Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) Page 6

  “You got a card?” Ceelie asked. “You know, in case I have any other questions. Would it be okay to call you? Agent Sinclair gave me her card when you got here.”

  Yeah, and if he hadn’t had his head so far up his backside, he’d have done the same. It was standard protocol. He obviously needed sleep. Preferably without the nightmares.

  “Let me know if you change your mind about the air conditioner.” He fished a business card out of his wallet and handed it to her. “And call me anytime. My cell number’s on the card.”

  He found Jena waiting around the corner, obviously eavesdropping. She wore a smirk but kept her mouth shut until they climbed in the truck and got back on the highway.

  “Call me Gentry,” she purred. “Call me anytime. My cell number’s on the card.”

  He turned the AC fan on high and tugged down the bill of his cap, slumping in the seat and closing his eyes. “Shut the hell up, Red.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Ceelie stuck her head around the corner, watching Gentry Broussard follow his partner to a dusty black monster of a pickup truck. Nice ass.

  Then again, there was something about a guy in a uniform most women found irresistible. Ceelie and Sonia had pondered this peculiar phenomenon over late-night glasses of moscato back in Nashville. They’d decided it had to be the belt and all the equipment that dangled from it when the guys walked, which not only was phallic but probably released extra sex pheromones into the air and turned women into nectar-seeking honeybees.

  Which was exactly why it was dangerous for her to stay too long in Terrebonne Parish. It felt too comfortable. In fact, it felt damned good. It felt like home in a way Nashville never had. Staying would be too easy, and one day she’d wake up and realize she hadn’t left Terrebonne Parish in ten years, or twenty.

  Plus, the men here were one of two types: either total losers or sexy and overburdened with testosterone. Too many of them, like Gentry Broussard, had a confident, unconscious sexuality that would bulldoze a woman into a single-wide with a half-dozen kids before she knew what hit her.

  And a dog. A guy like that probably had at least one or two hunting dogs, and not cute little beagles, either. Big dogs.

  Ceelie preferred cats and small dogs, although they tended to be eaten by alligators around here, as she recalled. Munchability wasn’t a desirable trait in a pet. She also didn’t like trailers, and she was pretty sure she didn’t want kids. Between having been abandoned by her mom and bullied by small-town mean girls, her own childhood had sucked; she wouldn’t have her own child subjected to it.

  So yeah, a guy like Gentry Broussard left her feeling restless and needy and defiant, all at the same time. She was annoyed that she’d checked out his left hand for the wedding ring and had been pleased there hadn’t been one.

  Weapon-belt pheromones. Had to be.

  He did look familiar, but she couldn’t figure out why. She’d been gone ten years, so if she’d seen him before, they’d both been a lot younger. If she’d recently seen that curly hair, those melted-dark-chocolate eyes and for-God’s-sake dimples, she would remember.

  Other than awakening her libido, which she’d now have to beat back into submission, the visit hadn’t accomplished much. She wasn’t sure what she expected the game wardens to tell her that she didn’t already know, but it had been worth a try. And Gentry had confirmed her suspicion that nothing on Tante Eva’s throwing table had been touched.

  Ceelie hadn’t touched it either, and she wasn’t sure she was ready. So first, she filled another bucket with water, mixed in some bleach, and got on her hands and knees with a sponge, scrubbing at bloodstains for at least the sixth or seventh time. The light coming through the open windows and door at different hours of the day kept revealing blotches she’d missed earlier.

  After the bleach, she retraced her steps using the pine cleaner until the place reeked. At least it reeked of clean things and not death.

  Finally, she couldn’t stand it any longer; that shrine beneath the window whispered to her like some kind of dark siren. She stashed the cleaning supplies in the cramped cabinet under the sink, then approached the throwing table. Tante Eva had called it that when Ceelie came out on weekends and, during the summer, for whole weeks or two at a time. That had been in the years after her mom left, until she’d turned sixteen and her dad forbade her to visit anymore.

