Read Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice for Free Online Page B

Charlie. Did it kill the rival?”
    “ Dei gratia, by the grace of God, no. The chemical in the
nasal spray changed the properties of the beta-propiolactone. Stung
like the devil but didn’t cause permanent damage. The assailant, it
turns out, had suffered a mental breakdown, and was given a
suspended sentence with intensive psychiatric therapy.”
    “ I like that story, Doc,”
Granny said. “For once, nobody got killed, and justice was
done.”
    “ He must have made it up,”
I suggested.
    Doc Riggs harrumphed at me, baited a hook
for himself, and launched into a lengthy and graphic description of
determining time of death by the extent of larvae growth in the
corpse. The story seemed to make Granny hungry, because she grabbed
a strand of Jamaican jerk chicken from a waterproof bag.
    I didn’t spend as much time with Granny as I
used to, and now I studied her a moment. She was a tough old bird
in khaki shorts, an “Eat ‘em Raw” T-shirt from a Key West oyster
bar, and a canvas hat. Her legs and bare feet were tanned the color
of mahogany bark and were just as soft. As she listened to Doc
Riggs spin his tales, Granny watched the water, squinting into the
morning sun, occasionally giving me directions by pointing her
fishing rod in a direction her instincts or her failing eyesight
dictated. She let fly a cast, grimaced, and allowed the line to
drift in the placid water. “You gotta lay the hay down where the
goats can git it. Jake, you see the tails of any bonefish
a-wiggling?”
    “ Only thing I see are
snails dancing across my eyelids,” I said.
    “ Too much of Granny’s
moonshine last night,” Doc Riggs told me, as if I didn’t know.
“We’re all liable to be blind by tonight.”
    Granny Lassiter wasn’t even my grandmother,
but there was some relationship on my father’s side. Great-aunt or
distant cousin or something. She raised me after my father, a Key
West shrimper, was killed in a barroom brawl, and my mother ran off
to Oklahoma with a roughneck. I called her Granny, and so did
everybody else. Well, nearly everybody else. There was the sailor
in the bar who called her Skunky, a reference to the white streak
that creases her jet-black hair. He only called her that once, a
whack across the ankle from a four-foot tarpon gaff ending the
nickname then and there.
    Charlie was going on about how posthumous
stench attracts blowflies. It’s just like an engraved invitation to
colonize a cadaver, I think he said. Granny was still chewing the
jerk chicken, washing it down with beer from the cooler. I kept
poling, watching for fish, occasionally looking at the towheaded
kid Granny had brought along. She was always feeding stray cats and
little boys.
    “ How about you, son,” I
asked. “You try any of Granny’s white lightning last
night?”
    “ I’m not your son,” the kid
said, matter-of-factly and accurately.
    “ And we’re both thankful
for that,” I responded. I am generally able to hold my own in
repartee with eleven-year-olds, though I don’t have much
practice.
    “ Kip drank his weight in
Granny’s mango milk shakes,” Charlie said. “Gave him an orange
mustache.”
    Kip. That’s right. I’d heard Granny call out
“Kippers” a couple of times, but I thought she was looking for some
salted herring.
    “ Mangifera indica, such a delectable fruit,” Charlie was saying.
“Though it tastes like a cross between a peach and a pineapple, the
mango actually is related to the cashew nut, and heaven help me,
poison ivy. Isn’t that strange, the relationship between a sweet
and a poison?”
    “ Reminds me of the women
Jake’s been sniffing around all these years,” Granny said. “Except
for that one who became the lawyer, they were a bunch of Jezebels
in miniskirts.”
    “ Non semper ea sunt quae
videntur,” Charlie said. “Things are not
always what they seem.”
    Charlie went on like that for a while,
waxing philosophical about plants, animals, and the human
condition. I watched the