Lethal Control, page 6
part #3 of The DuPage Parish Mysteries Series
After another ten minutes of gliding past the knees of cypress trees, the propeller fan filling the air with its droning, I said, “How are we going to find him?”
“I thought you were looking for tangled-up moss or something.”
“Dagobert LeBlanc!”
He hid a tiny smile. “Right now, I’m not so worried about finding Reb. You saw him with that gator; the boy can clearly take care of himself. I’m trying to put as much distance as I can between us and Fen. Then we’re going to find somewhere to pull out. A couple of state parks take in part of the bayou, and they’ll have facilities—launches, parking lots, phones, roads.”
“Toilets,” I said dreamily. “Showers.”
Dag laughed.
“And they’ll have vending machines with sour cream-and-onion chips.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“And ice-cold Dr. Pepper.”
“I like hearing you have an appetite, but should I have packed you a snack? Oh, Jesus, Eli.” He pulled his leg back, too late, from my pinch and massaged it through the jeans. “I bet you gave me a blood blister.”
“I’m hiding the remote for two weeks.”
“What?”
“The remote. The TV remote. It was going to be one week, but now it’s two.”
All things considered, it said a lot about our relationship that Dag’s only response was a bewildered, “Why?”
I declined to answer.
We kept moving through the bayou. My initial impression that we were alone faded quickly. Something moved in a stand of palmetto, and I flinched. Then a branch creaked overhead, and I was sure it was a snake. The air, fetid with the smell of rotting vegetation, stirred when a bird flapped up out of the water, wings snapping.
“God damn duck,” I muttered.
“Coot,” Dag said automatically.
“You’re a coot. You’re the one who owns multiple pairs of slippers.”
He laughed. “The bird. And you don’t have to keep looking up there; it’s a coon, not a snake.”
“I didn’t say it was a snake.”
The worst part was that he looked Gently Supportive, even though I knew he wanted to laugh.
“Is this why you always call yourself a coon-ass? Because you, like, know all this stuff?”
“I know all this stuff because my dad loves fishing almost as much as he loves golf, and he took me out a lot when I was younger.” He smiled. “I didn’t realize how much of it I remembered.”
I pointed to a mostly submerged line that was marked by floating Clorox bottles. “Trot-line.”
He nodded.
“You taught me that last year.”
His smile got bigger. “I did.”
He pointed out a muskrat moving through a clump of buttonbrush, and he said things about sedge and nettle, and he showed me not one, not two, but three armadillos. We passed a houseboat that looked abandoned, and he talked about old Cajun guys who lived out here, trapping for fur. Bream and gar streaked under the water. A heron waded in shallow water, picking each step gingerly. When I asked about the trees with the crooked, praying arms, he had a look like Loving Wonder on his face—which was downright annoying—and told me they were elms. All in all, I almost forgot we were chasing a werewolf and, in turn, being chased by a crazy monster hunter.
Of course, not all of it was beautiful. Go-cups were caught in exposed roots. A plastic can of Grizzly Natural Extra Long Cut floated past. A turtle poked its head out of an overturned foam cooler. Dag touched the trash bag between his feet, the one that held Reb’s bloody shirt—or what I hoped was Reb’s bloody shirt—and said, “I should have brought the whole roll.”
“We don’t exactly have time to pick up trash,” I said. “We’ll do a service project once we’re out of this mess.”
“We?”
“Yes: you will sail around in a boat, or whatever it’s called, picking up trash—”
“It’s not called sailing unless it has a sail.”
He got his legs out of the way before I could reach him. I settled for continuing, “—and I’ll, I don’t know, read every article on the internet about ‘one weird trick for a flat belly’ and practice throwing up.”
Leaning forward, he kissed the back of my head. One hand slid around to rest on my stomach. That’s all; he didn’t say anything.
“I’ll stop,” I said in a quiet voice.
“It’s ok.”
But it wasn’t, of course.
We must have seen it at the same time: a break in the live oaks to our right, the gravel launch, the fanboat, and approximately a million red-and-black signs that said PRIVATE and NO TRESPASSING. Either Reb couldn’t read, or he didn’t give a fuck. Maybe he was an all-star like me. Maybe it was both.
