Mutiny on the Bayou Read online

  You don’t want to know.

  I thought of my own secrets I kept from him. Necessary, of course. The less he knew about the real Fortune Redding and the real reason I was in Sinful the better for him. Yet it made me feel guilty as hell.

  His hand brushed against mine. I could tell he wanted to do more with that hand. Those arms. Those lips. However, Carter was a stickler for rules, and the rules dictated no personal business while on duty. The energy I felt when his hand grazed mine said personal business was definitely on his mind.

  “Look,” he said, lifting his eyebrows, “I was wondering… there’s a new restaurant getting some attention in Mudbug. Maybe in a few days, when you get back—”

  The screeching sound of brakes interrupted his sweet attempt to ask me out. I pulled my gaze away from Carter and toward the street. Gertie’s ancient Cadillac jerked to a stop next to the curb.

  “That woman always has the worst timing,” he muttered before continuing. “So… about dinner when you get back.”

  I turned toward him, his gorgeous eyes and sexy curly eyelashes giving me a momentary memory lapse about what I was trying to accomplish.

  Oh, yeah, don’t give in.

  But those eyes!

  Look away!

  I pulled my gaze away from him for a second to get grounded. To say I was conflicted would have been an understatement. Did I want to go further with him? Hell yes. Would it complicate things when I went back to my old life? Hell yes. Unfortunately, shutting the door on a serious relationship with him at this point just made me want him more. So I did what I always did—stalled until I could figure it all out. Mustering my most casual shrug, I looked back at him, commanding my brain to ignore his sexy lips.

  Stay with the mission, Agent Redding. You’ve fought overlords and arms dealers. Carter’s lips should be easy.

  Maintaining a perfect casual shrug, I said, “Maybe I’ll still be mad at you when I get back.” Oh, jeez, was that the best I could do?

  “It’s an anger management class, Fortune,” he said, flashing me a grin. “I’m hoping you’ll be the star pupil.”

  Ida Belle stepped out of the passenger side of the Caddy. She frowned at Carter. “Well, look who stopped off to say goodbye to the big, bad lawbreakers.”

  Gertie flung her door open and pulled herself onto the pavement. At least I thought the woman who stepped out of the Caddy was Gertie.

  “What the…?” Carter said, his mouth dropping.

  Gertie’s normally wavy white hair now swept up into spikes. Her lips painted with black lipstick. She’d replaced her white Capris with tight orange spandex pants, shrink-wrapped to her body, every crease, roll and crack announcing itself like a neon sign. On top she wore an orange leather corset adorned with five rows of belted buckles horizontally aligned across the front, the sides split open and held together by silver chains. And draped over that an orange lace minicape. If I wasn’t mistaken, a pack of cigarettes were tucked into her cleavage. Thick, spiked bracelets wrapped around her wrists.

  She lifted her leg and kicked the door shut, her normally petite feet looking enormous in bulky, black combat boots. Ida Belle reached into the backseat and pulled out a small carry-on and set it on the ground, then reached in and pulled out a medium-sized suitcase on wheels. As she reached in to pull out the large suitcase on wheels, Carter raced over and pulled it out for her.

  “Oh, now he decides to be a gentleman.” Gertie strutted over, pulling at her pants that had taken residence up her butt.

  “You should have thought of the consequences before going off on Celia,” he said. “And what’s with that outfit?”

  I patted the top of Gertie’s stiff hair. “And hair?” Then touched her arm, running my fingers over a series of symbols—triangle, eye, lightning bolt—drawn on her arm with a Sharpie.

  “You are not getting on the bus wearing your Halloween costume,” Carter said.

  “Yes I am. This outfit says ‘don’t mess with me.’ We don’t know the women we’ll be incarcerated with. There’s no way I’m going to end up as some gal’s bitch.”

  “You are not being incarcerated,” he said. “This is just an anger management class, not prison.”

  “Am I allowed to leave?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then we’re prisoners. Prisoners who have to pay for our imprisonment, thank you very much.”

  Ida Belle raised her hand. “I want it on record I think it’s a stupid getup.”

