The Gator Racket
Jenny
Viola didn't often frequent the Green Bayou. Perhaps, when Jenny had told Clara it was a club, she was being generous. When one thought of the 1940s definition of 'club,' an old shack perched precariously on rotting supports hanging over the back of a swamp wasn't what immediately sprang to mind. Clara looked at it with a tiny morsel of disappointment when the Porsche trundled up and Jenny cut the engine. The neon shamrock flickered fitfully, the place was mostly made of wood, but the cars lined up out front were all brand-new and high-end. It was a glimmering, emerald beacon out there in the Louisiana sticks. Jenny, clutching her broken right hand to her bleeding left arm, got out swiftly, followed by Clara.
"This isn't a public kind of club," she began to explain as they trudged through the wet dirt to get to the run-down squat of an establishment, Jenny hurrying because, truth be told, her arm was beginning to smart a bit.
"I'd hardly even call it a club; why is it so isolated?" Clara asked, glancing around like she was worried some Scarpelli might come slinking out of the shadowy trees to pick them off from a distance. Sniping people and sneaking around wasn't the mafia style, though.
"It's the mob bar," Jenny answered.
"Isn't the Three Hearts the mob bar?"
"No, the Three Hearts is a where all the bigwigs Viola pays off – company executives and police commissioners and senators and the like – go to do 'business.' This is for the grunts. The Scarpellis would never hit it, because of a sort of, mutual respect kind of thing." Jenny went to hold open the door into the Green Bayou, but Clara reached it first.
"I'm not going to get shot at, am I?"
"Of course not. You're with me."
"Yeah, I was with you half an hour ago and we got shot at then."
"Ha, ha," Jenny said dryly, stepping inside the Green Bayou for the first time in a long time. She had rarely frequented it, though, truthfully. Only sometimes, when she had to take Conor Finnegan deliveries of moonshine from that old shack of hers in the swamp, and she would hang around late. It was just as stale-smelling, dimly-lit and empty as usual. She'd kind of missed it.
"DeLacey!" a heavy Irish accent shouted at her right as she entered. Her searching eyes found, marching out from behind the bar, Conor Finnegan himself. An old friend of hers – her favourite mob acquaintance. Jenny grinned broadly. She liked Conor because he was the owner of the Green Bayou (in the eyes of the law), he took care of all its business, and he still worked the bar as well.
"Oh – Clara – this is Conor Finnegan," Jenny introduced, glancing at Clara. Conor made a start – he mustn't have noticed her. It was something to do with the way that light passed through her – causing her sunlight aversion and her near-blindness in the day and her lack of reflection and shadow – that also made her terribly difficult to see if she was skulking around in the dark. "You remember hearing Viola mention Conor; he's the one who can't recreate my moonshine recipe properly."
"Only because you never left any instructions behind when you ran off to Europe," Conor joked, the nodded at Clara, "Who's the girl?"
"Clara's my friend, she's a teacher," Jenny said, for once not introducing her as her girlfriend, since Clara seemed to be fretting so much about what them being openly gay might mean in the 1940s – understandably so. Clara probably knew more about her own planet's history when it came to gay rights than Jenny did, anyway.
"A teacher of what?" Conor frowned.
"Literature, mainly," Clara answered.
"…She's trustworthy?"
"Oh, yeah, completely," Jenny said, "She's my best friend. Uh – I need a first aid kit. Badly." When she revealed to Conor her bloody arm and her bullet wound (more of a graze, honestly) he told her to go sit down somewhere while he slipped into the back room to get what she had requested.
"Ooh, I'm your bestie now," Clara whispered to her, "Friendzoned by my own girlfriend."
"I just can't win with you," Jenny muttered, then shushed her, going to sit by the bar. There was hardly anyone in the Green Bayou that night. Perhaps people were avoiding it because of this feud with the Italians. Just a pair of old men sitting at a table near the empty stage and a woman weeping silently right at the other end of the long bar, whom Jenny frowned at for a moment. The woman, whoever she was, didn't look up from the wooden surface she was leaning on. Smooth jazz was drifting through the room from the jukebox standing alone in a corner.
"I've always wanted a jukebox," Clara mused.
"What are you gonna do with a jukebox?" Jenny asked absently, looking at her injury. Clara sat down on her right at a little circular table.