“Please God,” Dag said as he turned the boat toward the launch, “don’t let us get shot by some territorial piney-woods numbnuts.”
When the fanboat bumped up against the launch, gravel crunched. Dag killed the engine. He ordered me to hop out, so I did, and I managed to land high and dry on the gravel. He splashed into the water, and between the two of us, we hauled the fanboat up far enough that it wouldn’t drift away. Making a face, Dag squished his way up onto dry land and looked around. He reached into the fanboat for the trash bag, and as he straightened, he opened his mouth to say something.
Then the expression on his face flickered. I felt something hot rake my shoulder, and Dag shoved me.
I hit the ground hard and skidded, tearing up my hands and arms even through Dag’s sweatshirt. I heard a thud behind me, then a muffled grunt, and then a snapping sound. Dag let out a whistling breath—a compressed sound full of fear and an adrenaline craze. I scrambled to get myself upright and turned.
For a moment, my brain refused to play along. What I was seeing wasn’t just impossible—it was at the far end of the scale, where impossible met ridiculous.
Dag was fighting an alligator-man.
There wasn’t really any other way to describe our attacker. He wore a pair of New Balance that looked like they were on the brink of dissolving, mesh shorts, and a bro-cut sweatshirt—no sleeves, and the armholes cut open down the sides. His skin was about the same shade as mine, but with a different cast to it—almost a dark green, although that was only at certain angles. He was muscular—legs, chest, arms.
The rest of him was where things got weird. He had fingers, but they sharpened to thick, black claws. It was hard to tell because of the bro-cut sweatshirt, but at some point, his skin transitioned to a leathery hide—thicker, rougher, olive-brown. The hide ran up his neck. His head was some bizarre fusion of man and gator: the long, rounded snout; the upturned nostrils; the upper teeth exposed even though his jaw was shut. His eyes were dark all the way through—no whites. When he and Dag spun in a circle, I saw the ridges—spikes?—on his neck and back, the way a gator has.
As I watched, the gator-man lunged at Dag, snapping his teeth. Dag stumbled back, fell, and landed on his ass.
“Dag!”
The gator-man surged forward, jaw snapping the air. Dag scooped up a handful of gravel and hurled it in the thing’s face. The gator man let out a bellowing noise and shook its head. It clawed at its eyes.
Blind, I thought. Everything was still coated by that dazed disbelief. It’s blind. Now would be a good time to hit it.
So, I picked up a fallen branch and bashed it on the back of the head.
The gator-man spun toward me, making that strange bellowing noise again. It was still blinking, trying to clear its eyes, but it trundled toward me. It opened its mouth. So many teeth, I thought. So many fucking teeth. And then it launched itself toward me, jaw already closing to catch me and, presumably, bite me in half.
I tried to move backward, but my legs weren’t working, and my movements were stiff and uncoordinated.
The gator-man lurched off course, and then it fell face-first onto the ground.
Dag was on its back, arms wrapped around its neck. He was doing something weird with his legs—hooking them around the gator-man’s legs, forcing them up, off the ground.
And then I realized that fighting wasn’t the best word.
Dag was wrestling it. He was wrestling a gator. Gator-man. Whatever.
The thought snapped me out of my frozen moment. I grabbed another branch, ready to do some more bashing, but there was no way to hit the gator-man without also hitting Dag. While the gator-man thrashed and bucked, trying to throw Dag off—which, I now realized, was why Dag had hooked the gator-man’s legs, to keep him from rolling Dag into the water—Dag clung on grimly. Dust and dirt covered his face. He’d gotten a gash on his temple, and blood blackened his cheek. He had one arm around the gator-man’s neck. The gator-man was still snapping his jaws and shrieking, the sound outraged. When the jaws shut, Dag clamped one big hand around them.
The gator-man’s roar, even with its jaw shut, made my ears ring.