  Gertie rolled her eyes. “Oh, you made your opinions known on the drive over. When it’s your turn to be sent up the river, you can dress like a sissy and see how far that gets you. But don’t expect me to come rescue you when some gal named Lola tires of you as her girl-toy and jabs you in the neck with her shank in the mess hall.”

  “You need to stop watching those prison shows.”

  I scanned Gertie’s suitcases. “Yep, and nothing screams ‘badass’ like a three-piece matching set of floral-print luggage and Sharpie tattoos.”

  A white minibus slowed to a stop next to the curb in front of us. A large magnetic sign clung to the side of the bus at a forty-five degree angle. It read, Camp Happy Frog Behavioral Facility in large red lettering.

  Gertie handed her keys to Ida Belle. “No joy riding while I’m gone.”

  “I’m not going to be seen driving that thing around town,” Ida Belle said, flicking her thumb back at the Caddy. “I’m taking it back home and hiding it in my garage.”

  I fished my keys out of my backpack and handed them to Ida Belle as well. “I left a bag of food for Merlin on the counter, a package of treats and his favorite blue ball. I walked, so the Jeep’s back at the house. Go ahead and joy ride.”

  Carter cleared his throat. “I’m required by law to check your purse for weapons.”

  Gertie blew him a raspberry, then said to Ida Belle, “I never should have let him move on to seventh grade,” before ripping her enormous purse open and shoving it under his nose. “Check away.”

  Carter looked inside, reaching in and moving a few items aside to look further. He nodded, glancing at her luggage.

  “I could open them for you.”

  “Do you swear—to God—there are no weapons in your luggage?”

  Gertie held up her hand. “And hope to die. There are no weapons in my luggage. Unless you count my bras I could conceivably use to smother someone with. Or my Monopoly game pieces I could use to gouge someone’s eyes out. And I do have an electric callous grinder I could pummel into someone’s heart. Then there’s my—”

  “Never mind. I’ll take that as a ‘no.’ You may now get on the bus.”

  Gertie hoisted her purse over her shoulder, grasping her carry-on with one hand and the medium suitcase with another, and trudged toward the shuttle. Ida Belle followed with the large suitcase.

  Carter glanced at me, wincing. “Any weapons?”

  I opened my backpack and held it out for him to check. He glimpsed inside and nodded, then shot a look at my duffel bag.

  “I swear, no weapons inside my duffel bag.”

  Carter nodded. “You’re free to hop on the bus. Unless of course I suspect you’re hiding a weapon on your person and require a pat down.”

  Part of me wanted him to and part of me didn’t.

  My mind was made up after one of the women leaned out of the window of the bus and whistled. “You’re cute, Mr. Lawman.” Then several women stuck their heads out and whistled as well. Nothing like a bus full of women whistling during your pat down to kill a mood.

  “Maybe you should just take my word for it,” I said. “No weapons.”

  He nodded and shifted on his feet. Brushed my hand again. “Well… guess this is goodbye.”

  More whistling, with an added catcall about Carter’s butt and how good it looked in his uniform.

  He sighed. “See you.”

  “Yeah.”

  As I stepped away, my hand brushed against his. I joined Ida Belle and Gertie at the side of the s
huttle, where the driver, a sweaty bald guy with an attitude, was in a stare down with Gertie.

  He finally spoke. “This ain’t no Hilton. You’ll have to carry your own bags into the bus.”

  The three of us returned his sneer. Realizing he was outmatched, he cursed, grabbed the large and medium suitcases and hauled them up the shuttle steps.

  Ida Belle turned to Gertie and in a hushed voice said, “Bring Fortune up to speed on our investigation.”

  Gertie nodded.

  “What investigation?”

  “Let’s just say we’re not going to get bored at Camp Happy Frog,” Gertie whispered.

  We boarded the shuttle and scanned the rows of seats occupied by young, mostly surly looking women. Luggage racks took up a third of the space, and the only seats left where we could sit together were near the front of the bus, so we edged into the second row, me taking the window seat and Gertie the aisle. As our ride pulled away I could see Carter hanging back by the oak tree, waiting until we rounded the corner at the end of the block before disappearing inside City Hall.

