The Miss Fortune Series: Nearly Departed (Kindle Worlds Novella) (8 page)

I raced up the wood plank that
served as wheelchair-accessible access onto the Swamp Bar’s porch. Without
warning the door to the bar, now just a few feet away, swung open.

“I said get
the hell out!” a beefy man said as he pushed a short, skinny guy through the
door.

“You can’t make
me leave!” Skinny Guy yelled.

“Hell if I
can’t,” Beefy Man shouted back. “Your wife threatened to come on down if you
don’t get your skinny butt outta here and back to home. Your wife and her rifle
are bad for business.”

Skinny Guy
stood defiantly in front of the door. Beefy Man pulled out a pistol. “It’s new.
Give me an excuse to use it.” He then coughed up a good one and spit a wad at
Skinny Guy’s feet.

Skinny Guy
shouted a string of cuss words, turned and jumped off the porch. He stormed
across the dirt parking lot, kicking up angry dust clouds with every step.

Beefy Man
looked down at me. “Cookie? What the hell are you doing here on a Thursday
night?” he screamed, obviously used to Cookie’s hearing issues.

I shrugged.
“I got thirsty. Sue me.”

“Come on
in, then.”

Beefy Man
held the door open and I wheeled myself into the bar. I’d been here three times
before, but it looked different from a seated perspective. Everyone looked a
little bigger. And drunker. I looked around and noticed a cork board behind the
bar. Photos were pinned onto it and one in particular stood out. Me, in a
hooker getup, wearing a “Best Boobs” sash I had won in the Swamp Bar’s wet T-shirt
contest while on surveillance a couple of weeks ago.

“Hey,
Mitch, you’re up,” the bartender said to a guy standing at the bar and sucking
every last drop from his bottle of beer.

Mitch slammed
the bottle down, hoisted himself from his bar stool and walked over to the cork
board, kissing his fingers, rubbing them on my photo.

I ordered
myself not to take my Cookie cane and beat him to death with it. In my Swamp
Bar briefing with Ida Belle and Gertie, I found out my photo had become a good
luck charm for a few of the pool players, who rubbed their fingers over it
before playing. One thing to hear about it, another to see it in action. I
couldn’t beat the finger kissers to death, but I could at least screw with one
of them.

Mitch was
about to take his shot as I wheeled behind him and jabbed him in the butt with
my cane.

“Shit!” he
screamed as the ball he was aiming for jumped up from the table and bounced on
the floor.

A few of
the men standing around laughed. Another guy holding a pool cue hooted. “What
the hell was that?”

Mitch
whipped around, staring at the space above me.

“’Scuse
me!” I screamed. He looked down at me, fuming, unable to yell at an old woman
in a wheelchair. Old age had at least one advantage.

I zipped a
few feet deeper into the place and scanned the patrons. At a table next to the
bar sat Fred Barbaret, the Yankee hater and the man I suspected of being the
bomber, deep in discussion with another man seated next to him. I eased my chair
into the empty space next to Fred and held my hand up, trying to signal the
bartender. Whether he purposely ignored me or I was invisible to him, either
way I wasn’t getting served. And if I had to sit in this place while waiting
for Fred to spill out any information, I would need at least one drink.

I grabbed
the cane sitting across my lap and banged it against the bar.

“Hey!” I
yelled in that annoying way of Cookie’s. “Who do I have to smack to get a
drink?”

The
bartender looked over the bar and down at me. His lips lifted a bit in a phony smile.
“Your usual, Cookie?”

“What?” I
screamed.

“Your
usual?” he yelled. “Fuzzy Navel?”

“I don’t
know, I haven’t checked it this morning,” I yelled. “But I wouldn’t be
surprised. I always find something hidin’ in there.”

The
bartender held up his hand to stop me. “Coming right up!” he yelled.

Fred and
his friend glanced at me, annoyed. I pointed to the empty space at their table.
“That seat taken?”

“Yes,”
Fred’s friend said.