  Forbade her because of what she’d learned at this table and had been stupid enough to let him catch her doing.

  Those had been bittersweet years. At the time, she’d thought her dad sent her here so often because she loved Tante Eva so much. Looking back as an adult, she thought maybe Dad had simply been overwhelmed that the woman he loved had packed her bags and taken a bus out of town in the middle of his afternoon shift at the gas plant. All while their eight-year-old daughter was trying to learn multiplication tables in her third-grade class.

  Now? She thought he’d sent Ceelie to stay with his Tante Eva not only to give his daughter a mother figure but to give himself private time to mourn the life he’d lost. He’d have struggled to make sense of it, would have wanted to figure out how he’d misjudged the character of his wife so badly. Would have needed to vent his anger where his daughter wouldn’t see him.

  The day her mom ran off to Texas or California or wherever she’d ended up—not running toward anything but simply away from them—Ceelie had come home from school to find a silent house and, on the kitchen counter, a white sealed envelope she’d instinctively known was not hers to read. Unsure of what else to do, she had taken her favorite teddy bear and crawled in her parents’ bed to wait for Daddy to come home. Afraid he wouldn’t. Afraid she’d be alone.

  Dad had been trapped in a dead-end, dangerous job that eventually served up a cancer cocktail, and he had gotten stuck with a confused, lost daughter to raise by himself. No wonder he’d made her promise to leave Houma the first chance she got.

  Now, here she was, back on Whiskey Bayou, which made Houma look like New York City.

  Humming that damned song she couldn’t finish but couldn’t get out of her head, Ceelie dragged over one of the kitchenette chairs and sat in front of the throwing table. The memories in this cabin were visceral, palpable things, and maybe seeing this table explained why they were pummeling her with such force. She rarely thought of her mom’s cut-and-run anymore, but the ghosts had paraded past her like Mardi Gras floats since she’d gotten off the bus in Houma and found a driver willing to bring her down here—down da baya, as the old-timers said.

  Ceelie moved the candles to the northeast and southwest positions before realizing what she’d done. Even through the eau de Pine-Sol, they smelled sweet, like the water lilies she remembered from being here as a kid. Most likely, Tante Eva had poured these candles herself. Ceelie remembered rows of new candles hanging at the end of the side porch, waiting for Tante Eva to bless them before she’d bring them into the house and light them.

  A fine lot of good those blessings had done. Ceelie wrapped the candles in a paper towel and placed them in the middle of the drawer, then took the fragile, yellowed chicken bones and settled them one by one into the satin-lined carved wooden box Tante Eva kept for them.

  “Bones gotta have a special place of respect,” she’d told Ceelie more times than she could count. “You treat them right and they’ll always speak true.”

  “The bones never lie,” Ceelie whispered, placing the last one—a tiny skull—into the box and closing the lid.

  She settled the box in the drawer along with the rolled-up square of leather that Tante Eva had told her was a gift from the greatest mystic in the parish. Ceelie didn’t remember his name, only that he’d lived even farther down the bayou.

  Ceelie splashed some water on her face and neck before picking up her guitar and going back to the porch. She’d forgotten how quiet it could be out here during the heat of the day, even with the occasional buzz of an outboard wafting across the water as the gator hunters did their thing.

&
nbsp; At night, as she had relearned, the bayou came to noisy life, filled with croaks, growls, hisses, and splashes. The first night, still surrounded by blood and chaos, she’d jolted awake at each noise. Now, the sounds were comforting proof of nature’s resilience no matter how hard humans tried to destroy it.

  She strummed the notes of the song, picking it out in different keys until she hit the one that felt right today. Tomorrow, it might be different. Until a song told you it was done, it remained a moving, growing thing.

  I won’t go back, I won’t go home,

  ’Cause in this place, the dead still roam.

  In this old house lies a pile of bones.

  Throw them down once,

  Throw them easy,

  Throw them slow.

  ’Cause Whiskey Bayou, she won’t let me go . . .

