Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 13 - The Diamonds of Ghost Bayou (25 page)

Across the room, Sheriff Lacoutrue looked up from behind
his desk. A broad smile spread across his angular face. “Ah,
Boudreaux. How you be, mon ami?”

“Fine. You?”

He gestured to the chair across the desk from him. “Comme
ci, comme ca. So, so.” He paused, his gaze sliding down to the
branding iron in my hand. “One of T-Ball’s branding irons, huh?”

I drew in a deep breath. “Look, Sheriff. Hear me out. Then if
you want to toss me out on the street, go right ahead. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough.”

“All right.” I plopped down into the chair, holding everything
in my lap. “First, someone is trying hard to find the diamonds
that Al Theriot hid before he went to prison. My friend, Jack
Edney, was severely beaten in an effort to locate them. You
know about that. Three or four attempts have been made to
scare me off. Then someone thought I was getting too close to
Benoit’s murder. That’s when they got serious.”

I outlined T-Ball’s visit to Cocodrie Slough, the falling chandelier in New Orleans, and once again the kidnapping with intent to murder as well as our subsequent escape.

“T-Ball came to Cocodrie Slough looking for me. The only
way he could have known I was over there was from Anthony
O’Donnell.”

The sheriff pursed his lips. “Me, I don’t understand”

“No one knew I was over there except Clerville Naquin.
After his boys and I left, O’Donnell called looking for Valsin.
Clerville told him where we were.”

Sheriff Lacoutrue drew a deep breath and leaned back in his
chair. He held his hands out to his sides. He was growing restless. “So?”

“So, that brings up the three town drunks who have been
killed in the last few months. The first two, Vitale and Primeaux,
were friends with L. Q. Benoit, who was in prison with the Judice boys before someone wasted them. Someone killed Benoit because they thought he knew the location of the diamonds.”

I laid the bent branding iron on his desk. “Whoever did it got
cute and tried to put the blame on that old superstition about the
loup-garou. They did it by using this branding iron to make
prints in the road.”

“You think T-Ball, he kill Benoit?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say yes, but
there might have been others involved. He might not have
known anything about it. The one certainty is that the branding
iron that came from T-Ball Stables is the one that made the
tracks in the road, and probably the weapon used to bludgeon
Benoit to death.”

Opening the folder with the glossies, I laid them beside the
branding iron. “Take a look. See how the heel of the shoe angles out a few degrees? And look at the nail holes. The open
holes in the shoes show up in the pictures, but the clogged ones
don’t. They’re identical.”

Lacoutrue looked over the glossies and the branding iron. I
pointed to the clogged holes. “I’ll bet when we have this analyzed, we’ll find that the dirt in the holes is mixed with blood,
and the blood will be L. Q. Benoit’s.”

“You might be right about that, Boudreaux,” Lacoutrue said,
an odd look in his eyes.

“I remember old Rouly telling me that Benoit had spent the
evening at his shack. He had just come from seeing you and-”
I froze, seeing the image of Sheriff Lacoutrue sitting at his desk
and smiling up at me when he stated he had not seen L. Q. Benoit since the old man got back into town from prison. I stared in
disbelief into the sheriff’s eyes that were smiling up at me
again, this time with a hint of malice.

“And what, Boudreaux?”

I stammered, trying to buy time to extricate myself from the
deadly dilemma in which my big mouth had placed me.

Behind me, the door to the cellblock opened. T-Ball’s guttural voice broke the silence. “I told you I thought Boudreaux
was the reporter who interviewed me.”

I glanced over my shoulder, staring into the leering face of
T-Ball Thibeaux and the muzzle of a black powder revolver.

The loose ends slipped together. I looked back around. That was why Lacoutrue had given me the wrong names of Benoit’s
cell mates. That’s how Mule and his sleaze knew Diane and I
had gone to New Orleans. Jack had told the sheriff when he
paid Jack a visit the morning Diane and I left.

I muttered. “There was no bourre game.”

Lacoutrue snorted. “Give the man a blue ribbon.”