It humped and twisted and writhed, but I saw, now, that it had lost. Dag released his hold around its neck and moved his hand up to join the first, squeezing the gator’s mouth shut. Then, slowly, he began to force the gator-man’s head up and back. The gator-man tried to fight, but Dag had the leverage—and, now I was beginning to suspect, the advantage of physiology. I felt it when the gator-man’s frantic movements took on a different tone: defeat. Surrender.
Dag must have felt it too. He relaxed his hold, allowing the gator-man to lower his head a few inches. Then he reversed the hold: moving one arm down to wrap around the gator-man’s neck, and then dropping his other hand from its jaw. I waited for the gator-man to snap and twist again, but instead, in a gravelly voice, it bellowed something.
Words.
I flinched, and the movement sent gravel skittering down the launch. Dag tightened his grip as the creature continued to shout.
“Yeah, yeah,” Dag said. “Je me rends, I heard you. You don’t speak English?”
“I speak, me.” The gator-man’s voice had a heavy Cajun accent, and the words sounded like they’d been scraped up off the gravel. “Parlangua speak.”
“That’s your name, huh? Parlangua?”
The gator-man hissed. “Pascal. Pascal parlangua.”
“I think that’s what he is, Dag. I think he’s telling us what he is. Like a rougarou.” At the word, the parlangua hissed again and tried to twist his head to see me. I fought a giggle at the unreality of the moment. “Pascal the Parlangua.”
“No fucking way,” Dag said. He was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Why’re you looking for Reb?”
“Not looking for nobody, me. Let me go.”
“You got all worked up when he brought up the rougarou,” Dag said. “You were hiding by Reb’s fanboat. I’d say you’re interested in Reb.”
The gator-man—parlangua—whatever twisted again, but Dag had him in an iron grip. After a moment, he let out a hissing breath. “The witch. She says she wants the pup alive. She says she won’t leave Pascal alone until she get the pup. I smell him, me. But I’m too slow. Maybe you know where he is. Maybe then everybody leave Pascal alone.”
“Yeah,” Dag said. “I bet Nelda Pie will be real happy to leave you alone.” He glanced at me, and after a moment, I realized he was waiting to see if I had any questions.
“How’d you know Reb was going to come here?” I asked. “How’d you know to wait for him?”
“Pascal wait.”
“Unh-uh,” Dag said, forcing his head back. “Answer his question.”
“The pup comes up here. The pup looks around. The pup leaves. He comes back.”
“He’d been coming up here? How many times? Do you mean the last few days, or before that?”
The parlangua’s hesitation had a confused quality. He answered, “The pup leaves. The pup comes back.”
Then, in a flash of movement, it bucked, its jaws snapping as it twisted. Dag clung on, his face locked in concentration, and when the parlangua’s jaws shut the next time, he clamped down with one hand. Then he got the other hand in place, and he forced the parlangua’s head back into the submission hold. Pascal thrashed for a few more seconds, and then he gave up. His body was limp, but it was hard to ignore that densely coiled strength waiting to move again.
“Uh, Dag—” I stopped because I had no idea how to ask what I was thinking, which was something along the lines of: How the fuck are you going to get off that thing?
“Get the rope from the boat,” Dag grunted. The muscles in his arms and shoulders were corded with effort, and his back was bowed, his legs flexed to keep the parlangua from rolling him. It had only been a few minutes, but I realized he must be exhausted.
I stumbled down the launch and worked the rope free from the fanboat. I grabbed the bag with the bloody shirt while I was at it and scrambled back to Dag.
“Can you tie him?” he asked. “Around the snout. I wouldn’t ask, but—”
“But you’re literally restraining a gator-man in a submission hold.” My laugh sounded bright and broken and a little insane. “Yeah, extenuating circumstances.”
Even with Dag holding the parlangua’s jaws shut, it took me about ten seconds to work up the courage. I inched closer. Huge teeth poked out, and they were thick and yellow and looked incredibly sharp. The hide was cool and pebbled when my hand brushed it. I jerked back, and Pascal made a noise and tried to thrash again before Dag forced him into stillness.
“E,” Dag said, weariness drawing his voice.
