Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) Page 22

  Advance planning didn’t seem to be Langston Broussard’s strong suit. Otherwise, he’d have realized that if he shot—maybe killed—an LDWF agent, it would bring out every law-enforcement agency in the region. He would’ve had backup plans. He’d have had supplies. Instead, he had a couple of candles, a roll of duct tape, a knife, a six-pack of water bottles, and a few packs of crackers. And pills and cigarettes. Of those, he seemed to have plenty.

  After a half hour, he’d taped her wrists together again, in front this time, and stretched out beside her on the bed, touching her a little—mostly her breasts—before going to sleep. His touch held no heat and she wondered if the drug use had taken its toll in the sex department. She’d come across enough junkies in the Nashville club scene to have heard several bemoan the trade-off of highs for hard-ons. Too many of the former eradicated the latter.

  Good news for her, unless he used his fists to take out his frustration over an inability to rape her. Those worked just fine. Twice while he slept, she’d tried to slowly maneuver herself toward the foot of the bed, hoping to escape into the swamp. Both times, he’d moved quickly and without warning, hitting her hard enough to bring tears.

  Now he was awake again, and Ceelie thought showtime had arrived. Until finding this abandoned house, he’d been too concerned with survival and avoiding capture to question her about these mystery coins, but she had her story ready. First, she had to get him talking rather than touching.

  “I do remember you, when you visited the cabin that summer,” she said, keeping her voice soft and calm. “I thought you were the cutest, coolest guy I’d ever met.”

  “I know you did.” Lang propped on his left elbow and ran his right index finger along the line of her jaw. Between the cuts on her face from the broken SUV window and his repeated blows, even the light pressure of his finger stung her skin and sent shards of pain racing down her neck and up to her temple.

  “Why didn’t you ever come back? I’d look for you every time I came out that summer.”

  “Did you now? I wanted to go back, but, well, you know.”

  Ceelie frowned. She didn’t know. “What? Why didn’t you come back?”

  Lang pinched her cheek, and she felt the sharp sting as a cut reopened. A wet trail streaked down the side of her face toward her hairline. “Because of LeRoy, bitch. Don’t play dumb.”

  Unfortunately, she didn’t have to play. She had no idea what he meant. “Lang, I was eight years old. All I knew was that Nonc LeRoy left Tante Eva, and I think it happened that summer but I’m not sure. I don’t know why he left, or where he went.”

  Lang turned her face toward his and studied her, then grinned. God, he had deep dimples like Gentry, but instead of an even row of white teeth, his were yellowed and two were broken. What a laugh God must have had in making these two men so similar up to a point, and then taking them in polar-opposite directions.

  He released her chin. “You really don’t know, do you? I keep forgettin’ how little you were. Nonc LeRoy, as you call him, didn’t leave, sweet Celestine, at least not how you think. You tell me what you think happened to him.”

  To do that, Ceelie had to put herself in Lang’s shoes, then in LeRoy’s, and finally in Tante Eva’s. “Eva killed him,” she whispered.

  “She bashed his face in with the business end of an ax.” Lang’s thin face, with his curly dark hair so like Gentry’s but his eyes filled with hatred, grew somber.

  “That’s horrible.” It was Ceelie’s turn to stare. Was her Tante Eva capable of murder to protect those coins? And was the ax Ceelie had slept with that night in the cabin the thing that had killed LeRoy?

  “Ain’t it?” Lang reached in his pocket and brought out a knife with a wicked serrated blade and black handle—a tactical knife similar to the one in her purse, which was either still sitting in the blood-spattered truck or was wherever the sheriff put stuff like the personal effects of kidnapping victims.

  He flicked it open and popped off a button of her blouse by shredding the thread holding it on. The once-white blouse was covered in blood and dirt, but at least it kept her covered.

  “I think I’ll ask the questions for a while. If I don’t like the answers you give”—he popped another button—“then we’ll see what I need to do to make you more cooperative.”

  Ceelie swallowed hard, hoping he couldn’t hear her heart pounding. “What do you want to know?”

