Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) Read online

  All he needed was to wrestle the dead alligator into the boat, and Gentry would have him.

  As soon as the poacher tugged the gator’s massive head over the side and appeared to be winning the fight to haul the heavy reptile the rest of the way in, Gentry used an oar to push the mud boat from its hiding spot, then pressed the switch to start the quiet trolling motor he’d used to get here from the little boat launch off Montegut Road. With an outboard, it was hard to sneak up on anybody.

  The poacher was so intent on pulling at the gator that Gentry’s approach didn’t register until he’d gotten within a few yards. Last thing you wanted to do was surprise a guy with a pistol, even if the gun was back in its holster, so Gentry settled his shotgun into an easy carry in the crook of his left arm. It was a hold he could quickly turn to shoot if needed, and most people didn’t want to argue with a shotgun.

  He cupped his right hand around his mouth. “State wildlife agent. Need some help?”

  The poacher stopped, turned, got a gator-in-headlights look on his face, and promptly sat on the reptile still hanging half in and half out of the boat. As if his scrawny ass could hide what looked like a well-fed nine-footer.

  “Hellfire and damnation!” was the guy’s first reaction, then he reconsidered. “Yessir, can ya help me pull dis big boy into da boat? Looks like I got a good’un to start da day.”

  Gentry put on his thickest South Louisiana drawl to match the poacher’s. Having grown up across a few miles of bayou in Dulac usually won him a little trust and sometimes kept things from getting ugly. “That’ll bring some money, for sure. This your first time huntin’ round here?” The poacher paused to consider his answer while Gentry set his shotgun on the floor of the mud boat and stepped into the rust bucket. He moved his right hand toward the .45 in his own holster and flipped open the snap, just to remind John Wayne that he wasn’t the only badass in the boat. Gentry might not have the shotgun, but he still had plenty of firepower within easy reach.

  Moving slowly, he gave the poacher time to devise a strategy while he helped the man pull the gator from the water. It landed on its back with a thud, long claws still flexing. Gentry watched it a second to make sure the movement was a postmortem reflex. It wouldn’t be the first time a stunned gator awoke and made breakfast out of a careless hunter’s arm or leg.

  The poacher strapped tape around the gator’s jaws, moving with an exaggerated slowness that told Gentry he was hiding something. “Usually, I hunt down on Lac Chien,” he finally said. “But thought I’d try me a new spot this year.”

  Gentry nodded. “Sure, I understand. Would you mind if I took a look at your hunting license? No worries; just standard procedure.”

  John Wayne cleared his throat again as he tapped on the pockets of his jeans. “Why, you know, I ain’t got it with me. Left it on da table back at home, way down da bayou near Cocodrie. Want me to call my old lady, have her bring it out here? Take her a while.”

  Gentry nodded. “Sure, I got time. Go ahead and call her.”

  The poacher patted his pocket again. “Don’t seem to have my phone.”

  “You can use mine.” Gentry held out his phone.

  “Forgot—she ain’t home dis morning. Guess you’ll have to write me a ticket fer not havin’ no license.”

  Gentry pulled his ticket book from his pocket. “Yes, sir, and I also will have to take possession of that alligator.” He paused. “Sir, have you been drinking this morning?”

  The poacher looked at the huge alligator and pondered this unhappy turn of events for a moment. When he looked back at Gentry, his eyes had turned ugly. “You damned possum cop. Ain’t got nothing to do but try and keep an honest man from making a living.”

  Gentry nodded. This guy was typical of what he’d come to expect from a certain breed of South Louisiana swamp hunter: short and wiry, dark-haired, leathery tanned skin, heavy on the ink that covered both biceps, the sleeves ripped off his faded, button-front red shirt, certain that The Man was out to rob him of his livelihood.

  Most of the local folks’ families had eked out a living from this muddy swampland for generations. They worked hard, earned honest pay, and possessed big hearts and generous natures.

  Except the ones who didn’t.

  Gentry gave the man a steady look. “Sir, I know for a fact that you aren’t licensed to hunt on these lands, and that you didn’t set the line for this gator. Do you want to know how I know that?”

