Pay Dirt in Louisiana swamp, New Orleans streets

Another fun week. Pay Dirt, the novelette you’re helping me write, has close to 1,000 Twitter followers. Thanks again for your help! Now, let’s replay what happened this week…

Moving the lighter closer to the chains, Grim found a seam in the floor, then hinges to a door opening to the swamp below. Forcing the crowbar into the seam, he broke the latch. Brown water below the camp. Darker in the center and growing darker. Big yellow eyes in the center.

Massive green jaws lurched from the water. Yellow teeth sliced Grim’s arm. He winced and dropped the lighter. Blind, he swung the crowbar in the darkness. The door slammed shut. Grim waited for the splash below, then collapsed on the closed door, bleeding in the darkness.

"Friggin' gators, I hate 'em."

The next day, Kat and DJ hung out on a bus bench across from Rube Rarick's New Orleans office, Kat on a cell phone, DJ's thumbing through the Times-Picayune.

"How many cabs you gotta rob to get your picture in the paper around here?"

"Weasel-dick Bastard!" Kat slammed the phone onto the sidewalk, before it skipped into the traffic of Carrollton Avenue. Someone in a Prius popped the horn. Kat flipped them off. "Google says he's in New Orleans, we've seen him, but his bitch of a secretary says he's on vacation."

A Tabasco truck hits the cell phone, crushing it like a cracker.

"Hey," DJ looked up from the paper, "that’s my phone."

"Forget it, the police could've tracked us with it anyway." Kat took DJ's round brush from the congressman's bag and twisted it into one of her curls." After we're rich, I'll get you another."

"Well, I found your congressman." DJ held up the B section, a photo of Rarick in camouflage. "It says he's hunting for gator the next two weeks."

"That explains it." Kat grabbed the bag and stood up. "C'mon."

"Where are we going?"

"Do I have to tell you everything? We’re getting a truck or something that'll get us to the swamp."

For those just joining the party, here’s what we’ve been doing: In the tradition of the fast-production pulps of old, we’ve got a wild plot and some zany, but dangerous characters, and through Twitter and Facebook, readers are giving me hints, helping me create a crime fiction short story in posts of less than 140 characters.

Bobby Grim takes on Bayou Manchac

Today, our story has 877 followers on Twitter. Another great week, and I’ve got to thank you for continuing to help write this story through Twitter and Facebook.

Now, let’s recap the week.

Climbing down from the Abita Beer truck, Bobby Grim heard the driver saying that Savoy Landing was Bayou Manchac's last boat launch, the end of the farthest road into the swamp. “Sure you wanna be dropped here? I ain’t back for another two weeks.”

“I told you, I’m a hunter,” Grim said, “I’ll survive.”

The shack next to the launch had rusted tin nailed on the sides covered with faded yellow paint and a picture—maybe a coffee cup—with some words: Morning Treat.

By a single gas pump and a dead Jax beer light, a hand-stenciled sign swung from a post and read: No Deliveries Today.

The front wall, eight-feet wide, covered with various sized wooden planks, held more stenciled signs: Pig Feet, Gator Balls, and Coon Meat. The shack looked dark, the front door open or missing. All quiet, till the voice of Rush Limbaugh shouted something about Femi-Nazis.

Grim followed the sound through the entrance.

A chest-type home freezer sat just inside the door. In the shop’s center, a table with two chairs. A plastic-lettered cafe menu hung behind a rusted deli counter, white with a Barq's logo. Post office mailboxes with peeling brass-colored paint covered the left wall. On the right, shelves filled with food, for people, fish, and deer.

Behind the counter, a fat lady in a Harley shirt broke a crawfish in half and sucked both ends before speaking. "Who the hell are you?" Something red and yellow oozed down her chin.

"How much to rent one of your air-boats?" Grim pinched a hundred dollar bill from his roll.

Fat Lady wiped her chin with a Post-it note. "Thirty an hour, you got I.D."

"How much if I don't?" He peeled off six hundred, lining the bills across the counter.

"Maybe I'll tell the owner somebody stole the thing. Like maybe it just floated off or something."

"When will you see him?"

"Her."

"When will you see her?"

"Another week, next Friday."

Grim counted another four bills. "The boat floats off next Thursday, right?"

 

Bouncing through Bayou Manchac, the air-boat disturbed a gator large enough to splash some green gunk on Grim’s map. He slowed to clean it and to make sure the gator wasn't in the boat.

He pushed the throttle forward and rounded another bend, then slowed in front of the target’s camp. The recruiter described the target as the only hunter in the swamp with his picture on the wall of his camp. This camp's walls were insulated in old campaign billboards, half painted over, each sporting a photo of the same man and the some words, red and blue, and reading: Rube Rarick for Congress.

Wearing white rubber boots he'd found in the boat, Grim tromped through the mud to the back of the camp and opened the door with a crowbar.