  “You tell me, Celestine. Why would that old witch Eva kill LeRoy Breaux, the man who’d been living with her for years?”

  Ceelie didn’t know about any killing, but she had thought about those coins and LeRoy’s anticipated windfall. “He wanted the coins, and she wouldn’t give them to him.”

  Lang tapped her on the nose with the side of the knife blade. “Good girl. Why wouldn’t she share with her loving husband?”

  Biting back the point that Eva and LeRoy weren’t married, which Lang might not even know, Ceelie tried again to put herself in Lang’s head, in LeRoy’s head. Especially in Eva’s head. “She thought the coins were a curse handed down from her grandfather Julien.”

  That rang true to her. If Julien had found some of South Louisiana’s fabled treasure when he first moved to Whiskey Bayou from Isle de Jean Charles, rousing the ill will of his Chitimacha peers, he might have considered it more curse than blessing. “She thought that it was bad luck to use them.”

  “Ding ding ding—give the girl a circus monkey.” Lang leaned over and kissed her. It took every bit of Ceelie’s resolve not to bite the son of a bitch, or at least spit in his face when he removed his lips from hers. “It wasn’t the coins that was bad luck, though. It was how they got ’em. Eva and LeRoy had some pillow talk, like couples do.”

  Lang traced his knife edge along the shoulder of her blouse. “Eva told him her granddaddy done killed a man for those gold coins after they found them down in Isle de Jean Charles. The other guy wanted to turn ’em in to the property owner, and Julien, he figured he could take it all for himself. He took ’em and hid them at Whiskey Bayou, using one or two to live off all these years, and the family’s been cursed ever since.”

  He popped off another button while Ceelie absorbed that information. Sin always has to be paid for, Eva would tell her. Julien’s sin, or her own?

  “So guess what Eva did?” Lang’s voice was soft.

  “You said she killed LeRoy, I guess with an ax.” She saw the truth on his face, or at least what he thought was the truth. “I honestly didn’t have any idea.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, you were just a kid, so I’ll give you that. Let me ask you this. How do I know Eva killed LeRoy if I never went back to the cabin after that summer?”

  Ceelie thought a moment, but there were only two possible answers. She whispered, “Either your friend Tommy told you, or Tante Eva told you that morning?” The morning he murdered her.

  “That bitch.” He rolled off the bed and began pacing. “She said”—he broke into a parody of a singsong Cajun French accent—“‘I done kep’ that no-good LeRoy from finding that money and tellin’ everybody about it. Instead, I done took his head. You can see it right over dere, and you think after keepin’ that secret all dese years I’m gonna tell you?”

  Ceelie watched him pace and struggled to understand. “His head?”

  Lang stopped and grinned. “Remember that skull hanging on the porch? My little gift to you? Well, that was LeRoy, comin’ back home to Whiskey Bayou. Where his fucking skull had been all this time.”

  An unbidden memory came to Ceelie’s mind. She’d been a little older, maybe twelve or thirteen, and had spotted a skull in the bottom of Tante Eva’s pie safe, tucked amid her collection of candles. “Who is this?” she had asked, and Tante Eva, with a little smile, said, “Child, that is something to keep us safe.”

  It had been LeRoy’s skull.

  Ceelie’s expression must have been horrified enough to appease Lang, because he began pacing again. “Well, I had to keep trying to make her tell me
where the coins were and, well, the bitch died on me.”

  “But why? There are other ways to get money.” Ways that didn’t involve murdering elderly women for some coins he didn’t know for sure existed.

  “We all haven’t had a fairy-tale life, little Celestine. My holier-than-thou father sure as hell didn’t give me that fairy tale, with all the rules he tried to make when he wasn’t even home most of the time. My whore of a mother who barely let the bed grow cold after dear old dad died before she replaced him—she didn’t give a shit. And then there was my . . .”

  He looked down at her and smiled with a look that sent chills down her spine. He stretched out on the bed beside her again. “Sure wasn’t my baby brother, Gentleman Gentry, the golden boy who followed the rules and played nice and did just as he was told.”

