Too Far Gone

7

Elliot Parnell, as a Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries enforcement officer, was keeping his eye on the hurricane because it could affect his beat adversely. If there was a mandatory evacuation, he would have to run all over the lakes and channels making residents leave. Most of the people who lived in his district were dumb as snakes, and he’d have his work cut out for him. He hoped the storm turned: he had a lot more important job to do than shooing cow-brained swampers from their hovels.

Parnell was a patient man. He had been employed as an enforcement officer for the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission for eighteen years. For each of those years-night and day in every kind of weather condition-he had been outrunning scofflaws when necessary, outsmarting them when possible. His job was to catch offenders who dared to take more game or fish than the laws of Louisiana allowed, hunt or fish without procuring the proper licenses, hunt or fish out of season, hunt or fish in restricted areas, sell game or fish, or poach protected animals.

Elliot Parnell never let a transgressor off with only a warning, unless he knew he couldn’t make a case, and the perp didn’t know it. If he had a man, woman, or child dead to rights, he would issue the citation, do whatever confiscating the law allowed, and testify against them if the case went to court. Parnell had no patience with any type of violator, but he had a special hard-on for people who killed alligators without the proper permits. Leland Ticholet was one of the worst offenders in the state. Any game and fish regulation that a man could break, Ticholet broke. Parnell had caught him on several occasions, and had written him numerous summonses, but mostly the judges let him go. Ticholet was as smart as instincts and criminal genetics could make a man. Parnell had joked that Ticholet’s whole family had been thumbing their noses at the law for so many generations that evolution had them emerging from the womb with the ends of their noses and their thumbs already calloused.

Parnell preferred to work alone, unless he was after poachers. A poacher could be dangerous. Although Parnell carried a Colt. 38, it was best to have someone watching your back. Lawbreakers could get testy or desperate, and sometimes wardens got shot, cut up, or just plain vanished. With people in the swamps killing deer, ducks, and gators out of season and cooking their methamphetamine, getting shot was a very real prospect.

Parnell looked over at the rookie-in-training, Wildlife and Fisheries Enforcement Officer Betty Crocker. She was asleep, snoring with her mouth open. Betty swore she didn’t mind people making jokes about her name, because she’d heard them all in her twenty-one years, and claimed she liked having a name people remembered easily. Some would have changed their names, but not her. She wasn’t right for the job, and not just because she was a black woman from the projects. Elliot wasn’t prejudiced. He’d had sex with black prostitutes when he was drunk. Probably he’d have sex with Crocker given the right circumstances.

A week earlier Elliot Parnell had spotted Ticholet driving a new boat across the lake. People like Leland couldn’t purchase such valuable items unless they were doing something very profitable, and such people could only make that sort of money illegally. Two days after that, Parnell had set up a digital video camera on a tree pointed so’s to capture activity on Leland’s camp house and dock. Triggered by motion of a boat or someone on the dock, the camera would record, and whatever the subject unloaded or skinned would be captured by the digital video camera, and Elliot would play it in court, and Leland would regret it. The expensive new boat would become property of the Wildlife and Fisheries Commission.

All Elliot needed was an image of Leland Ticholet pulling one gator carcass out of his boat onto the dock-just one.