"I don't know – I could start to collect vinyls, or something. Dylan's thinking of opening a record shop," Clara said.
"What? How's he gonna do that? How does that bookshop even make money – you've had two customers this week," Jenny said, "I don't understand it. And Sally has a ridiculous collection of vinyls, anyway. You know how she won't listen to anything written after 1950."
"Well I don't know where he gets the money from. Maybe he's secretly rich, or something. I don't really talk to him, and when I do it's usually because he's asking about you or Esther," Clara explained, and Jenny was alarmed to hear that Dylan Danvers kept asking after her. She had never met him, what did he want with her? Nevertheless, the conversation subsided when Conor returned with a treasure trove of unsensitised medical supplies, and Jenny peeled off the leather jacket borrowed from Clara so as to get a better look at the bullet wound. "You can keep that jacket now you got it shot."
"I got myself shot, too," Jenny pointed out.
"Yeah. But I don't care if I don't have the jacket anymore, only if I don't have you anymore," she said, which was quite smooth, and made Conor give her a funny look she wasn't that fazed by.
"Who shot you?" Conor asked.
"Some Scarpelli, I don't know," Jenny said, sighing and explaining the whole thing about Viola lending her the stolen Porsche to drive in and them getting chased down. While she did, she poured a modest amount of whiskey onto a wad of cotton wool balls to dab at her wound, clearing away some of the blood that had dried. It wasn't bleeding so much anymore, and really wasn't as bad as it could have been. It had barely even damaged the muscle; she'd be fine in a day or two.
"Will it need stitches…?" Clara asked guardedly, her eyes trailing over a rusty sewing kit in this box of Conor's. Conor sat with them and kept glancing back to the woman crying at the bar.
"Nah. It'll be fine, don't worry," Jenny said, getting a cloth and strapping it to her upper arm with a hefty amount of bandages, then pleading with Clara not to tell Martha Jones about any of this or else there would be hell to pay, adding, "She'll blame you for it."
"Me?"
"You're meant to be keeping me out of trouble," Jenny said, "That's why she told me I have to stay with you."
"I'm not the one who shot you. But when am I gonna see Martha to tell her? Just make sure to wear long sleeves around her, you'll be fine."
"Who's the woman at the bar?" Jenny asked Conor eventually. Ten years ago, Viola had come up with a theory that Jenny had a soft spot for Conor Finnegan – in the romantic sense. There wasn't a shred of truth to it, he was just a decent guy, to say he worked for the mob.
"Franny Mancini," Conor answered quietly.
"What? As in Eddie Mancini's wife? I thought Mahoney had her in his rooms on Fifteenth?" Jenny asked.
"Nah, nah. That's just what the boss has convinced him of to try and get him to talk about Sal's fronts. The poor girl didn't even know Eddie worked for Scarpelli, thought he worked for some law firm that dealt with insurance fraud til Johnny went and picked her up this morning. Nobody's harmed a hair on her head. Doubt I can say the same for Mancini."
"Yeah, we saw him earlier," Jenny said, "Called Mahoney a mick so she had Johnny take him down to the cellar. I only came to get a coat, you know, and look at all this I'm mixed up in again."
"That's this life for you," Conor remarked, "If I could give Eddie my advice, I'd tell him to talk. Nothing good would come of widowing a girl like that – she's a real gem. Anyway, things is slow. Don't suppose you'd be willing to break out your old charms, DeLacey?"
"Old charms?" Jenny asked. He laughed.
"You know what I mean. You look as though you haven't aged a day since I last saw yous, so you must remember how the boss used to show you off all the time," Conor said.
"Show you off?" Clara inquired wryly.
"Oh, you mean the fiddle?" Jenny realised what he was talking about, then explained to Clara, "Viola used to get me to play the fiddle all the time in one of her speakeasies. The oldest one, underneath the tailor's shop of her father's, just O'Hara's. During prohibition, you know? How she got her big break into the mafia."
"Mafia?" Conor snorted, "I'm surprised at you using a word like that in a place like this."
"…I don't get it," Clara frowned.
"Technically the Irish mob can't be called a mafia," Jenny explained, a little bored, "Since the mafia is all Italians and Sicilians. But it's still an organised crime family."