“Don’t mind
if I do,” I said, driving the couple feet over to the table.

“Should we
move?” the friend asked.

Fred shook
his head. “She can’t hear a thing. Watch.” He turned to me and said in a normal
voice, “Hey, you old witch.”

“Huh?” I
asked.

“See?” He
looked back at me, and in a louder voice, said, “I was just giving my friend a
demonstration.”

“Menstruation?”
I screamed “I haven’t had a period in over fifty years! What kind of a question
is that to ask a lady?”

Fred gave
me a dismissive wave of his hand and turned his focus back on his friend. The
bartender came to my table and set a nasty-looking orange juice cocktail in
front of me.

“Choke on
it, you old biddy,” he said under his breath.

I took a
sip of the Fuzzy Navel from the straw. The bartender went light on the alcohol,
no surprise there.

For the
next twenty minutes all Fred and his buddy, who Fred called “Rod,” talked about
was construction materials. A big snore. Until talk turned to some copper
tubing missing from a construction site in neighboring Mudbug. Copper tubing an
importer to China paid handsomely for.

“Are you
sure they can’t trace the theft to us?” Rod asked Fred.

“Would you
stop worrying? I told you I established an alibi. I made an appearance at the
rec center. Some fake funeral was going on. I stood in line and ended up in
some old guy’s selfie. Everybody’ll just assume I was there the whole time.”

Rod grabbed
Fred’s shoulder. “A funeral?”

“What’s the
big deal?”

“The big
deal is there was a bomb planted in the old lady’s casket.” Rod tossed back a
shot of something and signaled the bartender, holding up the glass. “The
sheriff’s department might talk to you about it since you were there.”

“Perfect,”
Fred said, laughing. “He’ll help establish my alibi. I was at the funeral, not
hauling butt with a load full of copper from Mudbug.”

My
shoulders drooped, and with them, my hopes. If what Fred said was true, then he
wasn’t the guy on the bench. I didn’t need to steal one of his glasses to lift
a print. In fact, I didn’t need to stay in the Swamp Bar any longer. I took
several more sips of my drink, set the glass on the table, and backed up the
wheelchair.

“Sayonara,
boys,” I said loudly to Fred and Rod. “You can finish it if you want.”

Rod grabbed
my drink and chugged it as I pulled away from the table and made my way through
the crowd.

“What the
hell, girl, where you goin’?”

I stopped
the chair and looked to my right, where an old man sat at a table, grinning as
if he swallowed the cat that swallowed the canary.

Five-foot
five if he were standing. Ears about half the size of his head. Wearing a
brown, velvet jogging suit with a thick gold chain hanging from his neck. A red
fedora topping his head. One hundred if he’s a day. Threat level: High, but
only in his mind.

“I’ve been
watching you, Cookie,” he said loudly. “Waiting to see if you’d notice me. Why
didn’t you call and say Delphine was bringing you here tonight?”

“Huh?” was
all I could think to shout.

He pulled
himself up from his chair with the help of his cane, grimacing. He then held
his hand out to me. “It’s our song. Dance with me, woman.”

Oh, crap. I
just realized Cookie didn’t go to the Swamp Bar to get drunk. She went to get
lucky with this guy.

He moved
over to me and grabbed onto my arms, trying to pull me up from the chair. I
didn’t want to call attention to myself and resist. So I slowly got up from my
chair and took his cold, bony hand and together we hobbled to the dance floor,
me throwing in a few arthritic grunts for good measure. He was stronger than he
looked, and when we settled on a dance spot, he wrapped his arms around me and
pulled me close.

“The second
I saw you I took my pill,” he yelled into my ear. “Little Marty should be good
to go in ten minutes.” He winked.

Little
Marty?
In all my years as a CIA assassin, I’d never had to get intimate
with a man in order to protect a cover. I wasn’t going to start with Methuselah
here.

“Can’t, I’m
a little gassy tonight,” I said into his hairy ear. True. What with the four
bowls of cabbage soup and the Fuzzy Navel at war in my stomach, I’d be lucky if
I didn’t blast my way back to Sinful.