  The poacher quit sputtering and watched Gentry with a dull, sullen expression.

  “I know that because I helped the licensed hunter set this line myself after somebody cut his yesterday. So you’re also facing a charge of poaching. Would you open the cooler sitting at the end of the boat, please?”

  Cursing under his breath, the poacher stumbled en route to the cooler and opened it to reveal a couple of six-packs. Actually, the one nearest Gentry was now a four-pack. He leaned over and spotted an open can beneath the seat.

  “I’ll be testing you for operating a vehicle under the influence, sir. Do you have any other weapons with you? Do you have a flotation device anywhere on the boat?” He wanted the poacher to understand that Gentry could make this as long and complicated and expensive as he wanted it to be.

  The man didn’t answer, but didn’t reach for his gun, either. He crossed his arms and pouted.

  “Please turn around and put your hands on your head, sir. You got a name?” He couldn’t keep calling him John Wayne.

  “Joe Marks.” As soon as the guy turned and slapped his hands on top of his head, Gentry reached over and removed the man’s pistol from its holster. Old Joe seemed to have lost most of his fight.

  “Do you have any more weapons in your boat, Mr. Marks?”

  “No.”

  “You got any identification on you at all?”

  Joe reached toward his pocket, but halted when Gentry pulled out his own pistol. “Move slowly, please.”

  Joe retrieved a wallet from his pocket, opened it, closed it, and threw the whole thing at Gentry. “Git whatever you want, possum cop.”

  “I’ve been called worse things, sir. Possums are fine animals.” And Joe Marks would probably call him worse when he found out how much this adventure was going to cost him.

  By the time another LDWF boat approached from the west, Gentry had administered a field sobriety test and determined that, while Joe had been drinking, his alcohol level wasn’t above the legal limit. The guy had lucked out on that one.

  Leaving his partner, Mac Griffin, behind the wheel, Senior Agent Paul Billiot boarded the poacher’s boat as Gentry read the man his rights. Joe Marks seemed surprised to learn that possum cops were, duh, cops. He was more surprised when Gentry informed him that he’d be facing a litany of fines that would lighten his wallet by a few thousand dollars unless he opted for a few months of jail time.

  The poacher also didn’t appear happy to see Paul Billiot.

  “You know this guy?” Gentry asked.

  “We’ve met.” Paul gave the man a grim smile. “Want us to take this fine specimen of humanity off your hands? Mac and I are off duty as of ten minutes ago, so we’re headed back to Houma.”

  “You can take the gator back to Houma too, since you’re going anyway. I want to check on old Eva Savoie before I leave, and then I’ll go in and file the paperwork.”

  “You got it.” Paul looked at the old cabin. “Looks like Miss Eva’s got company.”

  “Yeah, gonna check on that too.” Gentry couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong about that boat.

  Mac leapt onto Joe Marks’s rust bucket and pulled a wet tarp over the reptile to protect it from the heat. “We can leave the gator where it is. I’ll take it and this sad excuse for a boat back to impound.” The gator skin would be sold, the money donated to a benevolence fund. The meat would be delivered to a local shelter. Nothing went to waste.

  Except maybe Joe Marks of Bossier City, who’d revealed an impressive vocabulary of curse words t
hat he used in abundance when he finally realized his gun and boat and gator would be going to Houma without him.

  All Joe’s tirade accomplished was getting him handcuffed. Paul Billiot didn’t put up with much shit from anybody.

  “Gonna find you again sometime, possum cop,” Joe shouted as Paul’s boat powered up and moved back toward Bayou Terrebonne.

  As he followed in the poacher’s boat, Mac waved at Gentry. “Bye-bye, possum cop!”

  Gentry considered treating his colleague to a one-fingered salute, but he was supposed to be setting a good example for the younger agent. Instead, he sat down and finished a quick list of the charges against Joe Marks he’d need to file once he got to his home office. Then he’d be writing reports all afternoon. At least he could do it from home, since the region had only one office and it wasn’t in this parish.