"Ah, where'd you find such a sweet girl, DeLacey? Some might say she was a square."
"Seamus did," Jenny explained, "And she's not. You're not a square, are you?"
"What's the right answer?" Clara asked, and Jenny smiled and repeated to Conor that Clara wasn't a square. She got the sense that Clara might be beginning to regret going out that day. Conor broached the topic of Jenny's musical talents again.
"I can't, I've broken my thumb," she said, taking off one of the driving gloves she had been wearing nearly the whole day. Those and her scarf from Clara she still hadn't taken off, which she had also managed to successfully save from getting any of her blood on it. Jenny's right thumb was still a big bandaged lump she could hardly move. She hadn't changed the bandages since Martha had put them on a week ago, either. Clara kept telling her they smelt funky.
"How'd you do that?"
"Well, I didn't do it, there was just this issue with a Ukrainian who wanted information from me I didn't have," Jenny explained, "Broke my thumb." Clara wasn't listening to this brief story, she was looking at the jukebox again, which Jenny noticed and thought about. The Ink Spots' It's a Sin to Tell a Lie was crooning.
"Your girl there's a big fan of that heap of rust," Conor commented, and at him referring to Clara as 'Jenny's girl', Jenny was taken by surprise. "Never really had you figured for a dyke, DeLacey."
"Well I figure that if you don't call me a dyke I won't call you a mick," she snapped quickly.
"Huh?"
"Not a nice word, Finnegan," Jenny said coolly.
"Where are you heading after this?" he asked, "Whatever you're doing here. Getting a coat. When you get your coat, where you going?"
"Back to England," Jenny answered. It was true, they would go back to England, just England in the 2010s rather than the 1940s.
"DeLacey could fix up that broken thing no problem," Conor told Clara. Yes, she did like Conor, but he was still a gangster really. Still under Viola's thumb, still with the common aim of flooding Louisiana with booze and one-upping the Italians. Everything had a price, he wouldn't give her the jukebox out of courtesy. Especially think, as best as she could tell, it was working fine. And he was trying to pawn it off on Clara, for some reason.
"What do you want for it?" Jenny asked before Clara, who was confused, could speak.
"This car of Big Sal's," he said.
"What for? That's Viola's. She won't like me giving it away."
"You already got it wrecked. She wouldn't dare drive that thing, even if it got repainted and clean plates put on," Conor said, "She only took it to mess with Don Scarpelli, and Don Scarpelli's guys just tried to hit the O'Haras' most valuable asset; you."
"I haven't even been here for ten years."
"The whiskey is what keeps us afloat, and the whiskey is what you gave us," Conor said smoothly, "All I want's that Porsche. The boss won't mind once I tell her what I want with it. Don't you know who tried to whack you? That Tony's Antonio Vinci, he's their best new hit. And that car is the perfect bait." Jenny narrowed her eyes, then looked at Clara.
"What?"
"You're the one who fancies the jukebox," Jenny said, "Do you really want it? In exchange for a car so that Conor can try to ice Tony Vinci?"
"No! That'd be like blood money, but… a blood jukebox."
"The car's gonna go back to Viola," Conor said, "After you leave. I'll just tell her my idea. One scenario your girl gets a jukebox out of it, the other you don't get nothin'." Jenny narrowed her eyes.
"The whiskey is what I gave you, you said?"
"Aye, it is, but what's that to do with the car?"
"Moonshine recipe for the jukebox," Jenny said.
"Jen, it's only a jukebox," Clara said, confused about this haggling.
"Nah, he'll give us it now. For the moonshine." Jenny was right, and Jenny was also planning to do something with that Porsche that would prevent Conor from fitting it with a car bomb to try and take out Tony Vinci. Conor left to go get a notepad and a pencil so that he could copy down the complicated instructions for how to brew moonshine the way she brewed moonshine.
"Why'd you do that? I don't know what I'm gonna do with a jukebox," Clara whispered to her, "And I thought the moonshine recipe was in exchange for the coat?"
"Viola makes coats all day, and she couldn't care one bit about the jukebox in the Green Bayou. As long as Conor gets the recipe some way, it doesn't matter. And as long as we catch Kitty Winthrop."
"Well you've been sat here lollygagging with whatshisface for god knows how long – you haven't even asked about what she does here," Clara pointed out.