“Can’t you just shoot him or something?” I asked as I looped the rope around his snout a few more times. I didn’t know any knots—something which was an endless source of disappointment to Dag, I knew, even though he’d never said anything—so I did a granny knot and then another one. I backed away.
“I’m not going to shoot him. He’s just protecting his territory. Well, maybe a little more than that.” Dag drew a breath. “Follow the road and run.”
“We’re not getting back in the boat?”
“Eli, run.”
I opened my mouth to say, Not without you, but Dag apparently already knew that. In a smooth movement he unhooked his legs from the parlangua’s. Then he scooted backward. Last, he released the parlangua’s head and sprang up.
We ran.
Behind us, Pascal bellowed, although the sound was muffled because he couldn’t open his mouth. Then heavy footsteps thudded after us. I tried to look, but Dag’s hand closed around my arm, urging my attention forward again.
Since cardio was one of my love languages—or, at least, one of the few Dag-approved ways to try to get rid of my belly—I settled into an easy stride, my long legs eating up the rutted dirt road. Dag ran alongside me. After a couple of minutes, he started huffing for breath. He wasn’t in bad shape. The opposite, actually; he had a fucking rock of a body. But since he was a normal person and didn’t use running on the levee as a release valve for all his self-loathing, he also wasn’t used to running this fast for more than a couple hundred yards.
When he stumbled the first time, I risked a glance. The parlangua was nowhere to be seen.
I caught Dag’s arm and slowed him. He looked over his shoulder, and when he looked back at me, I shook my head. He sucked in air. I got a few deep lungfuls myself.
“They can’t run far,” Dag said between breaths. Then his brow furrowed. “Well, gators can’t. I guess I didn’t think about the fact that he might be able to.”
“I can’t respond to that,” I said. “I’ll never be able to respond to that.”
He put a hand at the small of my back. His touch was hot, and it was the first time I’d felt warm in weeks.
Then I said, “What the fuck was that?”
He was wiping his face with his shirt, exposing the hard planes of his chest and stomach. Through the cotton, he said, “Some kind of gator-man. You heard it—a parlangua, or something like that.”
“Not that, dummy. What was that stunt about jumping on its back and, I don’t know, wrestling it like Crocodile Dundee?”
“Crocodile Dundee wrestled crocodiles, I think—”
“Dagobert!
“Don’t yell at me, please.” He dropped his shirt. “It hurt you—oh God, Eli, let me see.”
Until then, I’d forgotten about my shoulder. I’d been occupied with little things like watching my boyfriend fight a human-alligator hybrid and then running for my life only to discover that, while my boyfriend apparently knew how to wrestle gators, he hadn’t considered the possibility that a parlangua might be able to run a five-minute mile.
I tried to look, but I couldn’t turn my head far enough. Dag stepped behind me. When he pulled on the sweatshirt, the wound stung.
“That’s your good sweatshirt,” I said.
“It’s a sweatshirt, Eli.”
“It’s your favorite.”
“It’s not bad, I don’t think. I’d like a doctor to look at it, but it’s barely more than a slice. It’s already stopped bleeding.”
“It’s not bad because you pushed me out of the way and then made that thing into your one-man bucking bronco. I’m sorry about your sweatshirt, Dag. I’ll get you a new one. I’ll get you a bunch of them, and I’ll wash them a hundred times so they’re soft and you can sleep in them and you can wear them on Saturdays when you don’t want to do anything except read.”
His fingers fell away from the cut. They brushed the outline of my shoulder blade. It felt like a long time before he said, “Aren’t all bucking broncos designed for only one person?”
I turned around to glare at him.
“What?” he asked with a laugh.
“Don’t think I didn’t realize you dodged my question. Explain yourself, mister.”
Color came into his cheeks. He shrugged. He toed the rut in the dirt road. I’d seen five-year-olds act less embarrassed. Well, I wasn’t sure I even knew what a five-year-old actually looked like, but I had a general impression.
“Lanny liked gator wrestling,” he said, and his tone was a closed door. “He made me watch, I don’t know, a million videos about it. He was crazy about it.”