  A distinctive, guttural hiss interrupted Ceelie’s song, and she watched, mesmerized, as a dark-brown bird with at least a five-foot wingspan made a wobbly circle overhead before coming to rest on a cypress knee rising from the water a few feet from the front of the cabin. It hissed again and turned its bright-red head, a black glittering eye, and its sharply hooked beak toward Ceelie.

  “Carencro,” she whispered. “Mauvaises choses.”

  A vulture, Tante Eva always said, was a sign of impending danger and sorrow. Despite temperatures in the midnineties and a hundred percent humidity, a line of chill bumps rose on Ceelie’s arms and shoulders as she and the turkey vulture, the ugliest of the carencro, stared at each other.

  She set her guitar aside and went in the house to hunt down the salt, finding an almost-empty box on the kitchen counter. The bird watched as if in disdain as she sprinkled a line of white granules around the perimeter of the porch, with a double line at the threshold of the door and the bottoms of the window casings.

  With a final hiss as if to tell her the low regard in which it held her rudimentary ritual to ward off evil, the vulture flapped its enormous wings and took off with a clumsy leap. For a moment, she thought it might fall in the water—hoped it would—but it rose, circling over the cabin a couple of times before disappearing. It wasn’t completely gone, though; it had left behind the stench of its latest rotten-meat meal and fine particles of something foul that wafted behind in its wake.

  Now there was only silence, ominous where earlier it had sounded clean and pure. The buzzard might be gone, but something else watched her. She felt it.

  Forget the heat. Ceelie took her guitar inside, closed and locked the door and the two front windows. She crawled onto the bed, wedged into an alcove beneath the small side window, and closed and locked that one, too. She coated the door threshold and all the windowsills with what was left of the salt.

  You’re being an idiot, Celestine. And she was going to have heatstroke in this house with no air moving, but between the memories and the buzzard, she was too jittery to open things up again. Tomorrow, if she hadn’t been baked alive overnight, she’d call Gentry Broussard and ask about the guy with the cheap air conditioners.

  CHAPTER 7

  Saturday nights always kept LDWF enforcement agents busy, so nothing about the evening had surprised Gentry. People drank and hunted, drank and fished, or drank and steered boats around the parish waterways like they were nautical bumper cars. Sometimes they smoked crystal meth, argued, and shot each other, but that was the sheriff’s problem—unless it happened while they also were hunting, fishing, or boating.

  Gentry and Jena had already hauled out of Lake Gero two guys who’d run their boat onto the bank and were still sitting in the half-submerged hull arguing about who was at fault. The agents had issued four other DUIs and had impounded two boats no one was sober enough to drive. They’d fished a poodle out of Bayou Dulac. They’d caught a boater with enough marijuana to make him a Colorado millionaire, and turned him and his stash over to the sheriff, along with a semiautomatic and high-capacity magazine.

  Now, at midnight, they were headed back to the boat launch to get in their respective trucks and spend a few hours doing paperwork.

  Except Gentry had something on his mind, and he’d put it off as long as he could. They’d exchanged their usual banter tonight, neither of them mentioning Eva Savoie or the murder case. Gentry had no intention of discussing how much he’d been thinking about Ceelie Savoie and her sexy voice. He did have an agenda related to the case, though.

  “Hold up, Red,” he said after they’d gotten the boat hitched to the back of his truck and stashed their gear. “You still got some contacts at NOPD?”

  Jena leaned against her truck, her face shadowed in the dark parking lot lit by a single streetlight. “Depends on why you’re asking. What’s up?”

  “I want to look at the paperwork on a closed case from a few years back.”

  Jena crossed her arms. “You worked in Orleans Parish long enough to know they’d let you look at a closed case file if you asked. You were Wildlife and Fisheries, but you worked with the police force a lot. What are you not telling me?”

  “I need it to be under the radar.” Gentry tried to read her expression for any sign of suspicion, but couldn’t see well enough. Plus, she was good at keeping a blank expression; he bet the NOPD had hated to lose her.