  “He really likes you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not happy about that? Carter and I might have our differences from time to time, but he’s a good man. I know Sinful’s a small swamp, but I bet he’d be the best catch in a big pond too.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You’re afraid to get too close to him because you’ll have to leave by the end of summer.”

  My stomach clenched.

  Gertie patted my hand. “We’re not looking forward to you leaving either, but I have a feeling it’ll all work out. That we’ll always be in each other’s lives. We just have to make it work.”

  “Yeah. So what investigation are you and Ida Belle working on?”

  Gertie glanced around, then leaned into me, filling me in on our future mission. Between packing and transforming herself into a senior Bonnie-without-Clyde, she and Ida Belle had done some snooping online about the camp to which we’d been sentenced. It was owned by a company operating several private prisons and low-security, behavior-modification facilities. And we weren’t the only residents of Sinful to have been sentenced to Camp Happy Frog during the past year. Judge Renaud had sent twenty-five Sinful residents and thirty people from neighboring Mudbug to this camp within the last twelve months.

  “Some people sentenced to Camp Happy Frog should have done jail time. Armed robbery, assault, that sort of thing. The rest were shooting their mouths off, like we were,” Gertie said. “Under normal circumstances, people like us would have been given a slap on our wrists.”

  “So a lot of the people sent there don’t belong there.”

  She nodded. “At four hundred and fifty a pop, plus what the state kicks in…”

  “We’re all a gold mine to this private company.”

  “Hm-hm. That makes me one angry old broad.”

  “Is the judge getting a kickback?”

  “That’s what we’re thinking. We didn’t learn anything online, but maybe we’ll discover something at the camp linking some compensation to her. Even better if we find a link back to Celia that would force her to forgive Donna’s fine.”

  She reached into her purse and pulled out a bottle of water and took a swig. “Ida Belle will be staying at a motel about twenty miles down the main road. At ten o’clock tonight she’ll join us and we’ll snoop around Camp Happy Frog’s office. Hopefully there’s a company computer hooked up to their corporate network. I packed an external drive so we can copy the computer’s files. You’ve done computer dumping before, haven’t you?”

  I held up my hands. “No, no. Harrison went crazy when I told him Director Morrow’s niece has an anger management class on her record they’re going to have to erase. I told him I would mind my Ps and Qs and be a good girl.”

  Gertie frowned. “Good girls expose wrongdoing. Didn’t you ever see Norma Rae? Silkwood? Erin Brockovich?”

  “None of them a CIA assassin hiding from a Middle East arms dealer,” I whispered. “I have to keep a low profile.”

  “Then we’ll have to be extra careful we won’t get caught, now won’t we?”

  Chapter Three

  Camp Happy Frog – Turning Your Frown Upside Down proclaimed the sign on the dirt road winding off the main highway. The sign was held up by a creepy, cartoonish frog statue standing on its hind legs.

  Gertie strolled toward our row from the back of the bus, where she’d been pretending to use the on-board restroom. In reality she’d been selling Sinful Ladies Society cough syrup to our fellow anger management classmates.

  She dropped into her seat next to mine and glanced up at the driver, who followed her movements in his rear-view mirror. “Hey, Doll Face,” she said to him in a loud drawl, “my frown would love it if you drop me off at the next bar. Wouldn’t y’aaaall agree?”

  Snorts and snickers arose from the women on the bus.

  “I presold six bottles of cough syrup,” she whispered before extracting the package of cigarettes from between her cleavage. She opened the pack and slid one out.

  “You don’t smoke,” I said.

  “No, but my lawbreaking, don’t-mess-with-me, alter ego does.” She pressed the cigarette between her lips.

  The driver peered at the rear-view mirror and said, “Hey, no smoking on the bus.”

  She withdrew the cigarette. “I’m going to put it away as a favor to you, Sugah Smacks,” she called out to him, “but only because you have the sexiest combover I’ve ever seen.” She smacked her lips at his reflection in the mirror, causing more snickers from the women on the bus. She leaned into me, whispering, “Gah! This tastes nasty.” She rubbed her tongue with her hand. “How can people smoke these things? Gum. Gum. I need gum.”