"I got a jukebox out of it!" Jenny protested, "It's fine, look, I'll get rid of the Porsche so they can't use it in their scheme. I'd rather not contribute to this little gang war of theirs. I'm only here for a coat – a coat! And all this just-"
Gunfire tore through the air and the wooden front of the Green Bayou, from something powerful and automatic. To Jenny's well-trained ears, she guessed it was a Thompson. It didn't really matter though; as bullets ripped above, Jenny tackled Clara to the ground and flipped the table so that it made cover for them, all the first aid material falling to the floor. Bottles of drink behind the bar exploded and Franny Mancini screamed. The bullets continued until the tommy-gun's whole drum was emptied into the front of the mob bar, and the noise of them was then replaced by crying. Then Clara, next to her, tensed up.
"Someone's been shot," she said, "A human." When she said that Jenny grabbed her wrist to keep her close and away from wherever the blood she could smell was.
"Don't think about it, get the flask out of the bag," Jenny said, prioritising Clara over whoever had just come to shoot up the Bayou, "You won't hurt anyone." Jenny glanced around and saw that it had been none other than Francesca Mancini who had been shot. In her gut, too. Clara saw this.
"Shit," she breathed, staring, but there was more empathy than hunger in her dark eyes. She held Jenny's right hand tightly, though, tightly enough to make the tender flesh around her thumb ache. But if it came down to Clara killing somebody or Jenny's thumb being gammy for a while longer, she would take the latter.
"Who's out there!?" Jenny shouted loudly. There was a clattering, splashing noise. Whoever it was had dropped the gun in the mud.
"It's them," Clara answered, "I can smell alien. And-"
"Kitty? Is that you?" Conor called, Conor standing up slowly from behind the bar. He must have heard them drop the gun as well.
"Yeah, it's Kitty," Clara finished what she had been saying, and Jenny pulled her revolver back out and made sure to turn the chambers so that it was on the empty one, in case she needed to bluff someone. Franny Mancini was bleeding out nearby. Jenny didn't know where Kitty had found a tommy-gun, but she took a gamble and assumed that Kitty didn't have any more firearms, so she stood up slowly, pulling her hand out of Clara's. Viola probably had guns stashed in all sorts of funny places around her rackets in the swamp anyway – Kitty had presumably found a cache somewhere close.
And there she saw a young girl, late twenties, standing out there in the swampy road with a submachine gun at her feet, crying into her hands, through the splintered wood now riddled with bullet holes.
"Go look after Franny," Jenny ordered Conor. In the mob she was still his superior by a long way, "Keep pressure on the wound, as much as you can. Tell me if you can smell anything bad while you're over there."
"Bad how?"
"Bad like her bowels or stomach have been shot open how," Jenny hissed at him, and he rushed over, her keeping her eyes trained on Kitty. Clara, struggling to keep hold of herself around the blood loss, had a hand around Jenny's ankle. At least Jenny knew she was still there if she did that. "Kitty Winthrop?" Jenny called, reaching down to get Clara to stand up.
"What?" Clara whispered.
"Aliens are your specialty as well," Jenny said, "Come help me." Clara did so, perhaps forgetting in the world of mobsters and hit squads and car chases that she was actually of use in some situations – just ones that didn't involve the criminal underworld. The pair of them slowly but surely walked towards the door, full of holes, and left the Green Bayou. "You're not from this planet, are you?" Jenny asked. The girl wasn't quite a girl anymore. There was some odd colour about her skin, a vivid green, and blemishes sprouting up across her. The closer they got, the more these blemishes looked like the suckers of an octopus, rising and sinking all over her body.
"What am I?" she asked, "Am I Kitty?"
"Do you feel like Kitty?"
"Sometimes," the stray alien admitted, "I killed people. And I didn't care."
"Who did you kill?" Jenny spoke softly. Clara was holding her arm.
"James Flannigan."
"Carlito Scarpa killed James Flannigan at his sister's wedding in 1936," Jenny said. James Flannigan used to be an O'Hara enforcer while Jenny was still involved with the mob's business.
"No, no, no, it was me, I remember it."
"You don't remember it," Jenny said.
"How could I have been so cold? How did I not feel anything?" the girl begged Jenny for the answer to that question. Carlito had been pretty cold, that was true.