  Behind him, another motor rumbled to life, one that sputtered and skipped before catching. He swiveled to see Eva Savoie’s visitor sitting in the back of his boat, leaning over to fiddle with something around his feet. Finally, the guy glanced up, and from across the bayou, Gentry got a good glimpse at the face revealed when the hood fell back.

  It was almost like looking in a mirror.

  CHAPTER 2

  Gentry’s heart froze at the sight of the man’s face.

  His thoughts froze.

  The world froze.

  Finally, he took a breath and his brain reengaged. “State agent! Shut down that engine!”

  He reached over, switched on his outboard motor, and jerked the wheel of his boat toward the cabin, never taking his eyes off the man who’d frozen into a locked gaze with him. A man with dark-brown eyes and curly hair a lot like his own. Tall, like Gentry, maybe a little taller. They’d always argued about who was taller. Same bone structure, but with fuller lips and a softness around the mouth and jaw. A lot skinnier.

  The world shrank to the two of them as Gentry drew closer, until the man suddenly jerked his hood back in place and reached for his tiller. He accelerated, racing around the Savoie cabin so fast and hard the ripples skewed Gentry’s boat and almost knocked him off the seat. By the time he regained his balance and turned again, the guy was already out of sight, around the bend toward Bayou Terrebonne. He could be halfway to the Gulf of Mexico—or farther north into the serpentine Atchafalaya Basin—in no time. That boat might be shabby, but it had been moving fast.

  Gentry paused, torn. His duty told him to check on Eva Savoie; his gut told him to chase down a ghost.

  Get your shit together, Broussard. You don’t even know what you’re dealing with here. Might be nothing. Check on Miss Eva. He drew a deep breath and let it out. Then another and another, until his heart rate returned to normal. He’d let his imagination get the best of him, that’s all. So what if the guy in the hoodie looked like Lang? The guy had broken the law by not stopping when ordered by a law-enforcement officer, but there was no proof he’d done anything else.

  Still, the unease that had crawled up his back and coiled itself around his neck at the first sight of the man continued to tighten.

  Gentry maneuvered the mud boat the rest of the way across the narrow bayou, tying up in a different spot from the other boat’s in case evidence needed to be preserved. Or maybe he was just being paranoid.

  “Miss Eva?” His voice echoed in the early-morning quiet of the bayou, now that the buzz of the outboard had faded. “Agent Gentry Broussard, Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries. I’m coming onto your porch. That okay?”

  A gator bellowed somewhere behind the cabin, followed by a splash, then silence.

  He climbed onto the porch, noting the sag of the wood beneath his heavy boots, spots in the weathered planks so broken in places that glints of water shone through. He also noted an unmistakable odor that cinched his throat as if someone were tightening a vise.

  Blood. Lots of it.

  The door stood ajar, but he didn’t have to push it open farther to see the blood pooling beneath it. He grasped his pistol—the standard department-issued .45 SIG Sauer—in his right hand as a precaution, reached out his left foot, and gave the door a gentle shove.

  It opened a couple of feet before encountering resistance.

  “Miss Eva, it’s Agent Broussard again. I’m coming inside. Can you answer me?”

  Quiet. Gentry looked back at his boat. His pack lay under the seat, filled with gloves and evidence bags, among other paraphernalia. He didn’t want to waste the time retrieving it, even though he knew in his gut that he stood at a crime scene. His instincts told him that nothing—nobody—was alive in this cabin.

  Careful to avoid brushing against the door facing, he leaned in and peered around the door into a riot of disrepair, poverty, and chaos. He noted details quickly as he scanned for movement: overturned chair with a broken leg lying a couple of feet away, drawers pulled out and contents strewn in the kitchen, a small table in front of the window with candles burning and what looked like sticks strewn across it, some paper money lying on the counter of the kitchenette, blood. Some kind of long-handled knife with a serrated blade.

  On the floor at the edge of the blocked door lay a small, wrinkled hand curled into a claw, a thin brown arm protruding from a blood-soaked sleeve of blue-and-white cotton. He leaned in farther and closed his eyes briefly at the sight of a woman who looked at least eighty and would never see eighty-one. Eva Savoie.

