Page 22 of Iggy

“Speak for yourself,” Zulu said, pulling a hood over his head. “I am brave, highly trained, and deeply motivated by the fact that Belle Fleur’s kitchen still has bread pudding.” Saint lifted one finger.

“If anyone gets hurt, I am documenting that dessert was listed as an operational objective.”

Then, from the darkness beyond the boathouse, came the slow slap of something heavy entering the flooded path. Brix turned his light toward it and froze. Two yellow eyes hovered just above the waterline.

“Absolutely not,” Brix said. Olive leaned around Ham’s shoulder and exhaled in relief.

“That’s Alvin.”

“Right, our pet alligator that we named because it made it less deadly,” Pax said sarcastically.

“He named himself by showing up every Tuesday for scraps from the fish-cleaning table,” Finley said. “He knows the deeper channels better than anyone.” Zulu stared at Alvin, then at Finley.

“Just to clarify, our guide is a prehistoric purse with attitude.”

The team moved out under a sky that seemed to split open every few seconds. Rain came sideways across the boathouse lights, turning every beam into a trembling white cone. Finley and Olive followed as far as the raised walkway allowed, both wearing rain jackets that had surrendered ten minutes earlier.

Ham stopped at the edge where the walkway disappeared beneath the flood. He looked back once, not at the storm or the rising water, but at Finley’s face.

“We’ll get your gate back.”

Finley wanted to say something clever. She wanted to match Zulu’s ridiculous bravery or Olive’s sarcastic defiance. Instead she nodded, because if she opened her mouth, every terrible calculation in her head might come pouring out with the rain.

Alvin drifted ahead of them, low and silent, a shadow with eyes. He did not hurry. He did not panic. In the middle of the storm, the old alligator seemed almost offended by everyone else’s urgency.

“I respect his confidence,” Pax said over the radio.

“I respect his dentist,” Brix replied.

The channel swallowed sound. Above the surface, the storm screamed through trees and across tin roofs. Beneath it, the world became pressure, darkness, and the low grinding thud of debris striking the gate housing. The divers stayed close enough to remain aware of one another, each light reduced to a faint glow in the mud-brown water.

Finley’s voice crackled through their comms from the control room.

“You should be approaching the bend. If Alvin keeps left, follow the left channel. The right side drops into an old scour pocket.”

Alvin kept left.

“I hate that this is working,” Brix said.

A branch rolled past like a battering ram, close enough to thump Ham’s shoulder and spin away into the current. Zulu caught his balance against a cypress root and laughed once, sharp and breathless.

“Still better than my last family reunion,” Zulu said.

Nobody asked about the reunion. Nobody ever asked about Zulu’s family reunions twice.

At the gate housing, the reason for the failure revealed itself not as one problem but as several conspiring together. A mat of storm debris had wedged against the metal framework. The access grate had twisted just enough to block the service opening. Somewhere inside, the manual mechanism waited uselessly, out of reach unless the obstruction could be cleared.

Ham surfaced beside the half-submerged piling and keyed his mic.

“Engineering, we found the issue. Gate’s not broken so much as buried under everything the storm stole from three parishes.”

Olive closed her eyes.

“Please tell me my missing lawn chair is not part of the problem.” Zulu’s light swept across the jam.

“Depends. Was it ugly, green, and somehow judgmental?”

“That chair supported me through graduate school,” Olive said.