I tried to bluff my way out of my predicament. “Jimmy LeBlanc knows I came to see you.”

Pushing to his feet, Lacoutrue sneered. “Well, now, Boudreaux, maybe so, but all me and T-Ball know is you dropped
in, gave us a couple of pictures, and headed back to Austin. Us,
we never see you again.”

“He’ll never believe you.”

The lanky sheriff rested his knuckles on the desk and leaned
forward. The sneer on his face grew wider. “Oh, he’ll believe
me. You see,” he added, “that one, he’s my cousin. Distant, but
still, he a cousin.”

I gaped at him, and at the enormity of the odds of such a coincidence. The fact that Jimmy was black and Lacoutrue white
meant nothing. I have a black cousin. Racial mixes within Louisiana families are a matter of common record, seldom given a
second thought.

T-Ball jammed the muzzle of his revolver against my spine. I
stiffened. “Put your hands behind you,” the big man ordered.

TI had no choice. I did as he said.

Lacoutrue shook his head and reached for the handcuffs.
“No. Hands in front. Put the chains on him just in case someone happens by when we’re loading him into the cruiser.” Quickly
he snapped the chain around my waist and then looped the
cuffs around it and shackled my wrists. He glanced at T-Ball,
his eyes cold with anger. “We wouldn’t have to do this if you
hadn’t played games with that blasted branding iron.”

T-Ball glared at him. “Don’t you be handing me that. You
beat Benoit so he couldn’t talk.”

“The old man was stubborn,” Lacoutrue snapped.

I had to ask. “What about Primeaux? Did you kill him because he wouldn’t talk?”

The sheriff snorted. “That one, his heart gave out” He leered.
“Vitale, he don’t know nothing, but he was a witness. So there be
no choice. Like now.” He cut his eyes at T-Ball. “Bring my
cruiser around to the side. We’ll take him out that way. You bring
his pickup.”

While he was giving T-Ball instructions, I looked down at
the handcuffs. Despite the fear squeezing my chest, I felt a hint
of relief when I saw that the cuffs were Smith & Wesson. Most
of their models were simple to pick-with the right tool.

“What do you plan on doing with him?” T-Ball asked.

Lacoutrue eyed me coldly and nodded in the direction of
Ghost Bayou behind the jail. “The bayou there, it hides everything. Dui?”

T-Ball sneered. “Oui.”

By now, night had settled over the small town. Only a thin beam of light shone through the office door as the sheriff hustled me outside and shoved me into the backseat of the cruiser.

I fell to the floorboard. Behind me, he slammed the door. While the chain about my waist limited the range of my
searching fingers, I felt over the floorboard for any wire I
could use to pick the handcuffs.

With the right tool, I could be out of the cuffs in thirty seconds.

To my dismay, I found nothing I could use.

By now, we had pulled onto the highway and were headed
out of town. I struggled to my knees and placed my hands on
the seat. My fingers slipped into that crevice between the back
of the seats, and my fingers touched a paper clip.

I could have shouted with joy. I squeezed the clip for all I was
worth, knowing my life depended on the flimsy piece of tin.

Lacoutrue snarled, “Don’t fight it, Boudreaux. You can’t get out them doors. And ain’t nobody out here to help you.”

Scooting around in the seat, I glanced out the window.
Through the giant cypress trees and drooping strands of Spanish moss, I spotted flickering lights off to my left in the bayou.
The sharp beam of a spotlight swept past.

The headlights of my pickup, now driven by T-Ball, shone
through the rear window.

I turned my attention to the paper clip. Quickly, I straightened
one end and then felt for the keyhole on the cuffs. Inserting the
tip of the thin wire, I bent it into a ninety-degree angle, turned
it over, and reinserted it into the tiny hole. I pressed down on the
clip, forcing the bent tip upward, releasing the ratchet. The jaw
swung open. All I had to do was slip the cuffs from under the
waist chain, and both hands were free.

Now what?

