Gator Aide Read Online Free PDF

legend in his own mind. When higher-ups finally decided they could take no more, Charlie had been hog-tied by a promotion to a desk job. It was either that or leave the Service. He’d have sooner given up his life.
    I cleared off the chair on the other side of his desk and sat down, plunking my breakfast on the only patch of open space that had so far escaped the growing fungus. Charlie joined me, pulling out his own start to the day—a Baby Ruth bar.
    “Have a good time last night, Bronx?”
    “Yeah. It was great. I actually got to see something that didn’t have feathers on it.”
    That brought a smile to his face, and I felt safe in continuing. I told him about Valerie and how she had ended up looking like a demo for Etch-A-Sketch. Filling him in on the gator brought me around to mentioning that I’d heard Val was a local girl from down south in the bayou.
    Charlie reached for the Hershey bar beckoning to him from his desk drawer. “Sheeet! I’ll bet the tail on a horse’s ass that she was Marie Vaughn Tuttle’s niece. Pretty little coonass. She left the swamp to become a star. Never got any further than Bourbon Street, discovered her main talent was in twirling her titties. Last I heard, she was hooked on smack.”
    The first time I’d heard the expression “coonass” my Northern guilt had reared its ugly head, sure that it was a racist Southern expression for blacks. It was only later that I learned it was a term of affection for the local Cajuns. Especially coming out of Charlie Hickok’s mouth. If he had been given three wishes, one of them would have been to be born Cajun.
    “Who’s Marie Tuttle?”
    Charlie was a walking bible on the people of the bayou, and I had learned to pump him for information whenever I could. I was quickly picking up on the fact that the only way to get anything done was by befriending the folks in the swamp. Without their help, I might as well pack up my bags and start heading out once more for dog-food commercials back in New York. I was in luck this morning. Charlie was in one of his more talkative moods.
    “She’s a little Cajun coonass lives just outside Morgan City. Valerie was her sister’s kid. When her mama died, Marie took her in. I think Valerie moved up to Bourbon Street mainly to get the hell away from Marie and gator skins. You can smell that woman from a mile away. She traffics in buying hot skins from the local outlaws and selling ’em at cut-rate prices to some of our local business scum.”
    Charlie scratched a raised armpit and hunkered down farther in his chair, letting the memory of former glory days wash over him.
    “I busted her once, but she was out again before you could swallow your stew. A little bitty thing, but she’s as mean as they come. If she were a man, someone woulda killed her by now. Lord knows, she’d as soon shoot you as look at you.”
    Whether or not he had put the bait out on purpose, I didn’t know. But I was hooked.
    “I’d like to go see her. Maybe dig around a bit and see what I can find out.”
    I didn’t know what Charlie’s reaction would be, but he’d opened the door with his call to me last night. It was a Fish and Wildlife case now, as well as N.O.P.D.’s. Still, if I were to pursue the investigation further than just writing up a report on a dead gator, I needed Charlie’s permission. To my surprise, he not only gave me the bait, but pulled the hook tight so it caught in my mouth.
    “Sure thing, Bronx. Have a good time.”
    I decided to push my luck. “Charlie, there’s something that’s bothering me about that alligator. I can’t see how those bullets could have penetrated the skull. I’d like to have an autopsy done.” Before I even finished I sensed that I had gone too far, forgetting my bounds as a rookie agent.
    Leaning forward, Charlie slammed his elbows on top of a pile of papers that shifted slightly to the left. The movement was enough to set off a chain reaction reminiscent of the flicking of a