  She tore open her massive purse and rummaged through it, shoveling out crap and dumping it on my lap. Her water bottle, cell phone, wallet, two bottles of Sinful Ladies Society Cough Syrup, a large bottle of hand sanitizer, and a set of windup teeth.

  “Windup teeth?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” She continued to dump a night-vision scope, two pairs of handcuffs and a pistol onto my lap before producing a package of gum.

  “Did you switch bags with Ida Belle when Carter wasn’t looking?”

  Gertie nodded. “Yeah, when you two were getting all lovey-dovey. I packed identical purses expecting him to search one.” She unwrapped a piece of gum and popped it in her mouth, chewing feverishly.

  “He said no weapons.”

  “Some of these women have done jail time. My gun might help us in a pinch.” She held out the pack of gum, offering me a piece. I shook my head. She then shoveled everything back in her purse. A line of sweat ran from her forehead, down her face and across her neck. “Dear Lord, I can’t believe the air conditioner on this bus is broke.”

  “I can’t believe you’re wearing spandex in Louisiana in July. Why’d you decide on this costume, anyway?”

  “It’s my Gertrude Roy costume. I’ve worn it for more Halloweens than you’ve been alive.”

  “Who’s Gertrude Roy?”

  “What? You never heard of her?”

  I shook my head.

  “She’s referred to as Miss Gertrude, and she’s a legend in these parts. A book was written about her, and Lord knows how many folk songs. She led a gang of bank-robbing women from the seventies through the nineties. She’d go into a bank, slam her windup teeth on the counter, and announce they had until the chattering stopped to open the vault and fill her bags.

  “She never took guff from anyone, especially rival male outlaws who tried to get rid of her. More than one ended up as Gator chow. And after every heist, some charity for women or children would receive an anonymous donation of a bag of laundered cash.”

  “So she drew sympathy from women.”

  “You bet she did. We’re the same age and have the same first name, so it seemed a natural fit for costume parties. Also, we looked like we could be twins. So much
alike that during her active years Sheriff Lee gave me a note to carry around stating I wasn’t her so police in other towns wouldn’t take me in for questioning.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She disappeared in 2006 after a hung jury led to a mistrial for a bank robbery in Atlanta. This outfit is similar to what she wore to court, orange like a prison suit, only glammed up a bit. Miss Gertrude always had the gift of showmanship. Every year I rewatch the interview she gave after the verdict to get her mannerisms down.”

  “Is that why your y’all spanned two time zones?”

  Gertie nodded. “Oh, yeah, Miss Gertrude was known for her long, drawn-out drawls. And she always surrounded herself with a harem of young, hot men who’d give her foot rubs, neck massages, and anything else she wanted rubbed.” She squirmed in her seat. “Of course, you’re right about wearing spandex and leather during July. These pants and boots are making me sweat so much I’ll have to wring out my undies when we get to our room. And don’t get me started on my under-boob sweat.”

  “So you think these women are really going to believe you’re Gertrude Roy?”

  “Most already do. It’s all in the denial. If you deny something often enough, all people can believe is what you said you’re not. But don’t worry, I didn’t forget about you. They think you’re my toady, so you’ll get a pass.”

  I could feel my lip quivering.

  “You’re only laughing because you don’t know the legend of Gertrude Roy. Her memory still holds sway throughout the South. You’ll see. This’ll be fun.” She thought for a moment. “You know, I’m almost kinda glad we were sentenced here. We’re going to be roomies. It’ll give us a chance to get to know each other better.”

  “Welcome to Camp Happy Frog,” the driver announced with not a hint of “happy” in his voice. He pulled up to a large log structure with the word Administration painted in red on a sign above the door. The same stupid wooden frog statue stood in front of the building holding a welcome sign. I noticed someone had painted a mustache on him. The bus stopped and the driver reached over and cranked open the door. “Make sure all your belongings are off the bus, watch your step, and enjoy your stay at Camp Happy Frog.”