  Damn it. He edged into the room, moving nothing, each step choreographed to avoid the blood still pooling beneath the woman’s body. He didn’t see how she had any left; she was drenched in crimson.

  He knelt and pulled out his radio even as he placed two fingers on Eva’s already-cool skin to confirm the lack of a pulse. She’d been dead a little while, so the guy had hung around, maybe looking for something. Yet there was money on the counter.

  First things first; get help on the way. He tugged his radio out of its holder. “This is WL-817, requesting a parish homicide team on Whiskey Bayou one-eighth mile east of Highway 55. Coroner too. There’s been a murder.”

  The radio squawked with Stella Walker’s shocked voice. “Doing it now.” She abruptly cut him off.

  A few seconds later, his phone rang. “Gentry Broussard, what have you gotten yourself into?” Stella knew better than to put personal chatter on the radio. Half the people in the parish monitored the whereabouts of local law enforcement, especially the people who wanted to avoid them. They did most of their communicating by phone these days.

  “Just what I said, Stella.” Gentry took another quick look around the cabin. “I’m at the cabin now. Where’s the lieutenant?”

  Stella’s voice rose an octave and several decibels, forcing Gentry to wince and hold the phone away from his ear. “He’s on his way. You stay outta that shack, Gentry. You know the stories about that woman. There’s hexes all over that place. Wait outside in your boat.”

  Gentry knew that Stella wore her Catholicism on both sleeves, so she wasn’t exactly a believer in voodoo. Like a lot of locals, however, she paid it a healthy dose of respect, just in case.

  Gentry was already halfway back to his boat, but he had no intention of waiting.

  “Tell Warren the details so he can get with the sheriff.” Gentry described the boat, the killer, the faded jeans, the brown hoodie. But not the familiarity of the face, the same one that had haunted his dreams every night for the past three years.

  He got in his boat but paused before starting it; the phone would be hard to hear over the motor. “We got other agents in this area? Billiot and Griffin are on their way to Houma with a poacher; see if they can come back.”

  Gentry wasn’t a believer in voodoo either, but this scene was creeping him out all the same, for reasons he didn’t want to think about. The killer couldn’t possibly have been Lang. Gentry had let a resemblance and three years of pent-up guilt and sadness set his imagination on a wild ride.

  Stella muttered a moment before answering. “Agent Sinclair’s a few miles east. I’ll make s
ure she heard the call.”

  Good. His night-patrol partner, Jena Sinclair, had a background in forensics. She might see something he’d missed.

  “I’m heading south down Bayou Terrebonne to see if I can find the guy,” Gentry told Stella. “Let me know when the sheriff gets here and I’ll come back to give a statement. If I make a sighting, I’ll call it in.”

  He bypassed the trolling motor and went for the outboard this time. He needed speed and he needed to stay busy so he could stall the questions roiling around in his mind.

  Wondering what this old woman could own that was worth stealing, when there had been money left on the counter.

  Wondering what she could know that was important enough to be killed for.

  Wondering about the man’s face he’d seen so briefly in that boat, the face of his older brother, Lang.

  After all, Langston Broussard had died three years ago.

  Gentry knew that for a fact. He’d been the one to pull the trigger.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Hey, babycakes! Whatcha doin’ later tonight?”

  A middle-aged drunk, poured into a snug camo sweater-vest and sporting a black cowboy hat, draped himself over the edge of the stage. He’d been bellowing at Ceelie Savoie for almost twenty minutes, since she’d begun her set. This was the first time he’d staggered away from his table, however.

  Ceelie considered kicking him, but her rent was past due and planting a boot on a customer’s expensive cowboy hat would probably get her fired.

  She shifted the neck of her guitar to the other side of the mic stand and finished an admittedly half-baked version of Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya” to a smattering of applause. The few claps were barely audible through the crowd chatter, the clink of glassware, and the drunk, who had contorted himself into a camo-clad pretzel in his attempt to throw a meaty leg over the edge of the stage.