  “Gentry, I won’t do it unless you tell me what you’re up to.” Yep, she was definitely suspicious. “Does this have anything to do with Eva Savoie?”

  He needed to trust her, but could he? He trusted her with his life on the job every night they partnered together, but could he trust her with his secrets? Especially this secret?

  “You can talk to me, you know. Partner-partner privilege.”

  He chuckled. “You mean like doctor-patient or attorney-client privilege?”

  “Something like that.” She wasn’t laughing.

  He took a deep breath and plunged into the bayou of trust. It was deep, and its waters swift and dangerous. “I want to look at the files of the last case I worked in Orleans Parish. An interagency drug-smuggling case.”

  “The one where your brother was involved?”

  They’d never discussed it, but he should’ve realized she’d know about his background, about why he’d eventually decided to transfer out of Region 8. He’d done his research on her, so she would’ve done the same, especially with her NOPD resources. He’d lay odds his file was a lot thicker than hers, and it wasn’t just that he’d been an agent longer.

  “You mean the case that involved my brother because I shot him? Yeah, that one.”

  “Okay.” She paused. A long pause. “Can I ask why you want to revisit the files?”

  Oh hell, maybe it would help to talk about it. “I caught a glimpse of Eva Savoie’s killer, right?”

  “Your description was pretty generic. Not a lot to go on.”

  True enough. “Yeah, well, the Broussard men aren’t very distinctive, I guess.”

  Jena came to stand in front of him. He was six-two and she could almost look him in the eye, which was unsettling. Her expression had edged out of the shadows, and her brows contracted in a frown. “What are you saying, Gentry? What are you not saying?”

  Deep breath; just get it out. “The killer was a dead ringer for my brother Lang, no pun intended.” He looked past her into the darkness of Bayou Terrebonne. A shrimp boat rocked gently in the water, its white nets illuminated by the streetlight like misshapen spiderwebs. “I know it sounds nuts. Lang’s dead. We buried him.”

  Jena shook her head. “No, you had a funeral. You didn’t bury him, though, did you? His body wasn’t found.”

  She’d definitely done her homework, and the fact they’d worked together for three months without her even hinting at what she knew upped his respect for her.

  He huffed and ran his fingers along his jawline. He hadn’t talked about that night in almost three years. For six months before that, he’d done nothing but talk about it—to the department psychiatrist, to his mom, and then to Warren Doucet and the region’s captain up in Thibodaux, who wanted to make sure
Gentry’s head was screwed on straight before he offered him the position in Region 6 that let Gentry come home. Until then, he hadn’t realized how badly he wanted to come back to the parish.

  “Lang was strung out that night.” Gentry spoke softly. “Really strung out. He’d been screwed up for a long time, but the drug use had gotten worse. That night, he had a gun and a nothing-to-lose attitude.”

  He and his LDWF partner had been doing what started as a routine boat check in bad weather, not expecting to find a haul of drugs in the small trawler. Lang had been on the aft deck, on guard over the fishing tanks full of drugs.

  “What went wrong?”

  “He tried to bluff me. He took aim at my partner, thinking I wouldn’t call his bluff. Lang was sure his baby brother wouldn’t shoot him.” In his nightmares, Gentry always saw the defiance on his brother’s face turn to shock when he saw the kid he’d always called Gent raise his weapon and fire without hesitation. “I put two bullets in him. I didn’t miss.”

  Jena nodded. “And he went over the back end of the boat?”

  The ship had been tossing like a kid’s toy in that maelstrom. “I don’t see how he could’ve survived with those wounds in those conditions. We were at the tail end of a tropical storm and the river was as rough as I’ve ever seen it.”

  Rough and wide and deep. The Mighty Mississippi had earned its nickname that night.

  “Well, you weren’t that close to Eva’s killer and he was wearing a hood. It’s probably just somebody who looks like your brother.” Jena fished her truck keys out of her pocket. “But yeah, I’ll get the digital files sent to me and send them to you on the down-low. But there are two things I want in return.”