"Listen to me, you're not a human. Kitty Winthrop, Carlito Scarpa – they were humans. You're something else. You took on their shape."
"I just wanted to feel something again."
"You took on some of their memories, too – it doesn't matter, you're safe now, alright? I'm not a human, either, I was lost on this planet once, an orphan, and I got dragged into the mob as well. I can help you. I can take you home," Jenny approached still, carefully, with Clara at her side. Clara who, against what Jenny would expect from her, didn't say a word.
"Kitty's dead. I saw her, and now I have her face – is that right?"
"I don't know. Come with us, we'll help you, my name's Jenny, and this is Clara. It'll be-"
When Jenny reached out to possibly touch her arm, the girl let out a horrific noise from her mouth, more deafening than any human scream. Jenny was left a little dazed, but Clara with her sensitive hearing was nearly incapacitated.
"Don't touch me!" the girl, the alien, yelled, and she ran off. It took Jenny a second to regain herself enough to follow, seeing the girl disappear behind the back of the Green Bayou, into the shadows. Jenny made after her, dragging Clara along almost by force. Made woozy, she was having an evidently even harder time controlling her bloodlust. At least it was dark enough out for Clara to see.
The Green Bayou was used to smuggle hooch from Viola's moonshine racket (some alcohol she produced legally, but Viola O'Hara wasn't a big fan of taxes) out into other areas of New Orleans, via boats and canals. To accommodate this, the Green Bayou's rear was an old wooden dock, propped up by old wooden stilts being gnawed away by the saltwater. 'Kitty' had scrambled up the mud to get onto the dock, so Jenny and Clara followed suit, and then she was stood there in the light from the moon and the lanterns hanging at the edge of the dock, so that the smugglers would see where to go through the fog.
"Careful, Kitty," Jenny warned.
"I'm not Kitty, though! I don't even know what I am! I'm some monster – some creature! Look at me!" the girl shouted. By now some of these sucker-welts on her skin had grown, it was nearly as though she had tentacles protruding out of her in an oddly natural way. Jenny remembered the large tentacle ball shown on the species identifier earlier that evening; that must be what 'Kitty Winthrop' was halfway towards transforming into. "You can't touch me! Nobody can touch me! All I did was bump into Kitty in an alley, that's all!"
"This isn't your fault," Jenny said firmly, still trying to get closer, but 'Kitty' was matching her step for step, going backwards as she went forwards, "Stay away from the edge of the dock, you don't want to fall into the swamp."
"Stay away from me, then!"
"Look, you're in danger over there! I promise nobody will touch you, just come with us," Jenny pleaded, "We can help you, none of this is your fault!"
"To hell with it not being my fault, of course it is! So many people dead…"
"Carlito Scarpa killed those people, he killed dozens before he became the consigliere," Jenny explained, then she said something she didn't believe herself, "It almost makes it worth you using him; you've avenged so many."
"But Kitty had never done a thing," she said brokenly, "I can't be forgiven for the damage I've done here."
"Of course you can, just take a deep breath and – no. No! NO!" Jenny let go of Clara's hand and sprinted to the edge of the dock. Kitty Winthrop had taken a step back and let herself fall into the swamp, "Clara, help me!" Clara was at her side in a flash, Jenny flailing her bad hand uselessly at the black water. Then she heard a hissing noise and froze. As she withdrew her arm immediately, a green, scaly mass lurched forwards from underneath the dock. Jenny scrambled away, sitting on the damp wood now, Clara standing behind her. There was a gurgling scream from the depths of the bayou as pale green liquid floated up from beneath, sitting like oil on the top of the water until the great, thrashing thing came up again.
"Shit! That's a crocodile!"
"An alligator," Jenny corrected hollowly, "It killed her. It was hiding under the dock, probably waiting to get at the smugglers…" Between its jaws and its yellow teeth the beast was holding a mangled, fleshy tentacle. "That poor thing… she wouldn't even let us help her…"
"Jenny, don't watch," Clara said gently, touching her shoulder, "Come on. You can't do anything for her. Franny Mancini is nearly dead because Kitty shot her."
"Right. Yeah. You're right, you're right, come on, Clara. I'm going to save Francesca Mancini if it kills me."