  Lang squeezed her breast and ran his hand lightly down her belly. He dug his fingers into her crotch hard enough to make her flinch. “Yeah, Gentry’s getting some of that; you been at that glorified trailer he calls a house for days. I think it’s time Gent and I shared something. Never had much in common with my stick-up-his-ass little brother before.”

  Ceelie couldn’t quite keep the quiver out of her body. Maybe she’d been wrong about him being impotent.

  He used the knife to pop off the remaining button on her blouse, then used the tip of the blade to push the fabric away and expose her beige bra. He traced the top of the bra with the blade, not hard, but it was sharp enough to draw a light cut that instantly beaded with blood.

  He leaned closer, his breath warm in her ear. “I can’t screw you the way he can, but I can make it so he don’t want you anymore. I’ve already screwed up that pretty face, and now . . .

  He leaned back and Ceelie closed her eyes to brace for a blow when she saw his hand snake toward her. But instead, he grabbed her ponytail and jerked it out from beneath her head. “I bet Gentry loves running his hands through this, don’t he, sweet Celestine?”

  Ceelie wriggled, her composure shattered as he got on his knees, jerked her ponytail out straight and sawed across her hair next to the elastic band.

  She couldn’t stop the tears when he held up the ponytail, a thick, long snake of jet-black dangling from his fingers. She closed her eyes and gulped down a sob. It’s just hair. It will grow back. You will not let him break you. You can cry later. Not now.

  She opened her eyes and sucked down the rage and sorrow. “Don’t you want to ask me another question?”

  Lang had been stroking her inner thigh and examining her body like a starving man at a buffet, but he stopped. “What’s that?”

  “You want to know where the coins are, don’t you? The rest of them?”

  She didn’t see his hand coming until it hit the side of her face hard enough to knock her head against the wall. The room spun for a moment, but her vision cleared. An open-handed slap instead of his fist for a change.

  This time, Lang held the knife against her throat. “You do know. I knew it. You’re just like her, with your witchy ways and your chicken bones.”

  If Lang thought she was a voodoo queen or a witch, well, better for her. He hadn’t touched Tante Eva’s throwing table, after all. “I threw the bones yesterday mornin’.” She used her own version of Eva’s accent. “I knew you was comin’, and I knew you was determined to get it.”

  “Give me a break, little Celestine. Taking you was as easy as shooting that red-headed bodyguard of yours.”

  Not a bodyguard, but a friend who was probably dead.

  Ceelie spoke softly, keeping her voice low and musical.

  “Tu ne me connais pas.” You do not know me.

  “Je passe la malédiction à vous, Langston Broussard.” I pass the curse to you, Langston Broussard.

  “Tu ne me fais pas peur.” You do not scare me.

  For a fraction of a second, Ceelie saw a flash of doubt—maybe even fear—cross Lang’s face before it settled back into a sneer. She had rattled him with a few words pulled from long-ago memories.

  The momentum might have swung her way, at least for a moment.

  CHAPTER 26

  There were no trolling motors on today’s version of the manhunt. The search was taking on a life of its own, and Roscoe Knight had told all the gathered law-enforcement officers at daybreak that he wanted Langston Broussard to hear them coming, and hear them coming hard.

  Only he hadn’t used such nice words.

  If Gentry hadn’t been so taut-nerved and restless, he’d have gotten downright teary-eyed at the dozens of officers, male and female, who’d gathered to cover every inch of the central parish east and south of Montegut. Sheriff’s deputies, state police, LDWF agents he’d seen only at regional events, even some officers wearing the dark-blue uniforms of the Houma PD. He’d never seen so many patrol boats in one spot.

  He prayed it would be enough, and that it would be in time. And that the media wouldn’t pick up on where they’d set up base camp and put a lot of civilians in harm’s way—or muck up their chance of finding Lang and Ceelie. Bad enough that it was gator season and hunters all over the bayous were on the prowl for gators, raccoons, nutria, and feral hogs.

