put the clinking sound into perspective. The front bumper, which previously could have charitably been referred to as mildly serviceable, was now a rolling eyesore. It was mangled and dented and popped forward on each end of the car. Bright pink and green duct tape held the whole thing in place. All hope that we could make this trip unobserved went straight out the window.

“Stop gawking and get in,” Ida Belle yelled from the passenger’s window.

Despite the hundreds of really good reasons this was a bad idea, I walked down the sidewalk and hopped in the car. Gertie took off down the street, the bumper flapping in the wind.

“Wouldn’t it have been better to pull the bumper off?” I asked.

“It’s wedged stuck in the middle,” Ida Belle explained. “I couldn’t pull it out and Gertie couldn’t find her crowbar.”

“At least I got the squirrel out of the grill,” Gertie said.

Ida Belle nodded. “Dinner at my house tonight.”

I grimaced. It was definitely a Hungry Man night for me.

The drive to Mudbug seemed to comprise one long stretch of the same piece of marsh, but we passed the time by speculating on the Pansy situation and Ida Belle and Gertie arguing over the last season of
American Idol
. Since I’d been rousted out of bed too early, I spent the arguing time dozing until Ida Belle poked me and said we were there. I propped myself upright and took my first look at the town.

Mudbug looked very similar to Sinful, only slightly bigger. It had one main street with worn brick buildings and the same southern charm, and I wondered how many of these tiny towns with bayous, banana pudding wars, and deadly wildlife Louisiana contained. Then I wondered how many of them had an abnormally high percentage of murders given the population.

At the corner of Main Street stood a statue of a frumpy older woman, but what caught my attention was the added extra that someone had placed on the gray plaster.

“Who is that woman in the statue?” I asked.

Ida Belle looked over at the statue. “Some rich woman who died and left the town property.”

“Why is she wearing a cone bra?” I asked, particularly pleased with myself for recognizing it from a music video I’d seen last night.

Ida Belle waved a hand in dismissal. “Probably kids.”

At the end of Main Street, Gertie turned and followed a winding road that ran parallel to a bayou. Houses were larger than those I’d seen closer to town and spaced farther apart. Finally, Gertie swung into a driveway and followed the circular drive up to the front of the house.
 

“Are you sure this is the place?” I asked, looking out at the large plantation-style home sitting on a well-manicured acre of land.

Ida Belle checked her phone and nodded. “This is the address he gave me.”

“I don’t see any snipers or killer dogs,” Gertie said.

“If you saw them,” I pointed out, “they wouldn’t be snipers.”

“It doesn’t look scary at all,” Gertie said.

“In my experience,” I said, “that’s usually the worst case, but this time, I suspect someone’s playing a joke on Ida Belle.” I climbed out of the car. “Let’s get this over with.”

We walked up the sidewalk to the front door and I pressed the doorbell, somewhat relieved when no sounds of killer dogs were forthcoming. After several seconds, I pressed the bell again.
 

The door flew open and I looked straight down a hall and into a living room. Then I adjusted my gaze down…way down.

Male—maybe ten years old, four feet six, seventy pounds soaking wet, skin that had never seen sunlight, which was rather a frightening contrast to his black hair and blue eyes.

“May I help you?” he asked politely.

“Yes,” I said. “We’re here to see, um…The Sorcerer?” I barely kept myself from cringing at how stupid that statement sounded. Why hadn’t Ida Belle gotten a real name? It had never occurred to me that a techno-anarchist might have a normal life, complete with wife and kids.

He studied us for several seconds, then his gaze settled on Ida Belle. “Are you Killing Machine 1962?”

“Yes,” Ida Belle said.

He stuck his hand out. “I’m The Sorcerer.”

I tried to control my surprise as Ida Belle shook his hand, not quite managing to hide her own amazement. How in the world had she not clued in to the fact that her gaming buddy was younger than her wardrobe? More importantly, how had this scrawny, pasty child managed to convince intelligent adults that he was some kind of cyber vigilante?

“Aren’t you just adorable?” Gertie said, beaming at The Sorcerer.

I frowned. Maybe the “intelligent” part of my question was the problem.

“This are my friends, Gertie and Fortune,” Ida Belle said.

“A pleasure to meet you,” The Sorcerer said and motioned us inside.

We followed him down the long hallway and through the living room, where an older man and woman sat watching television. They never even glanced over at us, but from the thin frames and pale white skin, I figured they had to be his parents.

He veered off down a hallway to the left and then through a door on the right with a sign hanging on the front of it that read Client Meeting—Do Not Disturb.

“Sometimes, my parents forget I’m working,” The Sorcerer explained, and pointed to a huge ornate desk and chairs in the middle of the room. I slid into a chair between Ida Belle and Gertie, discreetly casing the room. Bookcases ran along every wall, completely circling the room, and every square inch of them was filled with books. I looked at some of the titles—
Combinatorics
,
Brain and Cognitive Sciences
,
Nonparametric Statistics
,
Macroeconomics
,
Advanced Japanese
. Yikes.

The Sorcerer took a seat behind the desk and pressed a remote. A panel of bookcases on our left side slid back, revealing four enormous flat-screen televisions, forming a large rectangle on the wall. One of them flashed with New York Stock Exchange information. The others contained market information for different countries. Apparently, the stock market rumors had been accurate. Hopefully, the “money laundering for drug dealers” rumors were stories created to keep people away.

“Your parents don’t mind you doing business in the house?” I asked.
 

“Why would they?” he answered. “It’s my house.”

All righty then. His parents were probably afraid of him. Heck, for that matter, I was a little afraid of him myself.
 

“You said you had a law enforcement problem,” he said, getting down to business.

Ida Belle nodded. “My friend Fortune got into a silly argument with an obnoxious woman last night and might have threatened to kill her. All in the heat of the moment, you understand. She wasn’t serious.”

Because I’d been sort of serious, I forced my innocent face. I’d worn it so many times in Director Morrow’s office that I’d perfected it.

“I assume this obnoxious woman is now deceased?” The Sorcerer asked, not appearing the least bit concerned with the subject matter.

Ida Belle nodded. “She was murdered last night around midnight. Fortune is a visitor in Sinful, and the obnoxious woman is the mayor’s niece—”

“And you’re afraid she’ll be railroaded,” he interrupted. “Probably accurate, given the circumstances and small-town mentality, which I am all too familiar with. So what do you want from me?”

“We think the sheriff’s department needs some help getting things right, but of course, they would never allow us to take part in the investigation.”

“So you’re going vigilante to try to solve the murder and get your friend off the hook.” He studied me for a moment, then gave Ida Belle a nod. “That’s admirable, and although I’m skeptical about your potential success, I’m happy to help. You brought the item?”