He laughed.
“I’ll say you’re sassy.”

“No!” I
shouted. “I’m gassy!”

Several
dance couples moved away from us.

He
dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “My camper’s parked out back.”

“What about
my daughter?” I screamed, grasping at excuses.

“She always
waits in the van reading,” he screamed. An odd smile formed on his face,
quickly turning into a confused expression. “What’s wrong? You normally like it
when I squeeze your peaches,” he said, casting his gaze lower on my body.

I looked
down to find his hand cupping one of my fake breasts. I couldn’t feel a thing.
Thank God.

He then
stopped dancing, a look of fury crossing his face. “Is there another man?”

“Yes, there
is,” said a voice from behind.

I could
tell the voice was faked, trying to sound deeper and masculine. I turned around
to find Gertie wearing a long black coat, black bowler hat, and a fake black
mustache and matching thick black eyebrows. Holding a cane.

Charlie Chaplin
?

“We have an
unexpected problem,” she whispered in my ear.

“Who the
hell are you?” Old Marty shouted at Gertie.

“We have to
go,” Gertie said.

She scooted
me back over to the wheelchair and pushed me down into it. Old Marty hobbled
over and whacked her in the butt with his cane.

“Ow!”

“Let her
go!” he screamed.

I lifted
myself to her ear level and whispered, “What’s going on?”

“Delphine’s
van just pulled into the lot,” she whispered back. “The real Cookie’s here. And
she’s hopping mad. One of the regulars must have seen you here but didn’t see Delphine’s
van out front and called Delphine to find out what was going on.”

Old Marty
shoved Gertie aside with his cane.

“Cookie,
honey, what’s going on?”

At that moment
the door to the Swamp Bar burst open. The bouncer came through first and held
the door wide for Cookie, who zoomed past him in her wheelchair.

“Where is
she!” she screamed, waving her cane.

The chatter
stopped. Soon, the music died as well. These people knew a good spectacle when
they saw one, and no one wanted to miss it.

As the Red
Sea did for Moses, the crowd parted, creating a clear path between Cookie and
me.

“She’s an
imposter!” Cookie shouted, pointing her cane at me. “Let go of my man!”

Knowing
that the best defense is a good offense, I pointed my cane back at her and
yelled in my best Cookie voice, “She’s the imposter!”

A
collective gasp erupted from the crowd. I bet they had never paid this much
attention to a senior citizen in their lives. But they knew a good fight when
they saw it, and it didn’t matter that the principle players were over a
hundred.

Out of the
corner of my eye I saw a man collecting money, taking bets on who would come
out the victor.

“Okay, I
think we should just calm down now,” Gertie said, deepening her voice.

“What?” Cookie
said.

“Calm
down!” a group of people near her screamed.

“Hell no!” Cookie
yelled. She pushed the speed stick on her wheelchair forward, racing toward me.

I backed up
and made a sharp right. “Outta my way!” I screamed, still maintaining my cover
as Cookie. People dove aside in order to avoid getting hit as I barreled on
through, knocking away chairs and tables. But it all slowed me down.

“Where is
she?” Cookie hollered from behind a crowd of bar patrons, who again parted so Cookie
had a clear path toward me.

We were now
a few feet apart. Cookie pushed the accelerator stick and bumped into me,
sending me and my chair sailing into a table. She came at me again, this time
stopping a couple feet away from me. She picked up her cane and swung it at me
like a sword.

I didn’t
care if she was a hundred; I had a right to defend myself. I grabbed my cane
and held it up, blocking her swings.

“Now, Cookie,
you put that down!” Gertie shouted.

Gertie’s
cries served to distract Cookie, giving me an opportunity to knock some chairs
out of the way, clearing a path for me around the pool table. I looked back and
saw Gertie charging in my direction, with Cookie on her heels. Cookie had an
evil look on her face as she stuck her cane down at Gertie’s feet, causing
Gertie to trip and fall into the pool table.