The back doors of the police cruiser could only be opened from
the outside. I couldn’t break and run when we stopped. Lacoutrue
would put half a dozen two-hundred-grain slugs into my back,
then toss me to the alligators. If I waited until we climbed into
the boat, my chances were even slimmer. I stared through the
half-inch steel mesh separating the front seat from the rear.

In the past, I’d always try to cheer myself that, when things
were going south, they could always be worse. Now, for the
first time in my life, I was truly in a situation where, for the
life of me, I couldn’t figure out just how things could be any
worse.

Lacoutrue turned off the highway and wound down a narrow
road toward the bayou. The headlights punched holes into the
surrounding darkness, a darkness that seemed to have a life of
its own, threatening, engulfing, ready to snuff out the last breath
from a person’s lungs.

As we approached a sharp bend in the road, Lacoutrue braked.
He rolled down the window and waited. T-Ball pulled up beside
us and lowered the passenger window. “What you want here?”

The sheriff pointed to a side road in front of us. “That leads
to the bayou. It not be used much, and the water’s deep at the
bend. Drive the pickup in there. I’ll wait here for you.”

“Oui.” The big man disappeared.

Lacoutrue chuckled. “Okay, Boudreaux, you take a good look,
you. This be the last time you see that truck of yours. “

My blood ran cold as my pickup rolled past. I watched as the
headlights jerked up and down. Then the taillights disappeared
into the black water.

With the truck now submerged, T-Ball returned and climbed
into the front seat of the cruiser. “That be done, Thertule. Now,
we take care of that one back there, oui?”

We drove a little farther, and the headlights touched on a
cabin on piers with a boathouse next to it.

The cruiser stopped in front of the cabin. T-Ball yanked open
the back door. “Okay, Boudreaux. Out!”

I kept my right hand over my left wrist as he half dragged me
from the cruiser. In my left hand, I still clutched the paper clip,
just in case I needed it again.

There was no moon. I glanced around, wondering if now
would be a good time to try to make my break. Maybe I could
lose them in the thick pine forest.

Lacoutrue must have read my mind, for he jammed his Mag num into the small of my back. “You, don’t even think it. You
be dead before you take one step.” He nudged me toward the
boathouse. “Follow T-Ball.”

T-Ball flipped on a flashlight. As we padded over the wooden
walkways spanning the black water, I toyed with the notion of
diving in, risking the possibility of alligators as opposed to the
certainty of a bullet in the back.

The sheriff must’ve noticed me eyeing the water and grabbed
the chain at my back and muttered, “You’d be dead before you
hit it.”

T-Ball opened the door to the boathouse.

“No lights,” Lacoutrue said. “We don’t want no one paying us
a visit.”

II”Oui.’

By the tiny beam of the flashlight, we climbed into an ancient Wellcraft bay boat, a center-console rig about eighteen
feet long. The sheriff shoved me down onto the bench in front
of the console and growled to T-Ball, “Watch him. I’ll get us
out of here. Turn off the flashlight when we get out on the
bayou.”

He backed the Wellcraft from the boathouse and turned it
around. The starlight cast the ominous swamp in eerie relief.

Remembering the lights I’d spotted earlier on the bayou, I hoped for the appearance of lights from approaching boats, but
only darkness greeted me. The engine purred as it picked up
RPMs, moving slowly into the shadows.

Mosquitoes swarmed us.

“We’ll go back into the swamp,” Lacoutrue announced. T-Ball
peered over the bow as we sped across the bayou toward the
towering cypress. The sheriff sneered. “I like you, Boudreaux.
That’s why me, I’ll do you a favor and shoot you before we give
you to the gators. Otherwise, we’d just toss you out to them”

If my mouth hadn’t been so dry, I would have told him not to
do me any favors. But the words stuck in my throat. Looking
back, I saw that the few lights that had been visible from the
shore were quickly fading. My heart pounding in my chest, I removed the loose cuff from my wrist, slipped it under the
chain around my waist, and clasped my hands back together.

T-Ball turned to face me, his legs spread on the deck for balance against the bouncing of the hull from the light waves.