  “Ready?” Paul Billiot strapped on his duty belt and checked the ammunition in his service pistol. The LDWF boat they’d come in on last night had been refueled out here in the middle of nowhere, thanks to some miraculous display of power pulled off by the sheriff.

  “Let’s go. What’s our area?” Gentry followed Paul through the sawgrass that seemed a much easier walk in daylight than it had last night with only a flashlight. It was a wonder they hadn’t sunk through a patch of floating grass and broken a leg.

  “We got the area just north of here, almost to the outskirts of Montegut.” Paul attached the boat’s kill switch to a lanyard and stuck the key in the ignition. They both had donned their life jackets and uniform-collar radios, and had rifles and shotguns in addition to their service pistols. Bulletproof vests added an extra layer of bulk under the life jackets. Gentry felt like a paramilitary Michelin Man. Probably a paramilitary Michelin Man who’d be on the verge of heatstroke before midday.

  He didn’t care, as long as they found Ceelie and his dirtbag of a brother.

  For the next two hours, they cut in and out of bayous and drainage canals and cutoffs. They stopped at every house and fishing camp, occupied or abandoned. Warren had Stella deliver their supply of business cards, so they left them whenever they found people, asking questions and leaving descriptions. They carefully searched every outbuilding and storage shed.

  Finally, they found signs of recent occupation in one of the abandoned houses and spent a half hour combing through it, reporting back to a deputy at the staging area every few minutes.

  They found piles of beer cans, pizza boxes, wine bottles, and other trash, but after a thorough search, Gentry shook his head. “I don’t think it was them.”

  “I reached the same conclusion.” Paul kicked a pizza box out of the doorway. “This was some teenagers finding a private place to party. And it’s been here long enough for animals to get in it.”

  They’d just gotten back to the boat when the dash radios—they had one for the sheriff’s office as well as LDWF—began a cacophony of chatter. Gentry’s cell phone rang, and he heard Paul’s follow right behind it. He walked to the rear of the aft deck.

  It was Warren. “We found a new hideout, north and east of your current location. We’re still verifying but you might want to come this way.” He read out the GPS coordinates and Gentry handed them to Paul, who was ending a phone call with Mac.

  The ride to the new location took about fifteen minutes, and Gentry’s body was pumped on adrenaline when the cabin finally came into sight. He jumped out of the boat onto the wooden pier. Sheriff Knight and Warren were standing in the front door just ahead of him. This was another fish camp, but it was a little bigger than Lang’s last spot, and its condition told Gentry it had been abandoned for at least a year or two—probably since the last tro
pical storm had come through and flooded the whole parish.

  The bottom half of the structure’s outer walls were in midstage rot. The whole thing would fall in the bayou within another six months, faster if the parish drew the unlucky card and got another storm.

  The area around them, a narrow waterway between Madison Bay and Bayou Terrebonne, was typical South Louisiana marsh, bits of solid ground interspersed among the flotons; floating bits of marsh that looked like land but couldn’t carry the weight of an adult. Occasional trees broke the landscape, as well as fish camps like this one where people would come out on weekends for the bounty of the fish-rich waters and waterfowl hunting.

  Today, it was an anthill of outboard motors on patrol boats and law-enforcement officers as news spread that another hideout had been found. Next, the sheriff would set up a new base camp here and they’d all fan out again until they found either Lang or his next stopping place.

  Gentry’s gut told him they were getting close.

  The part of Ceelie’s situation that scared Gentry the most was her lack of knowledge about the gold coins, unless Lang had talked enough for her to figure out what he was after. When Lang got desperate enough and realized she couldn’t help him, would he decide she was too much trouble?

  Two things worked in Ceelie’s favor. One, she was smart. If she could figure out a way to mentally stay ahead of Lang and his games, she could survive long enough to outmaneuver him—if she was physically able. Two, which tied back into one, Lang was smart, but he was impulsive. He’d never been one to think situations through to their logical conclusion. In junior high, he’d decided he wanted to play football because the uniforms were cool and the players always got the pretty girls; he’d made it through two practices before realizing that he actually had to earn the uniform.